Utopia, some thoughts

“For what justice is there in this: that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing at all, or, at best, is employed in things that are of no use to the public, should live in great luxury and splendour upon what is so ill acquired, and a mean man, a carter, a smith, or a ploughman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labours so necessary, that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs? ” 

From Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516. This month is the quincentenary and Verso Books have brought out a commemorative edition. Must get this book. Sadly, came across it too late to drop any hints for Christmas. 

A woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein, illustrating a 1518 edition of Utopia

Utopia – or as we might say, “nowheresville” – was the name of an imaginary republic, usually described as a place in which all social conflict and distress has been overcome. But I need to read it to check this; here's another extract, which is fine till you get to the discordant note of the two slaves:-

They have built over all the country, farmhouses for husbandmen, which are well contrived, and are furnished with all things necessary for country labour. Inhabitants are sent by turns from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. There is a master and a mistress set over every family; and over thirty families there is a magistrate.

Is utopianism any good?

There have been many utopias over the years, including visions of a socialist society. Utopian Socialism had many advocates in the early nineteenth century, like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen.  Marx and Engels defined their own socialism as scientific socialism in opposition to utopian socialism. The difference being that Marx and Engels thought they had mapped out a route to get from here to there, whereas the utopian socialists merely hoped to persuade the capitalists to hand the stuff over. That’s my second-hand understanding of the distinction in any event. 

Now two positive quotes about utopianism:

China Miéville in the Verso edition : Utopianism isn't hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire

Eduardo Galeano,  Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist.1940-2015: Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.

477 years

The early voyages of European discovery,  were, I imagine, amongst the influences that prompted More to write Utopia, and this has set my mind wandering off in another direction.  Between Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the West Indies in 1492, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 1969, is only 477 years. I find this a sobering thought. 

La Niña, 1492.   Apollo 11, 1969
2009 replica of Columbus's ship La Niña. Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the Moon (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin )

Dr Johnson and a head carved on a carrot

Two months since I wrote anything here, what’s all this delay? Surely I can come up with some insightful and entertaining bon mots pertaining to Jane Austen? Or how about some nugget culled from the dusty byways of English grammar?  Well, perhaps  … but my mind’s been elsewhere,  agonising about Brexit, Trump, the drift towards fascism and what is to be done ...  and just how, why and when did anti globalisation which used to the province of the left, become a plaything for the extreme right. Tonight I've given up trying to pen something on these themes that you haven't read much better elsewhere, so I've decided to talk about Samuel Johnson instead.  Till a few days ago I only knew his definition of oats, “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”  To which his Scotch friend Boswell retorted, “But Sir, what horses, and what people!”  The dictionary definition is actual, though so far as I can tell Boswell’s retort isn't. I picked up a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in a cancer charity shop in Cork last week, and may I take this opportunity to recommend you get or borrow a copy yourself. Almost every page contains pure entertainment.  

Left to right. Samuel Johnson c. 1772, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. “Am I not a man and a brother” – medallion made in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood [1]. James Boswell at 25, by George Willison

The first thing to say is Johnson was a strong slavery abolitionist, and no friend to the American colonists. Boswell records that in 1777, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, Johnson’s toast was, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” Johnson’s “violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity”, Boswell tells us, revealing his own prejudice.  Of the American colonists, Johnson said: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”  [2]

His colour sufficient testimony 

It seems that in the year 1777 a negro was claiming his liberty in a Scottish court, and Johnson dictated an argument in his favour.  No law but that of violence, subjects a negro to his master, he argues; and the slaveholder’s pretended claim to the negro’s obedience is based on having “bought him from a merchant of slaves, whose right to sell him never was examined ….  The laws of Jamaica afford a Negro no redress.  His colour is considered as a sufficient testimony against him.”  The argument is worth reading in full, and I have it for you, along with a handful of other extracts from The Life of Johnson, on a separate page.  Johnson could get vexed when opposed in argument, and after debating slavery and the taxing of the American colonies, two subjects which Johnson and Boswell disagreed on, they went to bed bad friends. 

As you would expect from the writer of the first dictionary, Johnson was jealous of infractions on the English language.  He found fault with Boswell for using the phrase to make money. “Don’t you see (said he) the impropriety of it?  To make money is to coin it: you should say get money.” Boswell doesn't agree though, and thinks the phrase to make money is pretty current. In an object lesson to those of us who would stem the tide of language change, Johnson “was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind”. We may have an idea or image of a mountain, a tree, or a building; but Johnson objected to an idea or image of an argument or proposition.  Lawyers “delivering their ideas upon the question under consideration” was modern cant, he thought.[3]

The finest head cut on a carrot 

Going into a convent for fear of being immoral was like a man cutting off his hands for fear he should steal. “There is, indeed, great resolution in the immediate act of dismembering himself; but when that is once done, he has no longer any merit: for though it is out of his power to steal, yet he may all his life be a thief in his heart.”

He argued against the value of sculpture. Painting is okay, as it consumes labour proportionate to its effect; “but a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.”  

Two final offerings, Johnson declared “It is commonly a weak man who marries for love”, and thought it was better to shoot a highwayman in the heat of the moment than to testify against him later in cold blood.  You can find all these things in my extracts.

I'm collecting books that Jane Austen had on her own shelves. According to her brother Henry, Johnson was her favourite moral writer in prose [4].  And in a 1798 letter, Austen wrote of getting Boswell’s Life of Johnson.  I'm now reading Johnson’s Rasselas, and have recently finished a handful of other 18th century novels. Which are not, I'm happy to say, as bad as I expected. My mistake was starting with Richardson’s Pamela.  It's dire, but I'm reassured to find Johnson also thought Richardson dire. More of this anon perhaps.

As a postscript, I see that challenged by Boswell about his prejudice against the Scots, Johnson admitted: “Why, I own, that by my definition of oats I meant to vex them.” (1783)

[1] For slave medallion by Staffordshire pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, see Smithsonian National Museum of American History 

​[2] Another Englishman, the abolitionist Thomas Day, wrote in 1776 that “if there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”  Can't find the source for this.

[3] In Rasselas I find: “Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas.” (ch XI) Here Johnson appears to have flouted his own rule.

[4] Henry Austen “Biographical Notice” in the 1st edition of Northanger Abbey (Dec 13th 1817)

The awkwardness of "Awkward"

I've come across another word that describes itself. 

Stare at awkward long enough and I think you'll agree with me. What an awkward word,  with that wkw in the middle. It turns out to be a combination of the Middle English adjective “awk” and the directional suffix “-ward.”

It seems  “awkward” was coined in the 1300's in Scotland and northern England, where it meant “turned in the wrong direction”.  The word "awk" meant the wrong way round, backhanded. Other possible meanings are sinister, ominous, perverse.

Here’s an example of the sinister/ominous meaning of "auke" from Philemon Holland’s 1600 translation of Livy’s history of Rome and the Roman people. In this passage Livy refers to those who disparage the Roman practice of augury:

Now let them mocke on and scoffe at our religions. Let them deride our ceremonies. What makes matter (say they) if those pullets pecke or eat not? What if they come somewhat late out of their coupe or cage? What if a bird sing auke or crowe crosse and contrarie? How then?

And here's a late example from 1674, where perhaps perverse is meant. It's in a scientific treatise from the 17th century clergyman Nathaniel Fairfax: 

What we have hitherto spoken, will seem to have less of auk in it, 

That is, what we have hitherto spoken, will seem less perverse.   Fairfax was keen to use native English words only, and I suspect that by 1674, having “less of auk in it” already sounded old-fashioned, or dare I say, awkward.  (I have more on Nathaniel Fairfax and the context of this quotation in an appendix.  It interests me because of a connection to the history of science. He seems to have been exploring some of the thoughts that gave rise to calculus at about the same time.)

For an early instance of "awkward", there's the Middle English poem Pricke of Conscience (1340): the world thai all awkeward sette (they turned the world all awry).

A bit of etymology

“Awk” is Scandinavian in origin.  Its equivalent in modern Swedish is “avig”. Suppose you were to put a shirt on back-to-front, this in Swedish would be “att ha skjortan avig”, literally to have the shirt the wrong way.  There's a German word "Abweg" meaning the wrong way, which looks as if it ought to be related, but so far as I can tell it isn't. 

I can't account for why,  but it tickles me that the “ward” in awkward has something to do with direction, as in northward, onward, backward, inward, and so on. We can perhaps think of awkward as equivalent to the non-existent word wrongward.

My Shorter Oxford Dictionary tell me that the suffix ”-ward” gives the meaning of having a specified direction, and is connected with the Latin verb vertere (to turn). I find that an especially fruitful piece of etymology as it helps us to think of “–ward” as having the meaning turned in the direction of.  So: turned in the direction of in, turned in the direction of out, turned in the direction of north, etc.  Then there's "toward", and the interesting case of "untoward". In Middle English there was a word “fromward”; which in Old English apparently meant "about to depart; doomed to die; with back turned."

“-ward” can in principle be added to any location, to suggest progressing or pointing towards that place.  As in she raised her eyes heavenward.  Or this sentence from H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898): In the road that runs from the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night after the fighting began. And in a recently published legal history of New York we find: It was not until the colony became a state that the pendulum of emigration and settlement swung New Yorkward.[1]

I thank the excellent Grammarphobia blog [2] for calling my attention to the awkwardness of “awkward”. It puts me in mind of the opposite case, the mellifluousness of “mellifluous”.  A curiosity I had something to say on back in May.

“Awkward” and “mellifluous”  are autological words, words that describe themselves – or so it seems to me.  

[1] Courts and Lawyers of New York: A History, 1609-1925, Volume 1 (2010) by Alden Chester

[2] The blog is the source of many of the foregoing quotations and I've even plagiarized the title of this post from it. You'll find more information in an email from the blog editors reproduced in the appendix.

But why did it feel that way?

Soon after the news of the Brexit vote came out, I wrote a piece describing what it felt like. Shock, disbelief, a country I don't recognise, these were some of my thoughts, which seemed to be shared by many of those with whom I am in contact in England, by Guardian columnists, and the like. Since then, I've been puzzling firstly, why these thoughts ... and secondly if they are the right thoughts. 

What were we voting for, we who voted Remain? It's perhaps presumptuous to say “we” because there will be many different we’s but I'm going to make a stab at saying what the we that I belong to voted for.  And the first thing to say is that it was neither the dull economic arguments often put forward by the Remain side; nor was it a vote for the EU that actually exists – the EU that wants to crush the Greek people and hand power to the corporations through TTIP.  Read George Monbiot on this theme: “I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in.”

No, not for what the EU is but what it should be. Equally, for what sort of country Britain should be. A connected and inclusive nation, not an angry island on the edge, in the words of the Guardian editorial two days before the vote. 

This montage encapsulates what I was turning my back on when I voted Remain.

And why was the Leave result so devastating? It appeared to be a vote for the Farage poster that encouraged voters to turn their backs on refugees, for a murky blend of xenophobia, nationalism, humble patriotism, and nostalgia for an imaginary lost age, a rainbow where the malignant merges into the stupid and the stupid merges into the naïve. The racist abuse “go home we voted Leave” that has followed the result, strongly reinforces the point.

Now for the hard bit

Those then were the thoughts that motivated a Remain vote and greeted the result. And up to here was easy enough to write. But what follows has been through several drafts and I'm not sure I've got it right yet. Since the vote there's been another analysis. That the large proportion of working class Leave votes in post-industrial Britain, if you’ll allow me to use that phrase, was a howl of anguish against the status quo. Why vote for what is, when what is is crap. I had a message from England after the vote along the lines of, “Is something good going to come out of all this.  I don't see what it is yet” ... and maybe this is it, that the dispossessed have found a voice. But if so they’ve used it to say the wrong thing. Life is bad! Let’s do what the right wing of the Conservative Party wants and see if that helps!  In the words of Fintan O’Toole writing in the Irish Times, it's a Downton Abbey fantasy rebellion of toffs and servants all mucking in together.

But I'm being dismissive again and I didn't intend that. Lisa McKenzie’s Guardian article “Brexit is the only way the working class can change anything” is worth a read. Writing a week before the vote, she says working-class people are sick of being called ignorant or racist because of their valid concerns. Hmm. What do I say about this ... let’s try: undeniably the Leave campaign was directed to the ignorant and racist. £350m a week for the NHS forsooth! So like it not, the burden of proof is on those who voted Leave.

Stupid to be taken in by this?

But the referendum is a chance for the marginalised working class to have their say, goes the argument. No explanation though of how voting Leave will help, or lessen precarity [1] and fear. Indeed the architects of Brexit hope to undermine workers rights many of which are based on European law. See a TUC report from February, UK employment rights and the EU.

Granted, in precarious employment, it's hard to enforce rights. And in no employment, impossible. But handing over to libertarian free marketers? What kind of answer is that? The drift of McKenzie’s article, and similar ones I've seen, appears to be things are so bad they couldn’t be worse so let’s take a punt on leaving the EU, it might be better, who knows. That may not be stupid or racist, but it is reckless. A recklessness born of desperation, it will be argued. Here I stop. I ought to have said something about the various studies contradicting the the view that immigration is the cause of falling wages. If my essay appears incomplete, I can only apologise.

[1] Apparently I haven't been keeping up, because “precarity” is the new word for the effects on workers of neoliberalism.

Jupiter over Death Valley

To Ballingeary near Cahir, Co Tipperary, on Wednesday to give a talk on a few curious facts about the universe to an ICA meeting (Irish Countrywomen’s Association). An appreciative audience. I showed them some arresting graphics of the relative sizes of the Earth and the other planets - but nothing I produced could match an image which I have just come across showing what Jupiter would look like in our sky if at the same distance as the Moon.

 

It's as if seen from Death Valley, California, by space artist Ron Miller. At the Moon’s distance (c. 240,000 miles, or 386,000 km) Jupiter appears about 1,600 times larger than the Moon, shown for comparison in the next image:

Jupiter is our solar system’s largest planet, two and half times as massive as all the other planets together.

Miller's images were published in The Atlantic, along with Saturn and the other planets, each hovering over Death Valley. 

And here’s a link to Ron Miller’s other work.

The Brexit referendum - what it felt like

The safety pin - a hastily improvised symbol to oppose post-referendum racism

If you live in Britain and especially in England you won't need to read this because you will know it, and have felt it yourself.  But for those elsewhere I just want to chronicle some of the shock and disbelief that greeted the Brexit referendum. It was on Thursday 23 June, the result coming early on Friday morning. Hard to remember this was only 7 days ago, so much has happened since.  Yesterday I heard an elderly Englishwoman on the radio describing her reaction on Friday morning.  She said it was the most shocking news since the declaration of the Second World War.  A New Statesman columnist wrote “I woke up in a country I do not recognise.”  And myself here in Ireland?  Well, I was so angry and upset that day I couldn’t bring myself to contact anybody even though there were various people I ought to have been in touch with on unrelated matters.
 
Here are some comments I had from friends over the following couple of days, directly or through Facebook … “Heartbroken, where has my country gone?” … “Terrible. I'm ashamed and embarrassed to be English, and I'm angry and upset” ….  “Feeling gutted, upset and as if living in another country” …. “Cannot believe that Britain has been so *** stupid. Very depressed” … “We had a party here yesterday for our local old friends and they are all very depressed”.  
 
Two days later in the European soccer championship Iceland faced England and beat them 2:1. I was delighted.  Seeing the England flags and hearing the England supporters singing God Save the Queen turned my stomach. I'm not normally a follower of football; but I know some English people who are, and they had much the same response to the Iceland match as me.  All those I've quoted are English, so far as I know anyway. (I'm stressing English because Scotland voted clearly to remain in the EU, so did Northern Ireland. Wales followed England, why I ask myself.)  

I'm recording all this partly for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand, and partly for my own benefit to come back to in years to come.

Something I should like to do and maybe shall in the next few days, is to analyse just why I and so many others feel this way. I've been sucking my pen wondering what to write next. Won't comment on the current political situation in Britain as it's moving too fast.  But one thing does need mentioning, and that’s the reports of racism unleashed by the Brexit vote. 

There's a 6-minute interview worth listening to, from a Canadian radio programme called As it happens. It's a young British woman named Singh.  She describes racist incidents witnessed in the past few days. The referendum she says, has emboldened people to be racist. They don't feel ashamed to come and hurl this abuse at you like they maybe would have felt before,  they feel they now have a democratic mandate for it. “Go home we voted Leave”.  In a similar vein, here are some reports of racism collected from Twitter over the past few days; all directed against those perceived as being of Muslim heritage - so, absurdly, the racists either don't know or don't care that the referendum was about Europe not Asia or North Africa:-

This evening my daughter left work in Birmingham and saw a group of lads corner a Muslim girl shouting “Get out, we voted leave”. Awful times.

We were accused of bringing sharia law in whilst distributing Remain leaflets yesterday in Southampton

Just arrived at 78% Muslim school. White man stood making victory signs at families walking past. This is the racism we have legitimised.

My 13-year old brother had chants of “bye bye you're going home” at school today. He insisted it was “a joke” but it worries me.

Maybe it's to soon for analysis. Maybe when history comes to be written it will emerge that this spike is post-referendum racism was very localised and short-lived.  I hope so but the signs are not good. There's a Facebook group worth a look called Post Ref Racism.

Linguistic postscript re the word “Brexit”.  Everyone is using it so I've fallen into line, though I resisted it as long as I could.  

Fervently hoping for Remain

Well, 24 hours from now the count will be on. I've sent in my postal vote to Remain in the EU, having voted against in the 1975 referendum. 

At that time I viewed the Common Market as it then was as a club for capitalists, and though the argument can still be made, now is neither the time nor the place to rehearse it. I hope that when I come to look over these words in a year’s time,  I shall find my predictions null and void: but if it's a vote for Leave, I fear not just God Save the Queen being sung in the streets - which I shall be mercifully spared - but a resurgence of fascism both in Britain and across Europe.

Staying in the EU was always going to be a hard sell to those of us on the left according to Billy Bragg writing a few days ago on Facebook.

The treatment of Greece and the threat of TTIP suggest that the European Union is little more than a neo-liberal cartel. He quotes Jeremy Corbyn being merely “7.5 out of 10” in favour of remaining within the EU. [1]

A turning point?

And he refers to the Jo Cox murder last Thursday as a turning point.

Is he right to do so? Not widely known before she died, and certainly not to me, this young Labour MP seems to have been murdered in the name of 'Independence for Britain'. She had a passionate belief in the European Union as standing for international cooperation, and had engaged in international humanitarian work in Darfur, Syria and Afghanistan, advocating for the UN-initiated, but dormant, concept of a Responsibility to Protect.
 
Since her death, says Billy Bragg, none of us on the left can be in any doubt who will be emboldened by a victory for Leave.  Viewed from over here in Ireland, my comment is this was never in doubt, with or without that murder, but no matter. The referendum is a battle for the soul of our country, says Bragg. If we win, we will have to work hard to address the genuine problems that mass immigration causes. We will need to build schools, hospitals and union membership. We will need to give a voice to the forgotten and the marginalised so that they can have some control over their lives and communities. And we will need to reform the EU to make it more about people and less about profits.
 
Addressing fellow socialists who are tempted to vote Leave, he says that if we do, none of this will be possible. If the libertarians triumph, what's left of our welfare state will be sold to the highest bidder and our workplaces – already the most deregulated in Europe - will be stripped of their meagre protections. The Tory Party will be reborn as shiny suited free market zealots. At the same time the forces of division will be emboldened and anyone doesn't fit in with their warped idea of who does and who doesn't belong will have a life of misery. But if Remain wins, then we will have momentum and the chance to utilise it while the Tories tear themselves apart over Europe.
 
Everything Bragg says is true, I've no doubt about it. At the end of his article, someone comments that if it was a choice between Weimar and the Third Reich, we would be campaigning for Weimar without hesitation, and I have the feeling there's some parallel to what's happening now.
 
[1] George Monbiot made a similar argument in the Guardian on 10 February 2016: "I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in."