The workers have no country

These arresting uniforms belong to the judges of the German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Pictures such as this appeared in Irish papers this week, on account of a case before the court that could have affected Ireland.  The issue was to block ratification of Europe's permanent rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), set up to support countries in financial trouble and which cannot function without German involvement.

In the event the court ruled it's OK for Germany to participate in the ESM.

It's a commonplace of Irish journalism, and I'm sure the same in Portugal and Greece, that everything is decided in Germany. In the Irish Examiner the day before the court ruling, economist Ray Kinsella wrote “The shape, and severity, of the forthcoming budget is being determined, not in the Dáil but in Karlsruhe, seat of the German Federal Constitutional Court.”

Last November, the Irish Daily Mirror ran the headline "Germany is our new master" when it revealed Irish budget papers had been to the German parliament before the Irish Dáil saw them.

And under the headline Government denies Germany inspecting our 2012 budget, the Irish Independent on 17 November last reported “The Government has been forced to deny it has allowed Germany to inspect the detail of plans to save €3.8bn in the upcoming budget.”

Synthetic outrage

Many commentators condemned the outrage over this event as synthetic. Here's a typical comment posted on a politics blog: 

I don't understand why so many others, especially in the Irish media, are outraged. Haven't these people been paying attention? We had to be bailed out back in November 2010. We're still beholden to those who bailed us out. Yet the media is acting as if the implications of the bail-out are a complete shock. The penny only finally dropped today. … Germany has been "our master" for more than a year. Ireland is not a sovereign nation. We have been giving away bits and pieces of our sovereignty for the better part of 25 years, but all pretence at being a sovereign nation evaporated last year when, essentially, we entered Chapter 11. That's the way it goes.

To make a red herring even redder, Chapter 11 is a clause of the United States' Bankruptcy Code, which permits the debtor to remain in control of its business operations as a debtor in possession, subject to the oversight and jurisdiction of the court.

My final thought is that when abstractions like “Ireland”, “Germany”, “Greece” and “Portugal” are bandied about in this fashion, it’s time to recall the words of the 1848 Communist Manifesto: The workers have no country.

Bronze - an exhibition I'll be sad to miss

Asante Ewer, British Museum. Height: 62 cm. Room 40 (Medieval Europe)

This lidded bronze ewer is something I must see. In 1896 it was captured by British troops from a royal palace in what is now Ghana, but how it got there is a mystery.  It can be dated to 1390-1400, and once belonged to the English royal household of Richard II. 

It's decorated with lions and lying stags, Richard II's emblems.  The jug's front sport the English royal arms current between 1340 & 1405. The neck is decorated with roundels containing a falcon with spread wings. The inscription around the belly is in Lombardic letters and reads:

       He that wyl not spare when he may
       He shal not spend when he would
       Deme the best in every dowt
       Til the trowthe be tryid owte

       ('He that shall not save when he can
       Shall not spend when he wants.
       Give the benefit of the doubt
       Until the truth comes out').

The jug is in the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy until 9th December.  An exhibition I should love to visit, but I fear it's unlikely I'll be in London before then.  But as the jug itself belongs to the British Museum no doubt I'll catch up with it there one fine day. 

In the Middle Ages rock crystal from Madagascar ended up in Europe, even though Madagascar was not even known to exist. The ewer turning up in West Africa may be an example in reverse of these complex medieval trading links, according to exhibition curator Professor David Ekserdjian (quoted in The Guardian)

'The Chariot of the Sun', Trundholm, Zealand, Denmark. Early Bronze Age, 14th century BCE.

Bronze and gold, 95 x 60 x 25 cm. National Museum, Copenhagen.
Photo Roberto Fortuna & Kira Ursem, The National Museum of Denmark.

This Chariot of the Sun is 3,500 years old, found in a Danish peat bog. A wheeled horse pulls an incised disk, one side gilded to symbolise the sun, the other plain denoting night. According to the Guardian article, this haunting artefact “is a work of totemic power that can take the viewer across centuries into a different world and different belief system, when the daily passage of the sun across the heavens was a matter of both mystery and life and death,” and is Denmark's greatest national treasure.

Lightning from space

Image shot from the ISS, looking down at a lightning storm over west Africa 220 miles below. Credit: ESA/NASA

Amaze your friends with this spooky fact: Lightning strikes the ground somewhere on Earth 100 times each second.  For the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) this creates a constant light show. 

Moreover, there are 5 to 10 times as many cloud-to-cloud flashes as there are ground strikes. That adds up to about 40 to 80 million lightning flashes every day.

Here's the NASA page on the ISS. It includes an image gallery.

The ISS orbits Earth 16 times a day, and if lit up by the Sun when it passes your bit of sky, is clearly visible with the naked eye.  Consult the Heavens Above website for its current path and position.

Pussy Riot? Not required, just better politicians

Pat Rabbitte

Irish Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte, made an ill-advised remark on RTÉ radio on Sunday, drawing headlines such as “Rabbitte orders Brady to stay out of abortion row” (Herald.ie).

So who actually said what?

It started when Cardinal Brady told RTÉ’s This Week radio programme "We would have a media campaign, we would be lobbying public representatives and also hope to write a pastoral letter on this situation … We would want to inform people of the ills of abortion."  He was responding to the question how the church would react if the Government decided to legalise abortion.

Pat Rabbitte then came on and said he was "surprised" when he heard "the cardinal's reference to lobbying and engaging, canvassing public representatives … I don't welcome the cardinal promising to engage in the political campaign."

and

“I don’t have any objection to any of the churches stating its position and making it clear, but I think it would be a retrogressive step if we were to go back to the days of the Catholic Church dictating to elected public representatives how [they] should address an issue.”

Responding to these remarks, Dr John Murray of the Catholic Iona Institute said: “It is Minister Rabbitte’s comment that is actually retrograde. First of all, lobbying is not the same as dictating.  Secondly, why should business organisations or farming organisations or trades unions be allowed to lobby politicians but the churches cannot do this?”

Too easily swayed

I don't often agree with the Iona Institute but this time it's hard to quarrel.

A blogger (describing himself as “an atheist with no time for the Church”) put it well;  he agreed with the Catholic Dr John Murray, and added:

“ I'm sure that Pat Rabbitte isn't suggesting that the Church shouldn't be allowed to lobby, but nevertheless it's a bit ill-advised for a cabinet minister to single out one organisation and tell them to shut up. They're perfectly entitled to lobby politicians if they want. It's up to the politicians to have enough moral courage to make hard decisions regardless of what the Church says. If the politicians are too easily swayed by their Bishop, then we need better politicians.”

Cardinal Sean Brady

So Pat Rabbitte has got himself into a bit of a mess with these remarks. Even his friends can't really support him, and the opposition Fianna Fáil has accused him of a divisive attack on the Church which has poisoned the debate around abortion.

The Fianna Fáil spokesman on health Billy Kelleher TD said Mr Rabbitte’s rejection of the Church’s right to campaign on the issue “was neither restrained nor respectful” and “While his comments may have went down well with Labour Party activists, they will have served only to antagonise many thousands of others who will correctly feel that their position, as articulated by Cardinal Brady, deserves the same respect as any other voice”.

So what was Rabbitte up to in this interview?

There's a explanation as to why he confused lobbying with dictating.  Within living memory the Catholic church really did dictate to the Irish government.  The celebrated instance of this is the 1951 Mother and Child affair. The health minister Noel Browne wanted to introduce a limited version of the NHS in Ireland, but the bishops said this would be a sin  (if you think I'm exaggerating read my essay on the subject) and none of the cabinet would support the scheme.

At a cabinet meeting where the archbishop’s letter denouncing the Mother and Child Scheme was read out, Browne asked each minister in turn if they assented to the church's ruling that the scheme be dropped. One Labour Party minister muttered "They shouldn't be allowed to do this" but nonetheless nodded assent.  Another minister blustered angrily “How dare you invite me to disobey my church!”

I'm sure this history is what Rabbitte had in mind in the RTÉ interview.  But the blogger was the one who put his finger on it when he said “If the politicians are too easily swayed by their Bishop, then we need better politicians.”

Constantinian church

Russia: defiant Pussy Riot protester

I'll finish with the observation that 1950’s Ireland had the opposite of the Constantinian church.  The Constantinian church is what they have in Russia, it's what the Pussy Riot protest was about: the church at the service of the state.

Here in Ireland we had the state at the service of the church.

The Constantinian church is a reference to the emperor Constantine legalising the previously persecuted Christians and making the church in effect an arm of government. The Greek Orthodox Church remained this way much longer than the Roman Catholic Church, because the Greek emperors lasted almost a thousand years longer than the Roman emperors - hence the Roman Catholic isn't really a Constantinian church (though the Church of England is).

And the Russian Orthodox Church is an offshoot of the Greek Orthodox, and was from the beginning at the service of the Tsars. Hence it was suppressed by the Communists. Now it's been reinstated, and is back at Putin's right hand. 

A word of caution about those last few paragraphs. They may read as if I know what I'm talking about but actually I don't. This Constantinian church stuff is something I haven't quite got to grips with.  And what I know of the history of the Byzantine Empire, and Russia under the Tsars, would fit on the back of a small envelope.  But as a broad brush picture, I hope I've painted it right.

Arctic Sea Ice : 15 years ago we didn't expect this

North Pole webcam picture taken on 22 August 2012 showing ice cap melting. Climate scientists expect the Arctic sea ice is on course to plummet to its lowest levels ever this weekend. Photograph: University of Washington/ North Pole Environmental Observatory/NOAA

August 24 in The Guardian: Melting at an unprecedented rate, Arctic sea ice is set to reach its lowest ever recorded extent as early as this weekend. These “dramatic changes” signal that man-made global warming is having a major impact on the polar region. 

Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, told the newspaper:  "Unless something really unusual happens we will see the record broken in the next few days. It might happen this weekend, almost certainly next week  …  The rate of ice loss is faster than the models can capture [but] we can expect the Arctic to be ice-free in summer by 2050."

She also said: "Only 15 years ago I didn't expect to see such dramatic changes – no one did. The ice-free season is far longer now. Twenty years ago it was about a month. Now it's three months.”

Feedback loop

Sea-ice loss is a positive feedback loop: if the white sea ice no longer reflects sunlight back into space, the region can be expected to heat up even more than at present. This could lead to an increase in ocean temperatures with unknown effects on weather systems in northern latitudes.  The consequences of losing the Arctic's ice coverage for the summer months are expected to be immense.

And the Antarctic

Meanwhile at the other end of the world, a new report in Nature released Wednesday says that on the Antarctic Peninsula, human-generated greenhouse gases have almost certainly been by far the most important driver of warming over the past half-century. Story on Climate Central.

On the shaping of ends

John Dover Wilson's Hamlet

The image is my copy of Hamlet from Cambridge in 1969.  Except I'm sorry to say it’s not, as I got rid of it a long time ago.  I hanker to have it back. But the moving finger writes and having writ moves on. It’s the Dover Wilson edition. As I got the image off the Amazon website, perhaps that's actually my old copy for sale. Comforting to think so.

An unhappy consequence for me of studying English literature at Cambridge was that for the best part of 20 years thereafter I lost any interest in it, and placed little value on my books. Reading any sort of fiction was associated in my mind with essays, deadlines and drudgery.

Here's what brought me back to this book. Last year there was correspondence in The Guardian about a labourer unconsciously quoting Hamlet’s words in Act 5, Scene 2 of the play:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

I blogged about this at the time, and resolved to see for myself the origin of the labourer story.  It's in the very book I once owned, Dover Wilson's Hamlet. Which a few months ago I tracked down in the British Library. And studied more assiduously, I suspect, than ever I did as an undergraduate.

Here's his note to these lines :

Mr J P Malleson writes (privately): Years ago a country labourer astonished my father by saying as he sharpened stakes for fixing hurdles in the ground: ‘My mate rough-hews them and I shape their ends.’

The unspoken assumption is that the labourer was unfamiliar with Shakespeare. Of course the assumption might be false, and “the labourer” as Mr Malleson calls him (wrongly, because a craftsman had a mate, a labourer didn’t) was perhaps alluding to Hamlet deliberately and playing a trick on the posh gent. Who knows.

King of the Britons

Saxo Grammaticus (Wikipedia)

To digress, according to Dover Wilson the original of the Hamlet story is “lost in the mists of antiquity through which, mingled as it were with sea spray, we can dimly perceive the common ancestors of the English and Scandinavian races.”

The earliest writer to give Hamlet permanent literary form was the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th century. (I've a feeling I knew all this once.)

His story is in all essentials the plot of Shakespeare’s play, including Hamlet’s long speech to his mother in her bedroom after he has despatched Polonius (as Shakespeare calls him).

The main differences appear to be that in Saxo Grammaticus, after the King of the Britons has executed the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern characters, Amleth marries the king's daughter and resides a year in Britain before returning to Jutland to complete his mission by killing his treacherous uncle, with (as in the play) a swapped sword. Amleth survives. That was all too happy happy for Shakespeare who invented the pirates to prevent Hamlet ever arriving in England and marrying a king’s daughter. And of course he has Hamlet die by the same swapped sword.

The first edition of Dover Wilson's Hamlet was 1934. Strange to think that in 1969, that was only 35 years ago.  Like 1977 is to us today. Subsequent editions came out in 1936 (with the note in it) and 1954 (the one I must have once possessed).

The British Library copy is a digitally printed version (2009), and carries the comically superfluous disclaimer: “This book reproduces the text of the original edition. The content and language reflect the beliefs, practices and terminology of the time, and have not been updated.”  I suppose an example of what they had in mind is Dover Wilson’s reference to the “English and Scandinavian races”.

In my day Dover Wilson was god when it came to Shakespeare studies, and his What Happens in Hamlet was the gospel.

The Philosopher’s Zone

When I related the parable of the farmer and the runaway horse a few days ago, I recommended the BBC In Our Time programme on Taoism but I forgot to mention the excellent Australian radio programme The Philosopher’s Zone, presented by the recently deceased Alan Saunders.  I've corrected the oversight.

I usually make a point of downloading these episodes which last only 25 minutes but pack a lot in. In this one on Taoism he interviewed two Chinese academics.
 

From the link I've given it's easy to download the episode as well as a transcript.

Alan Saunders was awarded the Australasian Association of Philosophy's Special Media Prize.  He died unexpectedly on 15 June.