Some friends and their 2 year old child are coming to stay: since I know there’s a history of dietary problems I check what they can and cannot eat. No dairy (relatively straightforward) and then for the boy, ‘he doesn’t have sweet things, no chocolate, but he does like fruit’. And I find myself thinking, ‘poor kid, he’s missing out on a lot’.

I can understand concerns about allergies and a wish not to encourage bad eating habits, but I do think that an attempt to ban all sugary food (or all ‘unhealthy food’) by parents is unrealistic and possibly counter-productive. What happens when some kind friend gives this child sweets for a treat: are his parents going to object to a well-meaning gesture? What happens when he goes to birthday parties or starts school - must every mouthful be monitored to ensure it involves no dangers to sound principles? How much does not allowing something give it an excitement not otherwise available? L, thankfully was not one of the 70% of three year-olds who could identify the McDonalds logo. Instead, I have tried to keep eating fast food as merely an option, neither prohibited nor seen as a treat. We do not buy her sweets, but we get given enough to keep plenty in stock for intermittent consumption. At parties she may eat almost as unhealthily as she likes, but she can’t expect that kind of food regularly at home. We will have to see whether this works in the long run, but it seems rather more practical than food fundamentalism.

I have been thinking recently about a particularly irritating article by Roy Hattersley on religion and morality (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1969058,00.html). He complains that in a TV discussion about AIDS in the Third World, a Christian panellist, Anne Atkins, said that the problem would not have arisen if people had followed Catholic teaching on sexual behaviour. Hattersley goes on:

But it is not the sheer stupidity of the comment that should offend us. It is what it reveals about the workings of one sort of Christian mind. By all means succour the needy, but first point out the moral of their plight. The wages of sin is death.

We must hope that, in this particular at least, Ms Atkins's views are not representative of modern Christian thought. But she did demonstrate a universal truth. Religious convictions have a hard edge. Those who break God's laws must accept the consequences. It is no good people of the Atkins persuasion saying that they help as well as judge the sinners. Once there is the idea - even at the back of the censorious mind - that the victims have brought it on themselves, the relationship between helper and the helped changes.

I will say right away that I don’t like Anne Atkins or share her views and I don’t agree with the Catholic church’s stance on contraception. But Hattersley’s idea that it is censorious ever to think that people might be partially responsible for some of their own suffering is ridiculous. ‘Actions have consequences’ as L’s (non-religious) grandmother puts it. If a drunk driver injures himself in a crash, is it wrong for the paramedic cutting him out of the wreckage to judge him? Christianity doesn’t teach either that particular individual suffering is necessarily deserved or that wrongdoing will necessarily be punished on earth by God, but sins (in the sense of wrongful acts), do normally harm in some way either the sinner or his/her neighbour. Abstinence and faithfulness are part of the solution to dealing with HIV infection, as well as condom use.

Hattersley can argue that the ‘victims’ of HIV infection mustn’t be blamed for their sins because he doesn’t believe that unmarried sex is a sin. That is fair enough; he doesn’t have to believe that, as anon-Christian. But to claim:

It is no more reasonable to expect the people of Aids-ravaged areas to enter into formal unions than it is to argue that Bangladeshis on the Ganges delta could avoid flood and famine by migrating to higher ground.

is to say that people in South Africa, for example, are incapable of faithful monogamy, and to imply that for men in such areas to practice polygamy, to use prostitutes, even to rape young women in an attempt to ‘cure’ their HIV status must be accepted as blameless activities. In the specific case of the AIDS epidemic, I have some sympathy with Hattersley; I don’t think a focus on ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’ acquisition of the HIV virus is productive. But his wider belief that an ‘arbitrary moral code, which goes beyond care and compassion’ must be rejected threatens to make moral imbeciles of us all.

Hey, ho, here we go again. The Conservative party have rediscovered that married parents are better for children than cohabiting ones and therefore want to introduce tax incentives to encourage marriage. (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1969105,00.html). Let’s quickly point out the obvious problems with this:

1) Are cohabiting couples readier to split up because they’re not married, or do they not marry because they’re readier to split up? In other words, is a ceremony and a bit of paper really going to make a difference to couples who are not particularly committed to one another?

2) Why do the Tories presume that relationships and family matters are influenced significantly by economic considerations? The fact that they are not is clear from the divorce figures. If people behaved in an economically rational way, 99% would not get divorced, because in 99% of cases both sides lose out financially with a divorce (The one exception would be where there are few assets and one spouse spends substantially more than they bring in).

3) How do they plan to use the tax incentives to encourage marriage? The only easy way to do it through the tax system is reintroducing the married couple’s allowance. However, this would involve a massive waste of money, because most of the money would go to people who would be married anyway (we would benefit, for example), and the income tax system cannot distinguish those who have children and those who do not. In addition, tax allowances benefit those on higher rates of tax most and those with very low incomes least. The only alternatives are to try and bolt it onto either child benefit (which would make a simple and effective payment more complex) or to use the child tax credit system. This would be the most targeted approach, but given the mess the system is in already (and the fact that the Conservatives object to the whole principle of this), this hardly seems a good idea.

So why are the Conservatives brining this old chestnut up again? Probably because they’re bankrupt of other ideas: there isn’t much more mileage in scapegoating lone parents for family problems and they daren’t look at issues of work and the family because they might then have to admit that modern capitalism is family unfriendly.

This is a rather belated write-up and discussion of a very interesting talk by Bruce O’Brien at the Institute of Historical Research on ‘Early Medieval Englishness Reconsidered’. His starting point was that ‘Englishness’ was a relatively recent term in studies of early medieval England. It only really took off in 1983 with the publication of Michael Clanchy’s England and its rulers 1066-1272 and Patrick Wormald’s article on ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the origins of the Gens Anglorum' (in the Festschrift for Michael Wallace-Hadrill). Michael was arguing that the development of a strong English nationalism in the thirteenth century suggested a largely hidden pre-Norman continuity. Meanwhile Patrick was looking much earlier, to see Bede’s work as already defining a sense of the English as a community, but as religious one rather than a political one. (There are also links to the work being done in the 1960s in Germany on ethnogenesis by Wenskus and others).

Bruce, argued, however, that the real take-off of the concept was linked to a third academic work published in 1983, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. As he pointed out, this is very badly-informed and hence dismissive of national feeling before ‘modern’ print culture, but it does link the strong state with the development of national consciousness. As a result, the Anglo-Saxon maximalists (James Campbell et al), wanted to use Anderson’s concepts rather than his conclusions. If the Anglo-Saxon state was so strong then it must have created/fostered a strong sense of Englishness and vice versa. The concept was therefore incorporated into the view of the Anglo-Saxon state and actively looked for. The result has been some recent works in which Englishness is a recurrent theme.

Bruce, having worked with the concept himself, however, is becoming increasingly uncertain about its usefulness, and wondering whether we should stop using the term at all. Firstly, because the term itself inevitably imports ideas of continuity and content from other periods. Englishness has a political and emotional content that ‘Norman-ness’ no longer possesses. (Similarly, I think most scholars are quite happy to see many ideas of ‘Frankishness’ as being political manipulations by the Carolingian elite). Perhaps even more importantly, there has been too much attempt to push the Anglo-Saxon evidence into the mould of ‘Englishness’. Any differences mentioned between ethnic groups are assumed to be a sign of Englishness. (To emphasise this, someone in the audience at question time was arguing that references to ‘Danish customs’ in a source indicated a sense of Englishness, whereas Bruce’s point was that you had to be far more cautious in interpretations such as these).

As well as being challenging for our thinking about early medieval England, the talk also got me thinking harder about the concept of Englishness (or Britishness) in the modern world and realising how sloppy some of my previous thinking about it had been. It wasn’t a distinction that Bruce explicitly made in the paper, but it did get me thinking about the difference between Englishness in terms of customs, identity and community

Firstly, just because the customs of a country are noted as being different, doesn’t necessarily say anything about national sentiment. Leave aside the question of whether the views of an outsider are correct/typical and assume they’re accurate. For example, I might correctly say that the Netherlands seemed different to me from England because they have double-decker trains. However, the Dutch do not, as far as I know, define themselves by their trains, and equally, nor do the British define themselves as the sort of people who don’t have double-decker trains. In other words, distinctive customs don’t necessarily translate into identity and if they do, they do so in complex ways. (Think of the complexities of how nations define themselves by what they do or don’t eat. The Japanese government are still defining them nation as whale meat eaters, even though they have problems in finding any Japanese willing to eat whales).

Secondly there is the problem of how Englishness relates to both identity and community. Recent attempts to encourage ‘Britishness’ have seen a simple equation in which a shared identity produces community and harmony and prevents violence. But as I think about it, I realise that my English identity does not necessarily increase my feelings of community. My English identity (which is strongly affected both by my work as a historian, but also my middle class upbringing in the rural south of England) is real, but it may have very little in common with the equally real English identity of a working class man from inner city Bradford, and I’m not sure how much sense of community we’d automatically feel. Even the promotion of a common identity/set of symbols may not be enough to promote this sense of community. The USA, for example, has a very strong sense of common identity, around symbols such as the flag and the constitution. Yet while a patriotic black American and a member of the Klu Klux Klan might attach the same importance to many of these symbols, there is no community between them, because of the single additional tenet of white supremacism: that non-whites cannot properly be American. (There was an interesting comment in an article by Gary Younge of the Guardian discussing anti-Hispanic immigrant views in the US: even the more racist there do not want immigration stopped, they just want the ‘right sort’ of immigrants). The experience of violence from right-wing racist organisations in the US and the UK suggest that a feeling of identity towards a country doesn’t stop them attacking other members of the country. Similarly, however worthy it may be to make British Muslims feel more British, it isn’t necessarily going to stop home-grown terrorism.

The Conservative party report on the educational failure of ‘white working class boys’ (http://povertydebate.typepad.com/education/) got headlines in several papers and the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6150042.stm). I thought it sounded an interesting piece of research, until I actually saw the statistics they were basing the headlines on. They claim:

17% of white working class boys gain five or more A-C grades at GCSE, slightly fewer than the 19 per cent of black Caribbean boys of similar backgrounds...But among boys from low income Chinese families, the success rate is 69 per cent.

That ‘low income’ is the give-away. Because when you see how they collected their statistics, it is based not on socio-economic class, but one very crude measure: boys who have free school meals. So I checked the rules for eligibility for free school meals. The main criteria are being on income support or Jobseeker’s allowance (i.e. being unemployed) or having a low family income (not more than about £14,000). That is not a definition of ‘working class’ that most people would accept (as opposed to a definition of poor). In particular, the majority of skilled working class jobs would be excluded. The median annual pay for full-time skilled trades (such as in agriculture, construction, electrical work) is £20,000, the median annual pay for drivers is nearly £19,000 etc.

What that means is that whether working-class families (with at least one full-time income) are eligible for free school meals for their children is going to depend crucially on what jobs they’re doing. If they’re in low-pay sectors such as catering or shop work, they may well be eligible. If they’re a motor mechanic or a fork-lift driver, their children won’t be. And given that some ethnic minorities (such as Chinese and South Asian) are concentrated in low paying industries, that immediately casts severe doubts on the validity of the statistics, since they are often not going to be comparing like with like. If you are going to argue (as the Conservatives do), that the difference is about culture, then you need to be controlling for employment status. Do the boys of the long-term unemployed (or those with a father in full-time employment) do equally well/poorly, whatever their ethnicity/culture?

There are also a whole lot of questions raised about what you mean by ‘culture’ when you’re talking about the ‘white working class’. Is there still a ‘working class’ culture in the same way, when the traditional work is no longer there? An important part of male working class culture, traditionally, as I understand it, was working at specific types of heavy/dangerous/dirty manual labour, many forms of which have almost gone in this country - mining, iron and steel industry, car production. You can define a class ‘culture’ in other ways than jobs, of course - I would argue that being part of the middle class is far more about education and attitudes to it than specific forms of employment after education. But if (male) working class culture depended heavily on the existence of manufacturing jobs that have now disappeared, then the Conservatives ought to start thinking a bit harder about their role their policies have and might play in damaging that culture.

My husband and I have been raising L as a Christian since she was born, since we’re both believers, but it has definitely been getting trickier in the last 6 months (from L aged 3.5 to nearly 4). I think Easter 2006 was the first festival that really registered at a theological level (Christmas 2005 did a bit), and I have had a number of theological discussions with her since then. I am trying quite hard both to answer her questions and not to tell her things that I would have to contradict at a later date. (I’m obviously simplifying and omitting a lot, but that’s a different matter). She’s now getting to the age where she can remember (if somewhat at random) what people say, so my consistency, at least is becoming more important.

My problems so far seem to fall into three main categories:

1) The theologically unexpected question

L followed up a question on ‘Can you open a tin without a tin-opener?’ with ‘Can God open a tin without a tin-opener?’ The theologically correct answer is, of course ‘Yes’ (it’s definitely included within omnipotence), but I felt the need to add to this that although God could do this, he wouldn’t do it, because it was a silly thing to do and God wasn’t silly. We have also since then had ‘Does God ever have a runny nose?’ (which again I think is probably excluded by omnipotence), ‘Is God a man or a woman?’ (I argued for neither: even if you take God as male, as Christian tradition has it, he is not a man and that is the point) and ‘What can God do that I can do as well?’ (The answer is Love people). These questions are tricky in the sense that there is no pre-existing theological answer (if only Augustine had had his young son around when he was doing theology, we might have got some of then), but I can usually come up with some vaguely logical answer. If L notices more inconsistencies when she grows up, I can point out that the problem is that God is beyond our human understanding in many ways, so descriptions of him are inevitably analogous and imperfect.

2) Don’t believe all you sing or pray

I was pleased that L was learning ‘Away in a manger’, until she came up with the killer question. ‘The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes / But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes’. Why doesn’t Baby Jesus cry? We know Jesus cried as an adult, why shouldn’t he have done so as a baby? If he was truly human as a baby, then he would have howled when he was hungry or wet or for lots of other reasons. I couldn’t come up with a good answer to this one. I have also had a tricky theological time with guardian angels. They crop up in several prayers and Christian picture books L has and she likes the whole concept of angels watching over her while she sleeps. I’m not sure how theologically sound the concept is, however, so I am trying to downplay it a bit.

3) Death

Hearing about the Easter story is the first time L came across the concept of death. As a result, she doesn’t yet have any sense that death is permanent and irreversible and that what Jesus did in dying and then rising is in any way unusual. We’ve also told her the idea of heaven and she likes the sound of this, so she comes out sometimes with some fairly morbid sounding comments. (Her best ever was ‘Don’t worry if I die when I’m a child, because God will be my daddy and Jesus will be my mummy’ - which makes me vaguely wonder if she’s going to grow up to be Julian of Norwich). My view is that she will in time inevitably face and become conscious of the sadness of death, whether of elderly relatives, animals or in other ways; I don’t feel the need to hurry up this realisation. If she shares our belief that death is not the end then that will be a support for her when she does have to learn about the pain of death.

Alongside these questions which, however, inadequately, I’m trying to answer, I’m also conscious of the one that is going to be really hard in a few years time, that is lurking on the horizon now. The problem of why God allows suffering. There are theological answers to the problem of theodicy, but as academic/detached answers they’re never convincing (compare CS Lewis in ‘The problem of pain’ and ‘A grief observed’). I guess all I will be able to say in the end is ‘I don’t know, but I still believe in a loving God’ and hope that the God-inspired goodness that she sees in the people around her (including, I hope, but am rather unconvinced, in me), will seem to her confirmation of this.

A couple of comments I read/heard recently have got me thinking about the different kinds of authoritarian states there are and their relationship to families. One was someone talking about life in Communist Hungary and how it came to influence the very things you could think and talk about. It was hard to trust anyone. He had a friend from school he used to discuss jazz with; he found out after the fall of communism, when the secret police files were open, that that friend had been forced into working as an informer and his own comments on music had been noted. In this kind of surveillance culture there were massive amounts of self-censorship; it became hard even to think certain things, since these could never be expressed safely.

As a contrast, I came across the opening of a book review in the New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/200610160056):

Contrary to a notion common in the west, in Arab countries no opinion is too dangerous to express. People say whatever they want to say - they simply do it in private. Those who try to disclose in public what is meant to be shared only with a small circle of trusted friends, especially if it relates to political or religious matters, could pay a high price. Samir Kassir, who was murdered last year, was one of these.

It seems to me that these represent two very different traditions in authoritarian states (both of which could be equally brutal to political opponents). One seeks to penetrate all of society, right into the most intimate relationships (the classic totalitarianism), another seems to allow more autonomy at the personal level, while still maintaining a wider oppressive structure. A couple of recent articles on Iran seem to emphasis this second tendency (http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009162, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1937510,00.html), showing a world where such illegal acts as premarital sex and watching satellite TV are normal activities, within complicated frameworks of deception and pretence. This itself obviously has a disconnecting impact on society and mentalities, but not in quite the same corrosive way as totalitarianism.

I started wondering both why such a ‘soft’, public-only authoritarianism developed and whether it was possibly more successful at political repression than the ‘normal’ totalitarian state. The conventional view is that any relaxation of repression by an authoritarian state will lead to its downfall: it is the state trying to lessen its iron grip where the system collapses totally (like Gorbachov’s communism), whereas the obdurate hardliners continue for ever. (See e.g. Ian Bremmer, The J Curve http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Understand-Nations-Rise-Fall/dp/0743274717). Yet I wonder whether some of these limited authoritarian states might not be more successful than traditional communist ones. Even Iran looks more politically stable than reformers would like it to be. (As the Wall Street Journal concludes: ‘How can you have a revolution when everyone is watching TV?’). And countries such as Singapore seem so far to be successfully combining economic and some social liberty with political repression.

The examples from around the world also suggest that this kind of public-only authoritarianism works best where there is a fairly strong cultural tradition of repressive/controlling families, for example in Mediterranean/Arab culture, Confucian influenced East Asia (or indeed pre-20th century Western Christen culture). Perhaps what happens is that the state is allowing the privatisation of control/repression here. There certainly seems to be some kind of trade off, since the totalitarian state often seems to be connected to a suspicion of the family: communism, in particular, from Soviet Russia to Mao’s China, being noted for the encouragement of denouncing your own family/close friends. Such a surveillance society, with the state invading private life, tends to be associated with the left, since they often have the most suspicion of the family. Sometimes this is justified: the idea that the family should never be questioned has led to a lot of domestic violence and abuse over the years. The Iranian mullahs don’t actually need to penetrate to the bedroom to check for misconduct: they can rely on grannies to do this for them. But there are also some occasions where right-wingers are enthusiastic to regulate private life: rules preventing private homosexual acts, for example, or the threat in the USA to subpoena women’s health records to check on abortions. (Ferdinand Mount, a conservative journalist, wrote an interesting book, The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage (London, 1982), which pointed out that the family wasn’t simply subversive of socialist values. It could also be hostile to more ‘conservative’ social movements, such as Christianity or Edward Burke’s wish to co-opt family love into developing patriotism.)

Meanwhile, in the recent discussion of Britain becoming a ‘surveillance society’ I think there’s possibly been too much focus on the technology of cameras etc. Perhaps more problematic is the growth of a culture that encourages denouncing of others, even those close to us. The government has certainly encouraged this, with John Reid wanting Muslim parents to spy on their children http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1876865,00.html), but I think the proliferation of ‘report a cheat’ lines has merely tapped into a deep-seated urge by Britons to inform on others (such as those who use their hosepipes illegally). Unfortunately, if a real authoritarian state ever did come to Britain, it would probably be at the more totalitarian end of the spectrum.

This is an extract from Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, (2nd ed, Cambridge, 2006), which I've just been reading, on the Inquisition (pp 28-29):

The accused was interrogated by the inquisitor and his assistants and a summary of the proceedings was recorded by a notary. The aim was to establish guilt, either by confession or by the use of testimonial evidence. He was not allowed a defending advocate, even if he could have found one, and witnesses were reluctant to testify on his behalf for fear of guilt by association. Hostile witnesses were allowed to remain anonymous on the grounds that they might otherwise be intimidated, and the accused could only read a précis of their depositions. In contrast to secular proceedings, all kinds of witnesses could be used, even perjurers, criminals and the excommunicate. The accused could only list his enemies in the hope that some names would coincide with the witnesses. It seems, however, that the inquisitors’ real aim was to obtain a confession, for, without the admission of guilt, a heretic could not be reconciled to the Church. If confession could not be obtained spontaneously, compulsion would be used, firstly by imprisonment under increasingly harsh conditions and ultimately by torture, supposedly of a limited kind which did not involve the effusion of blood or permanent mutilation.

I’m very busy at the moment, trying to understand how the Holy Roman Empire worked, so please fill in the contemporary analogies yourself.

I was teaching last week about the expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I in 1290. It’s pretty depressing reading all the material, especially the article by Robert Stacey which discusses ‘the connections between the precocious development of the medieval English state and the no less precocious development of medieval English anti-Semitism.’ (Robert C. Stacey, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State’, in J.R. Maddicott and D.M. Palliser, eds, The Medieval State (2000), pp. 163-77).

But it also got me thinking about some current issues of freedom of speech. There is currently a considerable divide between a US belief in freedom of speech as a fundamental right and considerably greater restrictions in most European democracies. One justification of the European position is the Holocaust, but the case of the medieval Jews is also instructive.

I would distinguish three basic degrees of ‘hate speech’ (including writing). Firstly, there is speech encouraging violence against specific individuals e.g. websites which list the names and addresses of opponents (anti-Nazis, abortionists, animal experimenters etc) and encourage attacks on them. I don’t think there is any enthusiasm among supporters of freer speech for this to be allowed. Secondly, there is speech encouraging violence against a social group in general, but without specific targets e.g. ‘Kill the unbelievers’, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. Thirdly, there is speech which encourages hatred against a group, but does not specifically encourage violence e.g. ‘Jews are Christ-killers’, ‘God hates fags’.

Those who are most enthusiastic about free speech think that the second and third forms of hate speech should be allowed, since they distinguish very clearly between words and actions. You may say anything, as long as you do not do anything. However, this clearly seems dubious when it comes to speech in category two. Otherwise, you have the paradox that the leaders of a hate movement (such as the Nazis, the groups responsible for Rwandan genocides etc) are acceptable, because they may not have blood on their own hands, but those lower down the organisation, who actually commit violence, are guilty. (You can only get round this by arguing about responsibility up a chain of command when it a government committing atrocities).

The trickiest bit is the third category, speech which encourages hatred, but not violence. Here, the case of medieval Judaism is particularly instructive. The position of the Catholic church, from the patristic period onwards, was clear. Jews should suffer various restrictions within Christian society, but they should not be harmed simply for being Jews. In particular, they should not be removed from Christian society, but instead should remain as ‘witnesses’. Thus the church opposed the murderous attacks on the Jews associated with the crusading movement from 1096 onwards; as far as I know, the more senior members of church hierarchies are never reported as sanctioning or abetting these attacks in the Middle Ages. Similarly, expulsions of the Jews from particular kingdoms seem to have been an independent initiative by rulers, often without much specific church enthusiasm.

Yet it is completely unrealistic to say that therefore the medieval church had no responsibility for these wider attacks on the Jews, when they had centuries of preaching the Jews as ‘Christ-killers’. Those who support unrestricted free speech have to answer the question: how do you prevent hate speech creating a climate which encourages violence and murder, when we have seen this happen? (The standard US view seems to be that the constitution will miraculously protect despised groups: given the current manipulation of the constitution and the rule of law generally in the US, this seems a less good argument than in the past).

The case of the medieval Jews also raises two other interesting issues. One is that the distinction made by some liberals (and also many other opponents of Islam) between religious and racial hatred is not necessarily a firm boundary. There has been a lot of discussion among medievalists about when anti-Judaism (religious hostility) became anti-Semitism (hostility to Jews as a race). There is a consensus that there is some kind of change in the twelfth and thirteenth century. It’s then that you begin to find doubts about whether converted Jews can really become proper Christians, caricatures of Jews showing ‘ethnic’ features, suggestions that Jews are congenital liars etc. Is the same things happening to ‘Muslims’, as a category? When you read references to the ‘Muslim mind’, or the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci describing Muslims as ‘breeding like rats’, I think you can see it already.

There is also the thought-provoking issue of assimilation. Jews in Medieval Europe refused to abide by one of the most basic tenets of the societies they lived in: Christian belief. If you follow some modern views, such refusal to adapt means that they shouldn’t have been tolerated by European societies. (There is a clear progression from the view that ‘if you don’t abide by British norms, you shouldn’t be in this country’ and the logic of expulsion, even if it’s one that at the moment would be seen as a step too far). Over the centuries, some Jewish communities have largely assimilated into other societies (though, notoriously, it didn’t help the German Jews at all in the end). But there has always been a strain of Jewish thought that has rejected assimilation, that has wished to remain separate in significant ways from the rest of the population, for example by rejecting intermarriage. Should modern British society accept such people, or should it be telling them: ‘if you want to behave like that, then you need to go to Israel?’ If you argue (as I would) that such groups should be accepted in Britain and as British, then you need to come up with a clear answer as to why some relatively unintegrated Muslims are unacceptable.

The Muslim veil argument rumbles on, with some good articles in the Guardian (see e.g. David Edgar: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1892543,00.html). However there are also some articles that confirm David Edgar’s view that some liberals’ tolerance is limited to what they approve of. Take the article by Catherine Bennett (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1920279,00.html). Bennett’s main comparison is with the Victorian movement for dress reform, which complained about such irrational dress for women as corsets. This is certainly one argument against the niqab and burka; that its restrictions limit what women can do. The problem is, that if rationality in dress is the main thing, more British women ought to be going round wearing the shalwar kameez. (south Asian dress of loose trousers and long shirt). By any reckoning this is a far more practical and less restrictive garment than e.g. miniskirt and high heels, and if global warming continues, might prevent a lot of skin cancer cases.

Bennett’s discussion of Victorian views on dress lead her into her main point: the problem of false consciousness (though she doesn’t specifically use this phrase, the implication is clear):

In common with today's critics of the veil, Gerrit Smith, his daughter Elizabeth and their fellow clothing reformers had to contend with the fact that most of the women constricted by laced-up whalebone and petticoats insisted that they wore their absurd skirts and corsets gladly, just as readily as they embraced dependency on men as their own free choice. Most women, Smith noted, "are content in their helplessness and poverty and destitution of rights. Nay, they are so deeply deluded, as to believe, that all this belongs to their natural and unavoidable lot".

This, according to Bennett, is why religious restrictions on clothing must be rejected:

All this free choosing, according to Straw's critics, we should accept, uncritically, at face value, because - here's their trumping argument - what does freedom mean, if it doesn't mean being free to oppress yourself? What does freedom mean if you can't feel comfy in a niqab? Or happy to shave off your hair and wear a wig instead? Or comfortable - if you so choose - with footbinding? Or keen - if that's what you want - to have a clitoridectomy?

As David Edgar wrote in this paper yesterday, true tolerance requires that we defend to the death people's right to oppress themselves. In all kinds of unappealing, even - you might think - barbaric ways.

Bennett doesn’t make clear what she wants to do on these issues; I’ll take the generous view and presume that she doesn’t actually want wearing the niqab or sheitel (the wig worn by some married Othodox Jewish women) banned. [Footbinding and clitoridectomy are a) permanent procedures and b) normally performed on children, so these are very different issues]. If she wants to argue against them and try and convince women not to wear them, she’s free to. But it is patronising to assume that women in the UK who adopt religious restrictions or other behaviour seen as ‘oppressed’ by some liberals are necessarily doing it because they are deluded. For example, it seems to be the case that the niqab (which is rare in Britain) is being adopted by some young Muslim women as a deliberate religious statement (see e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1889871,00.html).

I think there is a problem here for some liberals (and particularly some ‘missionary atheists’); they possess no adequate framework for dealing with those who choose not to accept liberal views. The opposite of the Enlightenment must (by definition) be the unenlightened. If those who do not accept liberal views do not respond in the correct way when properly informed, they must either have particularly acute forms of false consciousness or be mad (or evil). It is noticeable how often the idea of ‘brainwashing’ comes up in discussions by atheists of child-raising by the religious, as if seeking to inculcate one’s beliefs and values into one’s child was not common practice by all parents. Many religions, of course, have a long tradition of poor treatment (and sometimes immense cruelty) to unbelievers. But, at least in Anglicanism, there is, I think, now an acceptance that people can reject religion without necessarily being evil or deluded. There needs to be some thought among liberals about how they (we) treat the non-believers in liberalism.

Last week, where they met was at the first Institute of Historical Research seminar of the year, which was a joint meeting with the Institute of Archaeology. And the paper, by Richard Hodges on ‘Dark Age Economics in 2006’, was not a good example of how the disciplines might collaborate productively (although I wouldn’t go quite as far as the distinguished historian next to me, who commented ‘absolute tripe’ at the end).

One of the problems was that much of it was archaeology for the archaeologist, starting with a lot of discussion of theoretical spatial models of settlements and economies. This assumed that you were already well up on the debate, but it also wasn’t clear how well the models actually fitted what was on the ground. For example, Hodges was talking about the possibility of periodic trade at beach-heads, temporary coastal meeting points, but it wasn’t clear to me how you would recognise those in the archaeological record.

The bigger problem is the familiar disjunction between the disciplines: archaeology can tell you what’s happening, but not by whom or why. There is still a lot of redating of some of the key sites going on, but even when they are securely dated, twenty-five years here or there is not a lot for an archaeologist, but is crucial for a historian. In addition, Richard Hodges seems particularly prone to making unsubstantiated claims about how developments are due to rulers, even when there’s little evidence for that. For example, he’s excavated St Vincenzo al Volturno (a monastery on the fringes of the Carolingian empire) and was claiming its developments there are part of a scientific/technical revolution under Charlemagne.

What is frustrating is that there is a lot that archaeology can contribute to historical research, especially for the early Middle Ages. You shouldn’t now discuss the ‘Fall of the Roman Empire’ without looking at the archaeological evidence of trade collapse. Hodges made a couple of passing mentions of some very interesting work: his dig in Byzantine Albania and also evidence of assarting in early medieval Europe (for non-medievalists, this is clearing of woods/wastelands for farming, a key sign of more intensive agriculture and normally thought to have developed only post-1000). But if archaeological research wants to contribute more to history than a collection of site reports, then we need some archaeologists with a rather more sophisticated grasp of historical argument (to set alongside early medieval historians such as Chris Wickham, Guy Halsall and Ross Balzaretti who are taking the archaeological evidence very seriously). Otherwise historians are either going to ignore archaeology or just use archaeological data, not the wider implications drawn by archaeologists.

In the midst of all the newspaper discussions from last week on the peculiar clothing worn by some religions, there is one point that everyone has been too PC to point. It is time to stand up and say it loudly: Amish women should be banned from wearing bonnets.

Why? Because as Jack Straw puts it, the bonnet is ‘such a visible statement of separation and of difference’. And as Martin Kettle writes in the Guardian:

It says something not just about the wearer but the non-wearer too. It says, or seems to say, I do not wish to engage with you. It is at some level a rejection. And since that statement of rejection comes from within...cultures, some of whose willingness to integrate is explicitly at issue in more serious ways, it is hardly surprising that it should be challenged.

Oh wait, it isn’t the Amish costume that people are complaining about, despite the fact that they are a community who has defiantly not integrated into society. It’s Muslim women with veils. Freedom of speech is one thing, but freedom of dress...

It’s difficult to discuss the issue of the veil because there are so many different concerns being packed into one garment, but the comparison with Amish dress does make some of the hypocrisy clear. There are a few good reasons to be concerned about the veil. Wearing a veil is likely to makes face to face communication more difficult. There are some situations where there may be concern about security. If women are being coerced into wearing the veil or threatened for not wearing it, that’s obviously wrong. These cases mean that there are some situations where it’s justified asking a woman to remove her veil. It seems to me acceptable for schools and other institutions which have uniforms or dress codes, for example, to decide whether or not veils are appropriate. Maybe Jack Straw finds it easier to conduct constituency business, but he needs to think hard about whether he’s potentially deterring some women from coming to talk to him.

But Jack Straw goes further: he thinks women shouldn’t wear the veil in public, because it is ‘bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult.’ And this is where the hypocrisy starts coming in. Does he stand up and tell white people they shouldn’t go round wearing Union Jack T-shirts? I bet there are a lot of ethnic minorities who would see that as not only a ‘visible statement of difference’, but also an implicit rejection: I’m British and you’re not. Would Jack Straw dare say that you shouldn’t wear very revealing clothing in certain areas, because it might scandalise the religious communities there and worsen relations?

When I saw women wearing the full veil (in Gloucester, it’s not common in Hitchin) I thought it was peculiar, but I didn’t take it as some kind of statement rejecting me. Some religious people choose to wear funny clothes: nuns, Buddhist monks, Amish and Hassidic Jews, to name just a few. I would probably personally prefer women not to wear the veil, but then a large percentage of the population go round wearing things I think it would be better not to. Jack Straw, by broadening the issue beyond what he finds helpful in his office, is pandering (consciously or not) to all the bigots of Britain. And behold, they’ve come out. I saw the tabloid headings: 97% of Daily Express readers want the veil banned. It’s fair enough to discuss the limits of free speech and free dress, but Jack Straw’s soft bigotry (Oh, you can do that, but it’d be better if you didn’t, because it might upset the natives) isn’t a good place to start.

I have been reading up on late medieval British history (for a course I’ll be teaching) and so have been trying to come to grips with some of the key developments in constitutional history, such as Magna Carta and the early development of Parliament. What I’m most conscious of, looking at them for the first time as a historian, is how much it was chance (or at least external events) that gave them their long term significance and success. It was only because Henry III succeeded as a minor and needed to secure his position that Magna Carta was repeatedly reissued and came to be seen as a fundamental statement of English liberties. The extension of Parliament to include burgesses was part of Simon de Montfort’s attempt to gain support for his coup d’etat; the continued series of Parliaments in the reign of Edward I, which fixed its form, were largely due to his need for money to fight incessant wars. The developments were not due to some innately English character or ideas.

I thought of this when I came across a reference to a report by the right-wing think-tank Civitas on ‘Why history remains the best form of citizenship education’ (http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/CivitasReviewJuly05.pdf). This is written by a professor of philosophy, presumably because they couldn’t find a historian willing to write such tosh. The idea that you can learn about the British constitution via its historical development is fair enough. But it’s the details that are so dubious. Take the report’s claim:

‘A primary didactic purpose of teaching history in British schools should be...to serve the civic function of giving pupils the wherewithal for feeling justifiably proud of being British and for being attached to their history and their traditions.’

It then goes on to endorse the ‘Whig Interpretation of History’, which it says is:

‘distinguished by its portrayal of the history of Britain and of the native English-speaking diaspora more generally, as having been marked by an exceptional degree of material and moral progress’.

The article’s views are so ridiculous that it’s hard to know where to start. The author wishes to show that using history to develop citizenship isn’t a new idea and so quotes John Locke. He could have started a thousand years ago and more with Roman history. History was written primarily for the purpose of moral education for the vast majority of recorded history. The rise of professional history, a history that is more concerned with events than providing a moral commentary on them, is a relatively recent development. But one of the main reasons it happened is the obvious one: real life, the past real life that is history doesn’t fit into the neat categories of morality. The good don’t always win, the God-fearing nation (whatever God that may be) isn’t necessarily triumphant and bad ideas not only don’t disappear, but they flourish. Similarly, the idea of the exceptional ‘moral progress’ of the British/Americans (let alone white South Africans) just doesn’t hold much water today, because it’s obviously not true.

The old Whig interpretation of history (whatever David Starkey may claim) doesn’t work as a basis for a history of Britain (for one thing, it is effectively English history before 1707). It might be possible to produce a more progressive and inclusive ‘Whig history’ of Britain’s constitutional developments, in which an acknowledgement of an increase in liberties is done with less crowing about the inferiority of all other races. But this still leaves a big problem: what do you do about the bits of history that don’t fit the model?

Take Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. That now seems an important aspect of his reign (although it’s not mentioned in ‘Our Island Story’ (http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=marshall&book=island&story=_contents), Civitas’ preferred history book) and there’s an obvious moral lesson there. But will it make children ‘justifiably proud of being British’? And what, more generally, do you do about the fifteenth century? What is there to be justifiably proud of in the Hundred Years’ War or the Wars of the Roses? That a war of aggression by England was initially successful because of superior weapons technology (the longbow)? If you are going to stick to the morally uplifting story of how Britain (England) became so superior, you pretty much have to write off everything between Wat Tyler and the Reformation and hope no-one notices a gap in the textbook. Alternatively, you go back to the notion that the purpose of teaching history in schools is to give pupils an idea of what happened in particular periods of time, with inculcating patriotism only as a secondary function.

I made the mistake today of reading another article by Niall Ferguson and I am still seething. This was another of his articles on the theory of empire (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3550), which starts off by making the interesting point that most recent empires have lasted for far shorter periods than ancient and early modern ones (although Ferguson’s suggestion of the Holy Roman Empire as lasting from 800-1806 is pretty meaningless, and he omits some short-lived ancient empires, such as the Athenian and Macedonian empires) He then asks why recent empires have proved so short-lived.

One part of his answer is that more recent empires have aspired to more centralised control of the conquered territories and by their ruthlessness in reshaping their conquered territories encouraged resistance. Instead of exploring this, he then goes on to the dubious argument that empires emerge largely for economic reasons and adds: ‘But why fight wars? Again, the answer must be economic’. The idea that emperors from Augustus to Charlemagne decided whether or not to expand their territories based on whether they could do better than by ‘free exchange with independent peoples or with another empire’ is simply ludicrous.

Ferguson then goes onto the ‘Life of Brian’ argument:

At the same time, however, an empire may provide “public goods”—that is, benefits of imperial rule that flow not only to the rulers but also to the ruled and, indeed, to third parties. These can include peace in the sense of a Pax Romana, increased trade or investment, improved justice or governance, better education (which may or may not be associated with religious conversion), or improved material conditions.

He then concludes (as only a purblind economic historian can):

An empire, then, will come into existence and endure so long as the benefits of exerting power over foreign peoples exceed the costs of doing so in the eyes of the imperialists; and so long as the benefits of accepting dominance by a foreign people exceed the costs of resistance in the eyes of the subjects.
...
Empire today, it is true, is both unstated and unwanted. But history suggests that the calculus of power could swing back in its favor tomorrow.

The implication is clear: empire, if it’s the right kind of empire, is OK. Now, I don’t want to argue that all empires were equally bad, or deny that there have been positive aspects to some empires. But I find it extremely doubtful that there are going to be any more peoples eager to receive ‘the benefits of accepting dominance by a foreign people’. (And the ‘costs of resistance’ are weasel words for risking being killed: even the oh so benevolent British empire carried out the Amritsar massacre). Ferguson in his discussion of why empires now disappear so quickly doesn’t mention the obvious point: that foreign rule is incompatible with the aspirations to democracy now widespread in the world. It’s arguable that a Gallic peasant didn’t do too much worse under a Roman emperor than a native ruler (he still got exploited by some high-up, and in most cases he probably couldn’t dream of any different situation). But once theories of universal human rights (or even of no taxation without representation) develop, empires are on ideologically shaky ground. In particular, democracy for imperial subjects is almost a contradiction in terms: the British introduced it only in colonies where the ‘natives’ had largely been wiped out (such as Canada and Australia). (It is also possible where relatively small colonies send representatives to a single imperial parliament and can thus be outvoted - see e.g. pre-1922 Ireland and some of the French West Indies).

Such resistance to foreign rule is likely to have little to do with a careful calculation of the benefits (economic or otherwise) of empire as against independence. And even where there are such calculations they are rarely favourable to imperial rule, however ‘good’ the empire. There was no queue of countries I know of begging to be admitted to the British Empire, for example, (though Mozambique has asked to join the Commonwealth). Meanwhile, subjects who had ‘benefited’ from a Western education and sometimes elite status were often among the leaders of resistance to empires (from Jose Rizal to Gandhi and Jomo Kenyatta). The ‘calculus of power’ may well mean further attempts to create empires in the future, but they are likely to find ever more stubborn resistance.

There is only one realistic answer to this question: we don’t know. Nevertheless, historically several theories of how society/sexuality and gendered behaviour should be organised have been based on the assumption that the answer to the question is known to the moral organisers of society. As a very great generalisation, in Christian countries, which have seen some forms of sexual expression as wrong:

a) if you think that men cannot control themselves sexually (at least some of the time), then you emphasise marriage (as a legitimate outlet for male sexuality) and segregation of the unmarried. (One version of this is male monasticism, another is severe restrictions on the movements of women). In this view, (Catholic) priests, who must be celibate but are not cloistered, are almost bound to fall into sin (a common view ever since Protestantism got going). (Interestingly, you get the same patterns if you start from the medieval view that it is women who are unable to control their lust).

b) if you think only a spiritual elite of men can control their lust, then priests as well as monks can possibly manage OK. Laymen are then definitely an inferior group, ranked in their weak will with ‘bad’ priests. (In both a) and b) of course, women, or at least any who exhibit ‘tempting’ behaviour, by being sexually desirable in any way, are automatically worse).

c) if you believe that most men can potentially control their lust, then laymen and women aren’t automatically at the bottom of the heap. Instead of misogyny, there is more of an emphasis on male responsibility for controlling their own lust, as a conquerable sin. (I would argue this is the Carolingian position).

What is odd is that these three very different views, all of which have been held and are still held today, are based on the answer to an intrinsically unanswerable question. I can’t think of any way, even with modern research methods, that you could study this question accurately. The chances of getting accurate answers from surveys, however well defined, seem to me low for such a sensitive subject and there are few experiments that would avoid bias. There are some (fairly gruesome) methods for measuring sexual desire in men, but they don’t tell you anything about the interaction of body and will. Now consider how you would go about getting an answer in an age before social science. You are reliant either on dodgy medical theories about the genitals and observation/discussion. Jerome was happy to use anecdotal evidence for the unstoppable power of the sexual drive (such as the eighty-year-old bishop who suddenly married), but his primary reason for seeing sex in this way was his own experience. Jerome makes explicit that his lust tormented him even as an ascetic in the desert. The same is probably true for the many medieval clerics and monks who spoke of the overwhelming force of lust in generalised terms: it is their own experience that they are reflecting. Who else would they be willing to ask and might they obtain a truthful answer from (excluding possibly their most intimate friends)? How much has the history of Christian discussion of sexuality been influenced by the sexual sensitivities of a handful of men?