Certainly no leader in the West has attempted to call a halt to the savagery, for example by the despatch of commandos, such as the Delta force that killed the Isis “oil minister” Abu Sayyaf and about 50 other jihadis in Syria last May. According to Walid al-Asaad, son of the murdered director of antiquities, Isis commanders are squatting in his father’s house — a sitting duck for US or British special forces. No doubt any operation to save Palmyra would have risked damaging the ruins — though now they are being smashed anyway. David Cameron dare not risk losing another parliamentary battle over Syria. To have committed even a handful of troops to save Palmyra, rather than to rescue refugees, might have implied that buildings mattered more than people. No politician dares risk a charge of lacking compassion. Hence one of the greatest surviving relics of antiquity has been sacrificed without a fight.

The story of Palmyra’s rise and fall, an arc that spanned the first three centuries of the Christian era, has fascinated modern historians since Theodor Mommsen, who was the first to supplement the testimony of the Historia Augusta with evidence from inscriptions and archaeology. According to the Hebrew Bible, Palmyra was founded by Solomon, but this claim is considered dubious and the city’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is the source of its prosperity: an oasis on the caravan route from Damascus to the Euphrates, Palmyra grew so rich that its engineers were able to build vast underground reservoirs and aqueducts to make agriculture possible.  The temple complex was on a scale to rival those of Athens and Jerusalem, attracting pilgrims and merchants from across the Near East. Its art and architecture merged Graeco-Roman classicism with Jewish, Syrian, Mesopotamian and Persian motifs to create an inimitable and unusually well-preserved confluence of oriental and occidental cultures.

Having been granted not merely the privileges of a Roman colony but the status of a semi-independent monarchy to defend the eastern marches of the Empire, Palmyra finally overreached itself under Queen Zenobia. One of the most remarkable women in history, she was born in 240 AD and claimed descent from both Dido of Carthage and Cleopatra of Egypt, but in her conduct more closely resembled Boadicea of Britain. Gibbon tells us that she was “esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex”, spoke four languages and was so renowned for her chastity that “she never admitted her husband’s embraces but for the sake of posterity”, i.e. postponing sex until her monthly fertile period. Widowed by the assassination of her husband, the warlike Odenathus, she unwisely heeded the advice of Cassius Longinus, an elderly Hellenistic philosopher, to declare independence. The motives of Longinus are unclear, but we are told that in Palmyra he lacked the books to which he had been accustomed elsewhere; so perhaps he coveted the library of Alexandria, the largest in the ancient world. Having broken free of Rome, defeated its army at the head of her troops, and seized control of Egypt, its richest province, Zenobia styled herself Queen of the East.

Provoked by her insurrection, the Emperor Aurelian marched on Palmyra. After defeating Zenobia twice, at Antioch and Emesa, and braving the Syrian desert, Aurelian surrounded the city. Of the protracted siege that ensued, during which he was wounded, the emperor wrote back to Rome: “The Roman people speak with contempt of the war which I am waging against a woman. They are ignorant both of the character and of the power of Zenobia.” As hopes of relief from Persia faded, Zenobia attempted to flee by camel but was captured. Palmyra soon surrendered. Aurelian treated the vanquished Palmyrenes leniently, but was stern with their queen and her entourage. “The courage of Zenobia deserted her in the hour of trial,” writes Gibbon. He castigates her dishonourable betrayal of her “friends”, while lavishing praise on Longinus for embracing a true philosopher’s death. “Without uttering a complaint, he calmly followed the executioner, pitying his unhappy mistress, and bestowing comfort on his afflicted friends.” But Zenobia’s life was spared. She suffered the indignity of being led in triumph through Rome in chains of gold. Her subsequent fate is obscure, but according to one account she so impressed Aurelian with her dignity in defeat that he granted her freedom and a villa in Tivoli, where she married a senator, had several daughters and presided over a literary salon. Among her descendants may be St Zenobius, a Christian bishop who lived in Florence two centuries later.

Gibbon, however, sides with the sage against the warrior queen: “The fame of Longinus . . . will survive that of the queen who betrayed, or the tyrant who condemned him.” There are two things wrong with Gibbon’s account. Firstly, he is so prejudiced against what he sees as Zenobia’s inconstant lack of manly fortitude — not only was she a woman, but an oriental woman too — that he fails to put himself in her shoes. Lacking a convenient asp about her person, she did not have Cleopatra’s option of suicide, even if she had wanted it. It was natural for a queen to value her own life more highly than those around her (monarchs, then and now, do not have “friends”) because she embodied Palmyra: their sacrifice was necessary for her survival — and Zenobia was nothing if not a survivor. By choosing captivity over death Zenobia was obeying raison d’état. What of “the sublime Longinus”? He was not, as Gibbon supposed, the author of the celebrated treatise On the Sublime, which had been written two centuries earlier. In fact, none of Cassius Longinus’s works has survived; if he is remembered at all, it is mainly due to his ill-fated association with Zenobia. Moreover, despite his grey hairs, Longinus may have been justly served by her denunciation and his execution. Like Plato and Aristotle, he appears to have been an early example of that baleful phenomenon: the intellectual who meddles in politics. In the case of Longinus, it was Palmyra that paid the price for his decision to turn the lady he served into the vehicle of his ambition.

For Aurelian had not finished with Palmyra. Returning to Rome, the emperor was enraged to hear that its people had risen again and massacred his garrison. The emperor retraced his steps and this time he laid waste both to the city and its citizens. Palmyra’s temples were ransacked and the noble metropolis was left a smouldering ruin. The year was 273 AD.

Palmyra never recovered. As Gibbon observes, “it is easier to destroy than to restore. The seat of commerce, of arts, and of Zenobia, gradually sunk into an obscure town, a trifling fortress, and at length a miserable village. The present citizens of Palmyra, consisting of 30 or 40 families, have erected their mud huts within the spacious court of a magnificent temple.” Gibbon knew this because he had read and learned from Robert Wood, the British antiquarian who had recently visited the site and in 1753 published a pioneering description of what he had found there. The story of Palmyra’s rediscovery is as interesting as any other part of its long history, and even more momentous. For it was thanks to Wood’s great work, The Ruins of Palmyra, and especially to its engravings of the superb drawings of Giovanni Batista Borra, that the genius of Palmyra was to extend its influence throughout the Western world.

Who was this antiquarian, or archaeologist avant la lettre? Born in 1717 in County Meath, Ireland, the impoverished son of an Anglican clergyman, Wood was educated at Glasgow University and read law at the Middle Temple before becoming a “travelling tutor and an excellent classic scholar” (in the words of his friend Horace Walpole). Already well travelled in Europe and the Middle East, in 1749 he embarked with two wealthy young companions, John Bouverie and James Dawkins, on an expedition to Greece via Rome. Their purpose was, as Wood put it, “to read the Iliad and Odyssey in the countries where Achilles fought, where Ulysses travelled, and where Homer sung”. Borra was engaged as “architect and draughtsman”. Bouverie died during the two years of the party’s travels around the Levant, but in March 1751 Wood, Dawkins and Borra arrived in Palmyra. They remained for two weeks, making notes and copying inscriptions, while Borra amassed numerous sketches in pen, ink and wash. Then the expedition moved on to Baalbek, where they did the same, before returning home.

Two years later The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the desart [sic] appeared in London. The most impressive study of an ancient city that had been published hitherto, it included 57 folio plates plus explanatory notes, seven pages of inscriptions, a dissertation on ancient Palmyra and a journal of the expedition. Some of the plates extend over several pages and are so beautiful that copies of the first edition with the illustrations intact are today extremely rare. But what made Borra’s drawings so important was their photographic precision. Unlike his more famous contemporary Piranesi, whose depictions of ruins are primarily intended to be picturesque, under Wood’s tutelage Borra devoted himself solely to archaeological accuracy. They thus provided perfect templates for architects and designers to adopt.

Critical opinion throughout the republic of letters was unanimous in praise of Wood, and a French edition followed immediately. Four years later, a second, similar volume followed: The Ruins of Balbec, otherwise Heliopolis in Coelosyria, again to general acclaim. Only two decades later, after both Dawkins and Wood had died, would Gibbon sound a discordant note when he appended a sour footnote to chapter 17 of his Decline and Fall, claiming that Wood had “disappointed the expectation of the public as a critic and still more as a traveller”. Later in his History, however, Gibbon admitted his debt to Wood, acknowledging “the magnificent descriptions and drawings of Dawkins and Wood, who have transported into England the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbec”.

The story of the reception of Wood’s scholarship and Borra’s images deserves a book in its own right. Almost immediately, imitations of Palmyrene colonnades, capitals, reliefs and other architectural features became ubiquitous in neoclassical architecture and design, especially in Britain and the American colonies. One of Wood’s friends was the architect Robert Adam, who incorporated motifs from Palmyra into such great country houses as Syon, Osterley, Kenwood and Harewood. In the newly independent United States, there are ubiquitous echoes of Palmyra, most prominently where Jefferson copied the Temple of the Sun for the east portico of the Capitol in Washington. Even the eagle used in the Great Seal is also borrowed from a soffit in the same temple. Indeed, the debt is so extensive that a major Anglo-American exhibition is overdue. It is time that the great museums and libraries of London, New York and Washington joined forces to highlight what has been lost in the destruction of Palmyra.

Robert Wood’s life did not end with his books on the desert cities. He went into politics, became under-secretary of state to Pitt the Elder and spent a decade as an MP for one of his patron the Duke of Bridgewater’s pocket boroughs. But his political career was most notable for his pursuit of John Wilkes, the radical journalist, politician and campaigner for civil liberties. Wood was only a minor player in the battle between Wilkes and the British government, but he scarcely covered himself with glory. In 1763 he seized the papers of Wilkes on the orders of Lord Halifax, secretary of state, only to be fined £1,000 after Wilkes brought an action for trespass — a notable blow for liberty in which Wood found himself on the losing side. As under-secretary to Lord Weymouth, Wood again pursued Wilkes. The irony is that Wood had more in common with Wilkes than he did with the philistine ministers whose cause he defended. For Wilkes, like Wood, had spent time in Rome among the dilettanti who gathered there, chief among them Winkelmann, the historian of antiquity, and the artist Mengs, who had painted Wood’s portrait.

The only minister Wood served who shared his passion for antiquity was the aged Lord Granville. It fell to Wood to bring the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War, to Granville as the Lord President of the Council lay on his deathbed. Wood offered to return later, but Granville quoted Sarpedon’s speech from the Iliad, pointing out that great men must prove their merit with great deeds. He insisted that Wood should read him the text of the treaty and gave it “the approbation of a dying statesman, as the most glorious war and most honourable peace this nation ever saw”. In later years, Wood returned to his first love: his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade was published posthumously in 1775, with engravings of the drawings done by Borra in the region around Troy during their travels there a quarter of a century before. After his death in 1771, Wood’s works were not forgotten. Still quoted today is Horace Walpole’s prophetic tribute, in a letter of 1774: “The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”

Palmyra itself, meanwhile, remained in a state of suspended animation for another century before another British traveller encountered it in the Syrian wilderness. Gertrude Bell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s new film Queen of the Desert, was not merely the adventuress portrayed by Nicole Kidman, who falls in love with a married consul (played by Damian Lewis), but an accomplished archaeologist, Arabist, diplomat and spy, who played a big part in the creation of modern Iraq and founded the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad. In May 1900 she wrote to her stepmother, Florence, about her arrival, after passing “the famous Palmyrene tower tombs”, in Palmyra itself: “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. It is a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs . . . It looks like the white skeleton of a town, standing knee deep in the blown sand . . . Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I have seen in this country.” Her friend and brother officer T. E. Lawrence echoed her, in words that are inscribed on a plaque in Palmyra: “Nothing in this scorching, desolate land could be so refreshing.” Agatha Christie, who stayed there in the charming old Hotel Zenobia (now destroyed along with the ruins whose visitors it served), gushed: “It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream . . . It isn’t — it can’t be — real.”  

It is unbearable to think that the unique urban landscape Gertrude Bell, Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie described a century ago no longer exists. But Walpole’s thought experiment, in which a traveller from Lima “gives a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra”, no longer seems such a remote fantasy. The same atavistic theology that now justifies the levelling of the Temple of Bel also encompasses the destruction of churches and synagogues on an even grander scale. We need to recall Gibbon’s similar jeu d’esprit when he considers what might have happened if Charles Martel had not stopped the advance of Islam into Europe at the Battle of Tours: “Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the truth and sanctity of the revelation of Mahomet.”

The full significance of the demolition of Palmyra thus only emerges when we consider what it implies about the perpetrators’ attitude to Western civilisation. Ruins that had stood for nearly 1,800 years mean less than nothing to the genocidal ghouls of the new Caliphate, whose aim is to throw history into reverse and annihilate even the memory of all non-Islamic cultures. By harnessing the resources of Western culture — not only military technology but above all using the internet as a propaganda tool — the marauders of Isis have forced themselves into the forefront of our consciousness. Islamism is the face of nihilism in our time. The paralysis of the Western democracies when confronted with such radical evil is not unprecedented — we did not stop the Holocaust or the Cultural Revolution either — but what is new seems to be the brazen self-aggrandisement of the perpetrators. The great crimes of the 20th century were largely hidden from the world while they took place. This time, Isis has forced us to watch the agony of a civilisation. Whose civilisation is it? Ours — for the ruins of Palmyra belong to our cultural heritage no less than their architectural progeny, the English country house or the Capitol. The casual murder of Khaled al-Asaad in front of the antiquities that had been his life’s work recalls the death of Archimedes, who according to Plutarch was slain in Syracuse by a Roman soldier because he would not look up from his geometrical diagrams in the dust. Yet the Roman general, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, was apparently furious, having given orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed.

The Romans often behaved in a barbaric way — for example, by reducing Palmyra to a ruin — but they were not barbarians. The Islamists of the new Caliphate glory in their barbarism. They also have a growing number of admirers and apologists here. Once Isis has finished with Palmyra, the media caravan will move on to another oasis of death, with a new horror show to fill our screens. But the voyeuristic atrocities we are witnessing in Syria and Iraq are a foretaste of what the future has in store for the West — including Britain — unless we act now.

The post Why Palmyra Should Matter To The West appeared first on Standpoint.

In John Maynard Keynes’s book Essays on Persuasion there is an article about Russia written in 1925 shortly after he attended a conference in Leningrad. In it he maintained that “Russia will never matter seriously to the rest of us, unless it be as a moral force,” and continued: “If Communism achieves a certain success, it will achieve it, not as an improved economic technique, but as a religion.” He finished the essay with a comment that could be interpreted as not entirely pessimistic: “Out of the cruelty and stupidity of Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but that beneath the cruelty and stupidity of New Russia some speck of the ideal may lie hid.”

There is no doubt that lots of people were expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were dreamers among them like Andrei Amalrik, who based his prediction on his observations of Soviet society and the external threat from China. In his 1970 book he asked the question: Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? His observations were good but his predictions precipitate. There were many other forecasts. In a Wikipedia article entitled “Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union”, as many as 31 names are listed, although some of them are politicians who are in the habit of making off-the-cuff statements that might be regarded in the fullness of time as valid predictions.

To our mind the best prediction not included in the Wikipedia list wasmade by O.L. Smaryl (an anagram of L. Solymar, one of the present authors) in a 1984 article published in Survey, “New Technology and the Soviet Predicament”. Smaryl was no expert on Soviet economics. He was a natural scientist who often visited laboratories in the Soviet Union. By 1983 he could see how poorly equipped they were. He also saw how jealously the Soviet authorities guarded their monopoly of information.

In Kiev, for example, if a laboratory wanted to copy a Western scientific article they had to send it to some central office where the article was copied and sent back. Everybody knew that a computer could store information, hence it was a dangerous piece of equipment. Smaryl wrote:

A properly coded computer, aided and abetted by a printer, could appear to any KGB investigator as poised to print the collected works of V. I. Lenin, whereas as soon as the agent is out of sight it could churn out the latest news broadcast of the BBC or the last seven editions of a popular samizdat paper.

Brighter members of the Soviet establishment must have realised that in order to increase efficiency (military, economic, managerial and scientific) computers had to be introduced on a large scale. They did their best but under the circumstances that did not go far.

Having recognised that they had fallen behind in the military race, the Soviet leadership decided to reduce East-West tension. Glasnost and perestroika followed, which the leadership hoped would change Soviet reality. Their failure was predicted by Smaryl. The best theory to lean on was classical Marxist theory, with its concepts of “base” (relations of production) and “superstructure” (political institutions). According to Marx, when the two are no longer in harmony that society will perish. We should credit Gorbachev with the attempt to change both the base and the superstructure but those attempts failed. By the late 1980s, the Soviet system was beyond repair.

For those who prefer not to rely on Marxist theory to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, there could be a similar explanation based on the Soviet power structure. The two main components were the government (let’s include in this both the nominal government and the Communist Party) and the intelligence services. In the second half of the 1980s there was an increasing mismatch between the aims of the KGB and those of the General Secretary, culminating in the participation of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, in the anti-Gorbachev coup of August 1991. Smaryl’s prediction for the second part of the ’80s was: “In international relations the Soviet Union will adopt increasingly softer stands. It will first withdraw its support from the various revolutionary movements and then, slowly and reluctantly, will relinquish its hold over Eastern Europe.” Smaryl concluded: “Economic efficiency will increase accompanied by a spread of pluralistic ideas and there, at the end of the tunnel, will loom the inevitability of free elections.” He was wrong about economic efficiency. The relaxation of strict political control under Gorbachev led to declining, not improving, efficiency, but in all other aspects Smaryl was right.

The merit of Smaryl’s paper is that it gives only one reason for the USSR’s collapse: the emergence of new technology. Everything else followed from there. To give only one reason is a technique often followed in the natural sciences. It has the merit of simplicity, and it focuses the reader’s attention on one thing.

For later scrutiny another advantage of providing only one reason is that it offers critics the means of disproving whatever the author claimed. Playing the role of a critic now, could one conclude that the Soviet Union was bound to perish? By the beginning of the 1980s the writing was on the wall although nobody could as yet decipher it. But had circumstances been different in the 1950s and ’60s, could the Soviet Union have survived?

To answer that question we need to recall how new technology was born. In the early 1950s there were already well-defined research projects aimed at integrated circuits, i.e. combining several components. They were sponsored by the three arms of the US military, each of which had its own pet project. Had any of those projects been at least moderately successful, research money would have flown in that direction and the microchip (which came from a different project) would never have been realised. As it happens, it was. In the course of 40 years the number of  integrated components in an area covering a human nail rose to 15 billion. The invention of such an extraordinary device combined with such a fantastic growth rate was unlikely indeed. It was a lucky historical accident — for the West.

Accepting for the moment that the invention and subsequent growth of the microchip was a historical accident, can we imagine other historical accidents which would have been favourable to the Soviet Union? Let’s consider one of them: assume that Soviet researchers in biology managed to produce a set of super-intelligent mice by injecting into an embryo’s brain a certain substance one week before birth. With no more than a moderate amount of further research they decided to start experiments with human beings. They had plenty of volunteers who would have regarded their patriotic duty to allow surgical interference with the embryos they carried. The experiments on humans turned out to be successful. The children born could read and write at the age of three. By the time Chernenko came to power, the Soviet Union could have had a division of superhuman men and women, a division of John von Neumanns. It is futile to speculate how these superhumans would have made the Soviet Union an even greater power but we can imagine the Western reaction. Mice would have been fine, possibly even monkeys, but humans? Definitely not. The West would have fallen behind. The ultimate victory of Communism would have come that much nearer.

This example may be too specific. The point is that if there was danger to human life in any experiment the Soviet Union would always have had volunteers ready to please the authorities, whereas such experiments would have been banned in the West. So our conclusion is that the collapse of the Soviet Union could have been avoided if new technology had not come to the fore in the West. But it did.

The Soviet Union duly collapsed. The planned economy has been abandoned, a free-market economy has been installed. Russia has changed completely. But has it?  Russia has never had an independent judiciary. Corruption, collusion and narrow interests still prevail, inflation is rampant and military expenditure is once more enormous. Admittedly, there is now a middle class, more reluctant to accept official propaganda but once fear is reintroduced it will keep quiet.

We may safely conclude that not much has changed. The diseases of Soviet times are still there but they no longer threaten the existence of the regime. The base and the superstructure are once more in harmony: it is a capitalist economy upheld by the intelligence services. Putin has given up the messianic mission to convert the world to Communism. He just wants to get back what he believes was stolen from him. His ambition is to restore old Soviet borders. Can he do it? Can he challenge the West? Can he catch up with Western technology?

Our answer to the last question is no, the technological gap will remain. He might achieve some success in a few specialist fields but he will not be able to build a semiconductor industry comparable with that of the US. Will continued technological inferiority curb his ambitions? Unlikely. So what will happen in the next five years?

On the domestic front, it is unlikely that Putin would want to reconstruct the internal conditions that prevailed in Russia before Gorbachev. Times have changed. A little more freedom can be granted. In fact, it has to be granted because the hermetic sealing of the Soviet borders is no longer possible, nor is the monopoly on holding information. If he can’t ban everything Putin will realise that his best bet is to allow an opposition. Opposition broadcasting would be too risky but the opposition will be permitted to run a small-circulation newspaper, maybe even a daily paper financed by the government. This will be a kind of tame opposition. A genuine opposition will not exist in five years’ time. Putin will ensure that by using the time-honoured Soviet methods of intimidation, defamation, loss of employment, hounding by the security services, imprisonment for imaginary crimes, beating-up by thugs and the ultimate weapon,  assassination. Indeed, it is happening already.

Freedom of travel will be curtailed but restrictions will not be as strict as in Soviet times. All those who have shown loyalty to the regime and are wealthy enough to pay a “travel tax” will be allowed to leave the country for a limited stay abroad. To live abroad for extended periods will also be allowed but with the condition that a large proportion of the money earned has to be repatriated in foreign currency. Those who have dual citizenship will fare worse. They will be given a chance to return to the motherland with all their possessions but if they don’t they will be deprived of their Russian citizenship and their property in Russia will be confiscated.

Textbooks will be rewritten, children further indoctrinated, propaganda strengthened, patriotic mass movements initiated. The standard of living will be somewhat above that of Brezhnev’s time although with a lot of regional variations. And if it declines because of the overgrown military sector the vicious campaigns of the American imperialists against the Russian people will be blamed. That will only strengthen Putin’s regime, not weaken it.

There will be multi-party elections. Election fraud will be routinely perpetrated (once a certain habit is acquired it is difficult to discontinue it). That said, Putin might receive a stunning 85 per cent of the votes without any manipulation of the results. Russian nationalists will always back him to the hilt. He will forever be the hero of Crimea, the man of destiny who managed to restore the Soviet borders.

How will Putin proceed in his foreign policy? Slowly. He is an opportunist, but one who likes to create opportunities. It seems very likely that former President Yanukovich’s flight from Kiev was engineered by Putin. Once he could claim that Ukraine was ruled by fascists who had deposed the democratically-elected president, he had the excuse to annex Crimea. By encouraging and supporting the Ukrainian rebels he has managed to make Ukraine a failed state. For the moment he is just keeping it on the boil but sooner or later, very likely within a year, he will find an excuse to occupy the coastline needed to establish land access to the Crimean peninsula.

In the following years he will bring further parts of Ukraine under his control but not the whole country. To incorporate the various former republics would be easy: they will respond to intimidation. But it is unlikely that Putin will have to impose regime change on any of those countries. The present leaders will voluntarily accept Russia’s tutelage.

The sticking point will be the Baltic states. They are part of Nato. They want to remain independent. Nato makes lots of noises about defending them against Russian aggression but it is a hopeless mission.

Putin will start with Latvia, which has a large Russian minority. He will want them to return to the bosom of the motherland, and he can do that by making Latvia part of the motherland. He will foster angry demonstrations, demand full citizenship for the Russians, and then cabinet posts. By these means he will make Latvia ungovernable. The Latvians might then decide that Putin is the lesser of two evils. In this case Nato would have no chance of intervening.

But other scenarios are possible. Russian agents might murder a few Russians, attribute the killings to the Latvians, and send in the tanks to “protect” their compatriots. In principle this should invoke Nato’s immediate intervention but will Nato risk the Third World War for the sake of Latvian independence? Unlikely. With Latvia occupied, the Lithuanians and the Estonians will be surrounded, and will soon surrender. Finland? It will be Finlandised.

Having restored the Soviet borders, what will be Putin’s next move? He will rest on his laurels. He will assess the global military balance and realise his limitations. There will be no further territorial demands. The former satellites of Eastern Europe will breathe a sigh of relief. Putin will instead turn his attention to raising the living standards of the long-suffering Russian nation. He will be able to do so thanks to his country’s enormous natural resources.

What will happen after Putin? A difficult question but let’s be optimistic for a change. Feeling pressure from China and some of the Muslim states, Putin’s successor might start negotiations to join the European Union.

The post Will Putin’s Empire Outlast The Soviets? appeared first on Standpoint.

Magna Carta is all about the rights of the “free man”: “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed . . . save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” The King too is subject to the rule of law, the integrity and impartiality of which he is also obliged to uphold: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.” In much of the world today, including parts of Europe, the rule of law cannot be taken for granted by individuals. Even within the European Union, it is by no means always and everywhere clear that the state is indeed beneath the law, or that the judiciary is impartial and incorruptible. The punishment of Nazi war criminals, for example, has been delayed in some cases for up to 70 years; many escaped justice entirely; others who were put on trial were acquitted or sentenced far too leniently, while their victims and their heirs have in many cases been denied restitution of their property (for example works of art) or adequate reparation for their suffering.

Waterloo, for the British, is all about the independence of the nation state from the domination of an imperial despot. The British fought Napoleon Bonaparte, not merely to preserve their own freedom, but that of Europe as a whole. In a famous debate in the House of Commons in 1807 George Canning, the Foreign Secretary, justified a resumption of hostilities with France in pragmatic terms: “The single rule for the conduct of a British statesman is, attachment to the interests of Great Britain.” But he went on to explain why British and European interests must coincide in the defeat of Bonapartism. “The country has the means, and I am confident it has the spirit and determination, to persevere with firmness in a struggle, from which there is no escape or retreat; and which cannot be concluded, with safety to Great Britain, but in proportion as with that object is united the liberty and tranquillity of Europe.”

This refusal to accept any domination of the Continent by one power has been the biggest British contribution to European peace and prosperity: we saw it in both world wars and in the Cold War. In a debate in the House of Lords in 1878, Disraeli recalled Britain’s decision to stand, if necessary alone, during the Napoleonic wars: “[Britain] was isolated at the commencement of this century because among the craven communities of Europe it alone asserted and vindicated the cause of national independence . . . If that cause were again at stake, if there were a Power that threatened the peace of the world with a predominance fatal to public liberty and national independence, I feel confident that your Lordships would not be afraid of the charge of being isolated if you stood alone in maintaining such a cause and in fighting for such precious interests.”

By 1914, that cause and those interests were again at stake. The then Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, justified the decision to go to war for Belgium thus: “I do not believe for a moment, that at the end of this war, even if we stood aside and remained aside, we should be in a position, a material position to use our force decisively to undo what had happened in the course of the war, to prevent the whole of the west of Europe opposite to us — if that had been the result of the war — falling under the domination of a single Power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect.”

Yet the presumption that British and European interests must normally coincide is not the sole determinant of our foreign policy. There is also a presumption in favour of liberty. Gladstone stated it well when in 1876 he insisted that Britain’s “traditional policy was not complicity with guilty power, but was sympathy with suffering weakness”. Whether we call the policy that arises from such sympathy “liberal internationalism” or “neoconservatism” matters less than the fact that it has exercised an enduring influence on British foreign policy.

However, when we come to consider the present predicament of Europe, faced as it is by multiple threats, above all from Russian aggression and Islamist anarchy, what is most striking in British foreign policy is its continuity. One of Winston Churchill’s finest hours was his speech in the House of Commons on October 5, 1938. It was a philippic against the policy of appeasement immediately after the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had returned from Munich proclaiming “peace in our time”, to what Churchill himself acknowledged as “the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment”. Churchill was thus almost alone in his defiance of the consensus, and his speech was repeatedly interrupted, but he was undeterred: “What I find unendurable is the sense that our country is falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure . . . We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the German Nazi system of European domination.” The British, he declared, “should know the truth. They should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Churchill’s dire warning still echoes down the years; indeed, it resonates in this century too. The denial of justice and the rule of law to individuals in Russia and its client states offends against the principles of Magna Carta. And Vladimir Putin’s denial of national independence to Ukraine threatens the principle established at Waterloo. The European Union and Nato have failed to assert these principles with sufficient energy to deter Putin.

The British have voted to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership, and the result will ultimately turn not only on economic arguments about the costs and benefits of membership, but on the underlying question of sovereignty. The principles of Magna Carta and Waterloo are not obviously compatible with the EU’s principle of “ever-closer union”, the consolidation of political and legal power in a united Europe. The referendum is intended to resolve, once and for all, the tension between British traditions of parliamentary democracy and the constantly growing and largely unaccountable authority of the European institutions. But a referendum cannot prevent the emergence of a eurozone with its own rules and momentum within the larger structures of the Union. As the collapse of the Greek economy over the past two years suggests, those structures are being tested and may not prove strong enough to withstand the forces that have been unleashed. The British are mere spectators in the Greek drama, but we are uncomfortably aware that its consequences will affect us too.

The continuity of British foreign policy means that periods of isolation, splendid or not, are a necessary price to pay for upholding our principles. The EU has its own continuities, but at present it is unclear whether its members are prepared to adapt its rules sufficiently to enable the Union to survive into a new era. The British choice is an unenviable one, but in the past they have always chosen to preserve their own principles and traditions rather than surrender national independence. Just as Churchill felt that appeasement was a betrayal of everything that Britain had stood for, so the British today will not vote for the EU at any price. Just as the British must not expect our partners to give up their vital interests to keep us in, so Europe must not expect Britain to sacrifice principles that we regard as permanent aspects of our national identity.

The post Liberty And Sovereignty appeared first on Standpoint.

Throughout history, civilisations have compensated for this loss by stowing their shared memories in communal institutions. But today, for perhaps the first time in history, large chunks of our culture appear indifferent, even hostile, to their own past.

Look, for instance, at the art world. For many centuries, the West’s artistic traditions were held among its most precious assets, for they conveyed — by melody and brushstroke — so many things otherwise inexpressible about who we are. But at the beginning of the 20th century, culture suddenly took a different turn: artists, no longer content simply to loosen the ties and top buttons of convention, stripped themselves completely, doused their clothes in petrol, and set them alight.

Swept by the modernism surging through Europe’s veins, they sought to overturn and recreate everything anew. Declaring their own traditions irrelevant, they butchered them. Schoenberg irrevocably scrambled tonality. Duchamp scribbled a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

The great oaks of Western art were burned to the ground. Today, radical artists are left scouring through the embers, still looking for last traces of life. Their primary target is now the taboo — the unspoken memory of a once-communal system of values. Tracey Emin shows us her unmade bed, strewn with used condoms and bloodied underwear. Damien Hirst suggests that the 9/11 hijackers “need congratulating”. Every last inherited standard — every last comfort — must be torn from us once and for all.

But by trying so hard to wipe its own memory, art comes perilously close to losing its sense of self altogether. Once the shocks no longer shock, what does it stand for? A few generations after the narcotic highs of modernism, the art world has left itself largely brain-dead.

This tragedy acts as a miniature simulation of just how easily — and quickly — cultures can wither away. And it ought to alarm us to see the same pattern emerging right across Western society.

Consider the main philosophical movements of the 20th century. The majority followed the fearsome footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche — the man who killed God and buried good and evil at His side. And though they grappled with his legacy in a variety of ways, they shared, more or less, the same key assumption: that the traditional pursuits of thought — truth, beauty, meaning — were fundamentally misguided. Philosophy, unable to comment on the world, turned instead to — and on — itself. “Having broken its pledge to be at one with reality,” Theodor Adorno wrote, “philosophy is obliged to ruthlessly criticise itself.”

At the same time, positivism — the belief that only empirical or logically deduced data have any real meaning — took hold among many of the West’s intellectual circles. A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell declared that, if we were ever to understand ourselves, it would be by scientific means alone. Cultural memory, which could not be reduced to testable propositions, was made entirely superfluous.

Wherever one looked, the West seemed to be in the midst of a curious experiment: can a civilisation survive on nothing but the impulse to debunk its own presuppositions?

Adorno and his co-author Max Horkheimer tried to tackle this question in Dialectic of Enlightenment. A bleak assessment of Western culture, it argued that modernism, nihilism and reductionism were symptoms of the same fundamental malady — the suicide of Enlightenment thinking. Our insatiable appetite for self-criticism, the monstrous alter ego of philosophical scepticism, was finally gnawing at the very foundations on which we stood.

Adorno and Horkheimer thought it unlikely we would survive, and predicted three historical steps that would see us collapse altogether. High culture — including art — would exhaust itself, taking with it any sense of a shared inheritance. Second, we would lapse into infantile solipsism, duped by the immediate gratifications of capitalism — in particular, cinema and popular music. Finally, society — stupefied by such pleasures — would topple at the first serious test of its walls. Adorno and Horkheimer saw a host of surrogate mythologies — most notably, Nazism — poised to flood into the vacuum left behind.

This final point seemed borne out by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. But then, as the war receded into the past, much of the West suddenly found itself reclining into an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. To the baby boomers, Adorno and Horkheimer’s stuffy pessimism seemed laughably outmoded. And today, we assume — having never known any different — that this good fortune is simply here to stay. At a time of such global instability — with Putin and Islamism openly challenging our values — we urgently need to reconsider our confidence. Were the last 70 years really the final disproof of Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism, or did history merely postpone its judgment?

Let us begin with the charge of Western infantilism. Here, at least, Adorno and Horkheimer seem to have been rather prescient. The West is — for all its wealth today — far more childish than even they anticipated. This can be traced — I believe — to the reductionist narratives we adopted as our mantras during the last century.

Think about the social implications of Ayer’s philosophy, emotivism. According to Ayer, moral and aesthetic statements express nothing but the crudest of personal feelings — when I say “Theft is wrong,” all I really mean is “I don’t like theft.” That’s it. Arguments about the thorniest of ethical dilemmas or the most sublime of artworks are reduced to the level of a toddler’s tantrum. The evolutionary psychologists go even further: we’re not just children, they say; we’re animals. According to Richard Dawkins, “Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.” Culture is just a long-winded mating game that, somewhere along the line, seems to have got a bit out of hand.

These are not niche ideas any more. Advertisements humorously depict us as bumbling primates, perhaps stumbling upon coffee or a microwave for the first time. Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.” Such writers give us absolutely no reason to cultivate virtue, no reason to refine our judgments, and every reason to ignore the past and dispense with our responsibilities.

Which, given the easy ride we’re getting, suits us just fine. We seek to make society blinkered, mindless and immature. Look at the way today’s businesses choose to market themselves. They invent names that imitate the nonsense words of babies: Zoopla, Giffgaff, Google, Trivago. They deliberately botch grammar in their slogans to sound naïve and cutesy: “Find your happy”, “Be differenter”, “The joy of done”. They make their advertisements and logos twee and ironic — a twirly moustache here, a talking dog there — just to show how carefree and fun they are.

Those in our society who actually still have children have them later and in smaller numbers than ever. Many simply choose to forego the responsibilities of parenthood altogether. Marriage is an optional extra — one from which we can opt out at any point, regardless of the consequences for the children.

Students expect to be treated like five-year-olds: one conference recently prohibited applause for fear it would, somehow, trigger a spate of breakdowns. Many of my fellow twentysomethings reach adulthood believing they can recreate in their everyday lives the woolly comforts of social media. They discover, with some surprise, that they cannot simply click away real confrontation, and — having never developed the psychological mechanisms to cope with it — instead seek simply to ban it.

The effects of social media don’t end there. A Pew Research Centre study last year found that regular social media users are far more likely than non-users to censor themselves, even offline. We learn to ignore, rather than engage with, genuine disagreement, and so ultimately dismantle the most important distinction between civil society and the playground — the ability to live respectfully alongside those with whom we disagree.

Social media assures us that the large civilisational questions have already been settled, that undemocratic nations will — just as soon as they’re able to tweet a little more — burst into glorious liberty, and that politics is, thus, merely a series of gestures to make us feel a bit better. Hence the bewildering range of global issues we seem to think can be somehow resolved with a sober mugshot and a meaningful hashtag.

In reality, our good fortune is an anomaly. We’ll face again genuine, terrifying confrontations of a kind we can scarcely imagine today. And we’ll need something a little more robust than an e-petition and a cat video.

Sadly, our philosophical approach seems to have been to paper over Nietzsche’s terrifying abyss with “Keep calm . . .” posters. If one were to characterise the West’s broad philosophical outlook today, it would be this: sentimental nihilism. We accept, as “risen apes”, that it’s all meaningless. But hey, we’re having a good time, right?

This is gleefully expressed by our society’s favourite spokespeople — comedians, glorifying the saccharine naivety of a culture stuck in the present. When the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked the comedian Bill Maher to locate the source of human rights, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s in the laws of common sense.”

Unable to make sense — as Alasdair MacIntyre says — of the mutilated philosophical traditions that once gave our now everyday language its meaning, we curl up into our little corner of history and — fingers crossed behind our backs — resort to wishful assertions. As a classic sentimental nihilist, Stephen Fry, says: “I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.” Really? On what evidence?

Far more likely to perish, unfortunately, is the “open society”. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote: “the extension and consistent application of liberal principles transforms them into their antithesis . . . [A]mong the dangers threatening the pluralist society from within . . . what seems to bode most ill is the weakening of the psychological preparedness to defend it.” Perhaps he had in mind Bertrand Russell’s boast “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”, which is today echoed by Ricky Gervais: “We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.” Will history be kind enough to let us get by on that alone?

If we are to equip ourselves for the challenges ahead, we urgently need to tackle this nihilism. For as long as we see ourselves as the spiritless inhabitants of a meaningless world, we will teeter precariously above a precipice of our own making.

We must also reverse our deep-set suspicion of history. Our universities have, for some time now, been expunging reams of “dead white males” from their reading lists. To a generation with fingers in their ears, such thinkers have nothing to say. Unable to sense the subtle threads that bind us all to a shared past, we latch on instead to whichever tags are dangled in front of us — feminism, transgenderism, post-colonialism. These labels are much easier to grasp, for they require no real knowledge of the past, only of present suffering.

We need some way to engage with each other as members of a common group once again. And though so much of our culture splintered over the last century, there is one strand that might provide us with a starting point: popular culture.

Anchored by the conservatism of public taste, most popular forms — film and music in particular — stayed the course of the 20th century much more successfully than their “higher” cousins. Many can trace an unbroken line back to the very traditions the modernists tried to sever us from. If a contemporary classical composer writes in a tonal style, it sounds peculiar to us: too self-conscious, too kitsch. But in popular music, the continued use of a harmonic system developed centuries ago sounds perfectly natural — precisely because it never tried fully to break away.

Indeed, far more of the West’s teleological code might have been smuggled in popular forms than their highbrow critics ever realised. Just as the eye seems to appear on whichever evolutionary branch one looks at, so the same trends that preoccupied Western musicians a hundred years ago are unfurling in pop music today. Melody strains against its rhythmic and harmonic leashes once again, threatening to snap free altogether. But while Schoenberg — motivated by political ideology — thrust this melodic “autonomy” onto his works, today it grows out of humanity’s simple desire to explore. The prognosis for today’s music is therefore, I believe, much better.

Popular culture crystallised archetypically Western tropes that, if nurtured, may still blossom again. It is probably the closest thing we have today to a myth about ourselves — we do not question, perhaps cannot question, the pre-rational sway it has over us. So ingrained in the public’s mind are the perfect cadence and the love story that not even the Enlightenment’s cynical ticks can burrow deep enough to suck them out. Today, like the lounge suit, their ubiquity conceals a quintessentially Western inheritance.

Which suggests that capitalism — for all Adorno and Horkheimer’s misgivings — might protect, rather than corrupt, culture. Kolakowski notes how totalitarian regimes reach a point of economic stagnation and collapse, taking their culture with them. Capitalism, by reflecting more accurately the intricate web of human relations, does a better — though not, of course, perfect — job of preserving our tastes and traditions.

But it cannot look after us alone. It is but one part of an urgently needed review of who we are and where we’re going. And to face the future with any confidence, we must begin with the memory of where we once came from.

The post Sentimental Nihilism And Popular Culture appeared first on Standpoint.

Yet I told the 28-year-old winner that his crushing victory was now almost predictable, given the triumphant year Chinese chessplayers had just completed. In 2014 the national men’s team won the biennial chess Olympiad — the first time since the break-up of the Soviet Union that this event had not been won by one of the nations that formerly comprised the USSR. It was clear from the emotion and open tearfulness of the winning Chinese team after the final round just how much it meant to them to have broken the dominance of what we used to call the Soviet School of Chess.

This triumph is an augury rather than a summation. Last year a Chinese, Lu Shanglei, won the world junior chess championship (for the best players under 20). Yet Lu’s performance was almost overshadowed by that of 15-year-old Wei Yi, who took the silver medal. Yi is the most prodigious chess talent to emerge since Norway’s Magnus Carlsen: indeed, in rating terms, he has beaten the precocious world champion to a number of landmarks. And in May, still only 15, Yi won the Chinese national championship. China already has the youngest ever woman’s world champion in Hou Yifan — who won the title at the age of just 16. If Yi continues to improve at his current rate, it might not be long before China holds the most coveted title of all.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect is that more Chinese still play Xiangqi than western chess — and a number of its leading players, at least of the generation before Hou Yifan and Wei Yi, played Xiangqi at a high level before they switched to what we just call “chess”. Among those who switched was a remarkable man called Liu Wenzhe, who died in 2011 at the age of 70. He had been influenced by “fraternal visits” of grandmasters from the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s — part of the attempt by Moscow to seal ties with Mao’s China. But as Liu explained in his extraordinary book Chinese School of Chess, he regarded the Soviet School as excessively scientific. Liu proposed a unique Chinese chess philosophy stemming from the Book of Changes, the first records of which date from around 670BC: “According to the Book of Changes, the number 64 synthesises all objective situations.” There are, of course, 64 squares on the western chess board — though this is not true of Xiangqi in its current form, with a board of nine files and ten ranks.

Liu’s devotion to the apparently incredible idea of making China the dominant chess power was not even thwarted by the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four, when western chess was banned. He spent those years, from 1966 to 1976, in a state of near-starvation, translating Russian writings on chess — more than a million words of knowledge and instruction, according to the preface to his book.

It was only two years after that ordeal was over that Liu, playing for China in the 1978 Chess Olympiad, became the first Chinese to beat a western grandmaster in such an event — and in a game so spectacular it went round the world. He was later appointed coach of the Chinese national training team, in which role, he recorded without false modesty, “Teaching by personal example as well as by verbal instruction, I can say without exaggeration that my chessplaying skills and moral authority influenced every member of the national team.”

One can see in this something of the same character as Mikhail Botvinnik, the first Soviet world champion, who also imposed his ferocious work ethic on a generation of players. One difference is that Liu was nothing like as strong a player as Botvinnik: he never became a grandmaster himself. Another difference is that the Soviet school made enormous contributions to the theory of openings, whereas the Chinese school — and perhaps this is an element of Liu’s stress on the intuitive over the scientific method — has not produced material which can readily be assimilated by those outside the system.

There have been suggestions that Chinese players have a sharper and more tactical style than their western rivals as a legacy of the fact that Xiangqi is a much more fluid game than chess. I would argue that there are no “Russian” or “Chinese” chess moves — just good and bad, and China now seems to be playing more good ones than any other nation.

Here is that game from the 1978 Chess Olympiad in which Liu Wenzhe astounded not just his opponent, the Dutch grandmaster Jan Donner, but the whole chess world. 1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4.Be2 Bg7 5.g4!? (On seeing this extraordinary move, Donner thought for no less than half an hour. His eventual reply was widely criticised, but his error came later) h6 6.h3 c5 7.d5 0-0?! 8.h4! (This looks odd after 6.h3 — why take two moves to get the pawn to h4? But with Black’s King castled this crude pawn storm is now hugely effective.) e6 9.g5 hxg5? (Only move 9, but this is already the fatal error. Donner had to play unconventionally himself with 9…Nh7! 10.gxh6 Bxc3+ 11.bxc3 Qf6 when he would at least have counterplay) 10.hxg5 Ne8 11.Qd3! (The unmistakable intention is to shift the Queen to the open h-file — and this can’t be prevented) exd5 12.Nxd5 Nc6 13.Qg3 Be6 14.Qh4 (Liu wrote that while thinking about this move he suddenly saw the winning sacrifice: “My excitement took complete control of me”) f5 15.Qh7+ Kf7 (Liu recalled “at this point Donner still seemed optimistic, in view of his threat to win the Queen with 16…Rh8”) 16.Qxg6+!! (Amazingly, this forces mate in seven moves. But Donner played on imperturbably) Kxg6 17.Bh5+ Kh7 18.Bf7+ Bh6 19.g6+! (Perhaps Donner had counted on 18. Rxh6+ Kg7 after which the mate disappears and Black is winning) Kg7 20.Bxh6+ resigns. It will be mate after 20…Kh8 21.Bg7 (double check!) Kxg7 22.Rh7.

According to the Czech grandmaster Lubosh Kavalek, who was playing in the event: “After he resigned Donner sat in his chair for another 15 minutes, staring at the chessboard with amazement.” Then he recovered sufficiently to observe that he would be famous for ever in China.

The post Chinese Checkmate appeared first on Standpoint.

On May 2 in the Dallas suburb of Garland, two Islamists attempted to critique Pamela Geller’s “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest” with assault rifles. A massacre was averted only because a guard suspended the attackers’ freedom of assembly with a Glock pistol. Two days later in New York, there was extra security at PEN’s annual black-tie dinner. When PEN’s board had conferred its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, six of the dinner’s table hosts had resigned. Two of the six, Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje, are global figures; two, Rachel Kushner and Francine Prose, are names in America; and two, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi, need all the publicity they can get. “6 pussies,” Salman Rushdie tweeted, before remembering that he is a man of letters. “Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”

Politics, J.K. Galbraith claimed, means choosing between “the disastrous and the unpalatable”. Geller is unpalatable; the PEN refusés are disastrous. Geller does not discriminate between Muslims and Islamists. She has praised the thugs of the English Defence League; the guest speaker at Garland was Geert Wilders. She demonises her critics; she called the Daily Mail part of the “enemedia” for blacking out images of the Garland cartoons. When her organisation, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, campaigned against the “9/11 Mosque”, it attacked the First Amendment rights of American Muslims. Geller is a bigot, deliberately testing the margins of tolerance and legality. She is, then, exactly the kind of person that the First Amendment exists to protect.

The First Amendment does not protect “fighting words”: speech, acts, or images that are likely to provoke a punch. But do the Islamists have the right to be throwing punches? In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that the American National Socialist Party could march through Skokie, Illinois, swastikas and all. Public funds supported the exhibition of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987, and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary in 1996, which rendered Jesus’s mother in pornographic cut-outs and elephant dung. The Garland cartoons are aesthetically worthless, but Americans have the right to draw and display them: there are no laws against poor taste, or even insult. Geller is frequently wrong and hateful, but she is brave and right to warn that Islamists wish to intimidate Americans into restricting their First Amendment rights. This is how America rolls, at least in the red states.

While Geller guards free speech’s wild frontier, over in the blue states the PEN writers surrender disputed territory without a fight. All of them called the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in Peter Carey’s words, a “hideous crime”. None of them mentioned the associated murders of Jews at the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Rachel Kushner accused Charlie Hebdo of “cultural intolerance” and promoting “a kind of forced secular view’, which is kind of hypocritical of her. Carey denounced PEN for ignoring “the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognise its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population”. Teju Cole called himself a “free-speech fundamentalist”, but wanted to fill PEN’s “headspace” with “more progressive” causes, like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and “the awful effects of government spying in the US”.

Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway would call the PEN Six “a rotten crowd”. Issuing a trigger warning about an organisation that protects their freedom of expression, and publicises the persecution of less fortunate writers abroad, they bit the hand that feeds, and shot themselves in the foot. They seem not to understand that France’s constitutional laïcité is the European sibling of America’s constitutional neutrality. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt, and provinciality.

“If PEN as a free speech organisation cannot defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures,” Salmon Rushdie said, “then frankly the organisation is not worth the name. What I would say to Peter, Michael, and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.” Yet Rushdie did not comment on Garland, where people were nearly “murdered for drawing pictures”. Nor did PEN’s president, Andrew Solomon, extend to Geller his defence of Charlie Hebdo: “There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements.”

Emerson called politics “a government of bullies, tempered by editors”, but the editors led the bullying of Geller. An unsigned editorial in the New York Times attacked Geller’s “provocative” behavior. The Harvard law professor Noah Feldman suggested that Geller had “deliberately” provoked the assault; if so, she was “morally culpable” for her attackers’ deaths.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The depiction of Muhammad, and the application of standard critical methods to the history of Islam, have become test cases for the practice of Western freedoms, and the capacity of states to protect their citizens. It is possible to assert the right of speech without falling into Geller’s strategy of contempt or the PEN writers’ trahison des clercs. When editors vacillated over reprinting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, Timothy Garton Ash made a first-rate suggestion: to create an independent website, on which all media could publish the cartoons simultaneously. Without such a mechanism, terrorists will define the bounds of free speech.

The post Wrong And Hateful; Brave And Right appeared first on Standpoint.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, and the inability to conclude negotiations with Greece over debt repayment, should have ended those assumptions and forced Western leaders to reconsider their political model, not least in their own backyard. Russia’s exit from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe shows that Ukraine is not simply an isolated event. President Putin no longer feels any obligation to honour the long- standing security guarantees of Europe. In the absence of coherent Nato and EU leadership Russia is left to negotiate with the “Normandy Group” of Germany, France and Ukraine.

Their response to the crisis should have also made plain another uncomfortable truth. Under President Obama, America has become more isolationist than at any point since 1941. The crisis in Ukraine has revealed deep fault lines between the European allies and also with America. Years of reliance on the US backstop have meant that Europe long ago stopped spending sufficiently to maintain its armed forces. In 2014 only four Nato members met the agreed target of devoting 2 per cent of GDP to defence and one of them, the US, distorts the true state of Nato capability. Nato has always ultimately been reliant on overwhelming American military power. However, Obama’s quixotic approach to foreign policy makes his continued assurances about European security ring hollow. If Putin were to further test Nato resolve by threatening the Baltic states, it is not clear whether Washington, or any other Nato members, would fulfill their treaty obligations of mutual defence. 

The situation is no better in the UK. Once the euphoria of victory has receded, David Cameron will be faced by an unenviable list of tasks that will seal Britain’s international position. The preservation of the Union and the future of that United Kingdom in Europe are interlinked and will dominate the new parliament. Cameron’s herculean challenge will be to simultaneously convince the Scots, the Europeans and indeed his own Eurosceptic backbenchers that a new form of British exceptionalism in Europe is a meaningful way forward for all of them. Cameron’s negotiations with Europe have the potential to instigate useful reform of the fragile continental settlement. However, if they fail they also have the capacity to mimic the self-interested nationalism unleashed in the UK and Greece, hurting cohesion and Europe’s ability to defend itself. The election campaign was notable for the main parties’ lack of vision and their failure to commit to 2 per cent of GDP spending on defence. Britain’s continued global influence is being maintained on a tightrope.

Where does this leave the West? In The Edge (Little, Brown, £12.99) Mark Urban, Newsnight’s diplomatic and defence editor, grapples with this question. It is a slim but devastating assessment of what he suggests is the twilight of Western military power.

Urban is hardly the first to tackle the question of Western decline. Starting with Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and picking up momentum in the 19th and 20th centuries, there have been several waves of declinist prophesy. The spectrum of declinism has encapsulated ideological aversion to the perceived ills of the Occident and those, such as Oswald Spengler, who sounded a more tragic lament for Western culture. The most recent strain has been concerned with the decline of American power. Most influentially, Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, predicted the economic overstretch of the US only two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It would be glib to mock declinist arguments for poor timing but the genre certainly has its problems. Political scientists have a poor record of predicting future events — the end of the Cold War, or indeed last month’s election, being prime examples. Spengler and Kennedy could both be read more sympathetically as diagnosing a form of slow decay in great powers. Nonetheless, the issue with most declinist tracts is that they tend to have a teleological arrogance and it is rarely clear what point declinism serves. It is often more useful to think about foreign policy in terms of present-day outcomes and obligations, without the excuses of seemingly inevitable historical forces.

Urban’s argument is all the more powerful for managing to avoid many, if not all, these traps in his concise wake-up call for Western politicians. Rather than trying to diagnose a vague, existential sense of decline, he illustrates the decline of Western military strength since the end of the Cold War, as Western powers sought to reap the “peace dividend”. The scale of cuts is extraordinary and the trend has only accelerated since the financial crisis, despite increased global instability. Since then, cuts to military spending across Europe have been in the order of 20 to 25 per cent.

Almost as worrying is the faulty logic behind the allocation of these limited resources across the Continent. So confident were Europe’s leaders that war between states belonged to a troubled past, and that European countries would never face war alone, that most countries now lack full-spectrum military capabilities. So some Nato members might have anti-aircraft capability, others submarines. This may have made sense at the height of Nato cohesion during the Cold War but thinly-spread capabilities are a terrifying prospect in the light of Europe’s current fragility. This is worth remembering for countries such as the UK which still cling to the notion of Great Power status, without a serious commitment to support it.

Trident is one of the more shocking examples of this. A largely synthetic parliamentary debate focused on whether to renew the deterrent with three or four submarines for a continuous at-sea presence. This obscures the operational reality that for a nuclear-armed submarine to pose a credible threat, it must avoid being tracked by adversarial hunter-killer submarines. To maintain that ability requires maritime surveillance aircraft and an undersea listening capabiltiy. Britain lost the Nimrod surveillance aircraft to defence cuts. This wouldn’t have been a problem in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, but Russia poses a new threat and is operating submarines close to Britain’s shore. The Royal Navy won’t comment on the frequency of Russian incursions but had to call in US surveillance aircraft earlier in the year. The nuclear submarine HMS Talent recently had its turret “damaged by floating ice”, a Cold War euphemism for a collision with a Russian warship.

America and her allies have long pursued an “Offset” strategy through technological superiority of equipment, the logic being that a numerical disadvantage in conventional forces could be made up for with increased firepower. It worked to reduce defence costs under Eisenhower’s “New Look” and was repeated under Reagan, economically pummelling the Soviet Union.

Urban does an excellent job of ripping the logic of the current “Third Offset” strategy to pieces. The experience of war suggests that there is little match for numerical superiority of a potential enemy. America and Britain’s disastrous F-35 jet is an excellent example of why the Offset strategy has led to a decline in defence capability, despite huge increases in defence spending. In simple terms, vast amounts of money were invested in a small number of extremely expensive aircraft. To date none are in service.

Urban has written a comprehensive account of the cost of replacing modern weapon systems, the terrifyingly low actual numbers of technologically advanced equipment in service at any time, and the deficiencies this creates. The strategic consequences of the concentration of defence spending in a small number of expensive pieces of equipment are profound. If Russia were to step up its belligerence and invade a Nato member, then the alliance’s conventional forces would not only be slow to respond but would also be too weak. Nato leaders would then face the unenviable decision between opting for a nuclear counterattack or allowing Russia to destroy the alliance through inaction.

Urban’s argument is weaker when trying to twin its convincing analysis of Western decline with the rise of other geopolitical rivals in a multi-polar world. Some of his examples, such as Brazil, are not compelling as strategic challengers. However, his analysis of the potential for conflict with China or Russia is interesting. Despite its increases in military spending, Russia may not outrun the combination of Western sanctions and extremely cheap oil and gas. Similarly, China, despite double-digit defence spending, faces serious challenges — not least slowing economic growth, a demographic timebomb and the challenges of maintaining political stability without democracy.

Urban is correct to suggest that so far there has been no meaningful reassessment of national priorities in the West, even at the last Nato summit. He remains sceptical, although not entirely dismissive, of the possibility of reversing the West’s military decline and the will to act internationally.

It is, of course, often hard to distinguish between decline and retreat, particularly in periods of extreme turbulence in the international system. But this difference in interpretation is crucial for leaders, who must create grand strategy based on a realistic allocation of their national resources to the pursuit of vital interests. Obama seems to have been convinced of the inevitability of US decline since entering office. The real question is whether his retreat to isolationism has turned his declinist outlook into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obama is disengaged from America’s traditional role as a force for international stability, while simultaneously pursuing projects with unsound strategic logic, such as the disastrous nuclear negotiations with Iran. For most of his presidency Obama’s primary focus hasn’t been foreign policy at all, but “nation-building at home”. The result, euphemistically called “leading from behind”, is not a strategy but rather a chaotic mixture of aerial interventions, intended to avoid deploying US troops. For those who remember the eerily similar foreign misadventures of the Clinton presidency, the recent disasters in Libya, Iraq and Syria are unsurprising. The disjointed consequences of this approach are abundantly clear. In May, even as US special forces killed an ISIS commander in Syria, there were no conventional US forces to help prevent the fall of Ramadi in Iraq.

It is no longer possible to apply logical prediction to where and how the US will engage in international crises because the President has no sense of what America’s vital interests are and no commitment to sustained deployment of US forces. The European members of Nato should have realised that Europe is now simply seen as another theatre of operation for an overstretched US military and certainly not the most important one.

Urban doesn’t devote enough space to the problem of political will both in today’s leaders and the public. David Cameron stoked the ire of his backbenches and senior military commanders by refusing to commit to the UK’s Nato spending target during the election. Despite this, defence remains in the background on both sides of the Atlantic for the time being.

A second new book, Superpower (Penguin, £14.99), by the fêted foreign American foreign policy commentator Ian Bremmer, serves as a different kind of wake-up call. Bremmer has long suggested that US power is in long-term decline towards a “G0” world. The implication is that the G7 (or G8) is discarded and that the G20 is too big for decision making. This so-called “rise of the rest” thesis is a staple of TED talk primers on globalisation, and Bremmer himself has promoted this idea elsewhere. 

Washington-led globalisation has, according to this argument, sown the seeds of multiple challenges to American hegemony. None of this would have been particularly surprising to America’s early Cold War warriors. The implicit bargain was that America would protect free trade and stability to allow economic growth in return for America’s hegemony and definition of global rules.

This book is clearly intended as an early intervention in the 2016 presidential race and expands Bremmer’s argument into the territory of neo-isolationism. Worryingly, Bremmer’s voice carries weight with “Davos man” and his book is a concerted attempt to rehabilitate the idea of isolationism for a global elite of policymakers. He fuses the strains of isolationist thought from both sides of the party divide. The suggestion is both that America causes more problems than it solves abroad and that it can only remain in a position of economic strength by turning its focus inwards.

This is a surprising argument because Bremmer clearly believes in America’s continued superpower status for the foreseeable future. Equally, while sketching foreign policy decline, he makes a strong case for America’s domestic economic strength. As he notes, demographics are on the side of America in the global economic race. America is still a global leader in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation and is starting to surge in domestic energy production.

In fact Bremmer’s analysis is not really of American decline but rather the suggestion that the US should take an inward turn. Bremmer posits three scenarios for the future of American power: “Moneyball America”, a shorthand for “realist” policy where America takes selected risks overseas to safeguard national security and prosperity; “Indispensable America”, which suggests that American prosperity is dependent on her continued ability to shape the world order; and lastly Bremmer’s favoured option, “Independent America”. Such a vision is a departure from America’s role as global force and an inward turn to focus on building a “more perfect union” at home. The only real vestige of international engagement that would remain in such a scenario is trade.

The problem is that the arguments presented are made of straw. American foreign policy has always been a combination of the different strains that Bremmer outlines. This is not a vision of decline but rather of retreat as a conscious political choice. In some senses the book is less of a policy prescription than a description of Obama’s foreign policy. Parts of the book sound like memos from Obama’s State Department:

We can’t renounce important international commitments overnight. Our allies need time to transition to a world in which they must assume greater responsibility for their own security . . . Germany and Japan are wealthy countries that can take responsibility for their own security . . . It will be easier for them to shake their citizens out of their complacency if America makes clear it will do less in years to come.

There is a real danger that retreat rather than decline will take hold on both sides of the Atlantic. Bremmer’s interjection into policy debate has not appeared from nowhere. The presidential playing field is far from clear at the moment. Nonetheless, many global conservatives fear that Rand Paul’s candidacy might push the Republican party towards isolationism. This obscures the more worrying rise of isolationist thought on the Left. Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement video is striking for the relative silence on what should have been her greatest achievements as Secretary of State. The comparison with her last election campaign is stark and shows the direction of movement in centre-left American politics. In the last campaign Clinton used her now infamous “3am phone call” television advertisement to question Obama’s competence as a leader in a dangerous world.

Two things have changed since then. Under Obama, progressive opposition to intervention, short of invasion, has disappeared. Intervention in the form of aerial bombardment or extrajudicial drone warfare is the new norm, regardless of its efficacy. In tandem, the quest for ever elusive domestic social justice has eclipsed all overt global concerns. As some commentators have observed, the Clinton brand is being subtly refashioned as a byword for America insulating itself from overt intervention. In that world intervention is reduced to covert technocratic warfare which is neither protracted in length nor debated. It is still too early to judge how the presidential candidates will form their foreign policy positions. But Clinton will undoubtedly have the most experience and it is worrying that she appears to be backpedalling on the US’s historic global role.

The most important point that both Bremmer and Urban make, albeit indirectly, is that the US remains indispensible to maintain the relatively liberal world order we currently enjoy. Last month’s VE day celebrations should have been a salutary reminder that 70 years of peace was kept by Pax Americana. The best reminder of the consequences of hasty American withdrawal is in the Middle East: the disintegration of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the rise of the ISIS insurgency were not inevitable, despite the protestations of the Left, who treat the 2003 Iraq war as a skeleton key to all future misadventures.

Similar arguments can be made about Western Europe which currently faces a sustained assault on its values and borders both from within and from Russia. Part of the problem is that the West is no longer sure what values are being defended or indeed if these values have universal applicability. Perhaps there is a simpler explanation of what is at stake in the West that we should bear in mind when considering the future direction of foreign policy and defence spending. Values certainly do matter but can be encapsulated more simply. For the migrants risking their lives in the Mediterranean to reach Europe, the West is a place where ordinary people have the freedom and means to lead lives of prosperous self-direction. Obama, and to some extent Cameron, seem to have lost sight of this. Nato and the EU are important not just as a collection of states or geographic entity but as a constellation of shared values — the values for which so many laid down their lives 70 years ago and for which so many are prepared to risk their lives in order to secure today.

The post Why The World Still Needs The West appeared first on Standpoint.

I wonder. The above model was fine for the artist belonging to an unwavering narrative of history, the artist with a sense of what it is — but it has certainly hit the buffers in modern times. For Schoenberg it worked: his composition was part of “a good, old-fashioned, properly-understood tradition” because he had no shadow of doubt what that tradition was, or that it occupied a position of cultural supremacy. Webern later unpacked this, in 1935, in the talks published as The Path To The New Music: drawing on examples from Ludwig Senfl through to Beethoven and on to Schoenberg, Webern set out the construction of the train track, mapping the point at which successive composers alighted to take charge of a new stretch. “We haven’t advanced beyond the classical composers’ forms,” he claimed, reassuringly. “What happened after them was only alteration, extension, abbreviation; but the forms remained, even in Schoenberg! All that has remained, but something has altered, all the same.” In other words, the past (whether the historic past or just the prior statement of a phrase four bars earlier) is the Pole Star from which we take all our bearings and upon which we elaborate — in the process becoming ourselves part of the past for someone else “further down the tracks”.

But all this development, this laying of track, has to rest on something we may no longer have — namely that sense of culture as a matter of a consensual history. I’m interested in when, and how, we lost this. As it happens, it still works for me as a composer; but this is not the case for everyone nowadays. For a start, this narrative sense of past can today be personal-individual, rather than part of a shared movement; you and I cannot assume we share a “journey” just from our both being composers, as once we could, for composition even of “art music” within our culture embraces infinite histories and narratives — or even non-histories, in terms of the old canons of European culture. I remember an American composer responding to the question, “How do you evolve without a thousand years’ history behind you?” by countering, “How do you manage to evolve with a thousand years’ history behind you?”

So we are “somewhere else”, as we look back over the last century, distinct from any previous period of European art music; for many of us born from around 1950 onwards, the cultural route-map has fragmented into tiny branch lines. The reasons are tangled, of course, and relate to the new autonomy of our popular and jazz music, the availability of music from other cultures and so on — but that’s another story.

Meanwhile, I cannot think of a previous time in our culture when significant composers in numbers evolved their identities outside (and in such hostility to) the norms of peers, training and institutions. Even those confirmed radicals Debussy and Stravinsky, busy renouncing much of what their recent past offered, managed to continue the embodiment of cultural identities that we still recognise respectively as “French” and “Russian”. More recently, however, we note a cohort of composers whose well-spring seems located in their very alienation from previous art musics; the biographies of figures like Cowell, Scelsi, Partch, Sorabji and Nancarrow (all of them born within about 20 years) begin with phrases like “although having no formal training” or “rejecting much of the classical mainstream”. I’m not sure we could find that narrative in previous ages, imbued as they were with a sense of craft and social function more than by the otherness of a new music. That “The Shock Of The New”, in Robert Hughes’s phrase, is a modern priority in art will surprise no one, but the uprooting of time-honoured assumptions that it brings was so extensive that it is worth revisiting the profound imprint of this on today’s mindset. To make a start: if this tangled environment, this cat’s cradle of individuated cultural filaments, really is distinctive from its predecessors in this respect, I think one specific trait in the fraying of any mainstream in music will be the disintegration of instrumental medium (or genre) — though this in itself is only a reflection of a wider shift, to “the new individuation” in art.

The creeping loss of instrumental genre in art music to me stands as a fascinating and elusive spectre amid our cultural space, strongly indicative but strangely undiscussed — an eloquent elephant in our front room. Of course, instrumental genres continue to survive among modern composers — notably the symphony, whose adherents are impressively diverse and individual: Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Gerhard, Harris, Henze, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Nørgård, Rautavaara, Kalevi Aho, Daniel Börtz, Christopher Rouse, Lutosławski — the exceptions are impressive. Nor is canonic string quartet production gone, with  Bartók and Shostakovich being followed by multiple works by Tippett, Britten, Nørgård, Rihm, Harvey, Ferneyhough and Carter, to name only a few. Yet these continuing “collected” expressions are exceptions, even striking ones; it is not unusual for a premiere of a new symphony to be accompanied by a panel on “the survival of the symphony”, with a debate over what it continues to offer the composer. The composer of a fifth string quartet will be asked “why do you continue to return to this medium?”, as if perpetrating another quartet is like a reckless entanglement in a further, ill-advised marriage (which of course it can be). But questions about “the survival” of the symphony were probably not asked regularly of Brahms, as he struggled to be worthy of Beethoven’s legacy. His doubts, in turn, were about working in the shadow of Beethoven, rather than about the wider validity of continuing with the symphony per se.

So let me invoke a modern neurosis — which I’m going to term genre-panic — around instrumental media. In a century blessed by the hyper-facility of neo-classical figures like Milhaud and Hindemith, compositional genre has not aged well — sounding warning bells, for our individuated age, about mass production and “sewing-machine music”. In the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures Grayson Perry quoted the radical artist Marcel Duchamp as saying, “Abundant production can only result in mediocrity” — a clear expression of the modernist division between artefact and product, between individuation and mass-participation. Such a division would have baffled the productive Haydn, the prodigious Mozart or the phenomenal Schubert, many of whose works were instantly digestible to their public but still hardly separable in style from their most experimental masterpieces.

Yet the discomfort which, I think, has come to surround the modern equivalents of classical genre output is typified by the celebrated philosopher and writer on music Theodor Adorno, when he scornfully links such production to the fake coinage among new music: writing in the 1960s, he cites “countless concerti grossi and suites, wind serenades and other mechanical productions which would sound, once the superficial glaze of dissonance had been breached, just as old-fashioned and perhaps even more boring than anything by Raff or Draeseke”. The discrediting of composition media in the modern age portends the shifting attitude toward individuation, the concept of the uniqueness of each work — and this to me seems of a piece with the wider modernist suspicion of the comforting bounds of an inherited culture: later we will hear Adorno speak of the “sacrosanct taboos imposed by listeners’ expectations”. A similar historical rupture in painting is discussed by the artist Jacob Willer, writing in these pages in 2014 of the contemporary artist divorced from the past: “He knows he can never attain real painterly fluency by the old standards . . . The best he can do is to devise a process that works for himself, hence the diversity of modern styles.”

The sea-change in views of “the evolutionary in music” after Schoenberg and Webern is clear if we think of the terms in which the great composers were lauded, or responded to trials and triumphs: “I swear before God that your son is the greatest composer known to me,” said Haydn to Mozart’s father; “my art is winning me renown,” said Beethoven, about his arrival in Vienna. Though neither Mozart nor Beethoven exactly lacked a spark of originality, these phrases speak rather of quality, even greatness — but not of shock, ground-breaking change or even individuality. The implication is that the composer practises an art that enjoys stability and ownership, and is recognised, by that ownership, as taking his place within the ranks of that art.

The new disdain for the reassuring continuities of art in modern times is exemplified, at its extreme, by the young firebrand Pierre Boulez in 1951, asserting that Schoenberg was fatally compromised by his sense of the past. I say “new” because as recently as in Webern’s lectures in 1935, we heard the past still enshrined as our guiding star; the late 1940s, however, may be the point at which critical opinions crystalised a more radical conception of what a “new music” means.

The thrust of Boulez’s famous polemic, Schoenberg Is Dead, was that Schoenberg’s ability to realise his own pure, new world was fatally undermined by reliance on classical forms — yes, that continuity exalted by Webern as “tradition”; this means not just the outer shell of Schoenberg’s variations, Baroque dances and sonatas of that precious European inheritance but their entire inner periodic framework. “Schoenberg employed the series [his ‘12-note row’] . . . to ensure the semantic unity of the work, but he organised the elements thus obtained by an existing rhetoric, not a serial one.” This is worth highlighting for its context: Webern had said almost exactly this, but for him it was a reassurance; almost overnight, though, the past had gone from enabling provenance to hampering irrelevance.

For Adorno’s ideology, “the new music” is thus an experience aspiring to purification of its own past, while even for Webern it was an assertion of continuity. Adorno is hard on Richard Strauss for the latter’s backsliding from the cause: “Even Strauss, whose boldest strokes were genuine caprioles which unquestionably dealt the system a severe blow, finished by reinforcing it all the more powerfully.” If the role of art is “to deal blows to the system”, things have certainly changed, not to say become politicised. It seems, then, that the new music of the age dabbles at its peril in congress with modes from its past; for that past, with its listening habits, is now a fatal limitation.

Nor is comfortable imitation of fashion a refuge: Adorno is not persuaded by those who are “content to produce further examples of various types of compositions established by composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky and Hindemith, without recognising that these types do not define a space inside of which one can move with pre-established assurance, and that what matters is exclusively the production of new types, or rather new characters”. He elaborates: “The avant-garde therefore calls for a music which takes the composer by surprise, much as a chemist can be surprised by the new substance in his test-tube.”

Such imagery, with its talk of chemists and test-tubes, is in fact strangely prophetic of confused tendencies within modernism (even today) to appropriate quasi-scientific language and quantities. While the radical new outlook so startlingly drawn by Adorno here cannot be said to have prevailed, 50 or 60 years on, among English-speaking composers, its legacy is surely stronger among groupings in mainland European centres. During recent Soundings Festivals promoted by the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, I’ve conducted extensive public conversations with some younger Austrian composers, and probed their sense of connection to even the recent historical past. I continue to be struck by the lack of that sense — so important to Schoenberg as well as Webern — that you’re connected, taking forward something from your past. By contrast, some of the composers I interview have explicitly pursued composition as a rebellion against an academic establishment, striking out from what they found to be fossilised adoration of the Viennese canon and rigid conservatoire attitudes; one reported feeling stifled specifically by the regimentation of European piano pedagogy, and had turned to composition for its supposed lack of cultural baggage. Two Austrian composers who disclosed to me mainstream concerns with phrasing and hierarchies admitted to being self-conscious about their “traditional approach”, though their music was to my ears quite radical; none of them expressed excitement with the historical canon, the way that I might revel in Ravel or bask in Beethoven — a backdrop that cannot be excised from my composer-thinking. Among my Austrian colleagues there was a tendency to relegate historical learning to an academic outlook, leaving it thus estranged from their practice as composers. We shall return to the reasons for this different outlook; it suggests that, in our modern culture, different constructions of the idea of “past”, the traditional (organic) one and the iconoclastic (disconnected) one, can even exist, in parallel, to inform different compositional environments.

That brings us to the idea that the single journey of musical history has, itself, reached an end to its linear progress: if we may switch metaphors from land to water, a river has become a lake. “The new music” may be a listening purified of its own past, but the reality is that other musics will continue in parallel — those that will be historically informed just as before, in defiance of the orthodoxy of Boulez and Adorno.

In his landmark study of music in the modern age, Music, The Arts and Ideas, Leonard B. Meyer set out in 1966 the bold thesis that the restless exploratory journey of Western musical history could cease and compositional practice still function. Evoking human spheres in which, he claimed, stasis has facilitated continuing activity, Meyer posited a new order of permissive diversity, in which we may actually have stopped “laying track” altogether; maybe now we just choose our place to be. He wrote: “The old has not, as a rule, been displaced by the new. Earlier movements have persisted side by side with later ones, producing a profusion of alternative styles and schools — each with its own attendant aesthetic and history.” Later in the book he noted: “All these ways of making music are with us, and will probably continue to be with us for many years.”

This situation was for Meyer a product of expanding cultural availability, and it heralded a shift from historic to intrinsic value: “For a twentieth-century audience the appeal [of remote times and cultures] is irrelevant: the past is no longer distant, and the distant is no longer mysterious. Today, when the same person may delight in modern jazz and Renaissance polyphony, read Haiku poetry and Brecht, collect action painting and pre-Columbian art, the attraction of past or foreign art lies neither in romance of the remote nor the charm of the unusual, but in significance of form and perfection of result.” He went on: “As foreseen here, the future, like the present, will hold a plethora of styles and a plurality of audiences in each of the arts. There will be no convergence, no stylistic consensus. Nor will there be a single unified audience. I find nothing shocking or deplorable in this.”

None of us could deny the prescience of his prediction: we are all cultural travellers now, and — how right Meyer was — the remote and the unusual have certainly suffered a corresponding loss of their cachet, along with our once-isolated global localities. Equally accurate is Meyer’s prophecy of audiences fragmenting into minority supporters of different musics, which has clearly come about in globalised culture.

But what is the implication of this new order (if it pertains) for any sense of artistic lineage? Jacob Willer, writing about painting, echoes what I said above about the modern priority of individuated expression; tellingly he points out the need for experimentation to have a historical backdrop. “Of course, some painters have enjoyed devising their own styles. They celebrate their experimentation as if it were the liberation from tradition, because they want an individualistic art. But experimentation cannot be liberating when there is no choice but to experiment. The modern painter is an individualist in art whether he likes it or not.”

So there we have it: composition as tradition; composition as escape; composition as protest; composition as whatever we need it to be. I believe the shift in attitudes to art mirrors its social ownership: Beethoven’s reported comment on settling in Vienna, “my art is winning me renown”, embodies a wide ownership of his practice; by contrast Adorno noted, in the same city 100 years later, the loss of listenership around what composers wanted to do — the schism opening not just with listeners but with deeper historical continuities previously taken for granted. This, at first a de facto splinter (to the dismay of Schoenberg and the others), was later to be fashioned, as we have seen, into a spear of ideology.

I say it was later that the schism became a tenet of modernism in Western culture, but while placing the rupture with the past so precisely between Webern (1935) and Adorno (1948) I should not neglect the roots of modernism in 19th-century Europe. The musical historian Carl Dahlhaus sees this splintering that is our topic today as a facet of Romanticism: in his great discussion “Nationalism and Music”, Dahlhaus notes that “the preeminent aesthetic principle of the 19th century was the dogma of originality, an ideal that gave rise to a constant search for novelty. The seal of aesthetic authenticity was placed only on what was unfamiliar: imitation was no longer, as in the past, applauded as a pious honouring of tradition, of what was old and true.” This offers a pre-echo of my modern schism, in familiar phraseology, but locates it a century earlier; maybe it is enough to note that in many ways modern musical culture, defined by the individuation of expression, began with Beethoven.

As we return to the present to ask “what about today?”, I see no reason why music since 1900 should have been required to jump that train-track that leads back to all previous practices — no reason why music that does not leave the track should have been seen as inferior. I certainly want fearless exploration in art, but I want coherence as well. I noted above that a “disconnect” with even the recent musical canon is still discernible in mainland European thinking. The received wisdom about this striking and so-influential rupture, which we have traced to the late 1940s and ’50s, is that it marked among European modernists of the time a cultural revulsion with the continuities that had culminated in the Third Reich. In an article on German composer Helmut Lachenmann published in Tempo in 1998, Ian Pace was explicit about this: “The modernistic developments of the 1950s had a special potency for young Germans, distrustful of the conventions of the past, which could be seen to have been tainted by the culture from which they originated, a culture which culminated in genocide” — and I have heard this view echoed by some who were around at Adorno’s lectures. It is surely true, and understandable, that horror at the recent historical outcomes lay behind these startling disconnections — yet revulsion cannot validate, however it explains, the subsequent disorientation of artistic progression induced by that full-throated denial of traditional connection. This is not to do with the degree of radicalism but with the denial of context: how is communication with its society possible for an art that is composed in a vacuum? I believe there is no precedent for it in Western culture. To renounce the background information of our musical handbook up to, say, Schoenberg creates an artistic void — an avant-garde movement cut off from the oxygen of its own tradition.

To suggest that everything had to be done differently after 1930 has done untold damage to the ownership of new art music ever since — disproportionate damage, given that this was far from a general viewpoint: leading younger composers like Ligeti and Carter saw clearly at the time the pitfalls of this mid-20th-century trend. We can learn much about a musical society from its live music, meanwhile: today, for all the progressive trend of dissociation with the past — or perhaps because of it — we as composers now struggle to get a hearing in our own concert halls, that are effectively repertoire museums, and the connection is plain between ossified concert-programming and the severance of ownership between today’s cultural world and its new music. In bygone times, meanwhile, even while composers were widely informed by historical enrichment, the public listening environment was hungry for their new work; I believe that a concert diet, such as ours, that draws largely on music more than 70 years old, would have amazed a Londoner or Viennese in the 17th or 18th century, when new opera and instrumental music was the rage.

It is natural that any kind of artist may feel the proven achievements of that past as a formidable force; logically it even feels nonsensical sometimes to be adding to this body of work. Jacob Willer again: “The masters may loom over his (the artist’s) shoulder, but, stranded by modernity, he cannot see back over theirs.” I often feel that as composers we are less “those who can” than “those who dare”; the art we already have as our cultural heritage has nothing to prove, for its role is enshrined; by contrast our own efforts struggle to win a place in anyone’s life. Not surprising, then, that many artists still dissociate their output from the past in the search for a territory. But I still say that you cannot compose in a vacuum.

The post Music Of The Future Cannot Ignore The Past appeared first on Standpoint.

This in itself implies that those principles of duty or theological belief must differ in some ways from, or at least go beyond, what ordinary human reasonableness would have come up with. But there is a deeper and sharper problem here. The “liberal” view is that it is wrong to penalise people for failings which are not their own fault; good intentions and best efforts must be accepted as sufficient. Yet a human being who happens not to have been informed about the contents of divine revelation stands — if that revelation really does give the essential and otherwise unavailable key to eternal life — at a stupendous disadvantage. That people who have rejected Christianity should go to Hell may seem, at least to a believing Christian, entirely right and proper. But what about the ones who never even had a chance to accept it?

The problem raised by the idea that good pagans will burn in Hell-fire is more troubling than the other familiar problems that arise over the apparent injustice of God. There is the problem of undeserved pain and suffering in this life, for example, or the fact that we see wicked men prospering. In those cases, at least one part of the answer will be that the afflicted may be compensated in the next life, and the wrongdoers will be punished. By all means, let the wicked fry in Hell — but why should they find themselves frying alongside innocent and virtuous pagans?

The robust answer to all these questions is to say: God is simply not “fair”, if by fairness you mean the paltry and inadequate human version of that concept. God’s justice is absolute, more pure and more perfect than anything we can grasp. And it is bound up with the purpose for which He made us, which is also beyond our comprehension. How can the creature judge the Creator? Hath not the potter power over the clay?

In the Christian tradition, few thinkers have taken the robust line more robustly than Saint Augustine. Only those who believed in Jesus Christ, he declared, could be saved. Like other Fathers of the Church, he assumed that after the coming of Christ on earth the Gospel had rapidly become available to the entire human race, which meant that all post-Christ pagans were somehow guilty of rejecting the truth. For the period before Christ, Augustine allowed that God did grant miraculous prophetic knowledge of the advent of Jesus to some individuals (above all, the leading Jewish figures of the Old Testament). But whereas a more liberal-minded thinker might have used this escape-clause to claim that God had granted salvation to huge numbers of virtuous pre-Christian pagans, Augustine was scornful about the very idea that pagans could, by their own efforts, be morally good at all. Any virtues which are not animated by the love of God are, he argued, not in fact real virtues. They are self-regarding performances, tainted by pride — or, in the words popularised by a later writer in the Augustinian tradition, splendida peccata, shining or splendiferous sins.

John Marenbon’s fascinating new book on what he calls the Problem of Paganism takes Augustine’s position as its historical starting-point, and traces subsequent debates all the way to the end of the 17th century. This is much more than, and quite different from, a chronological survey of well-known arguments. While some of the thinkers discussed here (Boethius, Aquinas, Thomas More, Leibniz) are the subjects of huge modern secondary literatures, Marenbon constantly cuts across the standard discussions at a fresh angle, bringing new connections to light. This book is also no routine exercise in the history of medieval (and post-medieval) philosophy; it focuses on literary texts (Dante, Boccaccio, Langland, Chaucer), and on medieval and Renaissance works describing contacts with actual contemporary pagans. Those who know of Marenbon as a world authority on some dauntingly technical areas of medieval philosophy will be pleasantly surprised to encounter, in these pages, Peter of Dusberg’s description of pagan Prussian funerary practices, or Garcilaso de la Vega’s defence of the monotheism of the Incas, or Jean de Léry’s account of the virtues of the cannibalistic Tupí Indians of Brazil.

The long-running debate about whether pagans can be saved has attracted some historical studies in the past, of course. But Marenbon’s Problem of Paganism goes beyond the story of that theological question, embracing two other, closely related issues: whether pagans can have true virtue, and whether they can acquire true wisdom or philosophical understanding. The most liberal position would be to say “yes” to the second of these, and then, on the basis that true wisdom must include true ethics, “yes” to the first; in which case, with the help of some liberal assumptions about how and why God will grant people salvation, one can also give a “yes” to the theological question about whether pagans can go to Heaven. The relation between these three issues was seldom as straightforward as that, however. Much of the fascination of this book lies in seeing how attitudes and arguments shifted to and fro, as the pieces in this three-cornered puzzle were constantly altered and rearranged.

One thing is very clear: the hardline Augustinian position never went away. There were medieval writers who reasserted it (including some very fierce-sounding Franciscans), and in the 17th century Cornelius Jansenius, founder of the French “Jansenist” movement, would stonily insist that the virtues of the best pagans were “not true virtues, but vices hidden by the name and appearance of virtues”.

In the hands of some writers, the hard-line position became more obdurate even as it became less Augustinian. In a marvellously illuminating chapter on Dante, Marenbon points out that, far from representing a standard medieval view (as generations of readers have assumed), his treatment of the pagans is peculiarly severe. Dante does allow that pagans can have real virtue, yet still he insists that virtue is of no help in enabling pagans to avoid Hell: “I am Virgil,” says his virtuous guide, “and I have lost heaven for no other fault than not having faith.” The whole discussion of Dante here justifies Marenbon’s three-cornered approach to the “Problem of Paganism”; by studying the poet’s attitude to pagan wisdom, and placing him in a tradition of what he calls “limited relativism”, he helps us to see how it was that Dante simultaneously softened the Augustinian criticism of merely human virtue, and strengthened the distinction between the sphere of human wisdom and the sphere of faith.

Augustine’s doctrine was always present, but it was seldom a dominant orthodoxy. There were many ways of countering, evading or adapting its arguments. The great and highly original 12th-century theologian Peter Abelard laid down a path which many would follow later. His idea was that if you studied the works of ancient pagan philosophers (those, at least, that were available in the 12th century — one of whom, “Hermes Trismegistus”, was in fact much less ancient than people imagined), you could find clear hints of Christian theology, including knowledge of the Holy Trinity. To some extent, he thought, sheer unassisted human reason had been able to work out not only that there was one God (omnipotent, Creator, etc), but also that that God must have a threefold or triune identity.

As a good Christian, however, Abelard thought that only belief in the incarnated Christ could bring salvation; so he also supposed that where an ancient pagan thinker had tiptoed towards this threshold of Christian belief, God had then stepped in to bestow, by supernatural means, some prophetic knowledge of Christ’s human existence on earth.

In this way Abelard supplied later writers with not one but two very fertile ideas: the notion that valid theological knowledge did circulate among ancient pagans, and the claim that people could be turned, by a “special inspiration” from God, into Christians, long before the actual coming of Christ. (As a theoretical possibility that last idea had already been put forward by Augustine himself, whose “City of God” existed, interspersed among the human race, in all ages; but Abelard’s argument that wise pagans had reached the very threshold of Christian belief by their own efforts was deeply un-Augustinian.)

The most influential opponent of Augustine was Thomas Aquinas. His answer to the question of whether pagans could acquire real wisdom was a resounding “yes”: the towering philosophical structure which he spent a lifetime building had the teachings of Aristotle as its foundations, and the nature of the construction was meant to demonstrate a seamless transition, above a certain level, from the truths of human philosophy to the ones supplied by divine revelation.

On the issue of pagan virtue, Aquinas respected the theological principle that virtue in the full sense must be animated by the love of God, but he dismissed the Augustinian idea that pagans cannot be virtuous at all: they can indeed do “those good works for which the good of nature suffices”.

As for salvation: on this point Aquinas seems most radical of all, but, as Marenbon shows, he was simply developing a line of thought set out by previous writers. While he supposed that God might use “special inspiration” in exceptional cases (including Kaspar Hauser-like children, brought up among wolves without any human instruction), for his general solution to the problem he turned to a quite different concept: “implicit faith”. Pagan philosophers who had arrived at a basic monotheistic understanding could vow to believe whatever might be known about God by those whose knowledge was greater than theirs. In the ancient world, those superior figures were in fact the Jewish prophets, illuminated by God. But it was not necessary for pagans to meet them, or even to know who they were; a sincere belief that such people must exist was quite sufficient. The flexibility — or, if you prefer, generosity — of this argument is rather breathtaking.

All these positions, pro- and anti-Augustinian, were adopted primarily in order to argue about pagans of the ancient world, especially the most virtuous Greeks and Romans. Any interaction between these debates and discussions of contemporary pagans was quite limited, thanks to the continuing belief that, in the words of St Jerome, “no people remains which does not know the name of Jesus, and, even if they have not had a preacher, they cannot however be unaware of the faith from neighbouring peoples”. The discovery of the New World would shake that assumption to its foundations.

The last part of this book is dominated by the effects of that discovery — not just the jolt it gave to abstract knowledge, but the practical effects of a process of conquest which brought Christian governors, and Christian priests, into close contact with real live pagans. Some parts of the resulting ferment of ideas are fairly well known, such as the great mid-16th-century disputation at Valladolid between the humanist scholar and pro-conquest hardliner Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican defender of the Amerindians, Bartolomé de las Casas. But Marenbon’s account sets them in a longer context of theological argument which few previous writers have considered in such depth. (Even so, Las Casas’s justification of human sacrifice may still take the reader by surprise.)

Marenbon’s survey of the 16th- and 17th-century debates may be a little more schematic than his searching account of the medieval arguments, but it does suffice to make one large point, which he emphasises in his conclusion: while we may think that the shift from medieval mentalities to early modern ones was a move away from rigid religious dogmas towards more human and tolerant positions, the evidence of these debates fails to support that view. There was no clear direction of “progress”, and the anti-pagan positions of some 17th-century Protestants and Jansenists were more uncompromising than those of almost any previous writers in the Augustinian tradition. Marenbon does not speculate about the reasons for this; one, surely, is the fact that “Socinianism”, from the late 16th century, and “Deism”, from the late 17th, were bugbears that genuinely frightened many mainstream theologians. Both were forms of “rational theology” (the former with a strongly biblical basis, at least to begin with, but the latter not even with that), with far-reaching implications about the power of human reason to work out what God would, or would not, do. The danger that the information provided by the Bible might turn out to be quite secondary (or even irrelevant) to human intuitions about the nature of divine justice now seemed very real, as it had never done before.

Which brings us back to revelation, and our liberal understanding of what is reasonable. It would be easy to read the story told in this book as a struggle between, on the one hand, people who were Augustinian because they were illiberal, and, on the other, their opponents, whose essentially liberal impulses drove them to find ways of accommodating virtuous pagans in the divine scheme of things. Such a portrayal would surely have been unrecognisable to the people involved. The idea that human ethical intuitions were primary, and that theological principles were secondary things, to be moulded to fit them, would have bewildered these thinkers. Today we live in a world where the expectations, and hence also the bewilderment, go in the opposite direction. That is, at the very least, another reason why we need an expert such as John Marenbon to guide us through the thinking of such a very different age.

The post The Pagan Problem In Western Thought appeared first on Standpoint.

The ghostly images of her wreck, found by the American Paul Allen, brought back teenage memories for me. I too had sunk the Musashi—only mine was a scale model 1/500th the size of the original, and she sank in Black Park lake, ablaze with magnesium, while we watched and photographed my battleship’s immolation. Why a youth with no obvious pyromaniac tendencies would enjoy doing such a thing now eludes me. But it was by no means unique for a boy growing up in the decades after ttclauhe Second World War to acquire encyclopaedic knowledge of the armies, navies and air forces of the belligerents of both wars, to make models and play war-games, all without so much as a whiff of cordite. I even painted large murals of the two world wars on the walls of my primary school, complete with portraits of Churchill and Lloyd George. Only once, when the rest of my class suddenly chanted “war, war, war” because I had made one too many references to it, was I made to suffer for my hobby.

Boys like me could afford to treat war as a hobby because we thought we had got off lightly. We children of the 1950s thought of ourselves as “post-war”: too young to fight the Nazis or the Communists, too old to fight the Islamists, we were the fortunate beneficiaries of the carnage that had scarred previous generations. For us, the fascination of past conflict lay in its remoteness from our experience. For half a century the face of battle, in the late John Keegan’s phrase, was averted from our gaze. Now it is we who must avoid the Gorgon’s evil eye. We never thought that the spectre of war would return to haunt our middle age. We had not prepared our own children to fight for what we had inherited. We did not expect to see the survival of Western civilisation at stake yet again in our lifetimes, or in theirs.

The First World War had not proved to be the “war to end all war”, but the Second had come pretty close. The horror of the Holocaust, the containment of Communism, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction: these and other events conspired to deter Nato and the Warsaw Pact from fighting to the death on the plains of central Europe. True, there were many other theatres of war across the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America; and there was never a year from 1945 to 1989 when localised conflicts, coinciding with and encompassed by hostilities between East and West, did not kill people in their thousands. The Cold War was primarily ideological rather than military: its greatest confrontations were fought out on the chessboard of diplomacy rather than the battlefield. Notwithstanding Clausewitz, however: the politics of the period was a continuation of war by other means.

Oh yes, Clausewitz: we shall all have to dust him off and read him again, for there is nobody else to make sense of the infernal logic that is now grinding back into action. The Prussian soldier with a philosophical bent—a late flower of the tradition that produced Frederick the Great and Immanuel Kant—pursues us remorselessly with his definition of war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will . . . and there is no logical limit to the application of that force”. Clausewitz will have no truck with the notion that “civilised” nations must necessarily prosecute war less destructively than others. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had changed everything: “Bonaparte’s audacity and luck have cast the old accepted practices to the winds. Major powers were shattered with virtually a single blow.” Not only the French, but the Spanish, Russians and Prussians had “shown what an enormous contribution the heart and temper of a nation can make to the sum total of its politics, war potential, and fighting strength. Now that governments have become conscious of these resources, we cannot expect them to remain unused in the future, whether the war is fought in self-defence or in order to satisfy intense ambition.”

The prophecy of On War in 1832 has proved all too accurate over the past two centuries. In 1915, a century ago, the introduction of poison gas by the Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres marked the advent of weapons of mass destruction— an early example of the alarming alliance of science and warfare. (The chemist responsible for developing the lethal use of gas on an industrial scale was Fritz Haber, who by a terrible irony was a German Jew.) In Syria and Iraq today, chemical weapons are still being deployed by the Assad regime and ISIS indiscriminately against soldiers and civilians. The Germans tried to persuade the world that Allied accusations of “atrocities” were mere propaganda, with considerable success; and indeed the Allies soon retaliated with chemical warfare too. Among the tens of thousands who were gassed was a corporal named Adolf Hitler. Within a generation he had demonstrated that mere atrocities were obsolete, now that the new concept of “genocide” was within the power of the modern state. The “total war” invoked by Goebbels in his notorious speech at the Sportpalast in 1943—“Do you want total war?” he screamed, and the crowds roared back their approval—exceeded anything that had been seen before, but this time the Germans themselves reaped the whirlwind. By 1945, for much of humanity war had become a way of life as well as death. Nothing and nobody was sacrosanct.

In a macabre re-enactment of this hellish past, the Communist world remained locked into perpetual belligerence. Memorials, parades, conscription, training preserved the Eastern bloc in a state of permanent mobilisation. If the West offered welfare from cradle to grave, Communism offered warfare from cradle to grave. It was all done in the name of peace, but the road to the Gulag was paved with pacific intentions. Today, that pattern is visible once again. The contrast between the remilitarisation of Russia and the demilitarisation of the West has become too obvious to ignore. For the free world, martial artlessness is a source of pride; not so for those who see us as the foe. Democracies may have no enemies among their own kind, but to make disarmament the touchstone of decency ignores the existence of others who do not play by our rules. Faced by the threat of international anarchy, with predators such as Putin’s Russia and the Islamic State preying on their neighbours, the West runs the risk of repeating the mistakes that made both world wars possible and came close to costing us the Cold War too. Foremost among these mistakes is the notion that Immanuel Kant’s dream of perpetual peace can be guaranteed by global institutions as such, rather than by the nation states that created those institutions.

Nobody is immune to the wishful thinking that has led us to this pass. One of the most intelligent men of all time, Albert Einstein, dedicated much of his life to campaigning against what he called “the military mentality”. In 1932, on the eve of the Nazi takeover in Germany, the great physicist warned the West to embrace disarmament in the Leftist American magazine The Nation: “The introduction of compulsory military service is therefore, to my mind, the prime cause of the moral decay of the white race, which threatens not merely the survival of our civilisation but our very existence. This curse, along with great social blessings, started with the French Revolution, and before long dragged all the other nations in its train.” Yet what the democracies needed in the 1930s, as in our day, was not disarmament but a defence strong enough to deter aggression from whatever quarter.

After the Second World War, Einstein immediately began campaigning against the nuclear weapons that he and other scientists had created in order, as he said, “to prevent the enemies of mankind from achieving it ahead of us, which, given the mentality of the Nazis, would have meant inconceivable destruction and the enslavement of the rest of the world”. Quite rightly, he denounced the Western Allies for failing the Jews who had survived the Holocaust, especially the British: “It is sheer irony when the British Foreign Minister [Ernest Bevin] tells the poor lot of European Jews that they should remain in Europe because their genius is needed there, and, on the other hand, advises them not to try to get to the head of the queue lest they might incur new hatred and persecution. Well, I am afraid they cannot help it: with their six million dead they have been pushed to the head of the queue, of the queue of Nazi victims, much against their will.” But Einstein was wrong, utterly wrong, when he attacked the United States for its Cold War stance in a famous article on “The Military Mentality” for The American Scholar in 1947: “I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II . . . It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered unimportant and secondary.”

The genius Einstein was misled here by his own experience of the Nazis. He feared that America might follow his native Germany’s path to perdition; he mistook the anti-Communism of Joseph McCarthy and his ilk for fascism; and he underestimated the determination of a free country to use its military might properly. The pride of Americans in their armed forces, the fascination for their technological prowess, the mystique that surrounded the Cold War “military-industrial complex”—none of it had anything in common with the daemonic Nazi cult of war. As an intellectual, Einstein could not hide his distaste for the cultural manifestations of America’s superpower status, but with hindsight we can see that they were the mood music needed to lighten the burden of policing the world. Without the wisdom of that “greatest generation” of veterans, the United States has struggled to preserve the unity of purpose necessary to defend and nurture freedom across the globe.

But if America’s destiny is no longer manifest, Europe’s civilising mission is all but extinct. And in both cases, this has everything to do with the loss among our cultural elites of the ability to distinguish between the bellicosity of predator states and the ability of democracies to resist it. We need once again to cultivate the martial virtues, without which no civilisation is safe from barbarians. Things may have moved on in the decade since the great Harvard scholar Harvey Mansfield published a book devoted to these virtues entitled Manliness, when he was subjected to ridicule rather than serious argument. But even now the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy would reject the very idea that courage, for example, has anything to do with manliness or that the latter is even relevant in the contemporary world. The recent award of the Victoria Cross to Lance Corporal Joshua Leakey, whose incredible exploits in Afghanistan not only saved an American officer’s life but inflicted a severe defeat on the Taliban, instantly prompted death threats and obliged the authorities to protect him and his family. We no longer know how to give such heroism its due.

Einstein was wrong about America’s “military mentality” and in his day his call for a return to more pacific, if not indeed pacifist, values did not prevail. Today, it is a different story. Indeed, the arbiters of Western public opinion are so inclined to stigmatise heroism of the traditional kind that even when a film such as American Sniper (about the US Navy Seal Chris Kyle’s role in Iraq) proved to be the most successful war film in history, the reaction in Hollywood was a deafening silence. Clint Eastwood has been an ostracised figure there at least since his notorious “empty chair” speech endorsing the Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but the hostility of the glitterati has deeper roots. Eastwood is a symbol of everything that Obama’s America wants to put behind it: guns and religion, manliness and militarism, westerns and war. On both sides of the Atlantic, the only good war film is an anti-war film.

Yet this is not how Muslims see the world. There are many passages in the Koran that order Muslims to practise jihad, which can be interpreted both in the spiritual sense and in the military one. For example: “Those who believe fight in the way of God; and those who do not fight only for the powers of evil; so you should fight the allies of Satan.” The Koran is explicit about the rewards of martyrdom: “And We shall bestow on him who fights in the way of God, whether he is killed or is victorious, a glorious reward.”

For the avoidance of doubt, however, there are numerous sayings of the Prophet that make clear that he did indeed understand jihad primarily as holy war. For example, one of Muhammad’s companions, Abu Huraya, reported that he heard the Prophet say: “I have been commanded to fight against people until they testify the fact that there is no god but the God [Allah], and believe that I am the Messenger, and in all that I have brought [i.e. the Koran].” In short, Islam is anything but a pacifist faith, even if many Muslims are as reluctant to fight as anybody else. As the Koran says: “Enjoined on you is fighting, and this you abhor. You may dislike a thing, yet it is good for you.”

Muslims are still supposed to follow the example of their Prophet. In his Life of the Messenger of God, the first and most important biography of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq recounts what happened to the Jewish tribe known as the Banu Qurayza after a month-long siege: “Then the Banu Qurayza surrendered themselves and the Messenger confined them . . . Then the Messenger went out to the market of Medina—which is still the market today—and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches. . . There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900 . . . This went on until the Messenger made an end to them.” Does this scene remind one of anything? 

The contrast could not be clearer between the belligerent, even genocidal ethos of the Islamic State, and the repudiation by many in the West of the duty to fight even in defence of allies and victims of aggression. But there is a similar contrast with the Russians, who are much readier to take casualties than their Western counterparts. According to the Sunday Times, the estimated death toll in Ukraine is now at least 15,000, including more than 5,000 Russian conscripts, volunteers and mercenaries who have been killed in the last year, not counting casualties sustained by their Ukrainian separatist allies. By comparison, the total number of American, British and Coalition troops killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan over 15 years is just over 8,000. It is obviously wrong to sacrifice thousands of lives, civilians as well as soldiers, as Putin is doing, but so far there has been little sign of a backlash against the Russian president from his own people. On the contrary: they are apparently ready to die for him. As a Ukrainian woman told me recently in tones of disgust: “The Russians deserve Putin.” Perhaps life is held so cheap in Russia because life expectancy under Putin has declined to catastrophic levels, lower even than in Haiti. But do the Ukrainians and countless others (such as those on board the Malaysian airliner shot down by a Russian missile) deserve to be on the receiving end of a warlord who seemingly values human life so little?

So the West is up against at least two adversaries who are more warlike, more ruthless and more tenacious than we are. And there are plenty of others, from Iran to North Korea. What do we think will happen if it ever comes to a trial of strength?

We may not miss the military mentality; perhaps we would rather that boys memorised the vital statistics of actresses rather than warships. But at least the post-war generation knew what war was. Today, we are more likely to echo the internationalism of Einstein, who believed that if only the United Nations had a monopoly of nuclear weapons, then perpetual peace might be within our grasp, than Clausewitz, who taught us that, if an enemy is exerting force to compel us to do his will, then we are already at war.

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