Yesterday I put up a piece wondering if gay Americans and Brits were abandoning Pride and some of the mainstream gay organisations. This followed a video on YouTube of the operations manager of the group Gays Against Groomers angrily tearing apart the gay flag. Gays Against Groomers was set up to combat the gender ideology being taught to children, which they feel is a form of indoctrination and sexual predation. Instead of the Pride flag, the man pointed to the American flag as the banner which represented gays and all Americans.
Barry Wall, the EDIJester, and Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh of the Queens’ Speech podcast, are gender critical gay YouTubers. They are extremely critical of the mainstream organisations for their focus on trans rights to the exclusion of ordinary gay men and women. They also feel that the trans ideology has become a new form of eugenics and gay conversion therapy by encouraging gender nonconforming young people, who in most cases would pass through their dysphoria to grow up to be ordinary gays, to transition, rather than accept their natal sexual identity. And many gays are also saying that they aren’t going to Pride marches because of the overt displays of kink and fetish.
JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted his perspective on this issue from across the Pond. He writes
‘Well yea, I haven’t been to a Pride parade in … over a decade. The weekend of events were drunk Allies and naked people walking streets. I imbibe and defend adult’s choosing to go to nude beaches and the like, but when those happen in public … where children are brought by their parents these parades?! Mardi Gras in New Orleans was more tame than Pride in Chicago, and Mardi Gras isn’t tauted as being a posterchild of family-friendly events. Pride events weren’t something to be proud about if the intention is to support family-friendly storytime.
Don’t be too surprised by LGBs in America not all supporting a liberal agenda. So-called Log Cabin gays have been politically active conservatives for decades. It was the Log Cabins who challenged President Clinton in court over his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for the US military. The irony with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is that “liberals” went along with an anti-liberal policy. It’s another example of how liberal parties do not defend democratic freedoms. It’s good to hear that some LGBs are aware and don’t just fall in-line stereotyped gender and sexuality politics.
The problem for straights in these debates is not seeing similar politicing, like supporting so-called “family values”. Jim Crow laws defended the “family values” of banning interracial marriages in the US. Hopefully today’s straights would not fall in-line with mid-20th century politics about that.’
There’s a gay American writer and blogger, whose name escapes me at the moment, who has stated that as a demographic group, gays are largely Conservative, believe very much in fiscal responsibility and have a strong sense of loyalty to the companies that employ them. He called this ‘the Smithers Syndrome’, after Mr Burns’ intensely loyal secretary from The Simpsons. This is very different from the image of the gay milieu given by radical gay groups, such as the mock order of nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were at the centre of controversy a day or so ago when they were disinvited from appearing with the Dodgers’ sports team.
Related to this, the American chain store Target has been forced to scale down its display of trans clothing. Part of the scandal there is that the clothes were designed by a Satanist, and included messages like ‘Satan Loves You’ and ‘Satan Loves Your Pronouns’. The stores were ordered to take this merchandise to a room a third of the planned display in size. They were afraid the controversial clothing would result in them being on the receiving end of the same kind of boycott that has knocked billions of sales off Bud Light after the brewery made the mistake of choosing transwoman Dylan Mulvaney to promote it.
The Satanism here seems to come from the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, neither of which believe in Satan as a real, personal force of supernatural evil. Instead they identify Satan with the promotion of the self and its desires, which they view as liberating. The Satanic Temple has been around for years performing stunts intended to infuriate Conservative Christians. After the community in one American town put up a stone inscribed with the 10 Commandments in front of their courthouse to symbolise justice, they put up a statue of Baphomet. When another American town put up a crib to celebrate Christmas, they put up one with a baby Satan. They come across as a radical atheist/secularist group determined to attack the Christian right and the public promotion of Christianity. I also wonder if the clothing’s Satanism was also partly inspired by the rapper Lil Nas. Nas is gay, and is another pop star who has cultivated a Satanic image. One of his videos has him twerking in front of Lucifer in hell. I did wonder if Target had launched the clothing hoping capture the market offered by young, edgy LGBTQ+ peeps who listen to him and similar pop artists. If so, all they’ve succeeded in doing, it seems to me, is provoke a reaction against the store, especially as it came after the controversy that erupted a few days earlier when it was revealed that several of the speakers at a Satanist convention were trans rights activists. I can understand some of this desire to insult and provoke. It’s a reaction to the splenetic homophobia in sections of the Christian right, though to be fair, the Republican party as a whole seems to have become quite pro-gay and now accept gay marriage.
As for Bill Clinton and his sort-of legalisation of homosexuality in the US armed forces, this was intensely controversial for the Christian right when it was passed. I can remember reading a passage in the book Mind Siege, which is all about the way left-wing ideas are taking over America. This accused Clinton of ‘sodomizing the American military’. This boggled my mind! What! All of them! Where did he get the energy? And what do Hillary and Monica Lewinsky have to say about it? Of course, they then explain that they mean it metaphorically, not literally. It is interesting hearing another perspective on this issue, and I hadn’t known he was challenged about it by the Log Cabin Republicans.
As for the family and family values, I very much believe that the traditional family needs strengthening. The statistics for Britain, like America, show that children from fatherless homes generally perform less well at school, progress as well economically or professionally and are more likely to become criminals, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Of course, this is a general view – there are also any number of single mothers, who have done an excellent job of raising their kids. But I believe that it is possible to do this without promoting homophobia or prejudice or discrimination against gays. I recall that something similar was done a few years ago to a family values group in Yorkshire. This was reformed so that it genuinely worked to strengthen family after they’d kicked out the old guard, who had ‘some funny ideas’ and seemed to have used it as a tool for attacking gay rights.
The EDIJester in one of his videos also sharply criticised one of the trans rights activists, who appears on TickTock. This individual told his audience of young people, that if their families didn’t accept their gender identity, they should cancel them and having nothing more to do with them. The Jester was furious because young gays have been hurt by their parents disowning them, and considered this grossly irresponsible. There were gay organisations in Bristol that worked to help young gays left homeless after being thrown out by their parents. And some of the best stories from gay YouTubers have been about how young gay people were able to keep the love and support of their parents after coming out, or had succeeding in reconciling themselves and their families. Obviously, there should be more of this than victimisation and prejudice.
As for the stifling of civil liberties and freedom of speech, I see this as coming from both the left and the right. In Britain the Conservatives are trying to pass laws severely limiting the freedom to protest and for workers to strike. At the same time, the hate speech laws have been expanded so that they’re severely limiting what may be said in public. Today’s news has included coverage of the case of Kathleen Stock, a lesbian and a gender critical feminist academic. She lost her place at one university due to student protests that branded her transphobic, and there were similar protests when she spoke at the Oxford Union. As a result, Oxford Student Union has cut ties with the Oxford Union. And other academics and ordinary women with similar views have also suffered similar protests and harassment. James Lindsay, who is one of a group of academics alongside Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, who are particularly active fighting woke ideology, has said that this intolerance is no accident. It comes from the ‘repressive tolerance’ advocated by the ’60s radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Roughly translated, it means that freedom of speech should only be extended to those on the radical left, while their critics should be silenced. Lindsay describes himself as a liberal, by which he appears to mean someone who stands up for their traditional liberal values of freedom of speech, individualism and Enlightenment rationality. He is, however, vehemently anti-Communist, though possibly not without reason. Helen Pluckrose also describes herself as a liberal and someone who believes in those values, but also has socialist beliefs. And the other day looking through the internet I found a book by a left-wing author on how the Left can fight woke.
It therefore seems to me that countering the intolerant, extremist ideologies that have been called ‘woke’ – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on and the attempts of their supporters to silence reasoned criticism and debate isn’t either a left-wing or right-wing issue. It’s one that concerns people on both sides of the political spectrum, who are concerned about preserving Enlightenment values of free debate, rationality and the individual.
There’s an interesting opinion piece in today’s Evening Standard by the author Tomiwa Owolade. He was talking about the British book awards, which he attended on Monday, and the appearance there via video link by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie, remember, had suffered a near-fatal attack by an Islamist fanatic at a literary gathering in America back in August last year. Rushdie’s voice was hoarse, and the video accompanying the article shows him wearing spectacles with one lens blacked out, which were a result of his injuries sustained in the attack. But what impressed Owolade was that he didn’t talk about his own 30-year period hiding from murderous fanatics like his attempted assassin. He was receiving the Freedom to Publish Award, sponsored by the Index on Censorship. Rushdie didn’t talk about others who were suffering imprisonment and death for their writing, and didn’t mention authoritarian states like Russia, China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia. He spoke about the rising level of censorship in the supposedly liberal west, among nations that pride themselves on their tradition of freedom of speech.
“The freedom to publish,” Rushdie said, “is also the freedom to read. And the ability to write what you want.” But this conviction is now being weakened: “We live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression and freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”
This is not a problem that’s confined to the political Right or Left. Rushdie mentioned the “extraordinary attack on libraries and books for children in schools” in the US. A recent report by PEN America has found that book bans are rapidly rising in the US.
Across the country, novels by distinguished authors such as Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have been banned in schools and libraries. Rushdie argued that this constitutes an “attack on the ideas of libraries themselves.”
But he also described as “alarming” the trend where “publishers bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.” This is where editors are trying to ‘update’ novels by dead authors by removing or replacing offensive words or phrases. Rushdie argued that “the idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical.”’
Owolade concludes:
‘Rushdie viscerally understands the severe end of censorship; he has been nearly murdered for writing a book. But he is also rightly cognisant of, and opposed to, the milder threats. Because he recognises that the two ends are interlinked: once we accept that some books should not be allowed to be published, or read, or should have their content suppressed or bowdlerised in any other way, we accept the logic of those who think freely producing such books is a crime worthy of prison or death.’
I entirely agree with the article and Rushdie, which rather surprises me. I’m not a fan of his, and I honestly don’t think the Satanic Verses should have been published. There were three internal messages in Viking Penguin at the time advising against publishing it because it would upset Muslim opinion. I haven’t read the book, but people I know who have, including a lecturer in Islam, have assured me that it isn’t blasphemous. However, there’s something to about it in National Lampoon’s Book of Sequels that while it’s made clear that the book isn’t blaspheming Mohammed or the other principal figures of Islam on page 50, the book is so grindingly dull that no one ever makes it that far. The fatwa placed on Rushdie was a noxious piece of opportunism by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted an issue he could exploit that would allow him to wrest leadership of the Islamic world away from the Saudis. The publication of the Satanic Verses came at exactly the right time, and so you had the rancid spectacle of mass book burnings in Bradford, Kalim Saddiqui telling his flock that ‘Britain is a monstrous killing machine and killing Muslims comes very easily to them’, and a demented Pakistani film in which Rushdie is a CIA agent, whose career undermining Islam is ended when God whacks him with the lightning bolt.
But we do have creeping, intolerant censorship in the west and it isn’t confined to either the left and right. I’m very much aware of the purging of radical authors, and particularly LGBTQ+ material from American libraries. I’m also not a fan of the Bowdlerisation of writers like Dahl and Fleming because they’re deemed to be offensive to modern sensibilities. The term ‘Bowdlerise’ is particularly interesting. It comes from the name of a puritanical Victorian publisher, who produced a suitable censored children’s edition of Shakespeare with all the Bard’s smut and innuendo cut out. I’m also concerned at the way publishers, students and lobby groups are trying to stifle the publication of works on such controversial topics as the trans issue and ban their writers from speaking in public or holding academic posts.
A recent example of this has been Oxford University Student Union’s reaction to gender critical feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock speaking at the Oxford Union. There were protests by the Student Union against her appearance as well as attempts to sabotage it by block-booking seats so that they wouldn’t be available to those who really wanted to hear her. She’s been denounced as hateful, people have declared they feel unsafe after her appearance, and the SU has cut its connection with the debating society. They therefore won’t be allowed to appear at fresher’s fairs and other Student Union sponsored events. The SU is also offering support to people traumatised by her appearance.
This is in response to a feminist intellectual who simply does not share the opinion that transwomen are women. Controversial, yes, but not hateful. What makes this affair ridiculous is that there have been real, noxious figures from the Fascist right who have spoken at the Oxford Union and suffered no such attack by the Student Union. People like Nick Griffin, the former head of the BNP, and the Holocaust Denier David Irving. If anybody deserves mass protests against them, and who really would make people feel understandably unsafe, it’s those two. I can’t imagine how Jews and non-Whites would feel in their presence, especially given the BNP’s history of violence against them. But they were allowed to speak at the Oxford Union, albeit to the surprise and disgust of many.
Rushdie’s right about free speech coming under attack in the liberal west. And the Tories, and particularly the Nat Cons are part of this. They’ve passed legislation severely restricting the right to protest and to strike, as well as the legislation providing for secret courts. And I don’t see Starmer changing this legislation, not when he said that laws like the Crime and Policing Act need time to bed in.
We really do need to wake up this threat, and that this isn’t a partisan issue if we’re going to defend freedom of speech and debate.
Netflix has caused a bit of controversy this week with its documentary about the legendary queen of Egypt by having her played by a Black actor. This is unhistorical, as the real Cleopatra was Greek, descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Ptolemy had set himself up as pharaoh after Alexander’s death. I’ve also heard the claim today that she also had red hair. There have been a number of posts by bloggers and vloggers across the Net showing that Netflix got it wrong. And now, apparently, an Egyptian lawyer is so angry about it and the threat it presents to Egyptian identity that he’s suing Netflix. He also wants the streaming service banned in Egypt because its content is contrary to Islam, and especially Egyptian Islam.
His argument is that the portrayal of Cleopatra as a woman of colour is Afrocentric, and derives from that ideology’s doctrine that the originally ancient Egyptians were wholly Black and only became lighter through later invasion and immigration. This is a correct description of the Afrocentric view of ancient Egypt, although some leading Afrocentrists, like Cheikh Anta Diop, also thought that the ancient Egyptians were a racial mixture of Black and White. The idea that the ancient Egyptians and thus Cleopatra were Black is fervently held by very many western Blacks. The Black activist Akala gave a talk to the Oxford Union a few years ago arguing for the view. The contrary view, that the ancient Egyptians were light-skinned Caucasians, is dismissed as a colonialist doctrine intended to deny Blacks knowledge of their true history. There’s a weird conspiracy theory added to this. I’ve heard Blacks claim that White, British authorities deliberately chopped the lips and noses off ancient Egyptian statues in order to disguise their negritude.
The lawyer is not just angry at Neflix’s portrayal of Egypt’s most famous queen, but he also fears that this is a truly colonialist attitude that will lead to the displacement of his people from their homeland. He states that Afrocentrism is a doctrine that teaches specifically Black Americans that they are the true Egyptians and demands their return to Egypt. This is certainly true of a number of Black Muslim sects, beginning with the Moorish Science Temple. However, he adds that this return to Egypt is also coupled with a call to expel or displace the present indigenous Egyptian population. I’ve done some reading on Afrocentrism, and haven’t found that as an Afrocentric doctrine. The founders of Black American Islam seem to have claimed to be either Egyptian, or to have been told the true history of ancient Egypt during visits to the country by Egyptian holy men. I haven’t come across any doctrine in the Afrocentric religions calling for the disinheritance and ethnic cleansing of present-day Egyptians. The insistence that the ancient Egyptians were Black has caused friction at some Egyptological conferences and symposia held in Egypt, but I’m not aware of anything more serious.
I’m not a Muslim, so I can’t comment whether Netflix’s content is contrary to Islam or not. Some Islamic countries, such as Iran, have very strict rules regarding what may be shown on the screen. Violence is forbidden along with relationships between men and women. Hence a few years ago there was a spate of Iranian movies about the adventures of children. Other Muslim countries have different attitudes. When Dallas was still a force on global TV, I was surprised by a statement from one of the Gulf Arab states that the show was enjoyed by its people, and they felt that Patrick Duffy’s character exemplified proper Muslim values. That must have been before the character had an adulterous affair. The accusation that Neftlix is contrary to Islam therefore seems to me to be an extra allegation just to get the service banned in Egypt. The real reason is the documentary’s perceived insult and threat to Egyptian ethnic identity.
It seems to me that the problem is that Netflix wanted to please Black American ideas about ancient Egypt, ignoring how the Egyptians themselves saw their identity. This is a form of colonialism. One of the doctrines of Critical Race Theory is ‘epistemic violence’, which holds that White supremacy denies the colonised, darker peoples a voice and the ability to describe their position. Well, this is clearly what the portrayal of Cleopatra as Black for Afrocentric reasons has done, although I doubt this would be recognised by Critical Race Theorists, for whom the victims of such violent colonialist discourse are always Black. This controversy is itself another refutation of Critical Race Theory.
Over the past few days Keir Starmer and the Labour party have been giving the Tories a pasting over the migrant crisis and Suella Braverman’s latest plans to control it. They’ve pointed out that the Tories have had three prime ministers and numerous Home Secretaries, and still have not managed to solve the problem. But watching an interview with Dr. Matthew Goodwin on the New Culture Forum channel this afternoon, it seems that the Tories under Johnson have actively contributed to it.
The New Culture Forum is an organisation that campaigns for traditional British culture and values. It’s the cultural wing of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a Tufton Street free-trade, privatise everything, destroy the welfare state and hang the consequences outfit. It was the clowns at the IEA and other, similar mad neoliberal thinktanks like the Adam Smith Institute and the Taxpayers’ Alliance who packed Liz Truss’ cabinet and gave her all those brilliant ideas that wrecked the economy and people’s lives and businesses.
Goodwin is an academic at Kent University. He argues that there is now a profound disconnection between the liberal elite running the country and the mass of ordinary people. The liberal elite are wealthy, White graduates, who believe Britain is racist, are obsessed with past injustice and feel no pride in being British. They are overwhelmingly from Oxbridge. People who consider themselves strongly liberal are only 20 per cent of the population, these people are overwhelmingly represented in the media, education and politics. Goodwin states that journalism is now far more elitist due to the domination of the graduates and that it will be a long time before we see more working-class journalists like John Humphries. These liberal graduates look down on the rest of the population, who don’t share their values, and were profoundly shocked by Brexit and that much of the country didn’t share their views.
What was particularly interesting is that he stated the Tories had conceded too much to them. The people, who voted Tory want to control immigration rather than stop it completely. They want to cut it down from 500,000 a year to 100,000 a year. They also did not want or expect Boris Johnson to liberalise the immigration process and end the requirement that firms advertising for employees abroad must first advertise for applicants in Britain. This is news to me, and strongly conflicts with the rubbish we’re told that Labour want an open door immigration policy. In Goodwin’s view, the Tories have lost all hope of winning the big cities like London, and so must concentrate on holding the second-rank towns. That means making economic concessions to the Red Wall – real economic concessions, not simply moving civil servants out of London. But he was also optimistic about the people on the new media, the internet, who are also appearing to challenge the liberal cultural consensus from which they have been excluded in print and publishing.
This confirms what I think the Tories will try to do at the next election. I think they’ll fight it on cultural issues, like the trans controversy, Critical Race Theory and so on. They’ve already started with immigration, which I think is being used to divert people from the poverty and starvation they’ve caused.
Excellent video by the Left-wing group Led By Donkeys which shows the pervasive connections between the former Prime Minister, swivel-eyed Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and her cabinet and the mad, free enterprise groups located at or near 55 Tufton Street. These include the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Taxpayers Alliance. These groups are all in favour of privatisation, including that of the NHS, tax cuts for the rich and the ending of the welfare state. One of them also pumps out propaganda against global warming and climate change. Truss herself set up a Free Enterprise Group with the assistance of the IEA, and the group as how morphed into another organisation with a similar name, linked to them. Truss was among the authors of the noxious Britannia Unchained, which claimed that British workers were the laziest in the world and demanded more cuts and privatisation for the rich and that workers should be stripped of their rights. All of them were connected to the Tufton Street network. Kings College, Oxford, held a debate about whether the NHS should be privatised, put forward by one of the inmates of the IEA. And when one journalist asked them if Truss had handed the government over to the Tufton Street thinktanks, she was told ‘Yes’.
These organisations are very secretive and won’t disclose who funds them. Some of them received donations from BP, others from the tobacco industry. A number of them are American organisations. But for the most part, their donors are unknown. The video points out that nobody elected Truss except 0.1 per cent of the population, and her tax cuts benefited only 2,500 millionaires. It is for their benefit that she trashed the economy, an event Led By Donkeys commemorated by sticking a mock blue plaque about it on the front of 55 Tufton Street.
Their ideas don’t work and the economic collapse they caused showed they are catastrophic. But nevertheless, they benefit the rich and so the Conservative right definitely won’t question them, even when the force everyone else into poverty.
I’ve also had this email from the pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation, We Own It about a planned demonstration they’re holding against the privatisation of the NHS in February. They’re appealing for people to go to it. I can’t, due to expense and illness, but I’m putting it up here in case there are people interested in it, who may be able to attend.
‘Dear David,
BREAKING: private health companies donated £800,000 to the Conservative Party over the last decade. Now we know why the government is doing nothing about NHS privatisation!
A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
It is time to make the government feel the power of organised people over organised money.
Can you sign up to become one of 557 people in Parliament Square from 2 – 4pm on Saturday, 25th February demanding an end to NHS privatisation?
So far, 541 people have signed up. We need 89 people to reach our final goal of 630 (that is, 557 people representing the victims of NHS privatisation, 43 people to help carry signs and banners and 30 stewards to help manage the event).
You are involved in our NHS campaign because you believe that our NHS should work for people, not the greedy private companies that donate to the government.
Unite the Union, Just Treatment, Doctors for the NHS and Socialist Health Association fully agree with you. That is why they are now supporting our action.
It is time we make the government feel the power of organised people over organised money.
We want to bring together 557 people representing the 557 people whose deaths are linked to NHS privatisation to put on a powerful display that can get into the papers.
More press coverage means more pressure on the government. The more of us there are at the action, the more likely the action is to get press coverage.
We need 89 more people to reach our goal. Can you sign up now to join us?
Because of the incredible efforts of our NHS nurses and ambulance workers who are fighting to save our NHS, the government is already feeling pressure.
With the recent study that links NHS privatisation to 557 preventable deaths, there is no better time than now to pile onto that pressure they are feeling.
The government already knows that over 75% of the public, according to our last poll, want to end NHS privatisation. But they don’t feel that people will fight to see that happen.
You can show them from 2 – 4pm on Saturday 25th February in Parliament Square that you will.
The more people join this action, the more powerful it will be. The more powerful it is, the more likely it is to receive coverage from the press.
This coverage will pile on the pressure on the government and start forcing them to take action.
We need 557 people to represent the 557 people whose deaths are linked to NHS privatisation, according to a recent Oxford study.
But we need even more people to make sure the action is big and effective. So after signing up, please send the link to your friends and family, especially those who live in London and ask them to sign up too.
Thank you so much for always standing up against NHS privatisation.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate – the We Own It team
PS: 30 years ago today the British Coal and British Rail (Transfer Proposals) Act 1993 was passed, paving the way for privatisation of our railway. We’ve put together a list of 30 top failures of rail privatisation from the last 30 years. Take a read and share with friends and family.’
Jeremy Bentham was a British 19th century philosopher. He was the inventor of Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that states that something is good if it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This, however, fails as it neglects the fact that some things are inherently good or evil even though they may be popular. One of the examples of this would be a case where a mob demands the execution of a wrongly accused man. It is still wrong to execute an innocent person, even if this is massively popular and demanded by the majority of people. Bentham was also interested in prison reform and design. In his view, prisons should be laid out so that the prisoners and their activities were all under surveillance from a central hub, the panopticon. This constant surveillance would, he believed, lead to prisoners acquiring the habit of behaving decently and legally and so reform their characters ready for release back into society. Modern critics consider it a chilling, totalitarian surveillance society in miniature. Another of his ideas is truly bonkers. He believed that people – presumably members of the aristocracy and people accustomed to public service and social prominence – should preserve their ancestors after death through mummification and embalming, and put them on display as ‘autoicons’. The intention behind this bizarre idea is that people, surrounded by their dead relatives and antecedents, would then feel themselves encouraged to emulate their virtues. Bentham had himself preserved, and is on display in a glass case at Oxford University, except for his head, which is a waxwork. His real head is in a case somewhere, and not displayed.
However, the Utilitarians were behind the early 19th century hygiene reforms that cleaned up Britain’s cities by demanding proper sewage and the removal of waste from the streets to improve the inhabitants’ lives and health. And he was also a very much a political radical. He outlined his democratic views in Democracy – A Fragment. He believed that people weren’t naturally virtuous and public spirited, and that they acted primarily in their own interest. This meant that those governing also acted in their own interest, which was to expand their power against everyone else. They could only be kept in line through democracy and all adults possessing the vote. And he meant all adults. The franchise should be extended to include not just all adult men, but also women. He also wanted the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England. This was in the 1820s, and it was nearly a century before British women acquired the right to vote. As for the abolition of the monarchy, the Lords and the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, Tony Benn was reviled as a Communist for advocating them, plus nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. They’re not policies I support, though the House of Lords needs radical reform as at the moment it has more members than the ruling general assembly of the Chinese Communist Party. But I am impressed with his staunch advocacy of democracy, especially at a time when many would have regarded it almost as seditious because of the excesses of the French Revolution.
And unfortunately he does have a point about the corruption of the governing class. We’ve seen it in the way the Tory administrations of the past eleven years have passed endless laws to benefit their class at the expense of Britain’s working people, and themselves personally. As when one of their number decided to relax the planning laws while angling for a lucrative property deal in London.
There have been voices on the internet claiming that democracy is in crisis and that people are giving up on it. If that’s the case, then it’s because we don’t have enough democracy in Britain. Last year we saw three prime ministers come and go, but were not allowed to elect any of them. It’s high time this changed.
This is a fascinating video I found on Novara Media’s channel the other day. In it, host Aaron Bastani talks to archaeologist David Wengrow about the origins of the state and the development of social inequality. Wengrow argues that the evidence from archaeology challenges assumptions that prehistoric and preliterate peoples were incapable of rationally deciding for themselves what kind of societies they wished to live in. He gives examples from prehistoric Europe and North and South America to show that ancient and indigenous peoples not only did decide on the kind of societies they wanted, but were perfectly capable of reversing trends in their societies towards authoritarianism. One of the examples of this, which I found truly jaw-dropping, was one of the city states the conquistador Hernan Cortes made alliance with against the Aztecs. Unlike the Aztec empire, that state city was a democratic republic. He also talks about the influence on Enlightenment critiques of western society of a Huron Indian chief in Canada, who was an intelligent conversationalist able to hold his own in conversations about the nature of society to such an extent that French, British and Dutch colonial authorities invited him to dinner to talk this matter over.
Wengrow starts off by stating that modern political theory about the origins of society, as taught in politics courses, is completely divorced from archaeological accounts. The theory is based on the speculations of foundational Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau, who admitted that they were speculating. But these accounts are now taught as fact. Archaeological research, however, is overturning previous ideas about the origins of urban society. For example, it was believed that agriculture and urbanisation were linked and appeared together as part of the Neolithic Revolution. But this is not the case. Excavations of the ancient city of Catalhuyuk in Turkey show that while it was an urban centre, although Wengrow hesitates to call it a city, show that its people were still hunter-gatherers, living by foraging rather than agriculture. And the same is true of the settlement at Amesbury at the time Stonehenge was being built. The people then had given up agriculture, although they retained animal husbandry. It appears they had tried growing crops and then rejected it in favour of foraging.
He then goes on to talk about the Huron Amerindian chief. He inspired a colonist from New France, who had been expelled from the colony, to write a book based on the chief and his dinner conversation when the colonist was penniless in Amsterdam. This became a massive Enlightenment bestseller, and inspired other books by Voltaire and others in which Chinese, Tahitians and other outsiders criticise European society. Wengrow states that the Indian societies surprise western Europeans because they were much less hierarchical than they were, and contact with these societies and the indigenous critics of western civilisation did influence European political philosophy. We easily accept that Europe took over many material products from these nations, but are much less ready to accept the idea that they influenced our ideas, even though the Enlightenment philosophers said that they had.
He also talks about Cahokia, a great pyramid and city state in the Mississippi valley in America. This appears to be another example of a society, in which people rebelled or simply walked away from authority and hierarchy. It was also another indigenous monument that was ascribed to everyone else but the native peoples when it was first discovered, and is now disrespected by having a road driven through it. When it was constructed, the local society seems to have been hierarchical. At the top of the mound is a structure from which all of the city could be viewed. But sometime after its heyday it was abandoned. The traditional reasons are that the climate changed, but Wengrow finds that unconvincing. What seems to have happened instead is that people simply got tired of living in such a society and walked away.
Tenochtitlan, one of the great cities in ancient Mexico, is another example of a strongly hierarchical society that underwent profound social change and became more democratic. Wengrow states that it’s a massive state, and they owe a debt to the French scholar who produced detailed maps of it. When it first emerged, it was hierarchical but then the nature of society changed. People started living in high-quality, single-floor homes. These were so good they were originally thought to be palaces, but now it appears they were villas occupied by ordinary citizens. At some point, the people of Tenochtitlan decided that they wanted a more equal society, to the extent that some scholars believe that there was a revolution.
Then there is the case of the democratic city state Cortes encountered. This really was democratic, as there are accounts of the debates in its assembly. This astonished the conquistadors, as there was very little like it in Europe at the time, except some of the Florentine republics. This all challenges the notion that once society develops to a certain extent and becomes complex, inequality also emerges and is very difficult to challenge or remove. These cases show that indigenous peoples could and did. He also argues that the same may have been true of slavery. The only successful slave revolt that we know of is Toussant L’Ouverture in Haiti. But Wengrow suggests there could have been thousands of other successful slave revolts in prehistory of which we are unaware. Slavery came about, he argues, from the expense of laying out offerings for the dead. In order to leave food and drink for the dead, the bereaved had to have access to the foods themselves and so they became indebted and dependent on the people who owned those resources.
He also talks about the problems in describing some of these urban centres as cities. There are huge sites in the Ukraine, but archaeologists are hesitant about calling them cities with some preferring other terms such as ‘mega-sites’ because they aren’t centralised.
Bastani asks him at one point about the problem of pseudo-archaeology. I think this came up because Graham Hancock is currently fronting a series on Netflix claiming that way back in prehistory there was an advanced society, but that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm. Wengrow states that quite often pseudo-archaeology is based on old and discarded idea, such as Atlantis. The people involved tend not to be anyone who’s ever been on an archaeological dig, and view archaeologists as spending their lives trying to hide some momentous secret from everyone. But it can act as an entry for some people to archaeology, and he doesn’t really like the sneering attitude of some archaeologists towards it.
Wengrow himself is an interesting character. He didn’t want to be an archaeologist originally, but came to it from acting. He also worked in the BBC Arabic service. He decided at one point he wanted to get a degree, applied to the best university he could, Oxford, and sent reams of applications to its various colleges. They turned him down. Then he was told that he should apply for a place on a course that was just being set up. One of the colleges was just setting up an archaeology course, so he did. When it came to the interview, he told the interviewer that he had always wanted to be an archaeologist. At which point she held up all the previous letters he’d written. But they admitted him, and he has now had a career teaching and excavating in places like Egypt.
He states that sometimes the pseudoarchaeology about a period or culture misses the point about what’s really interesting about it. He talks about the idea that the Sphinx was constructed before the pyramids, and admits that it’s actually a reasonable question. But if you go back to the predynastic period a thousand years before the pyramids were built, you come to the burial sites of one of Egypt’s first kings. This is fascinating, although you wouldn’t know it from the dry way it has been discussed in conferences and museums like the Petrie Museum. Excellent though these are, they talk about highly specialised subjects like pot typography which is excruciatingly dull if you want to know the wider picture. The early king’s tomb is composed of room after room of the bodies of the people and occasionally the animals that were slaughtered to accompany the king into the afterlife.
The interview is based on a book Wengrow wrote with a colleague, The Dawn of Everything. Sadly, after spending a decade writing it, the co-author died just a few weeks after its completion. The book has been widely praised, and has even inspired artistic pieces. He talks about a French woman, who composed a piece of music based on it. He regrets he was unable to attend its performance thanks to jet lag coming back from somewhere, but later met the lady when she came to Britain.
I know a little about some of what he’s talking about to have no doubt that he’s absolutely right. One of the seminars in the archaeology department at Bristol, which I attended, was about how cities like Catalhuyuk were established before the appearance of agriculture. One of the huge Neolithic sites in the Ukraine is discussed in the La Rousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology. The great mound of Cahokia is also discussed in a book I bought years ago on North American Indian archaeology. I wasn’t aware that the people of Stonehenge had given up growing crops, nor of the democratic city states in South America and Mexico. This is fascinating stuff.
He’s right about archaeology contradicting the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers about the origins of society, though I’m not sure how much of a problem this is. The philosophers he discusses – Hobbes and Rousseau – were Social Contract theorists. Social Contract theory is the idea that the state and society were set up when men came together to select an authority under whom they would live, so that their lives and property would be protected. Thus the first kings. These princes are the representatives of the people, and so from the 17th century onwards the idea developed that sovereignty lay with the people, who could revoke the power they had delegated to the prince. This was the view of John Locke. However, subsequent philosophers showed that this was just conjecture, and that it could have happened like that as the people at the time were using concepts that only subsequently developed after the foundation of states and kingdoms. I thought Social Contract theory was dead, and he closest it had to a modern advocate was John Rawls in his Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that if people were just disembodied entities wishing to chose the kind of society in which they would care to live, they would choose one that had the maximum freedom and justice for everyone, as that would also include them. Away from centrist politics, the anarchists have been keenly interested in anthropology and those indigenous societies where there is no central authority.
I’m not sure how well some of this would go down with Sargon of Akkad and the Lotus Eaters. They’ve developed an interest in archaeology, recently posting a video discussing Homo Erectus, along with the Norman Conquest and ancient Rome. But Sargon is a huge fan of John Locke and describes himself as a classical liberal. I don’t know whether archaeology’s findings about the origin of early states would contradict his ideas or not.
The online encyclopedia states that she was encouraged in her career after writing a letter to Patrick Moore about it when she was 16. He replied, ‘Being a girl is no problem’. She studied astronomy and physics at Leicester University in 1973, where she met her long-term collaborator, fellow astronomy student Nigel Henbest. The two formed a working partnership, Hencoup enterprises, devoted to popularising astronomy. She then carried out postgraduate research as a student of Linacre College, Oxford, in the university’s Astrophysics department. She became the senior lecturer at the Caird Planetarium at Greenwich. In 1984 she was elected president of the British Astronomical Association. She was the first female president and second youngest. I can remember her appearing on Wogan and playing down the fact that she was the first woman to become president, far preferring to be noted as the youngest. She also served as the President of the Junior Astronomical Society, now the Society for Popular Astronomy. In 1988 the London Planetarium invited her to write and present its major new show, Starburst. In 1993 she was appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham college. She was the first woman to hold the position in 400 years and remained professor until her death.
She wrote and co-wrote with Henbest over 40 books, as well as writing articles for a range of magazines such as BBC Sky at Night, BBC Focus and Astronomy. She also presented a lecture on the solar eclipse in Guernsey in 1999, and led expedition to view other eclipses in Sumatra, Hawaii, Aruba, Egypt, China and Tahiti. She also made numerous public appearances and talks about the cruise liners Arcadia, Queen Mary 2, and Queen Victoria. She was aboard Concorde when it made its first flight from London to Auckland. She also appeared and spoke at various science festivals, including Brighton, Cheltenham, and Oxford. She also spoke at corporate events for British Gas, Axa Sun Life and IBM.
She also presented a number of programmes and series on astronomy on the radio. These included Starwatch and The Modern Magi on Radio 4. She also presented an Archive Hour programme on the same channel on Britain’s Space Race, for which she received an Arthur C. Clarke award. She also appeared on Radio 2, and Radio 5Live, as well as making other appearances on Radio 4. She also presented a series of thirty 15-minute episodes on the history of astronomy. Her shows for the BBC World Service included A Brief History of Infinity, The Essential Guide to the 21st Century, and Seeing Stars, which was co-hosted by Henbest.
She made frequent appearances as the guest expert on various TV programmes, mostly on Channel 4. She made her first TV appearance on The Sky at Night, In 1981 she presented the children’s TV programme, Heaven’s Above, on ITV with Terence Murtagh. I think I remember watching this when I was about 14 or so. She then presented the series The Planets for Channel 4, which was followed by The Stars. She also presented the ITV show Neptune Encounter, the Horizon episode ‘A Close Encounter of the Second Kind’, and Stephen Hawking: A Profile on BBC 4.
Couper, Henbest and the director of her series, The Stars, founded a production company, Pioneer Productions. The Neptune Encounter, which covered Voyager 2’s flyby of the planet, was its first programme. She was also the producer for the Channel 4 shows Black Holes, Electric Skies and Beyond the Millennium. She later left the company to concentrate on more general radio and TV appearances.
In 1993 she was appointed a member of the Millennium Commission. Of the nine commissioners appointed, only she and Michael Heseltine continued until it was wound up.
Outside her work on astronomy, she was also a guest presenter on Woman’s Hour, as well as the John Dunn programme and Start the Week on the radio. She was also interested in local history and literature, and so appeared on Radio 4’s With Great Pleasure and Down Your Way. She also appeared on Radio 3’s In Tune selecting her ‘pick of the proms.’ She was also the narrator on a number of other factual programmes, including Channel 4’s Ekranoplan: The Caspian Sea Monster, and Raging Planet on the Discovery Channel.
So, a huge science populariser, but probably one whose achievements are obscured by other, more prominent, celebrities.
As well as the children’s astronomy programme, I also once saw her speaking on about Mars and the question of life on the Red Planet at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. She had a rather mischievous sense of humour. There’s a real possibility that life in some form has existed on Mars and may exist now, but if it does, it’s almost certainly at the level of microbes. At the time, however, various individuals who had spent too long looking at photos of the planet claimed to have seen much larger lifeforms on the planet. There was a programme on Channel 4 in which a Hungarian astronomer appeared to describe how he believed there were massive mushrooms growing there. People also thought the saw giant ‘sand whales’ crawling about its surface, like the sandworms in Dune. These were, in fact, geological features left by some of the dune’s slumping, which created a trail that looked like the segmented body of a worm. One of the peeps taken in by this was the late Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke rang her up from Sri Lanka, asking her if she’d seen them and telling her that he really didn’t know what to make of it. She commented that for a moment she thought he’d gone mad, then covered her mouth like a naughty child caught saying something she shouldn’t.
For all that she played down her importance as a female pioneer in astronomy, I think she did prepare the say for more women to enter it and become television presenters. There’s now a drive for more women in the hard sciences, and we’ve science had a Black woman presenter, Aderin-Pocock, on the Sky At Night, and female astrophysicists and mathematicians appearing on the radio and TV.
Yeah, this is yet another post about Simon Webb and History Debunked. It’s my attempt to answer a question he posed yesterday in a video talking about a Chinese visitor to Britain, or possibly emigrant, who ended up as a librarian helping with the Chinese manuscripts in the Bodleian. Webb asked why this gentleman was unknown, despite there having been Chinese communities in Britain for centuries, while the advocates of Black History had been doing everything they could to turn Tudor trumpeter John Blank into a household name. Blank, he said, was probably Portuguese, and only here for a couple of years. Why didn’t British Chinese people feel the need to celebrate their history in this sceptre’d isle as the Blacks?
I’ve discussed this question before, and I think it’s because Chinese and Indian Brits are much more culturally self-confident than Black Brits. If you look through any history of inventions, an enormous number before the modern period come from those great nations. Just as they do from Islam, although Muslims lag behind Whites, Chinese and Indians in educational and professional achievements. I think people of Indian and Chinese heritage are very much aware of their nations’ cultural and scientific achievements and so don’t feel the need to have them explored by a wider public in order to boost their performance in wider society. It’s the opposite with the Black community. They have a greater feeling of alienation and that their people’s history and achievements aren’t appreciated, leading to racism amongst Whites and poor social and economic performance among Blacks. If White people were more aware of their long history here, there would be less racism against them on the one hand, and Blacks would also have a greater sense of belonging and acceptance on the other. Hence the insistence of the importance of rather marginal figures like Blank.
But Webb also asked about the way these two also conformed to racial stereotypes. The Chinese gentleman was a learned scholar, while Blank was a musician. I don’t think there’s much mystery there either. The Chinese fellow came to Britain in the late 17th century. I think this was the age of the great Jesuit missions to the Middle Kingdom, and also an age when European merchants were beginning to trade directly with the Chinese. Chinese civilisation had been known about for centuries and its products highly admired. Scholars and merchants were clearly keen to know as much about the country as they could, and so would have been eager to acquire Chinese manuscripts and scholars able to interpret them.
Black Africa was somewhat different. It was cut off from extensive European contact through geography and climate. I think Europeans knew about Abyssinia, if only through the legends about Prester John, the ruler of a great Christian empire somewhere in Africa or Asia. It was to find Christian allies in Africa that Prince Henry the Navigator launched the first voyages of exploration to the continent below the Sahara. But he didn’t find any. There were great Black empires there – that of Mali, for example, but I think that the Black African states Europeans contacted were pagan. While these were culturally sophisticated in their own way, I don’t think they were literate and as scientifically and mathematically advanced as the Muslim kingdoms. Hence, when Blacks were imported into Europe, it would have been as slaves or artisans, not scholars. As for music, Arab racial stereotypes at the time said that Africans had a great sense of rhythm. One of the comments one Arab writer made about them was that if a Black man fell from heaven, he’d keep good time with his feet right up until he hit the ground. I can therefore see how Blacks would have a musical career in Europe, just as they had in later centuries. I think Beethoven wrote the Kreutzer sonata for a specific Black violin virtuoso of the period. One of the contemporary depictions of Blacks in 18th century Britain in Gretchen Herzen’s excellent Black England: Life Before Emancipation, is of a group of Black servants making music in Cornwall.
But that isn’t to say that there weren’t Black or African scholars in Europe. I can’t remember the details, but during the Middle Ages and 16th/17th centuries I think there were people from North Africa and Abyssinia, who were Christians, who ended up at the Vatican helping their scholars and researchers into these cultures. Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, was Christian and literate with a civilisation going back millennia. It’d be very interesting to know if there were any Abyssinians in Britain before the 20th century, and if they were ever employed in scholarly pursuits.
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