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29.9.16
WFB
The Spanish-Speaking William F. Buckley
“Up until age six I spoke only Spanish,” William F. Buckley, Jr. told Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN, in 1993. “Then, I went to my first school in Paris, where, of course, they spoke French. Then at age seven I went to London, and that’s where I learned English for the first time. Now what I ought to sound like? You tell me.”
Buckley was irked. By this time, some four decades into his career as conservatism’s intellectual lodestar, his linguistic quirks had become such a fixture of U.S. political culture that they were being satirized in Disney movies. Early in Aladdin, released in 1992, Aladdin asks the Genie: “You’re going to grant me any three wishes I want, right?” The Genie, voiced by Robin Williams, sprouts a snowy comb-over and puts on an unmistakable smirk. “Almost,” he replies. “There are a few provisos, a couple of quid pro quo.” The excessive verbiage and aristocratic English accent being mocked were none other than William F. Buckley’s.
Buckley’s manner of speaking reminds us of a time when the right valued rather than vilified intellectual pretension. Today, nothing guarantees a nosedive in popular appeal in the Republican Party more than an elitist vocabulary and an ostentatious way of showing it. Just think of Donald Trump, and Sarah Palin and George W. Bush before him, iconic figures of the post-9/11 U.S. right. Although Trump marks less an ideological break than continuity with postwar American conservatism, as Corey Robin and others have persuasively argued, his appeal to lowbrow, commonsensical, and emotional language contrasts rather dramatically with Buckley’s dispassionate, educated, and cosmopolitan diction. Buckley’s era of snobbish conservatism spanned from the Goldwater 1960s through the Nixon ’70s and the Reagan ’80s. Trump’s age of vulgar rhetoric began in the late 1990s and will continue for the foreseeable future.
But what’s in the use of one kind of language over another? And how does it shape or obscure an intellectual worldview? When it comes to Buckley, most have remarked on his “High Church,” “patrician,” or “slight English” accent, using it as a license to draw conclusions about his political beliefs or those of his supporters. But beyond his Anglo-Saxon timbre, Buckley’s fluency in Spanish may have been the more important of his linguistic influences. His lifelong engagement with the Spanish-speaking world forms a largely unacknowledged part of his intellectual biography. Mexico, Spain, Chile and other Spanish-speaking countries fascinated him, and this fascination had political consequences. While his refined English accent pointed to where he came from—a moneyed, Catholic family that had made it in the oil business—his fluency in Spanish hinted at where he wanted to go: toward a distinct, Castilian brand of shock-doctrine despotism that, through Henry Kissinger and others, he helped make a global export in the 1970s and ’80s.
Hispanophilia ran deep in the Buckley family. Buckley’s father, William F. Buckley, Sr., believed in three things: Catholicism, capitalism, and teaching his children Spanish. Buckley Sr. himself had become fluent in Spanish at a young age, having grown up in the south Texas town of San Diego, which was 90 percent Hispanic. After a stint as a Spanish-English translator in the General Land Office of Texas, he moved to Mexico in 1908. Several years later, coinciding with the beginning of the drawn-out Mexican Revolution, he arrived in Tampico—along the Mexican Gulf Coast and at the center of Mexico’s burgeoning oil industry—to open a corporate law office. The revolution didn’t hamper business, however. He left the country in 1921 a wealthy oil magnate who nevertheless loathed all of the revolution’s insurgents, from the nationalist Venustiano Carranza to the peasant-anarchist Emiliano Zapata.
Perhaps “left” isn’t entirely accurate: Buckley Sr. was deported for conspiring to overthrow President Álvaro Obregón, whose policies had curbed Porfirio Díaz’s “concessions” to American and British investors. Like many American oil barons in Mexico, Buckley Sr. especially objected to Article 27 of Mexico’s 1917 Constitution, which gave the state control over all natural resources from the country’s soil, including oil. He had founded and become the president of Pantepec Oil Company in 1913 and quickly allied his business to the short-lived military government of Victoriano Huerta. But Buckley Sr. most often made political allegiances that suited his property and power, sometimes over his perceived political ideology. This made some of his political decisions seem haphazard. In 1913, he wrote a letter Colonel Edward M. House, a close confidant of Woodrow Wilson’s, advocating for U.S. military intervention in Mexico. Months later, after Wilson occupied the port of Veracruz following a bizarre incident in Tampico, Buckley Sr. was tapped by Emilio Rabasa to counsel the Mexican delegation to a peace summit meant to resolve the brooding tensions between the two nations. He played both sides, fanning the flames of conflict whenever it suited his business plan.
Capitalism, however, was but one of Buckley Sr.’s loves. Another, which drew him close to the Spanish-speaking world, was Catholicism. The armed struggle of the Mexican Revolution had effectively ended in 1920. By 1926, the country’s Catholic activists were ready to launch a counterrevolution, known as the Cristero War. Like Buckley Sr., the Cristeros (a Spanish neologism from Cristo Rey, Christ the King) also took issue with the 1917 Constitution, specifically with Article 130, which crystallized the separation of church and state and forced all “religious groupings” to register with the government. The Buckley family had since left Mexico, and Pantepec had “lost substantial assets” following the deportation, according to historian Stephen Andes. Still, Buckley Sr.—perhaps looking to recoup the losses, perhaps following through on his religious commitments—met with Cristero leaders to find them a financial backer. By 1929, however, negotiations had broken down, and Buckley Sr. didn’t belabor his Catholic duty. The Cristero cause had lost out to the lucrative promise of South American oil.
According to Buckley Jr. biographer John Judis, Buckley Sr. saw “the demand for political democracy in countries like Mexico, Venezuela, and Spain as a cover for communism and anticlericalism.” The same might be said for his son. Though Buckley Jr. liked to distance himself from his father’s unsavory support for dictatorial regimes—his father had supported successful and aborted dictatorships in Mexico, Venezuela, and Spain—his writings on the Spanish-speaking world tell quite the opposite story.
Buckley Jr. was born in 1925 in New York City. It could have just as easily been in Mexico City. He spent most of his earliest years with his mother, his sister, and his Mexican nana, Pupita, as he affectionately called her. His father had relocated his Pantepec Oil Company to Venezuela the year before Buckley Jr. was born and after being deported from Mexico. In 1947, Buckley, then a second-year student at Yale, was hired along with a classmate to teach beginning Spanish. The university was in a pinch. It quickly needed cheap labor. Like today, professors were “overworked and underpaid,” according to one historian; the university didn’t increase the size of its faculty at the rate that it allowed recent war veterans to enroll. It was somewhere between teaching beginning Spanish and reading José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses for Willmoore Kendall’s seminar on political philosophy that the idea forGod and Man at Yale germinated. Around this time, Buckley befriended Brent Bozell, a fellow debater and conservative whom he used as a sounding board for the book’s provocative lambasting of their professors’ impiety. Buckley didn’t rely on his own teaching experience in the Spanish and Italian department to make his argument, however. He focused his ire instead on other faculties: sociology, philosophy, and especially religion. Only later would he take his intellectual encounter with Spanish language and culture to heart, setting out, in 1963, to write a sequel to Ortega’s book he wishfully titled The Revolt Against the Masses. He never finished the book. But Buckley learned from Ortega the importance of what the latter called “specially qualified” minorities in checking the power of the masses and leaders. There was an intellectual elite, in other words, that needed to make sure that leaders such as Eisenhower kept in line and didn’t appeal to vulgar, middlebrow interests. Politics needed to stay above the fray.
Even as God and Man at Yale hit bookstore shelves in fall 1951, Buckley was already at work on another book project, though this time not his own. He spent that fall in Mexico City working for the CIA under E. Howard Hunt, later known for his role in engineering Watergate. Hunt assigned Buckley to work with Eudocio Ravines, a disaffected Peruvian communist who was also living in Mexico. In the 1920s, Ravines had collaborated in Paris with the poet César Vallejo, a fellow leftist and countryman, and in 1930, he had taken over the leadership of the Communist Party of Peru (which he renamed the Peruvian Socialist Party) following the death of the renowned Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui. But by the end of the Second World War, Ravines had defected from communism, and it was Buckley’s job in Mexico to help him prepare and translate The Yenan Way, an anticommunist screed that would be published first in English in late 1951. It was entry-level propaganda work. Yet the collaboration with Ravines foreshadowed Buckley’s ability to establish a common anticommunist ground with disgruntled leftists. The McCarthy era would grease the wheels for many later conversions to conservatism. His primary method consisted of attracting a significant number of disaffected radicals to write and edit for his new magazine, the National Review.
Buckley founded the National Review in 1955. Two years later, under the title “Letter from Spain,” his first and only signed homily for Francisco Franco’s fascist regime appeared in its pages. In the letter, published on October 26, 1957, he claimed that Franco had done his job and done it well. He had what it took, Buckley wrote, to “wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists, and nihilists” and reverse the course of a “regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul.” That regime was Spain’s Second Republic, a modern democracy that had elected a left-wing coalition in a landslide election in February 1936. To the delight of Germany and Italy and to the apathy of the United States and England, Franco launched a military coup that summer that did violence to much more than Spanish “souls.” The Spanish Civil War went on to claim the lives of half a million people, and sent more than another half-million into exile. The victory of Franco’s Nationalist troops in April 1939 inaugurated his thirty-six dictatorship.
Eighteen years in, Franco’s had become a near-model regime for Buckley. “He is not an oppressive dictator,” the 1957 letter continued. “He is only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power, and that, it happens, is not very oppressive, for the people, by and large, are content.” After Franco’s death, in 1975, Buckley would double down on this argument in an aside from an article on Pinochet, writing that Franco “believed in just as much repression as was necessary.” For Buckley, the grotesque slaughter that gave birth to the regime and continued well into its first decade—along with the mass imprisonment and executions that were its hallmarks throughout—were an acceptable, even necessary, feature of Franco’s political project. Politics was conditional on how much one could get away with. If the argument seemed sordid, Buckley took care to infuse it with world-historical, even metaphysical, resonance. “He saved the day,” Buckley wrote of Franco, “but he did not, like Cincinnatus, thereupon return to his plow.” Cincinnatus is the paragon of the benevolent dictator, who rules briefly and virtuously in order to accomplish a specific task, such as winning a war. In Franco, Buckley had found his contemporary analog.
Buckley was hardly the first U.S. conservative to hold Francoist sympathies. But he stuck by the aging dictator long after many of his peers had withdrawn their support—or at least hushed it up. By the mid-1950s, it was no longer in good taste in America to openly support fascism. Memories of Franco’s ties to Hitler still circulated, and Buckley wasn’t tone deaf. He knew that outright support for Franco would alienate him and the National Review. So he tempered his praise of Nacionalcatolicismo—“National Catholicism,” a common shorthand for Francoism—with criticisms of the regime’s centralized economy. Spain’s inability to spur economic productivity, Buckley complained, was rooted in the regime’s lack of capitalism.
For anyone paying attention, however, his objections were at best belated. On February 25, 1957, months before Buckley’s letter was published, Franco famously reshuffled his cabinet to include Opus Dei “technocrats,” brought in to further cut public spending, appeal to international investors, and thereby liberalize the Spanish economy. By October, Francoism was well on its way to becoming a kind of ideal regime for Buckley: a laboratory for capitalist development under a Catholic dictatorship. In Spain, Catholicism and capitalism were married at last.
For Buckley, then, behind Spain’s trajectory was a kind of roadmap to installing capitalist markets and Catholic churches simultaneously, and by way of dictatorship. Thanks to Kissinger and other postwar right-wing diplomats, it would be a roadmap that would guide U.S. imperial excursions during the second half of the twentieth century. It resulted in the likes of Pinochet’s Chile, Fujimori’s Peru, and Banzer’s Bolivia.
Buckley biographer John Judis reminds us that Buckley and Kissinger shared not only an ideological but a personal rapport. “Buckley’s most important relationship in the Nixon administration was with Kissinger,” Judis writes. Their friendship blossomed over a shared interest in international relations—Kissinger even invited Buckley to give a yearly lecture in his international-relations seminar at Harvard—and a mutual rejection of the so-called containment strategy of George Kennan. Their concern, instead, was to stem the influence of the Soviet Union by any means necessary.
Ultimately, Kissinger’s influence on Buckley may have been stronger than the other way around; Judis goes as far as to claim that “Buckley may have allowed himself to be manipulated” by Kissinger. But Buckley’s early writings in the National Reviewanticipated many of the ideas that Kissinger put into practice. His essay on Franco contains what one might call an early theory of shock therapy. Before the Chicago Boys returned to Chile ready to apply Milton Friedman’s latest textbook idea, Buckley already saw this process taking place in Spain thanks to Franco’s fascist regime. His formula was deceptively simple: launch a coup to win power, establish a dictatorship to stamp out communism and accelerate capitalism, and, unlike Cincinnatus, stay in power as long as possible.
Buckley also thought of his vision as a conservative third way of sorts. Somewhere between Hitler and Churchill, Franco’s conservatism was, according to Buckley, a careful balancing act. If executed well, as in Franco’s case, the new ideology would be supple enough to be able to turn its back on either dogma—Nazism or Toryism—when convenient. Buckley’s arguments enjoyed the generosity of hindsight: he claimed that dictatorship and bloodshed were necessary evils to stem the threat from the left, and that a ruler’s legitimacy should be judged by his regime’s ends, not by its means.
Franco’s government actively courted Buckley’s services in the early 1960s. It’s likely that they were searching for the precise recipe for how to better unite capitalism and Catholicism. While Buckley’s commitment to Francoism didn’t match that of his best friend and brother-in-law, Brent Bozell—who moved his family to Spain in 1965 and launched Triumph, a periodical of Catholic and Francoist apologetics, a year later—Buckley would praise the regime from afar through its collapse.* In 1974, on the eve of Franco’s death, he was asked by the right-wing publisher Devin-Adair to write a foreword to the reissuing of Arnold Lunn’s book Spanish Rehearsal. Originally published in 1937, Spanish Rehearsal had become the English-language manual for Franco’s supporters. Lunn’s book—a British travel narrative in Spain at its most myopic and ignorant—was Francoist propaganda not worth its weight in paper. But Buckley and several of his fellow conservatives hailed it as an honest, first-person account of the atrocities committed by the defenders of Spain’s democracy.
“In Spain,” Buckley wrote in the foreword, “Arnold Lunn exhibited the kind of indignation over the atrocities visited on innocent Christians which is taken for granted—I mean the indignation—when the victims are Jewish. This volume shows not the selective indignation . . . but a generic indignation, against persecution and torture of any people, in punishment for their race or their religion or their nationality.” Buckley’s own registering of persecution and torture was curiously selective. To this, we might also add other staples of conservative thought: the victimizing narrative, the universalizing of a specific religious worldview, the sweeping of ideological conflict under the rug. Distinct categories though they were, Buckley could only see race, religion, and nationality as indivisible.
After Franco’s death, Buckley’s interest in Spanish politics waned. He instead turned his attention back to Latin America, where his fascination with the Spanish-speaking world had taken root. It was in Chile—where General Augusto Pinochet had taken power thanks to the American-backed coup d’etat in 1973—that Buckley found the closest analog to Francoism, and his next muse. Buckley wrote more than a handful of essays on Pinochet. He saw the Chilean regime, like Franco’s, as a test case for instituting Catholicism and capitalism through authoritarian means. “Fine-tuning repression is a distinctly unperfected art,” Buckley wrote—an art that Pinochet, like Franco, had mastered. Chile not only enjoyed “public order,” it also boasted an “overwhelming majority of the people” who accepted the Pinochet government. Ends by way of means, legitimacy thanks to repression—these were the cornerstones of Buckley’s support for dictatorial regimes from Franco’s to Pinochet’s.
Even as he leaned on classical tropes, Buckley also began to test out a new vocabulary: perhaps surprisingly, that of human rights. Thrust into the public sphere by Cold War liberalism, human rights was—and still is—a vaguely defined term. Buckley was keen to reclaim it from progressive counterparts, as a watchword for the anti-Communist struggle. In 1977, he published a short National Review essay under the title “Pinochet and Human Rights.” The essay sticks out as much for its argument in support of Pinochet’s dictatorship as for its timing. Nineteen seventy-seven, according to Samuel Moyn and other historians, was a turning point in mainstream acceptance of human rights as a concept: it was the year Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, while references to “human rights” saw a five-fold increase in the New York Times. Buckley took the opportunity to deploy the term in defense of the Chilean regime, questioning ideas about Pinochet’s total repression. Most journalistic reports, according to Buckley, had skewed the coverage, focusing too much on the regime’s systematic kidnappings and murders. He instead wanted to turn attention to the regime’s laudable proselytism of free market and Catholic deism. In other words, he wanted to pour cold water on the idea that Chile was violating human rights.
Claiming a noble strategy of momentary authority and oppression, Buckley helped make intervention fashionable again for conservatives in an American postwar era of liberal imperialism. Like many fashionable ideas in American politics, Buckley’s stood on the shoulders of money: the short-lived American-Chilean Council, which he co-created with Marvin Liebman, was a direct beneficiary of the Pinochet regime. According to Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chile Documentation Project in the National Security Archive, the ACC “funnel[ed] hundreds of thousands of dollars secretly through an agent in Chile’s United Nations mission in New York to Marvin Liebman’s Madison Ave. office” from 1975–78, supporting lavish trips to Santiago forNational Review writers. Cincinnatus’s noble rule, too, had its price.
Buckley was a fluent Spanish speaker through the end of his life. Reviving aspects of his childhood, Buckley had two Spanish maids, who, like the Mexican nana of his youth, were hired in part to help teach his children Spanish. He also had a close relationship with the largely unknown Spanish painter Raymond de Botton—the great-uncle of the popular philosopher Alain de Botton—whose paintings covered the walls of his Stamford home. “Much of the daily small talk in the house is in Spanish, with English almost a second language,” noted the Paris Review in its interview with Buckley.
Three decades removed from teaching Spanish, Buckley rekindled his Yale experience once more during an interview with Alan F. Westin in 1978. Westin had asked him about the success of the incipient American campaign for promoting human rights around the world. “The Spanish have a word: pujanza,” he told Westin. “It is used to define a really brave bull who keeps charging you and keeps on charging, such is his desire to get you. He has pujanza. He turns around and charges you again, and charges again,” he said. “American policy on human rights thus far lacks that quality.”
Buckley wouldn’t have to worry for very long. Thanks to his colleague in reaction, Henry Kissinger, American human rights policy in the Spanish-speaking world has not been lacking in pujanza ever since.
28.9.16
London
In Pictures: Old Tourist Guides Of London
London is visited by 17.4m foreigners alone every year. But the city's been a popular tourist destination for centuries, with people drawn in by its lavish, exotic — and often oddball — attractions and events. The pop-up phenomenon has been going a while too.
A new five-week course at Bishopsgate Institute explores touristy London since 1800, using guidebooks and other historic items from the library. We've selected a few highlights.
In the 1820s London tourists might have visited Mr Cooke’s public print rooms in Soho Square, the horse bazaar in Portman Square or the Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly where they were able to enjoy a lifelike panoramic view of Mexico City. Other exhibits included models of pyramids and temples and a 30-foot high carriage made of gold and silver and studded with thousands of precious gemstones.
The Stranger’s Guide to London (1828), a small guidebook that describes itself as ‘a portable cicerone, containing every species of desirable information with a map and many useful tables’.
19th century tourist guidebooks often recommended prison visits, and on page 31 of Strangers' Guide the author suggests a visit to:
The Naval Asylum in Greenwich Park, for the education of 2,000 orphan children of sailors merits a visit, and will highly gratify every benevolent person.
The author also lists some heart-wrenching spectacles, including this one:
In the first three days of May, the unfortunate and abused class of chimney-sweepers fill the streets in dancing groups, in various attractive finery, and obtain, as well as deserve, much jubilee bounty.[i.e. people throw coins at them]’.
Around 1900, London tourists were encouraged to walk along the Thames Embankment at nightfall, visit the Charing Cross Turkish Baths (with its chiropodist, hairdressing rooms and separate baths for ladies) or attend the electric exhibition at Crystal Palace featuring displays of cutting-edge technology, including the first telegraph instrument and a telephone:
By the 1920s, London tourists might have hired a charabanc for an excursion to Windsor or Hampton Court, taken a flying trip from the London Aerodromes at Hendon or visited the Zoological Gardens (now London Zoo) in Regent's Park — just as millions still do today.
Helped in no small measure by the Great Exhibition of 1851, London became obsessed with cultures across the world. Here are the covers of four exhibition guides from the early 1900s:
And here are three images from an 1830 visitors’ guide to London, featuring examples of exhibits on show at a range of ‘pop-up’ galleries (that's right, pop-ups are nothing new) which were popular in the West End at the time and usually featured a single ‘wow’ item. In this case, those items are a huge urn, a monkey cage, and a 95-foot long whale skeleton (pictured). Those willing to pay an extra charge could sit inside the whale's belly.
Finally, here's a selection of vintage guidebook covers, including a book written especially for Australians in London. Not pictured is London’s Good Girl Guide (1968) which tells people (men) where to find the prettiest girls in the capital and how to approach them. Cringe.
Tourist London Since 1800 runs at Bishopsgate Institute from 1 March-29 March, with classes taking place every Tuesday from 2pm-3.30pm. It costs £52-£69.
Last Updated 27 September 2016
Maps
A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton. Ancient Alexandria, located in modern day Egypt, was the greatest city of its time, and it housed a library that was one of the greatest achievements of the classical world:
"Sailing [across the Mediterranean] to Alexandria by sea from the east, the first thing a classical traveller saw on the horizon was the colossal stone tower of the Pharos, on a small island at the entrance to the city's port. At more than 100 metres high, the tower acted as a landmark for sailors along the largely featureless Egyptian coastline. During the day a mirror, positioned at its apex, beckoned sailors, and at night fires were lit to guide pilots into shore. But the tower was more than just a navigational landmark. It announced to travellers that they were arriving in one of the great cities of the ancient world. Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC, who named the city after himself. Following his death it became the capital of the Ptolemaic dynasty (named after one of Alexander's generals) that would rule Egypt for more then 300 years, and spread Greek ideas and culture throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Gliding past the stone Pharos, a traveller entering the port in the third century BC was confronted by a city laid out in the shape of a chlamys, the rectangular woollen cloak worn by Alexander and his soldiers, an iconic image of Greek military might. Alexandria, like the rest of the civilized world at the time, was wrapped in the mantle of Greek influence, the 'umbilicus' of the classical world. It was a living example of a Greek polis transplanted onto Egyptian soil.
"The city's rise represented a decisive shift in the political geography of the classical world. Alexander's military conquests had transformed the Greek world from a group of small, insular Greek city states into a series of imperial dynasties spread across the Mediterranean and Asia. This concentration of wealth and power within empires like the Ptolemaic dynasty brought with it changes to warfare, technology, science, trade, art and culture. It led to new ways of people interacting, doing business, swapping ideas and learning from each other. At the centre of this evolving Hellenistic world, stretching from Athens to India between c. 330 BC and c. 30 BC, stood Alexandria. From the west it welcomed the merchants and traders from the great Mediterranean ports and cities as distant as Sicily and southern Italy, and grew rich from its trade with the rising power of Rome. From the north, it took its cultural influences from Athens and the Greek city-states. It acknowledged the influence of the great Persian kingdoms to the east, and from the south it absorbed the wealth of the fertile Nile Delta and the vast trading routes and ancient kingdoms of the sub-Saharan world.
"Like most great cities that stand at a crossroads of people, empires and trade, Alexandria also became a nucleus for learning and scholarship. Of all the great monuments that define Alexandria, none is more potent in the Western imagination than its ancient library. Founded by the Ptolemies c. 300 BC, the Alexandria library was one of the first public libraries, designed to hold a copy of every known manuscript written in Greek, as well as translations of books from other ancient languages, particularly Hebrew. The library held thousands of books, written on papyrus rolls, and all catalogued and available for consultation. At the heart of their network of royal palaces, the Ptolemies established a 'Mouseion', or museum, originally a shrine dedicated to the nine Muses (or goddesses), but which the Ptolemies redefined as a place for the worship of the muses of learning and scholarship. Here, scholars were invited to study, with promises of lodging, a pension and, best of all, access to the library. From across Greece some of the period's greatest minds were lured to work in the museum and its library. Euclid (c. 325- 265 BC), the great mathematician, came from Athens; the poet Callimachus (c. 310-240 BC) and the astronomer Eratosthenes (c. 275 -195 BC) both came from Libya; Archimedes (c. 287-212 BC), the mathematician, physicist and engineer, travelled from Syracuse.
"The Alexandria library was one of the first systematic attempts to gather, classify and catalogue the knowledge of the ancient world. The Ptolemies decreed that any books entering the city were to be seized by the authorities and copied by the library's scribes (although their owners sometimes discovered that only a copy of their original book was returned). Estimates of the number of books held in the library have proved notoriously difficult to make due to wildly contradictory claims by classical sources, but even conservative assessments put the number at more than 100,000 texts. One classical commentator gave up trying to count. 'Concerning the number of books and the establishment of libraries,' he wrote, 'why need I even speak when they are all the memory of men?' The library was indeed a vast repository for the collective memory of a classical world contained within the books it catalogued. It was, to borrow a phrase from the history of science, a 'centre of calculation', an institution with the resources to gather and process diverse information on a range of subjects, where 'charts, tables and trajectories are commonly at hand and combinable at will', and from which scholars could synthesize such information in the search for more general, universal truths."
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A History of the World in 12 Maps
Author: Jerry Brotton
Publisher: Penguin Books
Copyright 2012 by Jerry Brotton
Pages: 17-19
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27.9.16
Jose Fernandez R.I.P.
#16
There were few dry eyes. Dee Gordon's leadoff homer launched the Marlins to a 7-3 win against the New York Mets in Miami's first game since the death of star pitcher Jose Fernandez. The team held a pregame ceremony at the mound and wrote messages in the dirt to Fernandez - who died in a boating accident Sunday at age 24 - before resuming their quest for the NL wild card. Fernandez's funeral is set for Thursday, before the Marlins close the regular season with a trip to Washington. |
The Arts
This Week: Why is it so hard to tell if American theatre is thriving or not?… Have art and technology had a falling out?… Perhaps TV is the solution to our political polarization… The music industry seems to be finally getting it together… A cautionary tale about getting swallowed up by the online world.
- Theatre: The Best of Times or the Worst? Why is it so difficult to judge the state of American theatre right now? Looked at one way, things have never looked brighter. Yet in another way there are problems and challenges everywhere. Helen Shaw has spent the last 12 years as a theatre critic in New York. She says the state of the field is mixed. “As recently as 2007, critic Robert Brustein could say on a panel that we had 35 ‘really fine’ playwrights; even the hardest-to-please observer would say now that the number has more than quadrupled. Some theatre lovers don’t like to categorize the flood because of the canon’s long history of exclusion.” Even if you look just at play writing, it’s impossible to tell whether this is a Golden Age or really a bear market.
- Are Art And Technology Friends Or Enemies? Everywhere we look people are talking about the convergence of the arts and technology. Creativity as broadly defined is found across science and technology and that’s where some of today’s most interesting ideas are to be found. There is a historical precedent. “It was the assertion of the Romantic movement that art makes us appreciate the beauty, richness and sheer size of the world. And technology, used appropriately, brings us closer to that sublime.” But more and more technology is bumping up against that idea. “Even if that was true in 1939, it’s not true now: not now our drones do our flying for us; not now our technology has got away from us to the point where large portions of nature are being erased; not now we live mired in media and, indeed, have to make special efforts to escape it.”
- How Are We Going To Have Our Toughest Political Debates If We’re So Divided? The Answer: TV TV critic Emily Nussbaum says our politics are so charged that as soon as an issue is brought up it is so polarized that it’s impossible to hear the arguments. But there are TV shows that have fans across the political spectrum and talking about the politics in these shows can be an interesting stand-in for the arguments we can’t have directly. This is an updated take on what art has often been able to do – stand in as a translator when the world seemingly can’t agree.
- You Mean The Music Business Isn’t Dying Anymore? The recording business has been mired in a slump as long as digital distribution started to crater old business models. Suddenly though, things are looking up. There’s been a big surge this year, following on a strong 2015. “U.S. streaming revenue grew 57 percent to $1.6 billion in the first half of 2016 and accounted for almost half of industry sales, more than countering shrinking purchases of albums and singles. Subscriptions totaled $1.01 billion, according to the RIAA data.”
- Is Real Life a Casualty of Our Online Obsessions? Ex-blogger Andrew Sullivan holds himself up as a cautionary tale and in a thoughtful essay explains why he had to largely quit his digital life. “By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. “ I respond by suggesting technology isabout choices about how and whether to use it. “We can be unconscious of a choice when it’s not yet a choice. When technology extends our grasp however, we then have to choose it or not. Having chosen it, we can be consumed if we’re not also conscious of learning when not to use it.”
26.9.16
Religion
How the Council of Nicea Changed the World
When Constantine became the first Christian leader of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, his vast territory was populated by a hodgepodge of beliefs and religions.
Within his own young religion, there was also dissent, with one major question threatening to cleave the popular cult — as it was at the time — into warring factions: Was Jesus divine, and how?
It's hard to imagine riots in the streets, pamphlet wars and vicious rhetoric spawned by such a question, but that was the nature of things in A.D. 325, when Constantine was forced to take action to quell the controversy.
That summer, 318 bishops from across the empire were invited to the Turkish town of Nicea, where Constantine had a vacation house, in an attempt to find common ground on what historians now refer to as the Arian Controversy. It was the first ever worldwide gathering of the Church.
The Christianity we know today is a result of what those men agreed upon over that sticky month, including the timing of the religion's most important holiday, Easter, which celebrates Jesus rising from the dead.
Young religion
Christianity was young and still working out the kinks when Constantine took power over the Roman Empire in A.D. 306. Christian doctrine at the time was muddled and inconsistent, especially when it came to the central question of Jesus' relationship to God.
Jesus was as eternally divine as the Father, said one camp led by the Archbishop Alexander of Alexandria. Another group, named the Arians after their leader Arius the preacher, saw Jesus as a remarkable leader, but inferior to the Father and lacking in absolute divinity.
Supporters on both sides scrawled graffiti on town walls in defiance while bishops from across the empire entered into a war of words as the controversy simmered to a head in 324.
Fearing unrest in his otherwise peaceful territory, Constantine summoned the bishops to his lake house in Nicea on June 19, 325.
Savvy move
In a savvy move that would put today's shrewd politicians to shame, the compromise proffered by Constantine was vague, but blandly pleasing: Jesus and God were of the same "substance," he suggested, without delving too much into the nature of that relationship. A majority of the bishops agreed on the compromise and voted to pass the language into doctrine.
Their statement of compromise, which would come to be known as "The Nicene Creed," formed the basis for Christian ideology. The bishops also used the Council of Nicea to set in stone some church rules that needed clarification, and those canons were the reference point after which all future laws were modeled.
As a final order of business, the bishops decided upon a date for the holiest of Christian celebrations, Easter, which was being observed at different times around the empire. Previously linked with the timing of Passover, the council settled on a moveable day that would never coincide again with the Jewish holiday — the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.
Nicene legends still circulating
While the Council of Nicea had important consequences, its significance has been exaggerated into legend by a few conspiracy theorists, documentaries and books such as Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," historians say.
Contrary to popular belief, the council had nothing to do with selecting which verses and gospels would be included in the Bible, nor whether Christianity agreed or disagreed with the concept of reincarnation. Bishops did not burn books they deemed heretical there either, historians say.
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