Author: LittleHobb

Solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short

Conjecture of the Future

Sometime a man desires to know the event of an action; and then he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after another; supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that foresees what wil become of a Criminal, recons what he has seen follow on the like Crime before; having this order of thoughts, The Crime, the Officer, the Prison, the Judge, and the Gallowes. Which kind of thoughts, is called Foresight, and Prudence, or Providence; and sometimes Wisdome; though such conjecture, through the difficulty of observing all circumstances, be very fallacious.

But this is certain; by how much one man has more experience of things past, than another; by so much also he is more Prudent, and his expectations the seldomer faile him. The Present onely has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory onely, but things To Come have no being at all; the Future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions Past, to the actions that are Present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most Experience; but not with certainty enough. And though it be called Prudence, when the Event answereth our Expectation; yet in its own nature, it is but Presumption.

For the foresight of things to come, which is Providence, belongs onely to him by whose will they are to come. From him onely, and supernaturally, proceeds Prophecy. The best Prophet naturally is the best guesser; and the best guesser, he that is most versed and studied in the matters he guesses at: for he hath most Signes to guesse by.

A Signe, is the Event Antecedent, of the Consequent; and contrarily, the Consequent of the Antecedent, when the like Consequences have been observed, before: And the oftner they have been observed, the lesse uncertain is the Signe. And therefore he that has most experience in any kind of businesse, has most Signes, whereby to guesse at the Future time, and consequently is the most prudent: And so much more prudent than he that is new in that kind of business, as not to be equalled by any advantage of naturall and extemporary wit: though perhaps many young men think the contrary.

Neverthelesse it is not Prudence that distinguisheth man from beast. There be beasts, that at a year old observe more, and pursue that which is for their good, more prudently, than a child can do at ten.

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The historian and the time machine

The best of historians are intellectual giants, providing a valued contribution to understanding. Of the others, we pass by. I am no historian – just a picker at facts others have found – but I am fascinated with the process.

Hobbes translated Thucydides and knew an excellent historian from a poseur, laying down a standard:

In a good Poem, whether it be Epique, or Dramatique; as also in Sonnets, Epigrams, and other Pieces, both Judgement and Fancy are required: But the Fancy must be more eminent; because they please for the Extravagancy; but ought not to displease by Indiscretion.

In a good History, the Judgement must be eminent; because the goodnesse consisteth, in the Method, in the Truth, and in the Choyse of the actions that are most profitable to be known. Fancy has no place, but onely in adorning the stile.

Modern historians generally follow this principle, in the way the Romans did not:  the great speech of Caligacus before Mons Graupius is celebrated for its poetry, power and patriotism; and for being entirely fictional. No one would condemn Tacitus for writing what Calgacus would have said had he thought about it, but he would not get away with it these days; or not in the better corridors of Oxford.

But what if a historian were sent to the Highlands with HG Wells’s time machine to listen to what the Pictish chieftain said, to see how each side armed itself?  The historian at the cutting-edge of a field of study, straining against the limitations of evidence would beg for a machine if it were possible, even just a viewer to see the things of which they can only speculate. Imagine all the undescribed events, facts that are merely speculation, unlocated battles, lost languages that could be found.

They might of course resent it.  If a pharmaceutical chemist devotes his or her life to the detailed understanding of biological processes affecting a deathly disease, thrilling in the hunt and the expanding frontiers of knowledge, then someone comes along and cures it by waving a blackthorn stick and chanting ‘alikazam!’, the chemist is entitled to be more resentful than grateful. (And the blackthorn cure is just as likely as our being able to build a time machine.)

Imagine though a historian granted a viewer into the past: would he even then get it right?  He has even then but a snippet of a view of a slice of a vast and complicated nation and age.

Hobbes again looked at how ordinary people, not necessarily historians, see the past:

As Prudence is a Praesumtion of the Future, contracted from the Experience of time Past; So there is a Praesumtion of things Past taken from other things (not future but) past also. For he that hath seen by what courses and degrees, a flourishing State hath first come into civill warre, and then to ruine; upon the sights of the ruines of any other State, will guesse, the like warre, and the like courses have been there also. But his conjecture, has the same incertainty almost with the conjecture of the Future; both being grounded onely upon Experience.

Historians have an advantage in that they have studied evidence, read contemporary accounts, seen artefacts scrabbled from the dirt and become familiar with the wider story that all these tell. Even so, theirs is a study of speculation and conjecture, based on unavoidably limited evidence.

If a future historian were to judge 1930s America by the films about the era, he might write down in a learned tome that everyone wore pinstripe, the streets were constantly raked with gunfire and all policemen were corrupt; while in Britain hordes of young, minor aristocracy spent their days solving mysteries while being being shunned by cloche-hatted girls and pursued by German agents (when it was of course the other way round).  A single golden brooch found in an excavation might convince the textbooks that everyone wore exactly that style for centuries, while a parchment describing a peculiar habit of a fleeting moment in Paris in 721 AD can be baked in as the eternal custom of the Franks for a millennium.

A time machine might show more, but any snippet is only that. Eye-witness evidence is evidence only of the moment and the people seen – not the grand sweep of cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments; nor is it insight into thoughts and motivations.

Motivations?  An exam question asks “Why did Sienna fight Florence?”, but with hundreds involved in decisions and the actions leading to them, it would take a whole book, and still not answer the question. Alternatively, there may be many, contradictory reasons for a Siennese-Florentine war, and all be right. An eye-witness view will not answer a meaningless question any better.

For the further past we fall back more on imagination and struggle for sources. The Middle Ages revelled in fictions – Arthurian romance, spurious De Gestis works, and took them seriously. Geoffrey of Monmouth mercilessly lampooned these fantasies, and even his work became treated as a historical source. I have to wonder how much of this mediaeval mélange of mockery has so slipped into our understanding that it forms part of historical assumption.

Our understanding still starts on “Praesumtion of things Past taken from other things past also” and presumption too from projecting our own understandings back in time, while evidence serves to correct presumptions without overturning all of them.

Imagine then the diligent observer given a miraculous view of a day in the period of his study. He would learn a great deal, and many of his assumptions might fall away. He would also interpret what he sees in the light of existing presumptions, and if he has spent years developing a theory, then confirmation bias will cloud the interpretation of his observations. That is humanity. Still he sees that single brooch and projects it onto the whole of society for the whole age, and now with first-hand observation as proof. Still he sees an unexpected action from an individual and makes of it a custom of the whole nation. He hears a phrase mangled in the mouth of a careless child and from it founds a language.

The fantasy of a machine that shows the past first-hand has been with us since Wells imagined it for us. It would be a marvellous tool for the study of history and language. It would still though be subject to the flaws that hamper all historical study, and perhaps magnify them. I am no historian, but I have watched people

We are still in the Silly Season and I can allow myself these diversions.

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Books

Dante observes an eclipse

The scientific examination of a solar eclipse, the exact astronomical calculations to determine the dates and times of their manifestations, with diagrams, and advice on how to observe them; it all detracts from the poetry. The sky darkens, and the birds fly to their roosts, the land falls silent, if for a few minutes before some very puzzled birds start their song again.

Before Copernicus discovered real astronomy, men of learning knew that the Moon passing over the Sun causes the latter to be eclipsed. Dante settled down to writing a scientific description of an eclipse, using it to examine and refute the idea that the patches on the Moon are the result o differing densities of matter. However he was Dante, an extraordinary poet, reviving the lost art of the Roman writers, and he could no more write it as a dull scientific treatise than I could imitate him:

She somewhat smil’d, then spake: “If mortals err
In their opinion, when the key of sense
Unlocks not, surely wonder’s weapon keen
Ought not to pierce thee; since thou find’st, the wings
Of reason to pursue the senses’ flight
Are short. But what thy own thought is, declare.”

Then I: “What various here above appears,
Is caus’d, I deem, by bodies dense or rare.”

She then resum’d: “Thou certainly wilt see
In falsehood thy belief o’erwhelm’d, if well
Thou listen to the arguments, which I
Shall bring to face it. The eighth sphere displays
Numberless lights, the which in kind and size
May be remark’d of different aspects;
If rare or dense of that were cause alone,
One single virtue then would be in all,
Alike distributed, or more, or less.
Different virtues needs must be the fruits
Of formal principles, and these, save one,
Will by thy reasoning be destroy’d. Beside,
If rarity were of that dusk the cause,
Which thou inquirest, either in some part
That planet must throughout be void, nor fed
With its own matter; or, as bodies share
Their fat and leanness, in like manner this
Must in its volume change the leaves. The first,
If it were true, had through the sun’s eclipse
Been manifested, by transparency
Of light, as through aught rare beside effus’d.
But this is not. Therefore remains to see
The other cause: and if the other fall,
Erroneous so must prove what seem’d to thee.
If not from side to side this rarity
Pass through, there needs must be a limit, whence
Its contrary no further lets it pass.
And hence the beam, that from without proceeds,
Must be pour’d back, as colour comes, through glass
Reflected, which behind it lead conceals.
Now wilt thou say, that there of murkier hue
Than in the other part the ray is shown,
By being thence refracted farther back.
From this perplexity will free thee soon
Experience, if thereof thou trial make,
The fountain whence your arts derive their streame.

from Divina Commedia: Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, trans. The Rev. H F Cary MA

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Books

In Bruges

The gentle drift up the limpid canal waters which would in past days have felt the thud of heavy oars bearing groaning cargoes from across the world to warehouses and thence to all corners of Northern Europe, and to Britain, amongst houses barely changed from that time to this.

My visit coincided with Belgium’s National Day – lest any be cynical about it, they do mark it with all due pomp and the national flag flying from private houses – native Belgians may come in two fiercely contrasting flavours, but they are both Belgian and know it, sharing more than divides them. Belgian cuisine, for example, which is neither French nor Dutch. Trying to eat healthily, I have concluded that ‘Belgian health-food’ means ‘not eating at all’. I have picked carefully. One very positive thing though: the waitresses serve your order, and not a single one has asked if I have allergies. Can we have that at home, please?

The town en fête can be loud. One night the Markt was filled with Flemish folk-rock, and the next with pop standards. (How many times could they play Sweet Caroline?)

A tourist city can become a cliché. I promise you, in Bruges it is not all chocolate and lace – there are waffles and beer too. Behind all that, the town is a self-contained jewel. consciously preserving the look of its golden age as the trading hub of Northern Europe.

They do Performative Popery here:  statues of Mary on the corners of buildings, and tall churches encrusted with idols. It may be beautiful as art, but it is ugly to me. In the Reformation, Bruges, like the other merchant cities, became Protestant, but Bruges was unable to stay with the United Provinces and the Spanish crackdown was relentless. Its decline followed rapidly, and a new Counter-Reformation building programme to make the point, which explains the heavy Romish look. I found one Protestant church at least, to give comfort.

I have been out to see some of the Flemish countryside, where facility with English cannot be assumed (and knowledge of the Dutch language is not amongst my bag of tricks). It has ordinary towns and villages as so many paces.  There is little that is old, as the Great War flattened and flooded it. It lives though, and is a flat, green expanse, tall with shriveled crops in the drought – do not expect sweetcorn this coming year.

Just bumbling around the mediaeval city, its canals and parks, I can always find something new, all in a compact, egg-shaped city. It survived two German occupations in the twentieth century, unlike much of Flanders. The city centre is a mediaeval jewel, and the outer parts are not too shabby either. It attracted artists in the 19th century, and their legacy remains. I hope that Bruges can be more than an artist’s model, and it seems to retain the vitality to be so.

 

Maying in June

The village fete, crowning the year. It is traditional to hold the May Fair in June – Cambridge’s May Week is famously in June, and villages follow suit, defiant of the Gregorian calendar. I have been round in blazing sunshine and downpour, sometimes on the same afternoon, and the cheerful atmosphere is the same.

This is a village pulling itself together, displaying what gives it unity and life – its clubs and societies, churches, schools and small businesses, showing themselves, being appreciated, fund-raising, membership-raising and selling cakes.

Ignore for a day the grim prognostications, collapsing cities, worrying economic statistics, and wishful stories about how many Prime Minsiters have resigned this week – instead come and see what life is like when society is allowed to grow on its own, all on a summer’s day in the merry month of May, albeit in June.

I would never say “English” in the normal course, as if to exclude so many of our countrymen, but this is the lyrical England painted by the imagination, made flesh as a rebuke to those who want it gone.

If these village fetes then are the essence of ‘England’, how will they celebrate the 11th centenary of England itself in the summer of 2027? The name made them what they are, and it began in 927, in what we might think was a village festival atmosphere.drawing the whole island together.

How many local clubs I have accidentally been signed up to in the season of revelry I am not sure. The clubs make the village. They last throughout the year, not just on a May day in June, their roots reaching throughout village society, free and unregulated to thrive, feeding and nurturing, popping up that day like a bright mushroom to show themselves and spawn in a welter of poorly mixed metaphor. Long may they do so, and long may the tentacles of bureaucracy be slapped down from interfering with them.

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