More than one way to skin a Lord

This article from The Independent asks the obvious question of what, if anything, should replace the House of Lords if it were scrapped. It starts off a bit odd, noting that the Lords is "almost impossible to justify on any grounds other than their utility". Come again ? You can only justify its existence because it is in fact very useful ? I should have thought that would be more than enough to justify pretty much anything, really.

Anyway I'm just going to very briefly set down my own proposal here as a go-to reference. I will also note that Labour's plan isn't quite non-existent, but the idea of an elected "council of nations" is so vague as to be meaningless. Scrapping the upper House altogether would be ridiculous : it would make Parliament into a tyranny, as Oliver Cromwell already discovered. There's absolutely no point going down that road.

But I don't believe it's that difficult to come up with an alternative. What I would do would be :

• Restrict the number of voting peers to the same as the number of MPs.
• Immediately following each general election, peers eligible to sit and vote in the Lords would be chosen by lot from all existing peers, whose numbers would be drawn in accordance with proportional representation based on the election.
• Peers would be in some way affiliated with the major political parties but much more loosely than in the Commons, with no whipping system instructing them which way to vote on any issue whatsoever.
• Peers would not necessarily be appointed by political parties directly. Their total number would be unlimited (honours being handed out on some general merit-based principle each year), only the number allowed to sit and vote would be restricted.
• Nominations would be subject to an independent panel and not just at the behest of any one party. It would be possible to nominate for political service, but not for political donations alone : would-be peers would have to some sort of relevant experience of actually doing something.
• Powers for the Lords to delay or even block legislation might be increased, with the Commons only able to override with a two-thirds majority free vote and possibly requiring MPs from multiple parties.

This would give us a political system that uses representation and appointment, sortition and proportional representation all at once. It also utterly avoids any attempt by any government to pack the Lords in its favour.

A big problem with any alternative elected chamber is of course, "why wouldn't it just be the same as the Commons", and thus not acting as any sort of check at all. So let's just not bother with that. No, it's a good thing to have the proposed laws checked by a body formed on a different basis. As I noted at some length previously, democracy is best protected by non-democratic processes. As a general principle, I consider diversity key here. The more people of different ideologies in different backgrounds in bodies formed from different processes agree on something, the more likely this is to be correct. Hence a deliberate blending of democracy with other selection mechanisms.

Of course I haven't fleshed out any details because that's not the point. I'm not wedded to this either; it just seems like the most obvious solution to me. I'm perfectly open to alternatives. Show me a system of choosing an upper chamber that will at least given some degree of tension with the Commons and I'm listening.

Incoherency

Feel free top skip ahead if you don't need any background and just want a look at what is meant by "incoherence" and the problem of whether we can really hold contradictory beliefs.

Decoherently

I called this blog Decoherency for a simple reason. I wanted to make it sound scientific(ish) but also imply that posts wouldn't necessarily have any connection to each other. I would deliberately permit myself to write posts that would suffer from flagrant contradiction and not have to worry too much about what I'd written elsewhere. I think of this as a public notepad : a safe space for my immediate thoughts, with no real attempt to reconcile any paradoxes, generalise anything or establish robust principles.

What I jot down should hopefully be interesting enough to be worth bothering with, and at least have something to offer in its immediate context – but nothing whatever beyond that is guaranteed. Each piece should be self-consistent but that's it.

Incidentally, I do from time to time re-read this, and you know what ? I'm pretty happy with it, actually. Most posts seem to contain at least something of moderate interest, even if there are plenty of times when I think, "what the hell was I on about?". Sometimes I'm consciously aware of problems when I set something down but I just let it go because overall the content still holds and it makes a rhetorical point more clearly. Other times I genuinely don't realise until long after the fact, and only the benefit of hindsight reveals that something is now "obviously" just wrong, or at least lacking context. 

And that's okay. That's what a notepad is for. It's a sort of conversation with myself, fleshing something out to the point where the fundamental essence of a thing is preserved, but not bringing it to a full flowering, as it were. It's a notepad after all, not a book.

I also think all would-be commentators should give this a go. I find that when I try and really articulate precisely what it is I want to say, be that from something that's just popped into my head spontaneously or (more often) in response to something I've read, the process takes me in directions I rarely anticipate. Often I find that my initial ideas were just wrong-headed, and the final piece, even in this notepad-level form, isn't much like what I initially set out to write. The process of writing stuff down, re-reading the original text, trying to paraphrase it, all that generates ideas I simply never would have had otherwise. 

Of course discussion with others is often even more important. But the writing process for me is something special. It has the the powerful advantage of setting everything out in a more permanent way, something I can point back to and reference in a self-contained unit : here are my ideas at this particular moment, without too much of a meandering journey that some of the mega-long threads on social media can become. And the journey is one that I direct, where I get to decide what to focus on, where I can concentrate on what I'm interested in with with a freedom to fail all on my own terms.

These days it's almost a compulsion. I don't feel that I've completed the reading experience until I've blogged it up. I do this mainly for my own benefit and if anyone else gets anything out of it, well that's good for them, but that's a bonus, not a goal.

Incoherently

I take decoherency to mean, in this context, this process of working things out, of getting words on a page that attempt to be self-consistent only in their immediate environment. But this is a made-up word for my own purposes. What about the truly incoherent ? What do we do when we encounter ideas which are mutually incompatible ?

This Aeon piece is quite a nice (albeit overly-lengthy) examination of the whole notion. Incoherency is essentially just this synonym of incompatibility : two things which cannot both be true. So in the address/title the author asks a very valid question : is it really possible to believe things which are mutually exclusive ? The answer, I think, is very much yes, but we'll get to that.

Philosophers call the kind of incoherence that’s involved in these states means-end incoherence – I intend an end (getting new shoes), believe that a means (going to the mall) is necessary for that end, but do not intend the means. There are many other kinds of incoherence. For example, it’s incoherent to have ‘cyclical’ preferences – say, to prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, prefer vanilla to strawberry, but prefer strawberry to chocolate. And it’s incoherent to have beliefs that are straightforwardly logically inconsistent – say, to believe that great cooks never overcook eggs, believe that you are a great cook, but also believe that you have overcooked the eggs.

It seems obvious that if you believe you need to go shopping because you need new shoes but you also believe you don't, you've hit a very hard kind of incoherence. Likewise if you believe great cooks both do and do not overcook eggs, you're in a bind. But I must object to the cyclic example here because this is obviously wrong. For example, the Welsh rugby team frequently beats England, and England occasionally beat New Zealand, but Wales haven't beaten New Zealand basically ever. This can't be incoherent because it's simply a fact.

So it's perfectly possible to have cyclical preferences. The style of play of rugby teams is qualitatively, not just quantitatively different, and what works well against one team can be useless against another. And in Robot Wars (a "sport" I followed far more closely than rugby) it became clear that there was no perfect design, that Robot A could beat Robot B which could in turn beat Robot C, but Robot C was perfectly capable of trouncing Robot A. These things happen all the time. 

Ice cream flavour preferences are if anything an even better example of this, because preferences are so utterly subjective : the difference between the flavours is qualitative, not quantitative, and they can't really be ordered in a linear scheme like this at all. As with which movies or books you "should" like according to the critics, none of this changes how you actually do emotionally respond. Empirical data cannot itself be incoherent, only the interpretation allows for that... if you believe people must have a linear sequence of flavour preferences, you haven't understood people very well.

This doesn't invalidate the notion of incoherence as incompatibility, however. Not at all. The author continues :

It helps to contrast being incoherent with merely being unreasonable. Consider someone – call him Derek – who believes that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen for Joe Biden, and that in reality Donald Trump received far more votes. His beliefs certainly could be logically consistent. Moreover, Derek might think that his beliefs are well supported by the available evidence, thinking that the information provided on QAnon message boards, by One America News, and by Trump himself is extremely weighty evidence, and that information provided by the mainstream media is entirely unreliable. Like many conspiracy theorists, Derek might dismiss the evidence against his views by saying that it has been fabricated by malicious actors.

What’s enticing about charges of incoherence, by contrast, is that they seem to skirt these kinds of disputes. If I can show that Derek’s worldview doesn’t make sense from the inside – that it doesn’t even hang together coherently – then, the thought is, I can show that he’s being irrational without having to settle which sources of information are reliable, or what counts as good evidence for what. This, I think, is part of what makes us inclined to reach for charges of incoherence (or inconsistency) in political debate. When we reveal incoherence in someone’s political beliefs, we’re tempted to think, then we’ve really got ’em. Or, at least, then we’ve really shown that they are being irrational.

Pointing out that a vote against a bill would knowingly frustrate the politician’s own goals is both an easier way to show the irrationality of his intentions, and more likely (though far from certain) to be effective in changing his mind.

This is all well and good. The author continues to note that that incoherence could be taken as the hallmark of irrationality, with unreasonableness not really being irrational at all – but then, thankfully, rejects this. He notes instead that rather this points to different levels of irrationality. To believe in the Flat Earth is irrational, not merely unreasonable, but to hold in your head entire systems of mutually incompatible thoughts ("structural" irrationality) is surely worse still than merely in believing in one system which has been refuted. And here too I agree with the point. 

He goes on to say that inconsistency largely happens simply because we haven't noticed it, that we hold two thoughts fully independently, acting on them without realising the incompatibility :

My contention is that the cases where people most clearly have incoherent mental states are those in which their mental states are not perfectly transparent to them. It’s not particularly hard to make sense of incoherence in these cases; what’s harder to make sense of is incoherence that persists even when the incoherent states in question are brought to the attention of the person who has them... we hold incoherent beliefs, but never think about them together, and that’s how we manage to sustain the incoherence.

It fits with the fact that reporting one’s own incoherent states aloud in speech seems a lot stranger than merely being incoherent: this is because reporting the state aloud in speech requires bringing all the states to one’s conscious attention, making them transparent. And it explains why, when our incoherence is brought to our attention, we scramble to revise or reinterpret our mental states to make them coherent: ‘When I said “all”, I didn’t really mean all’; ‘I’ll do anything to help small businesses within reason’; and so on.

Again I not only agree but make an active conscious effort to search out and resolve inconsistencies. When I realise that I'd said something which is inconsistent with my other assertions, I try and generalise to keep everything consistent. Sometimes this means examining the full implications of what I said and finding that actually everything is fine. Sometimes I have to abandon one or more statements and admit I was mistaken. Sometimes I realise I was missing data which helps the whole thing hang together, or necessarily changes my interpretation of what's going on.

A simple example that's stuck with me : there was a meme explaining why women are distrustful of men in certain situations because they might be dangerous, comparing them to some fraction of snakes being venomous. I disliked this because I also dislike the notion that we should be distrustful of certain ethnicities or religions because of terrorism. The resolution in this case was a simple one, that the quantitative difference in the dangerous fraction is so high as to point to a qualitative discrepancy. If 0.0002% of your population is dangerous, that can't be taken as evidence that they're a bad lot. If it's 20%, well, there the claim has an awful lot more substance to it.

But... often I'm unable to reconcile the propositions. When confronted with the "transparency" of the inconsistency, as the Aeon piece describes it, I'm sometimes left with a nagging doubt. Like being presented with a brilliant, coherent, well-constructed argument about why a particular movie was terrible, it doesn't actually stop me from enjoying it, or vice-versa : you can't really persuade people to like or dislike something, these are things we simply do. And I've found myself more than once being unable to refute an argument but know, or at least doggedly believe, that the argument must have been deeply flawed despite being unable to express why. 

Consequently I go away in a state of confusion, still believing what I originally believed, unable to refute the counter-argument but unable to accept it either. 

This can happen to varying degrees. I might intellectually accept the argument but just not emotionally subscribe to it, or I might be partially persuaded (thinking perhaps, "yes this is true in these particular conditions"), or I might end up in a state of utter bewilderment. Or I might start veering back and forth between the two claims. And sometimes my eyes simply glaze over either with total incomprehension or utter boredom when someone else tries to convince me of something.

Perhaps intelligence also plays a role here, where even if you notice the two disparate propositions, you're simply unable to understand how they're inconsistent – thus you haven't really spotted the incoherency at all.

But at a deeper level I think the key to this is bullshit. There is a tendency for the very rational to assume that this is how everyone thinks, that everyone else must be fundamentally rational, logical, careful, and therefore unable to accept inconsistencies. I disagree. I think people can have wildly irrational beliefs, that are not just inconsistent with empirical data, but are even internally inconsistent. If they ever do notice, then they just don't care (the essence of bullshit). And if you don't care about consistency then you're free to believe the most outlandish, incoherent, self-contradictory nonsense. It's not that people have simply subscribed to a different set of trustworthy sources (something I've noted before at length in response to other Aeon essays), it's that their whole world view just is not rational. 

Ignorantly, Malevolently

To understand irrational ideas by rational means is, sadly, the height of folly. It can't be done. You cannot reason people out of positions they haven't been reasoned in to. Sometimes reason just plays no role in belief whatsoever. It's like people who openly admit that their favourite politician is a liar but then believe them anyway : I don't get it, but nevertheless it definitely happens. This is about as far as we can get by rational means, to simply acknowledge that it happens. 

This idea of people having different beliefs, even irrational ones, as a result of an information deficit is a dangerously compelling one. It would mean putting everyone on the same intellectual podium : not necessarily at equal heights, but at least thinking in similar ways. Differences could be reconciled simply by providing more or more comprehensible information (look, this source claims something in contradiction to the evidence so you can't trust them; look here's a simpler explanation of how internal combustion engines work). The problem is that if we insist this is true in the face of evidence, if we continue to insist that people are believing in fascism and despotism out of some perverted but fundamentally rational viewpoint, any efforts to thwart them will fail.

If I don't stop here this post will spiral out of control, so I just want to close with a few points. First, things are complicated. Sometimes we can and do behave rationally, acting much like a Bayesian net. Second, we consider metadata as well as direct data : that is, we consider who-believes-what to be a form of evidence in itself. But finally, that the human brain is also capable of being totally irrational. It can, under some circumstances, look two mutually incompatible ideas squarely in the eye and say, "yep, both of those are true".

It doesn't matter if these last two points are fallacies. Giant lists of the types of errors people make are of no help whatever, any more than yelling, "be more rational you dumb twat !" is likely to actually make them calm down and think more carefully. Rather we have to, if we want any chance of overcoming the lunatics, first begin by realising that we won't succeed with rational arguments. We cannot simply convince unreasonable people that they should be more reasonable; we cannot go around pointing out the logical flaws in illogical arguments and expect much in the way of successful persuasion. 

It would be nice to believe that people are basically rational. Conversely, the cynics seem to draw a weird comfort in the idea that people are irrational angry baboons who cannot ever be reasoned with. I think both neither and both of these positions are true. People, I suggests, aren't fundamentally rational or irrational. Rather both aspects, like it or not, are fundamental to being human.

Hume's Multiverse

Here's a nice little piece from IAI about reality not having any fundamental level to it. You might remember a previous discussion about this from another, more in-depth IAI piece which considered two main options : either reality becomes at some point self-referential, with some aspects being impossible to define without reference to others, or it's turtles all the way down.

Today's piece considers only the latter.

Perhaps reality has no foundation. Atoms, it turned out, could be divided into protons, neutrons and electrons, which it turned out could be further divided into quarks. Maybe we can keep going, further dividing and further dividing without ever reaching an end.

Why rule out the possibility of infinite regress in the composition of reality, whether that be infinitely many distinct layers, each more fundamental than the previous, or whether it be reality going in a circle, such that if you dig down far enough you discover the universe as a whole?

The claim that reality must have an ultimate level is often supported by little more than an appeal to intuition or incredulous bafflement at the alternative. If an argument is given, it is usually that reality must have foundations if anything else is to get off the ground. To go back to our analogy of the buildings, we might argue that there needs to be a foundational level for every other level to ultimately rest upon. If there is an infinite regress of distinct levels of reality, more and more fundamental but never ultimately fundamental, then (it is argued) there is nothing whose existence can account for the existence of everything else. A circular regression might seem even worse, from this perspective, since then every level of reality ultimately depends on itself, metaphysically bootstrapping itself into existence. The foundationalist, by contrast, can offer a picture whereby everything non-foundational ultimately inherits its existence from reality’s foundations.

Foundationalists take the ultimate beings - whether they be God, minds, quarks, quantum fields, or something else - for granted; there is no deeper explanation of where they come from. Why is an unexplained Prime Mover okay when an infinite regress of greater and greater movers is not, or a circle of things each moving each other? In fact, why isn’t it worse? The foundationalist posits some things that are, by definition, unaccounted for. In an infinitely descending or circular reality, at least everything is accounted for.

My objection would actually first be infinity : that once one invokes infinity, one is applying mathematical magic that can explain anything. This is why I concentrated last time on the idea of a circular, self-referential reality which would neatly avoid this. But yes, there's certainly also a nagging doubt about what something truly fundamental would mean. Supposing atoms were really indivisible, what would they be made of ? What is the "stuff" of a quark ? Why can't it be split ?

But perhaps I've let my own anti-infinity bias get in the way here, though I do still think any infinity means we've found a flaw in our mathematics. The issue for me is that infinity completely does away with causality, that one can simply point to an infinite multiverse and say, "our patch is the way it is because of sheer chance, all is probability, all parameter space must be occupied somewhere". This robs physics of any claim on meaning. Nothing is more or less real, it would seem, than anything else.

Or does it ? 

Recall that one about whether chairs exist. Let us suppose that the answer postulated, that it depends on the applicant conditions, is the correct one. In this way, perhaps infinite regress and causality alike can be cheerfully reconciled. If we can say that indeed, objects as we describe them do have some level of existence, then by the same token, we ought to be able to say that they experience certain processes. We can save causation thus. We might not have access to the true, fundamental nature of reality, but our observations of one thing leading to another are not meaningless either. Causality has the same level of reality as our observations do. If it's meaningful to say that a chair exists, then it is at least equally meaningful to say that pushing on a chair is what causes it to lean over.

Again, "equally meaningful" does not mean we've got at the true, underlying cause. We haven't considered electrostatic forces or atomic structure, let alone psychological motivations or the nature of mind. So Hume too, he can come along for the ride, happy that his seemingly bizarre claims that we don't understand causation can be saved after all. Rather the claim here is that our explanations for the cause of things are perfectly valid at the same level of the observations : they are correct, just not fundamental.

How does this hold up if there's nothing foundational but only infinite regress ? Well, at our level, the cause of the chair leaning is us pushing on it. At the atomic level, the cause of one atom moving is another pushing on it, with the existence of the experimenter being totally unknown and irrelevant. And at the subatomic level all is forces.

As we go down the levels, the ones above become less and less "real" in that they are less and less relevant. What seems to us to be truth, the existence of curious humans poking their noses into things because they want to, seem at first like at best emergent constructs : an atomic-scale observer wouldn't say a human is "real", just a collection of atoms that happen to be in a particular large-scale arrangement right now (just as some astronomers say exactly the same thing about filaments of galaxies). They'd say a human is no more than a label for that collection of atoms, not "real" in any fundamental sense.

And the deeper we go, the more detached from each other the layers become. At the subatomic the causes are electrostatic forces and the like. At even smaller scales it might be dominated by fluctuations in the quantum foam. Beyond that ? Impossible to say. We could likely not understand it anyway, even at the most - ahem - fundamental level. It would be utterly meaningless to us. To the denizens of this world, however, there might be yet smaller and smaller realms beyond. 

The point is that these levels do not affect one another. The processes at work simply do not exist in the different worlds, just as a single atom can't have a temperature but to anyone caught in a winter chill or a heatwave temperature becomes a very real consideration. So infinite regress does not mean avoiding causation : it means causation works on different scales, with there being literally zero chance of the smallest scales affecting the largest. This particular flavour of infinity isn't a mere substitution of meaningless statistics for physics.

Hmmm.

Review : Napoleon

Ever since we discovered the VIP cinema where you get a buffet, unlimited snacks and electronically-adjustable seats, we've been reluctant to go back to "normal" cinema. But by the time there was enough time to go, Ridley Scott's latest offering was no longer showing in VIP. Since I really wanted to see this one on the big screen, we were forced to choose another option.

... which turned out to be even better than the first. Oh, it's expensive. But you get actual table service during the film. Glasses made of actual glass. You pre-order your food and they bring it to you approximately when you asked to have it served. And the seats were even more comfortable than the first ! Little tables between each pair of couches with no more than a couple of dozen seats in total, on about four or five different levels so nobody gets in each others' way. I mean this is just a whole other level of civilised.

At this rate the next time I go to the cinema I'm expecting a full-on pool party with actual mermaids. But I digress.

Anyway, Napoleon. I personally loved it and rank it as one of 2023's great films, easily on a par with Barbie and Oppenheimer. Is it for everyone ? Certainly not ! For one thing there's no way this one will do anything but sink like a stone in France. But it works for me.

Like Oppenheimer, this one has in some ways plenty of breadth but little or no depth. Even more so than I was expecting, since I'd heard that it stopped before Waterloo, but that turned out to be false : it actually covers all the main parts of Napoleon's military career right up until his death. Necessarily, large tracts are omitted or glossed over. Of politics and government there is precious little. This is purely a character study with plenty of battles thrown in as a spectacular but also genuinely important backdrop : even Napoleon's harshest critics would concede his military genius, and I think this is more than apparent from Scott's film.

I also give major level brownie points since at no time have I heard any claims of historical accuracy being bandied about; this is a dramatization plain and simple. And I'm absolutely fine with that. I care not a fig that Napoleon didn't blast the pyramids with cannon or personally witness the execution of Marie Antoinette, because what difference does that make to anything ? Nothing. Likewise I'm fine with Gladiator not being historically accurate because nobody every made the claim that it was going to be, even though that too features real historical figures. This is clearly the film the producers wanted to make and dang anyone who wanted something else, and this is the correct way of doing things as far as I'm concerned*.

* This doesn't guarantee I'll approve of the final product, of course, which is a different issue.

And I like that Scott very clearly and openly has an axe to grind. While Napoleon's military genius is evident, especially at Austerlitz, Phoenix's portrayal is also petulant, vindictive, a raging egomaniac utterly convinced of his own greatness even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and sexually downright weird. 

By and large these attributes are blended together nicely. One thing that has become apparent to me as I've gotten older is that people don't really grow up, as such. They don't change from children to mature adults in quite the way you expect when you yourself are a child – they're generally still all the same kinds of weird as they were when they were younger, only maybe they get a bit more repressed*. And this seemingly paradoxical mixture of the extreme arrogance and insecurity in Napoleon is something I think Phoenix captures very well indeed. The film is almost purely a character study and I think the main point – look, this guy was bad, but he was also a complex human being – is done in a very satisfying, quite convincing and believable way.

* Not literally true exactly. It's perhaps more that the weirdness shifts around, changing but not really going away.

It's not how I would have chosen to do it, mind. What we get is essentially Napoleon on the battlefield and in the bedroom and little else. I would have liked more of the positive aspects of Napoleon's rule on Europe because to me that's genuinely interesting; I can't say I'm a fan of Napoleon, but I also wouldn't put him on the same pedestal of monstrous villainy as Hitler or Stalin. Certainly, at least not in comparison to other rulers of the time.

There's a reason for this (at times) almost-pantomime monstrosity in the film though, and it's a good one. I previously made a comparison between Gladiator's Commodus and Trump; here things are, I think, even more blatant. Not so much that one has been substituted for the other, but just with a nice, subtle slant on things. This is history interpreted very much to make a point, the transition from Republic to autocracy being too easy and too dangerous. Even at Austerlitz, when his military brilliance shines most clearly, Phoenix's Napoleon has a calculating, Putin-esque menace about him. 

There's also many references to Napoleon's lack of good manners, and if that's not referring to Trump then I don't know what is. And I'm completely fine with this approach. Realism is good, but not always necessary. To me it feels that while the movie is a character piece, what's it's primarily concerned with is not the character of Napoleon himself, but the viciousness of the autocracy he represents. The final ending screen may rub the viewer's nose in it, but I think in this case it should. To have those casualty figures in black and white is all by itself a damning indictment of those who would get too caught up with any benefits Napoleon might have brought throughout Europe; one should remember the tremendous cost behind it all.

And from that perspective, a more realistic, positive depiction of Napoleon would actually be in very poor taste. Movies have the capacity to reach audiences unreachable by traditional political avenues, and in the present era of would-be autocrats in the west, maybe now is just not the time for rehabilitating a despot.

I'd would someday like to see other versions though. I love the much earlier Waterloo, which remains to this day one of the most spectacular movies ever made, but that too gives a a tremendously one-sided (and again British) perspective. So, I can see why not everyone is going to like this approach... but what exactly is stopping the French from making their own version ? Exactly nothing. Go and make the version in which Napoleon is forced into conquering all of Europe and gives everyone better infrastructure and bestows the gift of surnames on the Dutch; this would be eye-opening for sure. But I for one like my villainous autocrats, so long as nobody's trying to convince me that this is really how things actually were.

Visually the movie just wins 2023 hands down. Barbie had its zany funtimes and Oppenheimer its arthouse minimalism (and of course that explosion), but Napoleon... that's where it's at. It doesn't have the astonishing depth of the emotive force of the charge of the Rohirrim, nor the sheer outrageous spectacle of Waterloo, but the whoosh of cannonballs overhead, the blood-soaked carnage, the freezing wastes of Russia, the grim and gritty sight of the armies clashing all conspires to give an effect all its own. It manages to convey horrendous chaos without being confusing. The audio-visual on this one is a real treat, with not only the big screen but also the big speakers really outfitting this as a proper, magnificent epic.

For me this is an easy 8 or 9 / 10. It's a thumping-good historical epic which makes me want to learn more about Napoleon. As a pure dramatization, I didn't take it too seriously and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Review : Pax

I was dismayed when reading the acknowledgements at the start of Pax by the reference to "one of the world's great cancer surgeons". Had my favourite non-fiction history author been struck down with cancer ? There's precious little about it online, but it seems that all was not as bad as it first appeared.

Tom Holland is my favourite largely for his incomparably magisterial prose. Edward Gibbon, you say ? Edward Gibbon can go suck a monkey. In book after book Holland consistently, apparently effortlessly, manages to weave narrative and analysis into a seamless chronological narrative. There are no (or the absolute minimum) of footnotes or explanations of sources as distractions, just one great continuous flow of uninterrupted, gripping narrative awash with blood and perverted sex and gripping speeches and all the great stuff about history.

It's not always the ideal way to do history, mind. And it almost certainly wouldn't work for all periods or for all authors. Some, like Francis Pryor and Marc Morris, do amazingly well with weaving the uncertainties into lively and engaging parts of the text, joining the reader in a journey of discovery and mystery, and I wouldn't want them to change a thing. But Holland in full flow is damned hard to beat.

Pax is the latest in a thus-far trilogy of the history of the Roman Empire. In Rubicon we went from the fall of the Republic to the rise of Empire, while in Dynasty he took us through the turbulent early years of the First Family of the Caesars. In Pax we follow the Empire to its apogee. In some ways this is the most difficult period for the narrative historian. It's easy enough to chart a story of change, but a period of stability is much more challenging. Holland opts to emphasise change where change occurs, such as the protracted series of civil wars and Trajan's spectacular but brief military successes. 

But the really interesting stuff, which to be honest I'd like a bit more of, is : what kept things stable while it lasted ? What was it about the Roman Empire that worked ?

It would be much too big a leap to paint Imperial Rome as any sort of socialist bloc. But despite its winner-take-all hyper-capitalism, with no concern for the poor save to prevent plague and rebellion (see Holland's magnificent Dominion) it did have streaks of modern leftism. Taxes were wealth taxes, not income-based : ancient societies didn't have the ability to monitor income well enough for this. These taxes worked, but they were understandably hugely unpopular, because taking even a little of what you've already got is quite a lot different to taking what you never received*. I add this even though Holland himself doesn't mention it; I think a lot of historians seem to take it for granted as widespread knowledge even though it really isn't.

* This is not relevant to modern wealth tax proposals, however, which are generally aimed squarely at the super rich. Perhaps the poll tax would be a fairer comparison in terms of its effects.

What Holland does mention is that in place of Universal Basic Income, there was Universal Basic Corn. Though even then, complaints were made that it would only make people lazy : "for what was a handout but a threat to Rome's moral fibre ?". And in the Emperor Galba's failure to restore the UBC after a period of economic turbulence, but lavishly spending on his own warehouses, it would be all too easy to detect some very modern hypocrisy. Perhaps most strikingly of all, Holland gives one quote from Seneca :

"No-one finds poverty – inconvenient though it may be – a heavy burden, unless he is minded to do so."

Being poor is a lifestyle choice ! Though to be fair, Seneca's stoicism, however daft and irredeemably flawed, doesn't actually intend this, but the author of the anonymous graffiti in Pompeii that wrote, "I hate the poor" is probably a better example of the general Roman attitude to the plebs. It's pretty hard to misinterpret that one.

(That's got me wondering now if Roman anti-poor attitudes had some role in fostering the bizarre ideas of certain stoics, but I digress. Still, here I think Holland is being unfair by not quoting the source, because the Stoic attitude is certainly not the same as the pantomime malevolence that is the modern Tory party.)

A final example of some very modern tensions : the Roman elite became concerned as the composition of the Senate diversified to include non-Romans, "it barely seemed to be Roman at all". They notoriously saw all non-Romans as barbarians, even the Greeks. And yet others, though by no means a majority, might instead see the possibility of the Romans being made rather than born as the very quality that was most distinctly Roman. The Romans, says Holland, "never claimed to have possessed a distinctive bloodline", with their founding myth depicting them as outlaws and fugitives, and their willingness to free their slaves seen as unique. 

This sort of cognitive dissonance feels again like a thoroughly contemporary attitude; one only has to look at the news for a few minutes to be sure of witnessing an ethnic-minority Prime Minister spouting the most deplorably racist claptrap. That the Romans might have paradoxical attitudes to racism should not be of any surprise. 

Of course while fundamental attitudes and the structures of society were important, the person of the Emperor himself mattered a great deal. Gibbon compares Nero and Augustus. Nero wanted to be an actor, to be known and admired for his acting skills. Augustus, and the other successful emperors who came after him, didn't. They were actors, but not for the sake of winning glory for their performances, but for the sake of maintaining the fiction of the Republic. By shunning naked autocracy, veiling it in a pleasant fiction in which senators could believe they still had real power, they kept the vital systems (especially the political systems) of the empire intact and functioning. By permitting them their illusions, reality was denied them. Exposing themselves as actors, as Nero did... that could not be tolerated. That would expose the whole lie for what it was.

But the Roman's own attitude to why their civilization worked seems to have been quite clear, and something altogether different : climate. 

Just as the cold weather of northern Europe bred men who were spirited but stupid, so did the enervating heat of Syria or Egypt breed men who were brilliant but soft. The happy medium, those who were simultaneously spirited and brilliant, were the people who occupied 'the middle-position geographically'. The Greeks, with their customary conceit, had identified this with their own cities. A comical error. History did not lie. The 'mid-position geographically' was patently, self-evidently Rome.

Whether the Romans saw this as literally affecting the bloodlines, actually changing racial features, or simply shaping individual characters (the Greeks refused hot baths on the dubious grounds it would make them soft), Holland doesn't say. Perhaps they viewed it as both.

One final interesting point underscores the sheer complexity of understanding why Rome worked. It's common to say that an external threat can be a powerful unifying force... and it can, but it isn't necessarily so. Holland notes that while the Roman invasions of the Middle East forced the Judeans and Samaritans to cease hostilities, it did absolutely nothing to alleviate their "mutual hatred". Which suited the Roman approach of divide and rule very well, yet, paradoxically, Rome was superb at making everyone Roman.

While the ancient Greeks have earned something of the reputation as being the brains of the Empire and the Romans usually just guilty of wholesale cultural appropriation, this isn't entirely deserved. Holland describes Pliny's indefatigable, imperial quest for ultimate knowledge :

The wonders of the world merited respect. This was the conviction to which Pliny had devoted a superhuman degree of effort. The true value of Rome's empire lay not in the opportunities it provided for profit, or for ransacking previously inaccessible reaches of the world, or for stimulating jaded palates, but in something altogether nobler : its success in pushing back, to a degree never achieved before, the frontiers of knowledge.... Knowledge was power. Such was the supreme achievement of the Roman people : to have fashioned a dominion that could reveal to humanity the fundamentals of the cosmos.

Holland is of course here, as always, trying to tell the story from the protagonist's viewpoint without actually endorsing it, lest anyone should take this too literally. And more amusingly, regarding Pliny's nephew :

An earnest and dutiful young man, he had once been told off by Pliny for walking rather than taking a litter : for by taking a litter he would have had the opportunity to read a book. 'All time is wasted which is not devoted to study.' Such was Pliny's maxim.

The Stoics would not approve of course, with Epictetus explicitly against excessive, impractical book-learning. But screw 'em, I like Pliny's approach more. If more people spent more time with their heads in books instead of doing "practical" things like cheering for sports teams or donating massive amounts of money to Taylor Swift for some reason, the world would be a happier place.

Anyway, I'm giving this one a solid 8/10. It's great stuff, rock-solid rhetoric, immensely and intensely readable. What I would have liked more of, however, is, well... Pax. The first half or so is dedicated to the turbulent wars, and while it's important to see how this eventually led to stability, I think a good deal more could be said about the institutions that made Rome work. There was plenty of politics in Rubicon and not enough of it here. 

Specifically, more of the big stuff is needed, more context-dependent generalisations : sure, Trajan overreached Rome's power with his continued expansion, but why was the cycle of, "conquer -> assimilate -> grow army -> conquer", fundamentally broken ? Trajan seemed to have just done too much all at once rather than trying anything really impossible; the flaw was in the method, not the concept. I'd like more insight in particular into Hadrian - what was he thinking with the wall ? What was the long-term plan ? And most vitally of all, what was the secret to preventing the endless rebellions that plagued other emperors ?

Perhaps all that will be in a future book; I for one would love the sequence to continue until Rome's bitter end. As it stands, a thoroughly good read.

Review : Persians - The Age of the Great Kings

This next review takes us considerably further back in time, to the age of Cyrus the Great and ending with the Macedonian conquest of Persia. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (one of the most Welsh names ever) takes a much-needed look at the history of ancient Persia from the perspective of the Persians themselves, attempting to dispel some of the myths propagated by their considerably more famous Greek adversaries.

In this I have to say he's only partly successful. There are times when he does an outstanding job, both spinning a gripping yarn and plausibly correcting some of the more deliberately-bigoted acts of Greek misinterpretation. But there are other times when he comes across as blatantly anti-Greek, which I think is bloody daft considering the debt modern society owes to them. Perhaps worse are the times when he's flagrantly self-contradictory. I'm not quite sure if he's being deliberately provocative, trying to take the Persian side just a bit too hard, or has genuinely fallen for it. Either way, pointedly labelling Athens as "democratic" with the quotation marks just feels extremely petty and mean-spirited.

I also have to say that the style is a bit old-fashioned. It's partly narrative history, partly archaeological reconstruction, and it tells the reader very explicitly what's being done and why. It all feels rather forced, often stating things which are really very obvious. The narrative sections are generally good (though the military aspect is very poor), and while switching back and forth in its different approaches does basically work, it could also have been done more effectively. I don't think it was necessary to compartmentalise things like this. A better way would be to control the narrative to focus each section on a particular aspect of Persian life, whilst maintaining a chronological flow.

Still, it does accomplish the important goal of making me want to know more about the Persians on their own terms rather than merely as a foil for ancient Greece. But ironically, I have to say I've come away thinking they're probably... nothing all that remarkable, to be honest. Important, certainly. But if one was to do a Python-esque sketch of what the Persians have ever done for us, the answer would have to be, "not much". 

Overall, I give this one 6/10 : a mixed bag, with some parts a respectable 7 or even a commendable 8, but enough stupid statements and tediously bland passages thrown in to be... not fatal by any means, but irritating.

I do however respect Jones very much for having an axe to grind, even though I don't agree with his conclusions. He begins by provocatively declaring the idea that the Persian conquest of Greece would have ended democracy and altered the course of civilisation as "absurd". Fair enough, points rightly made that some Greek cities in Asia Minor under Persian rule were permitted their democracies. But later he says that a successful conquest would have seen the Athenians deported ! And Persian rule was above all autocratic, so the idea that Athens would have been allowed to follow the imperial course that it did, that its greatest philosophers would have come up with the same thoughts without Persian interference... sorry, no, that's complete bollocks. It's not in the least bit credible, just a fashionable bit of self-loathing. If you're going to posit this idea, it needs much more development than a couple of paragraphs in the introduction.

Another glaring contradiction Jones makes is the role of concubines. Again, fair enough, try and explain the harem by going beyond the sexual stereotypes : a worthy goal ! But then having spent some pages explaining that it wasn't like this, that this is all just western sexualisation... Jones then describes in quite lurid detail that most of the concubines'* duties revolved around sex. Having tried to describe the harem as being far from the popular image of flowing silk curtains and scantily-clad nubile young ladies, Jones pretty much then describes things as being exactly like this. This doesn't do him any favours.

* Though not the harem, strictly speaking. This referred to the collective of imperial Persian women, mothers and daughters and sisters and concubines alike. But this is a very petty terminological issue to get hung up on, with the more obvious point being that yes, there were lots of concubines, and yes, they fulfilled exactly the sort of duties one would expect. It's good to be the Great King.

More interesting is Persian governmental structure. This is strongly reminiscent of the later Mongolian empire. It was a merger of many different civilizations and cultures under the umbrella of the Persian khans (the Persians themselves being of nomad stock), a true empire rather than anything like a nation-state. It was enormously tolerant and vibrantly multi-cultural, far more so (says Jones, not without merit) than Rome or, much later, Britain. In essence the Persians themselves were the rulers, the aristocrats with their hands firmly on the reins, but all the lower institutions were allowed to persist more-or-less as they had previously.

Jones may at times hate the Greeks but he's not an unapologetic fanboy of Persia either. He's clear that Persia could use extraordinarily brutal methods of executions (e.g. the ordeal of the boats, don't say I didn't warn you) when it felt it was necessary and that it took a very different view of the truth than western ideas. Darius could thus paint himself as both a foreign conqueror and the legitimate ruler of Egypt; their idea of history had yet to approach even the attempt at getting at objective truth in the way the Greeks at least claimed to try. Persia didn't seem to even understand the concept, and this lack of knowledge about its own history may have been a fatal weakness.

Fascinatingly, Persian culture held the concept of the Truth and the Lie as almost physical entities or deities. The way of Truth was the correct one, the way of the Lie was the realm of devils and monsters. But which was which seems to have been entirely arbitrary, very much in the vein of might is right. If the Great King decided that this was Truth, then so it was. By Jones' own admission, the best rulers of Persia were astute at the art of fake news and bullshitting, putting out messages for their efficacy rather than out of any interest in anything as petty as what really happened.

When it comes to the Greek wars with Persia it's very much a mixed bag. I commend Jones for two very plausible reinterpretations of stories in Herodotus. Firstly, rather than Xerxes stopping to all but make love to a tree because he was actually mad, Jones' version of this being an exaggeration of a widespread Persian practise of tree-worship feels far more believable. Secondly, that Xerxes would seek to appease the waters of the Hellespont with prayers and offerings sounds much more likely than he would whip it out of despotic anger, with the scope for misinterpretation being obvious. 

In like vein, Jones does an excellent job of demonstrating that Cambyses I was a competent and astute ruler, in stark contrast to the Greek portrayal of an ineffectual despot. And he makes the valuable point that it was probably simple imperial ambition that led to Xerxes' invasion, not any sort of revenge for the earlier defeat at Marathon or the Ionian revolt. Unfortunately he rather undoes the latter by apparently forgetting it was the Greeks who were on the receiving end of the invasion force, and getting all prissy because they said mean things about the vast army burning its way through their lands.

Militarily it's on very thin ice. Jones' numbers for the size of Xerxes invasion are on the extremely low side, lower than the lowest values given on Wikipedia. To me they just don't feel plausible. If we allow the city-states of Athens and Sparta to each field armies of 10-40,000 well-armed hoplites each, as is well accepted, then it seems like massive underkill to suppose that Xerxes invasion force was a mere 70,000 infantry. If Athens alone could manage 200 triremes, then for Xerxes to find just 500 seems downright pathetic given the vast scale of the empire*. To note that Greece was not a united front in defending itself is correct but disingenuous, the main point surely being that Athens and Sparta, two astonishingly different societies, did manage to unite. And to spin Thermopylae as a "great Persian victory" is honestly laughable in a grim sort of way, the sort of propaganda the Great King would have approved of.

* Granted, Michael Scott notes that the ability to field disproportionately large military forces was one of the principle advantages of early democracies.

Later Jones uncritically repeats stories which feel a lot more like Greek titillation than anything else. The idea that the Great King would have an occasion at which he would be unable to refuse any request is just plain silly (see Trump, immunity from prosecution...). Trying to justify the actions of an autocratic serial killer on the grounds of trying to protect her dynasty is just mind-wrenching, as is saying that Darius was destined to have a glorious reign... absolutely nothing about it was glorious, ending as it did with his utter defeat at the hands of Alexander. 

Likewise, the argument that Darius wasn't a coward by fleeing battle (an argument I've heard from others) just isn't tenable either. It's ludicrous to expect anyone in that situation to be so conscious of their dynastic obligations that they run away out of duty, and far, far simpler to suppose that they did so because they were bloody terrified. Alexander faced exactly the same dynastic pressures but was made of considerably sterner stuff.

Jones clearly loves his subject. Some of his narrative passages are genuinely gripping, but here he seems to be only repeating the historical sources. At the end of it all I'm reminded again of John Man's comments on Mongolia. Man too loves his subject but for all the light readability of his books, he's clearly thought a lot more about it than Jones. The Mongol Empire, according to Man, was driven by nothing much more than a pure desire for conquest. It had ultimately nothing to offer the world, no new ideologies, no new perspectives. It was conquest for conquest's sake. That gave it an extraordinary, paradoxical capacity for both tolerance and violence alike. 

So it seems to me with the Persians. To unify the disparate lands and hold them together for two centuries was an extraordinary but ultimately pointless achievement. A capacity for synthesis and fusion of artistic styles from a multitude of cultures was all very well, but art alone does not a culture make. To allow local democracies under autocratic overlords in no way compares with instituting democracy as the end point of rule. And mastering propaganda is no substitute whatever for even the worst philosophy; even a bad but honest attempt to get at the Truth is better than embracing the Lie.

Review : Summer of Blood

This is a wonderful little book that I picked up on a whim some time ago. Dan Jones is these days quite the celebrity historian and deservedly so. His first book, from the far-off days of 2009, however, appears to have been overlooked, and now seems a fantastic time to bring this tale of the Peasant's Revolt to wider attention.

Why now ? In 2009 we were in the grip of what should now really be renamed from "the" to "a" financial crisis, and bless little Dan's innocent cotton socks, it must have seemed that that was the perfect moment to tell a tale of a bloodthirsty mob suffering repression from the elite. Oh Dan, my sweet summer child...

Then as now, egalitarianism was in the air. Jones quotes a contemporary French poem from shortly before the revolt, hinting that tensions had been building for years and were not just a British peculiarity. I set it here in prose :

There are three things of such a sort that they produce merciless destruction when they get the upper hand. One is a flood of water, another is a raging fire, and the third is the lesser people, the common multitude, for they will not be stopped by either reason or discipline.

As always with Dan Jones' books, what I like most is his ability to, in his own words, fulfil the "historian's most important duty : to tell, as accurately as possible, a cracking good story" but at the same time deal with things even-handedly and analytically. It would be easy to simplify this to the innocence of the egalitarian peasants and the villainy of the so-called "nobility", but Jones doesn't do this. He makes it clear that while indeed there were powerful economic forces behind the Peasant's Revolt, the way they acted soon became detestable. What began with legitimate grievances ended in an orgy of the most brutal violence for violence's sake, an uncontrolled, anarchic rampage with no goals beyond sheer destruction and bloody murder. 

And he also gives a good many details not found in the standard narrative taught to schoolchildren. That version goes something like this : oppressed by the avaricious aristocracy, especially due to the notorious poll tax, the peasants rose in revolt. Led by Wat Tyler, they met King Richard at Smithfield, who promised to help them but immediately betrayed them. After Richard's henchman killed Tyler, everyone got bored and went home, and the peasants had to suffer yet worse oppression forever after.

This is an oversimplification. To start with, the initial poll tax wasn't in itself the main problem. The problem was endemic corruption. The poll tax itself was unfair, because it was being used to fund not just an arguably unavoidable war with France (albeit badly executed with little strategy), but also a wholly pointless private one against Portugal thanks to the nefarious John of Gaunt. And yet while the peasants rightly grumbled about it, the first poll tax wasn't unfordable, amounting to the equivalent of about three days wages for the poorest : hardly likely to win friends, but very much endurable.

Jones also makes it clear why the aristocracy thought this was a good idea. Thanks to the plague, the lower orders had seen massive wage rises while the upper echelons had not. So a one-off tax to defend the country ? Didn't seem like a bad plan at all.

And perhaps it would have worked, provided that had been the end of it. Of course it wasn't, and further, considerably larger taxes were required. Even though these were much more carefully implemented, scaled according to wealth rather than being a flat fee, it was now just too much to bear : it was not only unfair taxation, but the bulk of the tax fell on labourers who "had no voice at all." Taxation without representation indeed.

Thus began the Peasant's Revolt. It was in large part a spontaneous uprising of the commons, a genuine grass roots mass movement against oppression. But it was not entirely so, with from the start gangs of rebels pressing those who would prefer to steer clear into their ranks. This would continue right until the very end of the rebellion.

The demands of the peasants were mixed to say the least. The firebrand John Ball preached true equality for all in language that feels all too modern :

They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices and good bread... and we have the pain and the travail, rain and wind in the fields, and by that which cometh of our labours they keep and maintain their estates... we be beaten, yet we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right.

Ball inflamed the commons so much that one of their early petitions called directly for the heads of those who they found responsible for their undeniably sorry lot in life. Needless to say, asking the young king to kill his chief advisors had absolutely no chance of success. While the peasants were more politically informed than the stereotype might suggest, clearly this rebellion hadn't been carefully thought through. Yet Jones is careful to note that in some ways the illiterate peasants were quite justified in their suspicion of book-learning, used as it was to oppress them with no chance of giving them access to any kind of academia. Their deliberate burning of records, a "damning funeral pyre of England's legal system", and their insult taken at King Richard's request for a set of written demands, becomes understandable. The two sides weren't speaking the same language.

Yet shortly afterwards, a group of much more moderate rebels met with the king at Mile End. At this point the rebellion was still mainly organised and coherent. The demands they made of Richard were entirely reasonable and restorative, not in the least bit revolutionary. To be sure, the feudal system was inherently unjust and unfair, but like all systems of government, if it's implemented correctly it could be far better on the ground than on paper. After all, if your lord has the right to claim some percentage of your earnings but doesn't actually do this, this is far better a situation than if he does. So the peasants demands were initially entirely moderate :

"It was a request for a countryside charter of justice. They asked him to make them free for ever [serfdom was by this point already uncommon] - themselves, their lands and their heirs. They asked, specifically, for a rent limit of 4d per acre... Finally, they asked that no man should be compelled to work except by employment under a regularly-reviewed contract."

Not exactly "workers of the world unite", let alone "eat the rich". But here the young Richard made a very foolish mistake. Richard acceded to their demands (though surely only as a way to buy time), but then for reasons best known to himself, he went much further. He gave the peasants license to hunt down those they thought responsible for their rotten situation. Granted, he framed it somewhat more moderately than this, telling them to bring the traitors before him for due legal process, but in the heated atmosphere of the times, with enough of the mob eager for blood, it failed spectacularly. The peasants took it, quite literally, as a license to kill. And kill they did.

What followed was a series of atrocities that came close to the utter ruin of the kingdom. Palaces and homes were set ablaze, mob justice settling petty grievances with beheadings. Panic begat panic; defendable positions were surrendered out of sheer fear. Looting and destruction were widespread but the least of the problems. Hats were nailed to heads and heads were stuck on spikes, summary executions were common and men were burned alive. The legal boundaries had become blurred with mob justice, with catastrophic results. 

While John Ball had been preaching equality for a while, this proto-Marx had no grasp on political theory whatever, no alternative system of government besides bringing the old one down. I get the impression of a self-serving egomaniac, more interested in himself than his goals. He seem to have been completely undeterred by the death and destruction around him, or perhaps encouraged by it.

The rebels by this point were in such a state of bloodlust that they were hardly in a mood to hear lectures on sociology in any case. Contrary to the so-called "myth" of panic, they were not in any state to be reasoned with. They were unhinged.

This led to the second, more famous meeting with the teenage king, which does seem to have happened basically in accordance with the popular tale (Jones also provides some alternatives in the footnotes based on the different sources, but the usual version is the more likely, and the differences are in any case slight). The only nuance he adds here is that Tyler was drunk on power, making demands which, like those of Ball, were impossible for the king to meet : total equality, all Church property divided amongst the commons, no more outlawry. And now Richard's strategy of complete agreement proved successful :

Tyler's demand... had met with the one response that did not suit him : complete acquiescence. Part of the point of asking for such radical terms of peace had been to maintain the momentum of the revolt... Pursuing these sorts of demands kept the movement vital, idealistic and committed. But without such a central focus, it would inevitably dissolve back into local riots and isolated spates of rural complaint. Royal assent to his ludicrous demands guaranteed Tyler nothing.

This then was a smart move. Tyler wanted to inflame the king to use his refusal for propaganda for more recruits. By simply giving in, the king had at once rendered Tyler politically impotent. All that was needed was the slightest pretext, which was Tyler's rude behaviour, and he was famously cut down. The mob, having absolutely no clue what to do next, collapsed.

The wider rebellion, however, persisted for some weeks afterwards. If Ball had been a demagogue and Tyler an amateur general, then Richard became a truly pantomime tyrant. Jones hates Richard, and it's not hard to see why. The guy was about as bad as a medieval king could be. And yet while he did give the famous "villains you are, and villains you remain" speech, and had hundreds of rebels put to death (including Ball), it's not altogether a story of the establishment successfully crushing an uprising through sheer brutality. Many pardons were issued and respected. Eventually even a general pardon was issued for the commons. And it did nothing to solve the fundamental issues that had led to the rebellion, with king and Parliament almost immediately at odds and Richard going on to be a right little shit for the rest of his life. The rest, of course, is history. Hint : it didn't end well for Richard.

Overall, an outstanding read. It wastes not a single word and blends the analytic and the narrative perfectly. With vivid prose that doesn't fail to discuss the uncertainties of details, this, like Gaskill's The Ruin of All Witches, feels like it could almost be directly lifted from page to a big-budget TV miniseries. Judging this one on its own terms, I find it hard to give it anything less than 9/10.

Review : Oppenheimer

Let's start the new year with something positive : nuclear bombs.

Okay, let's not do that exactly, but after having slated pretty much all of Christopher Nolan's recent cinematic offerings, I feel honour-bound to give the guy his due when it comes to Oppenheimer. After being quite irritated by being unable to see it at the cinema (we waited so long for IMAX bookings to subside that by the time we decided to go for a regular screening, they were then only showing it at unfeasible hours), I finally saw it at home on 4k. And, having been disappointed time and again by Nolan of late, I'm glad to say that this is a long overdue return to form.

To recap, I loathed Interstellar with its rampant inaccuracies but claims to the contrary and its daft idea of "love crossing the dimensions" (urrraaarrrrggkkkk !). I found Dunkirk to be hugely underdone and anti-climatic. And Tenet felt like intellectual masturbation, relying far too heavily on a pretentious gimmick and being all but inaudible. While I admire Nolan's commitment to practical effects, sometimes he goes too far with this. Narratively too, many a time I've wondered if he's so pretentious that he's likely to disappear up his own arsehole in a singularity to rival anything in Interstellar.

But when he's right, he's right, and after such a run of largely crap, Oppenheimer at long last delivers the goods. It starts a little worryingly with Oppenheimer portrayed as the classic lone maverick genius, with one truly laughable line, "I liked your paper on molecules" repeated several times despite sounding like he's just come out of pre-school. And we get a lot of genuinely very pretty minimalistic art sequences to portray Oppenheimer's ability to see beyond the mundane surface reality and into the quantum realm, which is, I stress, gorgeous, but real scientists aren't usually so up themselves.

Shut up, we're not.

The style of delivery also takes some getting used to. It frequently jumps back and forth between different time periods and for a very dialogue-heavy movie it's extremely fast-paced, and add to that that most of the dialogue feels like the characters are literally reading out of a biography.

All this has the potential for disaster but... it works. The non-linearity adds a genuine extra tension to the narrative without being distracting, because it compares events which are similar enough to be directly relevant to each other. As a historian might draw parallels between different events through a direct analysis, so the movie presents them here. It also doubles as a story arc, beginning with a fairly standard narrative but gradually and seamlessly transforming into an Oppenheimer-vs-Strauss courtroom drama that eventually dominates and concludes. I think perhaps a few parts would be better left out and replaced with some more cinematic, music-dominated visuals instead, just to slow things down a bit, but this is a very minor quibble.

And what begins as another, "oh no, it's the Imitation Game* all over again" feeling rapidly transmutes into a pleasant realisation that "oh, you're not doing that at all". Oppenheimer is depicted as having a world-class understanding of the physics, yes. But he's not at all shown as being a lone genius or a revolutionary, but rather as an administrator. Many other figures** are from his own lips given to be more important than him, or at the very least necessarily complementary (in fact we don't really see any particular breakthroughs Oppenheimer himself makes regarding nuclear physics, which is largely left to others). He isn't especially socially awkward and there's plenty of mentions of his political leanings and activism. Overall, what emerges is a vastly more real, more complex depiction of a flawed and fraught human being than anything Benedict Cumberbatch would ever be likely to portray. For this alone I give the movie huge kudos.

* A perfectly good movie which I enjoyed very much, but it does fall for the standard lone-socially-awkward genius myth very heavily, and I really wish movies would stop doing this.

** Noland says in the extras that this is a conscious choice not to use composite characters and I applaud him for that. The large cast is never distracting, with each individual appearing when they're needed and not one moment longer. You never find yourself wondering what happened to so-and-so or who the hell that guy is. Everyone is there for a purpose and there are absolutely no pointless backstories. What we get is a far more realistic portray of the collaborative scientific process that most movies try to depict, without sacrificing narrative clarity.

I feel that by choice the movie has breadth instead of depth. It covers all the major moral issues regarding nuclear weapons and the impact on the scientists who built them, but at the expense of examining any of them in any detail. I think this is probably for the best. The overall feel is that it presents all of this to the audience for discussion, raising all the major points that need to be raised but not ramming any particular message down anyone's throats. Even the most villainous characters aren't treated as pantomime psychopaths but with some sympathy, making them all feel very much more nuanced and believable. Whether they were right to build the weapons in the first case, let alone use them, let alone use them against civilians... that's quite rightly left to the viewer to pronounce judgement, all the while showing that the same doubts gnawed at the protagonists as they surely must have done. It gets, I think, properly into the mindset of the times, of those caught up (in their own ways) in a vast and bloody conflict where there simply were no good choices to be made. It doesn't use the benefit of hindsight to cast judgement on anyone.

And it sets this in the broader political context of McCarthysim as well. In fact I think this may be my favourite, most subtle aspect of the film, examining the various political forces at work, the different structures of the political, military and scientific organisations at work on the Manhattan Project and beyond. I like especially that the detonation of the bomb is not the climax of the film but we get an extended epilogue of what happened afterwards which is probably for me the best and main point of the movie. In essence, it uses nuclear weapons as a clever plot device whilst simultaneously keeping the development process itself interesting and engaging entirely on its own terms. You could, if you so chose, stop watching after Trinity and you'd have had a damn good movie.

I do think perhaps this is a case of a movie that thinks too much and feels too little, but not to any serious extent. Quite unlike Tenet, it never gets hung up on its own clever nonlinearity. By and large we get a very thoughtful insight into the emotional lives of the characters; it demands concentration of the audience to follow everything that happens, but it isn't equivalent to solving a Sudoku puzzle in order to understand the basics, which is an approach to filmmaking I despise.

Overall, extremely solid stuff. The explosion is spectacular, the cast are perfect, the soundtrack is great (love Hans Zimmer but thank you Nolan for finally giving someone else a chance !), cinematography is perfect. I'm gonna give this one 8/10. It's a brilliant film, occasionally just a little too clever for its own good, extremely well-balanced but perhaps lacking in depth from time to time; I would rather have had a little less detail and more moral philosophy discussions. But this is probably only personal preference and I could probably be persuaded to bump this up to 9/10, and I think for the second half/final third of the film I certainly would.

Nolan, all is not forgiven. You still need someone to give you a good hard slap on the mouth from time to time. Nonetheless, welcome back to the land of sanity, and enjoy your well-earned accolades.