Spain has decided it wants to be a "Big Society"

The problem is that the square is just too popular and for many of the city's young inhabitants has become the number one venue to meet friends and hang out until the small hours. One resident said it was like living in a permanent party.

Step in Barcelona's fabrication laboratory, one of a network of 1,200 workshops around the world that allow people to test out new designs and ideas, and build products and new technology using a range of cutting-edge tools. Labs share their designs online so that something built in Boston can be replicated in a lab in Shenzhen.

With the help of some EU money, the lab built low-cost, easy-to-use sensors that can detect air pollution, noise levels, humidity and temperature. Families placed the sensors on their balconies and were able to demonstrate that night-time noise levels - with peaks of 100 decibels - were far higher than World Health Organization recommendations. Armed with this information, the residents went to the city council, pressing them to rethink the use of the plaza.

Well that's fine, but I can't help thinking you don't need any new technology or manufacturing for this. You just need civic officials doing their jobs and monitoring noise when there are complaints.

"We wanted to end this top-down approach where cities go to companies and ask them to build infrastructure and then pretend that is a smart city," said Mr Diez. And along the way, he hopes to build a new type of digital economy, one in which citizens own and control their own data - what he calls "citizen-based infrastructure".

Sensors in a Shoebox was a project set up earlier this year in Detroit, aiming to give local teenagers a say in urban planning. The project provides compact sensor kits that allowed the children to collect a range of data from two different locations - one on the waterfront and the other in a local park. "We took the view that we can't have smart, connected cities without smart and connected young people," said Elizabeth Moje, dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan, which headed up the project.

Air quality was important to the teens - a personal issue for many in a city where one in six residents lives with asthma. The children also learned the limitations of data collection. While they were able to measure the number of people who used a certain area, they also had to go out and see for themselves what type of person used the area, explained Prof Moje.

It was also important that the children saw that the data they collected and the observations they had made could have an impact on city planning. Their recommendations were passed on to representatives from the mayor's office, community groups and Citizen Detroit. "We have to teach children to be critical thinkers, as well as how to be good and productive citizens. This enabled them to learn about their communities, even if they don't go on to be engineers or social scientists," said Prof Moje.

Dr Jennifer Gabrys leads the Citizen Sense project at Goldsmiths, University of London, which aims to research how effective citizen-led sensor projects are. Giving people the tools to collect their own data can sometimes be a "perfunctory gesture to make smart city projects more palatable", she said. "Cities increasingly have so many sensors generating so much data, some of which people have access to and some of which they don't. People may not want everything monitored and who decides and shapes this agenda is a big question for future urban democracy."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41015486

The UK is taking Cambridge Analytica seriously

The UK's Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham says she will seek a warrant to look at the databases and servers used by British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.

Ms Denham had demanded access to Cambridge Analytica's servers by 18:00 GMT but said the firm had missed her deadline. "I'm not accepting their response so therefore I'll be applying to the court for a warrant," she said. "We need to get in there, we need to look at the databases, we need to look at the servers and understand how data was processed or deleted by Cambridge Analytica."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43465700

The NSFs plans for Arecibo are simply stupid

Edited for brevity.

Dear Stakeholders,

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has prepared a Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to assess the potential future use of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico under the condition of reduced funding of the Observatory by NSF.

This Final EIS identifies and analyzes the potential consequences of five action Alternatives:
Alternative 1 (Agency-preferred Alternative) would involve collaboration with new stakeholder(s) who would use and maintain Arecibo Observatory for continued science-focused operations at reduced funding by NSF.
Alternative 2 would involve collaborating with outside entities to operate and maintain Arecibo Observatory as an education-focused operation.
Alternative 3 would involve mothballing (preservation of) essential buildings, telescopes, and other equipment, with periodic maintenance to keep them in working order.
Alternative 4 would involve the demolition of all above-grade structures, except the large concrete structures (that is, towers, tower and catwalk anchors, and rim wall infrastructure).
Alternative 5 would involve the demolition of all above-grade structures, including the large concrete structures (that is, towers, anchors, and rim wall infrastructure).

The Final EIS also proposes mitigation measures to minimize the adverse impacts from demolition or operation of the Alternatives where such impacts may occur. NSF also considered the No-Action Alternative. Under the No-Action Alternative, NSF would continue funding the Arecibo Observatory at current levels; none of the Alternatives would be implemented.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Pentecost


Dear the National Stupid Foundation,

You are stupid. Why are you so stupid ? Do you have brain parasites ? Did the stupid fairy hit you on the head with a toaster, like that bit in Scrooged with Bill Murray ? I can't think of a more credible explanation right now, anyway.

Your "preferred action alternative", as you so eloquently call it, is supposed to maintain science operations at Arecibo. Commendable. Except that it explicitly calls for the demolition of up to 26 buildings including all the ones where the science gets done. You want to cut the NSF's funding and replace it with some other institute. Since you seem to be chronically stupid, that's probably a good thing. But how's about you don't force the theoretical replacement institute to have to rebuild all the frickin' buildings they're gonna need to maintain science operations, eh ? Booby trap them if you must, but what manner of witchcraft and sourcery compels you to think that demolishing science buildings will have any kind of positive impact on science is beyond me. Perhaps that's the key word : impact. Someone once told you you should increase the "impact" on science and you've taken them literally, because of the stupid fairy.

The other "action alternatives" aren't much better. Increasing the amount of education and outreach at AO is a very sensible idea; refocusing it so that it does nothing but education and outreach is not. You specifically call for, in this scenario, the 305m telescope to be rendered inoperable but not demolished, but "retained for visual/historical interest". Well great, let's all just hack our legs off while we're at it. I can think of few sights more discouraging to future astronomers than a vast telescope slowly decaying in the jungle, a sweeping curve of metal and soaring towers consumed back into the wild - save that all those who see it will know that this didn't have to happen. Perhaps the only benefit from this absurd idea would be that it would stand as a monument to the folly of small-minded bureaucrats.

There is not much to be said for the other possibilities. Mothballing the facility is only marginally better than blasting the thing to smithereens, which would at least win you the internet for a few hours. For the sake of a paltry, yes, paltry financial saving, you would end a scientific facility to which there is no comparable alternative, nor is one planned or ever likely to be planned.

In conclusion, you suck, you are stupid, and I don't like you.

Good day.
https://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/env_impact_reviews/arecibo/arecibo_feis.jsp

Australians get free portraits of the Queen

If this was done in the UK the economy would tank.

Australians have emailed MPs with dozens of requests for free portraits of the Queen, after the little-known entitlement was publicised this week. Under official rules, citizens may ask for "nationhood" material - things such as Australian flags, anthem recordings, and portraits of the head of state.

One MP, Tim Watts, said most requests for images of the Queen were due to a case of "excellent trolling". It followed a Vice story that had drawn wide attention to the entitlement. "I can say before the story was published, I had received zero requests for portraits of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth," Mr Watts told the ABC. "The last 24 hours, I would say [I have received] about four dozen. I think 99% were tongue firmly in cheek."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-45139047

No longer fringe - our elections are being hacked

The shadowy conspiracy theory becomes mainstream.

A probe into the political use of private data has been opened by the information commissioner. Elizabeth Denham announced the review amid concerns over allegations involving an analytics firm linked to a Brexit campaign. It follows calls for an investigation into claims that Leave.EU had not declared the role of Cambridge Analytica (CA) in its campaign. The Electoral Commission says its powers do not extend beyond the UK.

But Ms Denham said: "Having considered the evidence we have already gathered, I have decided to open a formal investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes. "This will involve deepening our current activity to explore practices deployed during the UK's EU referendum campaign, but potentially also in other campaigns." The probe was sparked by Labour's Stephen Kinnock, a remain campaigner, who called on the Electoral Commission to look into links between Leave.EU and CA.

Claire Bassett, the commission's chief executive, said, while it had "very clear rules" governing the permissibility of donations and printed materials, such as campaign leaflets, it has no power to stop overseas individuals or governments using social media to influence British elections. "At the moment the rules apply to print media - so if you get a leaflet through your door, that should have an imprint on it which makes it clear who's produced that leaflet and where it's come from so you know who's campaigning for your vote," she said. "At the moment those rules don't extend to social media and we've recommended that that should happen."
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-39946801

Do you mind ?

I mostly disagree with this. There are large parts which could simply be written as, "people's circumstances influence which ideas they're receptive to". I don't think transhumanism or Cartesian dualism (I read the Meditations recently, but I have to read it again before blogging it) are inherently anti-feminist, but, at the same time, the fact that certain demographics are treated differently does give them a different perspective. Dualism could (and almost certainly would) have arisen in a different way, but that doesn't mean the process bt which it did isn't worth examining.

Likewise, there are some articles which discuss how ideas arise that I find intensely annoying. This isn't because the origin of ideas isn't very interesting in itself, because it usually is (e.g. the purely philosophical reasons the ancient Greeks postulated the existence of atoms, which had little to do with observations). What I find annoying is when an article implies that because the origin process can be understood, this somehow invalidates the idea. It doesn't. Descartes may have had one very good set of reasons for dualism and the Princess Elizabeth another, equally good set, for rejecting it, but that doesn't mean their roles couldn't have been reversed. Nevertheless, I found this bit interesting :

It’s not that Elisabeth simply rejected Descartes’s views without critical reflection, or fell back to simply asserting her subjective opinion. It’s that her particular life experience inclined her to develop different intuitions to him, and gave her good reasons to doubt the plausibility of dualism. As the philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford has argued, the contingencies of what happens to us in life – the people who have shaped us, the challenges we have overcome – invariably shape the sorts of claims that we’ll find persuasive or the arguments we’re inclined to doubt. 

Here, it seems to me that Elisabeth’s experience as a woman meant that she did not have the luxury of entertaining anxieties about the stark separation of mind and matter. One might think that her concerns – as for many women, in fact, and other oppressed peoples throughout history – were not really about how to bridge a gaping chasm between some enclosed inner world and a remote outer one. Rather, Elisabeth’s worry might well have been about how to preserve an inner sense of self against the relentless pressing-in of the world’s demands; about how to assert an entitlement to be a full person with distinct projects; and about how to carve out space to flourish in a society that relies on exploiting you.

While I object to the idea that transhumanism and dualism are just the fantasies of misogynist playboy billionaires, I do think there's a good point here. Because of the way women were treated, their outlook would have been necessarily different (reading the Meditations, I look into myself and find my own awareness to be a singular, utterly unalterable thing : that this is not necessarily so is fascinating). But it could equally have happened the other way around, e.g. with men being seen as overly-emotional and irrational and thus with women trying to aspire to free themselves of such burdens. Of course, we should be extremely wary about drawing too many conclusions from a single example, especially a princess.

The second point I found interesting was the origin of the suppression of women :

Thus when de Beauvoir makes the oft-quoted point that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’, she is not just saying that women’s minds and selves are socially constructed. More trenchantly, she is arguing that women become women precisely so that men can become Human. While the Human has access to Cartesian qualities of reason, truth and clarity, the Other is linked to irrationality, emotion and vagueness; where the Human has civilisation and culture, the Other is aligned with nature and matter; and where the Human has a honed and powerful mind, the Other is at the mercy of the body.

Which makes sense - it feels good to have enemies. I will fiercely defend feminism on the grounds that there is unjustly unequal gender-based treatment of women (and men) in society, and thus, while it's true that all minds matter (to borrow from the article's title and annoying internet-based movements), the present focus is on the unfair treatment of women. Different perspectives on philosophy are valuable, but again, that doesn't mean the underlying ideas are invalid.

The final point I'll comment on is the view of the computational theory of the mind. I don't think this is at all incompatible with feminism, nor does this so-called "embodied cognition" present any difficulties :

New frontiers are opening up that view the body as something more than just a brain-carrying robot. In doing so, they have created the potential for alliances with feminist thinkers influenced by the likes of Fausto-Sterling. Within a broad church that can be called – not uncontentiously – embodied cognition, a growing number of psychologists, scientists and theorists are approaching mental life as something that is not just contingent on, but constituted by, the state of our bodies. In the place of a Cartesian computer, the mind becomes more like a clay pot thrown on a wheel.

Yeah, but I don't see any problem with this except in an overly-strict Descartesian sense. True, if you take mind-body duality very literally indeed, then yes, there are big problems. Clearly the body does influence the mind, if only because the mind relies on external senses - even though the actual perception may be an internal analysis of electrochemcial flows, that process is still triggered by external events. It isn't just the mind making stuff up, that would be preposterous. It's the same as the supposed problems with identity.

The way I see it, the mind is more like an object in an object-oriented programming language : it has its own identity which is independent of, but strongly influenced by, its current properties. The mind processes what it receives externally, just as any computational system does. It doesn't have its own mystical direct perception of the external world - it necessarily receives information via senses. Perception is an internal model that provides a way for us to interpret the external impulses, but that absolutely does not mean the external impulses aren't real, for heaven's sake. It just means the model is to a degree inaccurate and incomplete, not that it's entirely wrong or meaningless.

All this talk of expectations and affordances leads to a potentially troublesome consequence: cognition can no longer be cleaved apart neatly from politics. If I am black, my prediction of what a police officer might afford me is likely to be very different to that of my white friend, as well as eliciting very different felt responses and perceptions. Undoing such expectations (which it might well be reasonable for me to hold) is not just a matter of changing my beliefs, but of modifying longstanding embodied reactions. Similarly, as a woman, I might not expect a dark and deserted street to afford me walking down it at night, while my male partner might feel entirely at ease in that space. The fact that I feel myself to be vulnerable, in a very visceral way, means that I will avoid putting myself in that position, and so my predictions will be tacitly reinforced.

Yes, because your experiences are different to everyone else's. This is hardly much of a revelation. It's an important statement, which implies that direct experience is a more powerful teacher than classroom lectures, but again, not exactly a novel one. Nor do I see any incompatibility with the idea that the brain processes information in a manner analogous to a computer. The only way I can see a conflict there is if the mind is really, absolutely independent of the body, which is ludicrous - I'm not sure even Descartes went that far.

Feminists never bought the idea of a mind set free from its body - Sally Davies | Aeon Essays

We are shackled to the pangs and shocks of life, wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), 'as bodies to wild horses'. Or are we? Serge Faguet, a Russian-born tech entrepreneur and self-declared 'extreme biohacker', believes otherwise.

The problems of zero

I once got into an small argument with someone who came up with the memorable phrase, "It's a logical absurdity to say you can believe that things don't exist. It's like trying to prove a negative; you can't distinguish between things which have no existence."

By that "logic", zero is the same as an imaginary hippo or a unicorn. People are indeed weird.


Our understanding of zero is profound when you consider this fact: we don’t often, or perhaps ever, encounter zero in nature. Numbers like one, two, and three have a counterpart. We can see one light flash on. We can hear two beeps from a car horn. But zero? It requires us to recognize that the absence of something is a thing in and of itself. “Zero is in the mind, but not in the sensory world,” Robert Kaplan, a Harvard math professor and an author of a book on zero, says.

Imagine a box with nothing in it. Mathematicians call this empty box “the empty set.” It’s a physical representation of zero. What’s inside the empty box? Nothing. Now take another empty box, and place it in the first one. How many things are in the first box now? There’s one object in it. Then, put another empty box inside the first two. How many objects does it contain now? Two. And that’s how “we derive all the counting numbers from zero … from nothing,” Kaplan says. This is the basis of our number system. Zero is an abstraction and a reality at the same time. “It’s the nothing that is,” as Kaplan said. (At this point in the story, you may want to take another hit on your bong.)

Elizabeth Brannon is a neuroscientist at Duke University who studies how both humans and animals represent numbers in their minds. She explains that even when kids younger than 6 understand that the word “zero” means “nothing,” they still have a hard time grasping the underlying math. “When you ask [a child] which number is smaller, zero or one, they often think of one as the smallest number,” Brannon says. “It’s hard to learn that zero is smaller than one.”

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/5/17500782/zero-number-math-explained

Save Arecibo !

Resharing in the light of the NSF's draft "Environmental Impact Statement", a.k.a., "what shall we do with Arecibo Observatory ?"

http://astrorhysy.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/just-give-them-some-money-already.html

Robert Minchin writes :

Help save Arecibo Observatory!

As you might have heard, Arecibo is currently under threat from the NSF. If you feel that your education has benefited from Arecibo and/or if you feel that you have been inspired by the Observatory (scientifically or culturally), please write to the NSF to let them know, and send a copy to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Letters/emails need to arrive by 12 December 2016.

Addresses are:
NSF: Envcomp-AST@nsf.gov
Ms. Elizabeth Pentecost
RE: Arecibo Observatory
4201 Wilson Blvd, Ste 1045S
Arlington, VA 22230

Advisory Council: achp@achp.gov
John Fowler
Executive Director
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
401 F Street NW, Suite 308
Washington, DC 20001-2637

Thanks!

The NSF's proposal is nothing short of bonkers :
http://websites.suagm.edu/ao/?q=AO-Response-EIS
(Full report > 200 pages : https://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/env_impact_reviews/arecibo/eis/DEIS.pdf)

TLDR : They want to keep Arecibo running but with reduced funding from the NSF and more from partner institutions. That's fine, and quite understandable given a funding shortfall. However, for some reason known only to themselves, they also propose demolishing so many buildings that Arecibo would be dealt a very efficient death blow. It would completely stop Arecibo's planetary radar capabilities (Goldstone is the only Solar System radar transmitter in the world) which provides about $5 million of Arecibo's ~$12 million budget. It would demolish the buildings where the permanent scientist's work and the visiting observers are housed, thus killing it completely as a scientific facility. It would, in short, be completely mad, and I for one shall be telling them this using those exact words.

There is no good replacement for Arecibo planned. Not "planned in the near future", but at all. There is nothing remotely comparable to Arecibo - yes, China's FAST is bigger, but its frequency range is much smaller and it won't do planetary radar. It has yet to be demonstrated if it even works at all. Arecibo does unique science, and if we lose it there's little hope we'll ever be able to replace it. We're still making discoveries with Arecibo even in the very nearby Universe for goodness bloody sake; yes, eventually it will become obsolete, but with proper (though modest) investment and development it could remain competitive for decades to come.

Who exactly is Queen Elizabeth, anyway ?

Things I believe that I will only ever rationalise and seldom actually sincerely question include :
- I'm me.
- Time exists.
- I have free will.
You can argue against them if you like, but I probably won't believe you even if your argument is dead clever. That's not to say I don't find the alternatives uninteresting, but I don't believe them. Interesting ideas can be very silly, but that's okay.

That's all by way of disclaimer. From the article :

The denial has two dimensions—the diachronic and the synchronic. That is, Buddhists deny that anything retains its identity over time (this is the doctrine of universal impermanence), and that even at a given moment, there is no unity to who we are, and nothing in us that answers to the object of our habitual self-grasping.

Let us begin with the impossibility of anything retaining its identity over time - the diachronic dimension. To see this point, it is useful to distinguish between strict identity and mere similarity. When we say that x is strictly identical to y, we say that x and y share all properties, that they are one and the same thing, perhaps under two different descriptions. So, for instance, Her Majesty the Queen of England is identical to the world’s best known breeder of Welsh corgis in this strict sense. You can't meet one without meeting the other; you can’t kick one without kicking the other. It is not just that they look so similar, and each wear the same kind of hat. There is only one thing, under two descriptions.

But Her Majesty the Queen now and the young girl who was crowned in 1952 are not strictly identical to one another. They are similar in certain respects, but different in many others. One is much older than the other. One is married to Phillip; one is not. We call them by the same name, but that is because of relationships of similarity and causal continuity, not strict identity. There is no strict identity over time, because any two stages of the same continuum are of different ages, if nothing else, and so do not share all properties, and so are not identical. The fact that we treat individuals as literally the same despite changes over time is a confusion of identity with similarity and causal continuity, not a recognition of an underlying reality.

I think it's more like an object in a programming language. Thus :
"ElizabethWindsor == Queen" evaluates to true since 1952.
ElizabethWindsor.age = some value
ElizabethWindsor.CorgiBreedingSkill = Maximum
ElizabethWindsor.NumberOfLegs = 2
... and so on. ElizabethWindsor has some properties which change, but a deeper, fundamental identity which cannot be defined by particular attributes. I don't claim to know how this identity can be defined, but you can push things quite hard before identity truly breaks. For example if I set ElizabethWindsor.NumberOfLegs = 0, it wouldn't make sense to say she's no longer herself. It's just that her particular properties have changed. To say that her entire identity is invalid because properties vary is too drastic for me; she doesn't have to be strictly identical in order to be fundamentally identical. Even though I'll cheerfully admit to having no good definition of what the fundamental identity really is.

Think of somebody whose body you’d love to have, for whatever reason. I have always wanted to have Ussain Bolt’s body, at his peak, for just about 9.4 seconds. Just to see what it feels like to go that fast. You probably have other desires.

In any case, I don't want to be Ussain Bolt. That would do me no good. He is already Ussain Bolt. I want to be me with Ussain Bolt’s body. That shows that I do not take myself to be my body, but to possess that body, because I can imagine (whether coherently or not) being me with a different body.

But how about my mind? Same thing. Imagine somebody whose mind you would like to have for a little while. I would like Stephen Hawking’s. Just for a bit. So that I could understand general relativity and quantum gravity. It would be so cool. Again, I don't want to be Stephen Hawking. He already is, and that does me no good. I want to be me with his mind. That shows that (whether coherently or incoherently) I don’t imagine myself to be my mind, but to be its possessor, which could be the same self with a different mind.

How monstrous ! I don't want anyone else's body or their minds at all. If I want to change myself, I want my mind and body to have different abilities. I can imagine I might, at least in principle, make drastic changes to my body without fundamentally changing my mind. But I can't just replace my mind with someone else's and still be me, that would be daft. I could, however, alter many of my mental abilities and still remain fundamentally me.

When we experience ourselves as decentered persons, however, we experience ourselves as part of a larger network of others, whose interests we share, and whose pains and pleasures we share as well. This allows the cultivation of the set of virtues known in the Buddhist tradition as the brahmavihāras, or divine states.They are benevolence, care, sympathetic joy and impartiality.

I don't think it's necessary to question the fundamental nature of identity for this. You can just assume that the network in which we're embedded changes some properties of us, and we in turn change some properties of the network, but some properties change very rarely or never.

https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/why-there-is-no-self-a-buddhist-perspective-for-the-west-auid-1044

Sam Altman Isn't A Nice Chap

Today, an excellent piece of investigative journalism from The New Yorker. 

Anyone remember those brief few days in 2023 when Sam Altman was removed from the board of OpenAI ? Of course you do. But now, more than two years later, we finally get an inside look into what the hell that was all about. Months of investigations have revealed in extreme detail just what was going on behind closed doors. If you're at all interested in these kinds of companies, then this is well worth your time. 

In the most compact form possible, this amounts to : "Sam Altman isn't a paedophile, but he's definitely a lying scumbag". As far as a character assessment goes, this is devastating. With regards to OpenAI the company, the picture is considerably more nuanced, especially in terms of the actual researchers involved (Altman himself is only a businessman). To their great credit, the author here interviews everyone involved, including Altman on multiple occasions. This is by no means a hit piece, but what emerges is abundantly clear. Virtually all those involved say that Altman is an inveterate liar, and while Altman may rightly dispute the interpretation of some recollected conversations, the idea that everyone else but him is misremembering beggars belief. 

In PDF form this runs to 39 pages. No doubt other media outlets will produce a more distilled version, but in the meantime, what follows below is my own 2200 word-summary in pure quotation form. To keep the narrative coherent, some of these are rearranged from their original sequence but no paraphrasing is used. Highlights are my own.

But first, there are two comments I should add for my own perspective. First, the main concerns of the other employees and board members revolved around the issue of AI safety, especially whether it would be aligned with human values and suchlike. I personally believe that these concerns are – provisionally – not sensible. I've said many times that while we can legitimately call LLMs intelligent in a carefully-defined way, I don't believe they show the merest glimmer of consciousness. Safety in terms of "killer robots will be the death of us all" is, I believe, complete hogwash; LLMs have absolutely no will of their own, and if putting them in certain situations is a bad idea, that is entirely the result of human error : we can simply choose not to do that, and nothing stops us from pulling the plug. I said almost from the very start that the whole "this is too dangerous" thing was a genius bit of marketing spin, not a genuine concern on Altman's part.

The provision I make here is that safety and alignment may still matter in the lesser regard of AI not behaving as expected. This certainly does pose problems and it clearly is important to have it behave in a basically-predictable way, as a useful tool rather than as an independent entity. But given a lack of any consciousness, I don't worry at all about a rogue AI deliberately trying to murder everyone of its own volition, as many of the top researchers are apparently genuinely concerned with. 

What matters here in terms of Altman's character is, then, not who's right about safety, but what he said he'd do about it. He lied about this over and over again, and whereas absolutely everyone tells lies from time to time, the degree to which Altman does this, routinely, is inexcusable. He's also a bullshit artist. It's fine to change your mind, but you should acknowledge that you've done this, as well as explaining how and why. Altman simply doesn't bother.

This leads me to my second point : people are being awfully naïve about this. The subreddits exploding with people saying they were ditching OpenAI for Anthropic never made any sense; the idea that the US government bunch of deranged fascist fuckwits wouldn't be using LLMs was beyond belief, never mind that Anthropic were already deeply in bed with the US military (the article also goes into Anthropic's misbehaviour as well, though to a lesser extent). Trying to lionise Anthropic for pushing back on a couple of points is, in my view, a classic example of naivety curving back on itself in an ouroboros of cynicism. And again, to pretend that a CEO will never lie is an absurdity, but this should not be the take-home message of this piece. Rather it should be the more realistic and far more important point that Altman lies so much you can never trust him about anything. That's what should concern everyone, not the non-story that "CEO is a scumbag". That's par for the course. 

That's more than enough from me. On, then, to the summary.

---

In a tense call after Altman’s firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. “This is just so fucked up,” he said repeatedly, according to people on the call. “I can’t change my personality.” Altman says that he doesn’t recall the exchange. “It’s possible I meant something like ‘I do try to be a unifying force,’ ” he told us, adding that this trait had enabled him to lead an immensely successful company. He attributed the criticism to a tendency, especially early in his career, “to be too much of a conflict avoider.” But a board member offered a different interpretation of his statement: “What it meant was ‘I have this trait where I lie to people, and I’m not going to stop.’ ” Were the colleagues who fired Altman motivated by alarmism and personal animus, or were they right that he couldn’t be trusted?

Most of Altman’s employees at Loopt liked him, but some said that they were struck by his tendency to exaggerate, even about trivial things. One recalled Altman bragging widely that he was a champion Ping-Pong player—“like, Missouri high-school Ping-Pong champ”—and then proving to be one of the worst players in the office. (Altman says that he was probably joking.) As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.

If everything went right, the OpenAI founders believed, artificial intelligence could usher in a post-scarcity utopia, automating grunt work, curing cancer, and liberating people to enjoy lives of leisure and abundance. But if the technology went rogue, or fell into the wrong hands, the devastation could be total. China could use it to build a novel bioweapon or a fleet of advanced drones; an A.I. model could outmaneuver its overseers, replicating itself on secret servers so that it couldn’t be turned off; in extreme cases, it might seize control of the energy grid, the stock market, or the nuclear arsenal. 

Not everyone believed this, to say the least, but Altman repeatedly affirmed that he did. He wrote on his blog in 2015 that superhuman machine intelligence “does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all. A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal . . . wipes us out.” OpenAI’s founders vowed not to privilege speed over safety, and the organization’s articles of incorporation made benefitting humanity a legally binding duty. If A.I. was going to be the most powerful technology in history, it followed that any individual with sole control over it stood to become uniquely powerful—a scenario that the founders referred to as an “AGI dictatorship.”

By September, 2017, though, Musk had grown impatient. During discussions about whether to reconstitute OpenAI as a for-profit company, he demanded majority control. Altman’s replies varied depending on the context. His main consistent demand seems to have been that if OpenAI were reorganized under the control of a C.E.O. that job should go to him. Sutskever seemed uncomfortable with this idea. He sent Musk and Altman a long, plaintive e-mail on behalf of himself and Brockman, with the subject line “Honest Thoughts.” He wrote, “The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship.” He continued, addressing Musk, “So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator.” He relayed similar concerns to Altman: “We don’t understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it’s hard to really understand what’s driving it.”

By 2018, Amodei had started questioning the founders’ motives more openly. “Everything was a rotating set of schemes to raise money,” he later wrote in his notes. In early 2018, Amodei has said, he started drafting a charter for the company and, in weeks of conversations with Altman and Brockman, advocated for its most radical clause: if a “value-aligned, safety-conscious project” came close to building an A.G.I. before OpenAI did, the company would “stop competing with and start assisting this project.” According to the “merge and assist” clause, as it was called, if, say, Google’s researchers figured out how to build a safe A.G.I. first, then OpenAI could wind itself down and donate its resources to Google. By any normal corporate logic, this was an insane thing to promise. But OpenAI was not supposed to be a normal company.

That premise was tested in the spring of 2019, when OpenAI was negotiating a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft. Although Amodei, who was leading the company’s safety team, had helped to pitch the deal to Bill Gates, many people on the team were anxious about it, fearing that Microsoft would insert provisions that overrode OpenAI’s ethical commitments. Amodei presented Altman with a ranked list of safety demands, placing the preservation of the merge-and-assist clause at the very top. Altman agreed to that demand, but in June, as the deal was closing, Amodei discovered that a provision granting Microsoft the power to block OpenAI from any mergers had been added. “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) 

In the course of several meetings in the spring of 2023, Altman seemed to waver. He stopped talking about endowing a prize. Instead, he advocated for establishing an in-house “superalignment team.” An official announcement, referring to the company’s reserves of computing power, pledged that the team would get “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date”—a resource potentially worth more than a billion dollars. The effort was necessary, according to the announcement, because, if alignment remained unsolved, A.G.I. might “lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.” 

The twenty-per-cent commitment evaporated, however. Four people who worked on or closely with the team said that the actual resources were between one and two per cent of the company’s compute. Furthermore, a researcher on the team said, “most of the superalignment compute was actually on the oldest cluster with the worst chips.” The researchers believed that superior hardware was being reserved for profit-generating activities. (OpenAI disputes this.) Leike complained to Murati, then the company’s chief technology officer, but she told him to stop pressing the point—the commitment had never been realistic... the superalignment team was dissolved the following year, without completing its mission.

By then, internal messages show, executives and board members had come to believe that Altman’s omissions and deceptions might have ramifications for the safety of OpenAI’s products. In a meeting in December, 2022, Altman assured board members that a variety of features in a forthcoming model, GPT-4, had been approved by a safety panel. Toner, the board member and A.I.-policy expert, requested documentation. She learned that the most controversial features—one that allowed users to “fine-tune” the model for specific tasks, and another that deployed it as a personal assistant—had not been approved. 

Last June, on his personal blog, Altman wrote, referring to artificial superintelligence, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.” This was, according to the charter, arguably the moment when OpenAI might stop competing with other companies and start working with them. But in that post, called “The Gentle Singularity,” he adopted a new tone, replacing existential terror with ebullient optimism. “We’ll all get better stuff,” he wrote. “We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.” He acknowledged that the alignment problem remained unsolved, but he redefined it—rather than being a deadly threat, it was an inconvenience, like the algorithms that tempt us to waste time scrolling on Instagram.

Some people defended Altman’s business acumen and dismissed his rivals, especially Sutskever and Amodei, as failed aspirants to his throne. Others portrayed them as gullible, absent-minded scientists, or as hysterical “doomers,” gripped by the delusion that the software they were building would somehow come alive and kill them. Yoon, the former board member, argued that Altman was “not this Machiavellian villain” but merely, to the point of “fecklessness,” able to convince himself of the shifting realities of his sales pitches. “He’s too caught up in his own self-belief,” she said. “So he does things that, if you live in the real world, make no sense. But he doesn’t live in the real world.”

Yet most of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Six people close to the inquiry alleged that it seemed designed to limit transparency. Some of them said that the investigators initially did not contact important figures at the company. Others were uncomfortable sharing concerns about Altman because they felt there was not a sufficient effort to insure anonymity. “Everything pointed to the fact that they wanted to find the outcome, which is to acquit him,” the employee said. 

Given OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) status and the high-profile nature of the firing, many executives there expected to see extensive findings. In March, 2024, however, OpenAI announced that it would clear Altman but released no report. The company provided, on its website, some eight hundred words acknowledging a “breakdown in trust.” People involved in the investigation said that no report was released because none was written. Instead, the findings were limited to oral briefings.

Many former and current OpenAI employees told us that they were shocked by the lack of disclosure. Altman said he believed that all the board members who joined in the aftermath of his reinstatement received the oral briefings. “That’s an absolute, outright lie,” a person with direct knowledge of the situation said. Some board members told us that ongoing questions about the integrity of the report could prompt, as one put it, “a need for another investigation.”

In a meeting with U.S. intelligence officials in the summer of 2017, he [Altman] claimed that China had launched an “A.G.I. Manhattan Project,” and that OpenAI needed billions of dollars of government funding to keep pace. When pressed for evidence, Altman said, “I’ve heard things.” It was the first of several meetings in which he made the claim. After one of them, he told an intelligence official that he would follow up with evidence. He never did.

“My vibes don’t match a lot of the traditional A.I.-safety stuff,” Altman said. He insisted that he continued to prioritize these matters, but when pressed for specifics he was vague: “We still will run safety projects, or at least safety-adjacent projects.” When we asked to interview researchers at the company who were working on existential safety—the kinds of issues that could mean, as Altman once put it, “lights-out for all of us”—an OpenAI representative seemed confused. “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’?” he replied. “That’s not, like, a thing.”

Altman is not a technical savant—according to many in his orbit, he lacks extensive expertise in coding or machine learning. Multiple engineers recalled him misusing or confusing basic technical terms. He built OpenAI, in large part, by harnessing other people’s money and technical talent. This doesn’t make him unique. It makes him a businessman. More remarkable is his ability to convince skittish engineers, investors, and a tech-skeptical public that their priorities, even when mutually exclusive, are also his priorities. When such people have tried to hinder his next move, he has often found the words to neutralize them, at least temporarily; usually, by the time they lose patience with him, he’s got what he needs. “He sets up structures that, on paper, constrain him in the future,” Wainwright, the former OpenAI researcher, said. “But then, when the future comes and it comes time to be constrained, he does away with whatever the structure was.”

Even people close to Altman find it difficult to know where his “hope for humanity” ends and his ambition begins. His greatest strength has always been his ability to convince disparate groups that what he wants and what they need are one and the same. He made use of a unique historical juncture, when the public was wary of tech-industry hype and most of the researchers capable of building A.G.I. were terrified of bringing it into existence. Altman responded with a move that no other pitchman had perfected: he used apocalyptic rhetoric to explain how A.G.I. could destroy us all—and why, therefore, he should be the one to build it. Maybe this was a premeditated masterstroke. Maybe he was fumbling for an advantage. Either way, it worked.

Review : The English Civil War

Ever since I read Witchfinders last year, I've been hoping to find a more general social history of the Civil War. Gaskill did an excellent job of presenting Matthew Hopkins in his broader, blood-soaked context, of a country already in political and religious turmoil - but more interestingly, of a society going through an intense change of mindset. An all-pervading mythical, stereotypically medieval world view was giving way to a more rational, modern, materialistic perspective : but by no means uniformly or equally, let alone smoothly. 

Couple that with the political parallels to recent events depicted with brilliant prescience in the movie Cromwell, and this era becomes incredibly appealing. Everyone knows the basic outline of Roundheads versus Cavaliers, the absolute monarch versus a fledgling democracy, but this is at best simplistic. As in earlier eras, democracy was not born out of some grand ideological vision, but gradually and largely accidentally. What the Civil War did was unleash an explosion of new, unpredictable ideas. It was a moment of extreme flux, replete with tyrants, hypocrites and idealists alike - and as Diane Purkiss reveals, it could easily have ended very differently.

(I picked up the book without realising that Purkiss is that very strange historian from the telly who has an extremely annoying and bizarre accent. When I discovered this, I couldn't help but mentally read it in her weirdly pretentious voice. Fortunately, I was able to overcome this because she's a far better writer than an orator.)

The English Civil War isn't quite what I was looking for, but gosh(!) it's pretty darn close. It's a bit more haphazard as a sociological history, being more concerned with individual, anecdotal experiences than drawing grand narratives. Sometimes it's a bit of a mess, being needlessly unchronological, with characters introduced hundreds of pages before they actually become relevant, or accidentally referencing things that aren't explained until much later. Like many history books, it has too many named characters who only appear once, making it very hard to know who one should pay attention to, as well as using multiple names for the nobility (e.g. their first name, surname, and title interchangeably). A Cast of Characters and a timeline would have been very welcome, as would some better maps and colour plates.

But all of these are minor irritations. To its credit, it doesn't have a bewildering array of footnotes at the back which one must keep referencing because one in ten are actually worth reading, an all-too-common practise which ought to be punishable by beheading. And though Purkiss does tend to lapse into somewhat confusing descriptions or trivial minutiae, when she writes well (which is more often), she writes very well. Overall, the text is lively and engaging, interpretative and analytic as well as descriptive. This is an attempt to explain why as much as it is describe what. While I would have preferred a few less anecdotes and a bit more big-picture, it's got more than enough of the latter to satisfy me. I give it a very solid 8/10.

The biggest take-home message to me was to depict the war as an essentially religious conflict. Yes, says Purkiss, it did transmute into a conflict about the basic power structure of the kingdom (especially concerned with how rulers should be appointed more than who specifically they should be), and there were some strongly modern democratic leanings of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn would doubtless align with, but it didn't start off this way. Fundamentally, it began with a conflict of Catholics and Protestants - or perhaps more accurately, devout Protestants and some other people who weren't Protestant enough.

Purkiss describes at some length how the conflict began with reforms that were seen as largely too Catholic in a now fervently Protestant majority country. What she doesn't really do is explain what the initial armed rebellion was aiming at. What, in particular, was Charles doing when he left London and raised his standard ? Why was he allowed to leave ? How exactly were the armies mobilised ? With hindsight, letting the king leave seems really, really stupid, so it would have been nice to have some insight into what people were thinking and expecting when this happened. Similarly, one doesn't get much a feeling as to why apparent trivialities like a new prayer book invoked such feelings of extreme hostility - some modern analogies would have helped here.

Much better and more important are the descriptions of what changed. At various points Purkiss describes a sort of reactionary, conservative radicalism : a response to exceptional circumstances to restore normality with extraordinary methods; revolutionary means rather than aims. Only as the conflict evolved did truly radical ideas take hold, for new forms of government become inevitable rather than merely changing the head of state or forcing him to alter course. "They could talk and act radically while their reflexes remained conservative, even reactionary. They backed awkwardly into a revolution they did not intend."

And later :

"It was widely known that Charles had trusted Strafford completely... so Pym said that Strafford was guilty of treason not against the king, but against the constitution. Here again, Pym seems to have reversed accidentally into radicalism because of expediency... Strafford's indictment allowed the Commons to practise talking as if they and not the king embodied English sovereignty. It was to become an acceptable rather than an unthinkable idea."

"[Pym] connected the religious menaces of popery with menaces to Parliament, to property. That afternoon, although it was not obvious to him or anyone else, Pym created the Parliamentarian cause that was to be so bloodily disputed over the next nine years."

What seems to have happened was that there was sufficient alignment between Catholicism of the king and his supporters (or more accurately, insufficiently zealous Protestantism rather than genuine Catholicism) as to cause the initial rift, but once the two sides were separated, it became ever easier to view the conflict itself as being about mode of government. Yet the initial split, according to Purkiss, was based on religion - not on political ideology. The idea of Parliament was not yet formulated enough, nor its actual institution robust enough, to drive the wedge by itself. That was a consequence of the war, not its primary initial cause. 

Likewise did the war spill over into class warfare rather than originally having much to do with egalitarianism versus the elite. Charles' obsession with the Divine Right of Kings (which I was taught in school as being central to the whole conflict) doesn't get even much of a look-in; according to Purkiss, it's all about religion (which, vice-versa, was barely mentioned to me in school).

"The people did not know they were about to fight an 'English Civil War'. Some thought they were beginning a religious war against the Antichrist. A subset of these thought they were fighting a vast conspiracy of Catholics... others that they were fighting to protect Church and State... still others thought that the war was merely a simple and obvious matter of honour... others that they were witnessing Parliament about to curb the excesses which had grown upon the king... others that what was happening was a chance for regions normally excluded from the process of government to make their voices heard... a very few thought the end of the world was coming."

Of course none of this means that the war didn't eventually define itself as the king versus Parliament, or the commoners versus an elite : it certainly did. It's just that that happened very indirectly. In particularly, the enormous relaxation of censorship allowed for the unprecedented mass dissemination of of ideas. It allowed the discussion of completely new ideas, radical alternatives to the centuries old system of government. It also allowed for fake news and propaganda - if anything, even more so than today, since fact-checking was enormously more difficult.

What this led to was a feedback effect. Lack of censorship drove new ideas which gave the prospect of a more egalitarian future a life of its own, which became a self-driving movement against the monarchy more than the Catholics (indeed, many radicals supported religious toleration, in varying degrees). One of the most interesting examples of this self-perpetuating change is... cookbooks :

"The relaxation of censorship and the resulting expansion of print and reading during the war years did not only open the way for political discussion; it also allowed tradespeople to sell their once-secret knowhow to a wider reading public. It might seem odd to describe cookbooks as a product of political liberation, but Hannah Wolley's works were to open a new way of learning to those not born to the trade. They were part of a democratization of knowledge which in turn may have had political impact. Monarchy makes sense in a world where younger servants learn from older servants in a strict hierarchy. Once print made it possible to learn outside that hierarchy, the existence of privileged knowledge and even privilege itself could be called into question." 

Such ideas eventually manifested themselves in movements like the Levellers, a sort of proto-socialist, anti-monarchy ideology, and the Diggers, a more cult-like proto-communism. But while eventually Britain was to get a far more constrained monarchy and more representative society, this was not its moment : not even close. The complex interplay between ideas and events led to a far less linear sequence of events than the popular narrative. Though created by Parliament, the New Model Army became an independent actor in its own right, at one point even occupying London. It was in victory, not instigation, that the war became cast as a drive for the end of monarchy and the rights of the people.

Unsurprisingly, this highly complex (though not truly chaotic) situation actually makes it very hard indeed to establish any heroes and villains. The anti-monarchy Independents were hardly a model of democratic ideals, having far more in common with modern Brexiteers* than genuine parliamentarians :

* The book was published in 2006, so Purkiss herself doesn't make this analogy.

"They were not a majority in any institution except the army. Perhaps they were not even a majority in any town or city. But they made their views known through a bold willingness to challenge anything that ran up against their opinions. They were immeasurably strengthened because they had now achieved their aim of winning the war. True, they did not quite command the Commons, but they were more numerous than they had been... Ideas that had once been unthinkable and certainly unsayable were now held by a significant, vocal, and very active minority."

"They removed ecclesiastical authority altogether. Learning - and especially and Oxford degree, once a passport to a clerical living - became hated signs of Royalist sympathies... Through this process, it came to seem normal to many members of London radical sects to be addressed by people who had no particular qualifications, people who would not get a hearing in the Commons, in town meetings, or in trade guilds. It even came to seem meritorious that a speaker had no qualifications : a sign of purity and even of election.... They had an open structure, too, which itself served as a model for the removal of hierarchy in other arenas. If bishops and priests could very well be abolished, why did anyone need kings and magistrates ?"

The people have had enough of experts ! With delectable irony, Michael Gove would surely feel at home among the Independents. And on this occasion they were, of course, ultimately proven right in some ways : the country of the 17th century was (by modern standards) too elitist and hierarchical by far. 

Not only that, but Parliament seriously buggered things up. Its ill treatment of its own victorious army led the army itself to radicalise and take matters into its own hands. Parliament remained an old boy's club : it was in the Independents and the Levellers where real social change was fomenting. The Army came to see itself as defending liberty not on behalf of Parliament, but actively protecting the people from Parliamentary oppression :

"...early Leveller tracts... almost identified with the king on the grounds that he too had been scorned and dishonoured by Parliament, who 'make the king their scorn and us their slaves.'"

Ultimately, this dealt a hammer blow to the fledgling British democracy :

"A war that had begun when Charles had tried to remove unruly MPs ended with the Army deciding to do the same. Colonel Thomas Pride, with a group of musketeers, forcibly removed one hundred and forty-five Presbyterian MPs, leaving a group of fifty who supported the Army. This was an extraordinary event, an armed coup. It was the end of 'Parliament' as a cause, the end of law and order, but also the beginning of true populism. After all its moderates were removed, the House of Commons was transformed into a kind of kangaroo court."

Here unfortunately is where the book's lack of focus becomes its greatest weakness. While Purkiss gives a good biographical overview of Charles, Cromwell* gets a walk-on part. Purkiss provides only the briefest outline of what happened after the war, so if and how the revolutionary concepts unleashed by the war translated into the later concept of a constitutional monarchy is frustratingly left unexplored - as too are the effects of life under Cromwell's tyranny. This feels almost like a cliffhanger ending : with the dominating narrative by the end having at last become the mode of government, to not explore what happened next is downright strange. 

* And unfortunately what he did in Ireland, which is almost glossed over completely. English history books badly need to cover this.

What is interesting is how much chance seems to have played a role in events. Nothing about the evolution of the war was inevitable. Leveller ideas could have been accommodated to a more reasonable degree than Parliament or Cromwell were willing to tolerate. The Army could have been treated more fairly and so avoided its mutiny. And indeed, Charles could actually have won - or even avoided war altogether :

"Nevertheless, despite all these doubts and difficulties, the terrifying thing about Charles' personal rule is not that it was bound to fail, but that it nearly succeeded. There were tensions, there were fears, even panics; there was also opposition. But these things were common, and had accompanied the Tudor reforms of the monarchy, too; indeed, Elizabeth I was threatened with far greater outbursts of popular dissent than Charles faced before 1642. The Civil War was not bound to occur; it would take a special, exceptional set of circumstances to make it happen."

And this is very much in line with my own take that political rhetoric is often concerned more with what could potentially happen than what actually has happened already. It's not that we fear, say, some merely dislikeable change of legislation, it's that we fear where this will lead. The frightening lesson of history is that sometimes these fears do indeed prove well founded. 

Democracy, for all its flaws, is a precious thing, and its greatest weakness is that it's all too easy to throw away. History sometimes gradually creeps forward and other times lurches spasmodically, sometimes driven by mass revolutionaries and sometimes it's dragged kicking and screaming by the elites - but the moral arc of the universe bends not in any particular direction but only where we will it. So while we would do well not to collapse in despair whenever politics takes a more authoritarian leaning, so too would be do well to point back into history and say, "Look, we're not making this up. We know our concerns are justified because we've seen this happen before. Yes, there are differences between now and then, but there are also similarities. The freedoms we have were hard-won in blood and battle, and we ought to be deeply concerned whenever anyone decides we should surrender them. History isn't an instruction book, but it would be foolish indeed not to consult it at all."

Review : Civil Wars of the Three Kingdoms

My quest to fill in the huge gap in my history knowledge concerning the Civil War has taken a enormous stride with the completion of Trevor Royle's mighty tome, Civil War : The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This 800+ page epic is about as comprehensive as any popular reader like myself is ever going to want.

Previously, I've looked at the war tangentially with Witchfinders and The Ruin of All Witches, as well as more directly at the social side of things in The English Civil War, and in some detail to its aftermath in Providence Lost. But none of these much cover the military stuff, and trying to understand the impact of the war while neglecting the whole bit about tens of thousands of solider lining up to shoot each other feels like something of a rookie mistake.

Civil War makes amends for this in abundance. As both a military and political history it's almost outrageously thorough, to the point where I decided I needed a bit of a break and treated myself to the hardback illustrated version of The Hobbit by way of diversion. Not because I was bored, just because I needed to read something else for a bit. Then I plunged right back in. Civil War is a book which demands your immersion and requires a great deal of time, but it is, I think, well worth it.

The Review Bit 

It's almost impossible to write 800 pages of perfection so let me start with the negatives. There aren't many of these and they're all really quite minor : there's the occasional apparent contradiction*, especially near the start but this seems to fade as the book progresses; though very possibly I just needed time to get used to Royle's writing style. Conversely, there are two stock phrases he repeats, "the times were out of joint" and "would not have been human" which get used ever more frequently towards the end.

* E.g. why should Charles' marriage be considered to be lacking in passion because he didn't have a mistress ? I would have thought the exact opposite ! Likewise someone being described as both "young" and "in middle" life; various other minor things like this.

There are two somewhat more substantial difficulties. First, he doesn't give much in the way of physical descriptions of anything, be that persons or landscapes (at least nothing beyond the most superficial, e.g. the hill was tall and steep), or indeed the capabilities of the military hardware used at the time. This isn't a big deal but it would have enhanced the book to have more of this. Second, a more problematic omission is the lack of a list of cast of characters. With such a necessarily enormous number of protagonists, it's inevitable that it becomes difficult to remember who everyone is, regardless of the quality of the writing*.

* Though it's still not anywhere near the complexity of the Wars of the Roses.

Like many authors, Royle makes the mistake of naming people who really don't need to be named, which makes me try and keep them all in my head when honestly most of them aren't worth it since they only make an appearance for a page or two. Similarly, because the narrative is generally large-scale and political, sometimes individual characters become extremely important but only for a little while, and then the focus moves elsewhere and by the time they re-emerge I've completely forgotten who they are.

Against this, the major narrative is extremely well-written. Royle is adept at knowing when to divert into interesting anecdotes and never dwells excessively on them, always returning to the main theme promptly. In general the style is as clear as a book like this can ever hope to be, which is praise not to be dealt out casually. Chapters are short and focused so you always have a convenient break point, and there are no stupid "footnotes" at the back of the book you have to keep turning to.

But best of all, the balance between presenting the raw facts (as we know them) and the interpretation as to why events happened in the way they did, e.g. getting into the mindset of the various characters, trying to disentangle the major socio-political forces driving the events themselves, is just about perfect. Royle favours giving the facts and generally trying to let them speak for themselves, but provides in my opinion exactly the right amount of his own analysis to keep this interesting and provocative without forcing the book to support any particular agenda. And while it may not be quite the unputdownable page-turner that Dan Jones comparable-length The Plantagenets is, it's usually lively and interesting, occasionally thrilling, rarely dull, never tedious, and always commendably thorough. Managing this in a topic this complex and important is no small achievement.

All in all, the deficiencies are far outweighed by the positives. I'm going to give this one a very solid 8/10. It is, though, quite the tome, and a bit more descriptive, narrative zeal would have sealed it as an easy 9.

The summary bit

I kept overly-extensive notes on this, so much so that if I try and even summarise those, this post will end up unbearably long. So instead I'm just going to pick out the major themes which have stuck with me from memory, mainly things that were either new to me or which I happened to find particularly interesting for whatever reason. Forgive me, then, if I don't attempt a summary of the enormously complex character of Cromwell, but I think that if I were to begin such an undertaking, this post would never be finished. 

I should also note that Royle focuses on the military and political side of things, with not much said about the social aspect (for that, Purkiss' English Civil War is by design much better). The major exception is that he also gives a commendable coverage of the immediate aftermath, and though it's not of course as detailed as Lay's Providence Lost*, it's broader in scope and better describes the context needed to understand the consequences of the conflict.

* Royle only mentions Providence Island in one brief passing sentence; Lay used this for a whole series of chapters and those were by far his worst.

Reasons for the war

Unlike both Purkiss and Lay, Royle sticks closer to the line oft told to children and tourists : that the war was primarily fought for political reasons, rather than being a religious problem that bled out into politics. Sometimes he's quite explicit about that, though he does always acknowledge the heavy religious dimension which the children and tourists are basically never told at all. 

Rather than ignore it completely, Royle simply reverses the priorities compared to the other authors. In his view, it seems that the political tensions provoked the religious disagreements which in turn eventually got everyone so cross that they just had to have a jolly good fight to sort it all out, instead of being the other way around.

Reading between the lines a little, while Purkiss takes the fact that there were abject religious dimensions to the start of the war, Royle would probably say that this too shallow a reading of events, and that this aspect was just a manifestation of the political tensions that had been festering for years : had Charles had the political acumen to better deal with the problems, the differences of faith could very possibly have been accommodated harmoniously. No, in Royle's view it's very much politics which is the root cause here, not a matter of spiritual ideology.

In my totally unqualified judgement this rings true. The religious disputes were all about such utterly trivial minutiae that anyone with any real political acumen ought to have been able to deal with them without difficulty. Unfortunately Charles had precious little of this; his tendency towards political differences and power struggles was to either suppress or ignore them. Still, the bigger lesson for me remains that religion did play a major role here. It definitely was a factor in itself, if only partly independent of the political disputes in play.

Civil/not civil

Newspapers are wont to proclaim the times as being of ever-increasing political polarisation, but I think it's vital to remember that this has always waxed and waned. Anyone saying that things are better or worse "than ever before" had better be aware that such claims are almost certainly no more than rhetorical hyperbole.

In the movie Cromwell, in one early engagement the two sides line up amicably for battle and refuse to start until the appointed time. Royle makes no mention of this specific event, but it's clear this does reflect a real sentiment of the day. While the two sides did of course go to war and were happy to shoot and stab each other to settle their disagreements, initially... there were rules. Captured leaders would be imprisoned and ransomed, or simply fined and released – or even forgiven entirely. Mercy and clemency were expected and received from both sides. Fleeing enemies were not cut down. Civilians were generally not involved. Reconciliation was possible between individuals who happened to find themselves on opposite sides; friends rent asunder could and did forgive each other, even simply agreeing to disagree while maintaining communication throughout the war. As one commander wrote to his opposing friend :

"Hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person... we are both upon the stage, and must act the parts assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities".

This would seem to support Royle's assertion of a politically-driven conflict. That is, in a very literal sense, the primary disagreement was one of specific policy. It wasn't about an ideological world view, not a fundamental, identity or moral-based dispute. After all, it's much easier to forgive someone when they just disagree on the particulars of governmental structure than whether or not it's wrong to murder kittens. The propaganda may have been filled from the outset with high rhetoric, but the actions and communications of ordinary people caught up in the conflict tell a very different story. At least to begin with, at any rate.

In contrast to Purkiss, Royle's view of the war is one primarily of large-scale battles rather than individual disputes. The two views aren't mutually exclusive, however. Purkiss does seem to have neglected a lot of the set-piece battles*, as is quite proper for a social history. But Royle also makes it clear that the classical view of the war as brother-against-brother, fathers-against-sons, did occur, just not from the outset. Only as the conflict dragged on did all sides lose patience and resort to atrocities. By the end there was no question of chivalry or mercy; it became a violent bloodbath in which only might was right and the law was simply ignored, coming to a head, as it were**, with Charles.

* Royle appears to cover almost every single one of the many dozens of such large-scale actions that took place, of course in varying degrees of detail. Purkiss in my view unfairly downplays the importance of these, giving an impression that they were much less common than they actually were.
** Terrible pun intended.

The other very surprising thing I'd never heard of before, which I would never have guessed at, was that it became routine to sell captured soldiers into slavery. Yes, full-on slavery in the New World colonies. I don't think Royle gives the numbers (they may not even be known) but we're certainly talking thousands or more probably tens of thousands. And yes, of course, this pales in comparison to the later industrial-scale atrocity that was inflicted on non-European countries, but I find it remarkable that this is basically never mentioned at all. You just don't think of Englishmen selling fellow Englishmen into slavery. 

I would also have liked to learn more about "Captain Frances Dalziel, bastard daughter of the Earl or Carnwath, the commander of a troop of horsemen who rode under the banner of a black flag sporting a naked figure hanging from a gibbet". She sounds great.

Charles and Cromwell

Royle generally gives little (but not nothing) in the way of character analysis throughout, with the major exceptions (though there are others) of Cromwell and Charles. These are examined in vivid detail. What I found most surprising about Charles was that though often having the political decisiveness of a suicidal sheep, he was actually a perfectly able military commander. He took direct command of armies on several occasions and won victories in the field. He was also, even more surprisingly, a capable administrator too. In the period just before the war when he was ruling without Parliament. the country was getting along just fine, even being in outright prosperity, for some years. The problems came when he was unable to make a choice when both outcomes were disadvantageous, in which case he'd resort to delay, dissembling and flip-flopping. Basically he'd just fall apart and lie about the whole thing afterwards. He was incompetently duplicitous.

And the Cavaliers as a whole don't seem to have been particularly cavalier in the modern sense of the word. Sure, there was their dashing hero, the bold and decisive Prince Rupert, but apart from him ? Nah, not really. Again, in the main the generals were perfectly sensible, and even Rupert wasn't reckless. Bold and decisive he may have been, but he wasn't at all stupid; this was not an era of charging headlong into battle just because honour demanded it.

The other character I have to mention briefly is the tragic figure of Montrose. A singularly brilliant general who led Royalist forces in Scotland to victory after victory, his whole endeavour ultimately fell apart : with Scotland itself seemingly secure, the Scots simply refused to carry on the fight on English soil. Montrose could understand the military situation both strategically and tactically and bend it to his will, but politically... not so much. He doesn't seem to have grasped why the war was being fought or what the Scots were seeking, ultimately consigning him to the status of a mere footnote in history.

On Cromwell, I'm restricting myself to one specific topic here. For a while I've been wanting to understand just what it is about Cromwell that causes the Irish to hate him so, with many documentaries noting this but failing to mention what it was that Cromwell actually did. Royle at last redresses this. He hardly finds Cromwell to be the demon of Irish folklore, but all the same, he clearly did enough that you can understand how and why this perception has come to be the case.

Royle makes it clear that Ireland was treated differently throughout the whole campaign. As elsewhere, there was more at work than geography, making any maps of Royalist and Parliamentarian territories complicated and misleading, with no simple clear splits between the two. There were, in essence, supporters of both sides more or less everywhere, resulting in highly complex shifting allegiances and radically different Royalist treatment of both the Scots and the Irish depending on the circumstances : now unduly harsh, now bizarrely lenient; now people to be conquered, now a vital recruitment pool. Compounding all of this was that while the Royalists were generally Catholic and the Parliamentarians generally Protestant, there was by no means a perfect alignment here. 

But whereas Scotland was in the aftermath dealt with more or less as a full partner, Ireland was treated with oppression; it got none of the rewards that came from the ultimate political stability after the war but suffered even more harshly than other regions during the conflict. Irish causalities were much higher than in the other nations, and here Royle unfairly omits much discussion as to why this should be. He notes that many of the supposed atrocities committed by Cromwell are little more than provable fabrications... but all the same, the way in which Ireland was oppressed, particularly in how its land was divided, and... yeah, Royle presents more than enough to understand why Cromwell remains a figure of hate. One short passage will suffice :

Catholic families were transplanted from their lands in Ulster, Leinster and Munster because they were to be on the losing side and the winners, the English Protestants, had to be rewarded. In pursuit of that policy many thousands of Catholic Irish were also sold into slavery in the West Indies; some of these were vagrants from the main towns, but because women and children were included in their number it added to the feelings of persecution... Catholic worship was outlawed... up to 40,000 were banished.... The use of Irish Gaelic was also banned under earlier statutes and the net aim was to produce an anglicised Protestant society in which all traces of traditional Irish life would eventually disappear.

The word "brutal" hardly feels unfair here. Purkiss to her shame doesn't mention this at all.

New Worlds

Americans love the Magna Carta for some reason, but the Baron's Revolt is hardly a watershed moment in British political history. Not so the Civil War. Here is something that feels like a fulcrum, a pivotal part of history around which the world turned. Here, set paradoxically against a background of slavery, were ideas of freedom and egalitarianism mingled with monarchy, magic and mysticism all mixed with science and empiricism, ancient despots giving way to the as-yet primitive power of the people. It's an astonishing period, the transition between the medieval and the modern, and we need a lot more dramas set in this period and for everyone to shut up about the bloody fucking boring Tudors*.

* I'm being rhetorical, but there are far too many dramas and documentaries alike about Henry VIII which add exactly nothing to the story; even Elizabeth I has been overdone. Conversely, nothing at all is even said about Henry VII (except in Shakespeare's Richard III play) or Bloody Mary.

Royle makes it clear that the Civil War was only one stage in the process, and that the full transition away from absolute monarchy was not really complete until the Glorious Revolution a few decades later. But it was still of profound importance. None of it happened by design. What began as a "crisis by monthly instalments" of a king profoundly lacking in self-awareness eventually allowed truly revolutionary ideals and ideas to flourish, but it wasn't those ideas themselves that initially drove anyone.

The ideas which did emerge, however, are sometimes strikingly similar to modern positions. Here indeed is the birth of liberalism, with a pursuit of individual freedoms, income-based taxation, an insistence on Parliament to act as a safeguard for the safety and liberties of the people. At the Putney debates we see some hints of American ideals. Thomas Rainsborough :

"I think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under."

Later, the Rump Parliament passed acts which Royle himself describes as "using language that presaged the birth of the United States of America a century later" :

That the people are, under God, the original of all just power : that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation; that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the King or House of Peers be not had thereunto.

Other radicals were even more prescient, though distinctly un-American and far more of British liberal sensibilities, calling for the existence of a free health service. In 1649 ! Well, we had to wait a while...

Royle concludes with a brief, direct comparison with the Civil War and the War of Independence, going so far as to compare Washington and Cromwell. Both were real human beings, which means that neither can really be described as a hero or a villain in the truest sense, but people capable of heroics and villainy as the occasion demanded. Royle believes Cromwell was on the verge of accepting the crown when chance intervened to make it impossible; Washington would not have done so. Cromwell espoused liberal ideals (especially religious liberties, see Lay) but had no compunctions about persecuting the Irish or acting with flagrant hypocrisy as a tyrant when the situation turned against him; in America "emancipation did not extent to the black slaves, nor to the native Americans, and there was to be no tolerance for Loyalists... From that vantage point the struggle for freedom loses some of its gloss."

The only brief conclusion I will venture is that all these high-minded ideals were not the driving force of anything. Rather they emerged through bloody struggle and chance. It wasn't that someone decided one day that, "hang on a minute, having a ruler chosen by bloodline is no basis for a system of government" and then set out to overthrow the king. Instead this realisation dawned gradually on the battlefield in a war begun essentially by happenstance. Without a whole series of accidental mistakes, unfair oppression, and leaders at once perfectly able and catastrophically incapable of dealing with the situations put before them, these ideas would never have begun. With an able ruler, the ideas of egalitarianism would have languished in obscurity. 

It took the blood and muck of battle to bring the concept of equality into reality. These ideals were born in a very real world, not the ivory tower, and that means they were from their inception rife with implicit assumptions that some deserved more egalitarianism than others. Hypocrisy and inconsistency were rife. Instead of lamenting this, or cynically viewing these ideals as flawed, I think it speaks very strongly that there must be some fundamental truth behind them. What was found through harsh accident is, after all, still among our most cherished political principles, surviving uncounted upheavals and revolutions for more than three centuries. Like discovering penicillin, the role of accident doesn't mean it isn't true.

Review : Providence Lost - The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate

In the last few years I've become fascinated by the English Civil War. It's a period I don't know much about, but I'm trying to make amends.

I very much enjoy reading ancient and medieval military history*, but in this case I have only the most rudimentary grasp of the conflict itself. No doubt that will eventually be remedied. But the colossal scale of the Civil War seems emblematic of the massive social changes that were raging throughout the country. The bloody but brief witchfinder epidemic points to a flux in thinking from the mystical to the material, a period still rife in superstition but gradually giving way to empiricism and objective reasoning**. The war unleased creativity by reducing censorship, formulating prototypes of socialism and modern-day democracy; an initially religious conflict giving way to a choice over system of government - and of course with some powerful lessons about how that government should be run. Here was a time when few of the modern conventions existed, a key period in history when the British Constitution (such as it is) began to be formulated. There were no rules and a golden opportunity to design a truly republican (small r), democratic government. So how did they fare ?

* It's a good thing I proof-read these, because initially I'd written historical military history. I mean, historical history, for goodness' sake...

** Lucy Worsely has a new documentary about this which presents a different view of the witch hunts than the book review I've linked. Gaskill concentrates on the most famous examples of Hopkins and Sterne, whose reign of terror was brief, and aimed at the most vulnerable in society (not always women) accused of committing often rather petty crimes. Worsely presents a very different view of the background-level witch hunts, which, she says, were sometimes about prominent public figures accused of committing major crimes and with a strong sexist element at work. Furthermore they were enabled by the whole way of thinking of society, whereas Gaskill and Sterne only flourished because of the temporary lawlessness of the War, though they inflicted a much higher rate of victims compared to the more typical witch hunts.

Terribly. That's the short answer according to Paul Lay's Providence Lost, which covers the brief period when Britain was a republic. And there are many reasons for this, from the conflicting philosophies pervading society to the complex characters who found themselves in charge of the whole omnishambles. Naturally I'll cover some of those shortly.

Firstly, it must be said that the book is somewhat bipolar. The first six chapters are, to be frank, no good. Lay presumes an enormous amount of background knowledge for a popular audience which I for one just do not have. He gives no overview of the Civil War whatsoever - a truly bizarre omission ! - and rambles on and on about an expedition to some Caribbean island for no (initially) apparent reason, then gets bogged down in microbiographies of insignificant characters bereft of context. Immensely complex forces and events are glossed over, characters are named ambiguously (Charles Stuart confusingly referring both to Charles I and II), and bizarre phrases ("the mystery that is the Isle of Man") are chucked in without any apparent reason. I was well on the verge of giving up.

Well, I'm glad I didn't. The first chapters are poor indeed, but chapter 7 really turns a corner. From thereon it's excellent. It's insightful, concise, and lucid, unafraid to draw interpretations of what happened and why, whilst giving ample detail as to the events themselves. The complexities of Cromwell's character emerge, set marvellously in context. Why in the world his editor didn't tell him to chuck out the awful chapters 1-6 and write them again I'll never know, but I give nothing but praise for the rest of the book. Overall, I'll give it a solid 7/10. This could easily have been an 8 or even a 9 if the first chapters had been better or the rest had been longer. So much for the sunk cost fallacy.

So, what does this mostly-wonderful book say ? Rather than try and summarise the history, I'll try and extract some interesting themes instead.

Cromwell wasn't a dictator

Lay's view of Cromwell is conflicted : socially liberal but politically authoritarian. In the previous book review, Parliament and the Army were seen to diverge as independent actors. Here, as Protector, Cromwell himself becomes independent from both, sometimes advancing the causes of his key backers but often acting purely in his own interests.

Lay maintains that Cromwell wasn't a dictator in the modern sense, in part simply because of technological constraints of the era : "The early modern state, with its lack of infrastructure and limited communications, was incapable of administering totalitarian government, whatever an individual's ambitions." This is not to say he didn't have some strong authoritarian tendencies - he absolutely did. But there simply did not exist the modern technological capacity for rapid, large-scale monitoring and response. Nor, as we shall see, was there anything like sufficient national unity to ensure Cromwell could get his own way through dialogue, or military power sufficient to force the issue.

In fact Britain in this period was briefly but only technically under military rule - the rule of the major generals. But their inefficacy only reinforces the limits of what was possible. In essence these were regional governors with the power to raise local militias. This was paid for by a tax on the royalists, thus using the state's enemies to fund their own oppression - a clever maneuver possible thanks to its relatively mild nature, imposed on a vanquished enemy who saw no real alternative to Cromwell. 

Ultimately the scheme was a complete failure. Royalists were incapable of providing enough cash to fund the scheme, and while a few governors were (predictably) zealous, others were far more lenient with their opponents. Cromwell himself appears especially gracious in this regard, frequently letting off opponents even from paying fines. And centralised government was simply ill-equipped to deal with many of the problems : governors tried to tackle vagrancy through transportation to colonies, but the government couldn't organise the necessary ships. In the end, most were simply released. This is part of a distinct pattern of largely lacklustre attempts at enforced Puritanical virtue, "generally more heavy-handed than brutal" (though with some important exceptions).

Furthermore the population at large were simply not devout enough for the more busybody "nanny-state" aspects of the plan to ever have much impact :

Examples of inequity are rare, though not because of the mercy of the Puritan commissioners. In truth, the procedures of investigation were often long-drawn-out and there was little support for them among local populations that, on the whole, remained quietly Anglican...There is little evidence that, on their watch, sexual offences were reduced, nor that rural sports were successfully proscribed.

Lay describes the situation overall as a "preference for a blanket of mild tyranny over the chaotic discomforts of anarchy". While Cromwell did broadly support the moral policing efforts of the major generals, albeit with some considerably leniency, socially he personally was much more liberal. His authoritarianism was very real, but in the main it was limited to his dealings with Parliament. It speaks volumes about the man that he saw no irony in trying to impose religious liberty on the British people, expending considerable effort to enshrine such freedoms in the Instrument of Government (an attempt at a written constitution) - if necessary backed by military force :

Parliament's commitment to liberty of conscience was never as sincere or expansive as Cromwell's... Parliament's persistent undermining of the Instrument of Government, which led to the dissolution of the First Protectorate Parliament in January 1655, had convinced Cromwell of a simple undeniable truth : that it was the army more than any Parliament he might call the bulwark of his regime.

And while he frequently called for "healing and settling", he was hardly adverse to stoking the fires of nationalism and conflict if he felt he needed to. He was not a nice man, but - in Britain at least* - he was not much of a despot.

* Lay does not cover his actions in Ireland, because this falls out of the Protectorate period. This is definitely a major weakness of the book, because such a context could change interpretations considerably.

The Protectorate wasn't a theocracy

In my day, schoolchildren were taught that the Civil War was all about Parliament versus the King, i.e. who has ultimate authority. The religious dimension of the conflict was almost absent, except, supposedly, that Cromwell was a staunch Puritan who cancelled Christmas because he was an absolute misery-guts. This is nowhere evident in Lay's account. Attempts at moral policing were implemented, but they were largely a half-hearted failure. 

Cromwell himself emerges as a complete hypocrite. While his lavish public offices of state can perhaps be excused as they were designed to impress visiting European dignitaries, even in private his atheistic tastes were solidly Catholic :

The tapestries at Hampton Court, a particularly expensive form of decoration, depicted the sinful, adulterous figure of Venus. Those in the aptly titled Paradise Room went even further in their dabbling with sinful narratives, celebrating the Triumphs of the Seven Deadly Sins. Cromwell's collection of paintings was no less decadent in its themes... Prominent courtiers also built up substantial art collections, perhaps feeling that Cromwell's own collection gave them the latitude to do so...The Puritan Mary Netheway was appalled by "those monstres".

As for music, while "lascivious anything was out (beyond the confines of Cromwell's private chambers), dancing, at least of the courtly, decorous kind, was a matter 'indifferent' ". At court, games of dice and and cards were "common pastimes". 

The moral vision of the Puritan revolution remained unfulfilled, unachievable in this word, though the polity remained stable and its institutions largely efficient.

Lay's description has the Puritans as a powerful minority, disproportionately represented in government, but with nowhere near enough of a wider base to really alter the social norms. It's not that they didn't try, or even that they wouldn't have welcomed a theocratic form of government : many of them were far more anti-Catholic than Cromwell ever was. It was simply that were unable to accomplish anything.

The quintessential feature of the rule of the major generals was not that it was army rule, nor that it was London rule, but rather that it was godly rule, and it was as such that it was decisively rejected by the great majority of the English and Welsh people.

As Cromwell could be argued to be a would-be dictator, so could Parliament and the army be seen to be would-be theocratic rulers. Neither were at all effective : "the rule of the major generals was never that; they never did rule... their impact [was] 'very slight indeed' - though there is an important caveat to this which I'll return later :

But that was not how it was perceived at the time, and perception in politics is the greater portion of the game.

Religion was however very important, and far more mixed with politics than today. Not only did the Civil War era see the rise of the Levellers and the Diggers, both movements striving for social equality, but it also saw the birth of new religious movements like the Quakers. Like Cromwell, they were a mass of contradictions. Fiercely individualistic, they embraced feelings above expertise, abstained from politics to the point of opposing democracy - yet preached equality for all. Their confusing, anti-Calvinist views did not sit well with the godly rulers, enticing them to harsher laws. While Britain's brief flirtation with republicanism didn't entail a fundamentalist government, that's not to say there weren't strong religious overtones about it, nor should the the general failure of Puritanism be mistaken for a total failure :

It may be that the Republic was harsher on sexual practises than any British government before or since. The 1650 Act laid down the death penalty for adultery by a married woman and her partner, though few were indicted. Death was also the price paid by those judged to have committed incest and prostitutes in the habit of reoffending. This brought English law into line with that of the Old Testament.

Just as Cromwell's lack of outright despotism didn't mean he didn't have a strong authoritarian streak, so should the lack of Puritan dominance not be mistaken for a complete lack of religious-based bigotry in politics.

While I'm trying to divide things into neat little categories for the sake of readability, it would be a mistake to draw too clear a line between Church and State. They were undeniably intertwined. As well as tax-collecting, we've seen that the militias also acted as moral police. But, says Lay, this was at least partly practical, as social gatherings were places where Royalist plots were hatched. Such plots did in fact occur, so this cannot be put down as an excuse or paranoia - yet the simultaneous attempt at enforcing Puritan values, however haphazard, inhomogeneous and ineffectual, should not be forgotten.

There's one section of Lay's text where I think he fails rather badly. He describes at length the prosecution of James Nayler, a prominent Quaker who walked into Bristol one rainy October morning accompanied by a small group of followers singing a nice song about God. For this he was lucky to escape with his life. Only with the greatest of efforts was the death penalty avoided, and his eventual punishment was scarcely less brutal : he was whipped 300 times. Lay does not at all convey what in the world Nayler had done that had people so enraged against him; an analogy to a modern-day equivalent would have been helpful here.

What was Parliament for ?

In Cromwell's attempts to protect religious liberty, however limited in success, we may perhaps glimpse the formation of liberalism proper. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was progressive for its time : it limited first offenders to six months in prison at most, and no more than banishment for repeat offenders. The Instrument of Government, for which Cromwell pushed hard, contained a considerably more liberal article :

That such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion.

Excluding Catholics, mind you. Well, it was 1650, you can't have everything.

Even so, such an extreme prospect caused outrage at Nayler's trial. "God deliver me from such liberty" ranted one MP. One of the major generals said that if the Instrument did indeed contain such religious protections he would "have it burnt in the fire".

Because the Civil War was initially a religious conflict, there was no overarching movement deciding what sort of government the people wanted*. This was not a revolution in the modern sense of overthrowing a dictator to return power to the people - because the very idea that the people should have power had barely taken root. Consequently the situation was much more complicated. Some didn't really want constitutional change, they just wanted a better ruler. Others were radically socialist, while still others held religion dear above all else. There was no one single cause that unified the nation.

* This also goes some way to explaining such harsh responses to proposed religious freedom. The war had been fought over religious matters, and to pretend the various religious orders could now become friends just wouldn't have made any sense. It would be a bit like if the Crusades had ended with everyone just deciding that actually, worshipping anything from Zeus to a giant duck god would be fine after all.

It's testament to Cromwell's skill and gravitas that he managed the chaotic situation as well as he did - even if "as well as he did" actually means "pretty badly". For "pretty badly" is not the "utter catastrophe" it easily could have been. Perhaps we can even excuse some of his more authoritarian tendencies - there being no democratic ideal to strive for and no clear idea as to what the roles of Parliament and Protector were supposed to be, no guiding principle for anyone to follow as to who should rule, let alone how.

If Boris Johnson would liken himself to Winston Churchill*, he has some definite resemblances to the nastier bits of Cromwell too. Given to long, rambling speeches, he repeatedly purged Parliament of his opponents, stoked fear and nationalism, and quite blatantly didn't understand how to work with a democratic Parliament - let along make that dysfunctional institution (for dysfunctional it certainly was) into something capable of running the country. It was Cromwell, and the respect in which he was held by the different groups, which managed that. Not respect for the office of Protector, but the man himself. Still, he was awful :

* Without realising the irony that Churchill was quite the racist and not widely regarded as being a democratic parliamentarian.

Cromwell's speech... was full of fear and warning, conjuring up once again images of 'Papists and Cavaliers' in league with the levelling sort. Much of the speech was devoted to 'security'... he claimed that those who opposed these men [the major generals] of 'known integrity and fidelity' were 'against the interest of England'.

'Being denied just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the sword which we could not otherwise do. And this hath been the spirit of Englishmen.'

It is, as so often with Cromwell, difficult to distinguish between the sincere and the manipulative, the hyperbolic and the realistic. One wonders whether the Protector found it any easier.

As with Johnson, it would be a mistake to present him as a full-throated despot. He did sometimes act purely in Parliament's interest, extending the duration which it sat when he was perfectly entitled to dissolve it by normal procedure. One of his odder moves was to in effect re-instate the House of Lords (though calling it simply the "Other Chamber"). The irony here was not that it was intended to curtail his own power, but that of the Commons - thus giving him, he hoped, more control of proceedings :

It was then that a new distraction had come upon the scene in the form of the Nayler trial, which, although it interrupted the advance of the succession debate, was to profoundly shape the Protector's attitude towards the creation of a second chamber, a successor to the House of Lords, to hold the Commons in check.

'By the proceedings of the Parliament, you see they stand in need of a check or balancing power, for the case of James Nayler might happen to be your case.' 

This, predictably, did not work :

The introduction of the Other House, so eagerly sought by Cromwell, had resulted in fewer regime loyalists in the Commons, which made managing the Hose that little bit harder. Problems were exacerbated when former allies of Cromwell... refused to take their seats in the new chamber, which looked a little too much like the old, and despised, House of Lords, and offered further fuel for the narrative of 'Betrayal'.

The need for a second chamber was real and continues to be so. But Cromwell had woefully misunderstood the nature and purpose of checks and balances. Adding more politicians, unless you really pack them with diehard, fawning loyalists, is liable to just add more disagreements - in the best case leading to more considered decisions, but in the worst case simply to an impasse. Without the second chamber Parliament also acted as a court (in the case of Nayler), and having politicians act as both judge and jury is pretty obviously one hell of a stupid idea.

Not that Cromwell never considered political theory and principle. It's just that he was very much a man of his time and the highly specific circumstances in which he found himself, with short-term considerations necessarily taking precedence over more grandiose ideas. He stipulated four principles of government which were to be strictly enforced : 1) Parliament could not sit permanently and must be elected frequently; 2) Government was to be comprised of Parliament and a "single person"; 3) Liberty on conscience was integral to government; 4) Control of the army was to be shared by Parliament and the Protector.

Here the concept of separation of powers is not more than the germ of an idea. It was a world wrestling with the idea of what the very purpose of government should be, and could not seem to escape the notion that Parliament was literally a process of parley with a ruler (formally this is still the case). That Parliament itself could be the entire system of government doesn't seem to have been on the agenda. It could be a check on the ruler's power at most, but not power itself - and perhaps in part rightly so at the time, since it was hardly a model of efficiency, let alone a bastion of representative democracy.

Strange alliances

No conflict is ever totally black and white. As in the Crusades did the Christians often side with the Muslims in support of specific goals, so during the Protectorate were there occasional alliances between Royalists and Levellers. On the face of it a group striving for social equality is by nature diametrically opposed to one insisting that certain bloodlines are divinely ordained to rule - the unifying factor was their opposition to Cromwell.

While these groups did occasionally join forces to become curious but genuinely dangerous bedfellows, Cromwell tended to exaggerate the threats. There was never any credible threat of foreign invasion during the Protectorate. For all its political failings, the basic institutes of State continued to function - political disturbance never translated into any significant unrest. In particular, Britain had a formidable and battle-tested military.

Referencing once again the unholy alliance of Royalists and Levellers, the declaration referred to a 'new and standing militia of horse'... The new tax was imposed on 'the whole of the royalist party, because the insurrection evidently involved the whole party by implications'. And yet this was despite the fact that many, perhaps most, Royalists passively accepted Cromwellian rule, if only because of the lack of any realistic hope of an alternative.

The truth is, Cromwell's rule was nowhere near as insecure as he imagined, or perhaps rather pretended it to be. A first-class intelligence network and strong army and navy made any threat from overseas implausible, while opposition within tended to be resentful and passive rather than optimistic and proactive.

Why exaggerate the threat ? Was Cromwell feeling genuinely paranoid and insecure ? Possibly. There are two reasons why this might be the case. First, Calvinist Protestantism lends itself very easily to monumental levels of insecurity :

Every event, major or minor, was to be interpreted within the overall plan of God's providence. An Essex minister sympathetic to the Protectorate recoreded his belief that the death of one of his children was due to his 'unreasonable playing at chess'... It was a surveillance society of the soul and it is no wonder it cultivated anxieties and paranoia.

The concept of a tireless interventionist and inescapable God might be compared to modern social meda.... Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are realms of round-the-clock surveillance, where one's thoughts and actions... are subjected to constant comparison and judgement. But one can opt out of social media, however addictive. There was no such option in the world God had created, nor in the next.

A heck of an analogy ! Second, and related, the failure of the 'Western Design' - a special military operation to annoy the Spanish in the Caribbean, which was poorly conceived and defined - would easily feed into this ever-watchful mindset. Even without the Calvinist philosophy, the failure of a major military project would give any ruler pause for thought. 

So it's at least possible that Cromwell really did misjudge the threats. But another explanation is that, just like in modern times, it behoves the ruling side to portray themselves as under attack. Charitably, this can be because of their own insecurities, aware their foundations are thinner than they'd like. Alternatively, but not mutually exclusively, having an external enemy to rally against is a great way to enforce group solidarity, preventing - or at least reducing - the prospect of the group fragmenting. My suspicion is that Cromwell, despite his religious hypocrisy*, was more than canny enough a political operator that this latter explanation is more likely. Perception is, after all, the name of the game in politics.

* "Puritanism and hypocrisy are natural partners", says Lay. And given this surveillance mindset, one can understand why : this level of repression is unnatural and self-destructive.

Trapped

I've likened Cromwell to Johnson, but this analogy should not be pressed very far. Cromwell, unlike Johnson, was brilliant. But the British republic was a fleeting, momentary thing. On this death, his son made a surprisingly good go of things considering he was "the worst prepared head of state in British history" (and incidentally, Richard Cromwell is the second-longest-lived head of state after Elizabeth II - it's just that unlike virtually every other ruler, he was able to abdicate and live a quiet life afterwards). Still, only a few short months afterwards, the experiment was over.

The impression from Lay is that everyone was trapped in the system. While individual Puritans made a determined - and occasionally brutal - attempt to enforce their ideology on the masses, they were nowhere near successful enough to overturn social conventions. Likewise the Protectorate system was too haphazard to ever work, too much dependent on the character of Cromwell and barely at all founded in philosophical or political principle. Once again, remembering the initially religious nature of the conflict makes this much easier to understand. Since few had actually set out to overturn the monarchy, there was little or no desire for a republic as the driving force in the country at large.

It does not seem too much of an oversimplification to state that the Protectorate was a monarchy by another name. The whole basis of government was the system of parlaying with the ruler. Without a movement to change the nature of the constitution, the easiest solution by far was simply to replace the king with someone else.

Or rather, the King, with a capital K. For monarchy had managed to cultivate an air of mystique that the title of Protector was unable to usurp. Everyone could see the Protector got to his position by merit - and there's nothing much divine about that (Calvinism notwithstanding). Whereas the King... he got there because God himself appointed him. Even in those who didn't buy into the Divine Right, kingship contained an almost mythological power that stretched back centuries. The title of Protector had no such associations.

More prosaically, the need for an individual head of state was deeply ingrained. More than that, the role of the king, and the limits of his divine power, were well-known, even if those limits were expansive. The Protector need not have such limits at all, a prospect many found distinctly uncomfortable :

Men... attended meetings in Whitehall in which the Protector would listen to their arguments as they sought to tie him down to the ancient office of monarch and restrict his personal rule to explicit English law, refined over centuries. Were the title placed on Cromwell's head, they urged, the people would 'know your duty to them, and they their duty to you... the people do love what they know.'

Cromwell was offered but refused the crown, apparently out of a sincere - on this occasion - religious belief, that God would have made it known if he should accept. He went further, endlessly procrastinating over the issue of succession until a hereditary solution was essentially forced on the system because nobody had any better ideas. But in every other respect he was King Oliver in all but title. The political circle of kingship simply could not be squared with the chaotic mass of conflicting revolutionary demands, and monarchy returned by default.

Conclusions

To me it feels like the Civil War was more the consequence than the cause of the massive social changes occurring in 17th-century Britain. Social norms were changing, but unevenly and incoherently. The country was pulling itself in different directions and nobody managed to lead a movement strong or persuasive enough to entirely subsume all the others. Reading Lay, all the major protagonists, Cromwell included, feel trapped by systemic forces they were unable to break.

Was a more democratic system even possible ? I'm not at all sure. Direct democracy would have been simply impossible, and certainly totalitarian despotism wouldn't have had any easy time of it. A representative democracy might, and I stress might, have been more feasible. But there was little or no underlying social movement to instigate it - it was simply never going to happen. And whatever Parliament's democratic elements that it did have were not nearly enough to render it a capable system of government. Too often still the notion persists that democracy of any kind is magically and literally inexplicably better than all of systems, something I think has been refuted over and over again. Democracy, it goes without saying, is essential in certain contexts, just as other methods of judgement are equally essential in other contexts.

Cromwell's Protectorate made the best of an extraordinarily complicated situation. The Instrument of Government wasn't the only attempt at a constitution, but it wasn't at all clear any sort of replacement would have helped. Years back an American associate told me that Britain should have a constitution to protect itself from dictators... well, we got rid of Johnson, however belatedly, without resort to anything except convention, whereas America had to endure Trump until he was finally beaten electorally (January 6th notwithstanding).

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying the British system is perfect - it isn't, it's shite. It's probably quite a bit better variety of shite than the American model (arguably, an irrational system of government is better able to handle man's irrational nature; the American model presumes too highly of people), but that's not saying much. My point is, the law is not the ultimate defence against tyranny. In the case of the Civil War, republicanism transmuted to de facto monarchy and then actual monarchy all too easily. As for Cromwell himself, arguably a would-be tyrant, the only thing that stopped him was his demise.