The Virtual Stoa

There just had to be something on beavers in Mandeville. I knew it. And as one of those academics who goes around telling as many people as will listen that the key to understanding the history of political philosophy is to understand the ways in which it used to be a discourse about anger-management, but then became a series of arguments about pride, I’m very pleased to see that this latter is the context in which Mandeville introduces this particular mammal du jour:

And as in these, Pride is overlook’d, because industriously conceal’d, so in others again it is denied that they have any, when they shew (or at least seem to shew) it in the most Publick manner. The wealthy Parson being, as well as the rest of his Profession, debarr�d from the Gaiety of Laymen, makes it his Business to look out for an admirable Black and the finest Cloth that Money can purchase, and distinguishes himself by the fulness of his noble and spotless Garment; his Wigs are as fashionable as that Form he is forced to comply with will admit of; but as he is only stinted in their Shape, so he takes care that for goodness of Hair, and Colour, few Noblemen shall be able to match ‘em; his Body is ever clean, as well as his Clothes, his sleek Face is kept constantly shav’d, and his handsome Nails are diligently pared; his smooth white Hand and a Brilliant of the first Water, mutually becoming, honour each other with double Graces; what Linen he discovers is transparently curious, and he scorns ever to be seen abroad with a worse Beaver than what a rich Banker would be proud of on his Wedding-Day; to all these Niceties in Dress he adds a Majestick Gate, and expresses a commanding Loftiness in his Carriage; yet common Civility, notwithstanding the evidence of so many concurring Symptoms, won�t allow us to suspect any of his Actions to be the Result of Pride; considering the Dignity of his Office, it is only Decency in him what would be Vanity in others; and in good Manners to his Calling we ought to believe, that the worthy Gentleman, without any regard to his reverend Person, puts himself to all this Trouble and Expence merely out of a Respect which is due to the Divine Order he belongs to, and a Religious Zeal to preserve his Holy Function from the Contempt of Scoffers. With all my Heart; nothing of all this shall be call�d Pride, let me only be allow�d to say, that to our Human Capacities it looks very like it…

This would be a nice segue to Adam Smith, had he talked about beavers in the passage on licentious systems in the Theory of Moral Sentiments — but he didn’t, and beavers only make an appearance in The Wealth of Nations as an illustration of the labour theory of value, and as one in a long list of commodities.

“These last weeks at Turin, where I shall stay till June 5th, have turned out better than any I have known for years, above all more philosophic. Almost every day for one or two hours I have packed such a pitch of energy as to be able to view my whole conception from top to bottom; so that the immense multiplicity of problems lies spread out beneath me, as though in relief and clear in its outlines. This requires a maximum of strength, for which I had almost given up hope, It all hangs together; years ago it was already on the right course, one builds one’s philosophy like a beaver, one is forced to and does not know it. But one has to see all this, as I have now seen it, in order to believe it.”

That’s from a letter to Brandes, 4 May 1888, quoted over here.

And now for a bit of wholesome Scottish verse:

When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,
He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown;
But now he has gotten a hat and a feather,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!

Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu’ sprush,
We’ll over the border, and gie them a brush;
There’s somebody there we’ll teach better behaviour,
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!

Over here.

No, one last, last one:

Come tal volta stanno a riva i burchi,
che parte sono in acqua e parte in terra,
e come l� tra li Tedeschi lurchi
lo bivero s’assetta a far sua guerra,
cos� la fiera pessima si stava
su l’orlo ch’� di pietra e ‘l sabbion serra.

– Inferno, XVII, 19-24.

Hamlet: Then saw you not his face?
Horatio: O, yes, my lord! He wore his beaver up.

Hamlet, I.2.OK, this is getting silly. I’ll stop now.

From ths History of Animals, 8:6:

Some wild quadrupeds feed in lakes and rivers; the seal is the only one that gets its living on the sea. To the former class of animals belong the so-called castor, the satyrium, the otter, and the so-called latax, or beaver. The beaver is flatter than the otter and has strong teeth; it often at night-time emerges from the water and goes nibbling at the bark of the aspens that fringe the riversides. The otter will bite a man, and it is said that whenever it bites it will never let go until it hears a bone crack. The hair of the beaver is rough, intermediate in appearance between the hair of the seal and the hair of the deer.

Not bad at all.

Yup, it was Pliny the Elder alright, Natural History 8, 47. Here’s the Latin:

Easdem partes sibi ipsi Pontici amputant fibri periculo urgente, ob hoc se peti gnari; castoreum id vocant medici. alias animal horrendi morsus arbores iuxta flumina ut ferro caedit, hominis parte conprehensa non ante quam fracta concrepuerint ossa morsus resolvit. cauda piscium his, cetera species lutrae. utrumque aquaticum, utrique mollior pluma pilus.

And here’s the splendid English translation of 1601 by Philemon Holland:

The Bievers in Pontus gueld themselves, when they see how neere they are driven, and bee in danger of the hunters: as knowing full well, that chased they bee for their genetoires: and these their stones, Physicians call Castoreum. And otherwise, this is a daungerous and terrible beast with his teeth. For verily, hee will bite downe the trees growing by the river sides, as if they were cut with an axe. Looke where he catcheth hold of a man once, he never leaveth nor letteth loose untill hee have knapped the bones in sunder, and heard it cracke againe. Tailed hee is like a fish, otherwise he resembleth the otter. Both those beasts live in the water altogether, and carrie an haire softer than any plume or downe of feathers.

That’s probably enough Beaver-Blogging for one morning. I’ll get back to Kitten-Blogging soon.

There’s quite a bit more interest in beavers among the readers of the Virtual Stoa than I think I had anticipated. So, to attempt to sate your demand for round-the-clock beaver-blogging, here’s chapter 19 of Gerald of Wales’s 12th century classic, The History and Topography of Ireland (which featured in the Virtual Stoa eighteen months ago). Don’t be misled, by the way, by his remark about how “Ireland has badgers but not beavers” into wondering why the beaver features in a book about Ireland. It’s not that kind of book. It’s not the bit about the testicles, that I clearly misremembered in comments below. Perhaps that’s Pliny, or some Roman writer.

The beaver and its nature

Beavers use a similar contrivance of nature [to that of badgers, discussed earlier - Ed.]. When they are building their homes in the rivers, they use slaves of their own kind as carts, and so by this wonderful means of transport pull and drag lengths of wood from the forests to the waters. In both kinds of animal (badger and beaver) the slaves are distinguished by a certain inferiority of shape and a worn bare patch upon their backs.

Ireland has badgers but not beavers. In Wales beavers are to be found only in the Teifi river near Cardigan. They are, in the same way, scarce in Scotland.

One should remark that beavers have wide tails, spread out like the palm of the human hand, and not long. They use them as oars in swimming. And while the whole of the rest of their body is very furry, they are entirely free from fur on this part, and are quire bare and slippery like a seal. Consequently in Germany and the northern regions, where beavers are plentiful, great and holy men eat the tails of beavers during fasting times - as being fish, since, as they say, they partake of the nature of fish both in taste and colour.

But about these and their nature, how and with what skill they build their settlements in the middle of rivers, and how, when pressed by an enemy, by the loss of a part they save the whole - a contrivance most commendable in an animal - will be more fully explained when we come to deal with the geography and description of Wales and Scotland, and the origin and nature of the people of each. We shall find another opportunity of doing this, and to another purpose, with God’s help and if life be spared…

[Gerald of Wales snippet from the Penguin ed., translated by John O’Meara, pp.48-9.]

Over here.

Kieran Healy started a discussion of Library Thing over at Crooked Timber yesterday, which I’ve found to be a tremendous facility. And, quite by chance, Kieran’s post was well timed, appearing just when I’d pretty much finished the basic catalogue of 1,930 items, with ten years worth of boring Fabian Society pamphlets being the last big thing to do. (Three of them, excitingly, by Paul “The Thinker” Richards! And two of them by Pollard!)

I’ve wanted to produce a catalogue of my books for a while now, because I’m that kind of person; and this website got going at exactly the right time for me, just after I’d moved all my books from one office to another at the end of the summer vacation, bringing a lot of them home to sit on some new bookshelves (the shelves that Andromache’s sitting on here), and they still need a great deal of sorting out in both places. I’m also going to have quite a bit less money for buying books in the months to come, for various reasons, than I’ve had over the last few years, and so this is a good time to think more about what I already own, and to read some of the titles which, inexplicably, I’ve never got around to reading up till now…

I’ve stuck the LibraryThing blogwidget (that’s a good word) down on the sidebar (scroll down), because that’s quite fun.

And now — how best to catalogue the journals…?

Over here.

David Widgery, International Socialist, East End GP, a key figure in Rock Against Racism, editor of the vital anthology, The Left in Britain, 1956-1968, among other books; born 1947, died absurdly young on 26 October 1992. Some writings are here.

Alright, I give up. What has happened to Tim Collins CBE x-MP since losing his seat at the election? Google’s no bloody good, as it just serves up billions of pages about Colonel Tim Collins, but I’m not interested in him.

The demolition of the old Lucy’s factory in Jericho is well underway, to make room for more of the kind of houses that you can see in the second picture (or over here). These photos aren’t very good - the light was poor, and the battery in my camera was dying - but I wanted to make sure I got some pictures before the shell of the building gets knocked down, which I suppose may be any day now.

Anyone know what’s going on here? There hasn’t been any fresh news reporting, according to Google News, since 12 October. Has there been some kind of adjournment, or are we just waiting for the judges to deliver a verdict? I tried the Court Service website, but couldn’t find this case anywhere in the listings.

Actually, I haven’t been dressed up like this since I did my finals, back in 1995. Although quite a bit of gown-wearing goes on among the academic staff here in Oxford, we hardly ever have to put on the all the contents of the academic dressing-up box; and on the rare occasions I’ve been officiating at university exams, somehow I’ve managed to discharge my duties without the aid of a mortar-board. Still, this is what I’d look like if (a) I were in full regalia and (b) were made out of Lego.

The facility for you to do the same is over here. [via]

(And if you’re interested in more pics of people in academic dress, Jo Salmon’s got the links. Apparently the university’s just matriculated thousands of new bloggers.)

UPDATE [4pm]: And the same Jo Salmon has produced a fantastic self-portrait of herself, in lego, too. It’s unmistakably her.

Louis Althusser, French Marxist philosopher who strangled his wife, H�l�ne Rytman, on 16 November 1980; born in Algeria, 16 October, 1918; died in Paris, 23 October, 1990. Some texts are here.

Do make sure, by the way, to read his autobiography L’avenir dure longtemps (The Future Lasts a Long Time), which is a terrific read for anyone interested in French academia, Marxist philosophy, or what it was like to be on the receiving end of electric-shock therapy in the 1950s (and, let’s face it, we’re all interested in at least one of these).

This what some members of Hizb ut-Tahrir have been saying to Harriet Harman, according to Nick Cohen:

‘We’re not a part of British society,’ they told her. ‘We stay here like guests in a hotel.’

If that’s what they think, there’s nothing to worry about at all. Guests have to abide by all the rules of the house.It’s also seems to me to be a less politically subversive position than authoritative Christian teaching on the same subject. Right through City of God, St Augustine�s opinion is that the “civis civitatis Dei“, the citizen of the city of God, must act with respect to the state as if s/he were a �peregrinus�, a Latin word that is usually translated in this context as �pilgrim�. And that makes a certain amount of sense: Christians are, on this view, to treat their time on earth as a pilgrimage through a vale of tears on their way (with God’s grace) to a better place in the hereafter.

But the translation of �peregrinus� as �pilgrim� always seems to me to be a little misleading, bypassing a lot that is most interesting about the word, and it�s worth digging out the major meaning the Latin word bears � a peregrinus is someone who comes from foreign parts, a stranger, or an alien. I�m rather drawn to the identification of the peregrinus with the modern refugee or asylum-seeker, the person who doesn�t feel welcome, or feel they quite belong in the country in which they find themselves � and, of course, there is no asylum which the state can offer to Augustine�s peregrini: they are in search of asylum, of freedom from strife, but this in a world to come.

So on the Augustinian view, the Citizens of the City of God are not to embrace the state or the nation, to internalise its values as theirs, or find any joy in its successes. They put up with it. They tolerate it. They keep it at arm�s length. Harriet Harman would probably disapprove of this attitude. If they are anything as dignified as guests in a hotel, it’s probably the crummy bed and breakfast the local authority put them in while waiting to hear the outcome of their deportation hearing, with rising damp and a hostile local population outside.

But then there’s a further twist. Harman’s question to the chaps from Hizb ut-Tahrir which prompted the reply about the hotel, apparently, was this one: “You’re British citizens. Shouldn’t you try to play a part in British society?” What would Augustine say?

Augustine argued, as I’ve suggested, that Christians should think of themselves as not-particularly welcome foreigners in the political communities in which they found themselves living, but he also argued that that shouldn’t stop them holding offices of responsibility in that society. Indeed, the example he uses is of sitting as a magistrate and authorising torture (a standard practice in criminal investigations back in the fourth and fifth centuries).

In one of the most striking passages in Book XIX of City of God, Augustine tells us that judges can never see the consciences of those they judge (only God can do that), which means that judges are

�often compelled to seek the truth by torturing innocent people merely because they are witnesses to the crimes of other men. And what of torture applied to a man in his own case? Here, the question is whether he is guilty or not; but he is tortured even if he is innocent… For this reason the ignorance of the judge is often a calamity to the innocent… And when the accused has been condemned and put to death, the judge still does not know whether he has slain a guilty man, or an innocent one…�

And then Augustine asks the key question:

�Given that social life is surrounded by such darkness, will the wise man take his seat on the judge�s bench, or will he not venture to do so? Clearly, he will take his seat; for the claims of human society, which he thinks it wicked to abandon, constrain him and draw him to his duty�

The right path is �to acknowledge that the necessity of acting in this way is a miserable one: if he hated his own part in it, and if, with the knowledge of godliness, he cried out to God, �From my necessities deliver Thou me�.What the earthly city is needed to accomplish is to help secure an earthly peace, which, while it is but a shadow of the heavenly peace the �peregrini� will enjoy when they finally reach the place which really can offer them asylum, is still an important good, not least because it enables the Church Militant to preach its mission to the world more effectively. And this is why Augustine also offers an account of a just war in the passages that follow this one, which is a war which is still wretched and miserable and violent and detestable � that�s important, and war should never be romanticised � but one which can nevertheless be a permissible or even necessary means to the valuable end of terrestrial peace.

So his isn�t an argument about how Christians should detach themselves completely from politics. Christ himself may have made such an argument � it�s not really clear � and the earliest Christian Fathers argued strenuously that Christians should have nothing to do with powerful secular institutions, such as the Roman state. But Augustine always set his face against Christians who counselled withdrawal from the world of affairs; he took very seriously the idea that Christ had enjoined upon the Church a mission to the world, and that Christians had to engage with the world and not withdraw into isolated communities of the virtuous in the desert (Donatism). In Augustine�s vision politics is a necessary evil. Real value lies elsewhere � in religion, in good Christian living, in following the divine commandments, and so on. But politics can�t be escaped altogether, and we shouldn�t seek to try.

I wonder what either Harriet Harman or the militants of Hizb ut-Tahrir make of that.

Curious about the vintage of David Cameron’s recent hawkish rhetoric when it comes to the struggle formerly known as the GWoT, I played with Google for a few minutes.

Writing in tehgrauniad on 18 February 2003 about the forthcoming vote in the House of Commons, Cameron remarked that his party’s then leader, Iain Duncan Smith had been “statesmanlike, rather than opportunistic, and given staunch support to the prime minister”. But he went on to say that while “most Tories back his view”, he described four groups who didn’t, and he aligned himself squarely with the last of these, whom he called “the confused and uncertain”.

The confused and uncertain weren’t peaceniks, Cameron stressed, but they were only “prepared to vote for war in the right circumstances”. Four circumstances were specifically mentioned in what followed. First, “there may be links between President Saddam and terrorist organisations, including al-Qaida”, although apparently the affair of the dodgy dossier was persuading some of the C and the U that there might not be. On the other hand, second, the C and the U had no doubt that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical warheads, and a growing arsenal of missiles with which to deliver them.” And in the third and fourth places, he thought that “many of us will not support preemptive war unless Blair can produce either compelling evidence of the direct threat to the UK, or a UN resolution giving it specific backing” but that “The signs are that he hasn’t got the first and won’t get the second”.

Roughly speaking, then, we’ve got a man who didn’t agree with everything that Iain Duncan Smith was saying (otherwise he would surely have aligned himself with his leader in this article), and who presumably (I’m guessing a bit here) largely voted for the war because he believed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Cameron’s more recent rhetoric on the SFKatGWoT is now utterly different.

So the question is, what changed? This seems to make Cameron one of the very small number of people who has got much more hawkish on SFKatGWoT programme-related activities over the last 48 months, moving from being “confused and uncertain” to, well, sounding a lot like Tony Blair. I can guess at any number of explanations, but if anyone thinks they know what the answer might be, do please write something in the Comments.

Enkidu has what seems to me to be a conventional set of cat noises: he’s got a good “miaow”, which can be made in a number of different ways, in order to express different moods. Andromache, by contrast, has a much wider repertoire of cat noises, including clicks and whirrs and a variety of things that aren’t quite honks or buzzes, but for which there aren’t really words in English, in addition to mews and miaows. Is this a boy-girl thing, or is Andromache just weird?

Here’s Enkidu, with collar-and-bandage, taking it easy a few minutes ago:

And here’s Andromache, keeping him company in his Attic exile, which is very nice of her:

My hunch at the moment is that in a run-off before the Great British Tory Public, Cameron beats Davis, Davis beats Fox, and Fox beats Cameron.

Back in 2001, my parallel hunch was that IDS beats Clarke, Clarke beats Portillo, and Portillo beats IDS.

It may very well be that I like to construct these parallel circles more than I’ve got any kind of insight into the contest. Probably. And given the various trumpetings of Cameron in polls and the press in the last few days, I’m not sure how confident I am that Fox could beat Cameron.

But you can sort of see how the logic of all of this is supposed to work, as the various candidates neutralise one of the other’s supposed strengths: Cameron can play the telegenic youth card against Davis but not Fox; Davis can harvest the non-headbanger vote against Fox but not against Cameron; Fox can get the right-wing vote united against Cameron but not against Davis.

Which means that if I’m right, and if Cameron’s guaranteed a place in the run-off, then the only way to stop him is for Davis supporters to turn en bloc to the doc, as it were, later this afternoon. (But I’m probably not right.)

It’s marvellous entertainment.

Samora Machel, FRELIMO leader and independent Mozambique’s first President. Born 1933, died 20 October 1986.

Arthur Henderson, one of the founding fathers of the British Labour Party, born 13 September 1863, died 20 October 1935.

Eugene Debs, American socialist leader and Presidential candidate; born 5 November 1855, died 20 October 1926. “I don’t want to rise from the working class. I want to rise with the working class”. Links to several of his writings here.