The Virtual Stoa

Andromache, earlier this morning:

This is what you miss if you don’t subscribe to the BBC Oxfordshire News RSS Feed!

I read through Martin Amis’s long piece in yesterday’s Observer, and was struck by one thing in particular: he writes in the third part that

The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

It’s a while since I flipped through a book called The Camel and the Wheel by Richard Bulliet that deals with the fascinating story of the disappearance of wheeled transport from the post-Roman Middle East, but I don’t remember the story there having much to do with the “intellectual autarky” of the Islamic world, and a glance at this article, in which Bulliet summarises his argument, suggests that my memory’s working along the right lines.

So is anyone seriously making the case against Bulliet that Muslim “intellectual autarky” (rather than the good old-fashioned historical materialist reasons of geography, political economy and camels) was a major cause of the collapse in the use of the wheel (whose decline, in any case, predated the rise of Islam), or is this just becoming something people like Bernard Lewis and Martin Amis can say in order to make the Islamic world sound more unreasonable than it in fact was?

Christian Rakovsky, Bulgarian Communist, born 1 August 1873 (old style), put on trial in Moscow in 1938 and shot, 11 September 1941. More here, and some of his writings here.

Anna Lindh, Swedish social democrat; born 19 June 1957, assassinated 11 September 2003.

Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, b. 17 April 1894, d. 11 September 1971.

Salvador Allende, President of Chile: born 26 June 1908, died 11 September 1973 in the violence surrounding the coup which brought General Pinochet to power.

Enkidu, at full stretch:

After a medium-sized gap and a transtlantic crossing, Sarah has started blogging at Just Another False Alarm again.

Gerrard Winstanley, English Digger, b. 1609, d. 10 September 1676. There’s some useful stuff on the Diggers collected here, with links to some of the classic tracts. St George’s Hill is in large part given over to golf nowadays, which is sad.

Welcome to the second incarnation of the Virtual Stoa.

I’ve finally left Blogger, after five-and-a-half years, not because it was irritating me, as it has irritated so many thousands of other bloggers in the past, but for a couple of other reasons. First, the old Enetation comments system that I’d been using was running very slowly indeed; and, second, I was approaching the limit of my quota of disk space on the Oxford University server, and would have had to do something before too long, anyway. I could have just republished the whole thing on blogspot.com, I suppose, and enabled the Blogger comments system, but instead I’ve decided, at long last, to experiment with a different software package for running these pages, and WordPress was the one that everyone I spoke to seemed to recommend.

I hope the transition is a reasonably smooth one. It’s going to be far too much work to move all the discussions from the old comments sections over to this site, I’m afraid, so if you’re weird enough to want to spend your time reading old Stoa comments threads, you’ll have to do it back at the old site, and you’ll just have to put up with slow-opening comments-boxes.

But I have imported the old posts to this site, to create the illusion of continuity, and I’ll tidy up these archives a bit in the days and weeks to come. (If you scratch around in them, you’ll see that the bulk of the posts have numbers instead of titles attached to them, and the foreign diacriticals have gone haywire.)

Thanks a lot to all the bloggers I emailed over the last few days with technical questions of one kind or another: I hope I wasn’t too troublesome, and the advice you all gave has been extremely valuable in helping me get my bearings in the adjustment to post-2001 blogging technology. (You know who you are.)

I expect I’ll be fiddling with the site design a bit, so don’t worry if the appearance wobbles around a bit from day to day. I’m quite pleased with this general look (or ‘theme’, as WordPress insists on calling it), but do drop me a note if it looks ghastly on whatever browser you’re using to view the site.

(I told you this was going to be fun.)

A number of bloggers have recently expressed distaste for the way politics is being covered in this country. Chris Dillow pre-empted the others last week (and is thereby pretty much exempt from the criticism that follows), and he was joined yesterday by Tom Hamilton, Antonia Bance, some chap called Paulie and Bloggers4Labour. Generalising, but, I hope, not too unfairly, they seem to want less media froth and speculation over Tony Blair’s exit plans, and more earnest in-depth coverage of the issues underpinning contemporary public policy.

In my earnest way, I often agree with something like this point of view, and I’ve generally been able to motor through a copy of the Observer pretty fast, as once you ignore the Andrew-Rawnsley-style articles based on what unnamed friends of the Prime Minister are saying off the record, and so on, then there usually isn’t a great deal left to detain me, unless there’s a row involving umpire Hair or Floyd Landis’s urine or something compelling like that to fill up a couple of pages in the Sports pages.

But it seems (to me at least) odd to complain about the coverage of the political soap opera precisely on the day that it stopped being about unattributable briefings, et cetera, ad nauseam, and became something quite different, with names on letters being sent to Number Ten, and even members of the government breaking ranks to tell Blair his time is up. People are still using the euphemisms of the day, of course, with discussion of “timetables” and “orderly transitions”, but it seems to me something important changed yesterday, and the media is quite right to take it very seriously indeed. (And the leaked Downing Street memo about Blair’s farewell tour taking in Songs of Praise and so on was very, very funny, whether it turns out to be a spoof or not.)

The narrative of high politics — call it soap opera if you want, but acknowledge that soap opera at its best can be gripping — has a few highlight episodes, and they often involve changes at the top of the governing party between elections: Eden in 1956/7, Macmillan’s resignation in 1963, Wilson’s in 1976, the wonderful political year that was kicked off by Nigel Lawson’s resignation in 1989 and which culminated in November 1990 with the fall of Thatch. These episodes are just as important to shaping the kind of government we get in this country as anything — well, almost anything — that happens in general elections. And given that one of them is now well underway and in full swing, it’s time to sit back and enjoy the show.

(Of course, if John Reid emerges as Prime Minister, then it’ll be time to leave the country. But I still think that’s quite unlikely.)

(I should add that I don’t really watch telly at all, except for cricket and cycling and the occasional DVD, and I can’t even get the cricket any more as I haven’t forked out for Sky Sports Two, so I’m perfectly happy to believe that Nick Robinson is out of order. But if these complaints are really about what’s on telly, then switch off the telly. It’s easily done. On the other hand, I’ve quite enjoyed watching Robinson’s reporting in the past as the vultures circled around Mr Kennedy: he seems to me to have a good sense of political drama and political process, and a certain relish for skulduggery that I quite like. The flip side of that, though, may be that he comes over as not at all interested in things like government or policy, let alone political ideas, and so that may be - to return to the theme of the post - why I’ve got a lot more time for him than perhaps some of the people mentioned above.)

I think it’s starting. This could be fun.

We don’t have enough Victorian sermonizing here at the Virtual Stoa, so I’ve just re-published two of my great-great-grandfather Stopford Brooke’s sermons on this site, Liberty, preached on 25 January 1874, and Liberty at Home, given the following Sunday, 1 February 1874.

I’m sure we don’t get the full effect just by reading them off the computer screen, though. Brooke was apparently quite the performer: Gladstone once found him “a bit wild” when he when he heard him preach “against respectability”, and Bernard Shaw thought that what the socialists really needed in England in order to make headway was “some man who would have something of the religious fervor of Hyndman with something akin to the cultured suasiveness of Stopford Brooke.” Still, what we do have is interesting enough, and I’m very pleased to see his stress on the importance of arguing with one’s daughters in the second piece.

I spent part of the morning tearing up old copies of the American Political Science Review, which is a curiously satisfying activity.

You could tell that Melanie Phillips needed a holiday: the Naziometer, which records the number of times the word appears on the front page of her blog had fallen to zero a couple of weeks ago. Batteries recharged, she’s returned to the fray, and the N-o-M is registering a reasonably healthy seven. (See the big number that appears on the sidebar for the most up-to-date readings.) I don’t think we should worry too much that all seven appearances are in quoted text from somebody else: it’s a good thing to take it easy for a bit when you get back from a trip, and I’m sure we’re heading for regular double-digit readings quite soon.

(There’s also four “Hitlers”, one “fascist”, one “fascism”, and, I’m very pleased to see, one “morally degenerate”.)