the greycat blog

History News Network have published a new article from me, dealing with the history of the bulldozer, a theme I have been researching and writing about for some time. Why the bulldozer, of all things? This is why (from the conclusion of the article):

[The bulldozer] is a machine that deals with fundamentals: the earth, transformation, creation, destruction. It buries the past while it builds the future, demolishing in order to construct, leveling the ground and starting anew from a cleared and emptied landscape – it is the year-zero machine. Celebrated as an icon of social progress or despised as a symbol of destructive exploitation, hymned as a machine of liberation or feared as a tool of repression, the bulldozer has reshaped cultural perceptions as it has transformed urban and rural landscapes. To follow in its tracks is to understand the history of the modern age.

You can read the entire article, ‘The bulldozer: one of the overlooked wonders of technology’, here. I hope you’ll soon be able to explore the history of the bulldozer at even greater length, in one of the must-read books of 2008.

The BBC have a reporter on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, tracking the Japanese whaling fleet as it hunts Humpback and Minke whales across the Southern Ocean. His name is Jonah.

‘I am still not sure whether or not sending me on this trip is a big in-joke by BBC editors back in London.’

See earlier posts here, here, here and here.

A slight change to the usual routine for this week’s t-shirt of the week. The featured shirt on this occasion does not come from CafePress but from Threadless, and you can’t buy it yet. You will be able to do so, however, if enough of you go to Threadless and vote for the design. Which you should, because it’s brilliant. It’s by Greg Stekelman, also known as themanwhofellasleep, which should be recommendation enough really.

The page for this design is here. You have to register at Threadless to vote, but it’s a quick, painless procedure and will win you access to all the wonders of Threadless’s t-shirt-focused universe. As well as giving you the opportunity to vote for this superb shirt.

The most popular essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘.

Hobbes’s assertion that ‘Feare and Liberty are consistent’ (II: xxi, 262) has caused a certain amount of puzzlement and confusion: how freely can a person robbed at gunpoint really be said to be acting when he hands over his wallet? Yet it is consistent with Hobbes’s view that liberty can only be restricted by an external agent. If the robber knocks his victim to the ground and restrains him physically while extracting his wallet from his pocket, then the victim’s freedom has been restricted; but if the victim reaches into his own pocket and hands the robber his wallet out of fear that he will be shot if he does not, he has chosen that course of action freely, while others, no matter how unpalatable, remain open to him; and he has removed his wallet and surrendered it with his own hands and of his own volition. This is an important point for understanding the nature of the covenant which gives rise to Hobbes’s Commonwealth, for its ultimate motivation is fear (‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death’ (I: xiii, 188)), and yet it is freely arrived at by all concerned.

Hobbes’s Leviathan is commonly seen as an argument for absolute despotism on the part of the sovereign and absolute submission on the part of the subject; yet Hobbes asserts that individual liberty is inalienable. How can these positions be reconciled? This is the question explored in ’Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘. Click here to read the essay, in full and for free.

Picture: Frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651 (detail). [Source]

Available from the Paranoid Press shop on CafePress, this homage to Captain Jack Aubrey’s greatest flight of wit is our current t-shirt of the week: ‘the lesser of two weevils’.

Those who don’t recognize the reference, which comes from Patrick O’Brian’s 1979 Aubrey/Maturin novel The Fortune of War, will find an explanation here (or another, backed by the full authority of the CIA itself, here; note that the Agency spells O’Brian’s name wrong).

In the current (3 December 2007) edition of In These Times, Slavoj Zizek of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, has an interesting article about the People’s Republic of China: ‘China’s valley of tears’. He argues that western expectations that democracy will follow in the wake of capitalism in China are profoundly mistaken, pointing out that economic development in China has occurred because of authoritarian rule, not in spite of it.

Zizek is surely right in seeing no essential contradiction between capitalism and authoritarianism in the Chinese case. Where he goes badly astray is in the parallel he draws between the development of capitalism in the People’s Republic of China today and its historical development in Europe. In short, he argues that the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe was accompanied by precisely the kind of state authoritarianism that we see in contemporary China:

Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands during the 17th century), it was only a democracy of the propertied liberal elite, not of the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today’s China. The state legalized violent expropriations of the common people, which turned them proletarian. The state then disciplined them, teaching them to conform to their new ancilliary role.

E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill might well have approved of this facile Marxism, but it really won’t do as history. ‘Democracy’ in early modern Europe meant something quite different to what it means today, in so far as it had (or has) a settled meaning in any case; as for ‘brutal state dictatorship’, no early modern state had the means to impose such a thing, even had it wished to do so. Capitalism in Europe was not imposed from above, it arose from below, from investment, invention and entrepreneurship. It arose first and most successfully in those countries which had political stability, surplus capital, availability of labour and natural resources, and in which governments enabled its development. An enabling government is a very different thing from an enforcing government. No Dutch merchant was forced by the state to trade with the East Indies; no English landowner was compelled at bayonet-point to dig for coal on his estate; no Scottish businessman was threatened with beheading if he did not open a bank. Even for the workers who provided the muscle which powered the development of capital, the economic imperatives of the market were far more significant in determining whether and where they worked than the coercive power of the state, which was minimal by modern standards.

Zizek’s characterization of the development of European capitalism is profoundly mistaken, and the parallel with contemporary China simply isn’t there. European capitalism arose organically from below, and the state developed to accommodate it. In China, capitalism is imposed from above by state decree (and what one decree gives, another can take away). European capitalism was driven by invention; no-one in China has invented anything for centuries, being content to copy. The development of western capitalism was bound up with philosophical and political notions of individual liberty and free will; in China these notions are absent, and have indeed long been officially despised and rejected.

Not only is the supposed parallel absent for the past, it is equally false for the future. The growth of the capitalist economies of Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was built on deep economic, financial and philosophical roots; it was real, it endured, and it changed the world. China’s recent growth is built on sand: it is illusory, it is short-term, and it will only change the world if the world is foolish enough to go on accepting China at its own valuation.

Where Zizek argues that there is a parallel between the contemporary Chinese situation and the conditions under which capitalism developed in early modern Europe, he is mistaken. He is correct, however, to argue that, far from authoritarian rule undermining contemporary Chinese economic development, it is the foundation of it, and to assert that (contrary to the claims of China’s cheerleaders in the west) there is no natural progression from capitalist economic liberalization to democratic political liberalization. That argument needs to be taken a stage further: given the artificial, state-imposed nature of contemporary Chinese capitalism, its continuing expansion - indeed, its continuing presence - cannot be relied upon.

Zizek sees modern China as a natural and consistent expression of Marxist economic and political philosophy. He is right, and the lesson is clear. The Marxist house of cards collapsed long ago; how long before the fragile edifice that is the People’s Republic falls down flat as well?

UPDATE 10 Dec 07: This article has been republished by History News Network in their ‘Roundup’ section - see ‘Ralph Harrington: China’s Future’ (number two in their ‘top ten’ today).

‘Most-read’ may not be strictly accurate; ‘most-visited’ is perhaps closer to the mark. The statistics for greycat.org show that ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’ has received far more visitors than any other essay over the last week, almost all of them over the last 24 hours. This essay always receives a good number of visitors but the recent surge is solely down to the fact that the page has just been ’stumbled’ - i.e. recommended and shared within the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon brings in a lot of visitors, but, at least for a site like this, most of them aren’t worth having. It’s like a hose that soaks your site in visitors, most of whom rapidly drain away. In the case of this page, only 12% of Stumblers stayed for more than 30 seconds, and 41% stayed less than 5 seconds. Lots of traffic, not much real interest. Still, every visitor is welcome and if even one person who comes here via StumbleUpon takes the time to read the essay and finds it interesting and/or useful then it’s worthwhile.

‘Representing the Victorian railway’ is derived from my doctoral research and was originally written for an academic conference in 1998. It has been much updated and revised since.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued, it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age. As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The essay uses two case studies to illuminate the ambiguities of nineteenth-century attitudes to the railway: J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1843-4) and Michael Reynolds’s book Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1889). To read more, visit ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’.

Picture: Great Western Railway locomotive, c.1880 [Source]

A mere two months after it was featured in The Guardian (and right here on this blog), the Zerefos et al analysis of paintings depicting sunsets between 1500 and 1900 has turned up on the Discovery Channel’s news pages: ‘Art as a window to climate change’.

The article quotes some skeptical responses to the Zerefos approach from, among others, Kevin Trenberth of the Climate Analysis Research Center, who points out that ‘Painters are not scientists trying to do an accurate picture of nature’, and James Hamilton, biographer of J. M. W. Turner, who comments that ‘It’s very hard to tell when artists are being absolutely accurate and when they’re using vivid sky as a platform to more vivid painting’.

I agree with those reservations, and have my own doubts about the study, which I noted in my original post, but it’s still an interesting approach and, if nothing else, provides some illuminating insights into the interaction between artists and nature (however they saw that nebulous concept) over a long period. This is a direct link to the Zerefos article (PDF) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, August 2007.

Remember Paul Gray? He’s the former head of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, who resigned last month over the ‘discs lost in the post’ scandal (still very much unresolved, of course). Well, he’s back in a Government post, but his situation is a mysterious one. The mystery is this: why is he now working for nothing?

Channel 4 News have reported that he is ‘working for his old treasury boss, Sir Gus O’Donnell at the cabinet office - on projects to “develop Civil servants skills”‘ (that should probably be ‘civil servants’ skills’, but never mind). Apparently he is not being paid for this work - indeed, Government has boasted of the fact. BBC News this evening quotes a Cabinet Office spokesman:

A government spokesman said Mr Gray’s period of notice meant he would continue to be paid until 31 December whether he was working or not. ‘In the meantime he has agreed to a request from Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to undertake a short piece of work on cross-government matters until Christmas,’ the Cabinet Office spokesman said. He added the period of notice meant ‘he could receive payment for no work or receive payment for doing some work. It was thought to be better in the public interest that he did some work. There is no additional cost to the public purse. He will leave the payroll on December 31.’

Paul Gray’s period of notice would be laid down in his contract, entitling him to be paid for a set period after leaving his post (depending on the circumstances). That isn’t ‘payment for no work’, that’s payment he’s entitled to for the work he was doing in his previous post. If neither the Cabinet Office nor HMRC understands that simple fact, no wonder we’ve got problems.

If Mr Gray is indeed now doing a short-term piece of work, he ought to be paid for it - and that pay has nothing to do with the provisions of the contract governing the job he has now left. It sounds as if the Government are depriving an employee of his rights in order to get what they hope will be the good publicity of saying that he isn’t costing taxpayers anything. And if Paul Gray has agreed to that, he’s surely ill-advised. Government is not a charity, and no-one should work for it for nothing.

It may not seem to matter very much in the case of a senior and well-paid official like Mr Gray, but the principle that if you work you should get paid for it applies to everyone and it’s very dangerous to chip away at that principle.

Yet another example of how clueless and confused the British Government is these days.