There’s a nice, long, fascinating article in The Nation on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. The writer, Corey Robin, discusses the view posited in Quentin Skinner’s book Hobbes and Republican Liberty that Hobbes was the first counter-revolutionary. What does he mean by that? As he says, the English Civil War of the 1640s, often thought of as a revolution, was not a revolution at all, so what was there to be counter to? Well, Hobbes did think of it as a revolution, in the slightly antiquated sense that the ancients used the word—the cyclical change of a political system. (As an aside, that must surely be the origin of the modern political sense of the word, since when real revolutions started popping up, the word picked up new baggage.) The “revolutionaries” of the time were aiming for a republican system of government, and Hobbes was avowedly against such a thing. Where Hobbes’s genius lay, though, was in coming up with arguments against it that were not utterly terrible. [Read more →]

Can art ever be truly timeless? It’s an almost universally accepted idea we have of great art that if it is truly great, it will “stand the test of time”. What does that mean, exactly? Simply that it still appears just as fresh, insightful and powerful as it did when it was first created. The point we can infer from that is that these great works of art are not slaves to fashion, but strike somewhere near the heart of human nature, which is unchanging over thousands of years—a fact which we know primarily from the classics. When we read an old play that is a relic more than it is a classic, that is usually because the artist was so seduced by some particular artistic fashion that was sweeping his part of the world at the time, that he forsook a true depiction of human nature in its favour. That seduction must be strong, because proportionally speaking, the amount of classics the world has produced is close to nil. [Read more →]

After the furore over Nick Griffin’s Question Time appearance has died down somewhat, perhaps we might be able to see more clearly its potential consequences for the British political landscape. Dianne Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, argues in The Independent that it was not the triumph for free speech that “white metropolitan liberals” tend to think it was. On the contrary, she says that it “legitimised” Griffin, and brought his extreme views a level of acceptance they would not otherwise have achieved. She makes the point that although Griffin has the right to express his views however he sees fit within the law, it is by no means his right to appear on the BBC with other “legitimate” politicians. That is true enough; however the reason for his appearance was not only the fact that he represents a small minority of voters, but also that he would inevitably expose his views for how ignorant and unacceptable they really are. [Read more →]

On Newsnight Review last night, the panel discussed science fiction. That got me thinking about what science fiction is, or at least what it should be. Kevin Smith, the creator of Dogma, said that essentially sci-fi just transfers real life stories into another framework, characterised by being very different to our reality. That’s probably true, but it’s not the full story. Not all stories are easily transferrable, or transferrable at all, to this imaginary other world. Imagine, for instance, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in a space station. Words can’t begin to express how this would utterly ruin the story. Firstly, its charm would be utterly removed—but that’s probably immaterial. Most importantly, nothing at all is gained from the shift. We learn no more about pride, prejudice or love from having the story exactly the same but in a different location. The writer must think, when choosing his location, why he wants it to be set there, and how, dramatically, it serves his story. [Read more →]

The monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose frequently debate one another on the finer points of scripture. Comically, these debates turn on such minutely fine points that the monks are in danger of entirely shaking off any proper perspective on Christ’s teachings. Whenever a monk is murdered, the blind monk Jorge takes it upon himself to interpret in these unnatural deaths signs of the forthcoming apocalypse, and is certain that they loudly echo warnings given in Revelations. In the novel, Jorge represents the over-literalist approach to interpretation, whereas the friar William of Baskerville represents the more liberal, and by implication more modern, approach. [Read more →]