On Difficulty and Obfuscation

 

 

Parliamentarians of the English Civil War period expressed the hope that one day the laws of England might be compressed into “the bigness of a pocket book”. That still gets quoted because it expresses a common feeling that things which affect our lives ought to be intelligible to us. We don’t want to break a law because we don’t understand it and, equally, we do want to defend ourselves in language which is our own. Cromwellians thought that the heart of the problem was not failure to be clear and concise but that the powerful and their lawyers benefitted from obfuscation. I think they were at least half right.

But the successes of the natural sciences over recent centuries are inseparable from the development of languages which only a very small number of specialists can really expect to understand and deploy. We accept the difficulties of mathematics and scientific theories as a price we must pay for extraordinary achievements of engineering (in the broadest sense) from which everyone can in principle benefit. We accept that most of us do not have talent and will not have time to get inside what scientists understand. There are no short cuts; you just have to be very talented, willing to work hard and not envy the very occasional prodigy who seems to understand effortlessly.

But in relation to the world of lived experience - the Lebenswelt of the phenomenological tradition in philosophy – it’s still thought we should be able to understand that experience ourselves though perhaps occasionally accepting the help of those proficient in some theoretical knowledge of which we have only a vague understanding.  Sign up with a counsellor or analyst and you expect them to know something you don’t. Equally, you might well expect them to be able to make relevant parts of their thinking accessible to you in some way. How else could therapy work? It’s not supposed to be magical or mystical.

Donald Winnicott thought that making his thinking accessible was part of what would make it therapeutically effective. He gave radio talks and wrote essays which any moderately well-educated reader could understand. The contrast between, say, false self and real self lends itself to fairly ready understanding and can be illustrated with examples. Of course, some would now object that it encapsulates some kind of humanist myth or ideology. If so, that would also be true of Jacques Lacan’s early use of a parallel contrast between the empty word (parole vide) and the full word (parole pleine). Both sets of contrasts point towards interventions a practising therapist could deploy. But therapeutically useful ideas can, in fact, come from anywhere. The concept of gaslighting takes its name from a successful film (Gaslight 1944) the story line of which gives a very clear exemplification of a kind of psychological manipulation which the term accurately identifies.

But there are those who claim to illuminate the world of lived experience but do so in prose which is either difficult or obfuscating. And it is sometimes difficult to know which is the case. Roland Barthes wrote that clarity is the virtue of prose which is designed to persuade. But not everyone wants to persuade.

Some writing is more like musing or ruminating in which the author is primarily addressing themself; this is true of many passages in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. The reader’s task then becomes that of trying to work out what is the problem which has set off the rumination and where the musing might be headed.  Some will give up, thinking that the author is ducking the job a writer is supposed to undertake.

Other writers may just want to jolt you into thinking afresh and use whatever devices they reckon might yield that result. The danger is that we don’t get beyond their opening move. When Wittgenstein offers an (oracular?) “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” it’s easy just to stare at the words and sigh, “Such wisdom!” rather than asking, “How do you know that?”, “Why shouldn’t we understand a lion who could speak?” In fact, since Wittgenstein wrote there has been great progress in characterising the structure and functions of things like chimpanzee calls. Lions may just be less approachable. The case illustrates a general problem with much philosophy: if it tries to rule a priori (without the need for evidence) that certain things are impossible it may subsequently be upstaged by empirical evidence demonstrating the contrary. Early Wittgenstein-inspired academics writing about human language were remarkably naïve, supposing that languages were really all rather like their own, and backed up by some local equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. Then linguists started to look seriously at how creoles develop and that upset several applecarts.

Finally (at least for the length of this piece), there are the sad cases. Early on in life, academics working in the human sciences discover that a well-trodden route to fame lies in being allusive, difficult and downright obscure. Though novelists may have been the first to realise that there were bones you could throw to the professors, other writers and academics themselves have more than caught up. The later work of Jacques Lacan is something suitable only to be pored over in long, inconclusive seminars and unread research outputs; it does not connect to any obvious therapeutic practice.  If you invest so much time in what is really theological study, it is very hard to conclude that your god may not be all you’ve hoped for. Back in 1979, Richard Wollheim (the centenary of whose birth has recently been celebrated) wrote a long piece in the New York Review of Books after reading a great deal of Lacan’s work. At the end he simply remarked “It’s not really my cup of tea”. But no young academic who has just completed a Ph D on Lacan and now hoping for its publication can afford such dismissive disinvestment from very recent labours. 

Imitating rebarbative prose is not the same thing as deploying someone’s theories to advance understanding. That distinction may be a useful guide to separating the difficult from the obfuscating. A difficult or relatively difficult theorist - say, Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault – can inspire new work which extends the application of a theory to new fields and maybe in the course of doing that introduce some amendments into the original theory. In contrast, imitative writing does no more than add to the corpus of imitations of the Master. As with didactic novels, the reader yawns and forgets. 

Review Peter Ackroyd The English Soul

  

Reading this book was like working through a cut and paste job. Peter Ackroyd acknowledges the help of two research assistants (Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien) and I guess they provided the cuts pasted into the potted Wikipedia-style biographies of divines and theologians which comprise the bulk of the book. Those biographies record births, marriages and death-bed scenes – in that order - though in contrast to Wikipedia nothing is footnoted. As far as I can tell, not a single new fact is reported; everything derives from secondary sources of which some are listed as Further Reading. It’s rather dull and there’s no humour at all – perhaps to reflect the fact that Jesus never laughed (the internet has long since gone viral on the subject). Occasionally, the book is coy: was John Wesley a philanderer or not? The book suggests it but doesn’t provide a clear answer. 

I found myself contrasting Ackroyd’s book with two recent works which are thoroughly researched and lively and which light up English religious cultures: Anna Keay’s study of Cromwellian England, The Restless Republic (2022) and Daisy Hays’ Dinner with Jospeh Johnson which treats of late eighteenth century radical and sceptical cultures in which William Blake figures (he gets a chapter in Ackroyd’s book).

Some discursive and slightly better essays appear later in the book but the last chapter reverts to mini-biography, presenting CVs for three twentieth century academic theologians with no attempt to discriminate. John Hick’s important Evil and the God of Love is not elevated above lesser works and there is no recognition of its core concern with solving the intractable theodicy problem: Since there is unmerited suffering in the world then either God is not all good or not all powerful.  Solve that one if you can. I am surprised that no editor was to hand to veto the inclusion of this worse-than-weak last chapter.

From time to time the biographies are interrupted or concluded by strange one-liners about “the English soul”. I quote a selection:

On Julian of Norwich: “The English soul was mediated through homely images.” (page 31)

On Thomas More: “The fight for the English soul had become earnest.” (70)

And again, “The burnings [of heretics] continued, shedding fitful light on the English soul.” (73)

On Henry Barrow: “But his witness survived, and became a significant aspect of the English soul.” (107)

On the Authorized Version: “It might even act as a mirror of Englishness itself, and by extension the English soul” (140)

On George Herbert: “Little Gidding became, for Herbert, a vision of spirituality in the world. It became a corner of the English soul.” (147)

On William Blake: “Yet in truth his vision has never been lost. It is integral to the English soul.” (240)

As a response to Samuel Butler: “it is certainly true that the established religion rested on what was comfortable and what was familiar. That has always been the default position of the English soul.” (261)

And so it continues. Wrap up all your expositions with the same phrase and it reveals itself as either trite or vacuous. Ackroyd nowhere tries to place the notion of soul in relation to, say, heart or spirit. There are those who are kind-hearted and those who are mean-spirited; we use such terms to describe characters and make moral assessments.  Is a soul in contrast something which can only be evaluated from a theological standpoint as saved or damned? But then it would be rather odd to have a theology which had a category of English soul as if there might be French ones or Russian ones or Japanese ones requiring  separate theologies. And would those theologies acknowledge that there is more than one path to salvation? It hasn't really been part of the spirit of theologies to allow that.

Regardless of who is responsible for what, this miscellany is in no sense an enlightening history of Christianity in England or a successful evocation of the varied ways it has infused the experience of some generic English soul. To have achieved anything approaching such lofty ambitions would have required some informing sense of history and structure. Should one be thinking of a Great Tradition (Leavis-style) of lives and works or of a Simultaneous Order (T S Eliot-style) of cultural monuments?

Or should one be looking for the reflection of social changes in the way Christianity has been expressed and lived (in the style of R H Tawney, Christopher Hill and the Hammonds)? The English soul would then take different forms in different contexts:  changing configurations and strategies of state power; the distribution of literacy and access to knowledge; and, most obviously, the changing ways in which the worlds of the rich and the poor have been conjoined (“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate” – second verse, All Things Bright and Beautiful).

*

Peter Ackroyd was a scholarship boy who studied at Clare College, Cambridge re-endowed (as Clare Hall) in the fourteenth century by Lady Elizabeth de Clare. Part of her endowment comprised land and the church benefice in the nearby village of Litlington. Fellows of Clare regularly took the church living and then employed a curate to do the actual work, making the usual profit on the deal. But the Rev Dr William Webb, Master of Clare from 1815 to 1856 and vicar of Litlington from 1816 to 1856 actually lived much of the time in its rectory and indeed died there. This apparent devotion to clerical duty allowed him to pursue a lifelong passion for agricultural improvement; he brought Enclosure to Litlington in 1830. The consequences followed as they did everywhere. My Pateman ancestors, for centuries Litlington agricultural labourers, were scattered – some as far away as Australia by transportation or assisted passage. Some remained but suffered again from the mid-Victorian agricultural depression. Despite that depression, promptly after his death Dr Webb’s executors auctioned his crops growing at Litlington  for £405. 

Webb's  successor the Reverend Joseph Power (vicar from 1856 to 1866) may or may not have known much about his parish. His interests lay elsewhere; he was University Librarian and also looked after the wine cellar at Clare ( the records are archived); as a mathematician he had successfully explained the mechanical cause of one of the first fatal train accidents in England. But in August 1864 he was able to sell the barley growing on his  four Litlington acres for £23. The year is significant for my history.

In December 1863 my great great grandfather James Pateman stole a bushel of beans from his master, a local landowner, because his pregnant wife Susan was ill and their family hungry; he paid the price with 14 days hard labour in January 1864. A daughter, a little Emily, was born at the beginning of February but died before the month was out after a private baptism at home – anyone could perform such an act but it was probably done by a local dissenter; the Patemans had married in an independent Meeting House in nearby Royston, a centre of lively dissent from the time of the Civil War. In the 1870s after the early death of Susan who had no more children, her teenage son John - my great grandfather – became another of those who left the stricken village; he made his way to Brick Lane in London’s East End and found work in the giant Truman Hanbury and Buxton brewery which offered effective competition to the other opium of the people. By this time it’s probable that the Patemans were no longer dissenters but simply godless, which is how I experienced my Pateman grandparents. But none of them transmitted orally or left anything in writing to reveal how they experienced their lives;  they can only appear to me as if bereav'd of light. As the Hammonds put it in The Village Labourer, “this lost world has no Member of Parliament, no press, it does not make literature or write history; no diary or memoirs have kept alive for us the thoughts and cares of the passing day” Their take on the English soul has to be guessed at.

*

 

After a  prefatory warning  that you will find nothing here about Judaism or Islam or … but don’t be offended etc…. Ackroyd’s book starts with Bede when I would have expected Augustine, sent to re-christianise an island abandoned by the Romans and Rome. Arriving at the head of a large expedition funded by Pope Gregory and heading straight to the Canterbury capital of the local secular power, Augustine’s first task was to get Aethelberht on side and that he achieved. He got the protection and resources in cash and kind without which no religious mission can put down roots, outspend and defeat competitors   Aethelberht had his reward in this world: renewed church power and old state power were going to march arm in arm and have done so ever since. But I guess Augustine doesn’t make the cut because he wasn’t English and, to boot, the agent of a foreign power. (And, yes I agree, that’s an old English trope).

As for lived experience which touches the soul there is in Ackroyd’s book precious little about country churchyards, church bells tolling for thee or me, organs belting out the tunes which all the faithful come to sing. There is surprisingly little about parsons, benefices, tithes, the Victorian clerical novel, Sunday and National schools, Nativity plays (were you Mary or a donkey?), the cost of keeping up bishops’ palaces, cloister intrigues, schoolboys beaten, choristers interfered with. Nor is it pressed upon us that the lives of our ancestors since Augustine arrived have, for the very most part, been nasty, brutish and very short, Christ or no risen Christ. We too easily forget both infant mortality and how that experience affected husband, wife and siblings. It is not surprising that we encounter so much evidence of melancholia in those who did record their lives. The money spent on understanding the perils of childbirth and on laying-in wards was a minute fraction of that spent on steeples and spires. 

Ackroyd sketches the outer lives and inner struggles of his cast of mostly male characters. Some of the choices are obvious ones, some less so. A chapter on three Atheists (Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Richard Dawkins) included, as it were, to represent the Other Side, simply ignores such details as the distinctness of not believing in the existence of a God or any gods and not believing in any kind of personal immortality (which I suppose knocks out one version of the Soul, English or not). It does not treat secularism as a distinct belief cluster which could be adhered to by theists and quite often is outside of a Church of England which still clings fiercely to the secular privileges without which it would now die.  Ackroyd is silent on agnosticism as distinct from indifference. He does not allow for those who rather awkwardly feel that some form of unbelief is a moral obligation imposed by the record of terrible crimes committed – and across millenia - in the names of organised monotheisms. It’s for much the same reason that many have felt obliged to renounce the more recent ideals of Communism.

*

I do share the hope that everyone who lives long enough will come to feel that there is some Quest or other that they must undertake before it is too late. Some discover very young, some never. The English soul? This is Rudyard Kipling in Kim:

“…we must find that River; it is so verree valuable to us”

“But this is gross blasphemy!” cried the Church of England.

  Reposted 27 April 2024 because of glitch in Google indexing of the original post 

Review David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu Who Owns This Sentence?

 

This is an important book not published by a major non-fiction house. It provides for three countries (France, Britain, USA) a detailed history of the complicated, uneven and often confused development of what we now call intellectual property law. The detail is fascinating and fully documented. But the book then turns to the hot button topic of the threat to intellectual and artistic activity  now posed by large corporate enterprises, heavy with lawyers, which are actively removing creative work (especially music and images) from what we call the public domain and in effect seeking to create corporate copyright in perpetuity.

In my country, there are houses which have been passed down through generations of the same family for several hundred years There are no laws in England or, really, in any country which set a fixed term to the period during which physical property can be passed down   Houses, land, jewellery, paintings, books – those can all be inherited though in many times and places tax has been due on inheritance.

In contrast, copyrights and other creator rights in intellectual property have always been restricted to fixed terms and subject to some other restrictions. The length has generally increased over time and now normally stands at seventy years after the death of the creator. Limited rights to “fair dealing” use in reviews and academic work are recognised, as is the right to parody. But “adaptations” are a very tricky area unless you are adapting Shakespeare over whose work no Heirs and Assigns now hover. But over the works of Samuel Beckett and T S Eliot they hover with a vengeance. Everyone enjoys hating these “Literary Estates” and those who manage them courtesy of the long property after-life of dead authors. That afterlife creates other frustrations too: Bellos and Montagu devote a chapter to “Orphan Works”, those pieces of property which are still in copyright but over which no known person or organisation claims the rights, either because they don’t know they own them or can’t be bothered to let it be known that they are the lawful proprietors. There must be many grand-children of dead minor or prolific writers and painters who simply don’t know what they own.

But the bigger problem is the corporations who think they do know. I will give an extended example of the kind of hazards we now face.

In 1808 Charlotte Reynolds (1761-1848), a minor figure in the circle of John Keats, wrote a poem about a goose and posted it to John Dovaston (1782-1854). It was never published though Dovaston published a poem, also about a goose, with which it is twinned. The dates of death of the two people involved clearly indicate that both poems are out of copyright. So when I found Charlotte's poem in 2023 in a batch of old letters sold in a provincial auction, I was free to publish both an image of the letter and a transcription of the poem and did so on this Blog on 20 January 2024. I also own the physical letter but plan to sell it; in her collection of Charlotte’s letters to Dovaston Letters from Lambeth (1981), Joanna Richardson indicates that the batch of letters she acquired  became available because of a house clearance, the commonest way in which old stuff comes onto the market. My letter was not in her batch – it predates those she obtained – but ended up in auction in 2023 no doubt in the latest of  a chain of previous auctions. It was sold for what was on the outside not the inside, at which probably no one had looked for a very long time. Physical stuff circulates through auctions, charity shops, garage sales, and so on and sometimes interesting things turn up. (Think Antiques Roadshow).

I own the letter but I don’t own any copyright on the text of the poem which I have placed in the public (internet) domain where anyone can read it and a surprisingly large number of people appear to have done so already.

What’s not to like? I scanned the letter and published an image along with a transcription of the text of the poem. In some jurisdictions I might be able to claim copyright on the image as recompense for the trouble I took in making it. But I did not place beside it a little label reading © PatemanImages and have no intention of doing so. I do have automatic copyright in the text I wrote to accompany the image, and (possibly?) in the transcription which took a lot of time. But I have no interest in either copyright. I am not preparing a daily-updated  list of everything I have ever written and published  to pass to my Heirs and Assigns.

But it is quite possible that some bot or corporate employee will come along, scrape the image off the internet, and offer it for “licensing” to anyone who wants to use it -  say, a literary periodical publishing a piece about Charlotte Reynolds. The fees will be variable but do not include future ownership of the image which is only available for rent – the key word which identifies the claim to ownership as analogous to the claim to a house or piece of land.

If you go to literary and art world periodicals you will find many illustrations which are accompanied by a © sign and the name of some well-known image shop. Many and maybe most of those images will feature works long out of copyright. One should ask, Where did the image-renter get the image? Did they despatch a photographer, or buy the original work,  or did they simply copy an existing public domain image? Did they scrape it off the internet? And having done so, can they then come back to you ( or me) and tell you (me) to take down the image to which they now own the copyright? That thought places me in a bind: should I now place a copyright notice beside my image to prevent someone else doing so?

If  you can create a new  copyright in any of  the above ways it’s clear that you can create indefinite copyright. After the requisite number of years you simply copy again the original image and claim a new copyright on the new copy. Bellos and Montagu do discuss similar cases where what is usually reckoned to be at stake is whether anyone has engaged in any fresh “creative” or “intellectual” work to produce something worthy of a new lease of copyright

You have been warned; Bellos and Montagu encapsulate the warning by using as a preface to their work an old English rhyme:

The law doth punish man or woman

That steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greqter felon loose

Who steals the common from the goose.