COVER -> DAY ONE
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As reference increases, resonance declines. The greater the availability of works of history the less accessible they become.
As an erstwhile historian one is sometimes tempted to hurl oneself off a tall public building or in moments of even greater despair to ask why we spend so much money on history if we are determined to ignore it.
One could, in a different context, ask the same question about any kind of research, particularly if it is statistically based.
This thought crossed my mind when a colleague looked completely blank when I made a cryptic reference to Eisenhower's "Vacationing" to describe a kind of Presidential style of governance not seen since Coolidge.
Here is a simple quiz; form a mental picture of the following, in reverse chronological order: President Carter, Barry Goldwater, Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton, King George II, Sir Robert Walpole, Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Columbus and Prince Henry the Navigator; and, if you have got this far, let us complete the series with Alfonso X of Spain, St. Isidore of Seville (who has just been created by the Pope as the Patron Saint of the Internet), St. Augustine and Pythagoras.
Eisenhower's name came up because of the relationship we are too often apt to make between Jimmy Carter style managerialism and effectiveness. Coolidge amply illustrates, where Eisenhower might not, that you can be effective without putting in too many hours. Whatever our worries might be about President Bush the quality of his output will not relate to the quantity of his input.
Without history discourse is prolix. Thus many current novels wrestling with topical ethical dilemmas are twice their necessary length because the contemporary narrative is shadowed by an historical parallel where, with an assumed historical knowledge, a few phrases would have sufficed. It makes me wonder whether massive sales of historical biographies are simply a style rather than a cultural phenomenon.
As Britain approaches a General Election many are in danger of forgetting what President Bush has already forgotten, the necessity which created the secular state as a replacement for Christian, Feudal dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise.
The pioneering enterprise that was America was driven by the need for relief from religious persecution, the corollary of which was a secular state and religious tolerance. From that it followed that there should be a constitutional framework of political and civil rights, not to mention the wonderfully free-spirited "Pursuit of happiness".The realisation of those ideals has been more grudging and muddled in Britain where, only last week, a Bill was being debated (and opposed) in Parliament to allow a former Roman Catholic Priest to stand for Parliament. Britain has never had its own bill of rights though it has been ready and able enough to draft them up for other countries but, still, the establishment of secular power and state welfare have created a practical enjoyment of rights if not an elegant, Rawlsian framework.
Now Mr. Bush, the US President, and Mr Hague, the leader of the British Conservatives, want to do away with all of this and hand money and power to largely unaccountable slabs of largely religious charities.
In effect, they propose to transfer power from elected to unelected bodies and to transform the enjoyment of rights, such as the right to housing or food into a lottery dependent upon the whim of a benefactor. It is, moreover, based on two extremely flawed assumptions: the first is that religious organisations are a priori ethical; the second that we in our various churches will meekly don the Beadle's cocked hat.
It is all very well to bring to mind the heroic St. Bernard dogs rescuing Alpine travellers or the homely fare of the Mediaeval guest house but put against this the collusion of many Christian churches in such episodes as the dilution and almost disappearance of Australian Aborigines. The record is not all dark but it is patchy enough to warrant caution. Atheists and believers alike should be deeply sceptical of all human institutions, particularly those which in some way claim a kind of moral superiority; it is naive to accept such assertions without question. There is enough history to warn us.
In a related development, we are in danger of forgetting how the poor were treated before the dawn of financial mutuality. It was to avoid the weak going to the wall that working people in the 19th Century developed mutual societies for house building, burials and, later, assurance and insurance. These bodies were established on the basis of pooled risk.
Now, all over the rich world, financial organisations are being de-mutualised and the result is that risk is no longer pooled; each individual is being looked upon as an actuarial proposition so that people such as those suffering from HIV will soon have to pay much higher health insurance premiums than those without it, or may find themselves totally uninsurable. As medicine becomes more sophisticated the irony is that there will be many more sufferers because insurance will become ever more selective.
Both of which trends, the charitable and the de-mutual, are symbiotic: the less insurable you are the more you depend on charity; and the more you depend on charity the more uninsurable you are.
There may be some argument about the effect of large government on the rich, though as I have shown often enough before that, if anything, the rich benefit from big government, but there is no doubt of its effect upon the poor; the bigger the government under democratic control the better the poor fare.
On that basis the key political tactic for all political parties that believe in rights-based welfare systems is to use all their efforts to increase voter registration by the disadvantaged as a necessary precondition for increasing their political clout. It was, after all, the franchise rather than any kind of philanthropy that forced the governing class to pay grudging attention to social justice.
