Author: Mark Hannam

Next year — or perhaps the year after, since the historical record is not clear — will be the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the death of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, who was brutally tortured and then executed on the orders of his former employer, Theoderic, King of Italy.  In the history of philosophy, Boethius is both important and famous, but not for the same reasons.   His importance lies in the scholarly work of his earlier life, when he translated several Greek works into Latin, including texts by Aristotle, and wrote commentaries on other important classical works, particularly on logic, as well as some early Christian theological studies.  These translations and commentaries were highly influential in the philosophical and theological thought of the next millennium, leading one contemporary scholar to describe him, along with Augustine and Aristotle, as the fundamental philosophical author in the Latin tradition.  Despite his influence, as a person he plays a very minor role in most histories of philosophy, being viewed today mostly as a conduit of Greek thought to medieval Europe rather than as an important thinker in his own right. 

The work for which he is famous, and which remains easily available today in English translation, is the Consolation of Philosophy, a literary text written while he was in prison in Ravenna, awaiting execution.  Written as a dialogue between the author and a woman who personifies “philosophy”, part in prose and part in poetry, the book asks us to consider what true happiness consists of, and how we should understand life’s sudden reversals of fortune.  For a man who came from a leading patrician family in Rome and had been appointed to a position as a senior royal official, but who now faced imminent death for defending a senator accused of treason, and whose erudition and scholarship had attracted unjust accusations of participation in occult practices, this was a real and pressing question. 

Continue reading “The provocation of philosophy”

Many years ago, I attended a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall in London.  In those days, I could only afford the cheap seats at the back of the auditorium, and on this occasion, I was in the very last row, far from the stage on which the orchestra sat.  Just before the concert started, the man sitting next to me took a large book out of his bag, which I could see was the score of the symphony.  I was impressed that he planned to follow the music, page by page, during the performance.  Then he produced a small white baton and, as the audience quietened and the dramatic opening notes were played, he started to keep time with his right hand while turning the pages of the score with his left.  Unseen by the musicians and unnoticed by almost all the audience, for the next thirty minutes he conducted the symphony all the way through to the end.  Bravo!

I had not thought about this unusual musical experience for a long time, but it came to mind at the end of last year, listening to certain British politicians debating immigration, which has recently risen to levels which they describe as “out of control”.  Various policy proposals are being introduced to try to limit the numbers of incoming migrants.  This was the great prize that many British people thought they had secured when they voted to leave the EU a few years back, that we would now be free to control our borders and to reduce the number of people who can enter Britain to live and work.  These voters have discovered in the subsequent period that meaningful control of our borders is elusive, and that the so-called Brexit dividend is really an invoice.  Those politicians who have not understood this, and who continue to demand policies to reduce immigration, remind me of the man who conducted the orchestra from the back row: they wave their hands around with energy and passion but to no real effect, for the migrants like the musicians are moving to a different beat.

Continue reading “Out of control”

I have been reading an essay by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.  His theme is the changing character of the public sphere, where debate and discussion lead to the formation of public opinion, which in turn influences public policy making.  This was also the subject of his first major book – The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – which was published fifty years ago and which I read when I was a graduate student.  (Full disclosure: I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Habermas’s work and its application to the theory of democracy.  In addition, I have just written a review of this essay plus the first volume of his history of philosophy, both recently translated into English, which should appear in the TLS early in the new year.) 

Today, the challenge to the integrity of the public sphere has less to do with the growth of mass circulation newspapers, which rely on advertising revenue, and more to do with new social media, which rely on the consumers themselves to become the producers of content.  Nowadays we are all authors, and this is a great advance in freedom as voices that had been excluded or distorted from the public sphere, can now be clearly heard.  To some extent, the media has been democratised, which is undoubtedly positive for the development of free and open societies.  And yet, these new freedoms are often being exercised with scant regard to the responsibilities that freedom brings.  As Habermas says: Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is turning everyone into a potential author.  But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?

Continue reading “Editing myself”

In September, it was reported that the Chinese authorities had arrested two people suspected of causing irreversible damage to the Great Wall.  The two are said to have used an excavator to knock a large hole through the wall, allowing motor vehicles to pass more quickly to and from a nearby construction site in Shanxi province, where they were both employed.  The Great Wall – actually, a composite of many smaller walls, built over many years and then connected – was started almost three thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Chinese empire, and is over 21 thousand kilometres in length.  It is designated a UNESCO heritage site and is today a major tourist attraction.  In other words, what was started as a project to keep people out of China has transformed into a project to bring them to China (at least, temporarily).  The hole in the Great Wall will be expensive to repair and the two workers, who have been charged with damaging a cultural relic rather than a military border post, will no doubt be punished for their crime. 

The same month that workers were creating a short-cut through the Great Wall, some unknown person(s) used a chainsaw to cut down a two-hundred-year-old sycamore tree, that stood at an iconic point along Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England.  (This site had become famous as a location from a film version of the story of Robin Hood, made in 1991, although why Robin would travel to Northumbria on his way from the English Channel to Nottinghamshire remains a mystery.)  Hadrian’s Wall was built slightly less than two thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Roman empire and is merely 120 kilometres in length.  Nonetheless, it is also a UNESCO heritage site and a modest tourist attraction.  Many local people were outraged by the felling of the tree – which appears to have caused some minor damage to a section of the wall – for which there seems to have been no reason other than a perverse desire to vandalise an object of natural beauty.  Arrests have been made but no-one has yet been charged with a crime associated with the tree felling. 

Continue reading “Hole in the wall”

A few weeks ago, I walked the southern half of the New River Path, from Enfield Town to Canonbury.  The two important things to know about the New River is that it is neither new nor a river.   It is an aqueduct that runs for 45km from Ware, in Hertfordshire, to Islington, and was constructed just over four hundred years ago, to bring fresh water from the river systems north of London into the city.   The scheme initially ran into engineering and financial problems but was completed due to the efforts of Hugh Myddelton, a business leader and entrepreneur in the first half of the seventeenth century, who is memorialised today by a statue that stands on Islington Green, just off Upper Street.  The New River Company, an early joint stock company, ran the aqueduct for many years, although it is now integrated into the Thames Water infrastructure and still supplies the reservoirs on the eastern fringes of London, between Hackney and Walthamstow. 

Plentiful clean water is an essential prerequisite for civilized urban life, and it is worth remembering that as recently as the nineteenth century, much of London did not have a reliable supply and that there were a significant number of annual deaths from the diseases associated with contaminated water.  From time to time the problems associated with poor water management became overwhelmingly obvious to everyone who visited London.  Funding for the sewerage system that Joseph Bazalgette built, which helped to rid London of cholera, was prompted by the “great stink” of 1858, when summer heat produced nauseous gases along the banks of the Thames, where untreated human and animal waste had been dumped for many years.  Today, we remember Myddelton and Bazalgette with gratitude: no-one in public life would seriously advocate dismantling the clean water supply system, nor would they allow unregulated private interests to jeopardise its integrity. 

Continue reading “Clean air”