Violence and Islam

The brutal murder on 22 May of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich by two young Muslim men has shaken Britain. One of the murderers, blood still on his hands, promptly addressed a cellphone camera held up by a witness to declare: “I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land, women have to witness the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. … Tell them to bring your troops back and you can all live in peace”.

As the tattooed hordes of the English Defence League sought to hijack popular disquiet by taking to the streets,  it was all too easy to forget how two years ago, when gangs of teenagers rioted and ransacked England’s cities, Britain’s Muslims were models of the virtues the English see as distinctively their own. Muslims took to the streets to protect communities and businesses from the rioters, and when three Muslims were killed in Birmingham, it was the Muslim community, led by the bereaved father of one of the slain, who appealed for calm.

Aggressive

This seems a distant memory now, with too many seeming willing to accept the constant refrain that Islam is an inherently aggressive religion. Some of these will concede, echoing the lazy clichés of the new atheists, there are plenty of peaceful Muslims, but this is only because they’re not doing it right. To their mind, it is hardly surprising that Islam, as Samuel Huntingdon put it in 2000’s The Clash of Civilizations, “has bloody borders.”

Such claims, however, betray an ignorance of Islam symptomatic of that religious illiteracy which Christians so rightly castigate when displayed by atheists, and which the 2012 parliamentary report Clearing the Ground identified as a serious challenge for public discourse in modern Britain.

It would be absurd to deny that the Qur’an is replete with martial passages – notably the eighth and ninth suras – calling for acts of warfare and violence against those who defy Allah. It would, however, be equally absurd to assume that such passages must necessarily be read in so brutally literal a way.

Over the centuries, Muslim scholars have often historicized the more violent parts of the Qur’an, seeing them as primarily relevant to the martial age in which they were composed, and arguing that passages about slavery, the rights of women, and jihad against non-believers represented stages in a process of liberation.

Spiritual Warfare

Spiritual and symbolic readings of the Qur’an’s more difficult passages have been even more common, with difficult passages being regarded as models of internal spiritual warfare. Sufi Muslims especially embraced such interpretations over what they saw as the naïve literalism of those who believed the Qur’an advocated real

warfare.

Radicalism and violent fundamentalism may blight parts of the Muslim world now, but this is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Fundamentalism is an act of violence against tradition, with fundamentalists reading religious texts as modern atheists often do; they read them directly and literally, heedless of history and context, as though their meanings are self-evident.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that religious literalism is conspicuously popular among university students of engineering, medicine, and the sciences, where poetic and multi-layered writing is frowned upon and where binary thinking is all too common.

Coping Strategy

Although fundamentalism is a coping strategy for those who would barricade themselves against the complexities and challenges of modern life, it’s ineffective and sometimes degenerates into a violent fanaticism. This fanaticism draws on models of terrorism as pioneered by the European anarchists of a century ago, nationalist groups such as the Stern Gang and the IRA, and especially Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. Islamic terrorism, far from being a medieval throwback or something intrinsic to Islam, is a child of globalised modernity.

What’s striking about much modern smugness towards Islam is that it disregards how our Christian and Jewish scriptures can themselves be mined to justify all kinds of violence. The description of Samson’s death in Judges seems tailor-made to justify suicide attacks, after all, while the 1994 slaughter of twenty-nine Muslims in a Hebron mosque by New York-born Baruch Goldstein was explicitly identified as a response to the biblical injunction to make war throughout time on the Amalekites.

Of course, Catholics aren't meant to read the Bible in this fashion; the violent passages of the Old Testament, calling for bloody warfare and even the absolute extermination of Israel’s enemies, have been read from antiquity in a spiritual sense.

Christians such as Origen of Alexandria followed in Jewish footsteps by developing the idea of the four senses of Scripture, drawing on the example of Jesus who taught the disciples on the way to Emmaus how the Jewish scriptures constantly spoke of him.

Biblical passages were understood as having a basic literal meaning, which needed to be understood in light of the literary genre and historical context of the text – history wasn’t the discipline it now is when the Bible was written, such that it’s naïve to treat it as historical in a modern sense – but they could also have as many as three spiritual senses: the moral; the allegorical, which usually points to Jesus; and the anagogical, referring to our eternal destiny.

The effect of such nuanced readings of scripture was such that over the course of the Middle Ages scholars and theologians developed humane doctrines limiting the legitimate grounds for wars and controlling to some degree the way wars were fought, especially with an eye to how non-combatants should be respected. Unfortunately, these gains were cast aside following the invention of printing as widespread access to the Bible for those unfamiliar with nuanced ways of reading it ushered in one of the most violent ages Europe has ever known.

Justify

During the wars of religion, it was all too easy to justify the extermination of one’s foes on the basis that they were the Amalekites of the day; the butchery of women and children could easily be justified on the simple basis that “nits breed lice”.

The Biblical conquest narratives cast a long shadow. In his second inaugural address, for example, Thomas Jefferson explicitly appealed to God as having led his people to a promised land. Ideas such as these naturally led to the subsequent Manifest Destiny theory that America had been given to the European settlers, and that those already there could legitimately be swept away.

Such readings abuse the Bible, which should be read within the Church in light of reason and traditional understandings.  Crude literal readings are alien to Catholicism and relatively rare among other Christians; we should refrain from assuming that our Muslim brothers and sisters are incapable of similarly avoiding a brutal and dangerous fundamentalism.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 20 June 2013.

Remembering Again

“Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.”

So, after the description of the funeral games in honour of Troy's greatest son, ends the Iliad, which began by reflecting on the carnage wrought by the wrath of the Greek forces' mightiest hero:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which puts pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.”

If the Iliad still speaks to us after almost three thousand years it does so not merely because it is beautiful, and not merely because life is -- among other things -- a battle in which how we conduct ourselves in the short time we have here matters profoundly; rather, it centres on our deep and abiding need to make sense of war.

The first step in doing so, as a rule, lies in commemorating our dead, which is probably why it felt so cathartic last year when Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stood in silence in Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance, recognising all those who died fighting against Britain in the cause of Irish freedom, be that in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, or the War of Independence. 

Here lie the dead of Marathon, as commemorated by the 192 horsemen of the Parthenon frieze.

As long as we've fought we have commemorated our dead, often giving our warrior dead special honours in death. Stephen Pinker argues that the high proportion of prehistoric skeletons showing evidence of violent trauma shows that we've become less violent over the millennia, but he glosses over how those who've died in battle are often specially honoured in death, such that their graves are more easily found than those of people who've died in more mundane ways. If anything, I suspect we've become far more violent over the centuries. 

It's not less violent to kill someone with guided drones than with a knife; it's just tidier. For us. 

As a war historian, and an Irishman who happens to be half-English and has lived in England for most of the last decade, I've long found Remembrance Sunday deeply problematic. Indeed, the first couple of weeks of November are always tricky for me. All Saints and All Souls are feasts of remembrance to which I unambiguously ally myself, but I dislike Guy Fawkes Night, and I'm always uncomfortable about Remembrance Sunday, though I think it important that Britain's war dead be properly honoured and that her veterans be properly supported; even now far too many of Britain's homeless are people who once served their country in arms.

I've had no shortage of family members who've fought in Britain's wars, whether in the Chitral Expedition, the Boer War, the Great War, World War II, or even Northern Ireland, but it wasn't until 2006 that I first wore a poppy, pinned onto my coat by a then recent ex-girlfriend one windy day in Liverpool as she managed the trick of firmly murmuring "I feel you should wear this". 

The first challenge is how to honour the dead without glorifying the wars in which they fought. We have to be honest and admit that plenty of Britain's wars have been far from honourable. The aforementioned Boer War, for instance, was a shameless land grab, and is hardly unique among Britain's wars in meriting such a description. I think most of us feel uncomfortable about the many wars Britain fought to deny people their independence, wherever they might be. And then, of course, there's the little matter of the invasion of Iraq nine years ago, justified at the time by the transparent fiction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which he was refusing to surrender. 

The German cemetery at Langemarck. Because thousands of German children marched to war in 1914 too.

We can't deny this. An honest patriot cannot celebrate his countrymen’s heroism unless he also recognises their sins. "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case," as G.K. Chesterton put it, "It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

Of course, I don’t think we can or should blame soldiers for having fought in bad wars. War is often the continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means, and as Kevin O’Higgins put it when putting down the Irish army mutiny in 1924, “those who take the pay and wear the uniform of the state, be they soldiers or police, must be non-political servants of the state.”

This has a correlative, however; if we’re not to shame soldiers for having had the misfortune to serve in bad wars, neither should we laud them for having been lucky enough to serve in good ones. We need to be careful too when indulging in the rhetoric of the ‘greatest generations’, not least because even the noblest of wars almost invariably encompass a multitude of sins. 

I firmly believe that we should honour our dead, and mourn those lives so brutally lost, and support those who've come home physically maimed or mentally scarred; I also believe that in doing so we should not forget how many wars were driven by cynicism, greed, and pride, and how there has been no shortage of soldiers over the years who've shamed the uniforms they wore. 

Remembrance Sunday, like I said, is complicated.

The second big problem, of course, lies in the fact that as the soldiers of the Great War have died, and those of the Second World War have grown fewer and more frail by the year, that Remembrance Sunday’s purpose seems to have changed, such that it’s in danger of excusing and even glorifying the shoddier wars of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow.

Much of the popularity of Harry Patch, Britain’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, was down to his impatience with those who tended to romanticise wars, and his bitter recognition that war was nothing more than ‘organised murder’. 

For him, Remembrance Sunday was ‘just showbusiness’.

When the reality represented by the likes of Harry Patch no longer exists to remind us of  soldiers hurrying to safety past their screaming, moaning, dying comrades, it’s easy for people to exploit their legends. There’s a simple level at which Remembrance Sunday is about recruiting as much as anything else – I was shocked a couple of years back when the build-up to coverage included an interview with a young Salford teenager  who was saying that he felt it was his duty to serve and that he’d always wanted to be a soldier. 

Of course, it’s always been like this at some level. The 1915 McCrae poem about the poppies of Flanders fields ends with an exhortation to fight on, and to scorn negotiated peace as a betrayal of those who have fallen:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

People fought on for three more years, and millions more died in the most horrible and pointless of ways. It’s hardly surprising that Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, damns this final verse as a stupid and even vicious propaganda argument.

Would a negotiated peace in 1916, preventing the Somme, really have betrayed the dead of Gallipoli?

We honour the dead, but we use them too, enlisting them as recruiting officers, summoning our children to serve and die in emulation of them. There’s nothing new in this. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how Roman funerals were used in just this way:

“By this constant renewal of the good report of brave men, the name of those who have performed any noble deed is made immortal, and the renown of those who have served their country well becomes a matter of common knowledge and a heritage for posterity. But the most important consequence of the ceremony is that it inspires young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that waits upon the brave.”

It’s not just Remembrance Sunday that stirs these confused feelings within me. Being a military historian invites all sorts of questions, not least because time and again I’ve had to explain to people that being interested in war doesn’t entail liking it, and I’ve wrestled with these issues while visiting military cemeteries in Ireland and Belgium, Turkey and Greece, and as I’ve walked battlefields as diverse as Marathon, Thermopylae, Trasimene, Cannae, Hastings, Ypres, and Gallipoli.

How do we honour the dead without glorifying the wars? How do we honour them without luring thousands more to early graves? How do we make sense of war at all?

I have no idea. The more I learn, the less I feel I know.

Ninjas, Vikings, and Celtic Fancy

Those of you with long memories may recall how last summer I enlightened you both by exploring a remarkable episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in which the viridian foursome visited the Emerald Isle, there to stroll inconspicuously through a Dublin as empty as though the Queen were visiting, before shacking up in a castle that had somehow evaded the tender cares of An Taisce and thwarting an assault on my home city by the denizens of Dublin Zoo's pets corner.

No, really. Go and look.

Anyway, early in the lads' adventures Splinter takes them through Fusiliers' Arch -- that's Traitors' Gate to the more unreconstructedly nationalist among you -- into Stephen's Green, there to tell them of Ireland's history, with the aid of the many statues in the park. He homes in straight onto a statue of Ireland's principle patron saint, there to tell the boys that Ireland is a land of magical legends, including that of Saint Patrick, who drove all the snakes and other reptiles out of Ireland.

No, really, that's what Splinter says. 

Now, there are at least four things wrong with this. First, although there's legendary accretion around the character of Patrick, he was a real historical figure, rather than a magical legend. Second, Patrick supposedly drove the snakes -- and only the snakes -- out of Ireland, with the few lizards we have being left to roam freely. Third, there is no statue of Patrick in St Stephen's Green. Fourth, if there were, it probably wouldn't look like this:

So, anyway, I was reminded of this recently after reading a letter in the Irish Times a few weeks back.

I would have loved this when I was in primary school...

Seemingly the American O'Brien Clan Foundation has decided that there ought to be a statue to Brian Boru, the victor of Clontarf, in Dublin; in principle this is a nice idea, and one that I espoused myself in school when I was eleven years old. The letter begins:

'The Victorian ambiance of St Stephen’s Green seems perfect for a classical equestrian statue of Ireland’s greatest High King, Brian Boru, the millennium of whose death is fast approaching. 

We believe Brian Boru deserves the place at the centre of the park, where the statue of King George once stood. Once in place, it would appear to visitors as though the park was designed around the likeness of an Irish leader, rather than a foreign colonial ruler, or bed of flowers. 

In his address to the assembled troops before the Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru spoke of Irishmen fighting for their country, surely the first ever mention of the notion of Irish nationality? Brian Boru was the first and only High King to unite the warring tribes of Irish into a nation. His was the greatest Irish life ever lived. Were the Office of Public Works to permit a monument to be erected, people would have the chance to pause and reflect about the sublime achievements of Brian Boru, and drawing inspiration from it, enrich their own lives.'

And it concludes:

'Texas Pastor Terrell O’Brien, who is also an accomplished monumental sculptor, famous for his statue of Rev Billy Graham, in front of the university he founded, has been chosen by the O’Briens to carry out the project. 

A photograph of a rough model he is working on is viewable at obrienclan.com/raising-a-monument-to-brian-boru. The scheme is simple: We will pay for the statue, and its erection, and hopefully the Office of Public Works, and the art adviser can help with the proper permits and approvals.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but remarkably aquiline features aside, isn't this statue of Brian just a bit similar to the fictitious statue of Patrick in the Ninja Turtles cartoon? I'm not suggesting for even one moment that Terrell O'Brien copied his maquette from the cartoon's take on our patron saint, but it seems to me that it might be a bad idea to have a statue so similar to the cartoon Patrick in the very spot where the cartoon Patrick is supposedly located. It could confuse tourists, after all. Especially the sort who like to wear Hawaiian shirts and play frisbee in cities so desolate that Cillian Murphy could show up any minute.

Seriously, look how similar the statues are: you'll note that Brian appears to have inherited Patrick's clothes, and is brandishing two cruciform shapes just as Britain's greatest son is portrayed as doing. The horses are a mirror image of each other, once you correct for the fact that only a miracle could explain how Patrick's horse is balancing so elegantly on its left legs.

What might have inspired this pose, you might ask, other than that mounted Prima Porta rip off we know as the Marcus Aurelius statue on the Capitoline? 

Ah, folklore...

Well, the centrepiece of the Irish Times letter reads as follows, quoting, it says, from the Annals of Innisfallen to describe the 73-year-old High King engaging in a fine piece of battlefield exhortation:

'Their ranks had been formed before daylight, and as the sun rose, Brian rode through the lines of his soldiers with a crucifix in one hand, and a drawn sword in the other; he reminded them of the day selected by the pagan invader to offer battle, and exhorted them to conquer or die. Standing in the centre of his army, and raising his powerful voice, his speech was worthy of so great a king and so good a man:  

"Be not dismayed my soldiers, because my son Donough is avenging our wrongs in Leinster; he will return victorious, and in the glory of his conquests you shall share. 

On your valor rests the hopes of your country today; and what surer grounds can they rest upon? Oppression now attempts to bend you down to servility; will you burst its chains and rise to the independence of Irish freemen? Your cause is one approved by Heaven. You seek not the oppression of others; you fight for your country and sacred altars. It is a cause that claims heavenly protection. In this day’s battle the interposition of that God who can give victory will be singly manifested in your favour. 

Let every heart, then, be the throne of confidence and courage. You know that the Danes are strangers to religion and humanity; they are inflamed with the desire of violating the fairest daughters of this land of beauty, and enriching themselves with the spoils of sacrilege and plunder. The barbarians have impiously fixed, for their struggle, to enslave us, upon the very day on which the Redeemer of the world was crucified. Victory they shall not have! from such brave soldiers as you they can never wrest it; for you fight in defence of honor, liberty and religion – in defence of the sacred temples of the true God, and of your sisters, wives and daughters. 

Such a holy cause must be the cause of God, who will deliver your enemies this day into your hands. Onward, then, for your country and your sacred altars!".'

Stirring stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, without wanting to be a party pooper, I think it mightn't be a bad idea to inject some reality into this narrative.

A touch of history...

Firstly, I'm far from convinced this is from the Annals of Innisfallen. It might be from the eighteenth-century farrago of fact, folklore, and full-blown mythologising that's known as the Dublin Annals of Innisfallen, but if you look at the year 1014 in the actual Annals of Innisfallen, you'll find the following passage:

'Great warfare between Brian and the foreigners of Áth Cliath, and Brian then brought a great muster of the men of Ireland to Áth Cliath. After that the foreigners of Áth Cliath gave battle to Brian, son of Cennétig, and he was slain, with his son Murchad, royal heir of Ireland, and Murchad's son, namely, Tairdelbach, as also the princes of Mumu round Conaing, son of Donn Cúán, and round Domnall son of Diarmait, king of Corcu Bascinn, and round Mac Bethad son of Muiredach, king of Ciarraige Luachra, and also Tadc Ua Cellaig, king of Uí Maine, and many others. There were also slain in that battle Mael Mórda son of Murchad, king of Laigin, together with the princes of the Laigin round him, and the foreigners of the western world were slaughtered in the same battle.'

It's a bit dry, isn't it? It's certainly not the Mel Gibson-esque patriotic fantasy that the O'Brien's are quoting.

Here's the thing. Clontarf, contrary to popular belief, wasn't what we think it was, and it didn't really matter all that much.

The Vikings had been a spent force in Ireland for decades before Clontarf. Under Olaf Sigtryggsson, Dublin had ruled over a big chunk of north Leinster in the mid-tenth century, but at the battle of Tara, fought in 980, Máel Sechnaill II, King of Meath, defeated Olaf, forcing the Dubliners to pay tribute to the Irish henceforth; it was Tara, not Clontarf, that had decisively ensured that Vikings would not rule in Ireland.

Clontarf, on the other hand, is best understood as a battle between rival Irish kings. Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, had rebelled against Brian Boru, the High King of the day, and although Vikings made up a large part of his army, the Vikings of Dublin did not take part in the battle on their doorstep; indeed, although Sigtrygg Silkenbeard, king of Dublin, was Máel Mórda's son-in-law, he remained neutral in the conflict between the two Irish kings. And well he might, for Vikings served in Brian's army too, and Brian had been the third husband of Sigtrygg's mother!

The tale of Clontarf grew with the telling. Vikings remembered it as a heroic encounter between champions, while as time went by Dubliners grew embarrassed about their Viking heritage and recast the battle as a clash of nations. The reality is that the Vikings were an important presence in medieval Ireland following their defeat at Tara. Though they remained an important -- if decreasingly distinctive -- element in Irish life right up to the arrival of the Normans in 1169, after Tara they would never again threaten to be an dominant one; the Irish and Norse nobility were deeply intermingled, and it's schoolboy nonsense to think of Clontarf as a heroic Irish victory against sinister foreigners. 

Then again, schoolboy nonsense has its charms. I suspect Chesterton would have said that there's truth buried there, the kind of truth that academics too often forget. 

Thousands of Words

It's long been a conviction of mine -- and as usual this is based on observation and not upon prejudice -- that academic talks with witty and dramatic titles tend towards tedium, whereas those with more workmanlike names can often surprise. Obviously, this doesn't work across the board, but it's a good rule of thumb, and one that first struck me when I attended a talk entitled 'Oaths, Omens, and Abominations' and found myself learning about Greek grammar.

The tragic aorist, to be particular.

I'm not saying it wasn't a good talk -- it was, and it's one where I really learned stuff -- but it certainly wasn't what I felt I'd signed up for.

In contrast, many's the talk I've attended with a dull title that's turned out to be utterly fascinating. Again, I'm not saying that all talks with uninspiring names prove inspirational; a serious contender for the worst talk I've ever attended had the kind of boring title that trained eyes recognised as promising hidden pleasures, but proved both condescending and deeply flawed, delivered in a ponderous manner and accompanied by an atrocious Powerpoint presentation, the nadir of which was an utterly incomprehensible flowchart.

Afterwards, as my colleagues made sure to take away their handouts lest the speaker notice the scathing comments they'd scrawled upon them, I remarked that I hoped the speaker was to be made pay for her own dinner; a friend who wound up seated opposite her during the meal then spent a tortuous two hours desperately trying to avoid discussing her paper.

Still, the principle holds, I think. Don't trust exciting titles, as they merely raise hopes, while things that seem functional and mundane can have poetic depths.

One of my favourite non-fiction books has perhaps the most soporific name of any book on my shelves, it being Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Dull of title it may be, but the book's a thing of rare beauty, and is one of those things that could change how you look at the world.

Scathing of charts and diagrams that are cluttered with useless or distracting information, and damning of those that mislead, Tufte sings the praises of elegant diagrams that convey large amounts of information in a clear and efficient way, especially those that do so in a narrative fashion. Not every picture's worth a thousand words, but some are worth that and more.

John Snow's cholera map, showing how outbreaks of the disease were distributed in the 1854 London epidemic, is recognised by Tufte as an exemplary instance of quantitative information being displayed visually, but the real highlights of his book are the nineteenth-century creations of the French engineers Ibry and Jean Joseph Minard.

Perhaps Ibry's most ingenious creation is this Paris-Lyons train timetable, as published by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1885. The horizontal axis reflects the time of day, while stations are placed proportionately by distance along the vertical axis. Southward-bound trains descend from left to right, while northward ones ascend from left to right. The table reveals an immense amount of information at a glance, with, for instance, it being immediately obvious that the steepest lines indicate the fastest trains.

There's no denying that this isn't all that clear when reproduced on a small size, but at its original larger scale it would have been admirably clear. Tufte's applied Ibry's methods to other modern timetables with impressive results, which really just leaves one wondering why this system hasn't been commonly adopted by transport authorities around the world.

Minard's historical maps are perhaps even more remarkable than Ibry's timetable. Indeed, Tufte is of the view that this 1869 map, depicting Napoleon's doomed march on Moscow, may well be the greatest statistical graph of all time, defying the pen of the historian, as Marey said, in its brutal eloquence.

The thick upper band depicts the advancing army as it sets out from the Polish-Russian border towards Moscow, the band narrowing along the way as thousands of men deserted and thousands more died through cold, starvation, typhus, and suicide; 422,000-strong at the beginning of the invasion, hardly more than a 100,000 reached Moscow.

The dark lower band -- tied to to temperatures along the route -- represents the broken and shrinking army's desperate retreat through the bleak and deadly Russian winter, harassed along the way by Russian peasants and irregular troops, such that barely 10,000 returned across the Neman.

I was horrified and thrilled when I beheld this map for the first time, as me being me I wondered whether Minard's methods could be applied to a similar map depicting Hannibal's march; surely, I thought, that'd be a boon to any book on his Italian invasion. Well, I discovered as I read on, Minard had beaten me to it and rendered such a map more gracefully than ever I could have done.

Working from Polybius' second-century figures, and following -- it would seem -- the route postulated by Jean-Louis Larauza, Minard showed how Hannibal's army set off from Cartagena with about 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, but after leaving men behind at the Ebro river to protect Punic Spain, continued to decline in numbers as it crossed the Pyrenees, Gaul, the Rhone, and especially the Alps, such that it eventually arrived in Italy reduced to a mere 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry.

Granted, this map takes Polybius' figures at face value, which I wouldn't do -- all else aside, I rather suspect that Polybius' figures exclude Hannibal's skirmishing troops who he regularly refers to as euzdonoi as distinct from pezdoi, his standard word for infantry -- but it nonetheless strikes me as an eloquent and valuable visual aid, and the kind of thing which should feature more often in modern books.

Dry it may look, but Tufte's book is an absolute wonder, and a call to arms. We shouldn't rely on lazy cookie-cutter diagrams or clutter our work up with noise and effects, the kind of sound and fury that signifies absolutely nothing. We can do so much better.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

Today being St Crispin's Day, and me being a war historian, it might be worth talking today about one of the most famous speeches never given. Every Englishman worth his salt is familiar with the St Crispin's Day Speech from Shakespeare's Henry V, given, supposedly, just before the battle of Agincourt 596 years ago today.

It's an absolutely stunning piece of writing and if thrilling to read is the sort of thing to raise goosebumps when you watch it performed -- I saw a superb rendition of it in Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre a few years back, and have since watched Laurence Olivier, listened to Richard Burton, and stared at Kenneth Branagh's standard-setting rendition.

It's an unforgettable scene, and the sort of thing to rouse all but the most lifeless of souls; it won't surprise anyone to read that it didn't happen like that, but it's worth winnowing through what we know about the matter.

To Begin With...

The most important historical sources for the battle are: Henrici Quinti Angliae Regis Gesta, written within two years later from an English perspective; the Liber Metricus de Henrico Quinto by Thomas Elmham, a contemporary English monk who composed an account of the Agincourt campaign in Latin verse a few years after the battle; the Chronique de Religieux des Saint-Denys and Chronique de Enguerrand de Monstrele, both written from French perspectives; and the hugely similar the Chronique de Jean le Fevre de St Remy by a Burgundian who fought for the English, and Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigneby, by Jehan de Wavrin, who observed the battle from the French lines.

If we go through these systematically, the first thing we'll notice that only Thomas Elmham and Le Fevre and Jehan de Wavrin, both of whom wrote decades later, report that Henry gave a speech at all. The sources generally recognised as being the most reliable say nothing of the sort. 

The earliest source, and the one generally recognised as the most reliable, the English Henrici Quinti Angliae Regis Gesta, says nothing about any speeches delivered by Henry on the day of the Battle; what's more, it reveals nothing of what Henry said to his men the previous day, when he ordered them to deploy for battle. Curiously, though, it does include a detail that Shakespeare seems to have worked into his speech, this being a discussion between Henry and one of his retainers about whether it would have been better if Henry had another 10,000 archers.

Thomas Elmham

Thomas Elmham, writing a couple of years after the Gesta, gives a remarkable account of what Henry supposedly said before the battle, which, though rich in the detail of medieval life, nonetheless can hardly be taken as accurate:

'It was the twenty-fifth day of the month of October ever afterwards giving the English passionate memories of that day. On the sixth day, Crispin and Crispinian willingly bore weapons in the name of Christ...

The king said to those remaining, "My fellow men, prepare arms! English rights are referred to God. Memories noted many battles given for the right of King Edward and Prince Edward. Many a victory occurred with only a few English troops. This could never have been by their strength alone. England must never lament me as a prisoner or as to be ransomed. I am ready to die for my right in the conflict. St George, George, saint and knight be with us! Holy Mary, bestow your favour on the English in their right. At this very hour many righteous English people pray for us with their hearts. France, hasten to give up your fraud!"

The king, bearing his own arms, put his own crown in his head. He signed himself with the cross, thus giving courage to his men. Now the priests cried out from behind, sighing, "Now have mercy on us, God. Now have mercy, God. Spare the crown of the English. Support the royal right! In your mercy, Virgin Mary, bestow your favour. As your right dowry, George, knight, and Edward, pious king, give your aid. May all the saints give constancy to our king. May God accept our holy prayers."'

Elmham never claims to have been present on the campaign, and admits to depending in large part on things he'd heard from others; it seems certain that he based his account in no small degree on the Henrici Quinti Angliae Regis Gesta, but that he embroidered this significantly, or at least recorded the embroidery of others, even claiming that St George was witnessed in the air, fighting for the English. As Anne Curry says in The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations, 'already a version of Agincourt was developing which was a mixture of experience and legend'.

This is pretty normal when dealing with patriotic triumphalism, for what it's worth. We need but look at ancient accounts of Marathon or how gladly the English during the Great War leapt on the story of the Angels of Mons in order to see how enthusiastically supernatural tales are embraced in wartime.

As for the two main French sources, the Chronique de Religieux des Saint-Denys claims that Henry exhorted his entire army on the day before the battle, while leading his men towards where they would fight the French, reminding them of their victories at Crecy and Poitiers; the Chronique de Enguerrand de Monstrele, on the other hand, makes no mention of Henry having made any speeches at all; de Monstrele says that there was a speech given before the battle, but that that battle exhortation was given by Thomas Erpingham.

Jehan de Wavrin

That leaves us with de Wavrin's and Jean le Fevre's similar and rather problematic accounts. Jehan de Wavrin  describes Henry as having given a series of speeches along the English lines.

'These things being arranged, the king went along the ranks to see if nothing was wanting to the work of the army, and in passing he made fine speeches everywhere, exhorting and begging them to do well; saying that he had come into France to recover his rightful heritage, and that he had good and just cause for so doing; saying further that they could fight safely and with free heart in this quarrel, and that they should remember that they were born of the realm of England where they had been brought up and where their fathers, mothers, wives, and children were living; wherefore it became them to exert themselves, that they might return thither with great joy and approval. And he showed them besides how his predecessrors, kings of England, had gained many splendid victories over the French, and caused them marvellous discomfiture; and he bagged that this day each one would assist in protecting his person and the crown of England, with the honour of the kingdom. And further he told them and explained how the French were boasting that they would cut off three fingers of the right hand of all the archers that should be taken prisoners to the end that neither man nor horse should ever again be killed with their arrows. Such exhortations and many others, which cannot all be written, the King of England addressed to his men.'

Of course, given that he would have been stationed with the French and could hardly have been privy to such speeches, de Wavrin must have been dependent on someone else for his account, and given how his account matches the apparently slightly earlier narrative of Jean le Fevre, it seems le Fevre must be the source for this element in later accounts of the battle, as followed in turn by modern writers such as Christopher Hibbert and Juliet Barker.

Jean le Fevre

Although a nineteen-year-old participant in the battle, le Fevre wrote his account of the battle several decades afterwards and relied to a very large extent upon the slightly earlier account of the battle by Enguerrand de Monstrele. Le Fevre describes two English exhortations, the first by Henry before the advance and the second by Thomas Erpingham immediately before the battle. Lest we be inclined to accept too quickly le Fevre at his word, it's worth noting that his account of Erpingham's speech is no more than a paraphrase of this account of it by Enguerrand de Monstrele, who most certainly had not been present at the time:

'Sir Thomas, in the name of the king, exhorted them all most earnestly to defend their lives, and thus saying he rode along their ranks attended by two persons. When all was done to his satisfaction, he flung into the air a truncheon which he held in his hand, crying out "Nestrocque!" and then dismounted, as the king and the others had done. When the English saw Sir Thomas throw up his truncheon, they set up a loud shout, to the very great astonishment of the French. The English seeing the enemy not inclined to advance, marched toward them in handsome array, and with repeated huzzahs, occasionally stopping to recover their breath. The archers, who were hidden in the field, re-echoed these shoutings, at the same time discharging their bows, while the English army kept advancing upon the French...'

Bearing in mind, then, that le Fevre depended in no small part on Monstrele, and that de Monstrele, like the author of the Gesta, made no mention of any speeches given by the king, what are we to make of this? Should we believe him?

Look at the options:

• The Gesta never mentions any speeches at all, but says Henry had a discussion with Walter Hungerford about how desirable another 10,000 archers would be.
• Elmham's verse account, which has obviously been embellished by patriotic fiction, describes the king on the day of battle exhorting the troops by calling on God and the saints for help.
• The Chronique de Religieux des Saint-Denys says that Henry exhorted the troops the day before the battle by reminding them of earlier victories.
• De Monstrele never mentions the king making any speeches at all, but says that Sir Thomas Erpingham rode along the line immediately before battle exhorting the troops on behalf of the king.
• Le Fevre and le Wavrin say the king gave a series of speeches while riding along the lines, before the English advance, and that Sir Thomas Erpingham addressed the army immediately before the battle.

Is it possible to reconcile these disparate accounts? Yes, I think so, though I also think the end result looks a tad on the contrived side. We'd have to assume that the day before the battle the king had a conversation with Hugerford about how handy extra archers would be and that he addressed some of the troops, doing so again the next day while riding along the lines before the advance. He would have said different things at different points -- with some men talking of previous victories, and with others talking of God being on their side. After the troops had deployed, then, Erpingham would have ridden along the line again, trying to rouse the spirits of the men with a series of short exhortations. And then he would have thrown his baton in the air, and the English would have advanced against the French...

The fact is that as far as I can see none of the statements in any of the writers are actually contradictory, such that they can be assembled into one consistent narrative; to do so, however, would be rather crude and pretty ahistorical. It would simply take the statements of the medieval authors at face value, without considering what sources the authors drew on, whether they'd have been in a position to check their sources, who were the intended audiences of each document,  and so forth.

Given all that, you might be better off sticking with Shakespeare.

Ending Violence: A Deluded Fantasy

I realise that given the day that's in it it's probably obligatory to say what I was doing when I first heard of the 9/11 attacks ten years ago. Well, if you're interested, I was in a pub.

I wasn't drinking, mind; I was working, serving drinks and soup and sandwiches to a crowd who'd come in from a funeral. Edel, the loungegirl who was working with me, had asked if she could turn on the telly, down at the far end of the counter where she was washing glasses and crockery, and I'd said no. I could hear customers murmuring and muttering about plane crashes, but I carried on with my work.

My phone rang, to my surprise, as I never had the phone on during work. I have no idea why I'd forgotten to turn it off. It was Heinrich, a German friend of mine, calling from Greece, where he was living at the time.

-- Have you heard the news?

-- No, I said, did a plane crash or something? I've heard some of the customers talking...

-- Worse than that.

-- Have two planes crashed?

-- Two plans have crashed into the World Trade Centre.

-- Do they think it's terrorism?

-- Well, it's hardly an accident.

And after a minute or more of chatting I hung up, and turned around.

-- Edel, I called. Turn the telly on.

And the towers fell.

It's weird to think that for so many people I know and love, this must have been the defining world moment of their adolescence and early adulthood. I remember the Hungarians allowing people to cross the Iron Curtain into the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, and the prospect of the world getting better.

A History of Violence

Of course, there are people out there who still think the world is getting better. I read an absurd article by Stephen Pinker this evening, entitled 'A History of Violence', in which he argues that:

'Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.'

The whole argument is historically ignorant, reliant on cavalier speculation and colossal assumptions, devoid of any meaningful evidence whatsoever and taking no account of so much that we do know. It is, frankly, a heroic demonstration of why for some people it is best to stick to the knitting. Or maybe to learn to knit.

Words from the Wise

I came across the article after seeing it linked to, with contempt, on the Twitter feed of one Benjamin Gray, a barrister who'd previously studied war studies. Describing it as the 'biggest pile of nonsense I've read in a long time', Benjamin went on to challenge Pinker's claims in a serious of thirteen points and a closing observation.

1. Violence is cyclical, shifting between cataclysmic conflicts and minor imperial tussles.
2. Violence has obviously declined since 1945 as that was the most lethal war in history.
3. Criminal punishments have become less "sadistic" as we've been able to replace them with graded forms of imprisonment and state justice.
4. Interstate warfare has declined in a significant part because the great powers have military power so great it can obliterate everyone.
5. Pinker's writing on Biblical massacres betrays his prejudices. Most of them didn't happen but were later literary inventions written in times of immense persecution (if the Bible were written in Auschwitz you can bet it would prescribe the genocide of Germans).
6. Modernity, starting with the French Revolution, unleashed the most violent, cataclysmic and destructive wars mankind has ever seen; the wars of the medieval and classical eras were much less bloody.
7. The Church and Christian military ethics were significant restraining factors in continental warfare (if not the Crusades).
8. Soldiers today are considerably more violent than in earlier eras. In WWII around 40% of infantrymen would shoot to hit people, now it's around 90%.
9. In every era some academic twit proclaims the decline of violence, and they are always proved wrong.
10. If it happens that this trend continues, it will only be because we are now so well-armed that we can extinguish ourselves
11. We may not burn cats, but we hunt foxes, gore bulls, and fight cocks, dogs etc.
12. Some of the main reasons fewer people die in war is because we have better armour, we fight at longer ranges and and medicine can now save people who only 20 years ago would have been T4s.
13. While we may not torture so many people, we are still horrifically exploitative of the third world. We just inflict our suffering through indifference, consumerism and selfishness.

At any rate, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with MidEast in turmoil, upcoming Palestine vote, borderline-nuclear Iran w/ regional ambitions, eurozone crisis, nuclear North Korea, nuclear Pakistan sliding to civil war, global economic downturn and American decline I find the idea that we are in a uniquely non-violent era a massively naïve hostage to fortune.

While I'd quibble with some of these, the general thrust of the analysis is absolutely spot-on. Pinker is talking complete gibberish, and it doesn't take a genius to work out where and why he's wrong. 

A Fundamental Ignorance of the Facts

He starts with a description of the torturing of cats in sixteenth-century France, says we'd never do this now, and argues that this is just one example of what he calls 'the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga', this being the decline of violence. Aside from the fact that I don't think there's been any such trend, I think this is merely an example of a heightened respect for animals, at least in the West. If that's seriously to be taken as evidence that we're less violent than we were, I think it needs to be held in sharp contrast with our increased willingness to kill humans who've not yet been born.

A false distinction? I don't think so. I'm not sure there's any sense in saying -- as we would surely do -- that it was violent of, say, the ancient Spartans to expose babies who looked frail or deformed, or of the wealthy Carthaginians to kill their babies -- assuming they really did so -- in the belief that doing so would make their lives better, but that it's not violent of us to kill our babies before they can see daylight, just because they're weak or inconvenient or girls. At the very least we must surely at least recognise that we'd need to agree on a definition of 'violence' before engaging seriously in this discussion. Me, I think 'deliberately killing other human beings' surely falls into any reasonable definition of such.

Admitting that it may seem crazy to claim that violence has been declining, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq and the century -- not shortly after the century, Stephen -- of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, Pinker insists that these are the facts:

'Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.'

This, frankly, is preposterous, flaunting an ignorance of both recent and less-than-recent history. 

Was human sacrifice to appease superstition ever an unexceptional feature of life in human history? Look at what we know of European history: the Greeks didn't do it at all, the Romans seem to have done it just a couple of times, and it never happened in the Christian era; yes, it seems the Vikings and others did do it, but we simply don't have the data to say how often they did so. There's not a lot of archaeological evidence -- certainly not enough to make any statistical claims -- and what we know about them seems to have been written either long later or by their enemies. It's crucial to understand that: it's a common trope of historical and anthropological writing to accuse one's enemies of human sacrifice, cannibalism, incest, and so forth.

As for the rest, and leaving aside the absurdity of trying to maintain that the Second World War was an eternity ago, rather than, in general historical terms, yesterday, it strikes me as staggering that claims such as these could be made less than a decade after the end of the Great African War and within twenty years of the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian War.

Particular obscene is Pinker's claim that the notion of rape as one of the spoils of war is something that's rare to nonexistent in the West and infrequent and concealed elsewhere: try telling that to the two million or so German victims of the Red Army, who'd replied to the Nazi atrocities in a manner wholly condoned by Stalin;  try telling that to the 500 or so girls raped each week by the American forces liberating France and occupying Germany; try telling that to those who claim that rape was all too often, in effect, standard operating procedure among GI's in Vietnam; try telling that to the victims of the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia.

And that's just the West, where Pinker seems to think rape is allegedly rare or non-existent in wartime, and where mass rape was one of the signature features of the biggest western war since the Second World War; it's not even getting into the use of rape as a weapon in the Great African War, something that was neither infrequent nor concealed.

The Thirty Years' War happened in the Age of Reason? Really?

Pinker's thesis is that the Rousseauist fantasy of the noble savage is wrong, not because it blinds itself to the reality of human nature, but because it gets things the wrong way round:

'But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.'

He gives a nod to the problems in our evidence, admitting that we simply have no evidence at all for huge chunks of human history and across vast expanses of the planet, but it's a shockingly inadequate nod and one that doesn't stop him maintaining that a picture can be discerned, with a decline of violence being visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years, the leading edge in this having been in England and the Netherlands, and with the tipping point having been the onset of the so-called 'Age of Reason' in the early seventeenth century.

This, as Benjamin Gray had pointed out, is balderdash, and not least because nobody in their right mind defines the 'Age of Reason' as beginning in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, the Enlightenment basically happened in reaction to the phenomenal levels of bloodshed during the first half of the seventeenth century, epitomised by the Thirty Years War and Cromwell's massacres in Ireland. 

The carnage of the first half of the seventeenth century, it needs to be stressed, was highly unusual. European warfare during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had been constrained by all manner of limitations, both those imposed by the Catholic Church through Just War theory and the Peace of God and Truce of God movements, and those imposed by economic and social realities. The so-called wars of religion, epitomised by the Thirty Years War, represented a vast escalation of slaughter, fuelled by new economic models and the breakdown of the Christian consensus, and were precisely what Pinker should recognise as a 'spike of horrific bloodletting'. 

If we flatten out the spike, as Pinker holds that we should, the general pattern of European warfare consists of several centuries of relatively low levels of military bloodshed up to the late eighteenth century, when everything changes as the French Revolution heralds the intertwined era of mass armies and mass democracy, this being amplified by the mechanisation of warfare, as railways and machine guns made carnage possible on a level hitherto unimaginable, and as whole economies were enlisted into war efforts in such a way that civilians became legitimate targets in a way they never would have been before.

And such a naive handling of evidence...

Insofar as Pinker wants to talk of warfare before his new age of peace, he throws science and basic statistical principles out the window by talking of how the proportion of prehistoric skeletons we have showing evidence of trauma caused by violence is such as to suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. Leaving aside the question of how there are hardly enough such skeletons to be deemed statistically representative, he ignores the fact that members of warrior elites and those who die in battle are often buried in special ways, such that their graves are more easily discovered than the graves of those who died less violently, thus massively skewing the sample.

Onward then he cruises to claim that:

'It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.'

Well, this is obviously true, because all tribes everywhere are and have always been the same, because no tribal societies have ever been stratified so as to restrict combat to warrior elites, because tribal societies have never tried to limit casualties through champion combat or symbolic warfare. Ridiculous. Just as an example, here's John Keegan, for instance, talking in his A History of Warfare of how the Zulus fought before Shaka and the lads changed everything:

'Battles tended to be ritualised, conducted under the gaze of old and young, begun with an exchange of insults and finished when casualties were inflicted. There were natural as well as customary limitations on the level of violence: because metals were scarce, weapons were made of fire-hardened wood, thrown rather than used hand-to-hand; and should a warrior happen to kill an opponent, he was obliged at once to leave the field and undergo purification, since the spirit of his victim would certainly otherwise bring fatal illness to him and his family,'

I'm not saying tribal warfare was always like this, just that to describe it as always like anything is historically naive to a dazzling degree. But if that weren't bad enough, on Pinker goes to say this:

'Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations—namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.'

It's hard to decide where to start with this, save to point out that Benjamin Gray hits the nail on the head in saying that Pinker betrays his prejudices here. The celebrations of genocide, so damned by the likes of Steven Pinker, are clearly literary creations written centuries after the events they describe supposedly happened. And no, this doesn't mean I'm denying Biblical inspiration in any sense -- I'm just pointing out that the Bible is a library, rather than a book, and that individual books represent distinct literary genres.

Until the Greek invention of history as a discipline, the ancients seem to have felt free to emboider, embellish, and even fabricate their histories in order to make what they regarded as deeper truths.* That was the nature of the genre. Indeed, this tendency never quite went away, even after Herodotus changed the game and Thucydides changed the rules. Hellenistic, Roman, and especially medieval writers all had a tendency to treat numbers, for instance, in a rather symbolic way. Pinker shows no awareness of this fact, and treats Biblical claims of massacres as though they're historically accurate accounts of historical events. The fact that nobody's found corroborative evidence for those events, and there seems to be no evidence of massacres inspired by the Biblical 'celebrations of violence' should be a clue that the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly violent at all.

There's something deeply disingenuous about Pinker's admission that the Hebrews, who he clearly regards as deeply violent, were 'no more murderous than other tribes'; he compares them with the Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, as well as with the Chinese, none of which could ever be described accurately as 'tribes'. Talk of the early histories of the Muslims seems particularly misplaced, given how long after the Muslim wars of conquest they were written, such that the evidence as we have it was written in a relatively peaceful era, romanticising the 'heroic' deeds of their ancestors.

So what is his point?

The subtext of the whole article is sharply revealed by this paragraph: people used to be savage and religious, but then along came the Age of Reason, and violence went into a sharp decline with the English and the Dutch leading the way. 

If anything, of course, the opposite seems to have been the case. The French Revolution was the child of the Age of Reason; it fetishised Reason, setting it up on one throne and Madame Guillotine on another as it unleashed an era of mass armies that ravaged the world until the middle of the twentieth century, when a war people claimed would end all wars was succeeded by the greatest slaughter mankind had ever seen, this being unleashed by those who that maintained that 'God is dead' and those who held among other things that it was necessary to work to abolish the opiate of the masses they believed religion to be.

Have things been quieter since the Second World War? In a sense, yes, but that's the natural of statistical outliers. They're the kind of spikes that Pinker thinks we should smooth out. Things aren't going to be quite as bad as that again until the nukes start flying and our mutual destruction is assured. Please God, that'll be a long way off.

In the meantime, we conduct our wars from afar, we kill our enemies from afar, we engage in slavery from afar, and we kill our children before we can look at them or they can look at us.

We haven't got more kind. We've just got more squeamish.

_________________________________________________________________________

* As indeed do some moderns, unfortunately.

Update: Sadly, there have been no shortage of people lauding Pinker's work, though I'm having trouble finding many with any historical training who've done so. In a way, this is hardly surprising, since it's clear that Pinker's historical research on this has been extraordinarily shallow. A book as large as this, with a thesis as comprehensive as this, is the kind of book that really only happens as a the fruit of decades of historical work, rather than, well, a year or so.

Just as sad, but fully understandable, is the fact that many would-be critics simply don't want to waste time writing about the book, or even reading it. It's clear from the points Pinker makes in his articles summarising and flogging the book that his methodology is as risible as his knowledge is shallow.

Of those who've challenged Pinker's thesis on the basis of his articles, one on Crooked Timber by Chris Bertram taking issue with Pinker's methodology raises a crucial point. It's beyond ludicrous for Pinker to contrast the roughly 1300-year-long “Middle East slave trade” with the six-year-long “Second World War” on a "scale of evil", with the former "event" being classed as worse than the latter. It shouldn't take a serious statistical thinker to see that Pinker's not comparing like with like here.

Of those who have grappled with this book and then written about it, it's worth reading John Gray, David Bentley Hart, and Ben Laws.

The creature was a party of boys, marching...

One of my sharpest and funniest memories of English class in secondary school was studying Lord of the Flies, in which one of my friends read almost an entire passage in a monotone, much to the obvious annoyance, however suppressed, of our (brilliant) English teacher.

'The rules!' shouted Ralph, 'you're breaking the rules!'
'Who cares?'
Ralph summoned his wits.
'Because the rules are the only thing we've got!'
But Jack was shouting against him.
'Bollocks to the rules! We're strong — we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down! We'll close in and beat and beat and beat — !'

I say it was almost wholly in a monotone. It wasn't entirely so. My friend rose from his monotone to roar 'Bollocks to the rules!' and then slipped back into his previous flat delivery. Comedy value aside, I loved the book and our study of it, often thinking that whatever about his other work, Golding achieved something special with that Lord of the Flies, showing just how thin and frail our veneer of civilization can sometimes be.Part of the sheer force of that passage, so burned into my memory by my friend's take on it, was how drastically it showed Jack having cast aside the very fabric of civilization that he had so chauvinistically championed earlier on:

'We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.'

'You knew, didn't you? ... I'm the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?'

I couldn't help but follow the coverage of yesterday's Mancunian riots -- and those elsewhere in England, both yesterday and over the previous days -- with an air of some disbelief. Leaving aside the question of why the rioting is happening, I've been amazed at the police's complete failure to get to grips with the situation. Water cannons and rubber bullets aside, the police are, as it stands, perfectly well-equipped to deal with what's being going on.

What do I mean? Well, broadly speaking, riot control aims towards one of two possible outcomes, these being dispersal and confinement.

• Dispersal is usually the preferred outcome, with the unity of the mob being shattered so that a rout begins and the rioters flee home. 
• Confinement isn't really desirable, because that means locking an angry mob into one place, which can endanger officers, but sometimes it's the only real option; it entails establishing a cordon around the mob, and then pulling the cordon tight. We've all heard of 'kettling'. Well, that's what kettling is: it's riot control tactics aimed at confining a mob.

The viral rioting that's spread across England over the last few days is such that dispersal tactics are basically useless. The mobs we've seen haven't been standing their ground. They've not been facing off against police, hurling molotov cocktails or such; rather, in the main, they've simply marauded along streets, smashing shops and vehicles, looting, plundering, and occasionally mugging as they've gone. It's wild and dangerous Lord of the Flies stuff, but it's not the behaviour of a unit inclined to stand and fight. These mobs aren't solid; they're fluid beasts, even gaseous ones. There's no point using water cannons against swarms that are happy to run away and ransack somewhere else... unless you're trying to drive them into a specific spot.

I know, this sounds like it's straight out of Sun Tzu, but there you have it. He knew stuff.

Kettling tactics, on the other hand, could work very well with swarms like these, assuming they're not quite as technologically savvy as people seem to be making out, with all their ridiculous hysterical claims about Blackberries and Twitter. I'm sure technology's playing a role in summoning the troops, but I seriously doubt it's being used -- in any serious way -- to coordinate them. It's possible, but unlikely. Besides, insofar as it is being used, it'll leave a huge trail of electronic footprints that'll result in vast numbers of arrests.

Take, for example, yesterday afternoon's ransacking of Oldham Street in Manchester's Northern Quarter, which you can get a good view of from this distressing video. Now, I know there are reports of there having been 2,000 or so youths rampaging through Manchester, but from looking at the video I very much doubt that there were more than 300 on Oldham Street -- perhaps as few as 200.


... the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable
In any case, the important thing isn't numbers. What's most important, from the point of view of crowd control, is how narrow Oldham Street is. Streets like this are ideal for confining rioters in.

I'm pretty confident that 120 police could have caged this horde in a matter of minutes, providing they divided up sensibly, and coordinated their movements properly. That's assuming they wanted to, of course, and I'll get to that.

This is pretty much how I'd envisage the situation at the start. Let's say there are 200 or so looters on the street -- there may have been more, but it wouldn't really matter in this context. The 120 Police are divided into three groups, a western group to move up Tib Street, a central group to block Oldham Street, and an eastern group to move up Lever Street.

Very quickly, then, the western group would advance up Tib Street, with a 10-strong unit peeling off onto Back Picadilly, a 20-strong one onto Dale Street, and the remaining 20 officers carrying on to Hilton Street in order to blockade Oldham Street from the north. Likewise, the eastern group would move up Lever Street, with a 10-strong unit peeling off onto Back Picadilly and the remaining 20 officers stationing themselves on Dale Street. This would have to be done very quickly, but also as discreetly as possible. No sirens, and staying as far back as they can manage. They need to be almost out of sight; the trick is to establish a silent cordon and then strike quickly.

The jaws of the trap have to snap shut almost instantaneously. The 20 officers at the northern end of Oldham Street should charge down to the junction with Dale Street, and then stop, with the 20 officers on either side of them then falling behind them, forming a wall of 60 officers, 20 wide and three deep. The 40 officers just out of sight on Picadilly would then move into position, blocking the southern end of Oldham Street with a two-deep wall of 40 men, while simultaneously the two 10-strong units on Back Picadilly would advance to close off the narrow exits, each unit being two men deep. There shouldn't be more than a few seconds between the northern and southern manoeuvres.

At this point the cage would be more or less complete, but it would make sense for the central unit to rush as far north as Back Picadilly, which would confine the mob in a still smaller space and allow the Back Piccadilly units to fall in behind the central unit, so that 60 officers would hold the mob to the north, and 60 to the south.

Once confined, it'd be possible for the police to start wading into the mob -- which seems basically unarmed -- and arresting individuals one by one, focusing immediately on anyone trying to break into shops in the hope of carving out escape routes. It'd take time, but it'd be doable.

The only risks to implementing such tactics lie in the possibility of the rioters having scouts of some sort, lads stationed a good way off able to phone their mates and tell them of the police movements. I think it's possible that there may well have been some outliers capable of doing this, but the thing is, even leaving aside how speed would be of the essence in a situation like this and how the police needn't have all started from one point -- it'd be more effective if they converged from several directions -- technology works both ways, and the police have far better technology than the rioters. I'm pretty sure they'd be able to jam phone signals or even have any phone masts in the area turned off, whilst continuing to rely on their own radios.

The white blob represents the rioting mob, with the other markers signifying phone masts

For what it's worth, I'm not plucking these numbers out of thin air. Riot control police are regularly armed with a large shield and with a long baton, designed to be swung; it's equipment analogous to that which was used by Roman infantry, and we know from Polybius and Vegetius that when fighting in close order Roman troops required a frontage of about three feet, though they could hold an area five feet wide when in open order.  Allowing for this, then, I reckon each line of officers on Oldham Street and Dale Street would need to be about twenty men across, with those on Back Piccadilly being five men across.

Now, I'm not saying for one second that Greater Manchester Police are stupid for not having done this. On the contrary, they know this stuff inside-out, so the question then becomes one of why this was allowed to happen.


'Meetings. Don't we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk.'
It was, quite obviously, a policy decision, and I hope it's one that's discussed in Parliament, as otherwise I can't see there being any point in Cameron having recalled Parliament; surely it's not simply so that left and right can point blaming fingers at each other while Britain continues to burn.

(For what it's worth, and I'm pretty sure that Phillip Blond would argue this way, the fuel for these fires has been laid down by decades of social, political, cultural, and economic errors, these errors having been made by those of all political stances, and quite probably by journalists, academics, and other opinion-formers almost as much as politicians. It won't do for left or right to blame each other; both sides should accept their own errors, whoever well-intentioned they'd been, and start tackling things responsibly.)

The key points seem to lie in police statements in this article. Steve Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of the Met said yesterday that:

'The Met does not wish to use baton rounds but if it gets put into a position that it needs to protect the people and the property and the lives of Londoners, [then] we will do so.[...] We had people as young as 11 being arrested for looting last night. Do we genuinely want to see the police of London using that type of tactic on 11-year-olds? We have to be very careful about what we use and how we're using it.'

That's the problem. What happens if you kettle a gang of a few hundred teenagers and even slightly younger children, and some of them try to escape? I don't think the police want to be wielding batons against kids. They might be savages, but they're still children.