Chronic Anachronism

29/05/10 - 4.5km, 30 minutes (9km/hr)

During my university course 'Radicalism in the English Revolution' (or 'RITER' for short) we learned about a veritable Babylon of fringe groups, who suddenly found themselves with a voice following the breakdown of censorship and social order during the 1640s. Some called for relatively moderate things, like the abolition of the bishopry or the extention of franchise. Some were rather more absurd. Amongst this absurd category were the Ranters, who can essentially be called 'spiritual-anarchists'. They believed that God was present in all things, and that there was no more holiness in the scriptures than there was in, for instance, a dog, or an apple. They argued that 'sin' was essentially the product of the imagination, and that no single authority had the right to define or defend against it. Furthermore, these notions of sinlessness and freedom from higher authorities extended into their personal lives - the gutter press of the period widely reported the depraved, sexual immoral behaviour of the Ranters, who were continually portrayed as a threat to the established order. Of course they were by no means the only threat to the established order, but they were perhaps the most singularly anti-establishment of any of the radical groups of the time - they didn't just question the establishment, they questioned the very idea of 'establishment' itself.

All very modern - no surprise that when asked whether they "would have been a ranter", many of my classmates put their hand up. Because hey, we're students aren't we! We're modern and hip and open minded. And we certainly would have been 360 years ago too!

Which reminded me of something I had heard four years earlier in a philosophy class. For a start I should explain the demographic. These were weekly classes held by the headmaster for sixth formers. They were essentially informal although many of the class were working towards an AS in the subject, whose modules would be spread over two years. It's fair to say that out of the fifteen or so of us (although numbers did fluctuate from week to week) there were only three or four people who actually studied and thought about philosophy away from these classes. One of these people was the Headmaster himself, and he regular engaged in argument with some of the brighter attendees. I was in another group - those who weren't particularly interested in sitting exams or the often confusing intricacies and arguments and technicalities and definitions that seemed to densely populate the world of 'philosophy'. This didn't mean to say I, or anyone else present, was anti-intellectual in any way, we were just observers to the spectacle, and were happy to let the gladiators do their business. There was a third group, perhaps the largest of the three, who did take the classes seriously, and were high academic achievers, but didn't seem to be interested in philosophy per se - to many of them it must have been just another subject under their already buldging belts.

The classes were sometimes formally structured, but often followed whatever stream the headmaster's consciousness had decided to spring forth. Sometimes he would give us physical lessons in epistemology, pointing out that all definitions are necessarily relative. Sometimes he would become the butt of the joke, one of the brighter (if rather more attention-seeking) students arguing that throwing a stool at the headmaster might be a good move from a utilitarian point of view, as although it would cause the headmaster some degree of pain, it would nevertheless bring a great deal of happiness to the spectators.

But fun episodes like that were not necessarily the norm. Being a classroom, everybody had to have their say, whether they had an opinion or not. And as you may have gathered many of us, mere sponges in the great bath of knowledge, didn't really have much of an opinion, or if we did it tended to be a defensive reflex to please the Headmaster rather than any distinctly personal, well-formed appraisal.

Sometimes the classes delved into the downright sociological. On one particularly dull class we somehow ended up talking about Hitler (cf. Godwin's Law), and the Headmaster, in conversation with one of the few girls in the class as to whether she would have housed Jews to hide them from Nazi persecution. Her response was an emotive, almost defensive "of course I would!".

She may have. But alas, she has fallen into the same trap as the Ranters in my history class, and made the strange assumption that she, as she is now, would be the same she if she was plonked into some point in the past. Trying to answer a question like this from our existing knowledge is like trying to create a World War Two 3D combat simulation game, getting somebody to play it, and then asking the gamer what their personal 'opinion' of war is. You can't simulate the fear and anxiety over the fact that the next bullet that hits you will probably kill you.

Back in August I was at Newhaven Fort, and one of the displays there was a mock-up air raid shelter. You can pack people into a bunker, make the lights flicker and sway and play siren noises and bomb sounds in the background. But you can't simulate the fear, the fact that you might live to see life outside the shelter ever again. Or that if you do survive, you might not have a house to return to.

Similarly, you can have all the fun you like going to historical recreations, either of battles or courtly life, say, in the Medieval era. But you can't simulate the rather rustic, smelly and brutal environment which dominated much of the medieval world, even within castles themselves. If someone was

Perhaps more importantly, you can't put yourself in the medieval mentality, or any other mentality for that matter. You can not truly understand the world around you in any way except the way you currently know. You can read about how they imagined it, but you will always be doing so through twenty-first century eyes and understanding. Theirs will always be the more primitive world view, the more superstitious one, the less well-informed one, pretty much by definition.

So next time you dress up in chain-mail, bear that in mind. And next time somebody asks you what you would have done if you were a German in the late 1930s, tell them that you honestly don't know, and that it is impossible to 'put yourself in their shoes' partly because even if you were you (rather than the equivalent of 'you' in a bygone age, if such a thing can exist) you would have to change your definition of 'you' based on your circumstances, as what are we now except heaps of molecules reacting to our surroundings? Would you be quite so eager in accommodating the persecuted if it meant the difference between enjoying a relatively comfortable Bavarian dream or getting shot at dawn?

A similar issue exists in modern politics. Many have criticized the Liberal Democrats for 'sacrificing their principles to get into power', and other such emotive claptrap. The whole purpose of a political party is to seek a role in government, and to claim that they are sacrificing their principles is really saying that they are sacrificing the principles that you agree with more than their other principles. So the idea that 'if you were in Cleggs shoes' you would have made no deal at all is pretty much pathetic and infantile, and you know it is.

I will probably post a tidied-up version of this post on Three Men on a Blog, perhaps with a witty ending, or certainly something slightly smoother than what appears here, for as it is a three-man blog I should make take three times the effort.