E.H. Gombrich – A Little History of the World

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A Little History of The World, Book Review, Children's Book Review, E.H. Gombrich, Ethics, History, Philosophy

Santa Claus doesn’t exist – when should the children be told about history?

E.H. Gombrich is probably best known as the author of a wonderful book on the History of Art, which I guess must have made its way, at some time, to every Art lovers bookshelf.

I recently discovered that he had, as a young man, written a wonderful history book for children, which was published in Austria in 1935, much later, translated into twenty five languages, , but only towards the end of Gombrich’s life (he died in 2001) did he produce an English version. This has also updated the History, taking it to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Gombrich, born in Vienna in 1909, was an Austrian Jew, and made his home in England in 1936.

He originally wrote A Little History of The World, a history book for children, when he had been commissioned to translate an English history book into German. Gombrich was not very complimentary about the history book, instead, suggested to be publisher that he could do rather better, by writing a book about history himself, for children, The publisher took him up on this, and, quite astonishingly, he wrote his wonderful ‘little history’ in 6 weeks .

The sweep of this effortlessly readable book starts in prehistory, and in 40 chapters arrives at the tail end of the twentieth century.

Whilst there is a major focus on European history, what Gombrich is really looking at is a kind of exploration of empires – whether these are empires of the mind, of ideology, ideas, religions, politics and of course the regrettable history of empires won and lost through club, sword, firearm, bomb and all the rest of mankind’s panoply of destructive devices.

It has to be said, an account of several thousands of years of interminable war, war which almost every tribe humanity might belong to (whether city states, nation states, countries, followers of religious, political or other belief systems) seems, if it gets any sort of power, to want to batter another grouping into submission to, makes for pretty depressing, despairing reading. In some ways, stunning though this is, I’m quite glad I didn’t read it as a child, since I’m pretty sure I might have succumbed to hopelessness.

What absolutely makes this book at all possible, in terms of a sensitive young mind not getting overwhelmed and distraught by our peculiar species, is the great warmth, the immense humanity, and, yes, despite our bloody history, the compassionate optimism of Gombrich, who at every turn also sees the wonders and the marvels, the intelligence, the curiosity, the excitement and the heart that is also humanity’s heritage.

And then there is the far from small matter that he writes like a dream, talks directly to, rather than down to, his intended young audience – not to mention his admiring older audience.

He will, I hope, reach small people who might, by this, want to take charge of learning the sad lessons of the past, in order to help us to better avoid repeating errors in the future.

Here is Gombrich, with a wonderfully poetic and heartfelt, not to mention wise and encouraging, exhortation to his young audience, on the theme of time, and history itself, as a river. He has taken his audience on an imaginary journey, flying along the river of time, from prehistory to the present, and presents this spacious, soulful image

From close up, we can see it is a real river, with rippling waves like the sea. A strong wind is blowing and there are little crests of foam on the waves. Look carefully at the millions of shimmering white bubbles rising and then vanishing with each wave. Over and over again, new bubbles come to the surface and then vanish in time with the waves. For a brief moment they are lifted on the wave’s crest and then they sink down and are seen no more. We are like that. Each one of us no more than a tiny glimmering thing, a sparkling droplet on the waves of time which flow past beneath us into an unknown, misty future. We leap up, look around us and, before we know it, we vanish again. We can hardly be seen in the great river of time. New drops keep rising to the surface. And what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that moment. It is worth the effort.

This is a marvellous, fascinating, deeply thought provoking, highly engaging and interesting book

It is beautifully complemented by woodcut images at the head of each chapter, by Clifford Harper

A Little History of the World Amazon UK
A Little History of the World Amazon USA

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Jasmine Donahaye – Losing Israel

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Book Review, Ethics, History, Israel, Jasmine Donahaye, Losing Israel, Middle East conflict, Palestine, Politics

The shifting sands of home

Jasmine Donahaye’s confessional exploration of the heartbreaking complexities around the divide between Israel/Palestine: whose land? whose homes? whose sacred and historical places? whose truthful history? – the aching, tearing emptiness in clear sight for one’s own, and others emotional faultlines – is a beautiful, soulful, despairing and melancholy piece of writing.

Donahaye, daughter of two kibbutzniks, one of them born in Israel (her mother) and the other an English born Jew, keen to help the socialist vision of an Israeli society, was born in the UK when her parents left Israel and came to live in her father’s birthplace.

She first visited Israel at the age of 10, in 1978. Losing Israel recounts her profound sense of home, belonging, commitment to Israel, and her swallowing of its myths and hero stories, as absorbed in childhood from her former kibbutznik parents. Israel was the longing-in-the-blood home; Israel was beloved grandparents; Israel her history and connection

The stories we learn in childhood, before we are able to analyse, stand outside and deconstruct them, or learn that there might also be other stories, are seductive and often, quite literally, enchanting – that is, they exert some kind of magic over us, and learning that our view of the world is a subjective, not an objective one, and that someone else is glamoured by different stories and world views, is shocking and unsettling. Often it’s the easiest, least challenging way to live to choose to view our own stories as objective and true, and to choose to view the stories of  others as glamours, wrong, false, subjective.

As with any national narrative, in order to legitimise itself, the modern Israeli one is grafted, like a new fruiting variant, onto an old gnarled trunk with deep historical roots

So, for Donahaye, `the Arab’ was dangerous, one who was trying to take `our land’. And then, the complicated history of Israel, or Palestine, or what had been the British Mandate, rather flung itself upon her, after she discovered the role of those passionately idealistic kibbutzniks, including her own grandfather, in taking those “desert wastes and uncultivated scrublands”, to build the kibbutz. Build Israel, There was a false potency in the myth of desert wastes and uncultivated scrublands, a false potency in naming that land, the ownership it implies, that hid the other story of displacement. Not the sorry uncultivated scrubs, but land already settled and farmed by Palestinians. Who has displaced whom, in all its sorry complexity, becomes the theme of this painful, honest and unresolved exploration

Israel’s national anthem is in minor chords, saturated with longing for a redemption that cannot be, a hope that cannot be fulfilled, because who can ever be fully at home in the world when that home rests on the homelessness of others

Donahaye was well into middle age before that other story, that Palestinian story, began to demand she listened to it. Although she had grown up in the UK, where there has been open, sometimes deeply painful dissent between the concepts which `Israel’ and `Palestine’ contain, she then spent over 10 years in America, where perhaps the Palestinian arguments have not been so widely listened to. In conflicts, the history which gets heard is that of the victors. It is not `the true’ history. It is the history of the victors. The `true’ history must always be knotty and uncomfortable : it contains oppositions.

How can we ever come to this place (‘Peace’, written in Arabic and Hebrew); the need gets ever more urgent

I didn’t find Donahaye’s late realisation of that other history surprising, precisely because those beliefs we grow up with, as received truths, whatever they are, shape us. Changing our fundamental beliefs, `losing our faith’ – whether that is religious, political, or any other belief which is as much emotional as intellectual, is an overwhelming experience. Letting go of our cultural and family myths may in the end be liberating, but there is likely to be a deeply painful process involved in that awakening. For Donahaye, it was also linked with the rightness – or wrongness – of her own family history, rewriting her heroic parents and grandparents and finding darker actions in their past

No matter what I learn about its history, what I feel about its government’s acts, its citizens electoral choices, what I think about its political foundations and exclusions, Israel is inextricably caught up with my mother – my inaccessible, elusive mother, who left her community and her country, but inwardly never left, who carried her home all the years of my childhood not in a book…..but in the locked chamber of her heart

I discovered (and was not at all surprised) that Donahaye is a poet. She has that poetic sensibility of grasping the importance and texture of language, of writing, not only beautifully, but with thought, with precision, working images, narratives, descriptions and reflections, whether of her own internal debates and confusions, or what she sees outside her, with freshness, immediacy, authenticity.

What’s In A Name : Cinnyris osea : Palestine Sunbird; Orange-Tufted Sunbird

She has also been, all her life, a passionate bird-watcher. And ruefully reflects how language to describe bird travels and origins: `native’, `migrants,’ comes to have a weightier meaning in that land whose name is loaded, always denying the other. Israel/Palestine – whose home? This became a particularly powerful, and unresolved metaphor in the name of a particular bird, native to the region. As a child, she learned to call this bird the orangetufted sunbird. However, its other name is the Palestine sunbird:

When I was a child we never called it the Palestine sunbird, because we never used the word Palestine…..Naming acknowledges and therefore begins to validate a story. Not naming erases. …it renders a thing void…..semantically the name Palestine erases Israel…the meanings and associations of the word Israel semantically erases Palestine

This is an honest, and a painful book. An uncomfortable one because the author does not take a black and white decision, there is not clear-cut, done and dusted resolution. Rather she stays in that difficult place of nuance. Our stories, it seems to me, all our stories, closely examined, are ambiguous

Love of a person, of a place – the more you know, the more complicated it is. The knowledge that the person is wounded, that the place is stained doesn’t diminish your love…..your need to love is a longing to feel whole, knowing you cannot be whole – a longing to be home, though you will never be at home in one place, not fully

I recommend this book unreservedly. She took me into the heart of the real battleground – we glibly talk about `hearts and minds’ and how we have to win the hearts and minds to resolve conflicts, but it seems to me that is the only real and lasting solution to the eternal, global conflicts which our complex, conflicted species, each and every one of us, are so prone to.

This might, or might not seem trivial, but every picture I looked at for inclusion, had another retaliatory picture behind it : my suffering, yes but you caused My suffering, here are MY dead children : and here are MINE. In the end, I found almost everything I saw provoked a raging fire, and I felt trapped by each image adding fuel to each side. Everything was oil to that flame.

I received Losing Israel as a digital review copy from the publishers, Seren, via NetGalley

I was alerted to Donahaye’s book by FictionFan, when she was in the middle of reading it, and thought it was a definite one for me. How right she was. Here is the link to her thoughtful review

Losing Israel Amazon UK
Losing Israel Amazon USA

Jonathan Balcombe – Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Reflection, Science and nature, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

Embracing our animal nature may be the only hope for us

Jonathan Balcombe is an animal behaviourist of the right sort. By which I mean that he views animals with respect and empathy, in the same way, I surmise, as he views other members of his own animal species.

Essentially, this is the nub of the book. Balcombe eschews the idea of ‘anthropomorphising’ because in effect he shows (backed up by good references and citing) how time and again many of the ‘higher’ behaviours which we arrogantly assume are evidence of our unique ‘humanity’ – such as altruism, empathy, the ability to reason, language are in fact ‘animalistic’. There is not such a clear divide between ourselves and the rest of the, particularly, mammalian and avian world, though Balcombe also shows reptiles, fish and even insects to be more advanced than we might suppose.

In fact, rather disturbingly, the idea cannot help but surface that our unique
humanness may rather be a retrograde capacity to delight in the wanton infliction of suffering upon others, whether of our own species or of other, supposedly dumb (sic) animals. Balcombe posits that we may well have introduced the philiosophy of regarding ourselves as separate from other species in order to justify this brutality, to find an excuse for our cruelty towards other animals – and indeed, our cruelty, expressed across cultures, geographies and the centuries, towards individuals and groups of our own species, which the dominant cultural group regards as ‘subhuman’. This ability to separate the human from the subhuman has been responsible for some of our most intense acts of racial cruelty.

Balcombe’s well written, carefully thought through book ends with an impassioned argument in favour of veganism, on environmental grounds, as much as any other argument against the exploitation of our fellow, though non-human, animals.

Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals Amazon UK
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Jonathan Balcombe – Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good

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Book Review, Ethics, Jonathan Balcombe, Philosophy, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, Reflection, Science and nature

A challenge to blinkered speciesism

This is a terrific book, giving the lie to those who dismissively accuse those of us who ascribe emotions to animals as ‘anthropomorphising’ Its always seemed to me to be rather crucially the other way round. As human beings are after all also animals, and as we can see clearly the development of anatomical structures across aeons of time, and across species, its absolutely obvious that all the aspects of physiology have also been a-developing. Animals – not just other mammals, but other vertebrates, have neurological and endocrine systems like ours. It has always seemed to me to be supreme arrogance to interpret human behaviour and human emotion one way, and deny that complex behaviour and emotion also exist in animals. Why should we interpret the playful human one way, and see other animals, both wild and domesticated, behaving in a manner which looks playful, and looks as if the animal is enjoying itself, and not draw the conclusion that he/she is also having fun. I have used the term he/she deliberately, as Balcombe does, pointing out that our language, calling animals ‘it’ removes them from individuality. His tenet in this book is that we have failed to investigate the clear evidence that animals feel ‘pleasure’ in all its many guises – pleasure from companionship and social bonds with other animals, pleasure in play, a sense of beauty, enjoyment in the feel-good of sex – not just a mechanical urge, but pleasurable, like it is for humans. Even, in one startling image, he presents the idea that certainly other primates may experience a sense of awe.

As he points out, carefully tracing what appears to be complex emotion back and back – even to invertebrates, to insects, once we begin to see the adaptive, in evolutionary terms, nature of ‘feel-good’ and to see that ‘dumb animals’ not only feel pain, but also the complexities of the pleasurable (a much more individualised, personal identity response than the pain response) we should be forced to change our thinking about the separation between ourselves and other species.

The further I read into this book, the more Jainism, with its deep respect for all that lives, makes scientific, not just ethical sense.

My only cavil about this excellently put together, well-written, carefully argued and researched book is that I wish the extensive bibliography and citing of published research material had been footnote referenced, rather than all the books and studies cited in a chapter collected together at the end of the book, as I wanted to look for the evidence of some of the more surprising information given.

Its possible that this may have been done in the physical text, but certainly is not a feature of the Kindle edition.
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Mark Rowlands – The Philosopher and The Wolf

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Autobiography, Book Review, Ethics, Mark Rowlands, Philosophy of Mind, Science and nature, The Philosopher and The Wolf

This story of the relationship between Dr of Philosophy Mark Rowlands, and a wolf he bought as a cub, whilst a very young lecturer in Arizona in the 1990s, is fascinating, touching, meditative, troubled, thought provoking and as heartbreaking at times as it is amusing at others.

Rowlands was, as he admits, on one level quite a troubled individual – misanthropic, intensely reflective but not particularly comfortable with himself or other members of his own species, and veering into a relationship, far less instructive and elevating than his relationship with a wolf or part wolf part dog – with the bottle. The ability to drink a couple of litres of spirit in agonised despair on one particular, heartbreaking night, as he recounts, is clear evidence of hardened heavy drinking.

This book is part a loving recount of an 11 year relationship with Brenin, but, as importantly, a reflection on what it is to be human – or, as Rowlands, in disgust puts it ‘ape’ or ‘simian’, by contrast with what it means to be a lupine, vulpine or canine animal.

There is much which fascinatingly turns our own perception of ourselves as fine and advanced, on its head – Rowlands marks all our achievements down, from the highest to the lowest, as based on the evolutionary road which started in other primates, before homo sapiens, namely, the ability to work an advantage in deceiving each other, carried forward in speech, to grandiose mendacity, to ourselves as well as others, and, in order that the deceived do not lose evolutionary advantages, the development of the ability to read each other, see through lies and deceptions, and the never ending content between deceivers and deceived which then goes on permanently. And of course, the fact that each of us is both, simultaneously.

He contrasts the colder, cleaner concept of relationships built on loyalty within the pack of non-primate social species, with the sort of tricky behaviour (so similar to our own) which can be observed by animal behaviourists who study primate tribes over years in the wild.

I very much appreciated the debunking of arrogant superiority which we are prone to, as a species, but, increasingly, as I read, I could not help but be reminded, again and again, that the insistance, almost, on our innate debased nature, in comparison to a more noble non-human animal nature, seemed as flawed as those who believe we are the pinnacle, and the rest, dumb beasts.

Much of the book seemed to inhabit a place of self-loathing – and that loathing was projected outwards to the species as a whole of which the author seemed to be a reluctant and repulsed member.

Man, like wolf, is neither wholly flawed nor wholly perfect and part of our ape-ish evolution also leads to that very ability to self-reflect, even at times to be brutally honest in our self-reflection and attempt to see the world through another’s eyes.

Yes, for all I know non-primates may indeed be able to try and empathise with what it might mean to be lupine or avian, or even to try to perceive the world through cockroach or evergreen tree perspective, but I think this is definitely a pronounced human characteristic – and one which, if developed, can work to overturn the undoubtedly also present duplicity of simian development.

At times I very much was in 5 star territory with this book, as it made me think and ponder deeply, but I got pulled back to 4 star because some of the arguments really felt due to the fact Rowlands’ own nature made him often peer at the world through ordure-tinted spectacles. Which, in the end may be just as partial in view as rose-tinted ones
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Richard Holloway – Leaving Alexandria

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Autobiography, Book Review, Ethics, Leaving Alexandria, Philosophy, Reflection, Richard Holloway

The uncomfortable comfort of doubt

Richard Holloway, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh has written a biography which is much more than that, examining as it does the clash between the blacks and whites of certainties and the dappled, doubt filled view which may be where `faith’ resides.

As Holloway puts it, religion is man made, is God? His conclusion that the fundamentalist certainties – whether theist or atheist miss the ability, on the one hand, to temper rules and decrees with the nuanced approach needed in dealing with the individual, and on the other, to answer the mystery and the need for mystery, is one that struck a chord for me.

The title of the book more than nods towards Cavafy’s `The God Abandons Antony’ (Leaving Alexandria) – the loss of dreams, home, the painful gap between the dream of oneself, and the self which our lives reveal to us.

Holloway’s Alexandria is both a real and a metaphorical place – his boyhood home in the Vale of Leven, Dunbartonshire, and the more mysterious inner journey.

He writes beautifully, using quotations from favourite poets to illustrate what can not be usefully explained except by metaphor – Hopkins, R.S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Cavafy.

Holloway asks more questions, of himself and his reader, than he answers, and in the end, settles with the fact that much cannot be answered.

I particularly liked this:

“The best I had been able to do was to persuade myself and others to choose to live as if the absence hid a presence that was unconditional love……..It was a relief now to name my belief as an emptiness that I was no longer prepared to fill with words. But though I had lost the words for it, sometimes that absence came without word to me in a showing that did not tell. It was the absence of God I wanted to wait on and be faithful to”

A compassionate, tender and painful book
Leaving Alexandria Amazon UK
Leaving Alexandria Amazon USA

Sharman Apt Russell – Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist

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Autobiography, Book Review, Ethics, Pantheism, Philosophy, Reflection, Sharman Apt Russell, Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, The Natural World

Everything Connects

I’ve long loved Apt Russell’s writings, a combination of science and the transcendent experience of mysticism, inspired by the natural world, since I discovered her Anatomy of a Rose: The Secret Life of Flowers some years ago.

I’ve known that the term to apply to myself was ‘Pantheist’ since my teens, and that luminous, numinous experience from the natural world was present for me since childhood. However this book reflects a more mature analysis of Pantheism, tracing skeins of Pantheistic thought through from the ancient Greeks (Heraclitus), Roman (Marcus Aurelius) through other figures such as Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and strong traditions which can encompass facets of Pantheism in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and, closer to a Western Tradition, the Quaker movement.

Apt Russell describes herself as a ‘scientific pantheist’, but her connection to the Quaker movement is also strong, taken there because the ‘everything connects’ of course includes all humanity, and therefore has to have a strong basis in reconciling conflict, taking practical action in community, and living with clarity, as far as able. The book is a lovely combination of tracing the theory and history of the wide variety of Pantheistic thought, and her own personal relationship with ‘the healing power of nature’ – whether that is mountains, cranes, grass – or fellow humanity.
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