When the anti-traditionalists love tradition

 

One of the several interesting moments in Joanna Hanink's piece 'A New Path for Classics' (which originally appeared under the title 'If Classics Doesn't Change, Let it Burn') comes when the Brown University Classics professor shifts from her critique of the field to 'a new generation of classicists' who, she says,  are turning away from the triumphalist “Western civ” model' and 'becoming better in tune with the world’s shifting realities.' 'The nation of Greece,' she goes on 

has recently been looking to allies beyond Europe. It is forging new economic and cultural links with China in a partnership based, at least rhetorically, on the idea that nations with ancient pedigrees understand each other. The same general premise also underpins the Ancient Civilizations Forum, a cultural initiative with nine member countries in regions that were “cradles of ancient civilizations.” The forum casts the antiquity as a potential source of soft power for modern nations.

There are a few points that might be raised here, from the wisdom of democratic nations cozying up to a communist dictatorship, to 'the idea that nations with ancient pedigrees understand each other.' What I want to highlight in this post, though, is the strangeness of Hanink appealing to 'nations with ancient pedigrees' at all. After all, in the rest of her article she several times casts doubt on 'the claim that ancient Greece and Rome were the “foundation of Western civilization," a 'fairytale Western origin story' that, she declares, she has 'no more patience for.' She also links approvingly to Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay 'There is no Such Thing as Western Civilization.' 

Now, admittedly, it could be the case that the narratives of continuity in Chinese history are correct (though the role of the Chinese state in constructing such narratives should give us pause), and every possible story about Western Civilization is simply false. But there is, I would submit, something quite strange, even less than perfectly consistent, about the position that some narratives of cultural continuity have to be insistently deconstructed while others can be routinely greenlighted. 

Appiah's idea that the Western tradition doesn't really exist is really only one step on from a general scepticism towards tradition that has had a place in the academy for quite some time now. The work that, as far as I can tell, planted the seed for this particular intellectual sub-tradition was Hobsbawm and Ranger's 1983 volume The Invention of Tradition, which discussed examples of traditions being more or less made up out of whole cloth, or at least reified to an extent that the actual historical facts didn't quite support. 

Hobsbawm and Ranger were no fools, and the phenomenon they pointed to was a real one. Traditions, from the Christmas Day address of the British monarch (inaugurated in in 1932) to the Superbowl (1966) are often more recent than we think. There's no doubt that some claims about tradition are more or less (sometimes entirely) mendacious, and that they often serve present-day interests and structures of power. 

But there's a risk of going too far the other way - a risk that, it seems to me, is especially perilous in contexts where the idea we're reacting to is associated with a political Other. Though some traditions - even many - may be invented, or at least patched up, we probably shouldn't conclude from this that all traditions are just made up, and there's no such thing as long-term cultural continuity at all.

One problem with arriving at this kind of conclusion is that talking about traditions and cultural lineages - even ones that reach back into ancient times - can often turn out to be very useful. Unsurprisingly, progressive historians and classicists sometimes find them useful too, as Hanink seems to in her talk of 'nations with ancient pedigrees.' And there are other examples.

Classicists who are in favour of transferring the Elgin Marbles to Greece, for example, usually do so partly on the basis that contemporary Greeks are, in some sense, the heirs (even the compatriots) of Pericles and of the classical city-states. Feminist classicists like Mary Beard are often partial to tracing a 'long tradition' of misogyny back to Greece and Rome. Somewhat further afield, Christianity is seen as having imposed repressive norms to do with gender and sexuality on cultures - in Polynesia, for example - that, it's claimed, had a tradition of more openness and flexibility in these areas of life.

My purpose here, again, isn't to contest any of these claims, or even to discuss them in any depth. At first glance, they all seem to have some plausibility. My purpose here is just to point out that strangeness. If it's true - or even plausible - that there's a tradition of misogyny that can be traced back to ancient Greece, isn't it equally plausible that we can trace a tradition of democracy back to ancient Greece as well? And yet my sense is that the idea of Athens as the cradle of democracy is less popular among American classicists than it used be. 

I noted above that it could be that narratives of Chinese (or Greek) cultural continuity are simply more accurate than notions of 'Western Civilization.' It could be argued, for a start, that 'Western Civilisation' is a more amorphous concept than Chinese Civilization, or Greece. In fact, something along these lines often is argued; although usually this is done by simply stressing the unhandlable multi-facetedness of Western Civilization, not by bolstering a sense of the continuities in national histories. (That, in itself, somewhat gives the game away.)

My own sense is that while we shouldn't uncritically accept stories about tradition (especially ones that stretch over huge spans of time - stories about apostolic succession and dharma transmission both come to mind), we also can't simply assume that all claims about tradition are false. Most of us recognize, I think, that some sort of long-term handing down of ideas and life ways is possible. (Indeed, I would go so far as to describe it as a fairly obvious feature of human society.) 

Whether particular claims about particular traditions are true is something that is best worked out on a case-by-case basis; and I would be the first to admit that there are, for example, simplistic narratives of Western Civilization and the transmission of democracy that don't stack up when set against the messy nuances of historical fact. 

My plea here, I suppose, is simply that we engage each other on a level playing field when it comes to teasing out which aspects of which narratives are sanctioned by the evidence, and which ones aren't. We can't, I think, make sweeping deconstructionist critiques of some narratives ( 'all narratives are constructed,' 'We must take care not to reify notions of "tradition,"' and so on) while exempting others from that style of skepticism. At least, we can't if we don't want those listening into our debates concluding that we're conducting ourselves in a less than perfectly consistent, and even-handed, manner. 

Locked in?

Whence Woke? There are many theories. Though some, like Lindsay and Pluckrose, stress the movement's origins in predominantly French political theory, many point to its striking predominance in English-speaking countries, a.k.a. the Anglosphere - and even Pluckrose and Lindsay acknowledge the origins of certain key concepts, such as intersectionality, in US academia. This is especially interesting - if that is the word - considering the Anglosphere's prominence in the history of liberalism. How did such an illiberal way of thinking grow out what looked like such liberal soil?

One possibility is that Wokeism developed for its own reasons, but was then spread around the world (at least in the first, and hopefully last, phase of the pandemic) by the English language and the networks and lifestyles that go with it - rather as world-beating rates of obesity have spread from Austin to Auckland with the diffusion of car-focused suburbs and fast-food joints. Another possibility is that it's something else in 'Anglo-Saxon' culture that has done most of the work, the most common culprit being not the flaxen moustaches but the residual habits of Protestant Christianity, with its predilection for puritanism and witch-hunts. 

The point of this short post is just to add another idea to the mix - probably a bad one, but, well, that's what blogs are for. Intellectual historians - and intellectuals tout court - have a tendency to over-state the importance of high-faultin' philosophical ideas on world history, and I'm well aware that's a danger here. So I offer this as just one more factor that may have played a role in the deep history of this new form of extremism. 

The hypothesis is just that the philosophical tradition of empiricism, long strong in English-speaking cultures, may have had a hand here. Philosophers like Locke and especially Hume argued that what we know comes overwhelmingly (even, perhaps, entirely) from our senses. This was a tendency in English-speaking philosophy even until the time of A.J.Ayer (a disciple of Hume) and Bertrand Russell. 

Locke and Hume and Berkeley argued, against continental 'rationalists' like Leibniz, that innate faculties (e.g. reason) played a relatively small part in how we came to understand the world. The debate involved famous puzzles like what would happen to a blind man who was suddenly given the ability to see. Would he simply take in knowledge of his surroundings like the rest of us, or would he be somehow cognitively unprepared for all the new information coming his way? (The answer, it turned out, was the latter.)

Part of Kant's contribution, of course, was to try to reconcile these two traditions: we understand the world, he suggested, by taking in evidence according to certain in-built schemas. Though empiricism retained a role in Kant's brand of idealism, the radical empiricism of the likes of Hume had clearly been left behind.

The problem for radical empiricists of various stripes since Kant has been our growing knowledge of human development and psychology. Aristotle and Spinoza had both intuited that different beings have different in-born tendencies, though neither of them quite understood why. Now we have a much better idea: we act in typically human ways (and even in typically male and female ways) to a large extent because of our genetics. (And the same can be said of cats and bears and flies and jellyfish).

Some writers still like to warn about the dangers and wrong-headedness of 'essentialism,' but, of course, essentialism isn't always wrong. We expect humans to act in certain ways (not like rocks, say, or gold- or star-fish) because we attribute (consciously or not) a humanness to them. We think they - we - have some mysterious human essence. And we're right. Except that it's steadily becoming less mysterious.

The later Wittgenstein, who can be read as a kind of born-again fundamentalist empiricist, tended to want to dissolve human tendencies and actions into 'forms of life,' even to the extent of seeming to say that internal mental states could be read off outward actions. What more aggressive empiricist invasion of the private sources of innatism could there be?

Psychological behavioralists followed this lead. Chomsky cut his teeth criticizing them, in particular by pointing out that languages seemed to have an innate aspect to them. Children across the world seemed to have been born with a 'language instinct.'

Since Darwin, Mendel, and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary theory and genetics, we've had a pretty good idea of how this works (even if the details have turned out to be far more complicated than we expected). Our genes encode certain inherited information, and this includes tendencies towards certain behaviours. We can even estimate the proportion of certain traits that are genetic as opposed to environmental (though lay people tend to underestimate the extent of the genetic influence that scientific studies support). 

One of the most obvious features of the Woke culture on university campuses is the hostility (among many other sorts of hostility) towards ideas about human nature. Most of the current elite are outspoken 'blank-slatists,' preferring to believe that we are born as blank slates for our environments to write on, rather than the largely pre-designed, if highly responsive, robots we more closely resemble. 

The sources of this hostility are multiple and have been written about extensively elsewhere. It's my suggestion here, though, that the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophical empiricism may be among the roots of this reactivity. Even if we have plenty of good evidence - overwhelming evidence, at this point - that our behaviours are strongly influenced by our genetic essences, there's a strong tendency among English-speakers to want to treat humans as random streams of sense-perceptions. If this is at all right, it's another way (along Puritanism) in which Wokeism emerges, not as a cosmopolitan revolutionary movement, but as an peculiarly reactionary brand of Anglo-Saxon traditionalism.

The Rediscovery of Johnny Baloney

Another thing it turns out I'm ignorant about (although I might have suspected it) is the short-lived but spectacular flowering of cast-bronze sculpture in southern Germany around 1600. This took place mainly in Munich, seat of the Wittelsbach princes, and Augsburg, home of the HNW Fuggers - no coincidence, since casting large-scale sculptures is bronze is enormously expensive. The 'Neptune ...taming a sea-horse...which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me' that the speaker of Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' draws his guest's attention towards is supposed to speak loudly about his spending-power. It's also a quiet reminder of a river of artistic influence on which bronze deities of all sorts flowed between northern Italians states and southern German ones as the 16th century drew to a close. 

At the head of this river was a Dutchman, usually known by the less than compellingly Dutch name Giambologna (French Jean de Boulogne). A portrait of him by Hendrick Goltzius (more convincing Dutch name) is above, partly so that he'll stand at the head of a river of images in this post. And partly as a thanks for leading, directly or indirectly, to the flood of monumental bronzes that visitors to Munich can now wade into. 

There's at least one weighty tome on this topic by others who know vastly more about it than I do. So instead of trying to write anything much about it, here's a quick intro in images.

Let's start with two works by Giambologna himself, both on classical themes: the Rape of the Sabines (1574-82) and Hercules and Nessus (1599), both now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

Literal tonnes of smaller bronze versions of these are around (including in a room in the Bayerisches Staatsmuseum  in which my personal rediscovery of Johnny Baloney was made). Some are better than others; here are two chosen at random:

One bronze in Munich that is by Giambologna himself is the towering crucifix in Michaelskirche, a gift to the Wittelsbachs by their fellow jet-setters the Medici. There was a connection there, with Albrecht V of Bavaria's sister-in-law marrying Francesco de Medici in 1565. And, of course, their wedding forged a link in the bronze-casting chain, with Hubert Gerhard, a student of Giambologna,  going on to work for both the Fuggers in Augsburg and the Wittelsbachs in Munich. Here are two examples of his efforts, the archangel Michael defeating Lucifer on the facade of the Michaelskirche, and Perseus holding up the head of Medusa (this one in the Wittelsbachs' Residenz palace in Munich):

Soon the Wittelsbachs decided to breed their own sculptors by sending talented sons of Bayern to Florence. Two of the most successful of the new crop were Hanses Reichle and Krumper. Here's another Michael by the one Hans, above the entrance to the Zeughaus in Augsburg; and the tomb monument of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV (a Wittelsbach) by the other Hans, in the Munich Frauenkirche:

I've saved probably the most recognizable of Giambologna's works for last, the Flying Mercury from around 1580. This one has been extensively copied and played off, and has turned up all over Europe - including, of course, in the Wittlesbach's home in Munich. What better image of the swiftness and borderlessness of artistic influence could there be?