He counted them all out...

According to Max Hastings in the Daily Mail, the rioters “are essentially wild beasts. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no-one even shot them for it… At the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’. They simply exist. Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies. Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present. They have their being only in video games and street fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious. The notions of doing a nine to five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.”

Mr Hastings has presumably no more direct personal acquaintance with any individuals in this class of “wild beasts” than I have with individuals in the privileged financial classes, and it does not occur to him that the latter could equally be said to “respond only to instinctive animal impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others”, except that the latter do it on a grander and more ‘elegant’ scale. Or that the financial classes who have laid our economy low make an explicit bargaining point of the fact that they do not “feel any allegiance to anything least of all Britain” – and in their case it has often, but vainly, been suggested to them that they should, after receiving more public subvention than the rioters could dream of.

The idea of Mr Bob Diamond watching the royal wedding on his telly before pottering off to do a little DIY around his oh-so-affordable house is delightful in the extreme and will no doubt do much in coming weeks to re-cement our society.

People will notice that in his list of the deprivations endured by the rioters (“no skills, education, values or aspirations”) Max Hastings curiously omits “jobs” – only to refer to them later as something these people might take up if they only wished, like DIY or literacy lessons.

With Mr Hastings lamenting that the rioters cannot be shot, like polar bears who have, through no fault of their own, got into the wrong place, and with Melanie Phillips, in the same Daily Mail, telling us that it is all the result of a “three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value. The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of drugs laws, and many other fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell bent on a revolutionary transformation of society” – with people like this bending the ears and understanding of middle England, hope is low indeed.

Old deal; new deal: a Modesto proposal

Modesto Post Office, California - any offers?

In the 1930s, as the United States struggled with depression and widespread poverty, one of the government measures was to implement a widespread programme of public works, providing facilities and infrastructure of public benefit and lasting quality.

Amongst these was a series of Post Office buildings. ‘In less than a decade, the Roosevelt administration built over 1,100 post offices, distinguished by fine architecture, materials and detailing, as well as by a lavish programme of public art that, for the first time, reflected back to patrons and workers their regional identity.’

Eight decades later, as the United States struggles with a new depression and public corporations and services face declining budgets and mounting debts, one of the solutions proposed is to sell off to private bidders those buildings erected for public benefit and the economic, social and cultural stimulation of ordinary people.

Meanwhile it is reported:
The US Postal Service "has announced radical plans to cut one in five jobs, reduce services and water down [that is, ask Congress to legislate to release them from legally binding agreements with unions] staff retirement and healthcare deals as the government agency struggles to keep costs in line with plunging demand."

Pierian spring water

I always knew responses, if I ever allowed them, might get me into trouble on this blog. My learned friend (though not in the sense that might interest Mr Murdoch in his present difficulties) has responded to my Herodotus quotation and murdochian musings. In the interests of public sobriety (There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.), and for the relief of modern-day furniture-makers and craft workers of all sorts, I post here his very informed response. 

However, Mr Murdoch has enough to trouble him just now, and so I should make clear that I saw the out-of-context quotation from Herodotus not in the Sun or the Wall Street Journal but on a caption next to a display of Greek pots in the Ashmoleum Museum in Oxford - and it just set me wondering, in sub-Dormer mode, about the status of crafts today more than about Herodotus. It did strike me as a little odd, but maybe if I had not been shouldered aside by polyglot camera-wielding museum visitors (who no doubt would have called up a few thousand words of digression from Herodotus himself) the Ashmoleum caption writer would have enlightened me further. I am grateful to my friend for doing so instead.
 
 
Dear Nicholas,

'The Greeks esteemed as noble those who avoided handicrafts.'

Beware of Murdoch editors bearing false quotations! Herodotus is talking about Egypt. (2.166-167). The warrior class engages only in military pursuits and their sons inherit this status directly from their fathers. Herodotus adds in a typical aside that Hellenes, Thracians, Scythians, Persians, Lydians and all other barbarians have a similar attitude to those who learn crafts. (A hint of the real herodotus shows through in the phrase 'the other barbarians'.) Amongst the Greeks, the Spartans despise craft work the most and the commercial Corinthians the least. Clearly he's commenting on the weird ways human esteem works in societies. He's seeing it as weird, as something worth comment. βάναυσοι or artisans are not really part of the city. As Aristotle tells us in the Politics, the βάναυσος is not allowed to attend the ἐλευθέρα ἀγορά, that's to say, to the assembly of free men.

I suspect that the disdain was for those who were tied to their work as contrasted with the superior status of those whose lives were dedicated to war. In practice, Greeks and especially Athenians valued craftsmen greatly. The Greeks had every respect for skilled artisans at every level - skilled potters and painters worked together in Keramicos. Some were free men and some were slaves. Ictinus and Callicrates worked with Pericles and had a higher status than our wretched modern equivalents such as the Gherkin Man. Not for nothing was Athena the goddess of crafts of all kinds and the concept of techne was the most basic source of intellectual metaphor for Greek philosophy. Knowing how to do something was the paradigm of knowledge. Disdain comes in because you had to be a free man and no slave if you wanted to aspire to the status of an Athenian gentleman. The disdain was for economic poverty and not for the skill or knowledge or products of men's hands. After all Ajax committed suicide when he couldn't get his hands on Achilles' armour. Its beauty is part of its high esteem. Same with Nestor's cup, and much else besides.

We still tend to regard military men as archetypes of honour and all the finest qualities, or at least we did when I were a boy. It's only in recent decades that people have finally gone over completely to applauding and crawling before the Murdochs and Berlusconis as though they really were the Lords of Creation. It all depends on what you esteem - it's one of Herodotus' favourite words! He's using comparisons to establish how things are and to point up just how weird they are. He is interested in the truth, but that doesn't mean to say that he thinks that everything's just fine and dandy with the world. What we are seeing in all this is men becoming aware of human values as something inherited and therefore potentially as something that can be shaped. Don't murdoch the man!