Here's the
second entry in our essay series, courtesy of
Talk Politics.
Due to the length of the article, I'm just posting the first half today (the rest tomorrow), however, the full piece can be downloaded in
PDF format from the new
Essays page.
I'll put some more information there in due course, but if people want to link to any of the articles, I'd rather they linked
there, so all of them can be seen together.
Anyway, this is great, so have a read and pick up the second half tomorrow.
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Myth-making and Politics
"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
In that one sentence, Machiavelli tells you everything you need to know about the role of myth-making in politics. You may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, so the aphorism states, but you can fool most of the people most of the time and that, if you're a politician, is more than enough to work with in the pursuit of power.
Machiavelli was the first true political radical; radical because he tossed aside Medieval notions of 'Kingly virtue', morality and chivalry and got right on down to the nub of politics - power. He was the first true political scientist, the intellectual father of pragmatism and the godfather of realpolitik, the man who single-handedly, and at no small cost to reputation, redefined politics as the 'art of the possible' rather than as the 'pursuit of virtue'. Machiavelli shifted the goalposts of political thought and rooted them in harsh, practical realities; the purpose of a politician is not to be good or moral, simply effective; it's not what you believe but what you achieve that counts.
It may seem odd, at first, to suggest that later political philosophers like Marx, Paine and Rousseau, whose work is very much concerned with ideals and ideology, owe a debt of gratitude to the ultra-realism of Machiavelli; there seeming to be little place for ideals and political utopias in the hard-boiled analysis of statecraft that is 'The Prince'; yet it is only through the influence of Machiavelli that such utopian ideals and ideologies, a belief in the possibility of a new social order itself becomes possible. The Medieval Christian world of pre-Renaissance Europe could simply not have conceived of anything so radical as Marxism or of the French and American Revolutions. It would have considered the social upheaval necessary to create the 'perfect society' that each sought to bring into being to be so thoroughly immoral that nothing good could possibly come of it and would simply not have been capable of thinking in terms of what might come after such upheaval. Perfection, to the Medieval mind, was reserved for the 'Kingdom of God' and anything which promised to upset the perceived 'natural' order of things was therefore the work of the 'Devil' and a complete anathema.
All of which is rather ironic given that Machiavelli did little more than systematically describe the world of politics as it really was. The Catholic Church, having become the established political order of the day, had conveniently chosen to forget its own revolutionary roots; that while expanding to become the pre-eminent religious and political authority in Europe and converting 'pagan' societies to Christianity it had had little difficulty in disrupting previously established social, religious and political orders when it suited its own ends; but having 'reached the top' it obviously had a vested interest in downplaying any further possibility of change which might threaten its own position. Machiavelli's 'sin', such as it was, was simply to call things as they really were. He let the cat of of the bag and explained the foundations and mechanics of political power and authority in such a way that it exposed nothing more than what political and religious leaders had been doing for centuries: in that sense Machiavelli was also the first 'whistle-blower'.
To understand the importance and power of myth-making in politics, one has to begin with Machiavelli and his seminal work, 'The Prince', even if one then has to look backwards in time from that point in order to understand the process of political myth-making, as Machiavelli was the first to clearly define and understand its purpose in a systematic way, as set out below:
"Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word...
...But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived. One recent example I cannot pass over in silence. Alexander the Sixth did nothing else but deceive men, nor ever thought of doing otherwise, and he always found victims; for there never was a man who had greater power in asserting, or who with greater oaths would affirm a thing, yet
would observe it less; nevertheless his deceits always succeeded according to his wishes, because he well understood this side of mankind."
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince, Chapter XVIII
Myth-making in politics or, as we refer to it today, propaganda is simply a tool of statecraft, a means to specific end; and this being politics that end is, naturally, power. Machiavelli's genius lay in his clear, and some would say cynical, understanding of human nature and the propensity of the masses to prefer the certitude of a simple lie told with seeming conviction over the uncertainties of a complex truth. It's interesting, therefore, to note that Machiavelli has become something of mythic figure himself, a writer who is often quoted but whom politicians, in particular, would rarely own up to having read, for fear of too obviously reminding the electorate of the ingrained cynicism of their profession.
To understand the all-pervasive nature of political myths its perhaps best to look at the fate of two Kings of England, both named 'Richard', whose historical legacies have all come under considerable scrutiny over the last century, exposing a very different truth to the 'authorised' histories that were taught in school until very recently.
Richard I - the 'Lionheart' - was one of the greatest of all English monarchs, right? - Wrong.
Richard, whose statue, sculpted by Carlo Marochetti in 1860, stands outside the House of Parliament was, by any standards, an absolutely abysmal King of England. Although born in Oxford, Richard was brought up in France - Aquitaine, to be precise - and spoke no English at all. Of his ten-year reign, Richard actually spent less than six months engaged in the business of ruling England, most of which time was spent acquiring taxes to fund his adventures in Palestine. The rest of time, while off pursuing the lordly arts of slaughtering Saracens, Richard left his realm in the charge of his brother, John, who, as history tells rather more accurately, was no great shakes as a monarch either.
In reality, Richard I was a nasty piece of work. In 1173 he joined with his two older brothers, Henry - who styled himself 'Henry III' during the revolt even though not recognised as King of England - and Geoffrey Duke of Brittany in an effort to depose his father, Henry II. When Henry II put down the revolt in 1174, after his second invasion of Aquitaine, Richard refused to face him in single combat and sued for peace, taking a renewed oath of subservience to his father. This act of grovelling obeisance obviously did the trick as Henry II left him in charge of Aquitaine, however his penchant for brutal repression, by 1183, resulted in the territory of Gascony taking up open revolt against his rule, with his two brothers siding with the Gascon nobles against him and requiring yet another intervention by Henry II, who lead his forces in France to but down this rebellion, killing his son, Henry, in the process.
There's plenty more to Richard's real history, none of it particularly edifying; but one incident worth noting, in particular, was the treatment meted out in line with the King's orders to the Jewish leaders who defied an edict banning them from his coronation as King of England in order to present gifts to the newly crowned King. Richard's courtiers - according to the chronicler, Ralph of Diceto - had the Jews stripped, flogged and thrown out of the Court, sparking a massacre of London's Jews as the people of London willingly joined in the 'fun'. Writing of this incident at a later date, Richard described it as 'holocaustum' - an interesting turn of phrase which would turn up again, in the 20th Century, with altogether more terrible consequences.
The Richard we know from what we were taught at school, the 'noble' King of history books and the romantic fictions of 'Robin Hood' and Sir Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe' is almost pure myth. Only the accounts of his activities as a soldier and military leader during the Crusades hold water in historical terms; in terms of domestic affairs, Richard's real importance lies in the fact of his absence from England for almost the whole of his reign; without a King on hand to interfere, the highly efficient civil government put in place by his father became solidly entrenched, creating the beginnings of the English Civil Service and, which in turn, "proved that the King, to whom all allegiance had been rendered, was no longer the sole guarantee for law and order" - Winston Churchill
Richard III, by complete contrast, has been judged by conventional history to be both a tyrant and a failure, a disfigured, semi-dwarfish, crook-backed villain of the highest order; the ultimate in pre-Hitler pantomime villains.
In reality, Richard III was a relatively minor King of England; his reign of a mere two years being insufficient time to accomplish anything of serious note. However, his one lasting achievement was the creation of the 'Council of the North', which survived into the late 18th Century as the Parliamentary position of Secretary of State for the Northern Department. This innovation gave the North of England a basis upon which to develop substantive economic activity across the region independent of the London and, by various twists and turns, laid the foundations for everything from the Pilgrimage of Grace, the founding of the province of Maryland and the Jacobite Rebellion, to the Scottish Enlightenment and, eventually, the Industrial Revolution.
Richard's reputation for villainy rests on the manner of his ascendancy to the throne and the still unknown fate of his nephews, the 12-year old Edward V, the legitimate heir to the throne, and his younger brother Richard, who were moved to the Tower of London, ostensibly for their own protection, by their uncle, who was at that time the Duke of Gloucester and acting a regent. Several months later, Richard presented 'evidence' to Parliament that their mother's marriage to Edward IV has been bigamous and, on their being declared illegitimate as a result, took the throne for himself - the two princes, as is well known, were never seen again.
Richard III was almost certainly a usurper and also moved rapidly enough to quell any possibility of a challenge to the legitimacy of his newly acquired position as King, which, at the time, inevitably meant having a few of his political rivals tried and executed for treason. In reality, this was little more than you'd expect in the circumstances and his actions were only what would have reasonably been expected from a newly-crowned and rather insecure Medieval King. Richard's almost unique position as the most villainous King in English history is the product of Tudor propaganda designed to 'sell' the English people on the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty by playing up the 'foul deeds' of its direct predecessor. In truth, Henry Tudor's claim to the throne was no more solid than that of Richard III but in the face of the public exposure of his alleged villainy, Henry came looking if not a saint then at least a worthy King of England.
Richard III, as as a consequence, has the distinction of being libelled by two of the most distinguished propagandists in English history; Sir Thomas More, whose 'The History of King Richard III' - written and published during the reign of Henry Tudor's son, Henry VIII - includes a whole series of embellishments on Richard's supposed villainy including the murder of large swathes of the royal family, plotting an incestuous marriage to his niece, Elizabeth of York - which would, presumably, have also involved the murder of his wife, Anne Neville - of accusing Edward V's mother, Elizabeth Woodville, of witchcraft in withering his arm and, of course, that perennial royal favourite of the era, of being illegitimate himself; and, of course, William Shakespeare, who put words, such as those below, in Richard's mouth, making him not only a villain but, in minds of the theatre-going public of that era and afterwards, a self-admitted villain:
"My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain."
William Shakespeare - King Richard III. Act v. Sc. 3.
As far as his supposed deformity goes, this seems largely a product of the prejudice of the era in which physical and moral 'deformity' were seen as synonymous. There is some speculation that he may have had a withered arm, the result of a childhood bout of polio, but the hunchbacked figure with which we are all familiar from Shakespeare is pure propaganda: modern examination of the one surviving portrait of Richard shows it to have been deliberated doctored after the fact, his 'hump' being painted in by an unknown artist at a later date, no doubt to support the fiction of his physical deformity.
Here we have two prime examples of political myth-making; of active and, until recently, extremely successful propaganda from our own history - successfully enough that I was taught that both mythic histories were, in fact, matters of documentary fact, while at school little more than 25 years ago.
The mythic figure of Richard I evolved over a period of centuries as a counterpoint to his brother, John Lackland, into the romantic warrior king who forever turns up at the very end of adventure stories set in 'Merry Olde England' - Robin Hood, Ivanhoe - and yet only really assumed his full mythic grandeur during the late Georgian and Victorian eras, where he came to represent the presumed and rather false nobility of Britain's Imperial ambitions. The image of a noble, civilised, warrior king was just what was needed to reinforce Britain's pretensions of going out into the world to spread the marvels of modern civilisation, even though Richard, himself, was far from civilised and would have looked in many way a total barbarian by comparison to his adversary, Saladin, and the sophisticated Islamic society of the era. Richard I is, therefore, an apt role model for the British conquest of India during Britain's own Age of Empire, which, under the Islamic rule of the Mughal Empire, was also far more civilised and sophisticated, by modern standards, than our own conquering antecedents of the time.
By contrast, the assault on the reputation and good name of Richard III was both calculated and deliberate - one might even say 'Machiavellian' - and served a specific purpose, that of reinforcing the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty and obtaining the good will and loyalty of the people by means of slating their predecessor: as Machiavelli, helpfully observes:
"He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can
neither rule nor manage them to his liking. But he who reaches sovereignty by popular favour finds himself alone, and has none around him, or few, who are not prepared to obey him."
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince, Chapter XVIII
One can still see this process of myth-making going on today, in the modern political era.
For Richard I, read Sir Winston Churchill, a man lauded as not only Britain's greatest Prime Minister but, in a BBC poll last year, as the greatest Briton is history. Churchill's achievements during World War II, admittedly, far exceed anything that Richard I ever came close to achieving, nevertheless it remains the mythic figure of Churchill, the war leader, that is burned in the public consciousness with barely a recognition that, before the outbreak of World War II, Churchill was widely thought of a political 'antique'; a curmudgeonly and bloody-minded relic of the Edwardian era who refused to move with the times, particularly on the issue of independence for India - a position which consigned him to political wilderness for many years.
Throughout the 1930s, Churchill was seen as the very antithesis of what a modern politician should be - and conversely Chamberlain was lauded as a master diplomat for securing the now discredited Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany. This was a view of Churchill which was put aside out of necessity during the war years from 1939 to 1945, where those same personal qualities which marked him as a political outcast during the 1930s turned out to be more than useful to a nation at war; only for the drive for modernity to reassert itself with a vengeance once the war was over.
Churchill's perceived rigidity and inability to move with the times was to twice be his undoing in the post-war era; first in 1945, when he was heavily defeated by Clement Attlee and a Labour Party offering a new political agenda, which led to the creation of the welfare state and the National Health Service. At that time, Churchill and the Conservative Party appeared to have run out of ideas and to have little to offer but for the same failed agenda pursued by the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments of the 1930s.
Returning to government in 1951, Churchill's unshakable belief that Britain should remain a global power, as it had been before the war, and by use of military force is necessary, led to a series of foreign policy crises; the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute, which resulted in a joint US/UK sponsored coup to overthrow the democratically elected Mossadegh government, the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya and the Malaya emergency, which he inherited from Labour after it began in 1948, all of which he tried to resolve by military action. By any rational measure, Churchill was swimming against the tide of history and his reputation was, perhaps, only saved by his sense of timing - he finally ended his political career, resigning in 1955, just days before the first democratic elections in Malaysia, getting out before his foreign policy stance and efforts to sustain British global power led to a full-scale disaster; he left that to his successor, Sir Anthony Eden, whose disastrous pursuit of a Churchill-style solution to the Suez crisis in 1956 marked both the end of Britain as a serious global power and, in January 1957, his own political career.
If Churchill and his reputation can be seen as a modern analogue of Richard I then there are no shortage of contenders for the position of Richard III. Bashing the previous government as villains of the highest order has become more or less standard practice in modern politics, irrespective of how long it has been since that government last held political office. The presumed past failings of the opposition have assumed talismanic proportions for the two main political parties in Britain; it's been 26 years, more than a quarter of the century, since the defeat of the Callaghan government after the 'Winter of Discontent' - another Richard III reference, you'll note - yet every now and then you'll still find the odd Tory - aren't the all - popping up with some dark allusion to their belief that the days of 'beer and sandwiches' for union leaders at 'Number 10' are only just around the corner, once again. With Labour expected to move back a little to the left on Gordon Brown's expected ascendency to the leadership of the Labour Party and, by extension, the country, just on horizon, we can expect this particular Conservative Party trope to crop up with increasing frequency - almost always when there's new employment legislation in the offing. Meanwhile the unquiet ghost of Margaret Thatcher stalks the corridors of Tory Central Office as though she were a creation of Edgar Allan Poe; the 'Telltale Heart' of the Tory Party; although admittedly, Labour has some considerable justification for raising her particular spectre as the Tories have failed to generate a single new idea since the late 1980's - still, it's a measure of her continuing unpopularity that having furnished the platform with stylish seating for the assorting dignitaries at a Tory conference during the period of William Hague's leadership of the Conservative Party, Ikea found itself almost unable to give away the same model chair - in blue, of course - in which Maggie was seated.
Politics, the media and, latterly, bloggers, of course, all thrive on their personal bogeymen; on their favoured cast of sub-Shakespearian villains: after all, its so much easier to slate someone else for their presumed failings than to come up with any constructive ideas of your own as Aneurin Bevan noted of the Conservative Party:
"The Tories, every election, must have a bogeyman. If you haven't got a programme, a bogeyman will do."
In the modern era of global communications, where little or nothing remains truly secret for long and one is readily exposed to so many different and competing 'takes' on the truth of almost any situation, why then does it seem that more than ever we are so wedded to the constant use and abuse of political myths to the extent that so much of what passes for political debate, these days seems invariably to take on the tone of one of the classic 'Looney Tunes' in which Bugs and Daffy take turns trying to convince Elmer Fudd that it's, alternately, either 'rabbit season' or 'duck season'?
Why, with so much information so readily to hand, do we still find it so very difficult to sift truth from propaganda and engage in rational political debate?
The answer, if anything, lies in a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of modern political culture; a blind-spot, if you like, in our understanding of politics which would, perhaps, be entirely forgiveable, were it not staring us in the face from writings which are, now, more that 2,500 years old.
What if I asked the question: "what is the dominate ideology or philosophy in 'Western' political culture?"
I'm guessing that, taking the end of the 'Cold War' into account most people would probably say something like 'democracy' or maybe 'capitalism' or one of its variant terms, like 'globalisation'.
But what about 'Sophism'?
Most people will, I suspect, know of Sophism only through the derogatory term 'sophistry', in its modern usage "an invalid or false argument based on spurious reasoning"; this is perhaps a harsh judgement on the original Sophists although one with considerable basis in fact - it tell us something about Sophism without revealing the full story.
We need to be clear about one thing here; we actually know little or nothing about the beliefs of the original Sophists. Few, if any of the writings of the Sophists have survived to the modern day and most of what we do know about them comes from the works of their opponents, Plato and Aristotle, which make understanding Sophism rather like trying to understand the socialism from a biography of Margaret Thatcher - they are a few nuggets of truth to work with, but one has to be careful of the bias.
What we do know for certain was that the original Sophists were once a highly respected group of teachers of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece; a group whose collective reputation, by the time of the rise of the 'logical' philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, had begun to fall into some considerable disrepute - the Sophist school was eventually banned by the Athenian state, having been accused of immorality.
Even allowing for bias in Plato's critique of the Sophists there is still much which can be learned from it which is relevant to modern politics; far to relevant for comfort, in fact.
If the Sophists had started out as respected teachers of wisdom (Sophia) then by the time of Plato their reputation and standing was seriously on the wane.
Sophism made of use of debate and rhetoric as its primary teaching method and, therefore, placed great emphasis on the development of oratorical skills; one might well say that 'the greater the Sophist, the greater their ability to argue the toss'. This would, no doubt, have been of limited consequence were it not for the fact that Athens, at this time, was an extremely litigious society. One must remember that under the Athenian system, democracy not only as the city states mode of government but all its judicial system; lawsuits were heard by the assembled electorate and decided, as with everything else, by majority vote. This, by Plato's time, had created what amounted to a lucrative market for high-priced demagogues whose ability to sway public opinion to a particular point of view, especially in the case of lawsuits, was heavily in demand.
The decline in the fortunes of the Sophists was, therefore, predicated on nothing more complex than good old fashioned greed. Many of its practitioners were more than willing to take on unjust lawsuits if the price was right and employ their full range of rhetoric skills in the task of trying to win the case, even if that meant engaging in semantic trickery and the use of rhetorical 'sleight-of-hand' to support entirely fallacious reasoning.
This is Plato's main and deepest-rooted criticism of the Sophists; working to such a system the essential claim of Sophism was that the logical validity of a particular argument was irrelevant, all that really mattered was the final ruling of the audience - winning the vote was the sole determinant of whether a particular argument should be considered 'true' or 'false'. As is ever the case when dealing with human nature, this meant that the Sophists, motivated by the high fees they commanded, became particularly skilled in playing to the audience and appealing to their prejudices and emotions in order to sway them to their point of view and cause what was often a factually false position to be ruled 'true'.
This was, of course, a total anathema to Plato, and to Socrates and Aristotle, all of whom saw the logical validity of an argument, the purity of its reasoning, as the only right and proper determinant of truth, such that each of them mounted a concerted challenge to the philosophical foundations of Sophism. Plato, in fact, took the argument much further in 'The Republic' and believed that he had uncovered a fundamental flaw in the nature of democracy itself, a flaw which led him to argue that the only 'safe' system of government was the absolute rule of a wise and benign King - the term 'dictator' did not appear until Roman times.
Look over Plato's critique of Sophism and the Sophists, one gets, indeed one should get, a creeping sense of uncomfortable familiarity.
Is his critique of Sophism and the circumstances in which it operated in ancient Greece not also a valid critique of modern political culture and, indeed, the media culture that feeds on it?
More to the point, are we not now rapidly developing the same kind of cynicism and disdain towards politicians that the people of Athens developed towards the Sophists and for what are markedly the same reasons?
If Machiavelli explains the 'why' of political myth-making then Plato give us both the 'how' and, more importantly, the key to understanding its likely consequences for modern democracy.
