Chrenkoff has some excellent posts up. Klio has been inspiring him lately. One is a guest post about the law codes of ancient Mesopotamia. This fits in nicely with one of my own convictions, that the Middle East is, by tradition, really part of what one might call the Greater West. It’s been pointed out before that the peoples of the Middle East have more in common with Europeans than with, say, the Chinese, whose civilisation has utterly different roots. In religious terms, the three great monotheisms are all children of Abraham, and culturally both Europe and the Middle East were both subject to the massive influence of Greek thought and tradition. In Europe this came through the medium of Rome, in the Middle East through the effects of Alexander’s empire.
In other words, whereas the Greater West can trace its traditions to Abraham, Hammurabi and Socrates, what we might call Greater China – that is, China itself and the countries which have historically under heavy Chinese cultural influence, notably Korea, Japan and Vietnam – have roots that go in a quite different direction, reaching back to Lao-Tze, Confucius and Gautama.
The great value of Daniel Foty’s piece is his demonstration that in legal terms too the Middle East has a tradition that is at least the equal of Europe – and given the age and richness of Europe’s two great legal traditions (Germanic and Roman), that is saying something. Those early codes have two great features that are at the core of any body of civilised law: a sophisticated system of contract and a recognition that it is not merely malice that must be prevented in a civilised community, but also neglect of the basic mutual obligations that enable a sophisticated society to prosper.
As a side issue, one thing that struck me in his comparison of Hammurabi’s code with the earlier code of Lipit-Ishtar is that women play a more prominent role in the earlier code, suggesting a decline in women’s property rights between the flourishing of Sumer and the rise of Babylon. ('Aniela' makes the same observation in the comments box.) Some radical feminists have made great play with the Marduk myth (the slaying of the female monster Tiamat) as an indicator of the birth of patriarchal religion and consequently patriarchy itself. Here is a piece of historical evidence that would seem to back up that view. Just because radical feminists believe something doesn’t mean it’s untrue.
Also on Chrenkoff at the moment, a good post on the value of historical perspective, ‘Time Will Tell’. He quotes Martin Gilbert on the way our views of Roosevelt and Churchill are very different from those of contemporaries, many of whom hated or despised them. And I’m not talking about Germans or Japanese here. He could have added Abraham Lincoln, who was routinely portrayed in newspapers as a buffoon or worse. And I’m not talking about the South here.
One of the many good reasons to read Orwell’s wartime essays is to see just how wrong he and others could be. Orwell was an exceptionally acute and fair-minded critic in many ways but his real-time political judgements were sometimes lamentable. He thought Stafford Cripps had a chance of ousting Churchill as PM in 1942. Stafford who? Exactly. More seriously, he went to Germany just after the war ended and on returning wrote of ‘the monstrous settlement being forced on Germany’ (that’s from memory so I won’t swear to the exact quote, but the word monstrous was in there somewhere). And we all know how monstrously Germany turned out, with all those plagues, famines and civil wars that have so ruined the place since 1945.
Orwell’s military judgements were not great either. He fantasised about invading Spain at one point – a forgivable lapse given his personal history. He also said, after the German invasion of Russia, ‘if we can’t invade Europe now, with the German army tied down in the east, when will we be able to?’ The answer was, of course, never, not without 2 million Americans alongside us to do their bit. He also had an odd sense of proportion, spending a lot of time and ink on domestic policy and politics while never mentioning pivotal events like Lend-Lease, the Malta convoys or the battle of Midway. (That’s from memory too: I might be defaming him, but I don’t recall him mentioning those events in his essays.) None of that, of course, takes away the fact that he was a wonderfully talented writer, perhaps a genius.
So just to make Chrenkoff’s point again: nobody knows, especially not journalists, who obsess about trivia and miss the key facts at least half the time.
‘The passage of time will not be a panacea for the current condition of historical short-sightedness and ignorance. After all, there is hardly a historic event that is still not subject to controversy and debate. But like a steady river, it will eventually remove all the daily garbage choking up the view. It's only five, ten or fifty years on that we will know whether the intervention in Iraq has been a success - certainly not now. The same can be said for the question of greatness or otherwise of our current leaders. In the meantime though, not having the benefit of hindsight on the present day events, I could only pray that more of our contemporaries living in their eternal present, with little awareness of context or precedent, could take a little sip or two from the fountain of history and realize that they're only splashing around on the edge of an ocean.’