In my latest National Post column I say that neither Jane Fonda nor the rest of us can reach low-carbon nirvana just by really nicely really wanting it.
On this date, January 10, back in 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, cast the die, and waded into an unending series of metaphors as well as a civil war that he won unless you count the bit where he was assassinated.
Especially in an era where cultural literacy is being lost, if not actively buried, it’s important to remember what crossing the Rubicon meant technically. The Rubicon is a shallow river in northeastern Italy, the crossing of which is not necessarily memorable as a rule. But (assuming the name has not wandered in the last 2000 years, which is a matter of some dispute) crossing it was a very big deal back in Caesar’s day because it was the frontier between the conquered Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul, and Italy proper. And while appointed governor held military authority ("imperium") in the provinces, only elected magistrates could do so within Italy itself given its proximity to Rome on which, just possibly, a man with soldiers under his command might suddenly march to seize power or some such.
For instance Julius Caesar. Caesar led his 13th legion ("Gemina") into Italy for the specific purpose of seizing power. And when he did so, he uttered the once-famous phrase "alea iacta est" ("the die is cast") meaning he had gambled everything and it was now too late to turn back because for an appointed governor to bring soldiers into Italy was open revolt and a capital offence.
Generally speaking if we use the metaphor today with any concept of its meaning, we refer simply to a decisively bold act. But there is a bit more to it, and it is less unequivocally praiseworthy. The reason crossing into Italy, over the Rubicon or any other otherwise insignificant marker, was a capital offence was that it was an attack on established authority and moreover in Caesar’s day, as Rome was still a Republic albeit very rickety by that point, an attack on civilian rule by those meant to be defending it instead.
The crucial political problem, then, now and always, has been to create a government able to protect liberty without being able to threaten it. It is by no means a simple problem or it would have been solved more often including in Rome. But Caesar’s contribution was to shove it aside in favour of the question of which strongman should rule, whose answer is far simpler but far less satisfactory.
The main difficulty through history is that most governments have been too weak to sustain themselves against invasion or upheaval even when plenty strong enough to oppress their citizens in the average course of events. You could not solve the former problem by further strengthening it without making the latter even worse. And you could not solve the latter without making the former worse.
The Romans did better than a lot of people, sustaining a Republic for nearly five hundred years. It had its flaws, both in its internal law and in its tendency to expand without regard for the niceties of law or justice, although it was on the whole a great deal better than its rivals in foreign as in domestic policy. But it caromed between anarchy and tyranny until the latter finally prevailed decisively, alternating the two problems rather than finding a solution that transcended them.
Not until medieval parliaments, backed by an alert and armed citizenry, did a more stable and attractive solution emerge, one we still enjoy today although its foundations are showing worrisome cracks and signs of crumbling. And so when we recall that in crossing the Rubicon Caesar cast the die once and for all, we should recall not merely his admirable boldness and directness but also his understandable but regrettable determination to bury popular government which, after the conspirators buried him, did succeed in the persons of Augustus, Tiberius and on down through the imperial centuries.
Like a few other great conquerors, such as Alexander and Napoleon, Julius Caesar has always seemed to me to combine military genius and political adroitness with a curious vagueness about what it was all for. And while it takes nerve to cross the Rubicon and courage is in principle a virtue, it was not in Caesar’s case directed to a praiseworthy end.
Regular readers of this feature will know that I have a soft spot for the incorrigible enthusiasts for hot air balloons, dirigibles and all those lighter-than-air craft that preceded the airplane, were rudely shoved aside by it, and yet whose backers continue to dream. You just can’t keep a hot air balloon down.
It is also remarkable that for some reason the French were especially keen enthusiasts. I won’t make any hot air jokes here. But I will note that French pioneers included Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who in 1785 boldly demonstrated the value of a parachute in escaping a troubled hot-air balloon by … um… throwing his dog out wearing one. (See "It Happened Today" for October 22, 2016.) Dogs being what they are, the pooch was probably enthusiastic about it. But I do not suggest you try it with a cat or it may well sharpen its claws on your balloon before your next flight. Or on you as you seek to ease it out of the contraption or into the parachute.)
Blanchard's interest in the subject of escaping alive from a balloon gone bad was doubtless stimulated by his own very nearly lethal trip from Dover to Calais on January 7 of 1785 in which (see "It Happened Today" for January 7, 2016) he and his co-lunatic only escaped a plunge into the Channel en route by jettisoning all the ballast they could think of including Blanchard’s pants. And the danger was very real; an effort by another Frenchman, Pilâtre de Rozier, to cross the Channel the other way later that year ended in a fatal crash.
Well, on January 9, 1793, Blanchard was at it again. No, I don’t mean the animal cruelty stuff or the mid-air striptease. I mean a historic balloon flight. The first in the Americas, taking off from the yard of Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia and reaching Deptford in New Jersey. Which may not sound like the acme of glamour. But in fact the flight was witnessed by America’s first, incumbent President George Washington along with her future 2nd president John Adams, 3rd president Thomas Jefferson, 4th president James Madison and 5th president James Monroe.
Sadly, Blanchard suffered a heart attack and fell from a balloon in the Hague in 1808 and died about a year later from his injuries. And his widow continued ballooning demonstrations until she too died in an accident. And it’s also sad to see how France, which was somehow still a world leader in many ways at the turn of the 19th century despite a long tradition of bad government that was about to get worse, has gradually faded as excessive if no longer vicious government seems gradually to have stifled much of the French genius for bold innovation.
Obviously ballooning continues to have adherents, and I cannot look up on a beautiful day and watch balloons cruising over Ottawa without wishing I were in one. But given all the passionate commitment, interest and courage that went into their early development I do hope that one day that somehow the first and most graceful form of manned flight will become more important relative to the dominant, convenient but loud and increasingly tawdry airplane travel that dominates today.
Who knows? Maybe they'll even serve good food. Especially if the French are involved.
January 8 was not a good day for the Papacy, Portugal or Africa. At least not if you mean January 8 of 1454. For on that date Nicholas V confirmed that Portugal owned all of Africa south of Cape Bojador and could enslave the inhabitants.
OK, perhaps "confirmed" isn’t quite the right word, since Portugal did not actually own that part of the world and nobody has the right to enslave anyone. And while you might expect an assertion to the contrary from some cackling old reprobate hunched over his ill-gotten gains, there’s this general idea out there that the Pope’s job when it comes to worldly matters is to be so unworldly that, in upholding high ideals, he sometimes gives advice that is almost wilfully useless. That trap at least Nicholas avoided.
Instead he issued this bull from concern that without it, other European nations would start horning in on Portugal’s "right" to grab large tracts of land because its inhabitants were not Christian, and demonstrate the virtues of the true faith by brutally mistreating them and denying their humanity. I can think of better plans.
I bring this up because I entirely reject ludicrous PC versions of history in which only Europeans were bad, basically the white serpents invading various gardens of Eden around the world. The inhabitants of Africa before the coming of European domination were up to the usual human tricks, sometimes in remarkably horrible ways. As were the inhabitants of the Americas. And I believe that on balance, the spreading particularly of the ideals and practices of the Anglosphere has brought great benefit to mankind. But it will not do, in rejecting one fairy tale, to substitute another.
At times, European conduct was so loathsome as to invite despair at humanity’s fallen condition. Especially when the worst practices were endorsed by those entrusted with recalling us to our moral senses when we went wrong. And so it is also important to note here that opposition to slavery and mistreatment of colonized people generally arose soonest and most strongly among professed Christians including Catholic clergy in the Spanish empire.
Still, we should pause on January 8 and reflect on the casual manner in which the papacy put its seal of approval on all that was worst about European colonization.
If you’d lived in Spain in 1492 you would have considered January 6 a very big deal indeed. For on this date Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile respectively, who ruled a semi-unified Spain, entered Grenada and completed the “Reconquista” of Spain from Muslim invaders after a mere seven and three quarters centuries.
You would have been much less likely to get excited at the sailing on August 3 of that same year of three modest ships from Palos de la Frontera under the command of a deluded Genoan explorer who thought Eurasia was way bigger, the Earth considerably smaller and Japan a lot further east than any of them actually were. Yet that’s the date we still remember: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Or maybe they don’t do that bit in schools or homes any more because Yes, it’s Christopher Columbus, once much celebrated, now much reviled, who never even admitted he’d found a new continent but did.
Looking back, which matters more? To be sure, the Reconquista was part of the recovery of European confidence and integrity without which the dynamic outward turn from the late 15th century on might not have been possible. But the Turks had only battered down the walls of Constantinople 39 years earlier and would go on trying to conquer Europe for several centuries before taking a break. And they didn’t prevent Spain, Portugal, France and most happily England from embarking on an age of colonization that transformed the world, not always in happy ways, but ultimately surely in very positive ones.
We are so reluctant to talk that way nowadays that, I am informed, some significant scholars and intellectuals including apparently Ortega y Gasset actually deny the Reconquista happened. And soon no doubt Columbus’s voyages will be so thoroughly deconstructed as not to have happened either. But in fact there is a kind of closing of one era and opening of another when by superficial coincidence the Reconquista is completed in the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
In my new video for Canadians for Energy East, a project of the Economic Education Association of Alberta, I explain why Energy East is the right practical answer to the actual choices we face in energy policy in Canada.
On January 5 Felix Manz was drowned. Which might seem like bad luck and maybe the occasion for a safety campaign. But I’m afraid it’s considerably more unpleasant than that. You see, he was drowned on purpose, in Zurich, on January 5 of 1527, as what I can only assume is a grimly ironic punishment for advocating and practising adult baptism.
Manz was an Anabaptist, part of an extreme wing of the Protestant Reformation, theologically speaking. Among other things they argued that infant baptism was just wetting a baby and that the ceremony could only have spiritual effect if performed on someone who understood it and did it willingly.
I grant that they could be annoying in a mild way, because they also tended to refuse to take oaths, defend the state or go along with civil authorities. They based this conduct on a very literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount and what strikes me as a wilful disregard of the injunction to render unto Caesar that which is rightly Caesar’s in this troubled and sinful world.
However that may be, Manz was not drowned for refusing to take an oath. He was drowned by the state because on March 7, 1526 the very Protestant Zurich council, whose members included the leading theologian Huldrych Zwingli whose ideas had a major influence on John Calvin, had declared adult rebaptism punishable by drowning. Which ought at least to dispel any notion that Protestants were better than Catholics on the topic of freedom of conscience and on separating Church and state. In fact Zwingli himself was killed in battle trying to force Protestantism on Catholic parts of Switzerland.
I’m not very sympathetic to Anabaptist doctrine or behavior in a lot of areas. I And I can see legitimate grounds for jailing people who will not pay a parking ticket because Jesus told them not to. But it’s the behaviour, not the belief, that matters, and it’s the behaviour of refusing to do something necessary to public order.
I don’t have freedom of conscience to run a red light or refuse to testify truthfully in court about seeing someone else do it. But holding a man under water until he dies for wanting to be held under water until God is happy is surely so grotesque that it’s hard to believe anyone would do it, let alone do it proudly.