History

April 9 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which required a special trip to Paddington railway station, it being the nearest surviving monument to the man’s genius.

As Richard Savill wrote in the Daily Telegraph a few days before that:

“The vision of Brunel – who by the time of his death in 1859, aged 53, had built 25 railway lines, more than 100 bridges and three ships – helped transform the West Country during the Victorian era.”

It also helped to transform Britain, as Richard Alleyne pointed out on the same day:

“Along with a handful of other industrialists he transformed the country from a traditional, rural, agrarian economy to a modern, urban, industrial one. By the time of his death, it was the industrial superpower of the world.”

A legacy to be proud of and a man, whose loss to Britain cost France dear. His father was an immigrant to Britain and himself a notable engineer. Isambard Kingdom was part educated in France but trained on his father’s projects. He was injured on one of them and spent his convalescence in Bristol, thus starting his very fruitful career in the West Country.

Still I can’t help wondering about a comment made by Andrew Kelly, the director of Brunel 200:

“Although Brunel was born 200 years ago, his influence remains with us in Britain today.

We hope that by showcasing his huge breadth of mind, and how he excelled as an engineer, ship designer, architect, surveyor and artist, we will encourage the Brunels of the future to adopt his ‘can do’ attitude and determination to achieve.”

I appreciate the need to encourage the Brunels of the future but what makes the man think that someone born 200 years ago is of little relevance. I seem to recall that in a recent BBC poll for the greatest Englishman, Brunel came second to Sir Winston Churchill.

Mr Kelly must realize, surely, that apologizing for the past is not the way to build the future. He could start by meditating on Edmund Burke’s sayings.

Cross-posted (mostly) from the Conservative History Journal

I’ve never been much interested in military history nor in the Civil War. (My relatives fought, I believe, on both sides, but – and this is telling – I’m not even sure about that.)

Still I love mid-nineteenth century lit. So, here I am – trying to pick the quite excellent and well-stocked brains of my co-Chicagoboyz and our knowledgeable commenters.

Clearly I have some really big holes in my knowledge. My impression (and something I always make a point of when teaching Frederick Douglass) is the splits in so many of the major Protestant denominations came from beliefs about slavery. (I’m sure economics & politics entered, as well, but to ignore the polarizing issue of slavery is to ignore the voices in the literature we read.)

I’d thought the church in the south found reasons to defend slavery, while the core of the Abolitionist movement came out of the Northern Protestant churches. I’m curious: am I wrong or have I been miseducating students? What are some good treatments of the role of religion in both the Civil War itself and the movements that led up to it?

My students have taken to politely observing that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, that the motives were political. This isn’t what the voices of Thoreau or Douglass would say, of course. I’ll accept there’s some truth to what they say, but my suspicion is that there isn’t as much as they would like to think. For instance, they are quite willing to see the Southern churches as hypocritical, but less willing to believe the Northern church’s role in the Abolitionist movement. Cynicism sounds more truthful when we are 18 or 20 than it does when we’ve seen a bit more of the world.

People’s motives are always a mixed bag, but it is best not to simplify them too much. When they approvingly quote their anthro teacher who argues that all of history is one group having something and another group wanting it and so wrenching it from them, I figure they are ignoring much that has compelled man to act. We are covetous, but we’re also complicated.

Imagine Montana, population 900,000, conquering the Western Hemisphere, population 800 million. In little more than one generation: slaughtering its armies, assimilating its air forces and navies, killing almost every government and corporate official; conscripting a tenth of the entire population in every country to provide logistical support; deliberately sparing, but nonetheless abducting, every high-profile scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, doctor, and clergyman, and rotating them amongst Helena, Albany, Austin, Mexico City, and Brasilia. Building infrastructure from Point Barrow and Labrador to Recife and Tierra del Fuego, then mounting a two-pronged invasion of Africa, overrunning Nigeria and South Africa in six weeks, poised to sweep north and east to the Mediterranean and Red Seas within months — and then abruptly withdrawing.
In the thirteenth century, events on that scale occurred in Eurasia, and Jack Weatherford explains how in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World …

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Eventually.

The idea that all of mankind is in mortal danger, which can be averted only by repentance and radically mending our ways, is not a new one. It actually precedes Al Gore and “Earth in the Balance,” believe it or not. Do you doubt it? Here is an example from 1014 by St. Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester.

Old English:
Leofan men gecnawað þæt soð is: ðeos worolde is on ofste & hit nealæcð þam ende. & þy hit is on worolde aa swa leng swa wyrse, & swa hit sceal nyde for folces synnan fram dæge to dæge, ær antecristes tocyme, yfelian swyþe. & huru hit wyrð þænne egeslic & grimlic wide on worolde. Understandað eac georne þæt deofol þas þeode nu fela geara dwelode to swyþe, & þæt lytle getreowþa wæran mid mannum, þeah hy wel spræcan. & unrihta to fela ricsode on lande, & næs a fela manna þe smeade ymbe þa bote swa georne swa man scolde, ac dæghwamlice man ihte yfel æfter oðrum, & unriht rærde & unlaga manege ealles to wide gynd ealle þas þeode.

Modern English:
Beloved men, know that which is true: this world is in haste and it nears the end. And therefore things in this world go ever the longer the worse, and so it must needs be that things quickly worsen, on account of people’s sinning from day to day, before the coming of Antichrist. And indeed it will then be awful and grim widely throughout the world. Understand also well that the Devil led this nation astray for very many years, and that little loyalty has remained among men, though they spoke well. And too many crimes reigned in the land, and there were never many of men who deliberated about the remedy as eagerly as one should, but daily they piled one evil upon another, and committed injustices and many violations of law all too widely throughout this entire land.

One of the persistent comparisons between the West and the Muslim world has been the place of religious tolerance. We in the West have become so accustomed to religious pluralism that a sizable minority feels safe in denigrating the religious background of the West by taking it out of context, while defending those who hijack yet another religion by insisting that the majority of believers of that other religion don’t share the views of those extremists. Goose and gander deserve different sauces. Yet, we tolerate these, and others less self-contradicted, because we have developed a respect for the freedom of conscience, without which we would still be experiencing the internecine brawls that rocked our ancestral societies in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Observers of the Islamic world have noted the societal trajectories there. While the outlying societies, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, have been largely able to co-exist with other religions (although these relationships have been strained in the past century), the core of the Muslim world, the Arabian peninsula, has been home to an intolerant fundamentalism which denies the validity not only of other faiths, but also militates against coreligionists who happen to follow a different interpretation. The Sunni-Shia divide, although subtle in practice, has been politically exploited over the centuries.

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