In Memoriam Prof. Donald Wiseman (1918-2010)

Donald Wiseman died last week – and with his passing, a giant of archaeological and biblical scholarship has gone. But what a legacy! I only met him a handful of times when I was a very green curate in Sheffield (one of his daughters was a member of the congregation). I’ll never forget the first occasion…

I think I’d been recklessly pontificating in a sermon with blind authority on one of the paragraphs of Romans 1, explaining how Paul had been shaped by an Old Testament worldview and in particular the early chapters of Genesis, and how this could be seen in Romans. On the whole, it’s easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes when you do it with confidence (and such confidence comes easily to ministers in their twenties) – but I could only make such claims as a result of second, fourth and tenth hand research and learning. What did I know about such things… really? We all stand on the shoulders of giants – but few acknowledge it…

Then after the service, I was introduced to Professor Wiseman – OT scholar, archaeologist, and faithful gospel teacher. Most will have encountered him through his work as OT editor for the wonderfully accessible, useful but still scholarly Tyndale Commentaries or the various editions of IVP’s New Bible Dictionary. My mind raced at light speed through my talk – and then realised that I’d actually said some things based on his own writing (which is perhaps inevitable when one speaks on the OT). But as it was from quotes of quotes etc, I’d obviously not attributed it. However, he was graciousness personified, of course, and couldn’t have been friendlier or more encouraging.

Now, I realise that you can’t attribute all the time in talks because very often that will obscure the message – but my problem was that it had not even crossed my mind that I should where possible. I learned valuable lessons that morning – despite the fact that I still forget them.

Always attribute where you can and never claim as your own what others have discovered; never claim to know more than you do (whether by subtle hint or blatant assertion)!!

In case you’ve not come across this, here is a fuller obit and appreciation, all of which is quoted from a recent mailing from Tyndale House. For example, I’d certainly no idea about his wartime exploits. A remarkable man.

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It is with a real sense of loss that I bring to you news of the homecalling on Tuesday of Professor Donald Wiseman (1918-2010) OBE DLit FBA FKC FSA, who played a vital role in the early development of the Tyndale House and Tyndale Fellowship and made a massive contribution to our work, to biblical scholarship, and to the study of the ancient Near East. There will be a private funeral, but we anticipate that a public memorial service will be arranged later in the year. Below you will find a tribute by Professor Alan Millard, followed by some highlights I found in his autobiography. Professor Wiseman was predeceased by his dear wife Mary and is survived by three daughters Gillian, Mary and Jane. He will be much missed.

In Christ’s service,
Peter Williams
Warden, Tyndale House

(l to r) Donald Wiseman next to his good friend Agatha Christie, her husband Max Mallowan, and Neville Chittick, on a dig at Nimrud

Professor Donald Wiseman (1918-2010)

The passing of Donald Wiseman on 2nd February, 2010, marks the end of an era in the story of Tyndale House and the Tyndale Fellowship. After a year reading history at King’s College, London, W. J. Martin persuaded him that study of the biblical world and its languages would be more valuable to the church and biblical studies, so he turned to Hebrew and Assyriology. Martin had been the major stimulus in the creation of Tyndale House and Donald Wiseman saw its strategic potential. He gave much time and thought to the affairs of the House, serving as Chairman of the Biblical Research Committee, which had the initial responsibility and of the Tyndale House Council, which inherited it, from 1957 to 1986. As Chairman of that and other committees, he guided discussion with wisdom, patience and humour, ensuring sensible decisions were made. When there were doubts in UCCF (then IVF) circles about continuing financial support, he insisted that the House was providing a service which no other evangelical institution offered and had potential for much more. When problems of space for the Library arose, it was Donald who suggested the annexe which was built as The Hexagon in 1984.

He saw the priority for Tyndale House lay in biblical research, supplying positive information and arguments to oppose widely taught liberal views about Scripture. His vision was well expressed by John Stott in 1992, ‘We shall never capture the church for the truth of the gospel unless and until we can re-establish biblical scholarship, hold (and not lose) the best theological minds in every generation, and overthrow the enemies of the gospel by confronting them at their own level of scholarship’ (Quoted by Tom Noble, Tyndale House and Fellowship, 239).

Like Martin, Donald Wiseman was a great enthusiast and encourager of others, in Britain and abroad. He chaired the Tyndale Old Testament Study Group from 1951 to 1981, taking time and trouble to find young scholars whom he could introduce to the Group so that they would know there were others who could support them in their often lonely research. The Bible is a product of the ancient Near East, so he recognized that it should be read and assessed in the light of knowledge about that world. With that in mind, aware of the value of the archaeological contexts of ancient artefacts, he set up the Tyndale Biblical Archaeology Study Group in 1958, which, although not functioning regularly in recent years, brought together linguists and archaeologists to evaluate and apply new and old discoveries to biblical studies. On his initiative papers were brought together as Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel (1965) and Essays on the Patriarchal Narratives (1980) and he stimulated other publications by fellows of Tyndale House (e.g. David Tsumura, The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2, 1989). A volume of essays by members of the Old Testament Study Group was dedicated to him in gratitude for his many years of devotion (R. S. Hess, G. J. Wenham. P. Satterthwaite, eds., He Swore an Oath (1994).

His experience and knowledge marked Donald as a major contributor to, and Editor of, the New Bible Dictionary (1962, 1982, 1996) and The Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1980). For many years he was Editor for Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries and gave his skills to a variety of other Christian publications.

Donald was always ready to help a cause he thought would be fruitful in the service of his Saviour, preaching and teaching and holding informal groups for Bible Study. The number who faced the claims of the Gospel through meeting him cannot be told, neither can the number whose lives and careers he has influenced or guided.

As one of the latter, I give thanks for his life, his service and his fellowship.

Alan Millard

Select gleanings from the privately published book Donald J. Wiseman, Life Above and Below: Memoirs (2003). Donald Wiseman led an extremely active and full life and it is not possible to summarize all of this. However, I thought that I would at least pick out a few of many highlights from his autobiography relating to his service in the Second World War:

• PA to Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, who was in charge of the Fighter Group responsible for the defence of S.E. Britain during the battle of Britain, and often finding himself on the phone to Winston Churchill
• trusted to handle large amounts of information from the Ultra Secret source known as Enigma
• chosen to carry maps and plans for first fighters to fly in to Algiers in Operation Torch
• plane crash in Sicily in which he temporarily lost the use of both legs
• recovery to play significant role enforcing German surrender in N. Italy

Here is the text of his citation for the USA Bronze Star Medal:

Donald J. Wiseman, O.B.E., Wing Commander, Royal Air Force, Headquarters Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Force, for meritorious achievement in connection with military operations in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations from 1 March 1943 to 22 June 1944. As Chief Intelligence Officer, Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Force, Wing Commander Wiseman displaying a rare analytical and organizational genius was responsible for the creation and development of an Intelligence Force headquarters in the Mediterranean Theater. Upon the Intelligence material gathered through his selfless and earnest work, this Headquarters was able to plan and launch the air operations which brought victory to the Allied Armies in Italy. His brilliancy in collecting and evaluating the necessary operational Intelligence data, his ability to work smoothly with an integrated American and British staff, and his unstinting fulfillment of duty reflect the highest credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of the Allied Nations.

Age of Wonder gems 4: Shelley & Walpole on Hot Air Balloons

Yet more from Holmes’ Age of Wonder. This time the focus is the new-found fascination with flight, as provided by hot air balloons. For the first time human beings could escape the shackles of gravity and deliberately ‘fly’ – albeit in a rather clumsy and highly dangerous way. What struck me was the contrasting reactions from those who gawped from the fields below.

James Sadler floating above Oxford

On the one hand, balloons provoked a wild sense of possibility, with all the enlightenment fervour and ambition that entailed. Here’s the poet Shelley again, dreaming of abolition:

Perhaps Shelley put it best, when he was a young undergraduate at Oxford in 1811, and had just witnessed another of Sadler’s balloon ascents one sparkling summer morning from Christchurch Meadows:

The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable; the art of navigating the air is in its first and most helpless infancy; the aerial mariner still swims on bladders, and has not yet mounted the rude raft… It would seem a mere toy, a feather, in comparison with the splendid anticipations of the philosophical chemist. Yet it ought not to be altogether condemned. It promises prodigious faculties for locomotion, and will allow us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we so ignorant of the interior of Africa? – Why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate every slave forever. (p162)

And yet, as at every great technological advance, there is the dread of the malicious ends to which it might be used.

Surprisingly, balloons did not appeal to the gothic novelist Horace Walpole, though perhaps at sixty-six he was a little old for such perilous novelties. He thought balloons might be sinister [as he wrote in a letter of 1783]:

Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race – as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.

It was an ominous prophecy. (p135)

As ever, the rough with the smooth – and our forebears were all too aware of both… It is no surprise therefore that Holmes gave his book the subtitle: How the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science.

Age of Wonder gems: 3. William Cowper and the Armchair Traveller

William Cowper is a hero of mine (and one on whom I’ve posted briefly before) – a Christian believer who persevered despite being plagued by the most appalling depression and mental afflictions. Through it all, he was able to compose some of the most piercing, faith-inspired poetry ever written.

So it was nice to see him make an appearance in this Holmes’ book, though.

Cook’s sober book (A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World in 1777) caught the public’s imagination. The poet William Cowper, tucked away in his Buckinghamshire vicarage at Olney, and permanently trembling on the bring of disabling depression, found extraordinary relief and delight in imagining the great voyage southwards. To explain his sensations, Cowper invented the idea of the ‘armchair traveller’: ‘My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.’

In his long, reflective poem The Task, Cowper accompanied Cook and Banks in his imagination. He transformed Banks, rather suitably, into an adventurous bee, busily foraging for pollen.

He travels and expatiates, as the bee
From flower to flower, so he from land to land;
The manners, customs, policy of all
Pay contribution to the store he gleans;
He sucks intelligence in every clime,
And spreads the honey of his deep research
At his return — a rich repast for me.

He travels, and I too. I tread his deck,
Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes
Discover countries, with a kindred heart
Suffer his woes, and share in his escapes;
While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.

from Age of Wonder (p51)

I simply love Cowper’s coining of the ‘armchair traveller’ (long before the concept was modified (and debased!) for sports broadcasting); it’s made all the more poignant by the realisation that he was so debilitated by his mental afflictions that he could never have travelled even if he’d wanted to.

Doesn’t the phrase just capture the joy of reading perfectly, though…?

Age of Wonder gems: 2. Mungo Park in Africa

The next gem from Richard Holmes’ epic Age of Wonder (after post on Tuesday).

Mungo Park was an unusual figure who was sponsored by Joseph Banks and the Royal Society to explore the unknown parts of central Africa – a scottish doctor, a Christian believer, a driven explorer. Above all, Banks clearly saw in Park a reflection of his younger self in his now long-past exploration of Tahiti.

But I was very struck by this description of how he had his assumptions completely overturned after ending up in dire circumstances.

At dusk Park was greeted by a Negro woman who had been labouring in the fields near the river. She invited him back to her hut, lit a lamp, spread a mat and made him supper of fish baked over a charcoal fire. Evidently Park half-expected some kind of sexual overture. But instead the woman invited into the hut various female members of her family, and they all quietly sat round him in the firelight, spinning cotton and singing him to sleep. Park suddenly realised the song was extempore, and the subject was himself. He was amazed when he began to understand the words: ‘It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words literally translated, were these: – ‘The winds roared, and the rain fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn. Chorus: Let us pity the poor white man, no mother has he…’

The women reversed all Park’s assumptions about his travels in Africa. He realised that it was he – the heroic white man – who was in reality the lonely, ignorant, pitiable, motherless and unloved outcast. It was he who came and sat under their tree, and drank at their river. He found it hard to sleep that night, and in the morning he gave the woman four brass buttons from his coat before he left, a genuinely precious gift. (p217)

It brilliantly illustrates why, despite its challenges and unexpected outcomes, we should relish the opportunity to relate cross-culturally.

Age of Wonder gems: 1. Surfing in Tahiti

As promised, here’s the first of a handful of gems from Richard Holmes’ epic Age of Wonder (after my (over)lengthy post on Tuesday). [This one's for Jem...]

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the book’s threads is Sir (as he would become) Joseph Banks – and his account of what he encountered as a self-funded scientific researcher during a Royal Navy expedition to the South Seas under Captain Cook. The focus of his work was the time they spent on Tahiti (or Otaheite, as they originally called it). He laid the foundations of what would become a formal discipline: cultural anthropology. He certainly took participating in local customs very seriously (!) and as a result scandalised some back home with his accounts. But that aside, I loved this wonderful moment in the Holmes’ account:

(in 1769) Rounding the tip of the bay, they looked out to sea and saw something wholly unexpected and ‘truly surprising’. This was the astonishing and never-to-be-forgotten sight, far out on the unprotected edge of the lagoon, of a group of dark Tahitian heads bobbing amidst the enormous dark-blue Pacific waves. At first Banks thought they had been flung out of their canoes and were drowning. Then he realised that the Tahitians were surfing.

No European had ever witnessed – or at least recorded – this strange, extreme and quintessentially South Seas sport before. (p24)

This was what he wrote in his journal (HT surf-research):

…  as the shore was coverd with pebbles and large stones. In the midst of these breakers 10 or 12 Indians were swimming who whenever a surf broke near them divd under it with infinite ease, rising up on the other side; but their chief amusement was carried on by the stern of an old canoe, with this before them they swam outas far as the outermost breach, then one or two would get into it and opposing the blunt end to the breaking wave were hurried in with incredible swiftness
Sometimes they were carried almost ashore but generaly the wave broke over them before they were half way, in which case the[y] divd and quickly rose on the other side with the canoe in their hands, which was towd/(swam) out again and the same method repeated
We stood admiring this very wonderfull scene for full half an hour, in which time no one of the actors atempted to come ashore but all seemd most highly entertaind with their strange diversion.

The infectiousness of wonder: Richard Holmes and the romance of science

Richard Holmes’ magisterial Age of Wonder has worked its magic on me. Having worked my way through it over several weeks before Christmas, many of its scenes and images have jostled unforgettably in my mind. This is not simply the account of a great period in the Royal Society’s history (although it is that); nor is it a cultural history of the Georgian era in Britain (although that would have been completely fine by me, since that’s easily one of my favourite periods).

It is instead a window into the relationship between the sciences, the arts and the popular imagination at a very important moment for the culture of the modern world. Combined with Holmes’ easy and fluent writing style and gentle humour, this makes it constantly compelling, regularly provocative and always insightful. I simply couldn’t put it down, eagerly anticipating the next ‘aha’ moment! One myth that Holmes seeks to dispel (and does so expertly) is the common notion that the Romantic era was anti-science. Of course it was more complex than that. Holmes is a renowned biographer of the Romantic poets and so clearly qualified constantly to weave his tale of scientific endeavour in and out of their’s.

Giants of the Royal Society

The book opens in 1769 with a very young Joseph Banks intrepidly setting his sights on Tahiti (and thus pioneering the world of cultural anthropology), and ends in the 1830s with the next generation of scientists like Faraday and Babbage.

A young Joseph Banks returned from Tahiti, by Reynolds (1773)

Various names from the British scientific pantheon take turns in Holmes’ spotlight (like the William Herschel and his equally gifted sister Caroline, Mungo Park, Sir Humphry Davy), and we see what drove them and inspired their science, as well as their impact on the likes of Coleridge, Percy & Mary Shelley (there’s a brilliant chapter on her pioneering novel Frankenstein), Keats and Byron etc. But if there is one constant thread, it is the guidance and patronage of Banks, in his capacity as President of the Royal Society.

There are so many things one could pick out from the book as it is so densely wide-ranging. But while I learned a lot about so many things of which I was previously woefully ignorant, I was especially keen to understand more of the worldview questions, and especially the theological debates which anticipated those of the Darwinian era only a few years later. (In fact, the narrative closes around the time Darwin was setting off on his fateful voyage to the Galapagos). And therefore this story is of huge importance. As Holmes says on the very penultimate page:

It seems to me impossible to understand fully the contemporary debates about the environment, or climate change, or genetic engineering, or alternative medicine, or extraterrestrial life, or the nature of consciousness, or even the existence of God, without knowing how these arose from the hopes and anxieties of the Romantic generation. (p468)

That’s absolutely right – and this book is a brilliant way to do all of that.

Herschel's 40ft Telescope

The Challenge from the Heavens

Astronomy, more than those later protagonists of botany and biology, was producing the biggest challenge to old theistic ways of thinking – especially after the discoveries and thoughts of the extraordinary William Herschel with his revolutionary 40ft telescope at Slough. This was profoundly affecting people’s sense of place in the universe – the cosmos had always been a place of awe and wonder, but now it was far bigger and far older than anyone had before imagined.

So notice the shift from Coleridge’s more neutral description of star-gazing with his father to that of Shelley’s polemical take:

At all events, Coleridge treasured the memory of (The Reverend John Coleridge) his father’s eager demonstration of the stars and planets overhead, and the possibility of other worlds: ‘I remember that at eight years old I walked with him one evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery – & he told me the names of the stars – and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world – and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them – & when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with profound delight and admiration; but without the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc – my mind had been habituated to the Vast.’ (pp111-2)

I just love that final phrase: habituated to the Vast. Wonderful.

Shelley used Herschel’s vision of an open-ended solar system, and an unimaginably expanded universe, to attack religious belief. His arguments went as follows. The cosmos as revealed by science must contain many thousands of different nebular systems, and therefore millions of habitable planets, so it was impossible to sustain a narrow, religious concept of one Almighty Christian Redeemer. Since there would be so many other ‘fallen’ worlds to redeem, the idea of God being born and crucified on each planet became absurd. As Shelley put it provokingly, ‘His Works have borne witness against Him.’ He wrote a particularly fierce note ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ in Queen Mab:
The indefinite immensity of the universe, is the most aweful subject of contemplation… It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman… The works of His fingers have borne witness against him… Sirius is supposed to be 54 trillion miles from the Earth… Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable Necessity. (p391)

But not everyone shared that view – or saw the direct threats that science would pose to religious belief in the years to come:

For many Romantic scientists, with a robust intellectual belief in the ‘argument by Design,’ there was no immediate contradiction between religion and science: rather the opposite. Science was a gift of God or Providence to mankind, and its purpose was to reveal the wonders of His design. This indeed was the essence of ‘natural’ religion, as promoted for example by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802), with its famous analogy with the divine watchmaker. It was the faith that brought Mungo Park back alive from his first Niger expedition. It was the faith that inspired Michael Faraday to become a Deacon in the Sandemanian Church in July 1832. (p450)

Which is much more nuanced than the vitriol of the anti-religion brigade, let alone the anti-science religious types, would have us believe. They simply ARE compatible – which his why so many cosmologists and ‘hard’ scientists are perfectly comfortable with their theism.

The Wonder of Science

Faraday's Christmas Lectures of 1856

But in many ways, the background to the apologetic debates that we get ourselves tied up is was not the book’s most valuable contribution (helpful thought it undoubtedly is). What most gripped me was the fact that I found myself again and again swept up in the sheer romance of science – the sense of awe at both the cosmic and microscopic, the desire to know, to understand God’s thoughts after him, if you like. I found myself frequently transported to the Oxford’s Christ Church meadow where spectators watching in astonishment at the first balloon flights, or to Herschel’s observatory, or to the audience of Faraday’s Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution.

My appreciation was only deepened, not diminished, when the romantic myths of the noble scientist get dispelled. I was very struck by this point, sadly tucked away in a footnote:

Michael Hoskin has suggested in his essay ‘On Writing the History of Modern Astronomy’ (1980) that most histories of science continue to be ‘uninterrupted chronicles’, which run along ‘handing out medals to those who “got it right”’. They ignore the history of error, so central to the scientific process, and fail to illuminate science as a ‘creative human activity’ which involves the whole personality and has a broad social context – Journal for the History of Astronomy 11 (1980). To this one might add that Romanticism introduced three important themes into science biography.

1. First the ‘Newton syndrome’, the notion of ‘scientific genius’, in which science is largely advanced by a small number of preternaturally gifted (and usually isolated) individuals.
2. Second, the existence of the ‘Eureka moment’, in which great discoveries are made without warning (or much preparation) in a sudden, blazing instant of revelation and synthesis.
3. Third, the ‘Frankenstein nightmare’, in which all scientific progress is really a disguised form of destruction. (p94)

Now, there were one or two moments where I did feel that Holmes’ objectivity temporarily deserted him, mainly in his depictions of theistic or Christian worldviews. Too often, Christian morality or theology was implicitly charged as unhelpful or even destructive (e.g. in the interactions between later Christian visitors to Tahiti), or individuals would be described as ‘fundamentalist’, as the painter Benjamin Haydon is on p319 (which was both jarring and anachronistic). But on the whole, I can forgive these as lapses because the narrative is so sweeping in scope and brilliantly told, and they are few and far between.

I think I’ll stop there for now – there are loads of other gems, which i might post separately and without too much verbiage. But I couldn’t have agreed more with these, the very last words of the book – inarticulately before reading The Age of Wonder, and passionately since:

The old, rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe. And that is how this book might possibly end. (p469)

Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 17 (February 2010)

This has ended up being a bit of a bumper one too! Hey ho. Enjoy.

Sacred Treasure

• Some wise words on Haiti from Graham Tomlin
• BibleArcs is a really helpful study tool from John Piper. It doesn’t take too long to pick up, and while it may initially look weird and unwieldy, it provides a significant means to getting under the skin of texts.
• It speaks volumes for the difference between British Islam and British Christianity that Newsbiscuit can make these sorts of gags: Banning the Salvation Army and The Radicalising dangers of Victoria Sponge at Church fetes.
• Mapping sin by nation: Australia is apparently the worst! As if you could measure such things…
• In case you missed it in all the hubbub of snow and politicking, here is Anne Atkins honest account of vicarage life and joining unions from the Times.

Topical Treasure

• Rian Malan wrote one of the most searingly powerful books I’ve ever read: My Traitor’s Heart – reflections on his white liberal experiences in Apartheid South Africa. Which made me sit up and notice when I saw he’d written reflections on Clint Eastwood’s Mandela film, Invictus. Thought-provoking stuff.
• An example of Google censorship and fear of Islam’s power? You decide…
• How the iPhone saved a life in Haiti – literally (c/o Wired mag)
• No idea how this got into the public domain but here is the letter supposedly written by George Bush Snr to his family on the eve of the first Iraq War.

Quirky Treasure

• Mr Plimpton’s Revenge: I just love it - who’d have thought you could tell a story through Google Maps? But you really can. (HT John Naughton)
• BACHTRACK is a truly EPIC resource for Classical music nuts (and comes with a cool free iPhone app) – find concerts and other performances near you, best recordings of different works and some excellent suggestions for children and teens. This sort of thing is what the internet is FOR!
• While we’re on webby things, make sure you subscribe (while it’s free) to Radio 4’s fantastic new series from Neil McGregor at the British Museum: A History of the World in 100 Objects.
• Britain under snow from space on Jan 7th 2010 – eerily beautiful
• This surely has to be one of the most satisfying newspaper headlines ever devised (oh to have been the one to think of it).
• Some sage advice from an international reporter on avoiding silly errors when travelling abroad.
• I love this update of the old classic advertising for the Mini
• An wonderfully quirky, but nevertheless excellent, guide to how to use the needlessly feared semicolon (HT Tony Watkins)
• This is pretty cool: Stargate Studios have produced a compilation of their virtual backlots:

Roscover’s Obama: BURDENED

Last week’s Time magazine had a poignant article about the loneliness of the Presidency as part of its coverage of the first year of Obama’s inauguration. Obama and the Loneliest Job It’s worth a read and is not particularly partisan or political. Who’d ever want the job, when all is said and done?

But the thing that struck me most about it was this picture. To accompany the articles, Time commissioned Dylan Roscover to come up with an image to tell the story. The man is a design genius. And I hope that this will become every bit as famous as Shepard Fairey’s famous campain poster.

It’s simply entitled BURDENED, but that’s superfluous, really. The image speaks for itself.

It is an utterly convincing, beautiful and bewitching work of art.

Check out his Steve Jobs from some time back:

Never as bad as we could be, sure; but never as good as we should be…

One of the most unsettling things in recent years is how the rosy-tinted, enlightenment perception of human nature has persisted for years, despite relentless evidence to the contrary. It staggers me that after the 20th Century we can still persist in thinking that we’re all basically good, just dependent on right circumstances. It’s just wishful thinking, surely? But still, surprising people emerge from the woodwork every now and then to cast doubt on this hollow mantra – and bizarrely in the last few weeks, I’ve encountered 3.

An Architect of Social Welfare

Some may take this quote as some sort a knock-down argument to undermine the whole premise of social welfare, just because one, if not many, of its key architects had this sort of view. But that’s obviously ridiculous as it is a far too complex a question for that. Still, it is intriguing to read this nevertheless:

Beatrice Webb, whom many consider the architect of Britain’s modern welfare state, wrote:

Somewhere in my diary – 1890? – I wrote “I have staked all on the essential goodness of human nature…” [Now thirty-five years later I realize] how permanent are the evil impulses and instincts of man – how little you can count on changing some of these – for instance the appeal of wealth and power – by any change in the [social] machinery…. No amount of knowledge or science will be of any avail unless we can curb the bad impulse.

from Tim Keller, COUNTERFEIT GODS (p xx)

An Historian of Disturbing Realities

One of my favourite reads is BBC History magazine. Fantastic stuff, full of all kinds of research. One highlight for me is columnist Dominic Sandbrook, who can be relied upon to come up with contrary views which challenge consensus and/or provoke a reaction. Well, last month, he bit the bullet in terms of going to ‘the darkest places imaginable’ in an article called ‘We’re not as different from the Nazis as we like to think‘. As he continues, ‘Far more than any religious text, the historical record of mankind is the story of sin and suffering played out again and again.’

Holocaust memorial in Usti nad Labem (photo by Ladislav Faigl)

With the Holocaust Memorial Day having just happened, it is a fitting that this is a focus of discussion. A few years ago, I had what I sometimes refer to as my dictator phase – not that i expressed megalomaniac tendencies but that I read a string of books about the eras of Hitler and Stalin (sparked by reading Alan Bullock’s masterly parallel biography). One of them was Daniel Goldhagen’s ultra-contraversial but challenging book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, referred to in Sandbrook’s piece. Sandbrook tackles the lurking questions about human nature that the Holocaust doesn’t just provoke but demands.  In relation to what one writer calls ‘the Holocaust industry’ Sandbrook touches on some important points. One is to recognise the legacy of British anti-semitism – which illustrates his bigger point:

The great danger, it seems to me, is for the Holocaust to become ossified, to be cordoned off as the stuff of museums and costume dramas. There is a tendency, exacerbated by our eagerness to cast the Nazis as supremely and uniquely evil, to see it as a uniquely German crime, orchestrated by a gang of fanatical madmen. In fact, many of the people who carried it out were otherwise decent husbands and fathers, people like us.

It was this sort of realisation that led to William Golding writing his chilling Lord of the Flies. And it led to the article’s unsettling conclusion:

… the truly chilling lesson of the Holocaust is not that the victims were people like us. It is that the perpetrators were, too.

An Internet Pioneer Facing Facts

Now, the final illustration is hardly on a par with the Holocaust – but it strikes me as on the same continuum, albeit a long, long way off from the extremes just touched on.

Pierre Omidyar, a co-founder of eBay, credits the success of his business to trust in the users; he has often said that one of his founding assumptions was that people are basically good. The reality is more complex: eBay may have been founded on a basic trust in human goodness, but within a couple of months after it launched, enough of the transactions were going awry in one way or another that the company had to respond. Ebay’s solution was to create a reputation system, allowing the buyer and seller in any transaction to publicly report their satisfaction with each other. The system was designed to cast the shadow of the future over both parties, giving each an incentive to maintain or improve their standing on the site; with that addition, eBay became the site we know today. Omidyar was right, with a caveat: people are basically good, when they are in circumstances that reward goodness while restraining impulses to defect. The rewards and restraints can be quite simple and small, but in big groups with relatively anonymous actors, they need to be there or behaviour will decay over time.

from Clay Shirky, HERE COMES EVERYBODY (p283)

These of course hardly amount to a coherent argument. They are merely resonances. But they resonate with what those far more ancient and far wiser than we are have been on about for centuries. The bible has insisted on the schizophrenic, disturbingly complex nature of human beings. Yes, we are surely remarkable beings, bubbling with potential for great good. There is such a thing as altruism and generosity, deeds that are truly good. Too many Christians overlook or even ignore that. But we are also full of gruesome perversities and destructive impulses. Too many moderns simply blind themselves to that.

Which is why it is so good to have people of sanity and humanity like G.K. Chesterton to turn to. Famously, in answer to a series of correspondence in the Times newspaper about what’s wrong with the world, Chesterton simply wrote:

Dear Sir,

I am,

Yours faithfully
G.K. Chesterton

Which is why it is such a joy to meditate on this other great axiom of his:

We do not want a religion that is right where we are right – we want a religion that is right where we are wrong.

Earth has not anything to show more fair…

After doing a hospital visit at Tommy’s yesterday afternoon, I walked back across Westminster bridge to catch the tube – and the sunset was truly spectacular. So couldn’t resist a couple of snaps – not great image quality as it was with a phone but still impressionistic

At this point, we could do much worse than to quote that old softy, Wordsworth…

UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE
William Wordsworth

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!