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2002-04-05 - 10:56 a.m.

Woke at 2.00am but didnt get to write. Instead I read about Sounfonts - quite an old technology but one I want to master as it looks as if has a lot of potential.

Mark's posting on washing-up today is amazing and I have sent it to some of the leading UK experts on process improvement who I know quite well. One in particular is very into Emmerson Lake and Palmer - what he homes in on in the CD shops in Tokyo.

�3.00 on the current edition of London Review of Books is money well spent in my view. There is a long but valuable reflection on how and why we get obsessed with the experience of men on the Western Front in WW1 - which goes over the top itself in terms of gender issues. The author dserves a VC.

There is also a fascinating 2 page review of a book on FDR's interest in intelligence in WW2. It blows the gaffe on some amazing UK japes and makes one wonder about Blair-Bush. I tore it out and gave it to my son James who wants to specialise on modern international history.

The absolute peach is Quentin Skinner on the concept of freedom. He starts with Isaiah Berlin and his two concepts of freedom. At first base is "freedom from" - want fear hunger etc. Of course we could all spend most of our lives increasing the global quantity of that kind of freedom for people other than us.

But there may be a second variety - a "freedom to" which is not reducible to a set of "freedom froms". If you are free to - for example develop yourself as a musician - then there may well be a number of things that you have to be free from. But there may - in a simple case - be a set of capacities such as discipline - which you are necessary in addition to make you free to follow that calling.

Skinner offers a third variety and uses a historical analysis. The powerful and celebrated advocates of type 1 which include for example David Hume - undoubtedly one of the absolute alltime greats in this business - are in political terms conservatives. They are, as is so often the case, offering a philosophically radical analysis for a conservative stance. Hobbes, I think, is another example - he was so radical that even in the 1960s he wasnt in the main Part2 History of Philosophy curriculum. Indeed I first got into him when Steve got ill and had to stop playing jazz and suggested we should write a book instead.

Hobbes and Hume are either side of the great event in English history where philosophy religion and action come together - The English Civil War. One of the great consequences was the execution of Charles. The conservative stance on freedom is to argue against the justification offered for that execution.

So Skinner thinks that in the justification for Charles execution there lurks a third variant of freedom -obviously a radical one.

He roots this in Roman thought - and in particular the distinction between Master and Slave in Roman law. With my interest in Hegel's dialectic of master and slave, this got me on the edge of my seat. Tacitus wrote about the human degradation of living in a political regime where any action one took might meet the disapproval of an all powerful Caesar. Similar arguments were used by Parliament to limit the power of the King - and it is the King's actions in acting arbitrarily and limiting freedom that are the justification for his execution.

Philosophers will argue in detail whether here we find a case of a third type of freedom or whether it can be reduced to some combination of the first one or two - we'll have to wait and see what they conclude.

However - where this connected with me was in the work I have been doing on Pontius Pilate. Jesus was tried on a charge of sedition, as indeed was Ghandi or the only Palestine member of the Knesset to argue an alternative to the current Israeli Government line.

The point about sedition around 30CE is that it is an example of the lack of freedom that Tacitus complained of. Essentially sedition was seen as mocking the State as personified by Caesar. However what counted as "mocking" was very hard to predict - in Rome at this time someone was crucified for having a crap when he had Caesar's image on a coin in his pocket, someone else was crucified for wearing clothes like Caesar. No surprise then that the events of Palm Sunday and subsequent trouble in the Temple could easly be constructed as seditious and in that sense the Crucifixion was no different to what was happening to people in many parts of the Roman Empire at that time.

Lets suppose there is a type3 freedom. Maybe when the Gospels say for example "The truth will make you free" what they mean is "The truth will make you (type3) free". One of the things especially in St John is the frequent use of capital letter abstract nouns - Truth Way Light etc. The vocabulary is restricted but this only adds to the poetic power of the discourses. But they are hard to nail down.

The classic example is where Jesus and Pilate are alone - the exchanges end with Pilate's famous question "What Is Truth?" . In my stuff on Pilate I try to point out that in fact he is very close to us culturally - he is working in a universe which is dangerous, multi-cultural, volatile, maybe even relativised. When you read about his exchanges eg with Herod in Luke you can easily put them into a modern context.

His famous question is an honest response to the situation he is working in - or you might say - it is the honest response of someone who is not (type3) free.

Where the London Review of Books really earns its money is in the link between all of this and the First World War article. In this the author reflects on the phenomenology of going over the top and calmly walking into death - say the classic ending of the Blackadder series which many people found very affecting.

So the emerging hypothesis is that this "calm walking to death" is the key example of type3 freedom - where by an act of will and discipline you demonstrate a supreme contempt for the inevitable physical outcome.

But of course, this stuff is utterly outrageous in the political drama we all face this week. Where is the distinction between this "calm walking" and the suicide pilot or bomber. There was a wonderful Everyman documentary on this subject this week. I think it may be possible to find distinctions - but in a highly politicised situation - where we all share Pilates doubts about the "Truth" of what we are offered in terms of the accounts that are going on, such distinctions are amongst the first casualties.

This is part of the genius of David Hume. His radical secptical arguments always serve to debunk abstraction especially any abstraction which might be the basis of fanaticism - and this kind of intelligent pragmatism has been an important strand in English culture - say from Hume to Mill and then on to B Russell. I came to see Steve as writing in that tradition - in using the abstratctions of anatomy and statistics to yield practical benefits eg in the design of everyday objects. He always wrote with fantastic clarity and wit and with abroad range of reference.

I actually think that the "type3" freedom may be a coherent concept - if it were then this might explain why Jesus uatterd so many "hard sayings" which crudely amount to - "you think this stuff is going to be all sweetness and light - well let me tell you it ain't".

I study some of this stuff in a group which meets every fortnight or so - and at the moment we are reading a great book on Discipline. It may be wrong - I can't tell - but it is certainly the best book I have ever read on that subject. The previous book we read was by Tom Wright who currently works at Westminster Abbey. It was hard work but worth it. Wright seeks to explore what things like "Law" and "Temple" meant in first century Palestine and then re-interpret the Gospel message against that background. In terms of what is grandly called Hermeneutics this has to be a sensible route.

Wright left me with the impression that "Jerusalem" may in fact not be the thing we imagine eg when we hear the WI sings Blake's words or look at John Martyn's paintings. Maybe "Jerusalem" isn't calm and integrated. Maybe the essence of "Jerusalem" is postmodern chaos - your TV will certainly endorse that impression this week. But you can follow that through to earlier times. For example in my mind I am pretty sure that one of the drives behind the Gospels getting written at all was the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 AD (think of the Twin Towers). But the Temple itself wasn't just the manifestation of calm tradition rolling smoothly on. It was the result of a deal between Herod the Great and the Caesars. That version of the building only lasted about 100 years. The previous version had been destroyed, I think by the Babylonians.

More another time.

Skinner goes

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