by Mary Beard
One of the most famous of these dictators was Cincinnatus (whose name lies behind the city of Cincinnati). In our terms he was a right-wing ideologue, but he was a hero of propriety when it came to the dictatorship. Having been consul in the past, he accepted the senate’s request that he become dictator while working on his farm (‘Cincinnatus called from the plough’, as his tag-line went), and as soon as he had secured the victory, he laid the office down. The famous modern sculpture shows him giving back the symbols of the dictatorship (the fasces) and returning to the plough.
The advantages of this over the technocrats? For a start, the time period for the suspension of democratic government was strictly limited. Secondly, this wasn’t the flying in of someone outside the political process; dictators were generally senior figures who had previously been democratically elected to political office.
Pity the ‘dictatorship’ got abused and got a bad name. Come to think of it, maybe ‘technocrat’ will have become a term of abuse in a thousand years’ time.
Comments
Technocracy in Greece? Wouldn′t Plato have approved?
LV
Online etiquette
22 November 2011
One of the things that I really like about this blog is that the commenters are (by and large!) courteous, on-topic and full of relevant learning (and languages). The comments engage with, and add to, the blog. Most people have read the original post very carefully … too carefully sometimes, if you ask me (that’s why they pick up all the errors of punctuation … but thanks anyway). And they (I mean, you) make the blog more than the sum of its parts.
I’ve only recently come to realise quite how different we are from the usual online postings. I’ve been doing a few BBC talks, and the comments on these are nothing of our sort. There are some careful engagements, that’s true, and I’m hugely grateful for those, whether pro or anti. But a frightening lot of the comments that appear on the Have Your Say BBC website seem to be driven by different versions of bile. Same is true for the Guardian Comment, and at least one thread on Mumsnet (though not all) … or really any big commenting site.
There is an awful lot of ‘this is rubbish’, ‘you are a complete idiot to write this’ … or ‘ho ho old lady, do you have a beard?’
My first reaction is slight fear. My second is to wonder what makes otherwise ordinary people write this vicious stuff when they get on-line, when they wouldn’t do so otherwise. It is partly the pseudonyms, I think. On this blog most commenters use their own names, or their first names or initials: you/we/I are there as ‘us’. On an awful lot of big public blogs people adopt all kinds of noms de comment … like ‘StrawberryJam’ or ‘RainingCatsandDogs’ or ‘QueenElizabethi’ and so on. My hunch is that this kind of ‘para-identity’ somehow allows people to write in a way that they would never do under their own names. It gives them a licence to be rude, in a way that they would never be face-to-face.
Strangely (and a bit unnervingly), some keen commenters seem to bond with their sobriquets. When I misremembered the complicated sobriquet of one regular commenter on the Mumsnet thread, she replied that it was an insult to get it wrong. An insult not to remember an on-line nickname? Come on …
I also have the sense – when people are commenting on my on-line articles – that they think they are talking on-line about someone who isn’t really a person. That’s partly why I respond to some of even the most aggressive comments. It’s just to remind everyone that there is ‘me’, a real person, there. And actually one who might be hurt by unmitigated vitriol.
I also think that never to reply is bad in itself. If you ‘put yourself about’ on the web or the radio, there is a duty (and in a way a pleasure) to respond and discuss. It not only reminds the commenter that there is a human being involved; it also confirms the general idea that we’re in dialogue, not just in lecture. And I have found some good friends this way, in the constructive disagreements between author and reader you can set up with new technology.
All the same, I do have one basic rule for on-line commenting. Cut all that ‘rubbish’ and ‘idiot’ talk; only respond on the web as you would do if you were talking face-to-face. For me, it’s a bit like reviewing: only say what you would say if you met the reviewee over a drink.
Comments
I would take issue with your frankly rather snide comments about pseudonymity. I′ve had a pseudonymous identity on the internet for almost ten years now – yes, the same, continuous identity. This is not because I′m running around bashing people on-line, but because I would much prefer that my on-line hobbies – though innocuous – not be fully accessible to all and sundry, particularly future employers, via a Google search.
SIRIANNE
Well said, though I do think that there′s a great deal more bile out there than you imagine. The sites you mention – Mumsnet, the Guardian and the BBC – are models of decorum compared to some.
However, I don′t think that the use of pseudonyms is much of a contributing factor. Here I agree with Sirianne. My own pseudonym came about simply because originally I used to post only on matters connected to my own profession and industry, and occasionally I expressed views which differed from the public and corporate positions taken by my employers, even though privately they might have agreed. The only solution to this conundrum was to use a pseudonym, or not to post anything which might displease my present employers or prospective future ones. Then I discovered that I had built a history, a reputation (I only ever use this pseudonym) and an online community of like-minded people that I′m now reluctant to abandon.
CHURM RINCEWIND
I wonder what Sirianne′s innocuous online hobbies are, that she doesn′t want ′all and sundry, particularly future employers′ to learn about.
TIM WEAKLEY
Knitting and crocheting, mostly! Together with discussion of (objectively not so good, I admit) SF and fantasy TV shows in probably more detail than the average member of a university hiring committee would be comfortable with. Nothing that would shock my aged gran, I assure you.
SIRIANNE
The phenomenon you refer to is the on-line disinhibition effect, known colloquially (including in academic circles outside trade journals) as GIFT: the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. The equation is: normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad. It has been proven time and time again by such comments as you have yourself received.
And on a fascinating Classical note, the idea apparently was originally proposed by Plato in his story about the Ring of Gyges.
CERBERUS
There was the recent case of a woman who sued for divorce (in the real world) because her husband′s internet character in some on-line game had been unfaithful to her own character with some other real woman′s character in the same game. I′m not saying the people who comment on Mary Beard′s blog under a pseudonym would go that far, but I think you can see the beginnings of the slippery slope.
MICHAEL BULLEY
I hate to say it, but your online etiquette piece sounded like a schoolteacher′s rules for engagement – listen and behave yourselves, otherwise I won′t reply. Blogging is the opportunity for adults and young at heart to express themselves in a way which makes them feel most comfortable, sobriquets notwithstanding, and in this diverse world of ours I would like to think that we could cope with others′ warts as well as their smiles. For somebody billed as ′wickedly subversive′ it would be in keeping with this image to poke fun in return. Sometimes, your more acerbic responses are hilarious, rudeness aside.
A DENNIS
Educational tourism
30 November 2011
There is something deeply frustrating about many of the bright new educational ideas headlined by all political parties. I mean the ‘educational tourism’ ones. They are easy to recognise. Some minister or shadow minister has been on a visit to Norway, the United States or wherever, and returns home with an ‘idea’ for schools or universities – whether it is how to raise the basic skil
ls of 11-year-olds, or how to increase diversity among undergraduates – which they proceed to wave around (often accusing the educational professionals here of blindness to exciting new developments overseas).
They sometimes haven’t got wise even to such problems of these schemes as could be discovered by a quick trawl on Google (the issues surrounding New York charter schools, for example). They sometimes don’t appear to have thought about the key structural differences between one (superficially similar) system and another.
That is especially apparent in admissions to university, where the USA and the UK are really non-comparable – for the simple reason that American kids normally aren’t entering into subject-specific degree programmes right away, but specialise later. So they can reasonably be selected by non-specialists (who might indeed be charged with particular targets for ethnicity, social background etc.). We, on the other hand, are normally choosing students for specialised courses, to be completed in three years. You surely have to involve specialists, not general administrators, for that.
For universities, America is the usual stick with which the UK higher education sector is beaten. Some US universities are truly, truly excellent (albeit different from what we expect). But not all. So it was useful to read Tony Grafton’s article in the New York Review of Books last week (24 November), discussing American universities across the board. Take the time an undergraduate student spends to get a degree at even the best public institutions: in a handful, 90% or more graduate within six years; most have a much lower rate than that … and the drop-out rate (not simply delayed completion) is much higher than anything we would be happy to accept. This article should be required reading for every minister of higher education.
The funny thing is that I saw the ‘boot on the other foot’ a few days ago, and had a glimpse of what happens when you talk about the UK system when you don’t really understand it. I was reading Martha Nussbaum’s new book Not for Profit – in all sorts of ways, an excellent defence of the humanities at university level. But when she gets on to the terrible things that are happening in British universities, she is seriously misleading. True, terrible things are happening, but not quite what she implies.
‘British faculty do not have tenure any longer, so there is no barrier to firing them at any time’, she writes. True, ‘tenure’ was abolished, with the result that academics can now be made redundant (and departments closed); and I am sure that has sometimes been misused. But that is not to say that they can be fired at any time (and of course they could have been fired before, when they had ‘tenure’ for a variety of crimes, like ‘gross moral turpitude’ or whatever).
And she goes on to suggest that there is no regular sabbatical system in the UK any longer and the only way that we can get leave is by applying for competitive grants. Again, simply not true in that form.
You have to be careful when you stray into some other country’s educational system.
Comments
Ah yes, the wonderful charge of gross moral turpitude. JBS Haldane was accused of that, although the term may have been ′gross immorality′. He had deliberately got caught in bed with the lady he was to marry, in order to secure her a divorce. He appealed successfully against the charge, I think on the basis that while it was moral turpitude (or immorality, as the case may have been), it was not gross.
RICHARD BARON
One of the major reasons that five to six years is the ′average′ time needed to complete a university degree in the United States is because the classes that a student must take (we call them ′required courses′) in order to graduate are often oversubscribed. It is not unusual for a student to have to wait several years before there is room for him/her in a required class. So, it is not a problem of a student′s limited ability, but rather a problem of overcrowding.
EILEEN
In my experience as head of a teachers′ union in Australia for some years, top bureaucrats read the journals, listen to the gurus and go on ′study trips′, then come back and sell their newly acquired, recycled, ′initiatives′ to their minister, who, knowing little about education except their own, falls for it and believes it will get him/her seen as the country′s brightest star.
It is then pushed down on to powerless teachers, who recognise immediately the unlikeliness of it to do anything to improve education but can do nothing to prevent it till the next new idea, which is usually equally bad. And so we progress …
JEAN
Cor blimey! I was gobstruck when I read Eileen′s letter so I checked some of the facts.
It does seem to be true that only 57% of American college students complete a four-year degree course within six years.
This in itself is extraordinary, but it was not really what amazed and shocked me. It seems that colleges do not provide facilities for all students to attend required classes, so students have to wait several years before a place becomes available on one of these courses.
Colleges admit students to courses and don′t provide the facilities for them to complete the course.
TOHU
Juliet’s balcony
20 December 2011
Tourist hot-spots come in many different guises. Only a couple of weeks ago the queue to get into the Colosseum was about an hour and a half in length – and all to see the rather depressing ruins inside the building, which are nothing compared with the splendid outside. (Tip: if you really want to see the Colosseum, go to one of the entrances to the Forum and buy the ticket there … the queue is never so long.)
In Verona, where we finished our stint of filming yesterday (not the amphitheatre, in case you are wondering), the place to go is the ‘House of Juliet’, complete with balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet. There were no actual queues, but a tremendous, polyglot crush, even in mid-December – made all the more democratic by the fact that the view of the balcony and other bric-à-brac is free. You only have to pay if you want actually to go and stand on it, and to see the other Juliet memorabilia in the ‘museum’ … pride of place going to the bed that starred in Zeffirelli’s version of Shakespeare’s play.
Of course, the place has nothing to do with the nonexistent Juliet at all, and was a clever invention of the nineteenth century, turned into a veritable tourist attraction in the 1930s. But overall it is as odd as the Colosseum, with the added tinge of slightly off-putting, slightly leering, slightly touching ‘romance’.
One high spot of the museum itself for most people is the opportunity to send an email (or even an old-style letter) to Juliet, who – it seems – will answer you (unless you are too filthy in what you choose to say to her). Indeed it appears that they have a whole team of people employed just to answer the emails that Juliet receives in the ‘Club Juliet’.
But if you can’t afford the 6 euros to go inside, there is still plenty to do. The walls of the entrance-way to Juliet’s House are covered with the graffiti of at least the last few years of hopeless romantics – as if scrawling your name in the vicinity of a mythical balcony of a mythical couple somehow gives it added force.
But the weirdest thing was the 1970s’ bronze statue of Juliet standing just underneath the balcony. It was clear from the ‘polish’, and by watching what people actually did, that one hallowed custom was to go up and grasp Juliet’s right breast, and have your photo taken in the act. This was the sport of almost every visitor from the seven-year-olds to the 70-somethings, male and female. A few looked a bit embarrassed. Most entered into the spirit of the fondle.
A new ritual, a bit tacky – but bringing the star-crossed lovers down to size.
Comments
Grasping the breast? Maybe a fertility rite or a good-luck wish? One wonders what Frazer would have made of it.
ANNA
I′m surprised, bearing in mind today′s social climate, that the fondlers have not been placed on a lifetime police register as sexual predators. Epstein′s stone Assyrian thingummy carved on Oscar Wilde′s gravestone in Père Lachaise cemetery used to have a large and
distinctive penis that was polished by many hands touching it … it was broken off many years ago.
LORD TRUTH/RONALD ROGERS
From New York Times (15 December): ′Recently, descendants of Wilde, the Irish dramatist and wit who died here in 1900, decided to have his immense gravestone cleansed of a vast accumulation of lipstick markings from kisses left by admirers, who for years have been defacing, and some say eroding, the memorial in hilly Père Lachaise Cemetery here. But the decision meant not only cleaning the stone, a flying nude angel by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was inspired by the British Museum′s Assyrian figures, but also erecting a seven-foot plate glass wall to keep ardent admirers at a distance.′
NICK JOWETT
Christmas tradition – and innovation
25 December 2011
‘Tradition always incorporates innovation’ insisted the daughter (an anthropologist-cum-historian) on Christmas Eve. The reason for her insistence on this great anthropological truth was her desire that this year we should try roasting rather than boiling the sprouts for Christmas dinner.
Predictably enough, we chose to follow that other anthropological model: namely, ‘accretion’. The husband had liked our encounter with roast sprouts in the USA but rather doubted our ability to do them well enough on our first try (and anyway, he is still quite partial to boiled ones). So – as we had laid in well more sprouts than we needed – we decided to roast half and boil half, just to be on the safe side. (I expect that we will now do this sprouting double act as long as we have Christmas together.)
At this point, I rather pretentiously observed that our decision followed the model of our Christmas tree … it was growing tradition, a bit like the way we put new decorations on the tree each year, without throwing away the old ones. To be precise: a rather jolly hart, vaguely taken from the Wilton Diptych, joined the line-up this year, as did a shining ship (supposedly based on Turner’s Fighting Temeraire).