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Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 1.Β
Posted by Catigern (U14419012) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
On the 'Cuddly Animals' thread, Cass made the following observation:
Actually Stephen Fry wrote most intelligently about the difference between Oxford and Cambridge in his latest volume of autobiography..
He felt himself a particulat affiinity to Cambridge literary heroes whom he characterised as being "iconocalastic"- likely to tear the world down or join in efforts to do so [we had programme on the Cambridge Spies of the Cold War era a couple of days ago]
Oxford on the other hand produces many more Prime Ministers, people who try to pursue their dreams of progress from within the "establishment".
In his own field of humurous entertainment when growing up Fry may have seen these two strands woven together in Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the one essentially iconaclastic and even at times anarchistic, and the other really just Cuddly Duddly. Β
I'm inclined to dispute Fry's assessment: Evil Fen Poly may have had its Stalinist spies, but Oxford had its early Protestant martyrs. I thought I'd test opinion on three of the most famous Tabs in history - were they 'likely to tear the world down or join in efforts to do so' or did they 'try to pursue their dreams of progress from within the "establishment".'?
Re Cromwell, no doubt regicide seemed radical, but he's been described as essentially a monarchist. It may also be worth noting that, once he achieved sufficient power, he made himself Chancellor of Oxford...
Newton certainly seems to me to have undertaken his groundbreaking work within an establishment context, and always wanted to be a pillar of the establishment, but when he managed to become such, it was the [Glorious]'revolutionary' establishment that accepted him...
Darwin I know less about - he had an enormous beard, I believe.
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Message 2
Posted by Poldertijger (U11154078) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
Hello Catigern,
In defence of Cambridge University, I feel that Newton is a category of his own, Darwin was able to state his theory of evolution because he had the good luck to have been invited to make a trip on board of HRM the Beagle, and the existence of the Cambridge spies can be explained by network theory; one enlists the people closest to you first. I guess that the Russians had a wonderful recruiter inside Cambridge.
I see nothing particular Cambridgian about the wonderful Cambridgians.
Regards,
PoldertijgerLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 3
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
Actually I think that we have to be very careful about the way that English historians and the English establishment very cleverly wedded "great men" to a very English version of history as somehow endowed with a special capacity for evolution, progress and improvement.
In his biography of J.M.Keynes during his childhood and early years Robert Skidelsky makes the point that when Keynes was to be set up as the High Priest of the new world economic order after 1945 an official biography was produced that did far more than air-brush over some aspects of Keynes life- especially as one of the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury circle. Of course he eventually fell in love with the leg muscles on a Russian ballerina and married etc.
And I must confess that my favourite biography of Thomas Cranmer the Cambridge man at the heart of the Henrician Reformation and the Break with Rome was probably written very much to fit in with the Anglo-Catholic movement of the late Victorian age and stressed that far from being a Protestant Cranmer was a great intellectual capable of understanding that Christianity could embrace both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, and under Mary Tudor he still hoped that he could prove that, which is why he was never put on trial on religious grounds that would have allowed him to debate theology. Cardinal Pole knew the danger of a brilliant mind.
As for Catigern's three..
It is very easy to forget that Cromwell was a despised figure as a regicide and republican until Thomas Carlyle included him in his lectures on heroes of the kind that Britain needed in these Hard Times of the 1840's.. Of course Carlyle's last great hero was Frederick the Great of Prussia, and his biography of FG was one of the books that Hitler had with him in his bunker at the last. But G.M. Trevelyan , who in his pieces published in 1913 recommended the reading of Carlyle in his early liberal years, but not in his later hard-line years of "The N* Problem, gave a talk on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ after the Second World War in support of the project to place a statue of Cromwell close to the Houses of Parliament acknowledging his role as a great parliamentarian.. But then those were heady days when historians could see the final accomplishment of English History with the Westminster Parliament, and the Cabinet and the Westminster bureaucrats running the life of the British people from the Cradle to the Grave in a new utopia. Keynes did not last long. But the equally disreputable in his younger days, Bertrand Russell was able to play the wise old man of world affairs.
Newton too has been air-brushed according to programmes about Newton as a whole man. Of course all schoolchildren were taught Newton's Laws of Motion and about his discovery of the spectrum, and if Cromwell was rehabilitated after the Second World War in a mood of national reconciliation, Newton's career was very much associated with the Restoration and Charles II's creation of safer subjects for human creativity than religion and politics. He was a great sponsor of the Restoration Theatre and of the Royal Society with an emphasis on pure science, and Newton gets plaudits for creating the idea of a comforting universe operating according to Universal laws. As Florence Nightingale was to observe to John Stuart Mill the existence of so many laws in nature is proof of the existence of a great law giver- whether that of Protestants or Roman Catholics.
But less attention, I believe, has been given to the other parts of Newton's life. Apparently he wrote as much about alchemy and the black arts and the work of the Devil as he did those efforts in the interest of science. Moreover, though Newton cannot be blamed for that, in one of his English Letters Voltaire expressed amazement that in England the funeral of a man of science and letters could be attended with such fervour by the common people, or that in fact a mere commoner could be so honoured by the Court and the establishment. It took a Revolution in France and the attempt to create a new establishment for Voltaire to have a funeral that was even more impressive because his English Letters were one of the sources from which revolutionary ideas and expectatios grew.
Darwin, of course, was very aware of the explosive nature of his theories and did not publish them for a long time. They have been, and in their own way in accordance with Hegelian dielectic, as a new thesis produced an antithesis most crucially perhaps in the the ideas of Dr. Lanz. Lanz argued that indeed evolution took place, but things evolved from good to bad. People did not evolve from monkeys. Monkeys were evolved from human beings, and the tree of racial evolution that produced the white caucasian as the highest form of creation [with the French biologist and theologian Theillard de Charden arguing that the final peak of evolution had been the birth of Jesus- the most perfect human being that there would ever be], actually went the other way. The inferior races were declined human beings and unless Humankind did something about it the process of decline would just go on dragging all Humanity to Hell. The pure blooded, therefore, had a duty to keep themselves pure - and also a duty to breed pure children to counter-balance the over-population of the world by the inferior species.
These arguments were all put out in Lanz's magazine "Ostara" which featured a knight with a swastika on his shield. The magazine published in German was popular reading with German troops on the Western Front, and people who had shared a hostel room with Adolf Hitler before 1914 recalled having seen him with copies.
Apparently Hitler banned Dr. Lanz's writing when in power, but he seems to have lifted at least part of his ideas about how the German master-race was going to save mankind.
CassLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 4
Posted by Temperance (U14455940) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
...but Oxford had its early Protestant martyrs. Β
Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were all Cambridge men. The poor s*ds just got burnt in Oxford.
Oxford has always been seen as the university for fuddy-duddies, even in the 16th century:
"Oxford was old-fashioned, behind the times; all the Princess Mary's tutors had come from Oxford; she (the Princess Elizabeth) insisted on a Cambridge man."
Elizabeth got Roger Ascham of course - former Greek reader at St. John's. Ascham had got all the trendy young students at Cambridge reading and acting Greek plays, although Cambridge pronunciation of Greek was denounced in Oxford as a great evil. And Cambridge was a hotbed of heresy - the Dolphin Inn where Cranmer and his Lutheran mates drank and argued was called "Little Germany".Link to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 5
Posted by TwinProbe (U4077936) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
Hi SST
Thanks for taking the time, but I fear that you are wasting it. His mind is made up and will only be further confused by facts.
Regards
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Message 6
Posted by Catigern (U14419012) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
Cass,
...and if Cromwell was rehabilitated after the Second World War in a mood of national reconciliation, Newton's career was very much associated with the Restoration and Charles II's creation of safer subjects for human creativity than religion and politics. He was a great sponsor of the Restoration Theatre and of the Royal Society with an emphasis on pure scienceΒ
Load of rot if you ask me - the so-called 'new science' of the RS grew out of Bacon's work and Wren's circle in Oxford before he moved to London. As for an emphasis on 'pure science' at the RS, that didn't come about until the later 19th century at the earliest - they elected Alfred, Lord tennyson, as a Fellow for his skill at the 'science of poetry'...
Temp,
Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were all Cambridge men. The poor s*ds just got burnt in Oxford.Β
But Tyndale went to Oxford first, and got his MA there...
Oxford has always been seen as the university for fuddy-duddies,Β
What is it they say about standards, again? 'Of course they're out of date - that's what makes them standards...'
Roger Ascham of course - former Greek reader at St. John's.Β
Ah - St John's, Cambridge. Great bastion of post-revolutionary non-jurors. You know the sort - Tories who preached that it was WRONG to try to cure disease because to do so was to attempt to interfere with Divine Providence...Link to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 7
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
Catigern
Re "load of rot" - As I inferred at the outset a lot of establishment history must now be seen as very suspect, because it was written with the establishments agenda in mind. What is yours?
I ask this because I think that what comes through those lives, and in fact what Stephen Fry writes about himself- with bipolarism and self-loathing- is that so much of this apparent Cambridge brilliance really involves "bolts from the blue", which seem like good and novel ideas at the time, but have not been looked at "in the round" in the light of all the implications.
I was thinking after I had posted about Einstein, not a product of Cambridge but I seem to remember Dr Bronowski saying that they he was on the staff there. Bronowski desribes how his friend Leo Slizard- one of the geniuses of the atomic bomb concept, who had contacts in Nazi Germany- went to Einstein in the early stages of the war and begged him to sign his illustrious name to a letter informing Washington that German scientists were repeating all the experiments that had been carried out by French researchers, and, given the disparity in the funding, the way things were going the Nazis would have the A Bomb first. He urged that the USA should make a big effort.
Then in 1945 with the A Bomb almost accomplished and the war in Europe over, Einstein wrote another letter signed by a number of scientists urging that the A Bomb should never be used.
Scientists and intellectuals may be capable of having a change of heart or mind, but Western Civilization with its "Heroic Materialism" is more like a juggernaut or a container ship. When you set things in motion in the real world rather than the world of ideas then you get into the realms of Pandorra's Box, and the really intelligent thing is to think carefully about where things may lead before you start.
CassLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 8
Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Thursday, 1st September 2011
I wonder if Fry would have been quite so sympathetic to the Cambridge spies if they had been fans of Hitler rather than Stalin. Yet Stalin's body count was by far the greater of the two.
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Message 9
Posted by Temperance (U14455940) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
I'm getting my Cambridge pubs mixed up. The White Horse Tavern was called Little Germany - or rather that was the name given to the group of radical thinkers who met there.
The Dolphin Inn was where Cranmer met his first wife, Joan. She is believed to have been the daughter of the owner of the Dolphin, and she and Cranmer were married in 1515. Jesus College authorities were appalled and threw Cranmer out: it looked as though this terrible mesalliance with a barmaid had effectively ended all TC's hope of an academic career in Cambridge or anywhere else. But Jesus reinstated him as a Fellow when poor Joan died in childbirth.
Better to marry than burn? How different Cranmer's - and England's - life might have been had that girl and her baby survived.Link to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 10
Posted by TwinProbe (U4077936) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Hi SST
It's easy to get pub names mixed up. For example the Eagle in Cambridge is where the discovery of DNA was announced, whereas at the Eagle & Child in Oxford grown men discussed elves.
Come to think of it we might invent some additional historical pub names besides the Marquess of Granby. What about the 'Declaration of Arbroath' or 'The Nine Days Queen'. I'd have a pint with you in them any day.
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Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Allan D
Perhaps I misled by mentioning the recent TV programme. on the Cambridge spies. It was just in case anyone here might want to catch up with it on Iplayer.
The young Stephen Fry seems to have been an avid reader- adicted to that source of input as to more material ones.. It seems to have been that alongwith a prodigious memory for what he has read that made him part of the Cambridge team that so nearly won University Challenge. I think that the final was a tie according to the points system, though his college team had actually correctly answered more questions than their Oxford opponents- and lost on a tie-breaker.
He had the audacity to commisserate with his by then good friend High Laurie as a "fellow sufferer". Laurie had gone to Cambridge as a rower. The son of a father who had gained an Olympic gold medal in the sport, and he had lived on the treadmill of those hoping to get a blue in a winning Varsity Boat Race- and lost. That really does seem to be "all or nothing".
As for Fry- as my wife sometimes says of me- it is all words, and he iseems to be very much aware of being torn between iconaclasm and extreme conventionality.
But perhaps that is the theme that I have been elaborating. Perhaps Cambridge is an environment which encourages people to believe that they can "walk on the wild side" in safety and immunity, and Fry mentions how nearly the University is to the wildness of the Fens. Oxford, however, is set at the heart of the Upper Thames basin surely God and Blake's "Green and pleasant land"..
Like Matthew Arnold up on the Cumnor Hills it is condusive to more peaceful and optimistic reverie's.. and an older Arnold wrote to Cardinal Newman in his old age thanking him for his inspirational sermons associated with the launch of the Oxford Movement which laid the deep foundations of what finally emerged as the dream of the Welfare State in which we would all care for each other in accordance with our means.
Somewhere I have a piece that I wrote entitled "The Blessing and the Curse of Oxford".
CassLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 12
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Just in case anyone is interested in more words.
CassLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 13
Posted by Temperance (U14455940) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
...whereas at the Eagle and Child in Oxford grown men discussed elves. Β
Was that the meeting place for The Inklings, TP? An all male group - even Dorothy L. Sayers was banned - and supposedly all charitable Christians. That didn't stop them from being rather unkind about that poor Irish woman, Amanda McKittrick Ross - possibly the greatest bad writer who ever lived. When they weren't arguing about elves, the Oxford Inklings would have competitions to see who could read AMR's prose for the longest without laughing.
We ought to have a History Hub meet-up, like they do over on Family Trees. They are all so nice and civilised over there on FTs: I fear a HH get together could well end up degenerating into at least one unseemly brawl. Actually I bet we'd all be really surprised at what people are really like: Catigern could turn out to be modest and polite, Cass everso quiet - and Minette and I could end up sitting in a corner talking about handbags.
How on earth did you and Grasshopper recognise each another? Do you both go around sporting "I'm TwinProbe!" and "I'm Grasshopper!" badges?Link to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 14
Posted by TwinProbe (U4077936) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Hi SST
I can't imagine why all male groups can ever have been considered desirable, let alone permissible. Although, having said that, there are such things as Women's Reading Groups I understand.
The Eagle & Child was the meeting place of the Inklings. Actually there are plenty of Eagles about. There is, or was, a Spreadeagle in Cambridge. and a pub of the same name in Thame was the haunt of John Fothergill. Interesting man; have you come across him?
A HH meeting would be a grand idea. I don't like the waspishness that creeps into some of the threads and it is a great deal harder to be truly disagreeable to people you have met and whose frailties you know. I don't think there would be a brawl at all. The belligerent attack and the crushing riposte are much more difficult to make if you can actually see the pain you inflict.
However hard we try it is impossible, and not especially desirable, to prune our posts of all personal details. Were you to recount what you know of my biography to the West Yorkshire archaeology and local history scene you would soon be directed to me. 'Brick-lover' alone would just give you two possibilities. Grasshopper and I use the same university library and making the final connection wasn't too hard.
Regards
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Message 15
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Whether Cass would be quiet or not might depend on which one turned up?
But I was just reflecting on what a relatively small "club" we now seem to be on the HH..
And this makes me think of something that I was just earlier reading in Barker's principles of Social and Political Theory (1951) about the fine balance between the coercive State and the voluntary Society, after the emergence of more settled State in England in 1688-9 with a great deal being achieved by voluntary groups and that even political parties are essentially just clubs that people are free to join and leave- like Minette..
And that makes me think of the way that Tony Benn regarded the Houses of Parliament as his club in the tradition of his heritage in the Upper Middle Class.
I always wonder whether Mrs Thatcher read Barker and , in view of the latest Oxford optimist in 10 Downing Street, I was interested by Barker's reference to the vogue in the early twentieth century for further English progress" by way of regression back to the epoch of the Middle Ages- that paradise of voluntary groups and Eden of pure society. Groups flourished in the Middle Ages in the absence of an effective State and an operative scheme of law and order; but the price paid for their flourishing was so heavy that men turned by preference to an effective State and sacrificed groups on its altar. Groups flourish today, if with less luxuriance, in the presence and under the shelter of an effective State; and for us to go back to the Middle Ages, in the sense of abandoning an effective State, might mean a sacrifice of the groups we have for groups we should hardly like to have- on such conditions and at such a price."
In the light of the recent riots one might add that they look very much like the result of the importing of the Urban Guerrilla and gang group culture from the US ghettos of the 1990's when in the USA as in the UK the State and the prosperous Society allowed a huge and seemingly unbridgeable gulf to develop between the winners and losers.
CassLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 16
Posted by Tas (U11050591) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
To an outsider, who has never been to either, it has always seemed to me that Cambridge has been somewhat more innovative and revolutionary and Oxford has been more "The Establishment."
It is interesting that so many Prime Minsters of England had been to Oxford.
The level of debate and speech-making at the Oxford Union is very good. I once heard a debate between Oxford and Harvard and Oxford beat Harvard hands down.
TasLink to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 17
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Wouldn't a meeting be fun but what would we carry/wear so we could recognise each other? Perhaps an appropriate corsage would suffice, easy enough for the Welsh, Yorks, Lancs and Scots amongst us, Caro could have her fern and ID might have a bunch of olives. I imagine the London pride might suit Cass but what the others sport?
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Message 18
Posted by Temperance (U14455940) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
The belligerent attack and the crushing riposte are much more difficult to make if you see the pain you inflict. Β
I don't like the waspishness that creeps into some of the threads... Β
Mmm. Some people find "waspishness" in discussion exhilarating of course. Depends on how robust the individuals involved are, I suppose. And levels of robustness (what a clumsy expression, but there's no such word as robustosity) vary with circumstances. In the end perhaps it's a matter (as someone in the Bar once said) of having the wit to stay in or the wit to stay out.
I was only joking about you being everso quiet, Cass. I try to tease you a bit to get you to lighten up, but I shouldn't. I'm *sorry*. See I'm apologising as usual. Oh blow - I'm off into my garden now.Link to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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Message 19
Posted by Catigern (U14419012) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
Cass,
a lot of establishment history must now be seen as very suspect, because it was written with the establishments agenda in mind. What is yours?Β
My agenda is to have fun, while promoting the understanding, and sensible interpretation, of what the evidence currently suggests is historical fact. This puts me directly at odds with the Royal Society, whose historiography I regard as pretty awful. You probably won't be surprised to learn that the Mission of the RS press and PR dept is to promote the RS and 'develop its brand' (ugh!). What may surprise you is that said spin-doctors have absolutely the last word on *all* external communications issued by other parts of the RS, including the 'Centre for the History of Science' (wot they used to call the library and archives). Thus, eg, the press/PR dept has been known to rewrite archival/library catalogue descriptions in ways which, while they do not accurately describe the material held, are more in line with the modern RS's emphasis on 'pure science' that the librarians' and archivists' own descriptions.
This is an absolute disgrace, given that the RS is given public money partly to promote the history of science.
Like many scientists, the Fellows of the RS tend to hold those who practice the humanities in contempt, and regard History as something that retired scientists can do in their dotage, without rigour or regard for fact. Thus the RS makes bizarre claims, such as that it invented modern archaeology in the Restoration period, which would come as something of a surprise to, eg, those Italian humanists who were conducting empirical surveys of Roman remains in the 15th century...
Allan D,
I wonder if Fry would have been quite so sympathetic to the Cambridge spies if they had been fans of Hitler rather than Stalin. Yet Stalin's body count was by far the greater of the two.Β
Quite
the Eagle in Cambridge is where the discovery of DNA was announced,Β
Oh, how swiftly TP abandons Rosalind Franklin when the opportunity to make an anti-Oxonian jibe appears...
whereas at the Eagle & Child in Oxford grown men discussed elves.Β
As it happens, I was first inspired to learn to transcribe runes by a copy of 'The Hobbit', and had my introduction to the Old English language (as sensible people call it) via LOTR...
Come to think of it we might invent some additional historical pub names besides the Marquess of Granby.Β
How about the 'Hunchback and Nephews'...
Actually I bet we'd all be really surprised at what people are really like: Catigern could turn out to be modest and politeΒ
Why does nobody ever notice how polite I am about 'new universities' *other* than Fen Poly...?
Wouldn't a meeting be fun but what would we carry/wear so we could recognise each other? Perhaps an appropriate corsage would suffice, easy enough for the Welsh, Yorks, Lancs and Scots amongst us, Caro could have her fern and ID might have a bunch of olives. I imagine the London pride might suit Cass but what the others sport?Β
TP and I could wear our gowns, as well as white and red roses. He probably has a fancier hood, which might please him. As our resident Glaswegian, Ferval, you'd have to assume the role of bouncer...
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Message 20
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Friday, 2nd September 2011
and ID might have a bunch of olivesΒ
Me bearing an olive branch eh!
Sssshhhhh ferval, you'll be spoiling my reputation. This is the only place I get to be a meanie.Link to this forum: Cromwell, Newton and Darwin - radical or conservative?
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