I’ve written a few historical/travel/personal posts about the Fens, so here’s a map and list of posts to put it all in context.
Early thoughts inspired by James Boyce’s book The Fight for the Fens:
Our recent explorations by motorcaravan. See map below.
Conclusion of our exploration of the Fens.
The Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire/Norfolk Fens all drain into and were flooded by the sea of The Wash. A potted history: they were first drained by the Romans, reverted to a natural state after the fall of the Empire, and were again drained around 12C by monks, falling into disrepair around 16C after the Dissolution, and drained in on a larger scale in 17C, the period focused on in James Boyce’s book.
The Fens and their drainage machines are an ongoing enterprise to maintain a balance between sea and land, in this most fertile part of England. No wonder this part of Lincolnshire is called New Holland.
The Wash is now a major natural asset for migrating and indigenous birds. As a last hurrah for our explorations, we go close to the mouth of the River Witham at RSPB Freiston Shore. Again we stand on the sea wall looking out over The Wash – salt marsh on one side and fresh water lake on the other.
A solitary cormorant stands in typical pose, amid black headed gulls and ducks.
On the landward side Boston Stump stands out proud (featured image), seaward there appears to be almost endless salt marsh, beach and then sea, with a misty Norfolk in the far distance.
I reflect that some of my ancestors played a part in this great drainage enterprise; the Fens are part of my own roots.
The dog was not impressed; there were cows on the sea wall. He dashed back towards the van.
Continuation of our exploration of the Fens.
Our next destination is Boston, near the mouth of the River Witham, and in the Middle Ages a major port of England, related to the wool trade.
Our main target is the church of St Botolph, commonly referred to as Boston Stump. This is one of the great churches of England, almost cathedral sized, funded during Boston’s glory days, made rich through export of wool and membership of the Hanseatic League. What a magnificent building it is! And the dog was welcome to enter with us.
I recall from childhood that we could see the tower of Boston Stump from the top of the central tower of Lincoln Cathedral, but we never actually went there. Boston did not have a great reputation. Today, the prosperity of Boston’s heyday is long gone, and the economy of the area appears quite depressed to us visitors.
I visit the dog-free 14C Guildhall, well preserved and containing a rather haphazard museum, with display boards outlining some of the key events in Boston’s history, particularly the role of local people in the nonconformist/ puritan movements, the emigration of those who became the Pilgrim Fathers, and the founding of the US city of Boston. 1 in 10 Bostonians emigrated to help form the new city of Boston, Massachusets.
Boyce’s book has a theme that Fen drainage was a colonisation project similar to what happened in Tasmania. It became clear here that the Fens were being colonised at around the same time as the Americas. This was the spirit of those times.
Not mentioned is Boston’s role in leading resistance to the drainage of fens in this area, described in Boyce’s book – such that the process was actually reversed. Drainage channels were destroyed and the process delayed for 100 years. Boston people resisted the trends in the rest of the Fens – a bloody mindedness that maybe continues to this day, as the area was significant contributer to the majority in the recent Brexit vote.
Continuation of our exploration of the Fens.
After a washout day, we drive the short distance to Wainfleet All Saints, where friend Alf was born and lived his childhood, before escaping the Fens via Skegness Grammar School and Sheffield University. In a way, we were both escapees from the Fens, which may have been a contributary factor to our subsequent friendship.
As Alf always said, there’s little at Wainfleet apart from Batemans’ Brewery, the church and the Magdalen Museum. There’s also a station and crossing gates, on the line from Grantham to Skegness, reminding me of the day trips we made to nearby Skegness as children, on the similar line from Lincoln.
We explore the free museum, containing typical local memorabilia and historic items. The name indicates its link with Magdalene College, Cambridge. The van that transported Queen Elizabeth’s wedding gown just happened to be parked outside for the Jubilee celebrations.
We find the cemetery and pay our respects to a good friend at the family grave containing Alf’s ashes.
A brief drive through holidaying Skegness crowds suggests that a promenade walk is not an attractive proposition. Instead, we drive down to the National Nature Reserve near Gibraltar Point and walk out over the natural barrier of sand dunes to see the salt marshes, offshore windmills (see featured image) and beach/sea of The Wash.
Here, the natural balance between land and sea is maintained. There are few people, and the scenery is immense and desolate.
Continuing the story of our exploration of the Fens.
Our second base was another Premier Park – Long Acres, near Boston. Unexpectedly, the satnav takes us there via Crowland, zig-zagging northwards – using the major east-west cross-fen highways between Peterborough, King’s Lynn and Boston. These seem to be the only decently surfaced roads in the area, and they are busy with lorries, tansporting the products of this fertile area to the rest of England.
We arrive at RSPB Frampton Marsh (featured image) and enjoy lunch overlooking freshwater marsh with a smattering of birds. The dog is more interested in the cows munching away at the grass, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
There are many more birds on the freshwater lakes we pass by to reach the raised barrier that constitutes the seawall. From this seawall we look out over huge salt marshes out into the Wash. This barrier is all that stops these Lincolnshire fens from being regularly inundated with seawater.
We are lucky that avocets are reasonably close to this side of the lake.
But we see rain approaching across the Fens, so make haste back to the van and on to our next base at Long Acres.
Out in the Fens, the sun slips slowly below the horizon.
Continuation of our exploration of the Fens.
Next day we wend our bumpy way back up to Whittlesey (Whittlesea – it was once coastal), a place of conflict in the Fen wars described in Boyce’s book. Locals all over the Fens did not like their land being drained and given away to outsiders, just like indigenous peoples all over the world. There were many battles and acts of sabotage before the resistance was tamed. Even after that, the great lake at Whittlesey remained at around 8 square miles, but it was eventually drained in 19C. Sadly, there is little evidence of all this in today’s slightly depressed looking town.
We went north to from Whittlesey to Thorney, once one of the five great abbeys that effectively ruled this area before the great Dissolution of Monasteries in 1539 (Peterborough, Ely, Crowland, Ramsey and Thorney). All the is left of the once-great abbey is a rather large parish church for such a small village, quite striking nevertheless.
More striking is our next stop, Crowland Abbey. I recall stopping here for a break many years ago on my cycle ride from Lincoln to Cambridge. The Abbey of memory is more delapidated than today’s impressive remains.
We are made enormously welcome by enthusiastic volunteers. All that remains of this once-great Abbey is the north aisle of the former church, now an impressive building in its own right. And with evocative ruined features attached. We are guided by the volunteers to see the highlights of the interior, including a striking Green Man, and then the exterior.
It is quite evident that the Dissolution in this area led to Fen drainage falling into disrepair – this job had been done by the monks. This was one factor setting up the situation where new forms of drainage were perceived as being necessary, and hence the new major drainage schemes less than a century later.
At the centre of Crowland is a unique 3-way bridge that once spanned the River Welland and a tributary. The waterways were diverted long ago, leaving this unusual structure high and dry.
Back at the campsite we spot a moorhen apparently nesting in the hedge above our heads – an unusual perspective on a moorhen.
The continuation of our exploration of the Fens.
The first large scale work on draining the Fens was completed in 17C by the Duke of Bedford and a Dutch engineer Nicholas van der Muyden. We drive along by one of the main drainage channels, called the New Bedford River (featured image), although it’s not actually a river but an extraction of some of the waters from the Great Ouse River.
The waterway is long and dead straight, with a high bank separating it from the surrounding lower ground. Nearby is an earlier parallel channel, the Old Bedford River. The land between these two channels, the Ouse Washes, is used as a flood relief area when the old River Ouse would have flooded. It’s also good for wetland bird conservation and bird watching, hence our visit here to WWT Welney, where hides that look out over the wetland.
We take turns to visit the hides as there is no provision for dog walking here. There is a fair bit of birdlife around, notably martins, avocets, lapwings. I also see a single black tailed godwit in the distance – evidence that the WWT project to establish a viable population here may be working. The avocets are particularly photogenic.
Following the channel towards the sea, via circuitous Fen roads, we arrive at our second destination, the Denver Sluice Gates near the Norfolk town of Downing Market.
These sluice gates manage water flows both ways from here up to the coast near King’s Lynn – and specifically prevent the Fens from being inundated by high tides. It is salutary to realise that without these gates this whole area of the Fens would be under water at high tide.
We continue our Fens exploration after Fens 3.
It is Sunday and we again circle Ely to the south, this time to to the small village of Prickwillow and its Engine Museum. With a small group of visitors we learn more about the history the Fens and specifically the engines used to pump water, from an enthusiastic volunteer and video. It is remarkable that the whole area of he Fens would be inundated regularly by the sea without regular pumping. A marker at the museum shows that the high tide water level would be above our heads.
After the Fens were drained, the land gradually sank due to contraction of peat, so that the fields are now lower than the rivers that drain them – another incredible feature of this area.
The village of Prickwillow was established in 1830 as a tolling station on the River Lark. When steam power came along in 1860 a pumping station was established for drainage. The old pumping station has now become a museum, containing a number of old diesel pumps on display from around 1970s. Sadly there are no remaining steam pumps.
I note that several of the pumps on display are manufactured by the company WH Allen, for whom my father worked designing pumps. Maybe he had a hand in some of these!
After this education, we visit and savour the magnificent Ely cathedral, one of England’s great religious buildings. The medieval octagon tower is quite remarkable. Ely’s position as an island in the original Fens made it a natural focus for travel and trade.
Featured image shows Ely cathedral from nearby meadow.
We continue our Fens exploration after Fens 2.
Next morning, we drive north, past the pretty market town of March, following the River Nene up to Wisbech. The river here is straight and channelled, part of the great works that ensure continued drainage of the surrounding farmland. Coming into Wisbech there’s a pleasing arrangement of Edwardian-style buildings along by the river.
In the 18C, Wisbech was a prosperous Edwardian town, but now we get the impression of a struggling economy. There is evidently a large population of non-indigenous people, and some just hang around on benches smoking or drinking. Apparently 70% of the town voted for Brexit. This trip is not about Brexit, but this experience gives us a feel for why they might have done so.
A visit to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum gives us more insights into the history of life in the Fens over nearly 2000 years. The layout of the museum is just like the museums of my childhood 70 years ago, with a huge miscellany of historic items. We browsed for quite a while. Remarkably, this Museum claims to be the second oldest in the country.
Here was a real example of a 19C ‘punt gun’ – an obscenely large shotgun carried stealthily on a punt until it was close to a group of birds, before firing and killing up to 50 birds – a frighteningly efficient way of exploiting what must have seemed nature’s inexhaustible bounty.
There was also evidence of the heavy use of opium and laudanum in the 19C fens, reminding me of a story in my great grandfather’s diaries, where a child had accidentally died from laudanum poisoning. It seems that this was a common occurrence, the bottles being easiy confused with a popular childhood remedy.
Returning to our campsite via March, I recall cycling down that very road nearly 60 years ago, transistor radio dangling from the handlebars, on the way from Lincoln to Cambridge. The Beatles’ She Loves You had just come out. The headwind that day was seriously strong, it was hard work.
Back at base, we see an odd couple of a greylag with a Canada goose, with just a single chick.
There is a small group of modern windmills near the campsite. However, considering the reliability of wind in the Fens we saw surprisingly few such windmills. I suspect that the vested interests that control much of this land are the sort who don’t want windmills disfiguring their landscape!
To finish, yet another spectacular sky!
Our exploration of the Fens continues from Fens 1.
Next day we drive south, circle around Ely, and across to Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve – the National Trust’s first nature reserve, established in 1899. With some of the largest unspoilt areas of Fenland, this seems a good place to begin our explorations. The site is well marked, with a good range of information boards on wildlife and Fen history.
We learn a lot about fen life – the great abundance of eels as a staple food, the techniques of mass murder used to capture much of the then-abundant birdlife; plover netting and a huge shotgun called a punt gun, both of which could kill or capture many birds in one go. They must have seemed wonderful wheezes, but of course this was never going to be sustainable.
The edge-of-fen area around Wicken is criss crossed by manmade watercourses called lodes, created during the Middle Ages primarily to prevent flooding, all draining into the River Cam.
Fen Cottage, a pretty, historic cottage and garden, suggest a glamour to the Fen life that I’m sure wasn’t always there. Information boards are more realistic about what life was really like in the Fens. After all, they were living in a large bog. But there was always lots of wildlife providing free food to those who could catch it.
The boardwalk (featured image) around the large reedbed is not accessible to dogs, so we take turns. But there are miles of other walks for dogs on stone tracks. Immersed in nature, we see a dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies and birds, and listen to invisible warblers.
In the 18C the Fens were for some years drained by windpumps, inspired by Dutch experience; one of the few remaining specimens is here at Wicken Fen.
Back at base, the greylag family has enlarged, and the dog enjoys trying to chase geese, goslings and ducks, prevented by a short leash.
Finally, another fen sunset.
I’ve written about the Fens on this blog previously in My Fens and about Tasmanian historian James Boyce’s story of the formation of the Fens in The Fight for the Fens. This was all a bit at a distance, so earlier this year we decided to spend some time there on a trip in our motorcaravan, really get the feel for the area. This is the first part of the story of our trip.
I was on a mission to understand the Fens better. I was brought up in Lincoln, less than a mile from the River Witham, one of the great Fen rivers. At the time I saw myself as a townie, not strongly associating with the Fens, which were ‘the sticks’ where my grandma and several cousins hailed from. In a sense, this trip was an exploration of my roots, inspired by Boyce’s book Imperial Mud, where he outlines the history of drainage and enclosure of the wild fenlands.
We drive in our ‘van with the dog from Cheshire, past Derby, over the rolling hills of the East Midlands. Picking up the Great North Road we skirt Peterborough and turn east. Suddenly, the land is flat as a pancake. We’re stopped by roadworks at Whittlesey, just by what is labelled the King’s Dyke, clearly a drainage channel. Welcome to the Fens!
Our first base is a campsite called Fields End Water, near the village of Doddington, which is right out in the sticks of the Cambridgeshire Fens. The drive there is like one long chaussée déformée, often with drainage waterways alongside. The land is flat, skies are huge, the wind is strong.
It turns out that all this is pretty typical of the Fens.
The campsite is very quiet, home to several families of greylag geese who wander fearlessly around the place – it’s evidently their home.
The flatness and big skies mean you can see the weather coming (featured image).
The sunset is quietly spectacular, and highlights a sprinkling of windmills.
To be continued.
Having grown up surrounded by The Fens (see earlier post), I was delighted to receive the book Imperial Mud by James Boyce, which outlines the history of this area of England. But why a book about English history written by an Aussie historian from Tasmania? This becomes clear as you realise that Boyce is also author of Van Diemens Land, a history of Tasmania. It turns out that the history of The Fens in England has strong echoes with the history of Tasmania – both being stories of displacement or co-opting of indigenous peoples in a colonial project, stealing their land for settlement.
The thing about the English Fens is that they were not easily settled by farmers, nor easily dominated by landowners. The low-lying land comprised varying degrees of bog/marsh, depending on season. But there was an abundance of fish and wildlfe, so it was possible to survive without the large farms in other areas of England. Also, travel was difficult, so the local people were very independent and distrusting of outsiders.
Boyce tells the story of the formation of the Fens and what he calls the ‘Fennish’ people with the emergence of a marshland environment in the East of England around 3-4000 years ago. The Roman invasion in AD43 had a significant impact, draining and colonising part of the Fens, provoking the rebellion led by Boudicca. After the Roman withdrawal in 410 the next ‘invasion’ came from the Christian church, through establishment of numerous monasteries, which grew into powerful centres integrated into the social fabric, and doing their own drainage projects. With the Norman invasion of 1066, feudal lords owned much of the land, alongside the monasteries, but there was still much ‘common land’ managed according to traditional practice, particularly in the Fens.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s led to major change, as many of the new landowners eventually wanted to enclose some of the common land and drain it for farmland. Land reclamation by drainage became big business in Holland in the late 1500s and this expertise inevitably found its way to the Fens. The political will came with the Stuart kings in the 1600s.
Boyce outlines the events of the ‘fight for the Fens’, where landowners sought to drain the land and create settlements by removing access to the Common land of the people. This was naturally resisted by local people whose way of life was being destroyed.
Read More »Having grown up surrounded by The Fens (see earlier post), I was delighted to receive the book Imperial Mud by James Boyce, which outlines the history of this area of England. But why a book about English history written by an Aussie historian from Tasmania? This becomes clear as you realise that Boyce is also author of Van Diemens Land, a history of Tasmania. It turns out that the history of The Fens in England has strong echoes with the history of Tasmania – both being stories of displacement or co-opting of indigenous peoples in a colonial project, stealing their land for settlement.
The thing about the English Fens is that they were not easily settled by farmers, nor easily dominated by landowners. The low-lying land comprised varying degrees of bog/marsh, depending on season. But there was an abundance of fish and wildlfe, so it was possible to survive without the large farms in other areas of England. Also, travel was difficult, so the local people were very independent and distrusting of outsiders.
Boyce tells the story of the formation of the Fens and what he calls the ‘Fennish’ people with the emergence of a marshland environment in the East of England around 3-4000 years ago. The Roman invasion in AD43 had a significant impact, draining and colonising part of the Fens, provoking the rebellion led by Boudicca. After the Roman withdrawal in 410 the next ‘invasion’ came from the Christian church, through establishment of numerous monasteries, which grew into powerful centres integrated into the social fabric, and doing their own drainage projects. With the Norman invasion of 1066, feudal lords owned much of the land, alongside the monasteries, but there was still much ‘common land’ managed according to traditional practice, particularly in the Fens.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s led to major change, as many of the new landowners eventually wanted to enclose some of the common land and drain it for farmland. Land reclamation by drainage became big business in Holland in the late 1500s and this expertise inevitably found its way to the Fens. The political will came with the Stuart kings in the 1600s.
Boyce outlines the events of the ‘fight for the Fens’, where landowners sought to drain the land and create settlements by removing access to the Common land of the people. This was naturally resisted by local people whose way of life was being destroyed.
Read More »
I grew up in the city of Lincoln, and was aware that much of the surrounding county of Lincolnshire was flat. And I sort of knew about The Fens, the drained area of farmland around and between the huge estuaries of the Humber and the Wash, that comprised much of the county – ‘the sticks’ we townies used to call it. The Fens also extend down to Cambridgeshire, as shown in this rough map.
My family was involved in The Fens. My father worked as a designer of pumps. Now why was there such a company in Lincoln? For drainage. Uncle Bob managed drainage in The Fens. Uncle Charles worked in the engineering teams ensuring continued flow in the drainage waterways, which passed through much of the surrounding farmland, draining water into the River Witham which ran down to Boston. My great grandma lived in Bardney, where we went for walks around yet more drainage channels. My country family, with their broad flat accents, seemed to live in a different world away from the city.
There was even the Sincil Drain running past the Lincoln City football ground, where I went every Saturday. The ground is known as Sincil Bank.
Yet despite all this, and cycling around much of the countryside, I never learned much about the history and geography of the area. My technical education was more oriented to learning about the new and upcoming technologies rather than all this old stuff, and history and geography were soon dropped in favour of maths and science.
So then I went to university at Cambridge, to discover that I was still in an area of flat fields, which were also fens. I even got an evening bar job serving at a country pub in Fen Ditton, and great fun it was too.
I cycled to Cambridge from Lincoln, to move my bicycle from one place to the other. It was flat most of the way. You might think that made the riding easy; on the contrary, strong winds coming across flat fens meant a rather more extended journey than anticipated. I stopped for a rest at Crowland Abbey near Spalding, not realising what a significant place it was in the area’s history. Why was there a large abbey in the middle of this flat farmland?
Cambridge was even more fen country than Lincoln. Regular fog in winter, bitter cold when the east wind blew across from the Urals. This would have been a hard environment before the coming of the cities and farms. In fact, The Fens would have been one big bog.
While I was at Cambridge, my father’s pump company was taken over by another one in Bedford, which lay not far from the southern edge of The Fens. They moved to Bedford, but hadn’t quite escaped The Fens.
After I married we moved west, to Cheshire, and I forgot about my origins in The Fens, until I was given a book telling the history of this area, which is quite fascinating, as I will describe in a future post.
Featured image shows the channelled River Nene, near where it runs into The Wash at Sutton Bridge (2020).
The rough map of The Fens is by Jb?, CC BY-SA 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Featured image is the chateau at Chinon and River Vienne.
Hope you enjoyed at least some of it, and maybe learned something from it.
Thanks to you fellow bloggers for your comments and likes!
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Jesus, Luke 23:34
I am republishing this post on forgiveness, first published in 2016, because it is intimately connected with my recent post on Letting Go. We cannot let go if we cannot forgive. See also Edith Stauffer on Unconditional Love and Forgiveness.
Part of growing up is learning to forgive. It is psychologically important.
At its simplest, there are two parties, two sides to an issue. Two different viewpoints, perhaps an expectation or a trust betrayed.
To an outside observer, perhaps one party is in the wrong, perhaps both in varying degrees. Regardless, each has a need to forgive the other – in the sense that they release that inner charge on their own psyche. The hurt that is not forgiven simpy festers and does damage at a later date.
So forgiving is something you do for yourself, not something you do to the other person.
I feel so much for a friend who was wronged and has been unable to forgive the person she had trusted for many years. She cannot let go of the hurt and it almost visibly eats away at her well-being.
It is striking how much we respect someone like Nelson Mandela, who was able to forgive his persecutors of former years – or Gordon Wilson, who was able to immediately forgive the IRA after the Enniskillen bomb that killed his daughter.
I am reminded of the story of the two monks whose order demanded they have nothing to do with women. They came to a river and a young lady asked to be carried over to the other side. The older monk picked her up and carried her over and set her down on the other side. The two monks walked on in silence, until the younger could restrain himself no longer and said ‘you should not have picked up that young lady, it is against our vows’. The older monk simply replied ‘I set her down upon the river bank, you have been carrying her with you ever since…’.
This does not mean there are not consequences. There are choices to be made in the light of what has happened. A relationship may be ended or modified; society may choose to deprive a convicted criminal of his/her liberty for a while, with the aim of a period of reflection and rehabilitation in civilised societies; and so on…
This is not to say that the pent up energy caused by lack of forgiveness cannot sometimes lead to beneficial results. For example, the refusal of many to accept the whitewash of the Hillsborough disaster, probably because it was not forgiven, eventually led to the recent enquiry that has helped the truth to come to light. But we should be clear that there is a psychological cost…
Looking at the broad sweep of history, it appears that the coming of Christianity brought foregiveness to the fore, supplanting the previous philosophy of ‘eye for an eye’ that is still prevalent in many places. More recently, psychologically, we now see lack of forgiveness as one of the defense mechanisms of the ego.
“It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive.”
Maya Angelou
How to forgive
See eg Wikihow on practical ways to forgive.
See also two excellent posts by psychosynthesis counsellor Catherine Lombard:
I never cease to be inspired by Lincoln Cathedral. Growing up in Lincoln, it was always there, dominating the city and visible across the fens for miles around. On our recent visit we caught the afternoon sun full onto the stunning and newly cleaned West Front.
Our purpose was to attend the candlelit Christmas Carol Service, enjoy listening to the sublime singing of the choir, and join in with the well known Christmas carols, all the while inspired by that superb gothic interior.
Afterwards, purple lighting on the cathedral towers gave some magical effects. I particularly liked this one.
God’s own cathedral, I call it. But then, I am a bit biased!
Featured image is a part of the West Front.
It is in the nature of humanity for there to be conflict and wars. If you doubt this, see the list of wars that have raged throughout history, or see how even now a large portion of the earth is engulfed in some form of conflict. So conflict is inevitable. Yet there is a spiritual principle, call Harmony through Conflict (also known as 4th Ray), which indicates that harmony can indeed result from conflict.
So political conflict does not necessarily result in wars. In this context, agonism is a very useful word, as you can see from its definition in Wikipedia. Agonism “emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain forms of political conflict [and]… seeks to show how people might accept and channel this positively”.
The recent World Goodwill Newsletter points at the deeper meaning of an agonistic approach as described by political theorist Samuel A. Chambers:
“Agonism implies a deep respect and concern for the other; indeed, the Greek agon refers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself—a struggle that cannot exist without the opponent. Victory through forfeit or default, or over an unworthy opponent, comes up short compared to a defeat at the hands of a worthy opponent—a defeat that still brings honour. An agonistic discourse will therefore be one marked not merely by conflict but just as importantly, by mutual admiration…”
So agonism is the ideal in any conflict – a respect for the other side, some sort of struggle, and a result that brings honour to both sides. This is of course the original ideal behind sports, which still prevailed in the cricket of the unpaid ‘gentlemen’ in my youth, but was soon superseded by the professionalism of paid ‘players’.
The important underlying concepts are respect for the other, and dealing with honour. Are the protagonists in the current Brexit negotiations behaving with respect for the other and with honour? One suspects that the problem in reaching a final agreement lies in a certain lack of trust that they are dealing with people with these fine qualities? Which sounds like agony rather than agonism.
Featured image shows world conflict map from Statista.
The idea for this post came from World Goodwill Newsletter.
Britannica suggests that agonism is a biological term meaning ‘survivalist animal behaviour that includes aggression, defense, and avoidance’. ‘In human societies, agonistic behaviour can serve as a tool to bring about constructive activity as well as distinct antisocial, destructive acts.’
Kerry McAvoy has written an interesting post on evil What Evil People Have Taught Me, which came to my attention because she referred to my earlier post on People of the Lie. She poses an interesting question, can evil people be ‘saved’ or redeemed, and suggests that this may not be possible.
To recap, my post picked out three major characteristics which give warning signs of evil:
refusal to face the evil within, denial of one’s own guilt, often means projecting onto others and scapegoating.
an extreme narcissism, termed malignant narcissism by Erich Fromm.
a strong will to control others, leading to manipulative behaviours, demanding loyalty,…
We tend to think that all people with evil characteristics can be redeemed, a speciality of Christianity. But what if the characteristics are so strongly built in that they are effectively caught in a world of their own, surrounded by the courtiers willing to go along with them? Adolph Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Napoleon come to mind.
As Kerry suggests, we can face them with the truth:
Our defense against such people is to stand firm in our convictions. To refuse to bow and tremble in fear. Truth is our best weapon.
Reality is the other corrective. Such as when a UK cabinet minister was sent to prison for his misdeeds and emerged from the experience a changed man, redeemed. Redemption has to be a possibility, but is difficult to envisage in cases such as Hitler and Napoleon. It would seem that there are degrees of evil.
Any thoughts on redemption?
This challenging book explains where Western thinking went wrong, and points the way towards the revolution in thinking that is needed to get back on track.
I read it on Kindle some time ago, probably not wise for such an erudite work, but it did make it easy to recall a lot of key points by downloading my highlights.
Almost by definition, this is difficult reading, because it does not ‘come from’ the place where Western thinking habitually does these days.
Henri Bortoft has a good shot at making this understandable to such as myself, with an interest in philosophy but no great training or professional expertise. It is of course inspired by the thinking of Goethe, one of the giants of our intellectual history.
I’ve included my edited notes in the following, which may help to give an appreciation of the staggering scope of this book and of Goethe’s thinking. But there is no escape from the effort of reading the book itself if you want to understand its quite revolutionary message.Read More »
I’ve been reading this little 227 page paperback by James Hawes. It does a great job of outlining the history of Germany for a popular audience. Having had a severely deficient education in the history department, I feel that this sort of knowledge should be the baseline of all Europeans, whether Brexited or not. This is after all the history of the centre of our continent.
Take some of the key points:
For me, this is a stunningly informative and thought-provoking book, putting in context much of European history and throwing light on modern events. (Apologies for my own oversimplification and misinterpretations.) Essential information really for understanding our world.
And of course, it is completely different from the Neil MacGregor’s Germany, reviewed a few years ago.
I can't believe it! 