Tag: Radio

Turkey: The New Ottomans

The second episode of Turkey: The New Ottomans was called “North Africa and the Middle East” and was actually mostly a compare & contrast of the political situation in Turkey and in Egypt. Allan Little’s thesis was that the two are interesting to look at side by side because in Turkey an elected Islamist government has spent the last decade or so acting within a secular democratic constitution, whereas in Egypt the elected Islamists moved to reject any secular governmental practices & policies in favour of religious ones. As with the first episode, he had clearly had the idea for & written this programme before events caught up with him – so there were inserted references to the not-a-coup-honest in Egypt at the end of June, but the overall narrative of the programme was based on the Muslim Brotherhood being in power.

It felt a little odd having Turkey held up as an example of a functional system given the protests against their government & the authoritarian leanings (and human rights issues) of that government, but in terms of what Little was looking at this was the case. And when the first Egyptian revolution in 2011 overthrew Mubarak the hope (both internally for a lot of the protestors & externally from the West & Turkey in particular) was that Egypt would follow Turkey’s lead in marrying Islamist politics with secular politics.

One of the key differences between Turkey & Egypt in this context is the position of the military in the two countries over the last several decades. Little compared the legacy of Attaturk (who took power in Turkey after the Ottoman Empire fell, and is seen as the founder of the Turkish Republic) to that of Nasser (who took power in Egypt after the Second World War and can be seen as the founder of the modern Egyptian state). Attaturk is still remembered as a national hero in Turkey today, and the military were the power behind the throne since his time. Nasser however is less fondly remembered, and this is the result of his disastrous war against Israel (the 6 Days War). This war also humiliated the military in the eyes of the people. So Little was saying that in Turkey the military were a presence that would enforce the secular state constitution, and so the Islamists in Turkey are operating in a framework where that is seen as “the way things work”. However in Egypt the way the state was run was what Mubarak said, so once the Muslim Brotherhood took power they saw themselves as free to set up the country the way they wanted.

Another difference between the two situations is that the AKP when they took power at the state level had already a lot of experience at the municipal level – for instance the current Prime Minister of Turkey, Erdoğan, used to be Mayor of Istanbul and Little was saying he’d done a good job in the role. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had been in prison or exile before taking power.

Of course the events since the programme was initially conceived meant that Little’s point was undercut a bit. The overthrow of Morsi by a popular protest then military intervention might be Egypt getting itself on track for a more secular solution to government. Or perhaps not.

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Turkey: The New Ottomans

Instead of an In Our Time this week we listened to the first episode of a recent series about Turkey from Radio 4. In the series Allan Little is looking at the current political situation in Turkey, both in terms of how it’s developed over the last few decades & how it’s interacting with the rest of the world.

This episode covered the internal politics & focussed on the rise of the AKP (the current ruling party in Turkey) and how they compared to the previous rulers. Around a hundred years ago the Ottoman Empire fell, and Turkey became a republic. The military were heavily involved in the formation of this republic, and there have been several coups over the years as the military replaced leaders they no longer approved of. The regime was authoritarian, but also very secular and focussed on being a part of the West. Little spoke to various people who were targeted by the previous regime because of their religion as much as anything else – anyone who was a practising Muslim was automatically suspect. Study of the Ottoman past was also suspect – textbooks for children glossed over it in a few paragraphs, archives of Ottoman papers etc were locked up & academics forbidden to look at them.

The growing discontent with the secular authoritarian regime led to the formation of the AKP about a decade ago, and at first this was seen as the dawning a of a new era. The election of the AKP put an Islamist but still Western-leaning party in power. Little talked to both members of the AKP and some of the same people he’d interviewed about the previous regime, and the picture all of them painted was of hope for the future at that time. The AKP were heavily invested in the idea of becoming a part of the EU and this drove both increasing prosperity (via their economic policies) and human rights reforms (to make themselves palatable to the EU).

However over time the AKP has become more authoritarian in its turn. Little opened the programme with a bit he’d recorded on the day the demonstrations in Gezi Park started (and I guess he had had the idea for the series before and had to re-write it as events caught up with him). Little, and some of his interviewees, linked the changes to both increasing confidence on the part of the AKP and to the rejection of the Turkey’s application to join the EU. Little made the point that majority rule is not the only thing required to make democracy a functional form of government – the rights of the minority & the right to oppose the elected government are also important. He was saying that the AKP are using their election to justify any changes they want to make, including talk of changing the constitution to make the AKP’s grip on power even stronger. This hasn’t sat well with the growing middle class, and it’s their discontent that is driving the recent protests. The next two programmes in the series will (I think) go into more depth about the change of focus from the West to the Arab world, so Little only covered it briefly here.

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In Our Time: Queen Zenobia

I’m sure I’d heard the name of Queen Zenobia before, but I’m equally sure I’d got no idea who she was other than a vague sense of “classical era?”. After listening to the In Our Time episode about her I now know rather more. The experts who talked about her were Edith Hall (King’s College, London), Kate Cooper (University of Manchester) and Richard Stoneman (University of Exeter).

Zenobia lived in the 3rd Century AD, and was the daughter of the Governor of Palmyra in Syria. Her family were Roman citizens and the experts suggested that they probably thought of themselves as Romans first & Syrians second. Zenobia claimed descent from the Ptolemies (so also from Cleopatra) and was also related to a previous Roman Empress (Julia, who was married to Septimus Severus who was Emperor around the turn of the 2nd Century AD). She was married to Odaenathus, as his second wife, who was Governor of Palmyra after her father’s death. Odaenathus died in suspicious circumstances, as did his eldest son (whose mother was not Zenobia). Stoneman said that there was no evidence that Zenobia had organised her husband’s murder, but there is also no evidence for it being someone else. His opinion was that it was a rival of her husband’s who had done the deed, but then Zenobia had taken charge before the rival could. She then governed Palmyra – at first on behalf of her son, but later in her own right.

Palmyra was an important city in the trading network that stretched from the Roman Empire across the lands to the east. It was situated in an oasis that had been a caravan stopping place for millennia, and the town had become rich from the control & protection of trade. By Zenobia’s time it had been a part of the Roman Empire for quite some time, and the experts seemed sure that Zenobia’s father would’ve regarded himself as a Roman keeping order for the benefit of Rome. By later in Zenobia’s reign it was clear she didn’t.

At this period the Roman Empire was in a bit of a shaky state – there’d been 19 Emperors in 30 years (by the late 260s AD) most of them having been assassinated. Unrest and barbarian incursions in the north and west of the Empire had distracted attention from the east, which was mostly left to its own devices. Zenobia took advantage of this and quite quickly conquered an empire of her own that ranged from parts of modern day Turkey round the east coast of the Mediterranean to Egypt. The experts suggested that her method of “conquering” was mostly to offer a more stable & powerful state to the leaders of the various towns & regions – capitalising on her family & personal networks of contacts & allegiances. The experts disagreed about whether conquering Egypt was a good idea or not – I think it was Hall who was suggesting it made strategic sense as the place to put her borders, but Stoneman thought that it unnecessarily antagonised Rome. Hall was also suggesting that Zenobia had sentimental reasons for including Egypt in her empire – due to her claimed descent from Cleopatra.

Unfortunately for Zenobia’s fledgling Palmyrene Empire the Roman Emperor Aurelian (who came to power in 270AD) was more effective than his predecessors. He recaptured the breakaway western parts of the Empire (in Gaul & Britain) and defeated some of Northern barbarians. He also regained a bit more control over the economy and political situation in Rome. So now he was free to turn his attention to the east, and deal with Zenobia. As I mentioned in the last paragraph Stoneman pointed out that Egypt was where a lot of the food for the Empire was grown, and so Zenobia had made herself a target that couldn’t be ignored.

There were two, or possibly three, major battles in Aurelian’s campaign against Zenobia & the Palmyrenes and Zenobia was defeated and forced to flee in all of them. After the last one Zenobia was captured, and Palmyra was eventually sacked (I think not immediately after Zenobia’s defeat but after it tried rebelling a subsequent time). Zenobia was to be taken to Rome, to be paraded as a captive through the streets of Rome in Aurelian’s triumph. There are doubts as to whether that happened or not, and what subsequently happened to Zenobia. Stoneman thought that after the triumph Zenobia was allowed to retire to a villa and live out the rest of her life in obscurity, rather than be executed. Hall & Cooper gave another couple of possibilities – Zenobia may’ve been executed, but she also may never’ve reached Rome. She might’ve died of disease on the way there, but Hall was convinced that Zenobia would’ve suicided rather than be paraded as a captive.

There was a bit more of a “herding cats” feel to Bragg’s moderation in this episode – Hall and Cooper were both very enthusiastic, and all three experts got a bit sidetracked from time to time with other subjects that weren’t quite the subject of the programme.

In Our Time: Icelandic Sagas

The Icelandic Sagas were written down in the 13th Century and tell the stories of the original colonists of Iceland and their descendants. On In Our Time the context & contents of these sagas were discussed by Carolyne Larrington (St John’s College, Oxford), Elizabeth Ashman Rowe (University of Cambridge) and Emily Lethbridge (Árni Magnússon Manuscripts Institute in Reykjavík).

Iceland was settled primarily by Norwegian aristocrats and their households from the 9th Century AD onwards. In Norway at the time the King was beginning to centralise more power which wasn’t going down well with these aristocrats, hence their move. As well as the Norwegians there were also other Scandinavian settlers, including some who had settled in parts of the British Isles first. And a not insignificant number of Celtic women from the British Isles. The society they set up in Iceland didn’t have a King, instead there were 36 or so chieftains who met at the Althingi to decide on laws & settle court cases. The sagas are often about these court cases, which makes them sound rather dry but these cases would be to settle things like family feuds which had got out of hand with lots of death on both sides so they’re anything but dry.

During the programme they told us the plot line of part of one of the sagas – the Laxdæla saga. In this two foster brothers (their genealogies are told in an earlier part of the saga) make a trip to Norway & they leave behind in Iceland a woman (Guðrún) that one of them (Kjartan) intends to marry. She would rather have made the trip with them, but was told it wasn’t appropriate. Kjartan remains in Norway longer than his foster brother (Bolli), who when he returns fails to pass on greetings from Kjartan to Guðrún and instead gives her the impression that Kjartan has found himself a new woman. Bolli & Guðrún marry, and when Kjartan returns to Iceland he’s not happy with this state of affairs. Eventually Bolli kills Kjartan, and then Kjartan’s brothers seek vengeance on Bolli & kill him. Guðrún is pregnant with Bolli’s son at this point, and when the boy grows up he seeks vengeance on his father’s killers. The saga as a whole tells the story of all four of Guðrún’s marriages.

Christianity came to Iceland around the year 1000AD, and with Christianity came the writing of books. At first religious texts were the only books written down but by the 13th & 14th Centuries the Sagas were being written. They were explaining that the coming of Christianity influenced the way these sagas were told or rather written down – in some ways the stories are divided into what might be thought of as an Old Testament & a New. So the people who lived prior to Christianity reaching Iceland are often depicted as virtuous pagans (by Christian ideas of virtue) or incidents in their stories are pre-figuring eventual conversion or reflecting biblical imagery.

Lethbridge talked about how the sagas are very much rooted in the landscape of Iceland. The places where events take place are real places that you can go and visit. And people who live nearby can tell you the stories that are associated with their local area. The sagas are still very much a piece of the identity of Icelandic culture, and the return of the physical manuscripts when Iceland became independent after the Second World War was an event that a lot of the population turned out on the streets to witness. People living in Iceland today can often trace back their family history to the people talked about in the sagas.

There is some debate about how much of the stories in the sagas are true. Clearly the supernatural parts (like the dead who don’t stay in their graves but come back to fight you) didn’t really happen. But in terms of the non-supernatural stuff some of it can be corroborated from other sources, although some can be disproved or disputed using these sources. For instance people & places exist independently of the sagas, and some of the events are recorded in more sober histories. But equally some descriptions of laws or events are clearly written long after the fact as they’re anachronistic for the time the saga is set. One of the experts said you can think of the sagas as being like historical novels – the facts are used but then dialogue & details are added to make it a good story.

The sagas generally share a narrative style. They are written fairly neutrally, and talk about what people said or what people did not what they were thinking. The narrator doesn’t take sides or judge the characters. The furthest they go is to say things like “and many men agreed this was not wise” – putting the judgement in the things other characters said at the time. There are interludes of poetry, said to be composed by the characters in the saga, which do convey something of the internal thoughts of a character and the experts were saying that this poetry was possibly composed at the time of the saga’s stories and passed down orally.

Women in Iceland in the era that this stories took place did not have legal standing – and so had to work through the men in their lives. The experts said that despite this women in the sagas are written about much like men, as real people, and the sagas will often have female characters who do act and get their own way. Even if it is through men because of the legal system, they’re still shown with agency of their own.

Near the end of the programme Bragg went off on a little diversion about language. He repeated a story he’d heard about speakers of Cumbrian dialect being able to make themselves understood to Icelandic speakers & vice versa after a little bit of time & some good will on both sides. The experts agreed that there’s sufficient Norse influence in Cumbrian dialect that this is plausible (and I think they agreed that the particular story he’d heard was true too).

In Our Time: Relativity

Physics is one of those subjects where I can very clearly see the boundaries of my understanding – as soon as we get to quantum physics or Einstein’s theories of relativity I can follow the surface level explanations & analogies, but I’m always aware I don’t understand it on a deeper level. I assume the same is actually true of all subjects at some point – I’m not a genius, and I spread my self-education widely among many subjects rather than deeply delving into one – but for physics I can see the fence. It’s a peculiar sensation.

The three experts who talked about Einstein’s theories of relativity on In Our Time were Ruth Gregory (Durham University), Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal and University of Cambridge) and Roger Penrose (University of Oxford). The programme started with a bit of context: in 1905 Einstein published four papers, including one on Special Relativity. At the time he was working as a clerk in a patent office & was previously unknown as a physicist. Ten years later he published a paper extending Special Relativity into General Relativity.

Prior to Einstein’s theories of relativity the assumption was that there was some sort of objective measure of time in the universe, the same no matter how it was observed. Einstein theorised that the motion of the observer affected the observation of the passage of time – hence relativity. Apparently he later regretted using that word for his theories because it’s been used since to imply that physics is all just subjective & depends on your point of view, but actually there is still an objective physical reality which can be described mathematically & rigorously it’s just that within the system the point of view of the observer is important for the observations made.

One of the things that Einstein’s theories grew out of was the observation that the speed of light remains constant no matter what direction you’re travelling in or how fast you’re travelling. This seems to be a paradox. Say you think about driving a car towards or away from another car that’s driving towards you – when you’re travelling towards it, it gets closer to you quicker than if you’re travelling away from it. (I hope that makes sense.) But with light if you’re travelling towards it it appears to be travelling the same speed as it travels if you’re travelling away from it. Einstein’s theory explains how this happens by explaining how time is running differently (I think).

Special Relativity implied that time is another dimension like the spatial dimensions, and Minkowski built on this theory to mathematically describe spacetime. Einstein then used this mathematics as part of his theory of General Relativity. One of the key insights of General Relativity is that spacetime is curved by the presence of mass and this curvature explains why gravity exists. Gregory used an analogy I’ve heard before to describe spacetime & its curvature – thinking of spacetime as being like a four-dimensional version of a two-dimensional rubber sheet. If you have your rubber sheet suspended as a flat horizontal plane and then you put something large like a bowling ball on it, the sheet will be distorted & curved where the ball weighs it down. Then if you roll a marble across it it will accelerate down the slope towards the bowling ball – or if you get your angles and speed right you can make it orbit the bowling ball.

There was some discussion of the twin paradox at two different points in the programme. This is a thought experiment where you have twins one of which remains on Earth, and the other one travels away to a different star system at close to the speed of light, and then returns. When the twins meet again the one that stayed on Earth will be older than the one that went to the stars and back. This is a staple of science fiction, and I think the first time I ran into the idea was in “Time for the Stars” by Robert A. Heinlein which I read when I was at middle school. The first time it was discussed on the programme was in the context of Special Relativity as the way of demonstrating what Einstein is talking about. And they mentioned that this has actually been shown experimentally – by getting a very accurate clock (synchronised with a matching clock) and putting it on a plane and flying it to the other side of the world & back. Then when you compare the two clocks the one that travelled has measured less time than the one that stayed put. Gregory pointed out that the observations demonstrate both the effects of relative motion and the effects of distance from a massive object (the maths needs to take into account that the plane is up in the air while the other clock is on the ground). I had no idea prior to this programme that the effects were measurable on such a human scale.

The second time the twin paradox came up was in the context of talking about the geometry of spacetime. Penrose was explaining that with his theories Einstein was trying to explain the universe in geometrical terms. Spacetime is four-dimensional, three dimensions are the familiar spatial ones that can be explained using Euclidean geometry. For the fourth dimension, time, Einstein (and Minkowski?) showed that you could use almost the same geometric rules only needing to reverse a sign – turn a plus to a minus. The way Penrose explained what he meant by this was to use the twin paradox – one twin is moving from event A to event B along a straight line in the time dimension, the other is moving from A to B on a curved line in the time dimension. For the spatial dimensions a curved line is a longer path than a straight line, for the time dimension a curved line is a shorter path than a straight line. (And this is what I mean by being able to see the edge of my understanding – I can write that last sentence as a fact and accept it is true, but I don’t understand why or how.)

I know I’ve missed out various things they discussed but I shall only mention another couple before I finish the post. Firstly there are real world applications of the theories of relativity, it doesn’t just help physicists understand the universe – it’s an important part of the underpinning of how GPS works. The other thing was that Rees was saying that Einstein was in some ways more like an artist than a scientist. By this he meant that for an artist their work is generally unique, if they didn’t exist no-one else would produce the same artworks. But for science generally if one person doesn’t come up with the theory or do the experiment then someone else would not long after. Rees thought (and the other two agreed) that while Special Relativity would probably have been thought of by someone else soon after, General Relativity was such a large jump that if Einstein hadn’t thought of it then we might still have not thought of it.

In Our Time: Prophecy

Prophecy is an important facet of all three Abrahamic religions, but the interpretation of the role of prophecy (& who the prophets are) is different in each. The experts who talked about it on In Our Time were Mona Siddiqui (University of Edinburgh), Justin Meggitt (University of Cambridge) and Jonathan Stökl (Leiden University).

For the modern incarnations of the three religions the bulk of the prophets are those attested to in the Hebrew Bible. Stökl was the expert on Judaism on the panel and so he talked most about these prophets. Prophets are divinely inspired and are in communication with God without being divine themselves. Nowadays when we think of prophecy we think of predicting the future, but this was only one of the sorts of messages that prophets could pass on from God. They also provided more general advice for the rulers about matters that the divine had some bearing on. They pronounced on the validity of old texts, they advised the King when to or when not to undertake campaigns, they’d advise him if God wasn’t happy with how the country was being run. Stökl was also saying that some figures in the Bible were retroactively designated as prophets – that Moses, for instance, was a charismatic leader and then later in Judaic history when prophets are more important he’s designated a prophet.

In terms of predicting the future most if not all of the descriptions of this in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible were written after the events that were predicted – so “prophesying” after the fact. (And actually there are no written texts dating before 200 BC, which means we don’t know how it evolved before this.) It was a win-win situation for the prophets anyway – if they got it wrong, then either they had misunderstood what God told them or God had some reason for telling them the wrong thing. Not that they weren’t a prophet, or that God had got it wrong. Jeremiah was the example here – God told him to tell the people something that turned out to be false & this was because it set up the punishment that God was going to visit on the people for previous wrong doing. There are warnings in the texts about false prophets and discussions of punishments for this, but there are actually no records of this ever happening.

Meggitt was the expert on Christianity & he talked about the way that early Christianity used the Jewish prophets to legitimise their belief that Christ was the Son of God. Obviously the Christian tradition is that prophets weren’t really getting the message across, so God himself had to come to earth in the person of Christ. The way the Christian Bible has ended up being structured means that the Old Testament ends with prophecies that Elijah is going to return and proclaim the day of the Lord. Although this is in the Hebrew Bible the way it is structured means that this isn’t where the book ends. Meggitt was saying that there’s a strong sense that the authors of the New Testament were looking for the prophecies in the Old Testament and then making sure they could find a bit of the life of Christ to fit them. The narrative being created to reflect the prophecy rather than the prophecy predicting the narrative.

In the early church there were still people being referred to as prophets, but as the Church became more institutionalised the role of the prophet diminished & then vanished. Meggitt was saying this was because lone self-selected divinely inspired people don’t really fit in well with a hierarchical organised Church. Bragg brought up the Pentecostal Church which is a modern Christian tradition which has prophets – so it’s not something that’s completely absent from Christianity. Just that as with Judaism the bulk of the religion thinks that prophecy stopped some time ago.

Siddiqui talked about Islam & the role of prophets in that religion. She told us that from an Islamic perspective all the prophets including Mohammed were given the same message or revelation from God. This message is about the oneness and truth of God, and has needed to be repeated because people fall away from it or fail to understand it. The differences in what was passed on or written down by each prophet & their followers are due to the interpretation of the prophet themself & their cultural blinders & ability to understand the message. Mohammed was able to properly understand and pass on God’s revelation, so there’s no need for any more prophets after him. Siddiqui also mentioned a distinction between prophets and messengers in Islam – I think she was saying that all messengers are prophets, but not all prophets are messengers. There’s some debate about whether the Virgin Mary is a prophet in the non-messenger sense because she is sinless, and this is one of the criteria for a prophet.

The way I’ve written this up it looks a little disjointed, but actually they followed the usual round table format & drew out the comparisons between the three strands as well as the differences. Although at times I felt like Siddiqui wasn’t quite having the same conversation as everyone else.

In Our Time: The Amazons

The Amazons are a staple of Greek mythology. The In Our Time episode about them talked about the sorts of myths that were told about them, whether there was any factual basis for these myths and how they’ve lasted into the modern day. The experts talking about them were Paul Cartledge (Cambridge University), Chiara Franceschini (University College London and the Warburg Institute) and Caroline Vout (Christ’s College, Cambridge).

The Amazons are mentioned in Homer’s poems in a couple of places, and stories are told about them through into Roman times – so they have about a thousand years of appearing in “current” mythology. The feel was consistent across the centuries, although the details often changed. They were a tribe of warrior women who are always situated somewhere on the periphery of the known world – where exactly depends on what parts of the world are best known. Even down to close to the modern day this is true – the Amazon river is named after this myth because an early European explorer came back with tales of being attacked by warrior women as he travelled down the river.

As well as “the people on the periphery” Amazons are women who live apart from men, and so women fulfil the functions that in “proper” Greek society are filled by men – they are warriors and leaders. Vout made the point that the Amazons are one of the “others” that the ancient Greeks defined themselves against. There are reliefs and art depicting Amazons in the same way and the same places that there are reliefs and art of Centaurs. Centaurs are the barbaric people that the Greeks are not – Cartledge told the myth where the Centaurs attend a human wedding and get drunk & try to rape the female guests, sparking a battle. That’s a display of “how not to behave”, the moral is to be Greek not barbarian. In a similar fashion the Amazons are the feminine against which the Greeks prove their masculinity. All three experts talked about particular myths where a Greek hero goes to visit the Amazons & wins over the Amazons or falls in love & brings home an Amazon Queen. The specific legends they mentioned were Hercules stealing the belt of Hippolyta, Penthesilea and Achilles fighting but falling in love as (or after) Achilles kills her, Theseus bringing Hippolyta back to Athens to marry her.

Franceschini talked about the iconography of the Amazons – they are always shown fully dressed. At first in Greek style clothing, but later in a style of outfit that she described as like a jumpsuit. They carried weapons, normally bows & arrows. They were often (particularly later) shown on horseback.

Herodotus was sure they existed – he places them towards the Black Sea, intermarrying with the Scythians. This is one of the legends as to how they managed to have children, another is that often they are depicted as living on an island where men cannot go and they go out into the world to find a man to become pregnant by. Girls are brought up by the Amazons, boys are killed or returned to their fathers depending on the legend.

Cartledge was keen to say that he thought the myths were complete invention – that the Greeks needed no “kernel of reality” to make up their stories from. But there is archaeological evidence in the area roughly where Herodotus places the Amazons for a culture where 20% of the fighting force were women and Vout (I think it was) said she thought this might be the origins of the initial stories. (And that percentage reminded me of this article about how it shouldn’t be a surprise to find women in fighting forces stretching right through history, yet somehow the stories we tell ignore this.)

The programme ended by very briskly moving us up from Roman times to the modern day, talking about how the myths have changed yet stayed a part of the culture. Franceschini was talking about how Queens were often represented with iconography that recalls that of the Amazons – concealing clothing, weapons, on horseback. She said that the chastity of the Amazons (often one of their virtues in myths) is what was intended to be evoked with this. Right at the end Cartledge name checked Xena: Warrior Princess for a modern representation of Amazons.

I was left at the end wondering about other modern re-workings of the Amazons – there’s a sub-genre of SFF that I tag in my head as “worlds run by women”, that’s feminist science fiction written in the 70s or so. A brief look on wikipedia backs me up that this is actually a thing not my invention. Which is just as well coz I can’t actually remember the names of any specific books I’ve read that precisely fit that category. However, what springs to mind are Sherri S. Tepper’s “The Gate to Women’s Country” and Elizabeth Bear’s “Carnival” which are both more recent than the 70s and more in dialogue with that sub-genre than part of it from what I recall. Anyway, I was left curious what debt that sub-genre owes to the Amazon myth and what is “convergent evolution” so’s to speak.

In Our Time: Japan’s Sakoku Period

For around 200 years (from the 1630s until 1858) Japan pursued a policy of isolation from the rest of the world. The Japanese people were not allowed to leave the country, and foreigners were only allowed in under very controlled circumstances. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Richard Bowring (University of Cambridge), Andrew Cobbing (University of Nottingham) and Rebekah Clements (University of Cambridge).

They started by putting the period of the Tokugawa Shogunate into context. 16th Century Japan could be described as chaotic – different warlords in different regions vying for power. Towards the end of that century three successive warlords tried to reunite & stabilise the country, the final one was Tokugawa Ieyasu who founded the Tokugawa Shogunate which was to rule from about 1600 until the 1860s. International relations with nearby countries at this time were strained. In part this was due to recent events – in the 1590s Toyotomi Hideyoshi tried to conquer China. To do this he invaded Korea (as it was in between China & Japan) but was beaten back by Ming Dynasty troops. Other tensions were more long standing – China saw itself as the superior country to all the surrounding ones, and trade was generally carried on via the tributary system. Japan had at times in the past been willing to play the part of a subject nation, but the Tokugawa Shogunate was not.

Relations with Europeans were also marked by tension. Prior to the onset of the Sakoku period various European nations traded with Japan, generally they brought European goods out to China to trade and they took the silk from China to Japan where they traded it for Japanese silver. With traders came missionaries – in particular Portuguese missionaries, and Jesuits. The Tokugawa Shogunate disapproved of Christianity for a couple of reasons. Firstly it encouraged people to owe allegiance to an authority that saw itself as superior to the secular authority of the Shogun (they didn’t say on the programme if they meant God or the Pope here). Secondly various of the warlords on the western side of Japan were interested in Christianity because it gave them access to trade in guns & other things that the central authority would rather they didn’t have.

So in the 1630s the third Tokugawa Shogun issued a series of edicts that began the Sakoku period. Outgoing ships were banned, people who’d moved away to other countries (as part of trade relations) were banned from coming home, Christianity was banned, the building of ocean going ships was banned and all trade from abroad had to enter through Nagasaki. Japan was able to enforce trading restrictions because the island was actually self-sufficient – the incoming trade was in luxuries. And this was looked down on, they were saying on the programme that the four classes of person in Japan at this time were samurai, farmers, artisans & merchants in that order of importance. Trade wasn’t approved of, and in particular trading for fripperies & frivolities was supposed to be beneath the dignity of a gentleman.

These edicts were enforced via threats of execution. They gave an example of an Italian missionary who tried to sneak into the country – he was caught, taken to the capital and interrogated, then buried alive. The experts also pointed out that Japan in this era was a very militarised society and people were accustomed to doing what they were told, and there was also a network of spies throughout the country to make sure disobedience was punished. And the Shogunate was seen as having brought peace & stability to the country after the chaos of the 16th Century.

Clements pointed out that this wasn’t some grand strategy. Even the name “Sakoku” is a later term. At the time these things were done as reactions to particular circumstances and then the conservatism of the Tokugawa Shogunate upheld the status quo rather than rethinking things. I guess this is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” taken to 200-year-long extremes.

Finally external forces forced the ending of this policy of isolation. In 1854 the US Navy turned up with gunships and bullied & threatened the Japanese into letting them refuel (coal for their steam ships) and re-supply their ships to make US trade with China more easily achieved. The US Civil War distracted the Americans from finishing the job, but Britain and Russia did that – forcing Japan to sign treaties weighted in the European countries’ favour (this was normal policy when dealing with non-Western powers at that time). The Tokugawa Shogunate had been a bit rocky already when the US showed up, and collapsed soon after. After a brief civil war the Empire of Japan was formed, and within 40 years was interacting with Western powers as an equal.

This can be seen as a very quick turn-around for Japan from isolation to embracing the modern world. But throughout the programme they were pointing out that the isolation wasn’t as complete as it’s sometimes pictured. Trade with the outside world still happened through the whole period – both with China and with the Dutch. Even though the Dutch were Christians they weren’t catholic (so no Pope) and weren’t as interested in conversion alongside trade as the Spanish & Portuguese. So they were permitted to establish a trading town on a man-made island in the harbour of Nagasaki. Another factor in their favour with the Japanese was that they were willing to go through the motions of paying tribute to the Shogun. Part of the political stance of this period was the Shogun setting itself up as another centre of a tributary system like the Chinese one.

As well as merchants all Dutch trading posts had doctors living in them – and these were the conduits of information in and out of Japan. Several wrote memoirs when they went back to Europe describing Japanese culture & history to the Europeans. And Western knowledge flowed into Japan – first medicine itself, and later other sciences like astronomy. So by the time that Japan was forced open to foreign trade there was already some knowledge of the Western world, and a literate, educated populace who could use it to learn more now that they had to.

An interesting programme about a subject I knew nothing about beyond the bare fact of its existence.

In Our Time: The Putney Debates

The Putney Debates were held (in Putney) in 1647 when the Parliamentary forces first felt they had won the Civil War – Charles I was safely captured – and these meetings were held between differing factions in the New Model Army to discuss the way the country should be governed thereafter. They ended inconclusively, when Charles I escaped and the Civil War re-ignited. However their influence has been felt throughout political thought since then, as the re-discovery in the early 20th Century of the notes from the meetings made clear. The three experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Justin Champion (Royal Holloway, University of London), Ann Hughes (Keele University) and Kate Peters (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge).

To put the debates in context they started the programme by talking about the causes of the Civil War – Charles I believed that as the divinely anointed King he had the right to do what he wanted but Parliament believed that he also had to heed their counsel. As well as the politics of the situation there was a religious aspect, many felt that the King was too close to Catholicism. Despite Parliament not really wanting to go to war against the King in the end it became inevitable, and hostilities broke out in 1642. At first the King had the advantage. Parliament’s troops were very localised, and often refused to fight outside their region, so eventually they decided that in order to win the war they needed to form a New Model Army.

This army was a professional army, which was under a cohesive chain of command rather than being lots of local forces stuck together haphazardly. I think they were saying that there was a rule that Members of Parliament couldn’t be part of the army, so that it was separate from the politics. Many of the soldiers were volunteers, and there was pride in the honour & professionalism of the force. As well as this the army felt they were fighting for a cause – for their country and for the True Religion (and many in the army were more radical varieties of Protestant).

The New Model Army turned the tide of the war and by early 1647 the King’s forces were defeated. The King himself was taken captive from the house he was staying in, by a relatively junior cavalry officer (backed up by the 500 soldiers under his command). And now the problem was to negotiate a settlement with the King. They were saying on the programme that really want people wanted at this point was to return the situation to normal – King back on the throne, peace time law & order restored. Obviously with the proviso that the King would now listen to Parliament and behave himself.

One stumbling block that had to be overcome, from the New Model Army’s point of view, was that the army’s pay was significantly in arrears. They also wanted a proper legal statement of indemnity for the soldiers – i.e. that the blood they’d spilt in the war would not be counted as murder now the war was over. The first proposals put forward by Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and other Grandees of the army for a settlement with the King did not provide for these conditions to be met first – it would happen after the King was restored. This did not go down well with the more radical elements of the army which made their grievances known via petitions and via the Agitators.

The political culture of the time was a very informed one – the experts were telling us how all sides in politics published pamphlets and wrote petitions to be presented to their opponents or political leaders. So the population were generally politically active & well educated about the issues of the day & what the various sides of any debate were. Therefore it wasn’t an unusual step for the New Model Army to present a petition to its leaders putting forward their grievances about the settlement. What was a new step was that they began to organise themselves politically – each regiment elected its own Agitator and these men met to discuss the issues that each of their regiments wanted raised. And it’s the representatives of these Agitators that met with Cromwell, Ireton etc in the Putney Debates. Many of them were part of the movement that would become known as the Levellers.

When the Putney Debates started in October 1647 the subject had moved on from simply being about pay and indemnities. The Levellers had published a couple of pamphlets setting forward their opinions on how the country should be run now that the war was over, and so the constitution of the country was under debate. The Levellers’ ideas were pretty radical for their time – they thought that every man over the age of 21 should have the vote. Both of these were regarded as appalling by the more conservative participants in the debates. Ireton said that universal suffrage would be anarchy, that you should only get the vote if you had a fixed & permanent interest in the country (i.e. were a land owner). The Levellers felt that by their fighting for their country they should get a say in the running of it – the cause they had fought for was important otherwise the army lost its legitimacy.

On the subject of religion the Levellers were also pretty radical, they felt that people should be allowed to worship as they pleased (I suspect there was an unsaid “so long as they’re Christian & not Catholic” here…). This was also too radical for the other side of the debates – Cromwell & Ireton were in favour of increased tolerance of different forms of Protestantism but they felt there should be a universal Church to which everyone belonged and any tolerance was to be within this Church.

The debates ended inconclusively after a few weeks – the King escaped from custody, and the second phase of the Civil Wars started. The notes taken during the debates weren’t publicly available at the time, and were lost to historians until the early 20th Century. Despite their lack of conclusion at the time they can be seen as the first steps towards our modern Parliamentary Democracy.

This was a programme that seemed like it had bitten off more than it could chew! It felt like they needed to give so much context that the meat of the programme got a bit short-changed. And it reminded me how little I actually know about the Civil Wars.

In Our Time: Water

Water is all around us, and so we tend to think of it as normal and perhaps even boring. This In Our Time episode was about the many ways in which water is unusual and interesting. The experts discussing it were Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge), Andrea Sella (University College London) and Patricia Hunt (Imperial College London).

(This is the second time in a week we’ve listened/watched something about water – the fifth episode of Wonders of Life (post) also spent some time discussing water and it’s uniqueness and importance for life.)

They started out with a bit of historical context – before the late 18th Century water was thought of as an element, not as a substance that was made up of other elements. Antoine Lavoisier was the first person to discover that water is made up of hydrogen & oxygen and he is the person who named those elements. Something I didn’t know but that seems obvious now it’s pointed out, is that the word hydrogen means water-maker and is so named because combining it with oxygen makes water. It took a while for this to be accepted by the scientific community as a whole, and took until the mid-19th Century before the proportions of the two elements were known. But it’s now a matter of common knowledge that water is H2O, two hydrogens and one oxygen atom per molecule.

Hunt told us about how that’s right but not the whole story. Each oxygen atom in water bonds to four hydrogens – two with short covalent bonds, and two with longer hydrogen bonds. The short covalent bonds are the bonds that require a chemical reaction and input of energy to break, and these are the two hydrogens that are part of the water molecule per se. Hydrogen bonds form because the water molecule is polarised, Hunt was describing it as the triangle of the water molecule (sitting with the hydrogens at the base and the oxygen at the apex) has two little bunny ears sticking up which are perpendicular to the plane of the hydrogen atoms. So the oxygen is inside a tetrahedral environment with a hydrogen at each of two of the corners of the tetrahedron, and (effectively) an electron at each of the other two. These bunny ears (which are slightly negatively charged) interact with hydrogens on other water molecules (which are slight positively charged. Chang said that in cruder terms this means that the water molecules are “sticky”. Hydrogen bonds are longer than covalent bonds and don’t need a chemical reaction or large amounts of energy to break – Hunt said that they flick on & off every picosecond (which is 10-12 seconds). When pushed she said that that’s not directly observable, but that you do experiments to do with femtosecond (10-15 seconds) bursts of lasers and do calculations involving quantum mechanics to indirectly observe this (this is her area of expertise) and this is the best hypothesis about what’s going on.

They spent a while talking about the properties of water that are unusual. For instance, ice floats on water. We just take this for granted but it’s a unique property – most solids sink beneath the liquid form of the substance. Sella gave olive oil as an example, if you look in the supermarket on a cold day then you see cloudy solid olive oil at the bottoms of the bottles. Water is densest at 4°C while it is still a liquid, and this has to do with how the hydrogen bonds between the molecules push them apart in the solid (I think).

Water is also unique in how high a temperature it freezes & boils, if you compare it to other similar molecules. They used H2S and NH3 as examples of similar molecules that are gases long before water even liquefies. This again has to do with the hydrogen bonds, these hold the water molecules together when otherwise they might drift apart. Chang explained that in the 18th Century there was a certain amount of confusion about what precisely the boiling point of water is, and it turns out that this is justified. Boiling starts with the formation of bubbles of gaseous water which rise to the surface. The surface tension of water (due again to hydrogen bonds) means that it’s very hard or impossible for a bubble to start from nothing. So if the surface of the vessel is very smooth (like a ceramic mug) then the water can be heated past 100°C before it boils – this is called superheated water. He said that in a normal mug you might get to 102°C or 103°C. I followed a link from the In Our Time programme page to some research Chang has done on this – I was particularly struck by his sixth experiment where using degassed water he found that the water gets to a temperature of 108°C without boiling, and then explodes.

Water is a very good solvent. For small ionic compounds (say, salt – NaCl) this is down to the charges on the ions of the compound that’s being dissolved. The positive ones (Na) interact with the oxygen atoms, and the negative ones (Cl) interact with the hydrogen atoms. The way that the hydrogen bonds between different water molecules make the water form a lattice like structure also helps to dissolve some non-ionic compounds. If the molecule is small enough it will fit in the gaps in the lattice, as if it’s in a cage. Hunt then talked about how this makes water very important in life. Partly because it can carry nutrients around the body (in the bloodstream of an animal, in the xylem or phloem of a plant). Water is also an important part of cellular biochemistry. It is the solvent in which the chemistry takes place, and is also involved in helping some of the components of this chemistry (proteins) to fold up into the right shapes. The way water and some things don’t mix (oils, lipids) is how cell membranes work – if you think of oil droplets floating on water then you can see how they could be formed into a shell around a compartment of water.

They also talked a little bit about how there are more sorts of ice than you might expect. At least 15. Ice I is the one that we normally see, and in it all the oxygen atoms are aligned like oranges stacked up in a supermarket. But the orientation of the water molecules is random – so which direction the short covalent bonded hydrogens are in differs randomly between the molecules. If you do things with temperature & pressure to the ice then you get different forms of ice – the oxygens will still be organised the same as Ice I, but the orientation of the water molecules will be ordered in some way or another. For instance all the short covalently bonded hydrogens might be on the same side of each molecule and lined up in rows.

The take home message was that water is much more interesting than one might think, and that chemists are still finding out new things about it. Sella finished up the programme by telling us about one question that’s got the potential to have an impact on everyday life – why is ice so slippery? Apparently the full chemistry & physics behind this isn’t yet known.