Comtean Positivism and its Effects on Political Development in Brazil

Positivism

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) saw one universal law at work in all sciences: the ‘law of three phases’ which says that society has gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. He also gave the name ‘Positive’ to the last of these.

• The Theological phase was seen as preceding the 18th-century Enlightenment, in which man’s place in society and society’s restrictions upon man were controlled by God.
• The Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a higher plane than the authority of any human ruler.
• The Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, was one in which people could find solutions to social problems and put them into practice.

Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and, for the first time, ‘social physics’ for which he later invented the term ‘sociology’).  Comte saw sociology as the last and greatest of all sciences, one that would include all other sciences, and would integrate their findings into a cohesive whole. His emphasis on the interconnectedness of different social elements foresaw modern functionalism. (In the philosophy of mind, Functionalism says that what makes something a particular type of a mental state does not depend on its internal constitution, but on the way it functions in the system of which it is a part).

Comte’s explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. He said: “If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them”.

He also coined the word ‘altruism’ to refer to what he believed to be a moral obligation of individuals to serve others and place their interests above one’s own. He opposed the idea of individual rights, maintaining that they were not consistent with this supposed ethical obligation

During his lifetime, Comte’s work was sometimes viewed sceptically because he elevated Positivism to a religion and named himself the Pope of Positivism. There are still one or two Positivist temples in Brazil.  He also re-worked the calendar, naming months after distinguished thinkers such as Homer and Aristotle.

His emphasis on a quantitative, mathematical basis for decision-making remains with us today. It is a foundation of the modern notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision-making. His description of the continuing cyclical relationship between theory and practice is seen in modern business systems of Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement where advocates describe a continuous cycle of theory and practice through the four-part cycle of ‘plan, do, check, and act’. The theories of Management by Objectives, fashionable in the 1960s, are clearly coherent with Positivism and were adopted by the leaders of the 1964 military coup in Brazil.

Positivism in Brazil

Positivism is the key to much of the social and political as well as intellectual history of Latin America in the second half of the 19th century. It was more popular there than anywhere else, even France. The Roman Catholic form of society remained, but among many intellectuals it was discredited, waiting for something to take its place. Positivism satisfied the needs of Latin American thinkers who had rejected Spanish and Portuguese culture and were trying to prove their independence by adopting French ideas. Catholicism, they maintained, was a tool of Iberian imperialism, and it had kept Latin America in a state of amoral, chaotic backwardness.

The Positivism of Auguste Comte promised progress, discipline, and morality, together with freedom from the tyranny of theology. Positivism influenced every country in Latin America, but none as much as Brazil. In Brazil the Positivist ‘Church and Apostolate’ became a reality unique in the world. Several Brazilians were students of Comte, but Machado Dias, who had studied in Paris under Comte in 1837-38, was a prophet in that he wanted a republic based on Positivist ideals to replace the Empire of Pedro II - something which did not happen until 1889.

Interestingly, one of the founders of the Brazilian Positivist movement was a woman, Nísia Floresta.  Having won fame as the founder and director of a school in Rio de Janeiro, she and her daughter moved to Paris, where they became close friends of Auguste Comte, who in his Twelfth Annual Confession refers to “the noble Brazilian widow” as a “precious pupil.”

While there were Positivist groups in all the states of Brazil, the most important and the most influential one was that in the capital, Rio de Janeiro. The imperial court of Pedro II attracted the social and intellectual elite of the country, and Rio de Janeiro was the principal entry for European culture. The influence of France was preponderant in all matters except politics, a domain in which the Empire cultivated English ideals. However, French Positivism was destined to undermine the Empire politically. About 1870 four Positivist magazines began to appear, followed in 1876 by A Revista do Rio de Janeiro, an important Positivist organ. The Positivists made no secret of the fact that the Empire was incompatible with Positivist Republicanism and told Pedro II so. He, with characteristic broadmindedness, made no attempt to repress the Positivist movement. As elsewhere in Brazil, Positivism had first developed around 1860 in medical research, especially in the field of cerebral physiology, but it soon affected every phase of thought, including political theory.

The leader of Positivist Republicanism in Rio de Janeiro was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhāes. The Escola Politécnica was a focal point of Positivism and at least ten professors there, including Benjamin Constant, were Positivist leaders. The students they imbued with Positivist ideas became teachers in many of the leading schools of Brazil.

Whereas earlier Positivism had had its most marked impact on medicine, now the instrument of Positivism was mathematics. The Positivists were the brains of the Republican movement which brought about the fall of the Empire in 1889, and Benjamin Constant was its leading intellectual figure. The peaceful transition from Empire to Republic was facilitated by a mutual respect unique in Latin American history. Despite Benjamin Constant’s declared Republicanism, the imperial court not only kept him as a royal preceptor, but also offered him a title, which he refused. To Benjamin Constant’s dismay, for he openly preached the subordination of the military to civilian authority, the republic was dominated by the Army. The Republic came into being because the Army refused to continue capturing fugitive slaves. Slavery thereby broke down, and in 1888, in the absence of Pedro II, the government abolished slavery. The Empire thus lost the support of the landed aristocracy, and it collapsed in 1889.

The Republican movement had won the decisive support of the Army when Benjamin Constant persuaded Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca to join its ranks. Deodoro da Fonseca accepted the Presidency of the Republic, although he had expected Benjamin Constant to take the post. Benjamin Constant, acclaimed as the founder of the Republic, was named Minister of War in the provisional government, but when the Republic created the Ministry of Education, Postal Service and Telegraphs as one bureau, he moved over to it. He died in 1891 so his role as an active Republican leader was cut short.

The division between the ‘apostolate’ of Miguel Lemos and Teixeira Mendes and the orthodox Positivism of Pierre Laffitte, which Benjamin Constant followed, continued to divide the Republicans. The latter group was more democratic, but even it talked about the need for a ‘dictatorship,’ by which it meant a strong executive. There were many young officers in the constituent assembly, all declared Positivists, and all in favour of an authoritarian regime. The result was that the assembly adopted a presidential form of government, whereas the Empire had been parliamentarian. The Church was separated from the State, and religious freedom proclaimed. Traditional militarism was discouraged, and the Army became essentially an organ for civic betterment, thus anticipating the ‘civic action’ roles of Latin American armies in the twentieth century.

The Brazilian Republic adopted as its flag a representation of the firmament showing the position of the stars, especially of the Southern Cross, at the moment the Republic was proclaimed. Over it appears the Positivist motto ‘Order and Progress’ against a representation of the Southen Cross and the attendant stars that were showing above Rio de Janeiro on the day of the proclamation of the Republic. For decades the Positivist church in Rio de Janeiro was a gathering place for national leaders. It continued to function long after Positivist churches had closed in France and elsewhere. In the latter part of the 20th century, it leads a precarious existence, non-Catholic religious activity having been diverted to evangelical Christianity, spiritualism and neo-African cults, all of which are booming.

An example of Positivism in action at this time concerns slavery, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888 and was a burning issue, especially in the Northeast. Pereira Barreto was opposed to immediate and complete abolition. In line with Comte’s thesis of social dynamics, he preferred a gradual approach. This was the attitude of most Brazilian Positivists, but it was sufficient to anger the landowners. One Positivist, Celso Magalhães, was a district attorney; his career was ruined because he prosecuted, unsuccessfully, the wife of a slaveowner who had stabbed a slave baby to death because it was white and because she suspected her husband was the father. The anger of the Positivists against universities and the Roman Catholic Church can be understood in the light of the experience of Domingos Guedes Cabral, whose Positivist-inspired thesis on The Functions of the Brain (1876) could not be presented at the University of Bahia because of the opposition of the Church.

The southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, became the most important stronghold of Positivism in Brazil. It was probably because of the proximity of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and because of the virtual absence of slavery that Republicanism was much stronger in Rio Grande do Sul than in the rest of Brazil. The two tendencies met and gave rise to the simple equation: Positivism equals Republicanism.

When Getúlio Vargas a politician from Rio Grande do Sul, who had a Positivist background, seized the national government, he established a dictatorship which, while it reflected fascist developments in Europe, was a culmination of the dictatorial trend within the political philosophy of Brazilian Positivism. The main feature of the Rio Grande do Sul Constitution, derived from Positivist principles, was the division of powers and the attempt to achieve a balance between authority and freedom. In fact it was authoritarian, and Positivist Republicanism in the New World was usually dictatorial. At the same time it is claimed that the constitution of the state of Rio Grande do Sul was the first in the New World to embody articles defending the rights of workers.

Modern Brazil: Military Rule and Redemocratization

From 1961 to 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart had been initiating economic and social reforms; policies which annoyed Brazil’s elites and threatened U.S. and Western interests in the country. In 1964, Goulart was overthrown by a military coup backed by the CIA, and a military regime lasted from 1964 to 1985. During this time, there was intense economic growth at the cost of a soaring national debt, and thousands of Brazilians were deported, imprisoned, or tortured. Politically motivated deaths are numbered in the hundreds, mostly related to the anti-guerrilla warfare between 1968-1973; official censorship, though not stringent, also led many writers and artists into exile.

During this period we see the elements of Positivism that had founded the Republic - rationalism and authoritarianism - being used by the military authorities to respectively justify and impose their developmentalist policies.  These policies effectively involved turning Brazil into a source of cheap labour for US and European industry.  The Positivist motto inscribed on the Brazilian flag: “Order and Progress”, was transformed by the dictatorship into its philosophy of “Security and Development”.  Opposition to the government’s policies was denounced as a danger to national security and the country adopted its own version of US anti-Communist paranoia.

The focal point of the military dictatorship’s adaptation of Positivism to modern conditions was that the Higher War College in Rio de Janeiro, and many officers who trained there also went on training missions to the United States.  On these missions and they learned about the adaptation of Management by Objectives from the business world to the military context.  When they seized power in Brazil they tried to adapt the same theory to running the country.  From a purely theoretical point of view, they had a point: the country was lagging behind in developmental terms, it was not making the most of its immense natural and geographical resources and its politicians and civil servants enjoyed high levels of corruption.

What better then than rule by the military, who were traditionally not particularly interested in personal profit, were not landowners and, in the absence of any international wars to fight, could turn their sense of patriotic duty towards improving the lot of their fellow countrymen?  Obviously, there would be inconvenient opposition to these altruistic moves coming from those wishing to preserve their own personal privileges but as the modern army interpreted Comte, altruism must sometimes be enforced by means of authoritarianism.

Trades unions were neutralised, newspapers were censored, universities (which some of the 19th-century Positivists had wished to abolish) had senior military officers installed on the campuses in order to keep an eye on ‘subversive’ lecturers.  In comparison with Chile and Argentina, the numbers of those tortured and killed were negligible, nevertheless most people in Brazil know someone who fell foul of the regime in one way or another.

And the result?  Initially there was an economic boom but after 21 years, the officers of the dictatorship themselves were ready to return to barracks, with the country’s foreign debt immense and out of control and (partly due to the Falklands War) the mood of the developed world having changed in relation to military dictatorships.  Brazil’s economic development was then and is now characterised as a cheap manufacturing centre for the developed world, from the vast Carajás iron ore mine to cheap agricultural products such as soya.  The division between rich and poor - one of the most extreme in the world - was then and remains now largely unchanged.  From 1994-2002 a centre-right government ran the country reasonably well but since 2003 Brazil’s version of Britain’s New Labour has shown itself to be extremely corrupt, politically incompetent though at the same time economically competent, mainly because the restrictions imposed on it by the international financial community do not permit financial irresponsibility.

Conclusion

The conclusion we may draw from this is that while the inheritance of Comtean Positivism, the lesser known rival to Marxism, has not caused as much human misery as the latter, in the case of what we might call the ‘Northern’ societies, it has had a certain amount of success.  When applied to what we might call ‘Mediterranean’ societies however, the rationalism that Comte advocates cannot overcome personal loyalties that place duty to the individual and family above altruism in favour of the general good.  The Brazilian officers who seized power in 1964 enjoyed 21 years of laboratory conditions in which to apply their neo-Comtean Positivism and at the end shuffled away from power with very little measurable progress to show for it.

ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN

I’m going back to John Donne to reflect on the sudden death recently of a man for whom I had greatest respect.  When I heard the shocking news Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 10 came to mind (I’ve included a modern ‘translation’ after it).

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Do not be proud, Death, even though some people have called you powerful and fearsome, because you are neither of those things. Because, poor Death, the people you think you kill do not die, nor can you kill me.  Since we take great pleasure in rest and sleep, which are imitations of you, then we shall have even more pleasure from you yourself, and our best men go to you before anyone else, to enjoy peace for their bodies and the delivery of their souls [to God].  You are a slave to destiny, to fortune, to kings and to desperate men and live with poison, war and sickness.  And if opium or magic can make us sleep as well or better than your actions, why do you swell with pride?  After a brief period of sleep we shall wake up to enjoy eternal life where there will be no more death and Death, you will die.

A few days ago we lost a very good man.  Paulo Renato Souza, Brazil’s Minister of Education for eight years during the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, died of a heart attack at the appallingly early age of 65. I was not a close friend of Paulo but we were friendly enough to have sailed together in his boat, which I later sold for him as he had rather more important things to do, trying to reform and modernise the educational system of a country the size of half a continent where social conditions range from the wealthiest of suburbs to riverside communities reachable only by boat, via some of the largest and most violent slums in the world.

 

The technical details of his innovations, the most important of which involved objective assessment of educational attainment both within Brazil and measured against other countries through the PISA system, together with schemes for extending access to schooling, providing books to the furthest outposts of the country and encouraging distance learning, are matters of official record. What the record does not show is the manner in which the man approached the immense problems put before him, a manner I can only describe as ‘graceful toughness’.

Looking objectively at Mediterranean cultures such as that of Brazil, the outsider is struck by the savage selfishness of their citizens when personal privileges are questioned.  Shaking up the complacent lives of teachers and educational bureaucracies is a short route to attracting vituperative criticism (we are seeing a version of it in Britain today, and this is a society where people are used to making personal sacrifice for the general good), yet Paulo Renato rode over these petty attacks with the self-confidence of strong man doing what was right – in contrast to the hysteria of weak men clinging to dogma which characterised his critics.

Paulo Renato was a Renaissance man in a shabby world of specialists – he enjoyed his sailing, though when I knew him work prevented him from doing it as often as he would have liked; when he visited a relative who had just had a baby I watched him give an informal lecture on how the bones of the infant skull knit together; he enjoyed his wine and his cigars and his house had good paintings.  We read his career path and it seems to have been an uninterrupted rise from one post of immense responsibility to another and yet this was not achieved by crawling to authority: he was working for a United Nations agency Chile when Pinochet seized power and he and his wife Giovanna took into their own house refugees from Brazil whose position in this new dictatorship had become perilous – at one time hosting 17 of them.  He and Giovanna also housed for a year a family member branded a ‘dissident’ by the Brazilian dictators, but they never boasted of these acts nor sought to gain personal or political capital from them

In life Paulo was an inspiration to those of us working in education at a far lower level and even his death reminds of another of John Donne’s reflections: “Do not ask who the funeral bell is ringing for – it’s ringing for you”.  The best thing those of us can do who are lucky enough to still be in the world and have the chance to do something useful in life is to take a lesson from Paulo and keep trying to make the world a better place.

HOW TO READ A SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

Sonnet 18

by William Shakespeare

                                Original Version                                                                    ‘Modernised’ Version

a b a b c d c d e f e f g g

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.   Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?  You are more lovely and more modest .    Strong winds shake the precious little May buds,  and the summer is too short. Sometimes the sun shines too hot And his gold complexion grows faint; And sometimes all beauty becomes less beautiful  either by chance or the unchanged course of nature;  but your eternal summer will not fade away  nor lose that beauty you owe;  nor shall death boast that you walk in his shadow  when you grow in eternal verses to time;  as long as men can breathe or eyes can see,  this will live and this gives you life.

A sonnet is defined by the number of lines it contains – 14. In the English language these lines conform to what we call the ‘iambic pentameter’, the standard line of English verse, which is defined by the distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, if we take the first line of the sonnet above we see that the natural stresses in pronunciation (if we exaggerate a little) fall like this:

shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY

You might argue with my distribution of stress in this line and when scanning poetry it is often better to start with the second line of the poem because poets often break the rules in the first line to attract attention to it, so let's have a look at:

Thou ART more LOVEly AND more TEMPerATE

What is happening here is that the line is being divided into five ‘feet’ consisting of two syllables each, an unstressed one followed by a stressed one, thus:

   1     |        2       |     3     |      4        |    5

Thou ART| more LOVE| ly AND| more TEMP | erATE

This ‘foot’ is known as the iambic foot (there are other different kinds of feet, but for now we shall just look at this one, the form of which is easy to remember because the phrase i AMB | ic  FOOT consists of two iambic feet). As there are five of these in the standard line of English poetry, the line is known as the ‘iambic pentameter’.  Just as a point of interest, the phrase ‘blank verse’ means poetry written in non-rhyming iambic pentameters, whereas ‘free verse’ means poetry written in no recognised formal distribution of sounds.  Most of the poetry in Shakespeare’s plays is blank verse.

The other aspect that defines the sonnet is its rhyme scheme. If we look at the first four lines above, we see that the first and second, and third and fourth lines rhyme, so we label this distribution as ‘abab’. The next four lines also rhyme, but with different sounds, so we call this group ‘cdcd’. If we look at the poem as a whole, we see that the rhyme scheme is the following:

abab  cdcd  efef  gg

The four-line groups are called ‘quatrains’ and the two-line group is the ‘couplet’.  In passing, it's interesting to note how formal poetry has a mathematical element, just as music has; we have specific numbers of syllables in line, specific numbers of lines that rhyme in a set order, specific numbers of lines in a verse (or stanza) and in the case of the sonnet, a specific number of lines in the poem as a whole.

The point about the 14-line sonnet is that this number can be formulated in various ways, e.g.:

abab  cdcd  efe  ghg

Finally, the sonnet usually contains two linked themes.  The change in theme usually happens around the 9th line, although in this poem it happens in l.10. Let's see how it happens:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st

In the first part of the poem Shakespeare has been telling his loved one how her beauty is more permanent than that of the summer and the general tone is light, airy and cheerful; then the mood changes and refers to death and ‘his shade’. 

We find that in discussing the technical aspects of the sonnet we are now talking of its meaning, so let's go back to the beginning and start an interpretation of the theme of the work.  At the end of the 1960s I remember seeing a film made by or for the British Council about the role of nature in Shakespeare's works. The theme of this film has stayed with me ever since because it reminds us that until the Industrial Revolution ordinary people had a three-part relationship with nature that most of us have lost. The first part is based on the fact that almost all the objects they had contact with were organic; they deatl mainly with wood and leather and with clay in the form of pottery. Metal was expensive to obtain and relatively few domestic or professional objects were made of it. (In passing, this makes us realise how phenomenally wealthy the armour-wearing gentry and nobility were.)

The second aspect of the relationship with nature is the intimate knowledge people had of the names of plants and natural phenomena. If you or I walked out into the countryside today, how many plants or trees could we identify by name? Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only knew the names of plants but also knew what nutritional or medicinal properties they had. In addition, these people were in intimate contact with both wild and domesticated animals, the former for hunting and the latter for farm work and/or eating. Again, how many of us have killed, plucked and gutted chickens for our table? I'm told that there are children today who believe that roast chicken starts its life on the supermarket shelf.

The third aspect of the relationship with nature concerns time. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have easy access to clocks or calendars. They measured time of day by the sun and the months of the year either by the seasons or by religious festivals.  We find frequent references in literature to temporal concepts such as: "We shall be gone before Michaelmas" and as late as 1820 we find John Keats writing his long poem The Eve of Saint Agnes (the day before the Festival of Saint Agnes). My mother was born on a hill farm in Wales at the beginning of the 20th century and long after she had moved away from the farm she still had a parallel sense of ‘agricultural time’ and I remember her commenting as we looked out of the window on train journeys (in those days ordinary people could still afford to travel on British trains): "Hmmm, they’re late getting the hay in here".

The vitally important aspect of the human relationship with nature in the pre-Newtonian world is that, although rational-thinking people accepted the Copernican universe in which the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun, there was a ‘poetic’ way of thinking that still gave value to the Platonic view of the universe as one in which the sun and planets were fixed in transparent, concentric spheres that circulated around the earth. Proof of the validity of this kind of philosophical ‘doublethink’ can be seen in the fact that even  today the most serious newspapers carry daily or weekly horoscopes alongside news reports of the latest discoveries of the Hubble telescope. And it's a reasonably safe bet that more people read the former than the latter.

No matter which astronomical system Shakespeare is following in this poem, no one can doubt that the sun is an element of maximum value in the lives of human beings, so much so that various civilisations have worshipped it. Therefore, if Shakespeare is saying that his loved one is more beautiful than the earthly elements nourished by the sun, she gains extra value from the comparison.

The great problem with beauty, of course, is time. As soon as the human being achieves a state of beauty that state begins to decline with the onset of wrinkles, unwanted weight, lack of hair where it is needed and excess of it where not needed, and various appendages becoming victims to the laws of gravity. And this is where Shakespeare is able to defy the natural processes by saying that even the sun's rule over summer comes to an end, but the summer of the loved one is eternal because she has been enshrined in his poem.

I suspect that, had Britain had Ayatollahs or the Inquisition at this time, Shakespeare could well have been hauled up on a charge of heresy because what he is doing here is saying that he, a mere mortal, is capable of endowing immortality upon another mortal whereas this is something that only God can do. I feel this shows, as most of Shakespeare's plays show, the opening of the modern age. Although Renaissance man does not deny the existence of God, he does question many of the traditional Church's official lines concerning God. Shakespeare's great characters like Hamlet and Macbeth bestride the narrow Earth and hurl their questions at the Deity. In Germany, where the Reformation began, Dr Faustus makes his pact with the devil in quite a rational way while even in ultra-Catholic Spain, Don Juan defies Christian rules knowing that he will go to Hell.

In other words Shakespeare is showing us here the authentic arrogance possessed by the great artist who is aware of his own power - and history has proved him right. You and I are reading this poem today and there is no reason to doubt that it will be preserved somewhere and read once again after the generation that believes Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and computer games are the height of culture has sunk into oblivion.

CRYOSTASIS AND THE MODERN STATE

OK, I’m showing off because I’ve just discovered the meaning of cryostasis, “the reversible cryopreservation of live biological objects”, but it is a useful word to convey the ideas I have in mind.  The thought came to me as I was watching on television the ceremony of Trooping the Colour in London. The public were treated to the spectacle of 3,000 British soldiers, 400 bandsmen and about 250 mounted cavalry performing intricate parade ground manoeuvres before the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

The television presenters made a point of reminding us that the soldiers on parade were on a rotation of duty from Afghanistan, where they would presumably return after this period of being posted back home. What struck me, however, was the fact that the uniforms of the infantry seemed to date from the Crimean War (although the guns they carried were those currently issued to British forces) whereas the uniforms of the cavalry and the bandsmen seem to be of an earlier period. Where exactly is the logic in this? How was it decided to freeze ceremonial uniform at a particular point in history? And if the uniform dates from a certain period, why are the men not carrying weapons of that period?  (Incidentally, the gun they were carrying has received a considerable amount of criticism as a fighting weapon, leading to the subversive thought that the time and effort put into ceremonies such as this might be better employed improving the soldiers' working tools.)

The same question must be asked about the cavalry: although they were the main motive for me watching the ceremony as I ride in a very amateur fashion, we do have to ask what the purpose is of maintaining what must be an extremely expensive ceremonial outfit, even if the men do serve their time on the modern battlefield, although in armoured cars rather than on horseback. We have to ask this question because men have died on those battlefields because of the lack of adequate equipment, equipment that had not been provided because of cutbacks in military expenditure instigated by a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is possibly a candidate for a treason trial (just to clarify, I refer to Gordon Brown). I have to be very careful making this point for fear of being denounced as what I once heard a senior Paratroop officer laughingly refer to as a “BGR” (Bloody Guardian Reader); no, this essay is not in the least anti-military, indeed I am striving to find ways to see where the British armed services may be enabled to act more effectively in spite of the country’s continuing economic decline.

On the one hand it is quite clear that for soldiers taking part in these ceremonies and presumably for their colleagues watching, these events make an immense contribution to morale and esprit de corps. Another argument trotted out when the subject arises is the contribution such ceremonies make to the tourist trade. This is, or should be regarded as, irrelevant nonsense.  On the other hand I have to make a private mental reference to the two most successful armies of recent times: those of Vietnam and Israel. To the best of my knowledge neither of these armies takes part in such elaborate ceremonies and they are certainly not famous for their military bands. Also, in the case of the Vietnamese army’s conflict with, and victory over, the most powerful armed forces on earth, there was no comfortable recycling of men (or women) from the front line back to a few months of ceremonial duties in Hanoi.  Neither do we notice a significant presence of cavalry in the armed forces of either of these countries; and does morale of their soldiers suffer from the lack of globally televised marching exercises?

Just in passing, it is interesting to note that the fighting forces of both these countries contain women. The units on parade at Trooping the Colour included no women; the only females taking part in the ceremony were the Queen and Princess Anne and while one would not wish to enter into conflict, armed or otherwise, with Princess Anne, it’s interesting to speculate why female members of the British Armed Forces are not represented in Guards’ Regiments.

Now that Britain’s global status has declined to the point where we have to share an aircraft carrier with the French and when soldiers are being killed because their regiments cannot afford appropriate body armour or properly protected vehicles, we should perhaps be looking at the kind of expenditure that goes into these events. I would estimate that a cavalryman’s cuirass costs about the same as a flak jacket; how much does an infantryman’s dress uniform cost and is it necessary for him to have one at all? Sorry to labour the point, but Israeli servicemen do not wear dress uniform unless they are military attachés serving abroad.

I don’t intend to get started on the question of military bands but was told recently that bandsmen are trained in first aid and function as medics when their regiments are in action. Now, I’ve never been a soldier and would have been a very bad one if I had, but there’s something at the back of my mind that says if I were facing the AK-47s of persons ill-disposed towards me I would actually prefer to receive medical assistance from a full-time professional rather than someone who divides his energies between learning first aid and practising his scales. In the 21st-century the argument that military bands have been in existence since the 17th century and served to rally men in the confused scenarios of mass battles does not cut much ice.

Something that also concerns me is that this cryostasis invades other areas of life and is given a superficially attractive historical gloss. One example of this is the Beefeaters at the Tower of London; once again we ask: why is their uniform frozen in a certain point in the 16th century? A possible answer is that these individuals have been removed from the reality of modern life and placed into a living tableau that serves up the Tower of London is a cosy piece of national history with one or two gruesome elements thrown in to simulate reality whereas the authentic nature of the edifice is a symbol of the Norman brutality that subjugated a conquered people. Our law courts as well remove their officers from daily life by disguising them in gowns and wigs trapped at a certain point in the nation’s history (fixed at the time of mourning the death of Queen Anne in 1714). In this case the alienation from reality is presumably intended to bestow some kind of mystical virtue and the officers of the court as religious vestments do for the clergy.

The same thing happens with the inanimate world. Scattered all over the country are the ruins of cathedrals destroyed by Henry VIII and castles destroyed in the Civil War.  I have a personal link to these monuments because my father and grandfather were stonemasons employed by the Ministry of Works in the 1930s and 40s making these ruins safe for tourists to visit.  So ironically, we have the state first of all constructing these edifices then destroying them and later ordering their cryostatic preservation in a state of frozen decay. This is about as logical as maintaining a military band today and possibly has something to do with the Romantic movement of the 19th century, which had a soft spot for, and in some cases even built, ruined buildings. 

Both my grandfather (who was the Clerk of Works) and my father (who was his apprentice) worked on the ruins of Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley which, of course, inspired one of Wordsworth’s great Romantic poems. But should this be the function of what was originally a magnificent piece of architecture in one of the most beautiful parts of the country - providing inspiration for poets and a background for modern day-trippers to eat their ice creams?  I hesitate to suggest that the Abbey should be rebuilt and turned into flats, and there is neither the public nor the demand in the area to justify it being rebuilt and turned into a concert hall but surely it is absurd to leave these ruins in their frozen state. Reconstructing the building would involve re-learning old skills and perpetuating skills that are in danger of dying out and then, who knows, given the way spiritual life is developing in Britain, it could probably become a mosque.

Back in the 1960s Harold Wilson entertained us all as possibly the last Prime Minister endowed with genuine wit and one of his funnier jokes was to claim that the country was about to pass through the “white hot revolution” of technology. Since then there has been much rhetoric about cutting the nation’s coat according to its economic cloth, but this has not really happened except when the cloth has been cut for us by outside forces. It really is time to take a good look at those elements of our society that we have chosen to freeze at a certain point in time and to debate whether they should continue to exist and if so, how they can be properly brought up to date.