Author: Jeff Rich
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Inspirations from Roberto Calasso
I aspire to write history not like a dry professor, but more like the shimmering mysteries of the past evoked by writers like W.G. Sebald or the sometimes ponderous but often astonishing Roberto Calasso. “There is no essential reason for history to be distinguished from literature,” he writes in the most enigmatic of histories of […]
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Third Rome
First there was the Latin empire, polyglot and legal, centred on Rome. Then there was the Eastern Empire, religious and magnificent, radiating out, then sucking itself back in when defending itself against Goths, Slavs, Persians and Arabs, in the seeming impregnable perfection of Constantinople. Then at last there was the third Rome – Holy Mother […]
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Thoughts on coasts
We think about history in categories that are the imprints of how generations of tradition have told the wide story of the past: rise and fall of civilisations, the phases of nomadism, agriculture and industry, the gradual mapping of a world defined by inner lands of continents, not the liminal boundary of unmasterable oceans. The […]
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The disappearance of stories from the world
If Snorri Sturlusen had not turned his court poet ear to the old stories among his people, which the Church urged them to forget in favour of just one book, then the stories of Freya and Odin, Loki and Yggdrasill would have disappeared from the world. Yet these stories survived. Their conquerors were followers of […]
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A new dark age
It is a dark age when learning is despised; when violence prowls our streets; when the cherished teachings of our wisest culture falls disused and forgotten. Apocalypses are not fashionable, though innovation and disruption are. We celebrate the piracy of wanton wealth and mock the traditionalists who sit in their cells and speak alone with […]
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Traditions beyond politics
For much of my life I have thought about questions of politics and government. How can government respond to any one of dozens of social issues that have occupied my professional life? What can government do? How can a policy issue be presented to political decision-makers in a way that holds their attention, if briefly, […]
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Islam and false lessons from history.
Tony Abbott has provoked outrage in some circles, and proud banner raising in others, by proposing that Islam needed to reform itself, and so undergo something akin to the complex sequences of cultural and institutional changes that led to the formation of politically secular, if morally religious, liberal democracy. Islam, he says, making an argument […]
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The return of the venal office and tax-farmer
The French Revolution was in part a revolt against a degraded court, whose profligacy in prestige goods was in stark contrast to its bankruptcy in pursuing national prestige in war, and in part the collapse of authority of a political order, so disabling its most essential task, taxation. The crucial preliminary chapters of any good […]
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Final millennial prediction: initiative will continue to shift
Fernandez-Armesto’s final prediction is almost too mild. It would seem like stating the obvious until you recall how often the obvious is ignored. Cultures freeze their minds at the moment of their triumph, and continue to regard themselves as global leaders while decay is obvious to all. The United States with its eternally replenishing liberal […]
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Political order and political decay in Australia
If there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, either aspiring or well established, it has been centred in their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth, and quality basic public services like education, health and infrastructure that are needed to achieve individual opportunity.” Francis […]
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Millennial predictions: cities will wither
Paris. London. New York. Perhaps Tokyo. Never Sao Paolo. Never Mumbai. So sings the liberal cultural fantasy of the tourist consumer who shops in the great cities of the world before returning to home base, where they gather in the inner city and try to impose their strangely rural visions of the 20 minute city […]
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Forebodings
It is not just the Paris attacks but Lebanon, the Russian plane from Egypt and Paris in quick succession, in a crescendo of terror. And Hollande’s direct words: we are at war. Speaking to a colleague when making morning coffee, I was told there was nothing new, nothing distinctive about this attack. David Kilcullen says […]
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