A recent article in the New York Times by the notable (or notorious) literary scholar Stanley Fish (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F6071EFC3F5B0C708EDDAE0894DE404482 (not free)) was discussing the concept of academic freedom. It started from the case of a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Kevin Barrett, who had been telling his students that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job by the US government. A debate had begun about whether teaching such views should be allowed under the concept of academic freedom or not.

Fish’s article claims that the debate has been framed wrongly. He argues that academic freedom is not about the freedom of academics to say anything they like, but to study anything they like. Thus it would be acceptable to study astrology, but not to proselytize for it. As Fish puts it:

The true requirement [for academic study of a subject] is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.

Fish gives as an example that in a debate about the pros and cons of the Iraq war:

it is part of a teacher’s job to set personal conviction aside for the hour or two when a class is in session and allow the techniques and protocols of academic research full sway.

Fish's idea seems superficially appealing, in terms of balance etc. But applied to history, in particular, it is unrealistic and possibly even undesirable. Suppose, for example, you’re studying the Nazi concentration camps and the reason for their use. How many academics would be able to set aside their ‘personal convictions’ on this? And is it really unacceptable to ‘proselytize’ for the view that the mass killing of Jews is not a good thing?

Large amounts of teaching on religion would also be seen as academically deficient in Fish’s view. Many US universities with a religious denomination would not wish to take a neutral stand on religious/ethical matters. If you go to a Catholic college, you get a Catholic take on the Middle Ages, reproductive ethics etc. Equally, it is very hard to remove personal atheistic views from teaching. I once went to part of a series of lectures on the early Church by Keith Hopkins, a distinguished classical scholar. He started from the presumption that Christianity was a social construct, not revealed religion and that the historicity of Biblical texts was not a topic of interest. I found his views irritating and sometimes ill-informed (as did several other Christians and Jews in the audience), but all I did was vote with my feet and not go back. The idea that he should be stopped from saying such things or required to provide ‘balance’ would have seemed ridiculous. (For that matter, does it count as proselytizing in the Fish sense if you have a series of literature lectures trying to convince you that Thomas Middleton or Chaucer or Beowulf are really significant and important writers/texts? Should lecturers really have to start each Old English course by saying: “Some scholars believe that the study of Old English grounds us deep in the roots of English literature and culture. Others believe that such study is a pointless waste of time”?

If I ever get to teach early medieval history (which is not looking likely at the moment), then students are along the way going to get my take on questions such as whether the Muslim conquests of the seventh century were some unprecedented alien aggression and whether barbarians and Vikings were a Good or Bad Thing. If they want a different point of view, there are other lecturers they can hear and books they read. Academic balance to me means that if they produce a bad essay whose conclusions I agree with they get a lower mark if they produce a good essay whose conclusions I wouldn’t support. Trying to reduce teaching history to an opinion free-zone (or even one where you spend all your time saying “I believe this, but I’m not going to try and convince you to believe this”) is just going to produce boring academic mush.

There have been a couple of articles in the Guardian’s family section recently (rather good most weeks) that have got me wondering what counts as liberal parenting nowadays. The first was a rather confused article by Charlotte Raven (http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1820455,00.html) saying that she had betrayed all her liberal minded ideals now she had a baby and become a ‘petty-minded domestic despot’.

The actual evidence that she had become one she gave was fairly minimal. She had got annoyed with her toddler for grabbing food and being unwilling to share. She had spelled out words she didn’t want her child to understand. She had got her baby, when 6 months old, into something of a routine (based on Gina Ford). She has embraced ‘domestic self-enslavement’ by doing some cooking for the child. (She also gone out and taken coke, which seems one of the less positive bits of ‘liberalism’ to me).

Her view of the ideal liberal mother (hers) also includes some peculiar traits. Her mother never cooked and Raven adds:

I was encouraged to say whatever came to mind and was never once upbraided for interrupting. When they told me off for doing it at school, I was shocked. I hadn't meant to be rude - I had simply got used to tuning people out.

There’s the equally odd sound of an outraged ‘liberal’ parent in an article in this week’s Guardian by Decca Aitkenhead (http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1826090,00.html). Here the outrage is not self-directed but turned against the TV ‘supernanny’ Jo Frost. (I’d better say up front that I haven’t seen the programme, so my knowledge of her techniques is limited.) Aitkenhead is appalled at the disciplinary emphasis of the series and makes some good points about possible exploitation. But some of her own comments are equally extraordinary:

To say that a grown-up has an entitlement to hear a toddler say sorry is not "common sense", I object. It's a radical departure from virtually everything anyone has thought or written about childcare in decades.

In the moral universe of Supernanny, if children spit or fight or swear it is basically because they can. The only difference between them and good children is that they have been allowed to get away with it. In this Hobbesian understanding of childhood, discipline is logically of paramount importance, and the only measure of a corrective technique seems to be whether or not it works. Frost's techniques certainly appear to "work". But they also imply that what she calls "unacceptable behaviour" could never be a legitimate protest.

I consider myself a liberal parent: I’m opposed in principle to smacking and I think it’s important to try and listen to even a small child and give them choices. I haven’t used a ‘naughty step’ or its equivalent (yet). But what kind of bizarre world are Raven and Aitkenhead living in? In what situations can spitting be a legitimate protest? How ‘liberal’ is it teach a child that they need listen to no-one else but themselves?

To my way of thinking, liberal parenting means treating a child as an independent person with rights to be respected. But it also means teaching them that other people’s rights should be respected. L needs to learn to say ‘sorry’ to people, and it’s easier for her to pick it up now than when she’s older. Equally, I apologise to her if I inadvertently hurt her or unreasonably upset her.

I do find it a difficult balance between liberal and more controlling/strict parenting and there are times I wonder whether I should be more strict. One reason is that liberal parenting and an unruly toddler can just run you ragged sometimes. There are times when it would be nice to have a child who would just obey orders instantly, rather than discuss what interests her for five minutes while tuning me out. (The problem is that even nice small children are awful for a certain percentage of time. The best quote on this is by Anne Lamott)

Donna was saying the other day that she knows this two-year old who’s really very together and wonderful a lot of the time, really the world’s best two-year old, but then she added, “Of course, that’s like saying Albert Speer was the nicest Nazi. He was still a Nazi.”

But I think another reason for an increasing emphasis on discipline by mothers today is the fear factor. The two things you will really be called an unfit mother for is if you hit your child or if your child is ‘badly-behaved’, which can cover anything from causing mayhem to normal curiosity. I’m always slightly wary, for example, that L’s innocent bouncing around when out (think of a Labrador puppy, only slightly more house-trained) is going to cause complaints, though she would be far unhappier and more of a nuisance if I have to hold her hand all the time. If parents are being made to feel that their child must be well-behaved all the time, it’s no wonder they turn to any non-violent disciplinary trick there is going. If L wasn’t quite an easy child to handle (which is largely dumb luck on my part), I would probably be doing the same thing. So far (but it’s early days yet) my moderately liberal principles are mostly intact, but only because I’m not trying to push the child-centred approach to extremes.

A row is currently developing about a cartoon that the Guardian published a couple of days ago on the Lebanon war. The cartoon, by Martin Rowson, shows a fist hitting a child; the fist has Stars of David on, being used rather like knuckle-dusters. (The cartoon is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/martinrowson/0,,1823933,00.html: there’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the central image). I don’t think I took in the details of the cartoon when I first saw it: I only started to take notice when there was first an apology by the Guardian and then a complaint by the Israeli ambassador. The ambassador’s complaint is that the cartoon is anti-Semitic (http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1825632,00.html) and an ‘incitement’.

Rowson’s cartoon is nasty, but then Rowson is a nasty cartoonist, which the Guardian seems to specialise in (Steve Bell and Ralph Steadman are others who spring to mind). I don’t think there would have been any loss to the world if the cartoon hadn’t been published. I didn’t understand it as anti-Semitic, but it was certainly viciously anti-Israel, in the way there are also routinely anti-American, anti-Russian etc cartoons. But it’s only a few months since the outcry about the Danish cartoons on Muhammad. There were vast numbers of Western voices then insisting that the right to publish offensive cartoons was the basic foundation of modern liberalism (or words to that effect). I somehow doubt that there will be the same voices raised to defend the Guardian. (Incidentally, I didn’t think the publishing of those cartoons was justified).

Why do so many Westerners apparently hold that it is wrong to publish anti-Jewish cartoons, but not anti-Muslim ones? One possible interpretation of the Rowson cartoon is that Jews as a whole hurt children. The only plausible interpretation of a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban (the worst of the Danish cartoons) is that Islam as a whole is intrinsically murderous. Thus the cartoons are equal in their impact or the Islamic one is more offensive (as well as being repeated with variants).

One immediate difference is that the Israeli ambassador has not called for any violence over the cartoons (and as far as I know, nor have any Jewish groups). Yet the argument that ‘you can have your rights, but only if you ask nicely’ isn’t exactly convincing. The final reason why complaints by Jews about hostile cartoons are taken more seriously is the obvious one: we’ve seen where that has led to in the past. The belief that free speech should be unlimited can only be maintained by the blind refusal to admit that there is often a connection between repeatedly saying ‘Jews/Blacks/Muslims/Gypsies/gays are scum who deserve to be killed’ and people actually attacking these groups. Does the fact that there hasn’t yet been mass physical targeting of Muslims (with the exception of former Yugoslavia) mean that it’s OK to demonise them?

I haven’t been watching the Channel 4 series ‘The War of the World’, which is Niall Ferguson’s take on the twentieth century (see http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/t-z/warworld.html), partly because I’m not that interested in yet another programme on WW2, the Cold War etc, and also because I don’t go for Ferguson’s brand of right wing economic history. The correctness of my decision was confirmed when I ended up seeing a short bit of the end of his programme on World War 2.

Ferguson was making a point, which is no longer terribly novel, that the Allies committed war crimes as well: we got stuff about Bomber Command and the Red Army raping German women and the fairly tired argument that Stalin was just as bad as Hitler. He then said that of course he wasn’t trying to suggest the sides were morally equivalent (despite the fact that he referred to the ‘hypocritical’ statements of the UK and US at the post-war war crime trials). Ferguson ended by saying that World War 2 was a ‘tainted victory’.

My thought was ‘what a smug git’. He sits there, having never fought a battle in his life and implies that Roosevelt and Churchill made the wrong choice in allying with Stalin, without of course stating that, because he has no better solution. And he calls it a tainted victory, as though any prolonged war is nice and clean and doesn’t involve atrocities on both sides. (War is hell, as Sherman pointed out long ago). I don’t think the Allies’ tactics were beyond reproach (and one of my heroes, George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, was speaking out against the bombing of German civilians at the time). But a historian who uses hindsight in that glib way to sneer at other peoples’ errors of judgement in such difficult situations is pretty distasteful.

It’s the first anniversary of the London bombing today and I’ll be on the tube this morning and afternoon. Not out of any particular spirit of defiance, but from the ordinary pragmatic reason that it’s the easiest way to get to my current job in London.

An article by Timothy Garton Ash yesterday (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1813592,00.html) compared the insistence in the USA that the country is at war nearly 5 years after the 11th September acts, with the UK’s refusal to take this line only a year after a major Islamist attack on the country. He comments on how exceptional the conservative American view is today in their militarism, as compared both to Europe and the UK (more militaristic itself than Continental Europe).

Coming at it from a historian’s point of view, the distinction between calling the events of the last 5 years terrorism and war (at least from the point of view of the US and the UK) is that if it’s a terrorist threat it’s a big one. If it’s a war however, it’s a tiny one (provided you’re not Iraqi). The World Trade Center attack was an extraordinarily large terrorist attack, with several thousand people killed in a day. It far dwarfs the London bombings (50 dead) or Madrid (190 dead). In terms of past wars in Europe, however, it’s nothing remarkable. Britain has just been remembering the Battle of the Somme, 90 years after it happened. On the first day, almost 20,000 British soldiers died. Meanwhile, as Max Hastings comments, in World War 2 ‘Stalin's armies experienced a hundred Sommes, and Russia lost 27 million lives.’

In the autumn of 2001 I was in Magdeburg. You probably won’t have heard of it: it’s a grim industrial city in Eastern Germany, whose glory days were in the early Middle Ages (why I was there). An exhibition in the Cathedral discussed a WW2 bombing raid by the British and Americans. In 15 minutes around 3000 people died. This wasn’t the biggest of the terror bombings (they have to be called that) by the Allies at the time: think of Dresden or Cologne. And in turn, they were a response to the Blitz, to the destruction that had been wreaked on civilian lives in Plymouth and London and Coventry and so many other British towns. It wasn’t the first time Magdeburg had been destroyed, either: it had happened before during the horrors of the Thirty Years war.

More recently, and even today, there are places at war where civilians must worry every day whether they can get through daily life safely. Belfast in the Troubles, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Iraq and many others. If you’re a civilian in the US or the UK today, your daily life is almost unaffected: you face a small risk of an attack even in the biggest cities. Compare it even to times in the Cold War, when there was a genuine and widespread fear of a possible nuclear war and the threat is almost negligible. This isn’t a war by any normal standards: claiming it is is simply a misuse of language.

I’ve just come across a New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/books/04beow.html) discussing several recent or forthcoming adaptations of Beowulf, including a couple of films and ‘Beowulf: the Opera’ (or rather ‘Grendel: the Opera’.) My immediate thought on hearing about these is that Beowulf is not actually a very good story for a film: there just isn’t enough material. The basic plot of Beowulf is as follows:

Monster terrorises Danes; Beowulf kills him
Monster’s mother seeks revenge; Beowulf kills her
Beowulf becomes king of Geats and grows old
Dragon terrorises Geats; Beowulf kills dragon and is killed in the process.

I remember seeing a student theatre production in Oxford twenty years ago and one of the things that struck me then was how short it was if you stick to the basic plot. The only reason that Beowulf lasts 3000 lines is that alongside these battles, there are a series of digressions, which form what I’ve seen described as an interlace pattern of themes, motifs etc. A very polished literary effect and (I’d presume) impossible to reproduce in a film. Maybe you could do it in opera with arias, but in a film, you can hardly have repeated flash forwards/flashbacks to stories which often include completely new characters. (It’s hard enough for those of us studying the poem to distinguish between Edgetheow and Ongentheow without a handy reference list).

My second train of thought was about the complaints of the journalist that the new adaptations miss the terror of Beowulf. There are two sides to this: the modern audience and the original audience. For the modern audience, it’s not clear that there’s any easy way to induce terror. All an authentic Beowulf film can have is a few scenes of monsters eating men and Beowulf pulling Grendel’s arm off. No sex or even sexual violence. You’re looking at a 15 certificate, not an 18, in these days of Quentin Tarentino. And you can’t for long take the other approach to inducing terror, that of keeping the horrors all off-stage and just dropping scary hints - you have to see the monsters pretty soon in Beowulf.

As for the original audience, were they listening to Beowulf for the thrill of being ‘scared out of their wits’, as the article suggests? If so, they may have been sadly disappointed (at least by the version of the story we currently have). As has often been pointed out, the poet keeps on undercutting the suspense, either by telling us the outcome of the fight in advance or by digressions. (Some scholars, in fact, have argued that Beowulf isn’t really epic poetry at all because there’s so little action). It takes 200 lines, for example, from Beowulf setting out to meet the dragon to him actually encountering it, lines mostly spent by Beowulf in discussing the past. The Battle of Maldon manages an entire epic defeat in around 400 lines; the Beowulf poet takes the scenic route. Whatever the audience got (a view of a whole society, an elegy for past heroic values), terror would surely have been only secondary to it.

An interesting article in the Daily Telegraph on the results of a YouGov survey on British attitudes to America (Article is at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/03/nyank103.xml, survey results at http://www.yougov.co.uk/archives/pdf/TEL060101010_3.pdf). What it shows is that the complaints about British anti-Americanism don’t hold up. The survey shows considerable positive feeling towards the US and some specific American traits and icons, combined with an overwhelmingly hostile view of George Bush and current US foreign policies. It also reveals that 59% of those polled said their opinion of the US had gone down in recent years.

The results were accompanied by an editorial from the Daily Telegraph that managed to miss the point completely (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/07/03/dl0301.xml). [It also claimed ‘What binds its people together is an ideal encoded in Americas’ DNA’, which if true shows surprising willingness to embrace genetic engineering]. The Telegraph complains that hating America was misanthropic, but Britons don’t hate the US (as the results show). They hate the current US government; it’s the Telegraph that’s out of line, probably even with a substantial percentage of its readers. You can argue that some of the results show old prejudices, such as references to the US as being uncultured and vulgar, but most of the rest seem fairly sensible: the US still comes across as forward looking and American culture is seen as positive overall. It’s also worth noting that 45% of those sampled have been to the US themselves, so they’re not taking ideas purely from the media.