History's One Important Lesson

Andrew Gamble, the Cambridge University politics professor, expresses surprise that the political Left continues to expect crises -- crises of capitalism, to be precise -- to work to its advantage. On the contrary, Gamble argues in his recent book The Spectre at the Feast, the gains have usually accrued to the Right, which is as it should be since "the right have often shown they understand the need of individuals for security better than parties of the left". People crave reassurance, he says, and so turn to authority rather than radicalism at such times.

Quite apart from whether Andrew Gamble has accounted for the manipulations of a corporate-controlled traditional media biased towards protecting existing property interests (not to mention the poverty of imagination that afflicts the alternative media), there isn't much in Gamble's observation that applies to our concerns. But I still cited him here because I wanted to make a quite different point.

The sort of crisis we are talking about --the crisis of culture when the Petri dish that holds the culture no longer provides a hospitable environment for its survival -- is not one where people would crave comfort in the familiar because the familiar has shown to have failed and, furthermore, is being combated by forces that are seen to be equally hostile. At such times, when two equally matched (equally strong or equally weak) forces are locked in mortal combat the conditions are just right for the emergence of a third force.

I call this the Peloponnesian Effect. The two adversaries, Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies), fought each other to a standstill. Neither of them won; each side was weakened by the long drawn-out war. The gains went to Macedonia, a rising power that was able to grow unhindered and would shape the new Hellenistic age.

So the Reformation in Europe set off the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century and the ferocity of those wars led not just to the birth of the nation-state but something far more profound, far more ambitious and with far greater consequences for the history of our civilization. It made possible the Age of Reason. The coffee houses of London in the seventeenth century were the "intellectual hub" of Stuart (and later Hanoverian) England, according to historian Stephen Inwood. These Penny Universities, as they were called, allowed for more stimulating conversation and discovery --and in the sciences closer to the revolutionary methodology that Francis Bacon had called for -- than the universities which remained steeped in their stuffy Aristotelian traditions.