Nations: Mania: GovernmentNations: Mania: GovernmentIn October of 2002, Saddam Hussein stood for re-election as President of Iraq. There were no other candidates, though rather than endorse the encumbent you could tick an option requesting electoral officials to shoot you and then burn your voting slip. Izzat Ibrahim, Vice-Chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, announced that of the 11,445,638 eligible voters, 11,445,638 had voted "Hussein": a swing to the Baathists of 0.2% since the previous election (and consequent executions).
NRA Man of the YearIn Mania, the same result is achieved by a simple one man, one vote system, in which I am the one man, and I have the one vote, which I cast for myself. Or at least, I have until now. The real danger in the future is not so much that I'll vote for someone else, it's that I'll refuse to stand as a candidate. Being President is tough work, and I'm thinking of buying one of those magic 8-balls to make the decisions instead.
This is all the more so because things didn't turn out that well for the only other President in the world to be elected with 100% of the vote. Saddam was removed from power by George Bush, who had been elected by voters free to vote for another candidate, and indeed despite the fact that most of them had done so.
The moral of this story is that Hussein should have stood for President in the US instead of in Iraq. Under the American smallest vote wins system, he'd now be in the White House, being named 'Man of the Year' by the National Rifle Association.
So much for the Presidency, but the constitution allows the President to appoint a Cabinet of Ministers to advise him. Unsurprisingly, given that the President is the only citizen of Mania, the Ministers may be foreigners. Perhaps more surprisingly, they may also be dead, fictional, inanimate, or even conceptual: Mania is a serious equal opportunities employer.
Ministers are not informed of their appointment, as they have no duties. This is perhaps just as well because even if appropriate allowances were made, performance reviews would doubtless be a demotivating experience for Ministers who lacked material existence, or were simply dead.
Instead, each Minister serves as an intellectual focus for the President. Though he was narrowly squeezed out of the final selection, let us assume that the Lone Ranger were a Minister. When faced with any problem, the President could then ask himself: How would the Lone Ranger handle this?
The amazing thing is, if done honestly and with imagination, this technique actually works: often generating new perspectives and ideas, or at least invoking humour to create a sense of proportion about the problem being considered. You should try creating your own cabinet, and assigning each areas of expertise. But then, you should try all of this yourself: cxiu homo estas nacio!
I believe the Manic Cabinet of Ministers to be the most inclusive government body in the world, including as it does seven living people, sixteen dead ones, two fictional characters, six inaninmates, and two cuddly toys.
The 33 ministers are listed below. (Note that the honorific H.O.M. stands for Hero of Mania, a civil honour described on the citizenship page.)
The Tao: First Minister, and Minister of Reality and Ethics
Jorge Luis Borges: Second Minister, and Minister of Words and Worlds
Woody Allen: Minister of Love and Relationships
Johann Sebastian Bach: Minister of Trascendence
Black: Minister of Creativity and Aesthetics
Tiny Clanger: Minister of Joy
Leiutenant Columbo: Minister of Perfect Mind
Leonard Cohen: Minister of Pain and Growling
Salvador Dali: Minister of Decadence and Dreams
Richard Dawkins: Minister of Faith
Death: Minister of Time
Albert Einstein: Minister of Space and Hair
Maurits Cornelis Escher: Minister of Form
Fire: Minister of Destruction and Cleansing
Dawn French: Minister of Gorgeousness and Bosoms
David Hume: Minister of Doubt
Martin Luther King H.O.M: Minister of Humanity
Lao-Tse: Minister of Dialectical Unity
Clive Staples Lewis: Minister of Clarity and the Obvious
Ada Lovelace: Minister of Systems
Rosa Luxemburg H.O.M.: Minister of Politics and Revolution
Groucho Marx: Minister of Irreverence and Irrelevance
Patrick McGoohan: Minister of Identity
Spike Milligan H.O.M.: Minister of Laughter and Tears
Pablo Neruda: Minister of Cherry Trees and Onions
Pablo Picasso: Minister of Vision
Winnie the Pooh: Minister of Here and Now
Don Quixote: Minister of Purpose and Integrity
Janet Radcliffe: Minister of Rational Polemics
Saturn: Minister of Silence and Eternity
The Scooter: Minister of Movement and Design
Fernando Sor: Minister of Melody and Simplicity
The Unknown Rebel H.O.M.: Minister of Liberty
By scrolling down, or clicking on the names of Ministers above, you may read their biographical summaries. These contain a mixture of accurate information provided by other people, and stuff I made up.
The Tao
First Minister of Mania
Minister of Reality and EthicsFirst Minister of Mania, Minister of Reality and Ethics
Date of birth: Before time
Place of birth: Outside space
Date of death: Beyond eternity
Favourite Beatles song: Across the universe
Notes: The Tao (Chinese for Way) is the actual reality behind any description of reality: the world which exists independently of human thoughts, and therefore in a state which the human mind literally cannot imagine. As writer Lao-tse puts it in the Tao Te Ching: The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. This is not mysticism, but the purest materialism. It is empiricism which reduces reality to a human thought, and is paradoxically exposed as mysticism by honest empiricist David Hume. In the same way that the mysticism of empiricism is the negation of reality: this is the very opposite of such mysticism, or the negation of the negation.
Human solidarity: the objective basis of ethics
British miners on strikeTo consult the Tao - to learn from reality - is the first responsibility of every materialist.
This is particularly so in those disciplines where we are likely to forget to do so, and to which we are most prone to attribute some form of validity or truth independent of reality, such as mathematics. The algorithms of Ada Lovelace do not float in some disconnected universe, but are abstracted from countless millions of observations of the world. The geometric circle is not a platonic super-reality to which the wheels of a scooter conform, but rather an abstraction of what was found by man, in practise, that is in reality, to roll.
This is most important in understanding ethics (and nothing is more important than understanding ethics). As C S Lewis brilliantly demonstrated in The Abolition of Man, ethics are not subjective prejudices, but expressions of what he too called The Tao. Though in other books he made it clear that he thought behind The Tao lay a personal God, in fact the commonality he correctly identified in ethics was not due to God's values but to humanity's, based on reality and reason. If reality provides the basis for our decisions, ethics provides their purpose.
These ideas are more fully developed in the essay The Tao and philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
Second Minister of Mania
Minister of Words and Worlds
Head of Central Bank of ManiaSecond Minister of Mania, Minister of Words and Worlds
Date of birth: 24th August, 1899
Place of birth: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Date of death: 14th June, 1986
Favourite Beatles song: The end
Notes: Borges wrote so simply of ideas so astonishing that one is left wondering what vague day-dreaming one had previously indulged under the belief that one was thinking. A Borges short story about an ancient lottery, or a man in a library, leaves the mind breathless and the imagination suddenly alive to the mystery not merely of life and eternity, but of mundanity itself. In Piere Menard, Author of the Quixote, he will reveal how much of Cervantes, and how much of you, there is in your understanding of Don Quixote. Speaking an unpretentious language of astonishing conciseness, he invokes an almost unbearable intensity of consciousness. His themes are often philosophical, and he shares M C Escher's fascination with the infinite, the reflected, the cyclic, and the impossible: but whether he writes of knife-fighters in the streets of Buenos Aires, or of men made from fire, his writings are the true Zahir, the unforgettable object of one of his own stories.
Borges's grave in Switzerland
Old English words read "and who did not fear"
Seven soldiers copied from a tomb on Lindisfarne
which Borges wrote of in 'La balada de Maldon'I have failed, as I knew I would. Read him: it is the only way you will understand. You will find that like myself, (and like the only other writer of fiction in the Cabinet, C S Lewis), Borges too was a world builder: but where Mania is a just a simple call for the recognition of simple rights, Tlon will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew of history and the world. I must include two quotes. The first is from an interview I discovered only this evening as I came to write this note, and is something of an answer to the accusation of apoliticism he felt was directed at him by sometime friend and sometime critic Pablo Neruda. It also seems to be a blessing on the spirit of Mania. The second closes the story of Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
"...as I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves - and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity - are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans." (From an interview with Ohio literary magazine Artful Dodge)
"A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlon. Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlon. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial." (Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius)
Woody Allen
Minister of Love and RelationshipsMinister of Love and Relationships
Date of birth: 1st December, 1935
Place of birth: New York, United States of America
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: I don't want to spoil the party so I'll go
Notes: Writer, film-maker, and expert neurotic Woody Allen is less a comedian and more an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis. You won't get any better, but you won't get any better through psychoanalysis either, and at least Woody Allen will make you laugh.
From 'Love and Death'
Woody Allen meets the old man himselfAllen began as a writer for other comics, but eventually progressed to delivering his own material. If the character played by Allen in Annie Hall is supposed to be autobiographical, and Allen is nothing if not autobiographical, this was largely because he wasn't happy with the way other people delivered his words. He certainly had strong views about comedy, and praised Groucho Marx as a unique talent, comparing him to Pablo Picasso.
As a Minister for Love and Relationships, Woody Allen makes about as probable romantic hero as Columbo makes a detective, or Dawn French makes a screen idol: and yet Columbo is a supremely good detective, and Dawn French is an unbearably sexy impersonator of famous actresses. It is precisely their reversal of expectations, and implicit satire of the hollywood demigods, which make both French and Allen so funny. They replace artificial ideals with far more human realities, emphasising her genuine beauty, and Allen's truly romantic soul. This same theme is revisited in film after film.
And the films are superb. His first, What's new pussycat?, starred Peter Sellers, who also acted in Spike Milligan's Goon Show, but his best came later, with Love and Death (a tribute to the great Russian novels like War and Peace which, like Annie Hall, mocks Allen's obsession with death), and Manhattan, which is one of the most beautifully constructed films of all time.
Above all of this, though, it is Allen's definition of a Roe which justifies his life and career:
"A Roe is a mythical creature with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but not the same lion."
Johann Sebastian Bach
Minister of TranscendenceMinister of Transcendence
Date of birth: 21st March 1685
Place of birth: Eisenach, Thuringia
Date of death: 28th July 1750
Favourite Beatles song: Roll Over Beethoven
Notes: Bach was a composer of such astonishing originality and brilliance that his contribution to music has been compared to Shakespeare's contribution to writing, or Newton's to physics.
The Golden Record sent into space with VoyagerI don't know enough to comment on those comparisons, but can say that Bach moves me more than any other orchestral composer. (But not quite more than any composer at all. I should not like to have to choose between Bach and classical guitar composer Fernando Sor.)
When a golden record was attached to the Voyager space probe sent to photograph Jupiter and Saturn, in the symbolic hope of communicating the best humanity had to offer with any aliens who found it, it included more music by Bach than by other composer. My hope is that it will be found by Tiny Clanger, who lives for such discoveries.
The highest praise is perhaps that of other composers, and some have included the sequence of notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural (the key of B is referred to as H in German) as a tribute to him.
Black
Minister of Creativity and AestheticsMinister of Creativity and Aesthetics
Date of birth: "In the beginning..."
Place of birth: Too dark to see
Date of death: Presumably, "...at the end"
Favourite Beatles song: Baby's in black
Notes: A perfectly black body absorbs all light, leaving none to reflect into the eye, and therefore failing to stimulate any of the three kinds of light receptor (red, blue, and green) in the corresponding part of the retina. This lack of sensation we give the name black, though it differs qualitatively from all other colours, which are recognised by the nature of the light they do reflect, and which we can see by. Black is light's slience, and shares silence's elegance and profundity.
An artists impression of a black hole
sucking in a companion starThe blackest objects in the universe are black holes, the existence of which was predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. This describes gravity not as a force but a curvature in space, and predicts curvatures around black holes so deep that even light cannot escape them, making them absolutely black. Ironically, though Einstein was aware that his formulae described such entities, he considered this merely a quirk of the numbers, and did not believe they existed. Since then, observational evidence has accumulated which suggests that Einstein's equations were right, while the man himself was wrong. Paradoxically, of course, being perhaps the only perfectly black thing in the universe, they cannot be observed, but their existence can be deduced from the behaviour of other matter which can be observed.
In most (but not all) societies, black is associated with death and is the colour of mourning. However, in the Tao Te Ching Lao-tse associates black with the feminine, and with the role of The Tao as the mother of all things. Similarly, though Genesis famously relates that God said "Let there be light," before he does so darkness is already noted to be on the surface of the deep, and so there too black preceded colour, and was effectively the lightless womb of the world.
Tiny Clanger
Minister of JoyMinister of Joy
Date of birth: Unknown
Place of birth: "A small blue-green planet, far far away..."
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Yellow Submarine
Notes: Of all the cultural influences to which I was exposed as a child, none left a deeper or happier impression than the story of the Clangers, a group of pink woolly creatures who lived lives of endless discovery and play on what was described at the beginning of each episode as a "small blue-green planet, far far away".
Tiny Clanger fishing from
the 'musical boat'Perhaps my longing to eat blue string pudding with them (how delicious it sounds even now!) had something to do with the fact that living on another planet, and speaking only in a melody of whistles, they presented none of the confusing and hated problems of nationality: to understand why I cared about this, you'll need to read a little history. But above all, I wanted to meet Tiny Clanger, as she was the youngest of the group, and exhibited a simple joy I have never seen portrayed more convincingly since.
Nothing would strike me as more pleasant (except possibly a night with Dawn French and a bottle of chocolate sauce) than an afternoon in the Clanger's musical boat fishing for bits of exciting and usually musical space debris. I have always assumed it was a mental vision of the Tiny Clanger fishing for music which inspired the inclusion of the Golden Record on earth's Voyager space probe, and I can only hope that one day she hears the music of Johann Sebastian Bach it contains.
Like Winnie the Pooh, Tiny Clanger possessies unconscious virtue which adults foolishly abandon as childish when in fact it is child-like, and the true childishness lies in rejecting it in order to appear adult. If joy is, as I believe it to be, the purpose of human life, then for all the wisdom of the philosophers and brilliance of the scientists, if we could learn to be less patronising to our young and therefore to things created for our young, we would all have something to learn from Tiny Clanger.
Leiutenant Columbo
Minister of Perfect MindMinister of Perfect Mind
Date of birth: Thought to be in the 1930's
Place of birth: Unknown, but of Italian descent
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Think for yourself
Notes: Columbo is a living dialectic: an unity of opposites. He is a man of perfect modesty, and yet preserves absolute dignity. He is a policeman, a part of a state, who will not carry a gun. He is a friend to everyone, though noone knows his first name. He deeply loves his wife, who we never see and who's name we never hear. He is from an immigrant background in a generally alienated society, and yet he gives us a glimpse of the joy which can be created by loving one's work. He is intelligent beyond measure, but always looks a bit of a fool. He is a character in a cop-show who doesn't womanise, bully, self-aggrandise, wise-crack, or shoot at people.
The cast of episode 'Ashes to Ashes'
Patrick McGoohan stands behind Peter Falk
with Sally Kellerman left and Rue McClanahan rightHe is a super-intelligent Winnie the Pooh. Imagine that.
Columbo is perfectly described in Lao-tse's Tao Te Ching like this: Therefore the Master can act without doing anything and teach without saying a word. When her work is done, she take no credit. He succeeds through his perfect mind, which maintains an absolute respect for reality, for the Tao. He is the complete materialist.
Though I have seen every episode many times, I enjoy Columbo more than any other television program except the The Prisoner (and perhaps Tiny Clanger in The Clangers), and it came as no surprise to me that The Prisoner's creator Patrick McGoohan was a friend and admirer's of Peter Falk (who plays Columbo), and guest starred and directed several episodes of the detective show.
Leonard Cohen
Minister of Pain and GrowlingMinister of Pain and Growling
Date of birth: 21st September, 1934
Place of birth: Montreal, Canada
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Chains
Notes: Leonard Cohen has a voice like a record played at the wrong speed. His songs sound not so much like music as like the rumble of an approaching storm. As he said himself Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win 'Vocalist of the Year'.
It would be easy, if you didn't listen to the words, to experience this merely as a tone of low hopelessness. However, the meaning of the lyric makes it clear that Cohen's intention is far less sunny than that. As he put it, I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.
If you want
a different kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you
('I'm your man', Leonard Cohen)Cohen's songs are really poems set to a minimal, but atmospheric, musical backing, and he is the only poet, save Pablo Neruda, I care for. His words explore themes of religion, politics, aging and death, isolation, and (above all) intense and passionate relationships. In writing of love, he plainly expresses (and indeed focuses on) its sometimes brutal realities, and it is this which has won him the reputation of writing music to commit suicide by. Interestingly, though, these bitter truths are never expressed with bitterness, but only with a dark and somewhat poignant humour, and there is something intensely moving about the persona he creates of a man who believes love to be shot through with pretence and pain, who yet stands ready to embrace it again: never cynical, but infinitely sad.
Neither that of the naive young lovers, nor that of the jaded divorcee, but that of the disillusioned lover who clings to love, is the heart to admire.
Salvador Dali
Minister of
Decadence and DreamsMinister of Decadence and Dreams
Date of birth: 11th May, 1904
Place of birth: Catalonia, Spain
Date of death: 23rd January, 1989
Favourite Beatles song: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Notes: Salvador Dali is one of those freakish throw-backs born every now and then who combine the untameable wildness of an animal with the will and intelligence of a human being. He was an anarchist, but it was an anarchism of amoral individualism, which not only cared little for the wider struggle for human freedom, but treated with contempt the idea of being part of it, or indeed part of anything. When his fellow, mostly Marxist, surrealists identified their enemies as the anarchists on one hand and the monarchists on the other, he pronounced himself an anarcho-monarchist.
'Ballerina and the face of death'
Salvador DaliDali fled the fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and refused to align himself with either side, though ironically he borrowed money from republican Pablo Picasso (who Dali had revered as a young man) to visit the United States, where he eventually settled to avoid the second world war as well. He became the darling of US high society, and after the war kept residences in the US, France, and Spain. He famously wrote to Franco, and praised him for signing death warrants for political prisoners. But then, he also sent praise to Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu for adopting a spectre as part of his regalia. Franco tolerated Dali for the prestige he brought a Fascist Spain which most artists had abandoned, but Dali was no fascist, merely organically irresponsible. He laughed at Franco, as he laughed at those who had opposed him.
This is all damnable, of course, but granted Dali a peculiar kind of clarity, or at least catholicity, in his vision and his art. He was enslaved by an entirely uncritical sensuality, and his paintings celebrated the essence, the quiddity of everything he encountered, beautiful or ugly, exquisite or corrupt. His work was surreal in the sense of being super-real, inflating and characterising the nature of the reality it portrayed. While I say reality, Dali was equally undiscriminating about his sources, and portrayed the worlds of sleep and reality without borders between them, painting everything from apparently an apparently straightforward portrait of a figure at a window, to designs on what is now the world's most valuable Vespa scooter, to repeated visions of death itself. It is his intense receptivity and experiencing of reality which we might usefully flirt with: but it is the fruit of a poisoned tree.
After the death of his wife Gala in 1982, Dali lost the will to live, and it is thought that a fire in his home in 1984 may have been a suicide attempt. He was badly burned, and though he lived another five years, his health never recovered.
Richard Dawkins
Minister of FaithMinister of Faith
Date of birth: 26th March, 1941
Place of birth: Nairobi, Kenya
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Mother nature's son
Notes: I have been warned that Mr Dawkins sometimes cruises the web investigating references to him. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but if it is I suspect he will be less than entirely pleased with his appointment as Minister of Faith. Under the terms of the Manic constitution, he has the right to resign, though I hope he will not do so precipitately. At least read to the bottom of this bit, Richard, and then I'd be delighted if you'd drop me a line.
Richard Dawkins is a zoologist, an extremely gifted popular science writer, and a leading and outspoken secularist. As he wrote chiefly on the subject of evolution, he has had more experience than most of the opposition of fundamentalist religionists, and has therefore long been in the front line of the battle for secularism. Perhaps because British religion has traditionally been rather mild compared to its US and continental cousins (only in Britain, I think, would the majority faith be "C of E, I think"), British secularists have also been less than militant in the past: but political Islam is waking the movement from this complacency, and ranks are now forming behind him.
'Bipmorphs' generated by Dawkin's
own computer program and used
to illustrate 'The Blind Watchmaker'Having made my living as a computer programmer for many years, I am also grateful to Richard Dawkins for being one of the very few writers who genuinely understands computers and is therefore able to draw meaningful analogies between natural and biological processes and their workings. Having seen this done so badly, it is a pleasure to see it done well. Though he is uncharacteristically modest on this score, he is clearly a competent programmer in his own right: the only one in the Cabinet except Ada Lovelace herself, the world's first.
So why Minister for Faith? To Richard Dawkins, faith means "knowing something just because you know it's true, rather than because you have seen any evidence that it's true", and he therefore condemns it. Interestingly, Christian C S Lewis roughly agreed. He wrote:
I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue- what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
But Lewis makes an interesting observation. There is knowing, and knowing. We can know, for instance, that anaethesia is safe and hospitals are competent, but we may still panic when the mask is placed over our face. It is a case where our intellectual opinion does not inform our subconscious, or the assumptions by which we live. To Lewis, faith means learning to trust in life what we think with our intellect: in the name of intellectual integrity. Interestingly, Satre makes roughly the same use of the word faith in his theory of bad faith, where we lie to ourselves to appease our fear.
Ironically, Dawkins gave the best demonstration of this principle I have ever seen. He once began a lecture by holding a large, ceiling mounted pendulum against his nose, and asking for a volunteer to stand as he was while he released the weight, and it swung away, and then back. There were none, and he did it himself. His point? Science explains that the weight literally cannot rise higher on its return than its starting point: but it is difficult to believe that when you are watching the weight swinging towards your face. Clearly Dawkins had faith - in Lewis's sense - in science. It is this intellectual integrity which makes him a worthy Minister of Faith.
Death
Minister of TimeMinister of Time
Date of birth: Never born
Place of birth: See above
Date of death: Always and everywhere
Favourite Beatles song: Happiness is a warm gun
Notes: The shout Viva la muerte! (Long live death!) was first uttered by Spanish Foreign Legion General Jose Millan Astray during the Spanish Civil War. It became a a battle cry of the fascists, and a sign of the nihilism and despair which lay at the heart of their philosophy. A contempt for individual life, and its expression through liberty, can be resolved by merging it into a huge, corporate state, by subjugating it to the whim of an individual obsessed with power, or by simply ending it in violence.
Viva la muerte!
Francisco Franco with Jose Millan AstrayThe natural death of an individual gives shape to their life. Death is the infinite black border to time. We do well to remember that we have but limited days to live, and should remember to squeeze in that life before we die.
This is done most fully and most admirably by those who do not fear death, or who act despite that fear, such as Cabinet members Martin Luther King, who received death threats throughout his career of marching and public speaking, and was finally assassinated, Rosa Luxemburg, who repeatedly defied the German state in denouncing the war and calling for solidarity and revolution, was frequently imprisoned, and was finally beaten to death by the state militia with revolution still on her lips, and the unknown rebel, who stood in the path of a tank in defence of democracy protestors.
(Almost as worthy are those who laugh at death, like Spike Milligan, whose gravestone reads I told you I was ill.)
Albert Einstein
Minister of Relativity and HairMinister of Relativity and Hair
Date of birth: 14th March, 1879
Place of birth: Ulm, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
Date of death: 18th April, 1955
Favourite Beatles song: Anytime at all
Notes: I can only hope that it is as cheering to Richard Dawkins as it is to me that the face of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein is better known than that of any religious leader of the twentieth century. Of course, it helps that the face in question was surrounded by a mane of unruly white hair and had a tendency to stick its tongue out at the camera: there's little question that Einstein enjoyed the flim-flam of fame. But nevertheless, if the mechanism of human communication must be used to impose dizzying and iconic status, it is as well that it should go to someone who did something of use and beauty, rather than a peddlar of superstition, yet another oppressive politician, or a vacuous, pretty star.
Einstein was responsible for a clutch of astonishing scientific achievements, though of course the most famous remains relativity theory. Do yourself a favour, and read his Relativity : the Special and General Theory, which is available free for download at the wonderful www.gutenberg.org. Almost as astonishing as the theory itself is that Einstein manages to explain it in plain English, and far better than any Introduction to Einstein book has ever done.
It is a measure of the peculiar strength of Eintein's theories that even when Einstein himself doubted the predictions of his formulae, evidence has tended to accumulate in their favour. Though aware that his theories predicted the existence of the blackest of all objects in the universe, the black hole (an object so dense that even light could not escape its gravity), he regarded them as a mere quirk of the numbers: their existence is now widely accepted. But above all Quantum theory, which was based largely on his own theories, was nevertheless incredible to the physicist, who ridiculed its probabilistic basis by objecting that God doesn't play dice.
'The persistence of memory' by Salvador DaliCuriously, in much the same way that Einstein is perhaps the only truly famous scientist, the theory of relativity may be the only famous scientific theory: it's central equation E=mc2 being known even to those who have no idea what it means: the ultimate test of fame. Relativity had a cultural impact beyond its scientific ramifications. In Art and Physics, Leonard Shlain argues that surrealist art reflected the uncertainties created by the new physics, particularly citing paintings like Time Transfixed by Rene Magritte, which shows a train appearing through a hearth under a clock (similar to the image Einstein himself used to explain the effect of speed on time), and The persistence of memory by Salvador Dali, with its melting clocks suggesting the new flexibility of time itself. Undoubtedly M C Escher was inspired by Einstein's work, and the difference of the universe to different observers was a constant theme in his work, not least in the drawing actually titled Relativity.
But there is much to admire beyond Einstein's science. He argued that science alone could not yield the benefits many expected for it without social justice: "we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems". He was active in the US civil rights movement, and a socialist. He wrote: "The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor-not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules." (Why Socialism?)
Though he will be remembered for encouraging US President Roosevelt encouraging him to order research into the production of an atomic bomb, this should be placed in the context of a world threatened by Nazism. Later, Einstein would comment "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth - rocks!"
Maurits Cornelis Escher
Minister of FormMinister of Form
Date of birth: 17th June, 1898
Place of birth: Leeuwarden, Netherlands
Date of death: 27th March, 1972
Favourite Beatles song: Glass Onion
Notes: When I discovered it as a boy, the first thing which struck me about the work of Escher was its extraordinary solidity. Every drawing conveyed a sense of texture, weight, and sheer three-dimensionality. No artist has ever captured a sense of matter as Escher did. And this was despite the fact that, like Fernando Sor who composed haunting melody from the sparest use of notes played by a single instrument, Escher strictly limited the form of his work, very rarely venturing even to use colour, creating distinctive, dense black drawings against plain white paper.
'Relativity' by Maurits Cornelis EscherWhen this skill was applied to the representation of the conceptual and the impossible, the result was astoundingly vivid. From stairways which endlessly run in a single direction, to tesselations which captured the infinite within the bounds of a single drawing, each image combined a craftsman's eye for reality, with a mathematician's understanding of its abstracted, spacial and topological properties. But what of the artist's eye, and what of beauty? Escher demonstrated that beauty cannot be directly sought: but arises from any human creation pursued with integrity.
Indeed, Escher is well liked by scientists and mathematicians, who recognise the concepts influencing the artist and expressed in his drawings. His discussions with Canadian mathematician H S M Coxeter, for instance, led Escher to creating Circle Limit I, a drawing which represented in two dimensions an infinite tessellation on a hyperbolic plane. The mathematician commented that "he got it absolutely right to the millimetre". But perhaps the most famous drawing based on scietific theory is named after Albert Einstein's theory of Relativity, which shows a three dimensional space occupied by people who clearly simultaneously experience it in different ways.
Escher's fascination with the impossible, and particularly with the infinite, and his unpretentious and graphically clear style, are powerfully reminiscent of the work of fellow Minister, Jorge Luis Borges.
Fire
Minister of Cleansing and DestructionMinister of Cleansing and Destruction
Date of birth: Unknown
Place of birth: Unknown
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Norweigan Wood
Notes: Let's have a go at my own definition. [Ahem] Fire: a region of yellow light and heat containing a chemical reaction, the rapid combination of oxygen with other materials. Hmmm. It just doesn't work, somehow.
Fire is beautiful. Fire can be homely, as it burns in a hearth, or terrifying, as it rages across the forests of a continent. Fire is an agent of death, killing countless people, but without it to provide warmth, cook meat, and intimidate predators, our species may not have survived at all: and without the fire of the sun, we would never have lived. We have never tamed fire. In Britain, Guy Fawkes' Night has nothing to do with the anti-parliamentary plot: it is the fire itself we are worshipping. Every year on that night, fire demonstrates its wildness by putting thousands of us in hospital: but should anyone suggest a ban on the private worship of fire, you would see a protest in its defence which the Church of England could only dream of.
'Fire! Fire! Fire!' by Salvador DaliFire destroys, but it also renews. In South Africa, the unique flora now rely on the periodic natural fires which occured throughout their evolution: near destruction and regrowth being part of their life-cycle. The great fire of London destroyed and killed, but also defeated the plague which killed before it, and preceded the building of a better city. Both the fascination and the fear of fire are represented in Salvador Dali's painting Fire! Fire! Fire!, in which we see both human attempts to douse the flames, and a huge moth being drawn irresistably to the light, and to its death.
Fire's most extraordinary property is its infinite ability to extend. To start a fire is a tiny act which may have huge consequence, for good or ill. When Albert Einstein was asked what the most powerful force in the universe was, he joked compound interest. Fire is our most dramatic illustration of what he was talking about.
Dawn French
Minister of
Georgeousness and BosomsMinister of Gorgeousness and Bosoms
Date of birth: 11th October, 1957
Place of birth: Holyhead, Wales
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: She's so heavy
Notes: If Salvador Dali spent a lifetime enslaved the painting visions of sensuality, Dawn French simply is one.
The inhuman distortion of human society and values is seldom more distressingly obvious than in our notion of human beauty. The social prejudices manipulated by our inescapable environment of television, film, magazines, and newpapers are naturally directed to serve the interests of those who pay for the distribution of these media: a small class of producers and advertisers, concerned not with beauty or even human happiness, but with profit. You do not make profit by celebrating the beauty of real men and women, but by convincing them of their ugliness and unacceptability, and making their only escape route from shame pass through your tills.
Dawn French: Largely made of chocolateFood is divorced from both pleasure and nutrition and medicalised into slimming products. If our hair is grey we can dye it, not for self-expression but to hide that we are old. For the same reason, if our skins carries lines, we can apply creams to shrink it until it is tight. I have no argument with anyone who wishes to be healthy, but those who aim to make us ashamed of our own bodies as a marketing device deserved their own level in hell. As Leonard Cohen put it, I don't like your pills to make you thin. Neither does Dawn French, who makes no secret of the delicious fact that she's largely made of chocolate. How good can she get?
Dawn French is voluptuous, and knows it, and that in itself is a rebellion and a symbol of freedom. She has consciously championed those oppressed by our society's distorted vision of beauty, for which I salute her, as I do for her humour, wisdom, and intelligence: and the desire to press my face into her cleavage will forever remain the purest expression of my soul.
David Hume
Minister of DoubtMinister of Doubt
Date of birth: 26th April, 1711
Place of birth: Edinburgh, Scotland
Date of death: 25th August, 1776
Favourite Beatles song: Nowhere man
Notes: Humanity's understanding of the world has naturally developed along with the our species and our society. (A more complete description of this development than I can include here is presented in the essay The Tao and philosophy).
Each stage of this development was progressive. Theology brought systemised knowledge in place of chaotic animism. Rationalism replaced God's whim with an order of reason to which even God was subordinated. The empiricists turned men's gaze from their own thoughts, where the rationalists had left them, to observing the world.
Backgammon: the only cure for empiricismMany believe that empiricism remains the highest point of human thought, and even that it is a final answer to the question of the world: those people should read David Hume.
David Hume was a brilliant empiricist, and an honest one. He developed the theory of empiricism to its logical conclusions, and arrived at the conclusion that we can know so little that his view has been characterised as nihilism. Ironically, he did not do so to attack empiricism, but because he really believed it to be true.
To take a simple example, Hume pointed out that though event A, say, the dropping of a stone, may be followed by event B, say, the stone falling to the ground, and though this may happen countless times, there is no proof that the next A will be followed by B. Next time you drop a stone, it may float into space, or hover in the air, or explode. The idea of causation is merely a superstition, in which human beings are instinctively and irrationally inclined to believe. Empiricism, which began as the philosophical expression of the growth of science, became its negation. He was well aware how depressing his own conclusions were, and advised his readers not to worry about them too much, and to play backgammon instead. He espoused hedonism, or the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good, a philosophy beautifully taken up by 'out' chocoholic Dawn French, but which, when unconstrained by human solidarity, took Salvador Dali to some dark places.
The philosophical problems Hume raised would not be resolved until the development of materialism, but Hume will forever represent the capacity to doubt and the pursuit of integrity and consistency. He remains the only empiricist to have paid the real intellectual price of consistent empiricism: the same existential good faith particularly praised (though not under that name) by C S Lewis, and Richard Dawkins.
Martin Luther King
Minister of Justice and HumanityMinister of Justice and Humanity
Date of birth: 15th January, 1929
Place of birth: Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Date of death: 4th April, 1968
Favourite Beatles song: Blackbird
Notes: I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. (Speech to the March on Washington, August 28 1963)
There are two possible responses to injustice: justice, or revenge. The oppressed may struggle against their oppression, or bay for the punishment of the oppressors. They may reject the division of humanity as evil, or call the other half of humanity evil. The leaders of libertation movements may wish to rescue new generations from the evils of the past, or punish the new generation born to the oppressors for what the Old Testament refers to as the sins of their fathers.
'I AM A MAN': King's politics rested
on common humanity, not 'black power'Look carefully, and this division can be found in every movement against injustice. Oppressed women may conclude that the evil they face is injustice, or simply men: some speculate on women-only societies, and even ask if men are necessary. While most disabled people struggle against prejudice and discrimination, some advocate degrees social separation between themselves and mainstream society, which is not deemed capable of understanding them. The persecution of the jews led some to passionate humanitarianism, and others to zionism. And the struggle of blacks, first against slavery and then against segregation and aparatheid, led some to fight racism, and others to adopt identity politics and a reversed separatism.
While the young Malcolm X focused on black nationalism, Martin Luther King 's vision was not one in which the whip had been removed from white hands and placed into black, but one in which the whips were burned forever. In this, his conclusions mirror those of Janet Radcliffe, who argues not for the reversal, but for the abolition of sexism.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
King faced threats of assassination throughout his political career, and regularly risked death by marching and speaking in public, until he was finally shot on the 4th of April 1968. His standing is as much due to his courage as to the purity of his dream.
Lao-Tse
Minister of Dialectical UnityMinister of Dialectical Unity
Date of birth: Around 600BC
Place of birth: China
Date of death: Unknown
Favourite Beatles song: Hello Goodbye
Notes: Some may be surprised that the author of the Tao Te Ching is included in the Manic cabinet along with The Tao about which he wrote, and wonder if this is a duplication. Well, it is: but then, given that the Tao embraces the whole of reality, including every human, and human concept, then ultimately all the Ministers are duplicated, and every book is about the Tao, and merely duplicates something within it. As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his story about the infinite Library of Babel:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Independently discovered the dialecticI cannot combine some characters 'dhcmrlchtdj' which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.
Lao-Tse's Tao Te Ching anticipates, many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, an idea which won't be discovered again, independently, until the turn of the nineteenth century after: what Lao-Tse calls the unity of opposites, and Hegel later calls the dialectic. A fuller discussion of the dialectic can be found in the essay The Tao and philosophy, but examples can be found in every part of life. Newton explained that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and Neils Bohr (who adopted the Taoist symbol as his personal coat of arms) that light was simultaneously a wave and a particle stream.
Hegel developed a number of ideas on the basis of the simultaneous unity and contradiction of the thesis and antithesis, perhaps the most powerful of which was the idea of development through the negation of the negation. For instance, while some black activists of the 1960s sought to negate or reverse segregation by establishing a black state within the Americas, Martin Luther King sought the negation of the negation, or the abolition of all segregation.
The poetically expressed materialism of Lao-Tse himself didn't find its antithesis until the consistent empiricism of David Hume exposed the nihilism of the new philosophy: modern materialism being the synthesis of the Tao and Hume's exposure of the true nature of empiricism.
C. S. Lewis
Minister of Clarity and ObviousnessMinister of Clarity and Obviousness
Date of birth: 29th November, 1898
Place of birth: Belfast, Ireland
Date of death: November 22, 1963
Favourite Beatles song: The word
Notes: My first contact with C S Lewis was through his book Mere Christianity, lent to me by a Christian friend who thought I might find it persuasive. I remember that I started reading it in his car as he gave me a lift home one day, and finished it as light was breaking the next morning. Here was something more important than God. Here was a writer who didn't write on the assumption that his audience agreed with him, or that those who didn't were simply foolish, but presented reasoned argument.
The abolition of man
C S LewisI felt I been walking a foreign country and had finally found someone who spoke my language. That I didn't agree with him was almost immaterial, it was such a pleasure to be tested by his polemics. Not until I later discovered Janet Radcliffe was I to find another writer whose argument moved me the same way, and I didn't agree with her either. I had to wait for Richard Dawkins before I found a writer who presented rational arguments aimed at the unconvinced and with whom I actually agreed.
What makes Lewis blessed are his logic and his clarity. Where some intellectuals seek to prove their erudition and brilliance by using obscure and overly abstracted language, Lewis wrote in plain English, and there is no doubt he was taken less seriously by the cogniscenti for it. I doubt he cared. He once suggested that all entrants to the priesthood should be asked to translate some theological tract into the vernacular, and suggested that if they couldn't do it, then either they didn't understand it, or it meant nothing: a stroke of intellectual bubble-bursting worthy of David Hume.
And while I disagree with Lewis's Christianity, I stand with him elsewhere. Above all, he was opposed to ethical subjectivism, and in The Abolition of Man sets out a historical and philosophical argument for what he too calls The Tao: real ethics, common to all humanity, and independent of individual opinion. I cannot recommend this book too highly.
Finally, of course, Lewis was a fellow nation-builder. As a child he created Boxen, and as an adult Narnia. I am glad I read Lewis's polemics before his childrens' books: I believe that some of the more reactionary ideas in Narnia might have disturbed me, poisoning him for me forever. As it is, I believe Lewis to be on the side of the angels in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense: and in any case, don't our children have the right to hear all the arguments?
Ada Lovelace
Minister of SystemsMinister of Systems
Date of birth: 10th December, 1815
Place of birth: London, England
Date of death: 27th November 1852
Favourite Beatles song: Fixing a hole
Notes: Ada was the daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Millbanke, and her mother left Byron within a month of her birth. Determined that Ada should not grow to be like her father, Lady Byron encouraged her to learn mathematics, and the child proved to have an apt student: Lord Byron called her, I hope with fondness, the queen of parallelograms. If Lady Byron had believed, though, that learning mathematics scrubbed all the poetry from a child's soul, though, she was to be disappointed. The child was as joyful and whimsical as Tiny Clanger, and her first serious application of her arithmetic and geometric skill was to design a flying machine.
Part of the analytical engine, never completed
As always, a programmer is let
down by a hardware problemThrough mutual friends she met and became friendly with Charles Babbage, inventor of the difference engine, widely acknowledged to be the world's first computer. Though the machine was unfinished, he had already designed an improvement, the analytical engine, and was seeking funds to build it. His case was supported by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, and Ada was employed to translate a paper Menabrea's had written on the subject. Ada appended notes to the translation, which described rather more clearly than Babbage had previously done the universal or algorithmic nature of the problems that it could be used to solve, and it is largely on the basis of these notes that she is now generally considered to have been the first computer programmer. Sadly, her programs were never run, as the analytical engine was never completed. Ada would have understood the joke which has been passed from programmer to programmer ever since: Q. How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A. None: it's a hardware problem.
She and the Cabinet's other programmer, Richard Dawkins, in addition to their assigned roles, both therefore reflect the closest I have had to a profession in a somewhat disjointed life: but Ada represents not merely computer systems but all systems and systemisation itself, by which the effectiveness of human effort is multiplied, and experience and wisdom is built into future practise.
Rosa Luxemburg
Minister of
Politics and RevolutionMinister of Politics and Revolution
Date of birth: 5th March, 1870
Place of birth: Zamosc, Poland
Date of death: 15th January, 1919
Favourite Beatles song: Revolution #9
Notes: Rosa Luxemburg was a socialist and a revolutionary of enormous brilliance, principle, and courage.
Her life was dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of oppression, and the unity of the oppressed peoples of the world. She rejected the Leninist notion of the right of nations to self-determination, emphasising instead solidarity between the oppressed of all nations against their ruling classes. This issue is one of the sharpest in all debate between socialists, and you can read more about the internationalist argument in the essay Imagine....
Stalin with Lenin, who should have listened to RosaDuring the international tensions preceding the first world war, she was a member of the German Social Democratic Party or SPD, and argued that all the socialist parties of Europe should call for a general strike in the event of war. When the SPD supported the Kaiser, she broke with them to form a group called first Internationale and then the Spartacist League. This was one of the groups which would later form the Communist Party of Germany or KPD. During uprisings in January 1919, she was amongst many members of the KPD killed by the state militia sent to crush any potential revolution.
Freedom was always central to her politics. She famously argued that Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters, and rejected Lenin's tendency to authoritarianism both within his party, and within Russia. In Leninism or Marxism she writes:
Lenin says that intellectuals remain individualists and tend to anarchism even after they have joined the socialist movement. According to him, it is only among intellectuals that we can note a repugnance for the absolute authority of a Central Committee. The authentic proletarian, Lenin suggests, finds by reason of his class instinct a kind of voluptuous pleasure in abandoning himself to the clutch of firm leadership and pitiless discipline...
...If, like Lenin, we define opportunism as the tendency that paralyzes the independent revolutionary movement of the working class and transforms it into an instrument of ambitious bourgeois intellectuals, we must also recognize that in the initial stage of a labor movement this end is more easily attained as a result of rigorous centralization rather than by decentralization. It is by extreme centralization that a young, uneducated proletarian movement can be most completely handed over to the intellectual leaders staffing a Central Committee.
Amen, comrade and sister.
She is one of three members of the Cabinet who faced death for political principle, the other two being Martin Luther King and the unknown rebel.
Groucho Marx
Minister of Irreverence and IrrelevanceMinister of Irreverence and Irrelevance
Date of birth: 2nd October, 1890
Place of birth: New York, United States of America
Date of death: 19th August, 1977
Favourite Beatles song: Savoy truffle
Notes: If there is any defence of an absurd, hierarchical, unjust society, it may just be that it affords geniuses like Julius Groucho Marx opportunities to satirise it.
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."Groucho wasn't merely a wisecracking comedian with a funny walk, he was an anarchist. His mind identified pomposity, phoney social hierarchy, and political insincerity with dazzling speed, and the humour in his performance lay in the fact that he manipulated this system to his own ends while simultaneously mocking it.
Dig trenches? With our men being killed off like flies? There isn't time to dig trenches. We'll have to buy them ready made.
Funny? Funny as hell. But why? This is the humour of Black Adder goes forth, built on an idiocy and contempt for human life in the military command of both sides of war so complete that, abstracted from the reality of death, it becomes funny. As Groucho said, Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Perhaps his most memorable scenes were played opposite the inimitable Margaret Dumont, who brilliantly represented high class society, and who Groucho called 'the fifth Marx brother'. In a parody of the Hollywood romance, he chased her money while making clear his insincerity: Send two dozen roses to Room 424 and put 'Emily, I love you' on the back of the bill.
Groucho's one-liners were superb, and his delivery and timing faultless, but his genius lies in his ability to see the human absurdities which his humour then mocks. May we all learn to be so clear sighted: A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx was the best comedian this country ever produced... He is simply unique in the same way that Picasso or Stravinsky are. (Woody Allen)
Patric McGoohan
Minister of IndentityMinister of Identity
Date of birth: 19th March, 1928
Place of birth: New York, United States of America
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: I me mine
Notes: While it is universally accepted that novels may be taken seriously both as art and as political or philosophical statements, and even the upstart of the twentieth century, the film, now attracts careful criticism, it remains the case that nothing made for television is taken that seriously. It is an irrational bias born, of course, of a class society. While literature and film have been safely divided into serious art, which remains the preserve of the intelligensia, and mass market, for the proles, television remains resolutely popular, thereby damning anything it might show.
The individual against the state
McGoohan's fictional unknown rebelIt is for this reason that one of the most imaginative and articulate works of art and political thought of the century never rose above a kind of cult scifi reputation. I am speaking of the 60's television series McGoohan created, starred in, and partially wrote and directed: The Prisoner.
In The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan plays an ex-spy who resigns his position on an unstated point of principle. He is drugged unconscious, abducted, and wakes in The Village. Noone will tell him where it is, and he finds his attempts to leave blocked by a huge white ball, neither quite animate nor inanimate, called simply Rover. The other villagers refer to each other by number rather than name, and wear badges wearing their own number. McGoohan's character, we discover, is Number 6. The village is run by Number 2, who explains that Number 6 has been brought to the village to reveal why he resigned. Roughly speaking, each episode features a different Number 2 - the actors playing them are changed without explanation - trying to gain Number 6's cooperation, and failing. No more vivid image of the lone individual defying the state would be shown on our televisions until life outdid art, and McGoohan's unknown rebel was echoed by the real unknown rebel.
The series is largely filmed in Portmerion, in northern Wales, a beautiful and fascinating architectural creation by architect William Clough-Ellis. The characters are given colourful 60s-modern costume, and a lot of bright, pop-art sets give the Village an extraordinarily distinct visual identity. Broadly speaking, each episode of the Prisoner investigates a different aspect of identity and individuality within society: from education, to government and elections, to morality and death.
Ultimately, the values implicit in The Prisoner are a form of anarchist individualism, the form of revolutionary politics natural to artisans and the middle classes. It recognises the oppressive nature of the state, and emphasises the role of the individual in opposing it. It is one of the most imaginative and powerful artistic expressions of politics ever made, and though deficient in making the case for solidarity, it is nevertheless a powerful spur to the assertion and defence of personal freedom.
Later in his career, Patrick McGoohan would form a close friendship with Peter Falk, and both guest star in and direct many episodes of that other celebration of the individual, Columbo.
Spike Milligan
Minister of Laughter and TearsMinister of Laughter and Tears
Date of birth: 16th April, 1918
Place of birth: Ahmednagar, India
Date of death: 27th February, 2002
Favourite Beatles song: The fool on the hill
Notes: Humour is the most immediately accessible form of wisdom, and Mania is blessed with three brilliant and iconic comedians. While the humour of Groucho Marx is based largely on deflating the pomposity of others, and that of Woody Allen on mocking the neurosis of the self, Spike Milligan seems to create humour from whole cloth. While always capable of satire, and self-awareness, Milligan's most distinctive mode is that of abstract and surreal flights of comedic imagination.
Milligan, Julia, and Julia's enormous breastsOf course, nothing truly comes from nothing: but Milligan's humour is based on the subversion of points of logic so basic most of us are unconscious we apply them at all until they are violated. The effect is to create a child-like absurdity, as when Goons character Eccles writes down the time of a piece of paper to remember it; or to imply the existence of connecting logic which he doesn't provide and which defies the imagination, as in NED: Bloodnok! How did you get in here? BLOODNOCK: I have the OBE and a parcel of steamed squids.
I have always felt a spiritual and aesthetic kinship with Spike, who said of his career When I look back, the fondest memory I have is not really of the Goons. It is of a girl called Julia with enormous breasts (cf. Dawn French)
Spike's struggle with bipolar disorder, and his obvious achievements and creativity despite it - or perhaps even partly because of it - were an inspiration to me as I struggled with depression myself as a boy, and as an adult, and this story, along with the role he played in the creating of Mania, can be found at the end of this page on the country's name.
Pablo Neruda
Minister of Cherry Trees and OnionsMinister of Cherry Trees and Onions
Date of birth: 12th July, 1904
Place of birth: Parral, Chile
Date of death: 23rd September, 1973
Favourite Beatles song: Words of love
Notes: I like very little poetry. For most of my life I assumed I liked none. This was not an aesthetic choice, but an acknowledged weakness: others seemed to be moved and informed by poetry in a way which was opaque to me, and I felt only disappointment that I should oddly lack this sense. Then, gradually, I heard the odd individual poem which I could take pleasure in, but it was not until I discovered Pablo Neruda that I found a poet whose work I learned to approach with an expectation of pleasure. Since then, I have also discovered Leonard Cohen, but he snuck up on me by singing his poems before revealing the written-to-be-read-out stuff.
La primavera y los cerezosThe first poem of his I ever read was one of his most famous: Every day you play, and I was so startled to find myself enjoying it that I even sought out the untranslated version - Juegas todos los dias - and forced my appalling Spanish round it. The closing line, Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos, persuaded me that a very few poets could find ways of saying things which was not merely pointlessly and pretentiously obscure, but actually revealed some aspect of the underlying reality which they had seen and others had not: much as Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso were able to do in paint, and Jorge Luis Borges in prose.
That Neruda turned out to be a socialist and an internationalist, and to have written good poetry about politics too, was riches beyond expectation.
Pablo Picasso
Minister of VisionMinister of Vision
Date of birth: 25th October, 1881
Place of birth: Malaga, Spain
Date of death: 8th April, 1973
Favourite Beatles song: I've just seen a face
Notes: Picasso, like Johann Sebastian Bach and Albert Einstein, is not merely an individual of genius, but a man whose achievements shaped everything which was to come after them.
Picasso's Guernica at the Museo Reina SofiaThough most famous for co-founding the cubist movement, Picasso painted in a bewildering range of styles, besides producing many works of collage and sculpture. His most recognisable work, and perhaps the most famous painting in history, is undoubtedly Guernica, which documents the Luftwaffe's bombing of the Basque town of that name in support of Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War - and as a demonstration of Nazi military power. Picasso, a republican and a communist, was commissioned to paint the work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. I glimpsed a print of this painting as a child, and it haunted my dreams for years, though it was a long time before I learnt its history. Each detail is heavy with symbolism, and yet the whole is drawn together into a unified chaos like fire - or like war. It seems inappropriate to describe such a grim image as a favourite, though finally travelling to see it in the Reina Sofia Museum was an emotional pilgrimage.
A bizarre footnote provides testament to the power of this indictment of war: when Colin Powell addressed the United Nations and, through television, the world, defending the US plan to invade Iraq, a copy of Guernica which would otherwise have been in shot behind him was hidden behind a blue curtain. Though UN officials claimed this was done at the request of cameramen concerned about a distracting backdrop, diplomats themselves revealed that the US delegation had applied pressure to conceal the world's most famous statement against oppression and war during Powell's speech.
Winnie the Pooh
Minister of Here and NowMinister of Here and Now
Date of birth: Unknown
Place of birth: -
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: A taste of honey
Notes: I must acknowledge my debt to Benjamin Hoff, who's extraordinary book The Tao of Pooh introduced me to, well, The Tao of Pooh.
The Tao of PoohLike Tiny Clanger, Winnie the Pooh embodies qualities of the child which adults tend to sneer at or patronise. Though the somewhat miserable Saint Paul recorded that when he became an adult he put away childish things, Lewis points out that one of the childish things we should put away is the desire to appear terribly grown up.
Something we most certainly shouldn't put away is our memory of the Bear of Very Little Brain. Pooh Bear is the yang to Patrick McGoohan's ying. Like the Prisoner, he is absolutely individual, but where Number 6 must constantly struggle to assert individuality, Pooh couldn't even spell the word. His absolute freedom is effortless, achieved (as Lao-tse described it in the Tao Te Ching) without doing.
Compared to most of us, who either treasure or crave material aids to happiness, Winnie the Pooh lives an extremely simple and indeed almost austere kind of life, and yet is completely happy. His secret is so simple that it is difficult to communicate: he lives in the present. To the cynics who find his story foolish, and would rub your face in the cruelty of the world to remind you of its appalling difference to Pooh's 100 acre wood, it is difficult to know what to say. Artistic visions of sanity and happiness are not a place to hide from the world, but an inspiration to change it. We need the Guenica of Pablo Picasso, and Winnie the Pooh. Those who have contempt for any art which doesn't drip in blood and condemnation of inhumanity may secretly be more interested in the blood and the inhumanity than the condemnation.
Don Quixote
Minister of
Purpose and IntegrityMinister of Purpose and Integrity
Date of birth: Unknown
Place of birth: La Mancha, Spain
Date of death: Unknown
Favourite Beatles song: Everybody's got something to hide except me and my monkey
Notes: Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote sometimes appears to be the foundation of all Hispanic art and writing. The image of the legendary knight shown here is by Pablo Picasso, and the one below is by Salvador Dali. Indeed, Dali painted a series called Five Spanish Immortals, which included both Cervantes and Don Quixote as two of the five! Jorge Luis Borges was captivated by the story as a child, and his most famous tribute was the extraordinary Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (you'll need to read it to understand the title). Pablo Neruda perhaps demonstrated the since of duty owed to Cervantes most clearly of all when he apologised I, a poet who writes in Spanish, learned more from Walt Whitman than from Cervantes. On the 400th anniversary of its first publication celebrated in 2005, the socialist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuala gave away a million free copies of the book as part of the country's literacy programme.
Don Quixote by Salvador DaliThe saying goes that you must read Don Quixote three times: the first time you will laugh, and the second time you will cry, but only the third time will you understand. It must be the case, though, that Don Quixote's enduring fame tells of an idea already in humanity's grasp of which the gaunt hero is only an expression. Indeed, it is doubtful that Cervantes himself ever intended his knight to become an object of such adoration, as he began his book as a satire of chivalric literature: I believe his feelings, like those of Don Quixote's once cynical sidekick Sancho Panza, had changed by the end.
At first glance, it would seem that Don Quixote himself was a fool, and even a lunatic, if a harmless one. He takes pubs for magic castles and windmills for giants. And yet there is a theme to his madness: I will act, says Don Quixote, as if the world were what I would have it to be, as if the ideal were real. Taken literally, this is delusion. Taken metaphorically, it is a struggle against the alienation and inhumanity pressed on us by a poor, grim, and exploitative society. As C S Lewis said many times, though he believed in an objective good, even if he were wrong, we would prefer to fight on its side than descend into the mire of cynicism and meaninglessness.
Janet Radcliffe
Minister of Applied PhilosophyMinister of Rational Polemics
Date of birth: 1944, exact date unknown
Place of birth: Unknown
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Because
Notes: Philosopher and bioethicist Janet Radcliffe shares with C S Lewis the distinction that she seeks to present rationally valid argument, and clearly feels constrained by the rules of logic. As a result, the arguments she presents are meticulous and fascinating. Many writers on politics, and even sadly on philosophy, write for an reader who is already in agreement with their general conclusions and seeks only a more detailed exploration of them, or, worse yet, mere psychological reinforcement. Janet Radcliffe writes for the undecided and for the rational opponent. This is not only a more demanding discipline, it helps to keep one honest, as the unsupported opinion and prejudice which might be accepted by the similarly partisan will quickly be exposed by an opponent, and must therefore be avoided.
The sceptical feministIn The sceptical feminist, Janet Radcliffe presents rational arguments for feminism, though this statement requires a little qualification as many opinions go by this name. Broadly, feminism may be divided into that which opposes a particular form of injustice, and may therefore include men and women, and that which regards men as inherently sexist and therefore seeks to organise women in defence of their own interests. Janet Radcliffe largely argues the former case, which might better be called anti-sexism. Interestingly, a similar division may be found in the politics of opposition to the oppression of blacks, between the anti-racism of Martin Luther King, and the black nationalist politics of the young Malcom X.
Though on the widest question of anti-sexism I agree with Radcliffe's conclusion, I disagree with most of her arguments. I disagree with her defence of positive discrimination, the objections to which she identifies brilliantly, but subsequently fails to overcome, and though I agree with her conclusion that there exists a right to abortion, I disagree with the reasons she gives in its support. As issues, these things are important, but in my admiration for Radcliffe, they are not. That she acknowledges not merely in words but in practise the demands of reason is rare distinction, and arguing with her is a pleasure.
Saturn
Minister of Silence and EternityMinister of Silence and Eternity
Date of birth: Unknown
Place of birth: Oribiting approximately 8 light-hours from the Sun
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Flying
Notes: Does everyone have a favourite planet, or is it just me?
A child's painting of a planet
Which planet inspired this?Saturn is a gas giant, with a hot rocky core surrounded largely by hydrogen. It is the only planet less dense than water, and spins so fast that this light form it is visibly flattened from spherical by centrifugal force.
But what makes Saturn instantly recognisable is the breathtaking beauty of its rings. Probably a disintegrated moon, these puzzled the hell out of Galileo who described Saturn as having ears. It took fifty years, and better telescopes, to finally discern this mysterious phenomenom.
For me, Saturn was the first home of the numenous, that inexpressible mixture of awe and wonder which I eventually found described by C S Lewis, but actually evoked by the stories of Jorge Luis Borges.
The Vespa scooter
Minister of Movement and DesignMinister of Movement and Design
Date of birth: Vespas first manufactured in 1946...
Place of birth: ...in Genoa, Italy
Date of death: -
Favourite Beatles song: Why don't we do it in the road?
Notes: The only thing in the world as elegant as Saturn and as curvy as Dawn French is a Vespa scooter. While she stands at a pinnacle of evolved human beauty, the scooter represents perfection in intelligent design, and though each is an object of desire, the Vespa is at least attainable.
Hand-painted by Dali with his wife's name
The most valuable Vespa in the worldIn fact, Vespa scooters have carried me all over Britain and parts of Spain, and no form of transport, not the comfort of a plush car, nor the sheer power of larger motorcycles, matches the sheer pleasure of riding a Vespa. Neither is there any vehicle which receives a friendlier response from other people. People like Vespas.
The manufacturer Piaggio hasn't changed the design of the Vespa in sixty years. While they have periodically experimented with more angular shapes, or other garish concessions to the fashion of the day, they have always been forced back to offering a model with the classic scooter shape: and it has been copied by almost every other motorcycle manufacturer. This is because the form of the Vespa follows its function, and its beauty lies in the simplicity with which it does so.
In terms of its mechanics, the placement of the engine over the rear wheel eliminates the need for any vulnerable drive transmission mechanism such as a shaft or chain, as the rear wheel bolts directly onto the engine: eliminating components which are amongst the most common to fail in other vehicles, and making the engine trivially easy to remove for maintenance or replacement. From the point of view of the rider, the step through design makes the scooter easier to mount than a motorcycle, the covered engine makes it cleaner, and the fact that the legs do not straddle the body of the vehicle allows the rider to wear what he or she pleases.
As my friends in the old Switchbax Scooter Club would have said some 20 years ago, ride free.
Fernando Sor
Minister of Melody and SimplicityMinister of Melody and Simplicity
Date of birth: 14th February, 1778
Place of birth: Barcelona, Spain
Date of death: 10th July, 1839
Favourite Beatles song: While my guitar gently weeps
Notes: For most of my life, I have been a supremely clumsy classical guitarist. I learnt to play the simpler music written for the instrument by a number of composers, including Matteo Carcassi and Francisco Tarrega: indeed, I was taught to play by a man who was taught by a man who was taught by a man who was taught by Tarrega himself, a heritage which I thoroughly dishonoured.
Francisco Tarrega, who taught a man
who taught a man, who taught a man,
who taught me guitar. See him wince.I would notice, though, that occassionally my playing would achieve a sound far more pleasing and mature than my skill really allowed, and whenever this happened and I was glance at the top of the sheet music, I would find the name Fernando Sor. Sor had a gift for taking a sprinkling of simple notes and arranging them into melodies of such haunting character and resonance that a million poor students must have blessed him.
Sor is one of two composers in the Manic Cabinet, the other being Johann Sebastian Bach (if we don't count the undoubtedly musical, but untutored, Tiny Clanger). While Bach's music is brilliant and powerful, if given a single instrument, a handful of notes, and an incompetent musician, it is Sor who would do the magic of creating a beautiful sound: and it is for the ability to create beauty from so nearly nothing that I felt I had to include him.
Unknown Rebel
Minister of LibertyMinister of Liberty
Date of birth: Unknown
Place of birth: Unknown
Date of death: Unknown
Favourite Beatles song: Don't pass me by
Notes: In 1989, an escalating series of protests by Chinese students culminated in the occupation of Tiananmen Square, sympathetic industrial action, and widely supported hunger strikes in support of a range of democratic demands. After two months of increasing solidarity between the students and workers of the capital, on 4th June the Stalinist government sent the army to crush the rebellion. Though largely unarmed, the protestors showed astonishing resistance, and fought the soldiers often with nothing more than their fists. Estimates vary, but between 700 and 7000 were killed that day, and an unknown number were to be killed or imprisoned in the wave of government repression which followed.
Spanish Civil War poster of the anarchist
CNT: Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo
'Loor a los heroes!' (Praise to the heroes!)
We should praise indeedOn 5th June, the day after, a cameraman caught sight of a man standing on the Chang An Ta Tao or Avenue of Everlasting Peace, in the path of a line of tanks. He filmed as the leading tank steered first one way and then the other to avoid him, and the man moved to remain in its path. Eventually, the entire column was stopped by this lone, unarmed protestor, who then climbed onto the first tank and spoke to the driver. His words were reported by those who gathered around as Go back, turn around, and stop killing my people. Some say he was captured and killed by the army, others that he was smuggled away by the crowd and lives in hiding, but as he has not even been reliably identified it is impossible to know the truth.
Indeed, it is a sad reflection that all three Cabinet Ministers who fought for liberty and justice, Martin Luther King, Rosa Luxemburg, and this unknown rebel, all faced death as a result. It would be heartening to think that this man escaped it.
The courage and symbolism of this man's protest need hardly be stated, and his inclusion here is a small token of my admiration. Here is a real Don Quixote, tilting not at windmills but at real monsters. But he also serves to represent all of those who have contributed to human freedom or happiness, but whose names and deeds have not been recorded by history. Whenever we hear that this person was the greatest artist, or that person the greatest revolutionary, we should bear in mind that it is almost certainly untrue: for every known achievement there are probably a hundred greater which we know nothing of: the world is not merely what we observe, and the past is not merely history.
We should recognise the lost achievements, and potential, of much of humanity who - because they were women, or black, or born in the wrong nation, or simply by chance - were never heard of.