I seem to be getting more and more entranced by history and ideas and the history of ideas.
One of the hits of the television season for me has been Channel Four's The Edwardian Country House wherein (reasonably) ordinary 21st Century people enact the upstairs downstairs world of an Edwardian country house. Not surprisingly, those upstairs have a much easier time of it. Downstairs is unrelieved drudgery.
However, an interesting symbiosis emerges. Although downstairs is totally at the beck and call of upstairs. Upstairs cannot do too much to break the pattern of duties of downstairs. Both sets of people are reliant upon the goodwill of the others.
In human terms, the programme is made by the downstairs characters. Mostly, they
have been totally unprepared for the amount of work that was expected of them and
for the lack of individual freedoms and recognitions.
The lads are very pretty.
Ross and I wonder if it isn't all very
E M Forster. They could easily be rogering young master Jonty from upstairs in
their spare time.
Another TV series with a fresh historical perspective on ideas has been The Century of the Self which we caught up with on BBC 4 - a haven for the thinking viewer. The series of four programmes followed the ways in which the ideas of Sigmund Freud were used by policy makers to influence a mass market of consumers by playing on their unconscious fears and desires - cars being sold out of penis envy, foreign policies being underpinned irrational worry of invasion (there was one whole section about the American Banana Corporation working to undermine the democratically elected Social Democratic government of Guatemala by convincing the USA populace that the country had been over-run by communists so that the banana plantations would not be nationalised and their profits would continue).
But the series also pointed up, albeit obliquely, the spiritual paucity of the age for, time and time again, a person's worth was shown to be equated with what they owned rather than with their innate qualities and abilities. It's no wonder there's a feeling of spiritual bankruptcy in much of current policy making.
Finally, I've been working through Radio 4's new series of This Sceptered Isle. Entitled The Dynasties, it tells the story of the last 1000 years of British history from the point of view of the two dozen or so powerful and influential families which have shaped political destinies in that era.
It's interesting because, in many ways, it is the same story told over and over again but from subtly different standpoints. And the telling makes you aware of how much of the formulation of policy depended on allegiances and quarrels reaching back over centuries.