Blickling Hall

Blickling Hall near Aylsham (Norfolk, England) was built on the eve of the enlightenment in 1620, approximately one hundred years after the reformation. Its Jacobean architecture is a pastiche of Elizabethan features and an unsystematic smattering of classical elements – pediments, pillars and entablatures. At the time of its construction the seeds of its fashionable demise were being sown by Inigo Jones who was already engaged in a much more systematic application of classical features in his first Palladian essays. A few more years and the owners of Blickling would find themselves in the neo-classical revival. Its Jacobean façade would become an unfashionable legacy no longer signaling that its owners were where it was at. In spite of the later neo-classical makeover of its interior Blickling Hall has a strong medieval feel. The Hall was built on the site of a moated manner house and this determined its rectangular castle-like footprint. Its four corners are occupied by square towers capped by lead pinnacled roofs similar to those on the tower of London. The Hall is entered via a bridge over the now dry moat. The walls of the bridge are ornamented with decorative pseudo turrets pierced by arrow slits. The bridge leads into a passage that opens out onto a courtyard in an arrangement very reminiscent of a castle gatehouse. Beyond the courtyard is the main door into the Hall itself. Blickling Hall is, in fact, at the end of a metamorphosis which slowly compromised the strength of the feudal castle and transformed it from an efficient crenellation where military potential was paramount, into homes which retained enough vestigial features of the castle to signal aristocracy. This slow victory of style over content can be traced from Bodium castle through Oxborough Hall to Blickling itself.

When Blickling Hall was built in the late Renaissance the mediaeval social order was long since defunct. History, however, is always a work in progress and its artifacts often blend past and future in uneasy union. The sense of symmetry which had begun to inform the architects of Blickling’s day militated against the mediaeval legacy that required the 'entrance' hall to be the center and hub of the building; this is why it is called a 'hall'. Unlike the later and modern practice that made the entrance hall an antechamber to the spaces where it really happened, the ‘entrance’ hall in Blickling’s day was the banqueting and entertainments focus of the house. What created an issue for Blickling’s architect was that medieval halls were asymmetrically arranged about their entrance. On one side of the entrance was a wooden screen with doors leading to the main space where the Lord dinned on his dais. On the other side doors lead away to the kitchen, pantry and service areas. This asymmetrical arrangement was originally found at Blickling, but this conflicted with an increasing desire for symmetry, an aspiration emerging out of the Elizabethan era and running its course into the neo-classical architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where a thoroughgoing symmetry was vogue.

History was slipping and sliding into a new synthesis and the resulting incoherent pastiche of Blickling’s design parallels, in many ways, the state of science at that time. In 1620 nearly 80 years had elapsed since the publication of Copernicus’ posthumous slight on the earth-centered universe – the first of a serious of apparent demotions of man’s position in the great scheme of things. Galileo’s partly self-imposed battles with the authority of the Catholic Church over this very matter had commenced. In the meantime, around the early 1600s, and concurrently with the building of Blickling, Kepler was publishing his 3 laws of celestial mechanics. Kepler, like the Hall itself, looked both to the past and future. His astrological work paid a wage and his mediaeval obsession with the platonic mystery of the five regular solids lead to his initial mathematical foray into celestial mechanics; but his neat scheme of concentrically nesting these solids in order to mathematically justify the position of the planetary orbits eventually went the way of Bode’s law into redundancy. Nevertheless the notion that there was a mathematical patterning behind the cosmos was an anticipation of the future. Kepler’s later three laws governing elliptical planetary paths have stood the test of time, at least as worthwhile approximations.

The spirit in which Kepler understood his three laws is indicative of the transitions of his time that gave rise to the paradoxical blending of past and future. To Kepler, the three laws were mathematical patterns imposed from above by God. In this sense Kepler’s underlying philosophy was little different from that which drove his soon-to-be-redundant application of the five regular solids. For Kepler mathematical patterns were imposed by God on nature in much the same way the Elizabethans and Jacobeans imposed highly regular and symmetrical patterns on their gardens and parks That a distant part of a planetary orbit should relate via some simple mathematical relation to another part widely separated from it would have preseneted no intuitive difficulty for Kepler simply because in Kepler’s view God in his wisdom had designed it to be like that.

Another stage in the beginnings of a sea change came just under 100 years later with the advent of the Newtonian revolution. Although the highly devout Newton probably thought more on the lines of Kepler than the French interpreters who followed him, his system of mechanics had the potential to be interpreted as ‘local’. That is, Newtonian Physics can be simulated computationally using a set of autonomous local ‘cells’ with inputs and outputs from their neighbors. Each cell doesn’t need to know about any overall pattern – it manages its affairs locally using some relatively simple rules governing how it interacts with its near neighbors. Even forces such as gravity, which in Newton’s day seemed to be a mathematical pattern that instantaneously permeated space, can be reduced to these ‘local’ terms. It turns out, of course, that Kepler’s elliptical patterns, which to him where just givens, are a product of one of these locally managed systems. There was during the eighteenth century a flurry of interest in extremum principles as way of interpreting Newton. This approach suggested that the mechanics of the cosmos was subject to an overall plan, but the philosophical gravitas of these principles was severely compromised by the realization that they contained no more information than the simpler and easier to handle local interpretation.

And so was born the ‘local’ physical paradigm - all that is required is a set of fairly basic, simple and definitely non-sentient units whose output in response to an input is determined by some relatively basic rules; you then turn the mathematical handle and out pops an overall pattern – or to use the vogue expression, the patterns emerge bottom-up rather than being imposed from above. As later thinkers went onto to conjecture, perhaps even sentience itself can be reduced to these local systems. The local paradigm sees the dynamic ordering agent behind the cosmos not as a supreme sentience overseeing it but rather as simple units responding to near neighbors using elementary algorithms. Thus, according to this paradigm order comes from below rather than from above. It envisages the cosmos as laissez faire rather than a command economy where each non-sentient unit autonomously looks after itself without heed to orders from on high.

Laissez faire or central planning? As Kepler, unbeknown to him, was sowing the seeds of the local paradigm, the first 100 years of Blickling Hall witnessed a turbulent period in English politics when this dichotomy was not just a philosophical issue but was being fought over, although the partisans would not have been able have to think of it in those terms. The Stuart kings of the day believed in the divine right of kings to rule with or without a parliament. Charles I wore this belief on his sleeve and this helped to precipitate the civil war of 1642. It was top-down power vs the more distributed power of the up and coming middle classes. In his last words before execution Charles I opined:

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For the people, truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody, but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having government - those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government ... that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.

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The issue surfaced again when James II attempted to use his divine right to bring Catholicism back to England. He was consequently deposed in the bloodless revolution of 1688. In spite of the feudal top-down pretensions signaled by the dated architecture of Blickling, the owners of the Hall weighed in on the side of the parliamentarians. They were the Whigs of their day.

The laissez faire vs. central planning question is one that finds no consensus resolution even today, either in science or politics. In politics we have the paradox of capitalists and socialists both having prima facia cases for claiming to be the true champions of freedom and of accusing the other side of being the true enemies of liberty. In the physical sciences it is not clear that locality of interaction is all there is to it; if all global patterning emerges from an array of simple locally communicating non-sentient nodes there remains, of course, the enigma of both the origins of the nodes and their rules of behavior. Moreover, the strange and curious global patterning arising from their combined effort makes one wonder if the local rules governing their behavior are in actual fact subject to global mathematical constraints applying a ‘field’ of influence analogous to the effect that a background sea of chemical concentrations has on the signaling behavior of neurons in the brain. At the very least it does seem that quantum mechanics has put non-locality back on the physical science agenda. (Note to self: compare Thinknet selections)

Non-local ontologies hold out the prospect of some kind of global top-down management of local matters. This top-down management takes the form of background constraints transcending the normal neighborhood relations between nodes and their time-like communications. In this case it’s as if the units are connected together in some space of relations transcending ‘space’ space. It is not possible to detect this kind of global organizer by attempting to discover locally transmitted signals because the constraint makes itself felt in bulk effects only. Theists will find non-local ontologies easier to swallow, because the notion of some kind of background influence managing the affairs of the cosmic order without detectable local communications taking place is analogous to Divine presence and power. Contra wise, atheists may find non-local ontologies less acceptable because they look suspiciously like the thin end of the theist wedge.

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Looking out of a window of the west range of Blickling provides an aspect across the beautiful vista of a landscaped park designed by the Reptons in the late eighteenth century. To create this informal park the Reptons removed three long avenues of trees that converged on the Hall, emphasizing its centrality. The natural appearance of the Reptons’ landscaping suggested indifference to the presence of the Hall. The fashion for landscaping was a sign of an increasing awareness of a natural world that was is stark contrast to the world of man, the world of artifice. This contrast is very marked in the estates where the elemental geometry of a neo-classical mansion is set against the informal landscaping of their surroundings. The landscape gardens were designed to look natural, unmanaged, a product of insentient nature. It is as if the men of the enlightenment period were pondering nature, now unsure of their place in it, whereas before it was taken for granted that like the old avenues of trees at Blickling all the ways of nature lead to man, the pinnacle of creation. But now questions and doubts were arising in the minds of men; in times past these questions wouldn’t have surfaced in their consciousness. That Paley published at all is a sign that points of doubt needed shoring up and this amounted to an acknowledgement that these points of doubt now existed. In a few more tens of years the scientific study of nature was to throw up some deeply disquieting surprises for mankind and further apparent demotions of his cosmic place. These surprises would lead men to question their status in the great scheme of things. The view that man is an epiphenomenona of impersonal dispassionate principles operating in a local paradigm has a hold on the minds of many.