Visit to York: The End of History Experience. Part I

I wish to God he was right but with Godfathers like Xi, Putin,
Kim Jong-un & Trump at large not to mention those religious  
hegemonists Francis has had to think again! 

Francis Fukuyama popularized the phrase "The End of History" with the publication of his book "The End of History and the last man" in 1992.  With the end of the cold war and Western democratic values in the ascendency and their capitalist economies generating technology & wealth undreamt of since the beginning of history it might have seemed that we were now all going to live happily ever after in the democratic lap of luxury. Moreover, many smaller countries still under authoritarian yokes wanted to join the rich democratic club, naturally enough. Well, we now know what happened:  Russia and China became powerful dictatorships, religious fundamentalists of differing brands sought the universal hegemony of their oppressive ideas and in the West a recrudescent far-right promoted lies and conspiracy theories in order to reinstate the demagoguery of Godfather style Government and the conceptual world-view of the unwoke. Does this mean we are on the way back to the Sauline worlds of monarchs (1 Samuel 8: 7-18) vying for as much power as possible and magnifying their personal glory via the violent extension of their empires of power? Such are the slaves & dupes of games theory as they make and break alliances in the monarchical ebb and flow of political influence. Traditional history with its unstable games theory feedback systems is very much back with us. 

And yet in a recent visit to the historic city of York (with the wife) the phrase "The End of History" kept coming back to me. I had had a sheltered and comfortable life untroubled by the privations of having to scratch an existence and free from the war & strife stirred up by Godfather rule. I had the education, health, time and comfort to take stock of the world around me. This privileged position allowed me to evaluate in a detached sort of way, the human condition and all that happens under-the-sun.  In a few more years, like my parents, I'm likely die in my bed. and history for me personally ends in a whimper. How anti-climatic!

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On the way up to York we visited the Palladian Cusworth Hall which overlooks Doncaster from its far-seeing hillside (see picture above).  The remnant of its aristocratic owners sold the hall to Doncaster city council about 70 years ago. The estate is now run as museum by the council with free entry. (But we made a donation). The council keep the hall in good condition, and it has become a specimen in a protective "resin block" ready for curious "end of history" visitors like ourselves with the time on our hands to be thoroughly nosey about the affairs of those who came before us.  

With the wind whistling through the crevices of the house, few other visitors about and the architectural vestiges of a past glory still evident, the house had an abandoned feel about it. It was no surprise when a steward told us that the Hall was haunted and he himself had heard the stories. I've never seen or felt anything that remotely classifies as a haunting. In fact, the wife and I have visited places with the scariest of ghostly reputations and never experienced anything spooky (most notably Bodmin Jail). I was three years working at the haunted Blickling hall and saw and felt absolutely nothing. 

The above picture is of Cusworth Hall's grand staircase, just inside the entrance. After the long driveway with the Hall sitting conspicuously at its end the staircase is the next item on the chorography of status, a chorography designed to impress the visitor. In halls larger than Cusworth I've seen grander staircases but given a hall's size architects would endeavor to make the staircase a statement of the owner's wealth by making it as impressive as possible. Compare the above picture with the main staircase of No 1 the Crescent, Bath:

Being a terraced house, the staircase at No 1 is not as grand as Cusworth's, but nevertheless it does what it can to impress the visitor.  It's worth comparing these staircases with the entrance hall of our own late Victorian terrace house, constructed for the bottom of the end of an aspiring lower middle class where similar ideas about aggrandizing entrances were employed:

With its small footprint in a crowded city street the hallway of our house is inconveniently and painfully narrow, but the Victorian architects tried to mitigate this limitation by increasing the height of the house and its main rooms thus enhancing the illusion of space; it is affected grandeur on a small scale. But to those whose houses had no hall it sent out subliminal signals of being on the next rung of the status ladder and an illusion of keeping up with the De Montegues with their aristocratic Norman ancestry.  

Back at Cusworth Hall we found the main reception room to be decorated with some elegant Georgian plaster work. This would be the room where guests were entertained with music and formal dancing. 

In one of the wings, we found the chapel: In my opinion they should have decorated the chapel with similar elegant Georgian plaster work: Instead, we get a poor imitation of Italian mannerist/baroque art, in an attempt to echo Micheal Angelo's Sistine chapel. I'm no art critic but somehow the figures in this depiction looked as though they were made of dough rather than flesh. They should have stuck with stucco, but then the artist was probably good enough to convey, at first look, a sense of sophistication, & opulence and perhaps even help the owners affirm their faith in God.

To finish let's have look at Osterley House which we visited in 2010. It is much bigger and grander than Cusworth Hall. With its ogee turrets it is a peculiar blend of Elizabethan and later Georgian modernization. But somehow the pedimented Collonade goes well with the turrets although I doubt classicists would have thought so. And just look at that grand reception room below making Cusworth's reception look rather pokey. 

I include this house because of the part it played in Sir Keneth Clark's Civilization series at the beginning of the episode "The Fallacies of Hope".  See the end of this post where I wrote the following: 

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At the start of the 12th episode of his Civilisation series we find Sir Kenneth Clark in the clean rational and regular neoclassical interior of Osterley House in England. As he looks upon this epitome of rational control he says:

A finite reasonable world, symmetrical, consistent and ….enclosed. Well, symmetry is a human concept because with all our oddities we are more or less symmetrical and the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam or a phrase by Mozart reflects our satisfaction with two eyes, two arms, two legs and so forth. And “consistency”… again and again in this series I’ve used that word as a term of praise. But “enclosed”, that’s the trouble. An enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit, one longs to get out, one longs to move. One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits are the enemies of movement……and what is that I hear, that note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger, yes it’s Beethoven, it’s the sound of European man reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave this trim finite room and go to confront the infinite. We’ve a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can’t say how it will end because it isn’t over yet. We are still the off spring of the Romantic Movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.

The romantics of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries rebelled against the deconsecration of the cosmos through the symmetries and regularities of enlightenment thinking and yearned for the infinite. They attempted to return to a much more intuitive apprehension of the natural world. As Clark says the journey isn’t over yet and even today our romantic intuitions and aspirations continue to do battle with our reason. I would suggest that two words are missing from Clark’s last sentence….victims of the fallacies of hope…in man!  !  ….. I want to look at the question of why science has left us high and dry…..

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According to Clarke, then, we are still very much in the middle of history and Francis Fukuyama has had to go back to the drawing board! In the meantime, in Part II, I'll continue to play out this end of history fantasy as we move on to York and back to times a thousand years or more before the snobbish, self-satisfied and Whiggish post-Newtonian Georgian upper-class who to us feel very familiar and so close to our own times.