Theft by finding, salvage, and island economies.

Still thinking about the London riots, one of the ethical dilemmas that emerged (alongside that old classic, will I allow my criminal 19-year-old to put my council tenancy at risk or will I throw him out?) was the custom of finders keepers. Various accused tried to claim that they had ‘found’ the stolen goods they were caught with. Nobody believed them, but the interesting question is whether that would have made it all right.

In law, no - there is an offence in England of ‘theft by finding’. The Theft Act 1968 defines theft as:

Any assumption by a person of the rights of an owner amounts to an appropriation, and this includes, where he has come by the property (innocently or not) without stealing it, any later assumption of a right to it by keeping or dealing with it as owner.

There’s a very good exposition of what this means in practice here by ‘on thin ice’. A finder is obliged to “to take such reasonable and practicable steps as would be appropriate to the property to try and find the true owner”, which might include handing the item in at a police station. The same applies in Scots Law, as far as I can make out, though theft isn’t defined by statute, so isn’t as explicitly formulated to include finding (“innocently or not”).

But there is a lot of ethical and even legal (“reasonable and practicable steps”) wriggle room for people to take advantage of the luck of finding something. The loser has to assert ownership, so the playground chant, “Finders keepers, losers weepers,” is perhaps, basically, an assertion that he will have to do it by force. This point is made by ‘tutuzdad-ga’ here in a very helpful discussion of the proverb, “Possession is nine points of the law.” As he says, “[O]ne who has physical control of his property is clearly at an advantage should his rightful ownership of the property ever be subject to challenge.”

And where is the dividing line between valuable property and trivial stuff? Who goes to the police station to hand in a pound coin? A ten pound note? A twenty? Even the dividing line between property and rubbish is arguable. This was brought to attention recently when a woman in England was charged with theft for taking discarded out-of-date food from a supermarket’s bins. Most people would regard that as abandonment – the supermarket has given up ownership of the goods. That was certainly the attitude of writers in both the Grauniad and, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Daily Mail. Obviously, the supermarket stands to lose custom if the ‘freegan’ movement gains momentum, but what could be more clearly abandoned than rubbish in a bin?

Another recent case has much deeper customary roots. When the container ship MSC Napoli was wrecked in 2007, people flocked to Branscombe Beach to help themselves to the wreckage, in scenes reminiscent of Whisky Galore, the film based on Compton Mackenzie’s 1947 novel, itself inspired by the scavenging of the S.S. Politician, wrecked off Barra in 1941. There are songs and reminiscences in the School of Scottish Studies archives (Tobar an Dualchais), for instance these anecdotes from Roderick MacKillop.

What makes scavenging wrecks all right in the popular mind? Let’s consider first what the actual legal situation is. In both England and Scotland, there is a position of ‘receiver of wreck’. This official must be notified when wreckage is found. (There is a recording of George Gear, a receiver of wreck in Shetland, explaining his role.) If unclaimed after a year, wreckage found in UK territorial waters becomes the property of the Crown. The receiver of wreck also deals with claims for payment in respect of salvage services, and may settle these from the sale of wreckage. If goods are perishable, badly damaged or not worth the cost of storage, the receiver will arrange immediate sale.

These rushed sales will obviously raise derisory amounts in many cases, which immediately takes us into the grey area of property of trivial value. People will have correspondingly few qualms about keeping such stuff.

Then the insurance write-off comes into the picture. There are few goods that wouldn’t be damaged by exposure to sea water or by being thrown onto shore in a gale. The shipowners may actually be better off losing the cargo and claiming against insurance, rather than going through the process of reclaiming some of it (or its auction value), possibly in a damaged state, in dribs and drabs, broken out of any packaging, and awaiting collection from some distant coastguard station. When insurance is involved, people seem to see theft as a victimless crime.

Salvage services are another grey area. There are quantifiable costs in terms of time, fuel, damage, etc. if a vessel assists at a shipwreck, but there are also intangibles – the risk to life and limb, the holding oneself and one’s boat ready to rescue strangers in foul weather. Small wreckage is traditionally felt to be a quid pro quo for such things.

Listening to various tracks from the School of Scottish Studies (search on ‘salvage’ and ‘wreck’), it is clear that wreckage was regarded as a perquisite of island life. In the days when ships carried timber as a deck cargo, it was frequently lost or jettisoned overboard, and this was a major source of building timber in the treeless Western and Northern Isles. Other general goods could make a big difference to people living at subsistence level, and occasionally there was the chance to pilfer a really valuable cargo, like coins from the legendary ‘siller ship’, the Vandela, wrecked off Fetlar in 1737.

More brutally, salvage has traditionally been a way of making a living on some parts of the British coast, with life-saving a side issue. Bella Bathurst’s book The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships is a terrific read on this subject.

Thomas Sowell *The Vision of the Anointed*

Subtitled Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Published in 1995 - not much has changed. I came across the reference in an online discussion of the London riots. Many saw the riots, of course, as confirmation that the social experiments of the last 50 years have failed – in education, penal policy, open borders, social policy, etc. This book is an analysis of the mindset that pushed these disastrous policies through with quasi-religious fervour.

The general thesis is that the idealists have neglected to operate checks and balances, and have disdained the grubby trade-offs needed to govern in an imperfect world. Sowell calls the idealist mindset the vision of the anointed and contrasts it with what he calls the tragic vision.

For instance, “both crime and war have been seen, by those with the vision of the anointed, as things to be deterred by changing people’s dispositions rather than by confronting them with retaliatory capabilities that provide incentives against crime or war” (p.107). Sowell shares the tragic vision. In relation to crime, he quotes Adam Smith, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” And when it comes to war, he agrees that “nations in general make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it” (John Jay).

Sowell points to the tendency of enthusiasts to choose ideal policy A over less than ideal policy B, even though they don’t possess (and possibly nobody could possess) the knowledge and competencies needed to realise policy A. I was eerily reminded of actual conversations that I’ve had with such people – their sense of urgency is wonderful, their demands for taxpayers’ money unbounded, their remorse for past mistakes entirely lacking.

And I say that with humility, having come to realise late in life that I’ve made my own small contribution to the trashing of Western civilisation.

Edmund Burke is a well-known exponent of the tragic vision. Will and Ariel Durant also sound well worth following up (The Lessons of History, 1968):

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant and well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

One of specific trends Sowell discusses is judicial activism – which has only increased in the period since his book was written. In pursuit of their own socio-political agendas, judges are willing “to derange a whole process, evolved from the experiences of millions of people over centuries of legal development” (p.130). The outcome for individuals, as Mark Steyn also demonstrates very tellingly in After America, is that it becomes impossible to know what the law actually is in some areas, since it depends not on legislation, but on judicial whim. The outcome for society is that the whole process of the law becomes ineffective (and falls into disrepute, as we see in the UK now with the Human Rights Act). Sowell is very keen on conserving processes and institutions, since he doesn’t believe that there are once-and-for-all solutions (e.g. to poverty) that will do away with the need for well-balanced processes.

In this respect, I feel very much the guilt of my generation. We did indeed, as Sowell accuses, see the constraints of civilisation as “arbitrary impositions” from which we desired to be “liberated” (p.247).

In the world of the anointed, human nature is readily changeable. To say that a particular policy requires the changing of other people’s dispositions and values may to others suggest a daunting prospect but, to the anointed, it is a golden opportunity. Making other people “aware”, raising their consciousness ... are all very attractive ideas ... Similarly, while polarization is to others something to fear, to those with the vision of the anointed it is a confirmation of their own superiority to the benighted. ... Whether it is the mandatory busing of schoolchildren for racial balance or the imposition of new policies on gays in the military, these are not thought of ... as polarization. It is only those who object who are said to be creating polarization.

One of the ominous consequences of such attitudes is that there is no logical stopping place in creating polarizations that may tear a society apart or lead to a backlash that can sweep aside not only such policies but also the basic institutions of a free society. ... There is nothing in the prevailing vision to make the anointed stop before things reach that point. On the contrary, the warning signs of such an impending catastrophe may be seen by the anointed ass only welcome indications of their own moral superiority ... (pp.246-7).

Chapter 1 sets out the idea that the anointed see themselves not merely as factually correct but on a higher moral plane, their opponents as benighted. Furthermore, theirs is the prevailing vision, and its assumptions are widely accepted without scrutiny.

Chapter 2 identifies the typical pattern whereby a crisis is identified; the anointed propose solutions; their critics say there will be unintended detrimental effects; the policies are instituted and the predicted detrimental effects follow; the anointed refuse to accept that the detrimental effects flow from their policy.

Chapter 3 gives examples of the misunderstanding and misuse of statistics.

Chapter 4 gives examples of the immunity of the anointed to evidence, and of their rhetorical techniques.

Chapter 5 contrasts the vision of the anointed and the tragic vision in detail. They differ in their understanding of:

• human capability;

• social possibilities;

• social causation (with the tragic vision seeing negative outcomes as systemic, the anointed vision seeing them as deliberate);

• freedom (tragic vision: freedom from; anointed vision: ability to);

• justice (tragic: equality before the law; anointed: equality of outcomes);

• knowledge (tragic: inherent in institutions etc.; anointed: property of the elite);

• the desirability of specialization (desirable in the tragic vision; jettisoned by the anointed in favour of the interdisciplinary and holistic);

• motivation (provided by incentives in the tragic vision; a matter of inherent dispositions to the anointed);

• attitude towards costs;

• preferred method of decision making (top down planning in the anointed vision);

• type of decisions preferred (tragic: incremental; anointed: categorical).

The remaining chapters elaborate on these distinctions and look in more detail at the vision of the anointed in operation.

Chapter 6 looks at some recent ‘crusades’ of the anointed, and identifies some of their ‘mascots’ (e.g. the homeless, criminals, AIDS carriers) and targets (business, the professions, the family).

Chapter 7 discusses the language of the anointed, which often implies a cosmic, god-like viewpoint. Examples are also given of verbal inflation, e.g. the over-use of ‘-phobia’, ‘violence’ and ‘hopelessness’. The anointed are given to denigrating not only their opponents but also the general public as benighted, insane, etc.

Chapter 8 looks at the impact of ideology on the legal system.

Chapter 9 articulates Sowell’s view of the ideology of the anointed (picking out the most salient features of the contrasts listed in Chapter 5):

• problems exist only because people lack wisdom or virtue (which the anointed will supply);

• evolved traditions or systemic processes are merely social constructs, and are to be replaced with rational solutions provided by the anointed;

• social causation is intentional and condemnation is the appropriate response to negative situations;

• the government should impose the vision of the anointed on the people;

• opponents are intellectually or morally deficient.

Sowell concludes that:

After the vision of the anointed was given increasing scope in the education and public policy of the United States and other Western societies ... the social degeneration became palpable ... – declining educational standards, rising crime rates, broken homes, soaring rates of teenage pregnancy, growing drug usage, and unprecedented levels of suicide among adolescents. This social devastation was not due to poverty, for the material standard of living was rising substantially ... It was not due to repression, for an unprecedented variety of new “rights” emerged ... to liberate people from the constraints of the law while they were being liberated from social constraints by the spread of “nonjudgmental” attitudes. Neither was this social degeneration due to the disruption of war of natural catastrophes ... It was instead an era of self-inflicted wounds. (p.260)

And he warns that the residual constraints of traditional values are receding into the past. Which brings us back to the London riots.

Similar viewpoint in this article in City Journal by Howard Hussock, "Nathan Glazer’s Warning:Social policy often does more harm than good, says one of the last of the original neocons". It references Jane Jacobs, and makes specific mention of urban architecture and the life of cities.

Any social policy, he writes in Limits, must be judged against “the simple reality that every piece of social policy substitutes for some traditional arrangement, whether good or bad, a new arrangement in which public authorities take over, at least in part, the role of the family, of the ethnic and neighborhood group, of voluntary associations.” In doing so, Glazer continues, “social policy weakens the position of these traditional agents and further encourages needy people to depend on the government for help rather than on the traditional structures. This is the basic force behind the ever growing demand for more social programs and their frequent failure to satisfy our hopes.”

Glazer goes further still, asserting that “the breakdown of traditional modes of behavior is the chief cause of our social problems.” This means that it might often be better for government not to get involved in social policy at all. “I am increasingly convinced,” he writes, “that some important part of the solution to our social problems lies in traditional practices and traditional restraints. Since the past is not recoverable, what guidance can this possibly give? It gives two forms of guidance: first, it counsels hesitation in the development of social policies that sanction the abandonment of traditional practices.” Such a view recalls Moynihan’s much-maligned observation that “benign neglect” might help poor blacks more than the War on Poverty did. But Glazer also offers an alternative: “Second, and perhaps more helpful, it suggests that the creation and building of new traditions, or new versions of old traditions, must be taken more seriously as a requirement of social policy itself.”

The Glazerian status quo ante—the sometimes informal institutions that we replace at our peril—includes the unplanned city and the architecture that it spawns.

Nevertheless, Glazer supports free healthcare - the lack of it in the USA is a disincentive to take up employment.

E. L. Jones Seasons and Prices

I picked up this 1964 work second-hand and read it with great pleasure. People wrote so much better in those days. There’s an old world charm about a book that can unselfconsciously use the word nutter (i.e. somebody gathering hazel nuts). The subtitle is The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History, and the focus is mainly on Southern England and the Midlands. The impact of the weather on farming is a terribly complicated area, and Jones does very well to extract any generalisations from it. As he says, apart from really extreme weather events, the weather that’s good for one type of farming or one type of soil can be bad for another, so fluctuations tend to cancel out in national statistics, while local histories are too specific to yield any patterns.

Price fluctuations are also very hard to relate to the weather – when communications were poor and imports limited by the Corn Laws, farmers’ losses in bad seasons tended to be compensated by scarcity prices.

Jones’ approach is mostly discursive. He shows how different types of farming are affected by the weather – what sorts of weather at particular points in the farming year can crucially affect success, and how changing practices over time have helped to dampen down the impact of weather conditions. He discusses the gradual shift of grain growing in England from the low-lying clays, where wet summers were disastrous, to the uplands, once these were improved by the new rotations. But he mainly concentrates on livestock farming. For instance he describes the flexibility of pig farming in response to adverse conditions, because of the short breeding cycle and the wide variety of possible feedstuffs. He discusses liver rot in sheep. He shows the impact of the weather on the production of feed, including the unreliability of turnips in the face of winter frosts before the introduction of the swede.

Something that really engaged me was the way he began his survey of different types of farming by looking at the small harvests of the countryside, what he calls the ferae naturae, such as pigeons and rabbits; primroses, holly and mistletoe to sell; crab apples and other hedgerow fruit; and sticks for the fire. He writes as a countryman, and as he says, “Not so long ago the countryman was the ordinary man” (p.29).

In the final part of the book, he gives a summary of most years from 1728 to 1911. That reminded me that there are particular years remembered in Scottish tradition for their extreme weather. There are several mentions in School of Scottish Studies recordings (online, Tobar an Dualchais) of the year of the short corn (search for ‘short corn’), some time in the mid 19th century – possibly 1868 if the weather was the same as in England. A summer drought stunted the straw, but fortunately the winter was mild so there was grass for the beasts. Also on the Tobar website, Andrew Gibson, a shepherd, talks about his experience of the hard winter of 1916-1917, and he reads from the diary of another shepherd, William Laidlaw, describing a severe storm in May 1887 (search for ‘Andrew Gibson’). Jones also has a few remarks (p.93) on the hardiness of blackface sheep and their ability to survive for weeks under snowdrifts.

Next stop has to be volume 2 of the Compendium of Scottish Ethnology - Farming and the Land. I’ve been meaning to get my teeth into this monster anyway. There’s a section on the environment, which will presumably cover this sort of ground.

Lord Franklin

(Reposted from my old blog.)

Twas homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.
                                                                   

With a hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek a passage around the pole
Where we poor sailors do sometimes go.
                                                                     

Through cruel hardships they vainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove
Only the Eskimo in his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through
                                                                       

To Baffin Bay where the whale fishes blow.
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Or Franklin alone where his seamen do dwell. 
                                                                         

And now my burden it gives me pain
For long lost Franklin I would sail the main
Ten thousand pounds would I freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin do live.

[The 'burden' is, of course, the lyric of the song, 'carried' by the melody.]

There are versions of the (traditional) lyrics at various places on the web. Russell Potter's Lord Franklin is close to the words above, as I recall them, sung by John Renbourn (on A Maid in Bedlam?), which is the definitive rendering for me. For the melody, there's a Lord Franklin midi at The Great Canadian Tunebook.

Lord John Franklin led an ill-fated expedition in 1845 with two ships to find a North-West Passage through the Canadian Arctic. The expedition became locked in the ice, some of the crew surviving for three years. The search for the lost expedition, organised by Franklin's wife, Jane, was legendary. The traces that were found told a story of horrors. But the folk tradition lingers instead on the moment of hope, the longing and waiting for the news that never came, of Franklin and his crew perhaps alive amongst the Esquimaux.

There's a great generosity of spirit in the song – it's not forgotten that so many ordinary seamen were lost too. I love the way it blends the sailors' point of view with that of Jane Franklin. It's not homoerotic, to my mind. Jane Franklin had accompanied her husband on an earlier expedition (to Tasmania or Van Dieman's Land), so she can naturally be portrayed speaking with a crewman's voice. It's about her love, but the strange and defamiliarising thing is that her love becomes the type of men's devotion to a leader.

Channel 4 did a decent (though, as always with TV, needlessly spun out) documentary on the search for the North-West Passage not long ago, and they have an excellent North-West Passage website. There's a biography of Lady Jane Franklin at the Archives Hub (UK college and university archives).

Captain Wedderburn's Courtship

When I saw this article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8714235/Italian-art-experts-accused-of-censoring-phallic-fresco.html about a 13th century painting of a tree with naughty bits growing on it, I was reminded of ‘Captain Wedderburn's Courtship’ (Child Ballad 46, Roud Folk Song Index 36). In the version that Jean Redpath sings, one of the things the lady asks for as she tries to buy time is “winter fruit that in December grew”, and her abductor answers this riddling demand correctly with the words, “My father has some winter fruit that in December grew.”



The Laird o Roslin's dochter walked through the woods her lane
And met wi Captain Wedderburn, a servant tae the King.
Says he untae his servin man, "Were't nae against the law
I'd tak her tae my ain bed and lay her at the waa."


"I'm walking here my lane," she said, "amang my faither's trees
And you maun let me walk my lane, kind sir, now if you please.
The supper bell it will be rung, and I'll be missed awa
So I'll no lie intae yer bed at either stock or waa."


Says he, "My bonnie lady, I pray gie me yer hand
And you'll hae drums and trumpets always at your command
And fifty men tae guard ye wi, that weel their swords can draw,
So we'll baith lie in ae bed, and ye'll lie at the waa."


"Oh haud awa fae me, kind sir, I pray let go my hand.
The supper bell it will be rung, I maun nae langer stand.
My faither will nae supper tak if I am missed awa
So I'll no lie intae yer bed at either stock or waa."


"My name is Captain Wedderburn, my name I'll ne'er deny
And I command ten thousand men upon yon mountain high.
If yer faither and his men were here, o them I'd stand nae awe
But I'd tak ye tae my ain bed, and lay ye at the waa."


Then he lap off his milk-white steed and set the lady on
And aa the way he gae'd on fute and held her by the hand.
He held her by the middle jimp for fear that she would faa
Sayin, "I'll tak ye tae my ain bed, and lay ye at the waa."


He's ta'en her tae his lodgin-hoose, the landlady looked ben
Sayin, "Mony's a pretty lady in Edinburgh I've seen,
But sicna bonnie lady is nae intae it at aa
So mak for her a fine down bed and lay her at the waa."


"Oh haud awa fae me, kind sir, I pray ye lat me be
For I'll no lie intae yer bed till I get dishes three.
It's dishes three ye maun dress me, gin I should eat them aa
Afore I'll lie intae yer bed at either stock or waa.


"For my supper I maun hae a chicken withoot a bane,
An for my supper I maun hae a cherry withoot a stane,
An for my supper I maun hae a bird withoot a gaw
Afore I'll lie intae yer bed at either stock or waa."


"When the chicken's in the shell, I'm shair it has nae bane,
And when the cherry's in the bloom, I wat it has nae stane.
The doo she is a genty bird, and flees withoot a gaw,
So we'll baith lie in ae bed, and ye'll be at the waa."


"Oh haud awa fae me, kind sir, I pray ye gie me ower
For I'll no lie intae yer bed till I get presents fower.
It's presents fower ye maun gie me, and that is twa an twa
Afore I'll lie intae yer bed at either stock or waa.


"I maun hae some winter fruit that in December grew,
And I maun hae a silken goon that waft gaed never through,
A sparrow's horn, a priest unborn this nicht tae jine us twa
Afore I'll lie intae yer bed at either stock or waa."


"My faither has some winter fruit that in December grew,
My mither has a silken goon that waft gaed never through.
A sparrow's horn ye sune would fund - there's ane on ilka claw
An twa upon the gavel sit, and ye shall hae them aa.


"The priest he stauns withoot the yett just ready tae come in,
Nae man can say that he was born, nae man unless he sin,
For he was hale cut frae his mither's side and fae the same lat faa,
So we'll baith lie in ae bed, and ye'll lie at the waa."


Oh little did that lady think that morning whan she rase
That this was for tae be the last o aa her maiden days,
But noo there's no within the realm tae be found a blyther twa
For noo she's Mistress Wedderburn, and she lies at the waa.

The bird withoot a gaw is the dove, because according to Medieval bestiaries, it had no gall bladder, hence no bile, hence its gentleness.

In a box-bed, the stock is "The outer edge ... the wooden rail at the front over which one climbs into bed ..." (The Scottish National Dictionary, s.v. stock n1 sense 4 http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/). Capt. Wedderburn is offering the lady the more comfortable, less draughty, position against the wall.