I watched Notre Dame burning last night, along with a great many others, I am sure. Of course it can be described as a tragedy, but three things struck me.
First, almost no one mentioned it is a church. Its role as a tourist attraction was mentioned time and again. Its architectural significance was stressed. Its role in the French psyche was also to the fore. But its function as a church - which is what it actually is - was almost ignored.
Second, the tears that flowed in Paris might have been of regret, but many who shed them have probably not been into Notre Dame for years. I happen to live very near a magnificent cathedral. Most people in Ely rarely go near it, although entrance is free for all residents. The regret might have been from ignoring the place.
Third, of course I would not have wished that this happened, but the fire reminds us that all of this existence, and all that we make and do is temporary. It is literally the case that nothing lasts forever. Except, perhaps, our legacy. A lot of carbon was emitted last night. A lot more will be in the inevitable rebuilding. I am not saying there should not be a rebuild. I am suggesting that if our legacy is entropy then we need to consider what the value of our temporary activities really is.
Doing what we really value is important. As is appreciating it. And understanding what it is that motivated it matters.
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Beautifully put. Hopefully this makes people reflect on making sure that we acquire goods of the soul (knowledge, skill, love, friendship, aesthetic enjoyment, self-esteem, and honor) over external goods (possessions). As always it has been said before by the Ancient Greek Philosophers (Aristotle in this case), we would do well to reintroduce their study into our education system.
And on this topic https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html?utm_source=swissmiss&utm_campaign=9c787c57a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2660ad4d17-9c787c57a8-393324789
[…] Jahnke is right: this is a fundamental flaw at the heart of modern accounting. I have said this morning that nothing lasts forever, and I stand by that. It's wise to realise that's true. But to assume […]
What I find interesting is that it looks as though some sort of building works may be implicated in the cause of the fire.
How many times have we seen this – from the Cutty Sark to Windsor Castle and even to the awful tragedy of Grenfell.
Something is try to talk to us. There is a valid message in all of this.
I work in the public sector as you may know, and our safety standards are quite high – sure we make mistakes and sometime over look things.
But we also hire a lot of private contractors who use non-trained staff or say get plumbers to double up as gas fitters to sign off work. We’ve watched private contractors go on roofs without safety lines or walk about on site without PPE.
What I’m suggesting is that we live in world that is constantly trying to spend as little money as possible to get a good result.
It’s stupidity writ large.
You are so right in this. Public works take ages to do these days because they use the minimum of personnel to do the work. One can, for example, drive for miles through motorway roadworks on a working day and marvel at the lack of activity. The costs of the pollution and stress caused by the accompanying rush hour traffic jams must be huge.
On a personal note, Notre Dame is a terrible tragedy. It will require public action to organise and oversee it’s restoration which, hopefully, would be sooner rather than later.
The public sector are one of the problems as you tend to put price, i.e. cheapness, as the main or indeed only consideration when appointing contractors or awarding contracts. If you needed heart surgery would you even consider the cheapest offer? Almost certainly not. Just as I have rejected quotes for insurance on the grounds they were so much cheaper, and often from someone not well known, that there would turn out to be a catch if anything did happen.
Tim Rideout says:
“The public sector are one of the problems as you tend to put price, i.e. cheapness, as the main or indeed only consideration when appointing contractors or awarding contracts.”
This has been a very effective way in which a centralising government has cemented its control. It is frequently ineffective to choose the cheapest tender, but government has insisted that local government do this irrespective of the consequences. Often the contractor simply ramps up the price once the project is underway and the contractors have better lawyers at their disposal so they can get away with it. Or, like Carillion, they just can’t do the business and collapse having pillaged the profits from the government budget.
It’s not been very clever and it is still going on.
Tim
You are strangely right and wrong at the same time so you deserve an answer.
Firstly look at current procurement rules (EU or otherwise). As far as I am concerned, the procurement process itself is predicated on the fact that we cannot be trusted to purchase goods and services because we are supposedly choosing contractors on the basis of favouritism and ‘back handers’ .
Apparently it is not right to find a reliable contractor who does good work and does not rip us off like you and I might as private persons. We have to go to tender blah blah. The whole thing is based on distrust. It is assumed that without procurement, we would behave fraudulently.
There are also tremendous risks in procurement where unsuccessful bidders can drag you into court if they feel aggrieved so a whole load of ‘back – covering’ follows on.
And let us not forget where the public sector is capitalised from: Her Majesty’s Government which (1) has for far too long sought efficiencies in it operations based on faulty inducted thinking from the private sector (the private sector saves money in order to pass it onto managers and chiefly investors – the public sector does not have share holders) and (2) austerity – which has brought some of the worst cuts to the public sector since WW2.
Denuded budgets mean denuded contracts. The Tory Government think that the world is divided into two factions – the public sector (PS) and the private sector and never the twain shall meet.
This is rubbish. We in the PS make extensive use of private sector service providers – there already is a mixed economy of provision. Austerity has therefore hurt the private sector and the public sectors just as much.
But the bottom line is Health & Safety. The built environment (I am a housing developer) is dominated by the CDM 2015 Regulations (Construction Design Management) and this has done much to help those who work in construction to come home after work safely.
There is no excuse therefore for any so-called contractors not to issue safety gear and insist that their workers work safely no matter how cheap the contracts are. It just so happens the the private contractors we work with sometimes make that choice themselves to increase revenue – something we are quick to nip in the bud in no uncertain terms.
We have purchased a number of completed housing schemes to add to our new build stock and every time we check them at handover, we find problems with the standards of the drains, plumbing and more seriously the gas installation where corners have been cut. These schemes are dangerous and we have to insist on them being rectified before handover.
Standards in construction decline because for example there are not enough qualified workers. I’ve seen schools with vocational facilities mothballed because of austerity budgets; the Tories cut back on funding for vocational courses like bricklaying for example at colleges. So existing plumbers receive a quick course on gas installation and are all of a sudden are ‘qualified’ gas installers; bricklaying goes up in price because there are too few of them laying.
The public sector has become a portal for stupid austerity and stupid ideas about ‘efficiency’. That is where you maybe right.
For too long we have said ‘You can’t throw money at problems’. It’s bollocks. For too long we’ve actually been taking money away from problems. It does not work.
It is time to reinvest and put the money back in. That is what we must do.
I agree with you. Public procurement is very bureaucratic, thus costly for the bidders, and involves an awful lot of arse-covering. Back in 2009 the Local Authority consortium in England decided to have a tender for maps, previously only supplied by OS. We are a tiny map company but teamed up with Getmapping to try to bid for the small scale mapping lot. So that was a 50 page initial proposal with specially created samples for the pre-qualification round plus interview in London. Then having got onto the short list (of 5 I think), more samples, another 50 page proposal and a couple of hours interview and Q&A session in London, then sitting around for a couple of months and then the news that they had decided to call it all off and not proceed. Had we won the contact it would have been worth maybe £50,000 a year for 5 years. So the time and cost involved in the bidding was really out of all proportion to the value of the business. What that sort of thing actually does is simply to eliminate all small / local business from consideration and leave the only bidders as the big corporates who have the lawyers, bidding team, etc that are actually able and willing to go through all that. These days as a two man team doing mostly business to business maps I never bother with Government tenders as I just don’t have either the time or inclination to go through the hassle.
I hope whomsoever it falls to, to remedy the damage to Notre Dame, will at least consider doing something a little more imaginative than simply trying to reproduce a copy of what has been lost.
As Richard implies it’s original function as a place of worship is largely lost, though it’s original significance as an edifice representing the power, wealth and vanity of the Church in society remains intact.
Andy, I have to say I think that is a bit mean-spirited. I very much doubt that the stonemasons, carpenters, etc that toiled on the project for 200 years, or indeed the donors that paid for it, considered they were simply building a vanity project. The early middle ages were short sharp and brutish for the ordinary person, but also deeply religious in a way that I think is very hard to conceive of where we are now. Especially later on then some big cathedrals, or in many cases more secular buildings, were indeed vanity projects, but society had changed by then. Inequalities had increased, overall wealth was much higher, and a considerable degree of greed and cynicism had taken over much of organised religion at the top levels. I would say something like the ‘new’ St Peters in Rome was almost a 100% vanity project. This involved demolishing a perfectly good 4th Century Roman basilica simply because it wasn’t grand enough for the Pope’s taste – I think that project was conceived under the Borgia Pope and then carried out by his successors and paid for by a semi-compulsory Peter’s Pence tax that was one of the triggers for the Reformation. But as I say that was 300 years later than Notre Dame and the other big medieval cathedrals and abbeys. Bringing things closer to home our own Holyrood Abbey was founded by David I in gratitude for God saving his life when he was nearly gored to death by a stag in what is now Holyrood Park. He had been trying to kill the stag with arrows so you can’t blame the poor animal for being aggrieved. Anyway a cross is supposed to have appeared in the sky and frightened off the stag. I will give David the benefit of the doubt that he believed what he thought happened and he could very easily have spent his money (or the peoples money) on his own palace and comforts rather than an abbey.
I hate to say it, but most English cathedrals are Norman for a reason – to intimidate the subjected
Timothy Rideout says:
“Andy, I have to say I think that is a bit mean-spirited.”
Well, Timothy I think the churches have always been rather more than a little mean spirited. At best, very selective in their generosity to, and care for, humanity. And from time to time positively vile. Power corrupts, even when it is based on fantasy.
Hmmm – When Edward I wanted to subjugate and intimate the Welsh he built castles and not cathedrals. The medieval English cathedrals / abbeys are part of a Europe wide pattern that saw very similar buildings appearing at roughly the same time all the way from Italy and Spain to Southern Scotland. There might be some particular Norman element at work in England but I would say it would be wrong to say that the main driving force was a Norman attempt to intimidate Anglo-saxon locals. That totally fails to explain why e.g. Koeln Cathedral, Milano, Barcelona, Strasbourg, etc were all going up at the same time. You can pretty much time the end of this great wave of building too, to 1347 and the arrival in Europe of the Black Death.
Let me take my local example then
We had a Cathedral before the Normans came
But mysteriously they thought it necessary to build a much more impressive one
Why, if not to establish power?
“We had a Cathedral before the Normans came
But mysteriously they thought it necessary to build a much more impressive one
Why, if not to establish power?”
Orthodox groupthink to blame I suggest.
Had they instead built a theme park and leisure centre and decent affordable housing they would have had a much easier time of it. I think the Normans may have been a people of bad intent. The evidence certainly points that way.
While, in West Sussex, the Saxon cathedral was at Selsey. The Normans moved the see to Chichester – probably because, like the Romans, they had conquered the country.
The Saxon cathedral is now beneath the waves – apparently its stones are nearly half a mile out to sea. It’s one of the possible candidates for the Drowned Cathedral, la Cathedrale Engloutie, of which you can still sometimes hear the bells when a storm comes in.
It is said that Chichester cathedral inspired the poet John Keats to write ‘The Eve of St Agnes.’ Or the inspiration may have come from the early nineteenth century church at Stansted, which was built by a man who was interested in the conversion of the Jews. Keats probably walked to Stansted from Bedhampton on Chichester Harbour to attend the consecration. He’d have walked along the road about fifty yards from our house.
Wasn’t expecting this when I scrolled through Twitter this evening! Very thoughtful, topical comment. Reminds me of my mentor when I was studying theology at uni, he took the view that churches were effectively monuments to man and all ought to be demolished. I expect he’d be quite pleased with events in Paris.
So I have only been there once, almost 20 years ago. My wife and I went to Paris for our honeymoon (from the US) and randomly arrived in Paris on 9/11, arriving at a small hotel and switching on the TV to see planes flying into buildings. Everyone was as nice as could be to all the Americans dealing with canceled planes, flowers at the embassy, and a day or two later I was at a candle lit service for victims at Notre Dame. So it’s not just a church but a major active working church. I wish all our friends there the best recovery be it a restoration, a reinvigoration or a reinvention.
I watched both British and French reports of the fire.
The French reporting was quite different, especially last night (Tuesday), as they mainly stressed the loss of a church for the local congregation and the rescue of many artefacts belonging to it.
They showed processions by people praying ang singing all night, they showed the vigils all around the Seine near l’île de la Cité.
Notre Dame’s pilgrims were all around her like a blanket smothering the fire so she could be saved.
I think the difference in reporting may be because for other countries Notre Dame is just somewhere to visit, a place where you try and imagine the characters described by Victor Hugo, as you visit other sites while in Paris.
For the French, for me, a severely lapsed catholic, it is much more than that, although it is also that.
I find my eyes are still filling up as I write this, emotions are what drives our feelings towards Notre Dame.
History dominates, a common history for all French people who’ve learnt about the place of that church in all important landmark moments of the country.
From its start at the time when France was being formed out of a myriad of feudal kingdoms, to its present role as a magnificent window of how architectures of all ages and craftsmanship can produce a world renowned beauty.
Notre Dame has become a symbol of France’s attachment to its past, to what shaped it as a single country. Symbols matter. They, too, are spiritual.
I’m not religious, but seeing that congregation mourn their place of worship was distressing.
They associate it with key moments in their life, with feelings of grief or joy, with moments of meditation and communion. We can all feel that in a church, and Notre Dame is a church before anything else, a place of spiritual refuge from the noise of the city, even for atheists.
It will be repaired, but some of its spirit has gone up in smoke and won’t be replaced, we know that, and that’s what’s hard to accept, that’s what’s making us angry.
The company in charge of the work, a private contractor, is already saying they did nothing wrong, workers were all out when the fire caught.
The private company in charge of security is saying there was a fire alarm shortly before the fire, they sent people to check in the roof area where the alarm went off “but, you know, didn’t see anything at that spot and it would have taken hours and hours to inspect the whole roof area”… I heard him say that live on TV, and I swore …it will probably take decades and millions to repair, not even replace, what was lost because you know…”hours and hours”!
Lessons will have to be learnt, but like after the Glasgow Library, the Reims cathedral, the Nantes cathedral, they will be forgotten again.
Something about not really being properly responsible or capable of thinking.
Thanks for this Marie
Marie Thomas says:
“Notre Dame has become a symbol of France’s attachment to its past, to what shaped it as a single country. Symbols matter. They, too, are spiritual.”
I’m sorry for your pain Marie (and others many) who watched a potent symbol going up in flames. I struggle to think of any edifice in the UK the destruction of which would rouse such feelings in me.
Probably only the NHS.
I find it curious and perhaps significant that the Pope praises the firefighters and Macron promises to rebuild. I’m not clear about what is going on there. Macron seems to be rather worried, currently, by a lack of funds to support the people of France in the manner to which they are accustomed. But rebuilding a cathedral can be done just like that ? Hmmmm… speaks volumes doesn’t it.
If this fine piece of historic architecture is such a potent secular monument it might be the appropriate time to buy it for the nation while it is likely to be available at a good price. (?)
@Andy Crow
The Pope has no choice but to show solidarity, very publicly, with what is still a very wealthy, and as a result, influential Catholic Church in France.
By praising the firefighters rather than pushing for re-building, the Pope avoids having to offer funding from the Vatican, which might not be allowed by Parliament anyway, as it would be seen as foreign State interference… I’m sure the Vatican is quite happy not to have to ‘close an account’ in order to fund it by the way!
The French Catholic Church is nowhere near as strong as it was in the last century or before, but traditions still a are very powerful social cement there.
The State continues to fund very many restoration and maintenance projects of churches and even subsidises private Catholic education up to university level.
A strange irrational set-up of a secular state still subsidising a Church…yet very clearly and sometimes even confrontationally non clerical.
Just a couple of weeks after the Church was pilloried in the media for paedophilia scandals and cover ups, the Vatican has to be seen to promote the acceptable face of French Catholic traditions: looking after its most famous building in France, loved and valued by almost all French people, no matter what their beliefs or values. It’ll be a welcome distraction…sorry, my chronic cynicism coming through here, can’t be helped.
As for Macron, a fairly recent Catholic convert, he probably wants to use this well-publicised fact and this dramatic event to boost his ability to impose a variety of social and political reforms in a very conservative country.
I have to declare bias, I am not a Macron fan, nor do I support most of his politics.
I watched his well rehearsed speech last night, he sounded like a good boy who learnt his poem by heart, and delivered it with the solemn and pompous intonation of a 10 year old going for first prize…nasty me says.
Still, many will fall for his over-emotional appeal in which he cleverly mixed European elections, Notre-Dame restoration, but not that many social reforms for those who need it most…a few, I suppose, but the bulk of the capitalised and speculative wealth will remain untouched and mostly untaxed.
Tinkering at the edges, I’d call it, but I’m prepared to wait and see, considering my dislike of the man’s political leanings get in the way of my fairness.
Notre-Dame is maintained through public funding, it is a building plot of the Vatican in France with a building in the care the French state. It could become totally state owned, but I can hear French Catholics plan barricades from here!
I am struck by how quickly private individuals have come forward with millions of Euros to help with the re-build. Is it churlish to wonder why there is still poverty in France, Britain and other “advanced” economies with huge private wealth?
It’s a church building not a church. The church is the congregation. As the building burned that congregation included many atheists.
I am sad for the disaster of the loss of much of Notre Dame, for the French people, but not because it is/was a church – not a matter of importance to me.
But would it not have been nice if it had been the Houses of Parliament in UK which had been burnt into inexistance, dragging the incumbents from the 16th century into the 21st century., just like all of the rest of us? We might have built another better building in Birmingham with a circular chamber and electronic voting.
I suspect any agree with you
Personally I just think we should knock the place down and start again
It’s fake after all, in almost every way
I gather the conspiracy theorists are circling Notre Dame pointing the finger of blame at whomsoever they disapprove.