How the crazies get away with more

My paternal grandfather, who died just before I started this blog almost nine years ago, had a vast store of proverbs. Two I remember and have tried to live by: “Never underestimate the value of being the only sober person in the room” and “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” (I may have even dropped the latter in a department meeting this week.)

A strange coincidental parallel from this week that brought those to mind:

First, on Substack, cartoonist Owen Cyclops, whose work has inspired ramblings here before, published a short essay on the 1970s Illuminatus! trilogy. I am mostly familiar with these books for first presenting a kind of grand theory-of-everything conspiracy narrative, a major node the present-day conspiracist worldview has grown out of, but Owen notes three interesting but overlooked “freak concepts.”

The first—and I’m not sure how it fits into Illuminatus! since I haven’t read it—concerns one of my favorite historical weirdos, Emperor Norton I. Emperor Norton was a failed businessman turned eccentric who declared himself Emperor of the United States (and later Protector of Mexico) and benevolently “ruled” San Francisco for a few decades. He published imperial proclamations through a local black newspaper (once banning the use of “Frisco” as a nickname for the city) and issued his own currency. He was so odd and beloved that the locals played along and his money was honored in a lot of establishments.

Owen compares Norton and his Norton bucks to a group of contemporary anarchists in Boston who tried the same thing. They were, after the manner of so many 19th-century radicals, utterly serious people, and were arrested the moment they started trying to use their own currency. Owen:

The point of this dichotomy is that Emperor Norton actually did the exact plan that anarchists on the other side of the country also attempted and failed—but he got away with it, specifically because no one took him seriously.

The anarchists presented themselves as serious, and thus were treated seriously. Emperor Norton was viewed as non-serious, and therefore was able to accomplish far more than his serious counterparts.

Second, YouTuber Feral Historian, in the second part of a new series on Planet of the Apes—Pierre Boulle’s novel and various adaptations—notes the tension in the first movie between the apes’ consensus dogma and the challenge Charlton Heston’s Taylor poses to it: a challenge that provokes suppression by the authorities. In a wry aside, referring to the charges brought against ape scientists Zira and Cornelius, he says they are

nonsensical, but state accusations against dissidents often are. . . . All that is required is a story that lets it be wrapped up and disposed of. At least when it comes to polite company. The crazies can say whatever they want, that’s why they’re positioned as crazies. Sometimes it’s why we self-position as crazies. You can get away with more that way.

Lear’s fool comes to mind. Perhaps there is still a place for such—or, better, as long as there is a place, there is hope. A comfort to those of us who have always used humor as a shield, and encouragement to those of us not taken seriously. Never underestimate the value of being the only person in the room with a sense of humor.

And to conclude with another proverb: “The truth is often spoken in jest.”

“Disproving” Lord of the Flies

I’m not sure how many people would say William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is one of their “favorite” novels, but its persistence on school reading lists and its resulting popular familiarity has given it a lot of influence. It has also attracted criticism, especially from those who, in our sentimental age, find it too “depressing” or “pessimistic.” The deeper critics will sometimes invoke a Rousseauian image of man as “basically good” and condemn Golding for his refusal to acknowledge this. I don’t have much to say in response to this; whether you believe in original sin or not, if you can’t see the potential in yourself to succumb to Lord of the Flies-like pressures, Golding’s book is the medicine you need.

A popular recent line of critique I’ve seen—especially on social media—is that a real-life incident from shortly after the book’s publication “disproves” or shows it to be unrealistic. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys ran away from their boarding school in a stolen boat and, after being stranded on a desert island, lived fifteen months. They cooperated in finding food and shelter, established orderly routines, and, when finally discovered by a passing Australian fisherman, were in good health and high spirits.

I first recall seeing this argument around the time this Guardian piece came out in May 2020 (rough timing for someone flogging a “hopeful” history of mankind), but it comes up in cycles on Substack. It is usually presented as decisive, a gotcha for Golding and all the doomers who like his novel or at least found it compelling food for thought.

This is a weak argument and a poor comparison. The situation of the Tongan castaways is only superficially similar to Golding’s scenario—basically the only parallels are the school-age boys on an uninhabited Pacific island. The scale and circumstances are fundamentally different.

Consider: in the real-life incident, six teenage boys from similar backgrounds who were already friends planned and voluntarily ran away from their school. They brought preexisting community and shared goals to the island with them. Both collaboration and negotiation occurred at the level of intimate friendship.

In Lord of the Flies, dozens of boys, only some of whom actually know each other, are thrown together by happenstance when their plane is brought down in an apparent nuclear war. Their ages vary much more, they come from different backgrounds—the class and regional difference evinced by Piggy’s pronunciation of asthma is a significant repeated joke—and the only bonds they share are either created deliberately after the crash, as in the friendship of Ralph and Piggy or the entire community itself, or small preexisting cliques, like Jack and his crew of choirboys. Loyalty to these groups has to be subordinated to the whole, competing interests debated and judged, and peace maintained between strangers and enemies.

Golding is quite clearly concerned with the artificiality of society, which, to rise above the level of a mere organic group of friends, must combine and coordinate multiple such groups. The island setting is both a spoof of Victorian Robinsonades, novels in which decent chaps effortlessly remake civilization on remote islands, and a jab at the Enlightenment “state of nature” idea that undergirded them—and modern optimistic critics of the novel.

There may be legitimate lines of criticism to explore regarding Lord of the Flies—although not regarding its craft or magnificent science-fiction atmosphere—or the philosophical assumptions and worldview Golding expresses in it, but this isn’t one. The real-life Tongan boys’ adventure, as fascinating and dramatic as it is, bears more similarity to Huckleberry Finn than Lord of the Flies.

Rereading and maturity

A few years ago an episode of the late lamented Great Books podcast on For Whom the Bell Tolls convinced me to give Ernest Hemingway another shot someday. Hemingway’s appearance as an important side character in Tim Powers’s latest, The Mills of the Gods, pushed me to start now.

I spent years hating Hemingway, all because of A Farewell to Arms. I read it in high school at the age of sixteen or seventeen, probably because I had discovered All Quiet on the Western Front and wanted another hard-hitting novel about combat. A Farewell to Arms, with its ambulance driver narrator and minimal behind-the-lines action—during a retreat, no less—was not that book. I might have finished the book merely disappointed were it not for the romantic plot between protagonist Frederic Henry and nurse Catherine Barkley.

My seventeen-year old response to Hemingway’s novel was essentially: This idiot gets a woman pregnant, bails on the army, and expects us to feel sorry for him! Everything bad that happens to him is his fault!

The book miffed me so much that for the next twenty-five years the only other Hemingway I read was The Old Man and the Sea, which I liked. But I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of my own favorite writers loved Hemingway and often mentioned how much they had learned from reading and rereading his work. Elmore Leonard was the most important of these; I couldn’t shake off his opinion the way I did the literary critics and lit professors in their modish sinecures.

Now I’m rereading A Farewell to Arms. There are no words to describe how differently it affects me at forty-two.

I missed all the implicit, unstated details that make the story affecting. At seventeen I took Henry and Catherine to be immoral, simpliciter. Now I see that Henry, for all his experience and understanding of the war, is hopelessly naive. He doesn’t understand that his feelings for Catherine are pure childish infatuation. He begs her for sex and doesn’t realize she’s only caving to the continuous pressure he’s putting on her. He doesn’t see that she merely feels sorry for him. His neediness and even his contentment when things go his way are pathetic. Even after she has become pregnant and he feebly tries to plan for the future, she is standoffish and reserves part of herself from him. A telling moment about halfway through:

“Wine is a grand thing,” I said. “It makes you forget all the bad.”
“It’s lovely,” said Catherine. “But it’s given my father gout very badly.”
“Have you a father?”
“Yes,” said Catherine. “He has gout. You won’t ever have to meet him.”

Henry hasn’t even bothered to find out about Catherine’s family up to this point and he misses entirely the import of “You won’t ever have to meet him.” Catherine sees no future in this. Whether she has plans for later or simply feels trapped, she’s waiting him out.

Every other character sees these things but Henry. Most importantly, the novel does, too. A Farewell to Arms is narrated by an older Henry with a decade or more of perspective on these events. (Reading the baseball news in the hospital he notes for the reader of 1929: “Babe Ruth was a pitcher then playing for Boston.”) The novel’s profound pathos is rooted in irony. The reader, through the old Henry’s more mature narration, sees what Henry doesn’t: his situation, the problems he’s creating with Catherine, how she actually feels about him despite his fervent crush.

Henry is whining about problems he caused himself? That’s the point. Benefit of hindsight. He makes terrible choices, but unlike at seventeen, I sympathize, because I can recognize the foolishness that the young Henry can’t. Anyone who has ever remembered youthful sin and bad choices—especially in a doomed or one-sided relationship—has felt the same pang. A Farewell to Arms evokes it with agonizing truthfulness. This is what I was too immature to detect in high school.

A few years ago when I read The Great Gatsby for the first time I wondered why it was ever assigned to high schoolers. What could a fifteen- or sixteen-year old hope to get out of a book, as I put it later, “of hidden pasts, severed roots, lust, and mountains of regret,” that “depends for its resonance on similarly long, difficult experience”? They are likely not mature enough to get what Fitzgerald is doing. Worse, reading it for symbolism and technique when you’re not ready for the story will flatten and cheapen it if it doesn’t ruin it altogether.

A Farewell to Arms offers precisely that example in my own life. It makes much clearer to me now the role of maturity not only in understanding but in responding rightly to a great novel.

If I’m celebrating people publicly changing their minds this week, I’m glad to admit I was wrong about the novel and Hemingway. I regret that it took me so long to come back to A Farewell to Arms, but I’m glad that I’ve read it now in a time and place where I can get what Hemingway was doing. It’s subtle, understated, and that much more powerfully moving, and even though I know what tragedy is approaching Henry and Catherine, I can’t wait to finish it.

On top of everything else...

In The Book Club’s episode on The Thirty-Nine Steps, which I wrote about two days ago, Dominic Sandbrook describes the trick John Buchan plays on the reader in the first chapter when Scudder, a crank American investigative reporter, reveals to the narrator that the plot he’s uncovered to foment world war is a Jewish conspiracy. This turns out not to be the case, but Sandbrook describes the way some readers—many readers, it would seem—react to Scudder’s revelation when they forget that Scudder is a fictional character: they assume that the author “has left himself down,” in the understated British phrase.

That brought to mind one of the few passages I can remember from The Thanatos Syndrome, the Walker Percy novel with the Robert Ludlum title. (I read The Thanatos Syndrome during our honeymoon, which was a legendarily poor choice for such a happy time.) Near the midpoint of the novel, Dr Tom More visits Father Smith, an eccentric priest living in isolation atop an abandoned firetower in the Louisiana woods. Father Smith, who may have moved beyond eccentricity into insanity, makes More increasingly uncomfortable with his disjointed theological ramblings, and as More tries to open the hatch to leave the exchange reaches its climax:

“My heart sinks. On top of everything else, is he one of those?”

“The Holocaust was a consequence of the sign that could not be evacuated.”
“Right.”
“Who remembers the Ukrainians?”
“True.”
“Let me tell you something, Tom. People have the wrong idea about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as people see it, is a myth.”
Oh my. My heart sinks. On top of everything else, is he one of those? I try harder to open the damn door.

This too turns out to be a misunderstanding of some kind, but I think of this passage often because More’s sinking feeling is all too familiar now.

I almost wrote a post like this four years ago after a certain rapper’s deranged pro-Hitler interview with a well-known paranoiamonger. I didn’t, because I don’t care about that guy and I didn’t really want to address anti-Semitism here at the time, but the moment I saw the headlines I thought the exact words: “On top of everything else, is he one of those?”

And of course I’ve had many, many more occasions to remember that line since. And the groundswell, the anonymous comment-section lurkers and social media cranks, has given way to high-profile media personalities with millions of followers. Someday I’ll write about my realization that subjects I once thought rare and academic have, in fact, returned in new strength. But in the meantime, one hopes for more John Buchans, refusing to conform to such conspiratorial bigotry no matter how widespread.

The scouring of the Shire and unconstitutionalism

Last week YouTuber Feral Historian posted an excellent short reflection on the often-overlooked final conflict in The Lord of the Rings: the Scouring of the Shire. After a brief summary of the ways Frodo and company find the Shire changed upon their return and what they do about it—bold activity rather than passivity being one of the marks left upon them by their journeys—Feral Historian unpacks just what is so devilish about Saruman’s achievements there.

It’s an excellent video with lots of good asides—about bureaucracy, the depersonalization of authority, a bit about historiography, and even the fundamental error of reading racialist meanings into Tolkien’s work—so by all means watch it. It’s well worth your eleven minutes. I want to focus on one important detail.

Feral Historian quotes a famous letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher (Letter 52 in the original edition of The Letters of JRR Tolkien, also quoted in full here), written in November 1943 as Christopher trained at an RAF based:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.

In light of Feral Historian’s analysis, Tolkien’s phrase “‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy” brought to mind Joseph de Maistre’s 1809 Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.

This is a short but dense work of political philosophy, but one of the chief arguments of the Essay is that the only authentic constitutional orders arise organically from a people’s way of life, and that the act of writing the laws down destroys it. Written constitutions lose their authenticity immediately, not, as Rousseau would argue, by being left behind by the march of generations, but by replacing organic and proven institutions with artificial constructions that can be manipulated by the unscrupulous,* and naturally generate more and more “law,” eventually smothering the people. On this point, the Essay is an elaboration of Tacitus’s observation, in a sweeping account of the history of law and its perversion, “Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges”—the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Indisputable.

Let the reader understand.

The Essay was a great challenge to me when I first read it but I think de Maistre is basically correct.** The question is what to do about it—if it is even possible to do anything about it.

As Feral Historian notes near the end of his video, Tolkien’s monarchism is already foreign to American thinking. Devolution and decentralization to the point of actual local self-governance—the kind Saruman sought to vandalize—are already something neither side in bipartisan politics would support since it would mean relinquishing even the possibility of “bossing other men,” as Tolkien puts it elsewhere in his letter. Going as far as de Maistre by stripping written constitutions of the sacred mythology built up around them in favor of “unconstitutionalism”—tradition, courtesy, and custom—would take us from fiction to fantasy.

But one can hope, perhaps.

Watch Feral Historian’s video, and take some time to explore his back catalog. Here’s a bit more about de Maistre and his context. You can read de Maistre’s Essay in its entirety in an 1847 translation here and here. It’s short and to the point and worth reading, even if only to argue about it.

* Hamilton makes a similar argument in Federalist 84, in which he asserts that a clearly elucidated bill of rights would be grist to the mill of legal shenanigans. Naturally I suspect Hamilton of mendacity, but the basic point is sound.

** I have a parable illustrating the basic argument in my head that, ironically, I need to get written down one of these days.

Dialogue, dialect, and expectations

Back at the end of last month I made a dumb joke on Substack that went viral. A classical educator I follow shared this meme, which he captioned “Finally, dealing with the real issues…”

I restacked it and added, on the spur of the moment, “Muse, sing of a guy who was wicked smart…”

I don’t keep close track of my Substack analytics but I think this is now the most widely viewed thing I’ve shared on there. That was May 31st, and June is about to end and I still get multiple notifications a day that someone has liked it or restacked it or—the point of this post—commented on it. And the people commenting on it have made the same highly original joke over and over for a month. Maybe it’s already crossed your mind as you read my silly invocation above:

That should say “wicked smaht.”

I haven’t counted but I’ve gotten at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, versions of that joke. It’s actually given me cause to think, again, about writing dialect.

My abortive series of long-form posts on Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing ended with a single post about dialect. Leonard’s rule: “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.” After examining several long passages from different novels featuring different approaches to writing dialect, I arrived at six general guidelines, my personal approach to the problem. What I think is one of the most important is: “Keep phonetic spelling to a minimum, using it always to suggest a broader pattern that you don’t render.”

I have striven to follow this guideline, letting syntax and vocabulary suggest the way a character pronounces words—so that the reader hears it in his head—rather than spelling the pronunciation out. Heavy use of phonetic spelling becomes difficult to read, distracting, or, at worst, insulting to the dialect being rendered. But.

But sometimes some words are so distinctive to the way a dialect is spoken they become emblematic of that dialect. The result is that writing even a line of dialect speech that does not spell a distinctive word phonetically will be interpreted by the reader as a failure. An unforeseen pitfall, one I fell straight into.

In the 2004 film The Alamo, Billy Bob Thornton’s David Crockett only wears his buckskins and coonskin cap for what amount to PR appearances. When questioned by Jim Bowie about his hat later (“What happened to your cap? Crawl away?”), Crockett confesses to wearing it only because of his popular image: “People expect things.”

A useful point to keep in mind when writing dialect. Even as a joke.

A Lodge in the Wilderness

Last week I reviewed a unique entry in John Buchan’s bibliography—the only children’s book he published in his lifetime. This week John Buchan June continues with another unique item, this one more a curiosity than anything: part novel, part philosophical dialogue, part political treatise, the 1906 book A Lodge in the Wilderness.

The book first introduces us to eccentric multi-millionaire Francis Carey, who after making his fortune in various business and government concerns throughout the British Empire, has established himself in a lavish country house in Kenya called Musuru. Every summer Carey invites eighteen people—nine men and nine women—to join him at Musuru for dinners, hunting, and intellectual conversation about the pressing issues of the day. A Lodge in the Wilderness is an account of one of these events.

Buchan briefly describes all eighteen of Carey’s guests, including a Conservative lord, a big game hunter, an ex-soldier with long experience of the Empire, a journalist, a Jewish financier, and a representative of the intelligence service. The female characters are mostly the wives of influential men but show themselves politically well-connected and informed and, as both Buchan biographers Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan point out, their contributions to Carey’s conversations are taken seriously. Nevertheless, most of the characters are ciphers and, after a chapter or two, become hard to distinguish. They are, as Lownie puts it, “merely mouthpieces for the book’s ideas.”

The two that give the story personality are Hugh Somerville and Lady Flora Brune, apparently based on Buchan himself and Susie Grosvenor, whom he would marry a year after the book’s publication. Hugh and Lady Flora become friends and the first hints of a romance kindle between the two, and their flirtations and conversations, which serve as interstitial episodes between the long dinner-time discussions, provide the most story A Lodge in the Wilderness has to offer.

Over the course of a month or so, Carey treats his guests to lion hunts, tours of his beautiful and seemingly endless mountainside gardens, field trips to missions and other colonial points of interest, and many intensely academic discussions of Empire.

And that’s about all there is to it. Though A Lodge in the Wilderness makes concessions to the novelistic form, especially small episodes of excitement like Hugh’s near-miss during the lion hunt, nothing resolves. I was prepared for this in the philosophical dimension of the book—which can only raise questions and suggest ways forward, and to which I’ll return shortly—but it was disappointing that, having developed Hugh and Lady Flora’s young romance so successfully, they do not get any kind of last-chapter send-off suggesting what will become of their relationship. A rare loose end for Buchan.

This is a reminder that the entire purpose of the book is philosophical and political. Written in Buchan’s early thirties after his return from the Transvaal in South Africa, where he had served as private secretary to colonial governor Lord Milner, A Lodge in the Wilderness is a response to changing policy and cultural attitudes toward the Empire back home. Better attuned critics than I, especially those who were alive at the time, have seen in the book’s characters stand-ins for real-life political figures, not least Cecil Rhodes. Buchan’s goal in the book is to lay out and examine the problems facing the British Empire as it stood during the Edwardian period, charitably work through opposing ideas, and suggest an ideal to strive toward—an ideal both of form and function.

Among the topics of discussion are the political basis of the Empire, its potential future structure and the role subject peoples will play democratically, and even—perhaps most interestingly—the aesthetic effects of imperialism on British culture. All of this is examined in excruciating detail. I wrote above that A Lodge in the Wilderness is “part philosophical dialogue,” and Hugh even reads Plato in the garden at one point, but there is really very little back-and-forth at dinner. The characters mostly make speeches, sometimes reading long poems or newspaper articles aloud to the whole party, with occasional pushback from someone else and an eventual attempt at synthesis. (Hegel is invoked more than once, an infallible sign one is in danger of being bored.)

Buchan seems to have known that not everyone would enjoy this. Halfway through, Lady Flora tells Hugh, “I do so wish . . . that they wouldn't all talk in paragraphs.” One sympathizes, as well as appreciating the self-aware laugh.

Some recent readers, to judge by reviews on sites like Goodreads, take some of the characters’ viewpoints as Buchan’s own and object to what they see as promotion of eugenics or a lust for conquest. Buchan, charitable to a fault, allows his characters to have opinions he disagreed with in order to offer a better alternative. His own views are sometimes difficult to parse but a number of important points show through clearly.

The view of the Empire that Buchan presents is benevolent and idealistic but hard to understand in the specifics. Negatively, he explicitly rules out conquest for its own sake, the equation of largeness and territorial size with goodness, the suppression and subordination of subject peoples, and the exploitation of the Empire for profit. Violence in an empire is inevitable but not to be sought out, enjoyed, or glorified. He also makes it clear that any backwardness or primitivism among non-European peoples is due not to race but to culture and opportunity, and he cautions against both denigrating native peoples and exaggerating their primitiveness as unspoiled goodness. He is neither jingo nor Social Darwinist.

What Buchan envisions instead is an ennobling enterprise that will make high moral, spiritual, and even physical demands of the imperialists, who will set an example for the complacent bourgeoisie at home. (Buchan’s critique of the middle class as apathetic and compromised is surprisingly sharp.) The purpose of the Empire is the spread of improvement—technologically, economically, and morally—and the eventual advancement and participation of all the peoples within its reach.

This view is essentially globalist, undergirded by a whiggish view of history. What sets Britain’s apart from other imperial projects, he suggests, is its long accidental development of the rule of law and the importance accorded to liberty. Having come into world power without plan or direction, the Empire is Britain’s opportunity deliberately to spread the good of liberty through order. In a phrase of Chesterton’s—who, no imperialist, would probably disapprove of me using it—the Empire at its best would “make room for good things to run wild.”

All of this should suggest to you that A Lodge in the Wilderness is now almost entirely of historical significance. It’s the only Buchan book I’ve read that I’d call a slog. (It doesn’t help that the cheap paperback I read has numerous text-recognition errors and formatting problems. If you do check this book out, avoid the edition whose cover I used above.) A Lodge in the Wilderness is informative as the dream of empire held by one principled, hopeful, well-intentioned man, and interesting as a strange outlier among Buchan’s fiction, but it is unsatisfying as a novel and will be unrewarding for the casual reader. I’m glad I read it but I very much doubt that I will ever revisit it.

Machine Man and the danger of AI

Max Barry is an Australian sci-fi novelist. My friend JP Burten introduced me to Barry during college when he recommended Jennifer Government, Barry’s satirical near-future comedy in which the world is governed (more or less) by big businesses. I fondly remember reading Barry’s followup, Company, another satire in which an office drone discovers that the company he works for produces nothing—it’s a lab for the publisher of business management books to field-test new techniques. I still think about some of the scenarios Barry came up with for that one.

But the novel that both amused and moved me is Barry’s 2011 Machine Man. The following is a more detailed version of an appeal I made to some of my online students earlier this summer.

Machine Man concerns Charles Neumann, a scientist developing advanced cybernetic prosthetics. One day he loses a leg in a lab accident and, after recovering, builds himself a sophisticated robotic leg. The leg proves so good and, Charles thinks, so superior to his biological leg that he voluntarily amputates the other and replaces it with an identical model.

This begins a cycle of Charles replacing his organic body parts with seemingly more powerful, efficient mechanical ones, tinkering and tweaking as he goes. His physical therapist and love interest, Lola Shanks, looks on in mounting apprehension. In Charles’s final “improvement,” he dispenses with his physical body entirely and ends the novel as a small black box with an output screen for text. LOLA I MISS YOU, he says through the text output. But of course he has sacrificed the gift of embodiment—everything he needs even to touch Lola.

Barry wrote Machine Man when the transhumanist movement, which, in most forms, sought to “improve” humanity by shedding the limited, physical, and human, had temporarily peaked. This is a comedy and Barry has some thematic fun with the names: Charles (from Karl, “man”) Neumann (German: “new man”) and Lola Shanks (an archaic word for “legs”). There is also some corporate satire that I probably scoffed at at the time but that feels increasingly realistic, perhaps even too optimistic.

That Machine Man starts off funny makes the tragedy all the more pointed. I remember the agony of reading Charles’s voiceless LOLA I MISS YOU vividly. I’ve thought about Machine Man a lot since I read it over a decade ago, but never more often than in the last few years as more and more of the writing I grade is instantly recognizable as AI generated. The pity and horror of Charles’s descent fits just as well in the age of increasing AI dependence.

The intellect, I told my students, is one of the things that makes us human. If you’re religious, it is one of the most important parts of the Image of God from Genesis. And every time you outsource your judgment to AI instead of using it to think and learn and remember, you sacrifice part of your intellect. Inevitably, whether, as with Charles’s robotic legs, it seems easier or more powerful or you buy into the cutting-edge allure of the technology, you give up more and become dependent. Sooner or later, depending on your reasons for using AI in the first place, the dependence is so strong that you give up your intellect voluntarily, bit by bit, and replace it with a bot. By the time you realize you miss it, it may be too late.

And if you use AI to cheat, you only compound the intellectual damage you do to yourself with vice and dishonesty.

Barry’s Machine Man is an excellent and prophetic warning. I take a hard line on AI in my courses not because I’m a spoilsport or a Luddite—though I can certainly be both in other areas—but because I don’t want to see that happen to anyone. Making things easier, faster, or more efficient is not always an improvement, and certainly not with the things that make us human, our bodies and minds.

The pods bursting in air

Detail of A View of the Bombardment of Fort McHenry by John BOwer

I was returning from vacation when they dropped, but I’ve enjoyed catching up on The Rest is History’s series on national anthems so far. The episode on the “Deutschlandlied” was especially good, and though I enjoyed Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I do have two notes I have to get out of my system. (I almost titled this post “Key notes.”)

For context, they do a good job with the poem’s origin as an account of the unsuccessful British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Eyewitness Francis Scott Key’s poem was published as a broadside ballad under the title “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” a title that might helpfully clue modern singers in to what’s going on in Key’s contorted verse but doesn’t catch the imagination quite like “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Holland and Sandbrook, however, turn the bulk of the episode into yet another discussion of American slavery due to the presence, in Key’s seldom-remembered third verse, of the lines “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” This line has provoked its share of controversy (less, I’m guessing, than the words “the land of the free,” but that’s not our focus here), including the suggestion that the song “glorifies slavery.”

Sandbrook quotes a Key biographer who pointed out that the word hireling is a giveaway—the phrase “hireling and slave” refers to paid soldiers and mercenaries in the service of a tyrant. This is pretty obvious to anyone who knows the period and the importance of the citizen-soldier image to a newborn republic. In parsing the intent of the poet himself, Sandbrook notes that Key, a Marylander, was a slaveowner but also represented slaves in suits for freedom but also opposed abolitionism and also that the invading British in 1812 fielded a regiment of runaway slaves that Key may have been aware of. So he and Holland conclude that the contested line probably has at least some tangential but problematic connection to slavery-slavery, not simply the metaphorical slavery of British soldiers.

One thing neither host does is quote the entire third stanza:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
[Refrain]

This is clarifying. Read in its entirety, Key’s poem is a narrative, albeit a convoluted one. Where the first two stanzas narrate the worry and aftermath of the unsuccessful bombardment, the third sees the British in retreat and their unwanted presence expunged. Every line supports this reading. The fourth, which is the only other stanza the average person might know, wraps up the story with a reflection and peroration.

Sandbrook and Holland concede entirely too much to the argument that the third stanza is about literal slavery, for what I think are two reasons:

First, they seriously underrate not only the importance of the citizen-soldier image to Americans but also the contempt with which paid soldiers were held at the time and the suspicion of Americans toward professional armies. Remember that people haven’t always admired soldiers. Read the Anti-Federalists and their hostility toward a paid standing army in the employ of the President stands out as one of their most important objections to the Constitution. And the myth of Hessians as bloodthirsty warriors-for-hire, a myth important enough and provocative enough to be explicitly invoked in the Declaration of Independence, persists to this day. That aspect of the Revolution is still taught with a whiff of disdain for people who would hire themselves out as mercenaries, a disdain that survives in popular culture (as in The Crossing, a mostly good TV movie about Washington at Trenton).

Second, the excessive focus on Key’s personal and political opposition to abolitionism in the second half of the episode leads Holland and Sandbrook into the trap of assuming—or at least talking as if—only two positions were available on the issue: support for slavery and abolitionism. This is hard to keep in mind and even harder to get students to understand, but especially in the early decades of the 19th century, before the fringe positions of radical, John Brown-style abolitionism and James Henry Hammond-style support for slavery came to dominate the debate, there were lots of intermediate, moderate positions. Many of the Founders favored gradualist plans of slow emancipation, as did figures from Key’s generation like Henry Clay—also a slaveowner—and Key supported the colonization movement, which Sandbrook mentions but pooh-poohs. That’s a mistake. Colonization enjoyed widespread favor despite proving unworkable and being written out of the story by the radical abolitionists valorized in the present. Key’s opposition to abolitionists was opposition to extremism and public disorder, not the end of slavery itself.

Again, a good and mostly enjoyable episode, but skewed in its coverage by a couple crucial points where Holland and Sandbrook’s usual nuance is missing. Perhaps, per Alan Jacobs, another anti-American blindspot? Or is it just that Brits will necessarily have to work harder to get into the would-be Roman republican mindset of this era?

Numbers come from somewhere

Yesterday on Substack, a young Orthodox Substacker whose work I usually appreciate, feeling perhaps a bit too eager to pause over and reconsider what felt like an epiphany, shared the following:

Caesar was declared divine for killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more. In the pagan world, Hitler would have been numbered among the gods.

There are a lot of factual problems (not least that this is not why Caesar was divinized) and dubious assumptions built into this note, which is framed as an even more dubious hypothetical (“would have”) anyway, and it was handled pretty thoroughly by responses like this one.

But what proved unexpectedly helpful to me was its use of the one million figure. I’ve seen this statistic repeated over and over again by people trying to paint Caesar as a war criminal—a category that would have been nonsensical in the ancient world—or guilty of genocide, which is itself a loaded and dubious term. I’ve idly wondered where they’re getting this number, statistics from the ancient world being so totally, notoriously unreliable. This time I decided to look into it.

The claim that Caesar “kill[ed] a million Gauls and enslav[ed] a million more” ultimately comes from three passages in sources that post-date Caesar by a generation or more. Here are all three relevant portions in approximate chronological order:

• Valleius Paterculus (19 BC-AD 31), Roman History, II, 47: “During this period, including the years which immediately followed and those of which mention has already been made, more than four hundred thousand of the enemy were slain by Gaius Caesar and a greater number were taken prisoners.”

• Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23-79), Natural History, VII, 25: “In addition, too, to the victories gained by him in the civil wars, one million one hundred and ninety-two thousand men were slain by him in his battles. For my own part, however, I am not going to set it down as a subject for high renown, what was really an outrage committed upon mankind, even though he may have been acting under the strong influence of necessity; and, indeed, he himself confesses as much, in his omission to state the number of persons who perished by the sword in the civil wars.”

• Plutarch (c. AD 50-c. 120), Parallel Lives: Caesar, 15: “For although it was not full ten years that he waged war in Gaul, he took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred nations, and fought pitched battles at different times with three million men, of whom he slew one million in hand to hand fighting and took as many more prisoners.”

That’s it. Whatever sources these historians used, if any, are long since lost. Of these, the closest to Caesar’s own lifetime gives by far the lowest casualty figure. All of them are approximations, a point made especially clear when they write about prisoners.

I ran these sources down thanks to the bibliography in Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus. After summarizing the statistics we get from the three sources above, Goldsworthy notes that:

It is hard to know the basis for any of these numbers. The figures given for enemy casualties in the Commentaries on the Gallic War do not add up to such a great total, while Caesar’s account of the Civil War often did not mention such things. It is questionable that numbers for losses amongst the Gaulish tribes were known with precision, although it may just have been possible to calculate from records the number of prisoners taken and sold into slavery. Probably these numbers are exaggerated, but still give some indication of the appalling human cost of Caesar’s victories.

Goldsworthy is a careful scholar and an expert military historian—an area often lacking in other classicists—and his Caesar is the book on this subject, as far as I’m concerned. His caution in accepting the one-million figure is warranted and well-explained.

There are other surviving figures that can indicate something of the devastation of the Gallic Wars; Goldsworthy notes in the same passage that the total tax Caesar levied on his entire province in 50 BC was lower than the funds required for a forum he built. But is that because of devastation or disparities in property values and population density? With factors like these unknown, the surviving numbers can only suggest. Absent our sources’ sources, we can only speculate about demographics and statistics, and even that speculation must be based on what the sources do tell us, however little we choose to trust them. (Here is a very skeptical take on the numbers in Caesar’s Commentaries specifically that should give you some sense of the scope of the problem; it’s not just about battle casualties.)

The obvious point of comparison—the one invoked by our Substacker in the first place—is the death toll of the Holocaust. Certain kinds of skeptics operating under ulterior motives will question the standard figure of six million Jews, but for the Holocaust we have mountains of data available—prewar and postwar population figures, logistical documentation, military and industrial reports, and the Nazis’ own plans and records. (Read Nikolaus Wachsmann’s excellent KL for a deep dive.) For Caesar’s Gaulish victims we have this handful of sources.

One might call ancient historians’ stats and figures “vibes-based.” But lest we feel too proud of ourselves, that’s essentially what that Substacker was doing, too. That note was designed as a zinger, not to provide an accurate picture of history. Which is too bad, because the Christianity-shaped chasm separating even secular modern ethics from Caesar’s is important to acknowledge.

Numbers come from somewhere. It is worth finding out where and, even more importantly, the limits of their usefulness—especially when they are consistently deployed as some kind of gotcha.