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.

Reign of Fire and stories worth preserving

Gerard Butler and Christian Bale in Reign of Fire (2002)

Last week film criticism YouTuber Like Stories of Old posted an interesting video on mediocre or bad movies that nevertheless—and often despite themselves—had one moment of insight or genius that changed the way he thinks. It’s an interesting selection. I thought I’d offer one of my own.

Reign of Fire came out the summer I graduated from high school. It wasn’t particularly good but I was sufficiently impressed to buy it on DVD and watch it once or twice more. Between the initial glow of seeing a big screen spectacle like this and the decision to trade the DVD in for credit somewhere a few years later, one scene always stood out. I still think about it twenty-four years later.

Briefly, Reign of Fire takes place in a near-future scenario in which dragons, long thought mythical, turn out to be real and dormant beneath the earth. Construction on the London Underground reawakens one and brings about apocalypse. Decades later, small bands of survivors live in the ash, struggling to grow crops without attracting the dragons’ destructive attention and fearing to go above ground. One such group is led by Christian Bale and Gerard Butler. They eventually fall in with a wild-eyed Matthew McConaughey as a dragon-hunting Kentucky National Guardsman* who has somehow made it to Britain with tanks and helicopters and has a theory about how to wipe out the dragon species. This goes way over the top, as you might imagine, but the scene that stuck with me happens before all of this develops.

In this early scene, Bale and Butler entertain the children of their little colony. Gathered in candlelight within the ruins of the castle where they shelter, the two act out a swordfight. Butler calls himself the White Knight. Bale, breathing heavily, calls himself the Black Knight. He forces Butler to his knees and demands that he join him. Butler refuses; the Black Knight killed his father.

In case you hadn’t guessed it by this point, they’re reenacting The Empire Strikes Back.** The children watch, rapt, and gasp at the Black Knight’s following revelation.

The scene is barely a minute long and more evocative and poignant than anything else in the movie. Here, in the ruins of civilization, an old story has survived to entertain a generation that never knew the world that produced it. It was preserved because it was worth preserving and continues to entertain despite the limitations of its new medium.

That’s the immediate import of the scene, but its broader implications have kept me thinking about it ever since. How much of our culture will survive into the future, and in what form? How will it mutate? Given a longer timeframe than that in the movie, what will Bale and Butler’s White Knight and Black Knight look like, and what new details might be added to the story? And—given that their group of survivors, though isolated, is not the only one out there—how is Star Wars remembered elsewhere, if at all?

I saw Reign of Fire long before discovering the Volsung saga or the Nibelungenlied but it primed me for encountering a tradition that emerged in catastrophe and diverged and changed in different ways over centuries. It got me thinking about the fragility of our stories, who keeps track of old things in a culture that has lost so many of them, how they go about it, and the value of preserving them.***

What Reign of Fire taps into for the space of a minute is the emotional and even theological register—in addition to a candlelit medieval chapel we get intentional insert shots of haloed saints—of A Canticle for Leibowitz. It does so apparently accidentally and then backs off, but that one moment struck a chord with me that has lasted to the present. For that reason alone I still think of Reign of Fire with some fondness.

Watch that scene and appreciate it, then watch this compilation of Rifftrax zingers and have a good laugh.

* That’s how I remember it, and I don’t care to fact check this particular item.

** An uncharacteristically clever YouTube comment on the scene suggests this scene as a question for Trivial Pursuit: “In what movie did Christian Bale play Darth Vader?”

*** Throughout my college years, especially as I started reading things like Gregory of Tours and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I toyed with an idea for a novel called The Chronicle of the King of Atlanta. It would take place in a post-apocalyptic South divided and warred over like 6th-century Western Europe and be written as both an official annal and the memoirs of its author, one of the few literate people left. It never happened, but I still think about that imagined world regularly.

Learning outside one’s field and sharing enthusiasm

Roman historian Adrian Goldsworthy, who maintains an underrated YouTube channel that I’ve recommended on Substack before, dropped a new video this morning. It’s a conversation with historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, whose book Persians: The Age of the Great Kings has been sitting high on my to-read stack for a while.

The conversation is informative and, since Goldsworthy and Llewellyn-Jones know each other from way back, a lot of fun, but Goldsworthy’s introductory remarks have some especially good insights. Noting that Persian history lies well outside the usual area covered by his channel, Goldsworthy notes

It’s slightly different from a lot of the stuff we tend to talk about and a lot of my own interest, but it’s complimentary, and the more you learn about different periods of history and how we try to understand them the greater the benefit for whatever your own focus is. It helps you to have that perspective of—sometimes it inspires you to ask slightly different questions to a topic that otherwise has become very familiar. It might suggest different approaches, different ways of using the evidence, or different types of evidence.

The same way a reader might alternate—as I do—a diet of spy thrillers with the occasional sci-fi novel or a string of mysteries with a western, it’s both refreshing and helpful for a historian to read outside his own field for precisely the reasons Goldsworthy lays out. It can give you new eyes, or at least clear the intellectual cobwebs away. Indeed, as Llewellyn-Jones discusses in the course of their conversation, his own approach to the classical past began with a theatre background and changed as he encountered and investigated new topics—Penelope’s veil in the Odyssey is an intriguing one—with surprising connections to each other.

Goldsworthy also points out the value of making history accessible to a public that always has an appetite for it:

“[I]f you can’t share that enthusiasm, share the excitement, and share some of that understanding . . . you’re less than useful.”

It’s all very well studying the past, coming to understand things, but if you can’t share that enthusiasm, share the excitement, and share some of that understanding—I think the awareness that this is fascinating, lots of people would be interested in this, it tells us important things about ourselves as human beings, it helps us to understand the world better, but unless you can actually communicate that, you’re less than useful.

He notes that courses on ancient history are popular with students and have no problem with enrollment. Such courses, however, are unpopular with the powers that be for non-academic reasons.

I could point out the same thing about military history (which is where my background overlaps with Goldsworthy’s somewhat). I’ve twice proposed development of an American Military History course that is listed as a possibility in the South Carolina Technical College System, each time making it to the curriculum committee stage before being shot down. I have no doubt it would be a popular class, not only because the well-known general interest in military history but also because some of our transfer students go to schools like Clemson with well-established ROTC programs. Maybe the third time is the charm.

Another significant topic of their conversation is the danger posed to Llewellyn-Jones’s program at Cardiff University. I’ll leave it at that but will note that it’s fun to hear some seasoned historians talk smack about administrators.

I haven’t quite finished the entire video but it’s been a pleasant and interesting discussion so far. I strongly recommend it. I’m hoping to pick up a copy of Goldsworthy’s latest, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece, for my birthday next week and I mean to start Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians soon. Give their conversation a listen or a watch.

Tossed-off trifles and top one-hundreds

The Guardian’s recent “100 Best Novels of All Time” list caused quite an understandable hullaballoo, it being broadly agreed—and obvious—that the list is terrible. The Guardian’s explanation of the list’s rationale and method didn’t really help, either.

All of this occasioned a lot of talk about this list, any such list, and novels in general, and while I saw a lot of thoughtful observations and critiques—including the question, which I’ve raised before, of whether something as broad and protean as “the novel” can be meaningfully sorted and discussed this way. But the best response came from Joel J Miller, who crowdsourced a better list through an open thread on his Substack. Each commenter could submit five to seven novels for inclusion, with Joel tabulating and weighting the entries for a new top hundred. You can look at the finished list here. It’s much, much better.

I commented with my own seven at the last minute, and found myself contending with some of the questions occasioned by the Guardian’s list in the first place. The Guardian’s list was for English-language books but was open to literature translated into English from any language. Huh? Joel’s was for novels, and yet I saw multiple people nominating the Iliad and Odyssey—an elementary mistake.

I ended up limiting myself to a pretty strict definition of novel and only books originally written in English. But even within those parameters I faced a more fundamental question: what precisely does best mean? What do I think the best novels in English are?

To be more specific, I paused over the work of Charles Portis. I certainly wanted to include him in my seven and my gut said to nominate Gringos, but I had already seen a few other commenters nominate True Grit and the herd mentality of such things, the desire to bandwagon in order to game the process, intruded. Maybe Gringos is better—I’m still undecided—but True Grit had a better chance of making it into the top one-hundred. Having had the question occur to me at all made whatever choice I would make feel inauthentic.

Which brought to mind a line from Douglas Murray I quoted in the course of my very first John Buchan June:

There are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table. But one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.

True Grit is undoubtedly the Portis novel most people would be familiar with. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print but was quite literally something he dashed off while sick to entertain himself. Meanwhile, possibly greater novels like Witch Wood, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River, much beloved of the few of us who look beyond the first couple Hannay novels, are pretty much neglected by the wider public. Likewise with Gringos, the discovery of which almost seems a rite of passage for serious Portis fans.

I wouldn’t call True Grit or The Thirty-Nine Steps “trifles” by any means; Portis and Buchan were too brilliant to trifle, and even their lesser books—say Masters of Atlantis or The House of the Four Winds—are more interesting than the best books by lesser writers. The competition, I suppose, is between best-known, favorite, and the elusive best. I wound up just listing my favorites by a few favorite writers. I suspect most of the other commenters did the same.

Joel’s list has Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion well ahead of Emma, the book I’d rate Austen’s best, and, as I’ve mentioned before, Poe’s best-selling book in his own lifetime was a writer-for-hire textbook about seashells. It is strange to consider the vagaries of what a writer is remembered for.

For what it’s worth, my seven, in no particular order:

• The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

• Emma, Jane Austen

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

• True Grit, Charles Portis

• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

• Witch Wood, John Buchan

I had a hard time coming up even with these seven. This morning I woke up and realized I wanted to include Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, or perhaps Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday. Too late. I also felt guilty including no fiction by CS Lewis, and another part of me strongly wished to include at least one Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, or John Le Carré. Ask me on another day and I might come up with an entirely different seven—though Lord of the Rings and one of Portis’s will probably be on there.

I suppose the real takeaway—all controversy about such lists aside—is that we should be thankful there is so much good literature to choose from. Maybe I’ll just have to make my own top one-hundred.

Buchan on Cicero

As previously mentioned, I’m already working toward this year’s John Buchan June. Right now I’m reading Buchan’s excellent 1936 biography Augustus. Last year I enormously enjoyed his concise and insightful Julius Caesar while dissenting from his overall positive interpretation of Caesar’s character and career; Augustus, which was published a few years later, I’m enjoying more wholeheartedly.

This is despite my misgivings about the fall of the Republic and Octavian’s role in it, of course. Buchan covers that well, including an incident I am especially interested in: the betrayal and murder of Cicero. Following an explanation, in Book II, Chapter 1, of Octavian and Antony’s reconciliation and their agreement to proscribe formerly protected political enemies—“the darkest stain upon Octavian’s record”—Buchan relates Cicero’s death this way:

Among the first to die was Cicero. He had little estate, only debts, but Antony could not forgive the lash of the Philippics. Plutarch has told the tale of that winter afternoon in the wood by the sea‑shore when the old man stretched out his frail neck to the centurion’s sword, and of that later day in Rome when the head was fixed by Antony's order above the Rostra, and “the Romans shuddered, for they seemed to see there, not the face of Cicero but the image of Antony’s soul.” He met his death in the high Roman fashion—the only misfortune of his life, says Livy, which he faced like a man. The verdict is scarcely fair; juster is the comment of the same historian that he was so great a figure that it would require a Cicero to praise him adequately.

A succinct but evocative description, and a good defense against Livy’s jibe. If you haven’t read Plutarch’s account, you can read that starting at section 47 here. And of course I dramatized this moment in my first novella.

Buchan continues with a broader reflection on Cicero’s character and times:

In the wild years when the Roman Republic fell, the thinker and the scholar does not fill the eye in the same way as the forthright man of action, and Cicero is dim in the vast shadow of Julius [Caesar]. His weaknesses are clear for a child to read, his innocent vanity, his lack of realism, his sentimentality about dead things, his morbid sensitiveness, his imperfect judgment of character, his frequent fits of timidity. The big head, the thin neck, the mobile mouth of the orator could not dominate men like the eagle face of Julius. He failed and perished because he was Cicero. The man of letters in a crisis, who looks round a question, cannot have the single-hearted force of him who sees the instant need. Yet it is to be remembered that he could conquer his natural timorousness and act on occasion with supreme audacity, a far greater achievement than the swashbuckling valour of an Antony.

Buchan is always attentive to personal character and this is an excellent insight. Cicero’s courage was rarer and of a different kind than that of a fearless brute like Antony, and therefore more virtuous. Physical confrontation cost Antony nothing; but Cicero knew, when confronting a Clodius or especially a Catiline, that he was in real danger and acted anyway.

Buchan continues his ascent to a final, sweeping consideration of the moral framework Cicero prefigured:

And let it be remembered, too, that it was Cicero’s creed which ultimately triumphed. His dream came true. His humanism and his humanity made him the prophet of a gentler world. The man to whom St. Augustine owed the first step in his conversion,⁠ who was to St. Ambrose a model and to St. Jerome “rex oratorum,” the scholar whose work was the mainspring of the Renaissance, has had an abiding influence on the world. While others enlarged the limits of the Roman empire, he “advanced the boundaries of the Latin genius.”

As much as I love Cicero, this is perhaps stretching it a bit—but only a bit. St Augustine, in a passage from the Confessions, Book III, that Buchan footnotes, invokes Cicero’s philosophical work as a praeparatio evangelica:

In the ordinary course of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called Hortensius. But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord; and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee.

When I wrote my novella about Cicero’s death I was unaware of or had forgotten Cicero’s role in St Augustine’s life, but my narrator too ends with a nameless hope that Cicero’s example has seeded in him, a hope for a world purified by self-sacrifice. I’m heartened, all these years later, to know I wasn’t trying something too outlandish.

Buchan concludes the chapter covering Octavian and Antony’s rapprochement with a reflection on the relationship between Cicero and Octavian, concluding that the two had merely been using each other for political ends. I’m not sure it was strictly cynical, and I was surprised by this passage because Buchan’s own account suggests mutual respect if not affection between the older and younger man. But in the following chapter, reflecting on Brutus, whom Buchan views as entirely overrated thanks to Shakespeare, Buchan pays his final and finest tribute to Cicero:

Brutus was a rarer species, who both impressed and puzzled his contemporaries. . . . Brutus had a solemn condescending manner, a hard face, a pedantic style in speech and writing, and a stiff ungracious character. He was capable of extreme harshness, as he showed in his treatment of the Asian cities before Philippi, and he was to the last degree avaricious. There was little principle about him when his investments were in question, and he extorted forty-eight per cent from one wretched Cypriote community.⁠ His philosophy of life was not profound, and he died abjuring his creed.⁠ He was an egotist and a formalist, yet he won an extraordinary prestige, for to his contemporaries he seemed the living embodiment of certain ancient virtues which had gone out of the world. . . . History has by one of its freaks perpetuated this repute, and he remains the “noblest Roman” when in truth he was a commonplace example of aristocratic virtues and vices. Cicero was in a far truer sense the last republican.

Greatly enjoying this so far. I’ve emphasized Buchan’s insight into character here, but his lifelong interest in statecraft—heightened, no doubt, by becoming Governor-General of Canada during the writing of the book (the preface is signed and dated from Government House, Ottawa)—is also clearly on display and entirely appropriate to its subject.

I’m reading a paperback reprint from Stratus House, but you can find the entirety of Buchan’s Augustus online here.

Just as nasty as the enemy

Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Despite YouTube’s thrumming ecosystem of amateur film criticism, there are precious few video essays on movies from before the Star Wars era, much less classic war movies. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover this nine-minute video (from five years ago) unpacking a little of what makes The Guns of Navarone great.

The host rightly starts with the strength of The Guns of Navarone’s story—a cast of interesting characters on a dangerous mission, wonderful scenery, a Mission: Impossible-like situation requiring a multi-part plan using all of the characters’ skills to accomplish. This is only right. The story should be good first; only then can interesting themes or lessons or philosophical implications emerge to be examined. Navarone has both: scope and depth.

As the host gives attention to the movie’s moral and philosophical dimension he highlights the contested pragmatic or utilitarian ethics of the men on the mission. The man who came up with the plan, Major Franklin (Anthony Quayle), is horribly injured while infiltrating enemy territory and, now viewed by some of the others (and himself) as a burden upon the team’s time and resources and a danger to the mission, there is a brief debate about what to do. Andrea Stavrou (Anthony Quinn), the hardened local guerrilla, suggests shooting Franklin and moving on. Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck), now the leader of the team and an old friend of Franklin’s, nixes that and they take Franklin along.

Franklin later tries to shoot himself—a calculated, coldly rational solution to the obstacles created by his injury rather than an act of desperation. Demolitions expert Corporal Miller (David Niven), Franklin’s most doggedly loyal subordinate, stops him. This is a pure act of love, and Miller, who has been comic relief up to this point, functions as the film’s conscience for the rest of the movie. (We learn during the briefing that Miller once blew up a Nazi headquarters in North Africa without damaging the orphanage nextdoor. This is presented as evidence of his skill with explosives but it also suggests an attempt to fight justly that is absent in the others, like Spanish Civil War knife-fighter Brown or “born killer” Spiros.)

Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck) has a quiet word with Franklin. Miller, unable to listen, at first interprets this as a moment of moral suasion, one old friend trying to reason with another. But Mallory is actually feeding Franklin false information—the mission has been canceled—that could play to their advantage if Franklin is captured and interrogated.

Mallory does his best to protect Franklin and the rest of the team but they do end up captured, and, when they manage to escape, Mallory leaves Franklin behind. His argument is that Franklin needs medical attention that they can’t give him. But he also has the secret knowledge that Franklin might be useful.

When Miller learns this—in later circumstances I won’t spoil—he is appalled: “Oh, I misjudged you. You’re rather a ruthless character, Captain Mallory.”

Not entirely, however. Mallory appears conflicted, as well he should be. (This is my favorite Peck performance, by the way.) Earlier in the film, in private conversation with Franklin long before Franklin’s accident, Mallory confesses to having ruined Andrea’s life through a gesture of chivalry earlier in the war, which he blames on “my stupid Anglo-Saxon decency.” But he’s gotten wiser since then: “To win a war you have to be just as nasty as the enemy. What worries me is that we’re likely to wake up one morning and find out we’ve become even nastier.”

It’s a rare film that raises this as a possibility for the good guys, especially in the main character’s argument for himself.

The thing is, Mallory’s ploy works—the Germans do get the false intelligence and do strip the defenses of the team’s target. But that’s not a neat resolution. We see Franklin being tortured and must assume that, offscreen, he broke. In Miller’s words, Mallory has “used up” his old friend for the sake of the mission. Mallory’s utilitarian arguments don’t withstand Miller, and Miller’s attempt to treat Mallory as coldly as he has treated Franklin ends in obvious regret. Both men, for different reasons, have tried to play the pragmatist and learned the hard way that it’s wrong.

And Franklin is only one instance of the damage wrought by the mission. Mallory’s self-accusing worries and Miller’s accusations are allowed to stand, even in light of the team’s ultimate success. What is permissible to win? An ever-necessary question.

Like The Bridge on the River Kwai, which similarly throws characters with distinct, conflicting worldviews at each other in a dangerous situation, The Guns of Navarone lets all of this grow organically out of the characters and story. It doesn’t feel forced, which makes it more powerful and also means that the action-packed adventure I thrilled to as a kid has grown deeper and weightier as I’ve gotten older. A rare accomplishment.

The Desecration of Man

Midway through his documentary “Why Beauty Matters,” the late Sir Roger Scruton surveys the brutalist wrecks in the hollowed out town center of Reading, a formerly quaint Victorian town updated in mid-century and now derelict, and asks us to look past the broken windows and spray paint. “[W]e shouldn’t blame the vandals,” he says. “This place was built by vandals, and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

We clearly live in an age of vandals, with vandalism lauded as both high art and meaningful political protest, and that is before we even consider darker acts of defacement: the surgical mutilation of human bodies in pursuit of phantom identities, the buying and selling of sex through pornography, the devaluing and destruction of unborn, disabled, and elderly life. But like Scruton looking at Reading, Carl Trueman, in his new book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, presents us the obvious acts of profanation while asking us to consider the subtler, invisible acts that first made them possible—the graffiti artists as well the architects who provided the already crumbling concrete walls.

Trueman’s project for some years now has been the basic historical task of explaining how we got here. Where his best-known book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and his more recent study of critical theory, To Change All Worlds, are big, sweeping books tracing multiple interrelated threads of philosophical and cultural development, The Desecration of Man is a short, brisk book concerned specifically with anthropology—the question What is man? If asking How did we get here? is the fundamental question of the historian, this is the fundamental question of the philosopher and theologian.

Everything else, Trueman demonstrates, is downstream of one’s answer to this question. Invoking Nietzsche’s Madman, Trueman argues that a shift in how both intellectuals and ordinary people answered that question began a long, slow rot that has only recently become obvious. The culture coasted for a long time on shared mores even as the anthropological assumptions that shaped them disintegrated. But the assumptions that man is not transcendent, that he is an atomized individual with no connection to others, that his interior life is his true self, that flesh is just flesh and sex is just stimulation, and that all of these are malleable have in the last century born fruit. A spirit of negation—a phrase borrowed from Goethe’s Mephistopheles—has led to a culture of desecration, the vandalization of mankind.

The surgeries, the “exuberant nastiness” of present day political rhetoric and online Holocaust denial, the public celebrations of aberrant sex, the industrial output and consumption of pornography, the epidemic of abortion or, in a seemingly opposite extreme, IVF, the push for infanticide and the rise of euthanasia regimes, the aims of Silicon Valley transhumanists, and even our consumerist obsession with youth and fitness—all of these treat man as a commodity to be bought, sold, upgraded, or disposed of as if man is just another product. These are desecrations, Trueman argues, and as often as not intentional. The frenzy with which, to choose one example, people are encouraged to take vocal public pride in having killed an unborn child betrays this spirit.

Some of this will be familiar, at least if you’ve read Trueman’s essays or have simply been paying attention. Rousseau, Marx, Freud, and others appear, tearing down the old anthropology and replacing it with their functional, brutalist edifices—the individual unsullied by society, the economic man, the Id. This is succinct and pointed, and should prove enlightening to anyone who hasn’t considered the longer history of how we think about ourselves before. But what Trueman does best is illuminate the logical connection between a debased understanding of what we are and how these outcomes—the spraypaint on the office block and bus stop—naturally result.

At this point it is worth noting, in case this sounds like a straightforwardly conservative polemic, that Trueman is bipartisan in his criticisms. He credits neither side in our current political environment or culture wars with a correct anthropology; both of them embrace the commodification of man in only superficially different ways. The end result is the same.

If a diagnosis were all The Desecration of Man had to offer it would be a good book, but Trueman ends with his most surprising and challenging material: a pair of cautions and a vision of the only true solution to the desecration. He roots both in three inextricably interlocked Cs: creed, cult, and code. Creed he defines as a given set of beliefs; cult, in the technical sense of a body of ritual, as the trappings and practices of those adhering to a creed; and code as the ethics, mores, and courtesies of those believing the creed and practicing the cult.

Trueman offers two examples as cautions. The first, Richard Dawkins, enhanced his already exalted reputation as a biologist by becoming the voice of an aggressive, hostile new form of atheism in the early 2000s. Recently, with the best years of the New Atheists behind him, he began to describe himself as a “cultural Christian,” someone who wants the customs and ethical priorities of the West, which he treats as having emerged apparently ex nihilo and as still viable without the pesky need to believe in God. This, Trueman argues, is a dead end, because it wants only the code but not the cult that sustains it or the creed in which it originates.

It is hard to feel sorry for Dawkins, who has shown himself so clearly to be a man sawing off the limb he has spent his life sitting on. More difficult for me was Trueman’s second test case, the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton himself.

Even after reading more than a dozen of his many books, Scruton’s precise views of Christianity remain opaque, or at least unclear. There are some signs in interviews and reminiscences that he became more traditionally religious toward the end of his life and his arguments in favor of it clearly come from a deep, sincere place, but the usual tenor of his work is merely to treat Christianity as useful. This was not solely for the way it propped up modern niceties about equality and self-congratulatory do-gooder ethics, like Dawkins, but because it made manifest the transcendent, which is aesthetically and spiritually good for people. Scruton, then, in lauding the faith as a way to bring beauty and a sense of wonder into the world, embraced the code and participated eagerly in the cult, but it seemed not to matter to him one way or the other whether the creed was true.

Other examples could be supplied. Trueman mentions Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson. But this also, Trueman argues, is a dead end. It matters whether the creed is true or not because, if not, the anthropology derived from the creed will be a sham. Once this is discovered, as so many thinkers over the last centuries have so eagerly asserted they have, why maintain it? And so we end up right back where we are.

If the problem is desecration, Trueman writes in his conclusion, having “imagined ourselves as gods” only to “have ironically reduced ourselves to dust,” the solution is the long, slow task of consecration, of taking the thing we have vandalized and treating it as it deserves again. The only way forward is Christianity in accord with those three Cs: belief in God and his vision of what man is and what he is for, teleologically; acted out in community rather than as individuals, in embodied, physical liturgy; and lived out in real-life acts toward flesh-and-blood people: giving, hospitality, neighborliness, even acknowledging our shared mortal limits by attending funerals. These three things are inseparable, and only if taken together may restore our anthropology and begin to undo the vandalism, both the obvious and invisible kinds.

The Desecration of Man is a helpful intellectual history, cultural critique, and religious appeal in one short book, briefly and clearly explained for the widest possible readership. And far from affirming a reader inclined to agree with Trueman, he graciously but clearly points out the weaknesses in much modern rediscovery of the utility of faith. Picking up some of the themes CS Lewis presciently explored in The Abolition of Man eighty years ago, this is a worthy successor to that book, and one that I hope many will find challenging and helpful, not to mention hopeful.

Lying and counting the inexplicable

The Messenger, Luc Besson’s brutal, ugly, inaccurate, and very very late 90s film about St Joan of Arc, is a terrible movie, but it has one brilliant scene that I’ve reflected on since the one time I watched it more than twenty years ago.

Late in the story, as Joan sits in prison awaiting trial and sentencing, she is visited by a character played by Dustin Hoffman called “The Conscience.” The Conscience has a literally satanic role as an accuser, introducing doubt where Joan has heretofore felt only conviction. His interrogation eventually centers on Joan’s sword, which she miraculously found in a field, an event she took as a calling from God. The Conscience seizes on this, pointing out that it is not self-evidently a sign, but simply a sword in a field. In an increasingly rapid montage, the Conscience suggests many possible ways the sword could have wound up there that did not require God placing it here for her to find.

Having run through several scenarios in which the sword is dropped during combat or simply lost by accident, the Conscience says, “And that’s without counting the inexplicable.” Whereupon we see a man trudging through the same field carrying the sword, which he throws, entirely unprompted, into the tall grass. He doesn’t even stop walking.

The scene is clearly meant to mock supernatural belief—and it doesn’t even get St Joan’s history with that sword right—but that penultimate image of “the inexplicable” makes a valid, important point.

A young true crime YouTuber got me thinking about the Conscience and the inexplicable again. In my constant search for another Lemmino, I’ve tried out a lot of documentary channels on YouTube. Sturgeon’s Law being what it is, most of them aren’t very good. But in the course of finding a handful of decent documentary YouTubers to listen to or watch as I do the dishes or make the kids’ lunches, I’ve noticed that even the best of them have a persistent flaw.

The YouTuber in question is a college graduate with a degree in history. He’s smart, funny, and clearly paid attention in his historiography classes, as he demonstrates a good historian’s grasp of how to gather and assess evidence—most of the time. Faced with contradictory or irreconcilable details in whatever evidence he’s gathered (usually on old missing persons cases), he is far too willing to declare that someone is lying. Not mistaken, ignorant, misremembering, or misinformed—lying.

Part of this may be generational and cultural. I’m a geriatric Millennial from the Deep South, where accusing someone of lying is still serious business, and he’s a northern Zoomer. But it’s also a historiographic problem.

The accusation usually stems from discrepancies in whatever evidence is available—note that—and unacknowledged subjective impressions of the people involved. Discrepancies, in true crime theorizing, offer the same incentive that “anomalies” do to the conspiracy theorist. Our YouTuber falls into this trap whenever he takes discrepancies as evidence of willful deceit.

A lightly fictionalized version of a real example:

Two tourists disappear while hiking in Central America. Their diaries, when found, include a final entry on Monday, April 20. Locals confirm this date. But another tourist who briefly got to know them before their disappearance later recalls seeing the two tourists on Tuesday the 21st. But when first asked about the missing tourists by the police, the records show she stated this happened on that Monday. Why did she change her story? Why is she lying?

The most likely answer is that she didn’t, and she’s not.

Imagine meeting two strangers in a foreign country. You see them again sometime later. Being recent acquaintances, you notice them, but you’re busy with your own business. When they disappear, it turns out you’re one of the last people known to have seen them alive. Suddenly, details of that day take on a significance you never could have anticipated, you’re forced to try to recall things you never knew you would need to remember, and you may not have learned about the disappearance for days or weeks after it happened.

You’re interviewed by local police and by investigators from the tourists’ home country. You return to your own country and your previous life, and years go by. The investigation is reopened several times and you are interviewed again at some point in the process. How well will you remember these things this time? How well did you remember them in the first place?

No one in this scenario is lying, covering things up, or changing their stories. People make mistakes, misremember things, have their memories tainted by bad information relayed from someone else, or simply don’t know. None of this is “lying.”

This is where the inexplicable comes in. Without even factoring in these faults and flaws of memory, how well can you account for your own behavior, even in ordinary circumstances? People do things they can’t even always explain to themselves—out of habit, or intuition, or boredom, or a myriad of other barely conscious non-reasons. To paraphrase a meme, you do just do things.

But imagine a single day of yours is, for reasons beyond your control, placed under a microscope, with the authorities—and YouTubers and podcasters and a legion of other amateurs—poring over your every movement. Who wouldn’t end up looking a little suspicious, especially after being run through a strong rinse of insinuation, as the true crime and conspiracy folks are wont to do? Who couldn’t be accused of lying when forced to remember details you may have forgotten or simply can’t explain?

A few good rules of thumb for sifting evidence:

• Always assume there is information you don’t have, especially when dealing with incomplete evidence. You can only work from what’s available. It’s irresponsible in the extreme to speculate on casefiles that are still partially classified, but guess what you’ll see on almost every true crime YouTube channel?

• Even if you have a complete set of the available evidence, remember that the evidence is not a complete account of reality. Every piece has its own built in biases—limitations in the kind of evidence it’s designed to gather—and will leave things out.

• Always assume there are things you don’t understand. This is especially important in highly technical cases like the radar, transponder, and cell tower evidence in the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 case which—guess what?—our YouTuber, who doesn’t understand a lot about aviation, takes as evidence of the authorities lying. Aviation is a good example because it’s so obviously complex, but there are hidden technical pitfalls everywhere. In our lightly fictionalized example, consider the possible role of customs and immigration law in our tourists’ story, or unspoken local custom, or simple slang. These invisible technicalities can be the most dangerous. Just keeping Old and New Style dates straight in modern history can wreck your study of a specific event.

• Don’t let your prejudices influence your interpretation. This should be obvious, but how many of us consistently meet this standard? Our YouTuber hates the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI, so guess how evenhandedly he approaches reports, statements, or other evidence from these institutions? The FBI’s handling of Waco doesn’t mean they’re lying about a child who went missing in the Great Smoky Mountains.

• Always leave room for the inexplicable. Compare the Umbrella Man. And even if you carefully work through every alternative and can prove someone is lying, as the aforementioned Lemmino points out, you may never determine why they are.

• Above all, remember historian’s bias. Approaching any event in the past will give us a different perspective and sense of its significance from everyone who actually lived through it. This is especially important to remember for people called to give an account of something that wasn’t significant to them at the time, that might, in the moment, to have been able to turn out some other way.

I could go on, but these are handy and important and should remain at the forefront of your mind when doing research. And if these are still not enough to dissuade you from leaping to the conclusion that someone you don’t know, under circumstances you haven’t lived through, that you don’t and can’t ever have a complete picture of, is lying, at least have a high enough regard for truth that accusing someone of falsehood becomes a charge you hesitate to make. Your conscience, at least, should demand as much.

Tron: Ares

Scientists at Disney generate a sequel to Tron and Tron: Legacy

I was one of the handful of people who saw Tron: Ares in theatres last fall. I love and enjoy Tron: Legacy beyond its merits and have shared it with my kids, who revere it, and if Tron: Ares had turned out to be good I planned to take them. I never did—not because it wasn’t good but because it was neither good nor bad enough for me to make up my mind about. I decided to give it another look at home when it came out on Blu-ray. That finally happened this month.

The plot, in brief: Tron: Legacy ended with the escape of a purely digital person into flesh-and-blood reality, and the new film’s very loose connection to that one is in the vast potential latent in the ability to transfer digital assets to reality. Kevin and Sam Flynn’s old company Encom is trying to develop this power to solve all the problems in the world. Old Encom rival Dillinger Systems wants to 3D-print weapons, vehicles, and expendable soldiers to sell to the military. Both are headed by Wunderkind CEOS: Encom by Eve Kim, who struggles to keep her idealistic sister’s dream of ending scarcity alive, and Dillinger by the ruthless Julian Dillinger, under the watchful but impotent eye of his mother Elisabeth.

Into this computer arms race steps the Ares of the title. Ares is a combat program created by Dillinger and trained on countless cycles of simulated combat, death, and regeneration. Dillinger shows him off to investors as the crowning achievement of his project. The problem is that Ares—and everything else generated from the system—only lasts twenty-nine minutes in the real world before disintegrating. This fact drives both Kim and Dillinger’s pursuit of “the permanence code.”

Through a little friendly corporate espionage, including the use of Ares to penetrate and exploit Encom’s servers in search of the code, Dillinger learns that Kim may have recovered it from old files hidden away by her sister. From this point forward it’s a race for Kim to bring the code safely back to Encom, for Dillinger to stop her and take it—through increasingly desperate means—and for Ares, who has begun questioning his programming, to decide what action to take.

Tron: Ares has a number of weaknesses, the chief of which is that the villain is much, much more interesting than either of the heroes. Eve Kim and friends are annoying do-gooders whom the screenwriters have worked too hard to make plucky and likeable, and Ares, as played by Jared Leto, is too convincingly robotic. Evan Peters’s Julian Dillinger, on the other hand, shows cunning and intelligence from his first scene and an amoral pragmatism barely restrained by the influence of his mother, played with chilly and ambiguous control by Gillian Anderson. The moment Julian has an opportunity to take decisive but irreversible action against his greatest rival, he struggles, but only so much. His lifetime of seizing every opportunity that will benefit himself has led to this, and even though he knows it’s wrong and we know that he’ll choose it, we see and feel the weight of the temptation crush him. Peters is likely the best thing in the movie.

This imbalance affects the entire film. It may be a cliche to point out how bad Jared Leto is since everyone online has been dogpiling him for months, but some cliches become cliches because they’re true. (My kids also insist I point out that he has weird hair. In a more artistic vein, my daughter noted that Ares, as a character, is more interesting in the first few minutes when he wears a mask. The moment Jared Leto’s vapid face is revealed, the mystery dissipates. A sharp observation, I’m proud to say.)

That said, the plot, which is simple but effective despite the banality of the movie’s heroes and escalates nicely heading into the final act, the production design and look of the film, the music, the special effects, and the action scenes make up for a lot. Despite the complexity of some of what the movie is offering, it’s intuitively presented—my kids had no trouble following it. I’ve seen director Joachim Rønning take some flak for Tron: Ares as an unimaginative hired gun, but I think the visual storytelling and style of the film serve the story well. I don’t find Nine Inch Nails’ electronic score as enjoyable by itself as I still do Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score, but it works well within the movie.

No one should go into a Tron movie looking for deep ideas. As much as I love Tron: Legacy, its Kevin Flynn is given to some silly opining about how much his video game world will challenge the foundational thought of all of civilization. Spoken like a true techbro. Kim and Dillinger, at least, are less prone to philosophizing. (There is an irony in how this movie asks us to root for the good AI overlords against the bad ones; I found myself wishing both could fail. A touch of tonedeafness on the part of the producers.)

But Tron: Legacy and now Tron: Ares do deliver some great action. My kids found the buildup to the climactic sequence, in which Dillinger, having lost control of his own programs, sees his facility print and dispatch lethal weapons tech into the city in pursuit of Kim and Ares, unbearably suspenseful. It’s well-set up and well-executed, and the Terminator-like indestructabilty of Dillinger’s chief henchman posed an intense added threat.

Tron: Ares does not measure up to Tron: Legacy, but it tries to develop one small element of the latter in interesting ways and has satisfying, enjoyable Tron-flavored action. One can’t help but wonder how much better it might have been with a few tweaks, including someone in the title role with more visible depth than Jared Leto (which wouldn’t have happened, as he produced the movie). Having waited several months to rewatch it with my kids, I found myself liking it much more the second time around, not least since they responded so strongly to it.

Impressing kids is not everything, but it’s not nothing, and—following on from The Fantastic Four: First Steps—I’m pleased to have shared it with them. If there are more flawed but enjoyable and workmanlike adventures out there, we’ll take them.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby as Reed Richards and Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps

I recently watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps with the kids. It was okay—enjoyable without thrills, funny without big laughs, suspenseful without surprises. But it was also inoffensive, had a creative retro-futuristic look that took me back to The Incredibles, and had one compelling subplot that held the entire movie together and made it just a bit more than the sum of its parts. This won’t be a proper review of the entire movie, but a recommendation on the basis of its straight-down-the-middle quality and this one surprising aspect of the story.

The movie begins with husband and wife Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman discovering that, after two years of trying without success, they are finally expecting a baby. This might seem an odd place for a superhero movie to start, but the pregnancy and baby subplot—which I heard a lot about when the movie came out—turns out to be central to the story. The film’s villain, Galactus, who means to devour the Earth, offers to spare the planet in exchange for the Richards’s unborn child. They refuse. The public turns on the Fantastic Four.

This was a refreshing surprise for two reasons:

First, the baby, even before birth, is presented unquestioningly as living and important. The most moving scene in the film comes when Reed wants to scan the baby in utero and Sue, in an attempt to show that his science is distracting him from the truth of the situation, uses her powers of invisibility to reveal their son in her stomach. He squirms, kicks, and responds to them—all stuff I’ve seen on ultrasound monitors many times, that my wife has felt many more. In a culture that persists in dehumanizing the unborn—for pernicious, devouring reasons of its own—this lingering meditation on their life and value stunned me.

Second, the film explicitly positions the Richards’s refusal to give up their baby against a utilitarian, consequentialist ethic. Saying no to Galactus means he will eat the Earth. The fickle public, who adore the Four one moment and revile them the next, want to know why the fate of one baby should doom the entire planet. This is the Caiaphas argument: it is more expedient for one to die than the whole nation.

Reed and Sue steadfastly refuse to give in. It is wrong for parents to sacrifice the life of the child gifted to them. They won’t give up on saving the world, but that route—the path of least resistance, of giving in to the pressure of numbers and a short-term vision of salvation—is closed to them. I can’t think of the last time a film made such a deontological move, presenting something as morally wrong under any circumstances. Their refusal in the face of public pressure and the threat of Galactus makes them more heroic.

The latter aspect of the film not only drives the events of the climax, it reinforces the message of the former. If Sue and Reed, in their joy at the news, their preparation for the baby’s arrival, and their refusal to give him up show that life is too precious to bargain, the climactic action, in which all four demonstrate their willingness to die for the innocent, shows us that they mean it. Life is valuable. How valuable? This valuable!

Again, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not an earth-shattering movie. It’s enjoyable entertainment with a unique aesthetic and more thought put into it than the last several Marvel movies combined—a low bar. What sets it apart is its wholehearted commitment to a vision of the value of human life—even in the womb—and its courage in allowing the characters to live that out without compromise. This was a great surprise, and I hope we can see more like this.