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.

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.