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.

Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

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.

Another justice

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl in Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage (2005)

The past two weeks in my Western Civ II class I’ve been teaching the interwar period and the Second World War. By coincidence, I have two things fresh on my mind:

First, I recently finished reading Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans. This collection of profiles and capsule biographies of people from every level of the Reich—from Hitler himself to ordinary citizens—concludes with a look at some commonalities: bourgeois backgrounds, decent education, a humiliating loss of status at some early point in life. Evans does not mention them specifically in his conclusion, but broken homes and religious apostasy feature in a nontrivial number of these lives.

Second, I recently listened to a Rest is History Club bonus episode with Jonathan Freedland, whose latest book tells the story of a German anti-Nazi resistance group. Freedland, in the course of the interview, notes that a significant factor in both motivating and sustaining the actions of many members of the ring was a deep Christian faith that allowed them to see beyond the Nazis and the Reich, to prioritize God above state and live sub specie aeternitatis.

In class Monday I mentioned to my students the story of the White Rose and recommended Sophie Scholl: The Final Days to them. Few movies tell a true story better or better demonstrate the truths to be inferred from the two items above.

Briefly, the film dramatizes the last several days of Sophie Scholl’s life in 1943. Scholl, her brother Hans, and a group of friends—Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox—had begun the White Rose as an anonymous protest against the Nazis’ conduct of the war. They drafted, printed, and secretly distributed leaflets denouncing Hitler’s leadership, the mass murder on the Eastern Front, where Hans had served, and the Reich’s top-to-bottom disregard for human life. Hans and Sophie were caught leaving stacks of their final leaflet outside the lecture halls at the University of Munich, and within days had been interrogated by the Gestapo, tried by hanging judge Roland Freisler in a specially convened Volksgerichthof (People’s Court), and guillotined.

The Scholl siblings had some steel in them, standing up to both the Gestapo, the Reich’s most brutal kangaroo court, and the threat and promise of death, and the film—which is very closely based on fact, including verbatim recreations of interrogations and the trial proceedings—shows us why.

There is their faith, invoked again and again and the source of their perspective. Hitler and the Reich hold no terror for them—these can only kill the body. Revealingly, the Scholls’ appeal to eternity and the City of God (he is never mentioned, but St Augustine heavily influenced the White Rose) are not so much disregarded by Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr or Judge Freisler as they are simply unintelligible. These two, the nose-to-the-grindstone cop and the ideologue, are alike so wedded to the State, the Party, and the Spirit of the Age that anything deviating from their devotion is worthy only of mockery and destruction. Evil cannot understand good.

Second, and inextricably linked with the Scholls’ faith, are their parents. Robert and Magdalena Scholl show up in the middle of the Volksgerichthof’s proceedings and demand a chance to testify. Freisler shouts them down and has them removed from the courtroom. Later, given a chance to see their daughter a final time, they praise her—“You did the right thing”—and tell her to remember Jesus. Like them, Sophie invokes the transcendent: “We’ll meet in eternity.”

Where do children get such faith and strength? Their parents. The film shows most clearly where the Scholls got their courage in their father’s one line as he is hustled out of Freisler’s courtroom, the line that still strikes me most powerfully: “Es gibt noch eine andere Gerechtingkeit!”

There is another justice. A promise to the faithful, no matter how terrible the suffering; a threat to the wicked, not matter how temporarily successful.

When introducing Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler in class a few weeks ago, I noted as an aside specifically for my male students that if they planned to have children they should take care to be good dads. All four of these dictators, and many others besides, not to mention many of their underlings, had terrible relationships with their fathers. The regularity with which the tyrannical, unfaithful, or absent father crops up in Evans’s book is telling. Hans and Sophie Scholl—not to mention the Stauffenbergs and Bonhoeffers—offer a positive counterexample and a challenge. We need more Robert Scholls than ever.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is well worth your time. I own the recent Blu-ray of the movie, but the entire thing is available on YouTube (with English subtitles available in the closed captioning button). I strongly recommend it.

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.

Easy to serve, difficult to please

This week I learned that a former department head at a college where I’ve taught adjunct classes off and on for a decade had died.

I first worked for her the semester my eldest was born. A colleague facing some unexpected surgery offered me a Western Civ II course at this other school and put me in touch with the department head there. She gave me the course on the spot, with just a few weeks to go before the spring semester. I had a hard time keeping up—I began that spring with five adjunct classes at two colleges, an ESL tutoring job for a German elementary student at Sarah’s school, and part-time work at a sporting goods store—but I was most grateful because we needed the money and the work was good. As so often, it was exactly what we needed when we needed it.

My department head didn’t have another class for me after that spring but said she would be in touch as the need arose. Lo and behold, as Sarah and I expected our second child two years later, she reached out with another spring class. I gratefully accepted. Again—just enough, when needed.

That summer I found out about a full-time position at Piedmont Tech and that’s where I’ve been ever since. When I let my department head at this other school know, she thanked me and wished me luck, and said to let her know if I ever needed anything. A generous offer, and she meant it. Over the next few years she’d check in regularly on LinkedIn—yes, LinkedIn can actually be helpful!—always encouraging me and letting me know that if I needed work all I had to do was ask.

I asked when Sarah and I found out we were expecting twins, children four and five. And my department head happily set me up with an online class, semester after semester until her retirement.

She will be missed. She not only played a willing role in God’s providential care for our family—something, as a fellow believer, she would have happily acknowledged—but was simply a good boss.

I’m old enough now to have lost several former bosses: my first boss, a family friend who managed the seafood restaurant where I kept the buffet line supplied with clean plates in middle school, and then her husband, an auctioneer and antiques appraiser who employed me for the year between college and grad school and where I learned a lot about old stuff—as well as how to properly load a moving truck. My department head joins them.

As I’ve reflected on this over the last couple days, their authority reminded me of Confucius’s concept of the junzi, the “superior” or “noble man,” a subject I once taught in an adjunct World History course for this department head: the superior man is “easy to serve but difficult to please.” A rare combination. They were gentle but demanding, graciously insisting on high standards of work, encouraging me to live up to my potential. It was never difficult to work for any of them but I always knew I could do better, and improved as I worked for them. I’m glad to say these are not the only such bosses I’ve had.

The internet is full of vindictive, cynical, hostile takes on the relationship between employer and employee, and it’s not hard to understand why so many people assume it must be adversarial. But I’ve been blessed to see a number of genuinely good bosses, including my current and former deans and department heads at my full-time work, and to cherish the memories of these who have passed away. Precisely by being a good boss they proved to be more. RIP.

The two basic ways history is going wrong

Last year, when Joel Miller asked me to introduce the subject of historiography over on his Substack, I noted the existence of modern schools of history that “deny even the possibility of Herodotus’s work.” Against this was a countervailing anxiety about “revisionism,” which undermines the discipline of historical understanding.

Last night I finished reading Robert Tracy McKenzie’s book The First Thanksgiving. McKenzie explains the historiography of that event and the broader context of the Pilgrims and post-Reformation Europe excellently, and it got me thinking about those two opposed errors in the approach to history again.

It seems to me there are two basic ways history goes wrong in the present:

The first, which I’ve railed against plenty of times here on the blog, stems from the hermeneutic of suspicion. This could be an ideological postmodernism that regards all historical sources as equally fictional “text,” feminist or postcolonialist or other intersectional assumptions about power and oppression, or—most commonly among the half-educated—a reflexive suspicion based on a cliche like “History is written by the winners.” In its elite form, with cultural cachet including glowing writeups in legacy print and endcap displays at Barnes & Noble, this is The 1619 Project; in its vulgar form, this is the TikTolk explainer that slices and dices to reveal to the viewer the dark forces behind great moments in history or, yet simpler, the Henry Ford or Napoleon attitude: history is “bunk,” history is “lies agreed upon.”

The second basic error is often a reaction to the first, and that’s resistance to any form of “revisionism.” Where the first error stemming from suspicion, whether in New York Times or neckbeard Redditor form, is leftist-coded, this is very much a conservative phenomenon. (It is also much more proportionally popular or vulgar, conservatives and their ilk having less purchase in elite taste-making institutions.) This error seeks to preserve the past in aspic, a complete, uncomplicated display piece. Questioning or correcting even the small details of an historical event as popularly understood—pointing out, for example, that the Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey and certainly did not have bread at the first Thanksgiving—is received as a profanation. That’s because, as with the first error, understanding the past isn’t actually the point for those making the error.

Though seemingly opposites—and you’ll certainly see the people doing this sneering at the others, especially imaginary others—both approach history more as a symbolic extension of themselves, both have a simplifying instinct (“Well, we know what’s actually going on here is…” vs “Just teach the facts!”), and both need a usable past, an instrumental version of history oriented toward achieving some goal. That is, they’re presentists.

McKenzie’s Thanksgiving book is excellent. I hope to review it in full here soon, but as I haven’t finished anything I’ve started writing for over a week, don’t hold your breath—and definitely give thanks for me if I do.

On “not sucking”

Two things I saw early last week that I thought a lot about even at the time, but that not long afterward took on much greater weight:

First, after a social media algorithm served up an amusing comedy routine about Christian rock, I explored the comedian’s other work. His brand is explicitly “exvangelical,” and in addition to the usual contemptible rants, complaints, and progressive exhibitionism of that demographic, he has an ongoing series of videos called “Christians Who Don’t Suck.” The most recent video at the time profiled Nat Turner.

Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Inspired by visions he claimed to have received from God, in the late summer of 1831 he led a slave revolt that killed around sixty people. In his master’s house, where he began the uprising during the night, his men killed a baby sleeping in a crib. At another house they killed a bedridden old woman. At another a three-year old boy recognized the slaves riding into the yard and ran to greet them; they decapitated him. At a farm where a schoolhouse had been built for local children, his men arrived just as the children were being told to flee. Turner’s men—by this time riotously drunk on hard cider—rode them down and dismembered ten of them with axes.

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

Second, a history account that I follow on Instagram shared something related to abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In the comments, when someone mentioned Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown, his sons, and some accomplices hacked five men to death with custom-made broadswords, someone who thought himself very clever indeed replied: “Thus always to slaveholders.”

Here’s the thing: none of Brown’s victims owned slaves. They were family farmers who had a mere difference of opinion with Brown, who settled on them as suitable targets for retaliation following what he perceived to be recent pro-slavery victories in the news. For this, they were roused from bed in the middle of the night, led away from their farms over the wailing and pleading of wives and mothers, and hacked to pieces, with Brown personally administering coups de grâce with his revolver. He would go on to plot a rebellion that, had it been successful, would have killed tens of thousands. It failed, but not before sixteen had been killed.

This is, presumably, also “not sucking.” Indeed, to go by that commenter’s words, it’s apparently a standard to be striven for.

I don’t remember the order in which I saw these two posts, but I ran across them on Monday and Tuesday of last week. I found the gloating tone, the posturing and virtue signaling, and especially the moral blindness of both annoying but not especially surprising. The self-congratulatory upright can talk a lot of smack about the long dead, especially when they’re ignorant of the details.

Then Wednesday happened.

I don’t have anything new to say about last week’s public political murder, but the gloating, posturing, and moral blindness of the responses following the event brought these posts about Brown and Turner back to mind, albeit more sharply and painfully defined.

One of my favorite history professors in college mentioned, as an offhand comment during class one day, that one should always beware of those willing to murder on principle. (He may even have been talking specifically about John Brown.) It took me a long time to grasp fully what he meant. One should also beware of those willing to excuse murder on principle.

This is why one’s perception and interpretation of history matter. One’s understanding of the past inevitably informs the present, and excusing the violence of a Turner or a Brown because they had the correct opinions creates the same incentive structure in the present. The person who can celebrate the long-ago slaughter of ordinary people in the name of high-minded political principle can also—it is abundantly clear—celebrate and excuse murder today. They even get the added joy of revisiting the moment over and over on video.

If only there were a way to describe these people.

I teach both of these events—Nat Turner’s revolt and John Brown’s career of bloodshed in both Kansas and Virginia—in detail as part of US History I. Both stories are well enough documented and complicated enough to rubbish easy celebration. Students will all agree that slavery was bad, but they almost always recoil from what Turner and Brown did about it—a salutary moral challenge offering a moment of genuine openness. I’ve linked to decent online articles about both above, but the books I routinely recommend to students on these topics are The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates, which is sympathetic to Turner’s plight as a slave but doesn’t soften or excuse the violence at all, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. I’ve written about both here.

Crucially, while both books are about the evil men at the center of these stories, they also offer small points of hope, of people who actually “don’t suck.” During Turner’s revolt, a slave named Nelson saved the life of Lavinia Francis and her unborn child by hiding her from Turner’s men, and on the night of Brown’s Pottawatomie Creek massacre, Mahala Doyle’s stalwart defense of her sixteen-year old son John spared him from Brown and his men’s swords.

May we have more Nelsons and Mahala Doyles, people saving lives amidst slaughter, and fewer self-righteous, self-proclaimed heroes embracing it.

Austen on seeing nothing

In Volume II, chapter IX of Emma, Emma and Harriet Smith got shopping Highbury. When simple, pliable Harriet takes too long over her muslin purchase, Emma gets bored:

Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole’s carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

This is a striking moment to me, because Austen includes few such slice-of-life moments in her novels. And yet here we have the ordinary goings-on in the village of Highbury. I can easily imagine this scene painted by George Caleb Bingham, who was five years old when Emma was published or, if he could rein in his instincts for meanness and satire, Hogarth.

So there’s the surprising social realist note to the passage, and the affectionate homeliness of the scene, but it was the last line that struck me:

“A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

I read that three times and my wife and I stopped to talk about it. I had struggled earlier in the day to express some of what I worry about as a generation raised on constant technological stimulation ages. What will those lulled by constant noise do with the long final silences of their lives? What will those with no attention span do with endless inactivity? Will they have anything of their own to fill that time?

Here Austen sums up the best alternative: a mind sufficiently self-furnished to be comfortable in “boredom,” a mind capable not only of encountering but of embracing and enjoying “nothing.”

Because Emma is not really bored watching her neighbors in Highbury, and what they are doing is not really nothing. Per Chesterton, “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.” My fear is that modern technology and our culture of content consumption and ceaseless stimulation will render many minds void even of the ability to be interested. And what happens then?

I have recently grown uncomfortable even with my own habit of listening to podcasts on my commute. Ages ago I used this time to think. I got ideas and worked on them later. Now I fill it with other people’s talk—good talk, talk I engage with and learn from, but still other people’s talk. I’ve begun to suspect that more silences would be good for my mind and imagination.

Emma famously starts with a list of the heroine’s strengths—“handsome, clever, and rich.” She can’t really take credit for these things, and she also has significant flaws. Part of the point of the novel is her growth in maturity and virtue, which brings her character into alignment with her natural gifts. And I think she owes no small part of that growth to the formation of her mind—not book-smart, as Mr Knightley points out early on, but sharpened and receptive, even when “at ease.”