St. Thomas Aquinas, virtue, and fireplace implements

Coincidental to my post on Thomas Aquinas and charity in debate, I discovered this delightful post from Christ and Pop Culture about my second favorite Thomas story: "How to Practice Virtue (by Chasing Hookers Away with Red-Hot Pokers)." It's a fun introduction to some of the basics of virtue ethics as demonstrated early in the monastic career of the Angelic Doctor. Thomas, who came from a noble family in southern Italy, joined the new and controversial Order of Preachers or "Dominicans" against his family's wishes, so his brothers abducted him, locked him in a tower, and threw a prostitute into the room with him to test his commitment to his vow of chastity. Read the piece to learn how that ended.

I say this is my "second favorite Thomas story"; it used to be my favorite, but the reality of lecturing a classroom of sleepy students on Western Civ at 8:00 AM moved the one I recounted earlier this week—about his startling interruption of a banquet with the king of France—to the top. I usually hold students' interest even if I'm not exactly a flamboyant lecturer, so this story,  the one time I pound on the lectern and shout during the semester, always gets hilarious and entertaining reactions. For me, anyway.

I'm not saying it was aliens

Giorgio Tsoukalos on The History Channel's Ancient Aliens. The pose that launched a thousand memes.

This morning I read a very interesting essay at The Atlantic in which the author, after summarizing some widespread beliefs, related scientific data, and modern attempts to reconcile the data with the beliefs, recounts wrestling and coming to terms with his unbelief—in extraterrestrial intelligence. Aliens. 

The title of the piece, by Michael Clune, a professor of English at Case Western University, is "I Don't Believe in Aliens Anymore." Clune's primary interest is in finding meaning and significance in a universe in which humanity, as a conscious intelligence, is alone. And we almost certainly are. Clune notes that:

“Humanity shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t found aliens, because most likely there aren’t any.”

Earlier this year, a group at the University of Oxford released a paper arguing that our knowledge of the universe and of math should lead us to assume that intelligent life is most probably an extremely rare event, depending on a series of fortuitous circumstances . . . that are so unlikely as to almost never happen. Humanity shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t found aliens, because most likely there aren’t any.

This is a realization I had myself some years ago. If, as we are often assured, the chance of intelligent life evolving anywhere is so infinitesimally small, the odds so impossibly long, then how can we assume it has happened more than once? 

But this is, in fact, what a lot of people will say if asked about extraterrestrial life. It's become a platitude: "The universe is so big there just has to be other life out there." Some people even take such questions as an opportunity to show how very 'umble they can be, by turning the question back onto ourselves: "I think it's arrogant to believe we're alone in the universe." But if you accept the premises above—the vast and dangerous complexity of the universe, the fragility of the conditions where life could emerge, and, given everything else, the long odds of life actually appearing and evolving—you must return to the question: If we're alone, now what? 

That's the question that animates Clune's essay, and I recommend reading it. But it was an offhand expression, not even an argument or line of thought, that caught my attention near the end, in this line from the conclusion: "Now looking back on that moment from the perspective of the Oxford study’s revelation, I wonder if giving up gods and aliens will lead people to the weird singularity of the human mind." Gods and aliens, lumped together. This follows from Clune's introduction, in which he posits religion as an earlier, now outmoded attempt by humanity to find a cosmic Other with which to communicate and through which to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. 

I don't know anything about Clune's religious beliefs—if he has any, and he seems to dismiss religion, albeit gently, in his essay—but I am religious, and this passing turn of phrase affirmed something about belief in aliens that also occurred to me some time ago: Belief in aliens is a substitute religion, and aliens are substitute gods.

You don't have to dig far or be intimately familiar with believers to see this, and once you've had that realization, you can't unsee it. Enthusiasts of spiritual esoterica and belief in aliens have a religious fervency and conceive of aliens in very religious ways: guides, protectors, sometimes even creators. The premise of everything from Ancient Aliens to 2001: A Space Odyssey is that aliens are responsible for the greatest human achievements, the greatest human wisdom, and the greatest historical leaps forward. Alien encounters almost always take the structure of a religious experience, so much so that some of the believers who have gone farther down the rabbit hole speculate that religious experiences are in fact alien abductions. The "kinds" of close encounters pretty clearly mirror the kinds of religious experiences people have, whether simply seeing a miracle, having visions, directly encountering saints or angels, more intense encounters that leave physical marks, and, the most awesome of all, being caught up into the heavens for a beatific vision. These encounters change the often unwilling witnesses and they long to reconnect with the intelligences that came to them. One of the most famous alien abduction books, which you may remember being repeatedly shilled on Unsolved Mysteries in the early 90s, is even called Communion.

One way to view these correspondences is as two iterations of the same nonsense, the attitude Clune, more tactfully, seems to assume in his essay. As he writes, "human culture never left the non-secular world behind." Aliens and belief in them "were just a modern version of religious literature." The old temples aren't being torn down; new ones are going up. Whether it's aliens (but I'm not saying it's aliens) or abstractions like humanity, spirituality, nature, Progress or, the ultimate abstraction, the Universe, new gods are crowding in with the old. And aliens and God are hardly mutually exclusive—there are embarrassing Christian spins on all of these things. It may be the most widespread but least noted form of modern religious syncretism.

“Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison”

— CS Lewis

Which brings me to my point. I do agree with Clune to an extent, especially about the non-existence of alien life. But I disagree that belief in aliens is simply one more sincere but vain attempt to find meaning through false mythologies; I think belief in aliens bespeaks a deep human need to believe that has gone awry. As CS Lewis put it in an entirely different context, "spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison." 

The answer to UFOs isn't to give up faith in every transcendent belief system as equally erroneous, but to take away the poison of conspiracy theory and substitute truth. That, as it happens, is the path to meaning.

St. Thomas Aquinas on charity in debate

Catholic priests and Eastern Orthodox patriarchs in debate, from a late 13th century manuscript

From one of St. Thomas's commentaries on Aristotle: 

“We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth and both have helped us in the finding of it.”

Surprisingly for anyone who believes medieval people all marched in theological lockstep, in ideological thrall to the Pope, one of the most cherished methods of education during the Middle Ages was debate. This passion for debate included not only debates before audiences (but with considerably more intellectual rigor than our political "debates" now) but debates carried on by correspondence. Debate was, in a way, part of one's own education, as students often had to argue opposing sides of issues using set texts like the Sentences of Peter Lombard. This was the purpose of his contemporary Abelard's Sic et Non, which set conflicting opinions of the Church Fathers against one another with the student's task being to argue both sides and/or resolve the seeming conflict. Not everyone received Abelard's book enthusiastically, especially since Abelard burned a lot of bridges during his career, but such a project—using preexisting authorities, compiling glosses, adding commentary, and, throughout it all, debating—was typical of medieval education.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was himself no mean debater. As a student and teacher at the Universities of Paris and Cologne, he both hosted and participated in debates and wrote extensively in preparation for them. His Disputed Questions on Truth is one such work, in which Thomas introduces a controversial topic like predestination, knowledge, justification, or the relation between human choice and God's will, considers them from multiple angles, proposes his own answers, anticipates responses and answers those, and, via dialectic, works his way toward the truth of the topic in question.

This format, the posing of thesis and antithesis in a disputatio, was itself a form of debate and mirrored the disputationes of the medieval university. Thomas wrote most of his heavy theological and philosophical work this way, including his magnum opus, the unfinished Summa Theologica, and his Summa contra Gentiles, apparently an apologetic work meant to help Christians both defend their faith and present it to Muslims in understandable terms. Thomas's use of the disputatio makes for incredibly tedious reading, but that reading will also be profoundly instructive if one sticks with it. It takes a serious amount of intellectual honesty and—to use a buzzword—empathy to work this way, presenting the strongest arguments of one's opponents rather than setting up armies of straw men to knock down. One has to respect one's opponents to work this way. It requires the virtue of charity.

Thomas took debate seriously, especially when theological truth was on the line. One of the weightiest issues of his day was the Cathar heresy, a revival of the dualistic Manichean spiritualism of late antiquity. Briefly, the Cathars held that one's spirit is pure, the material world—including one's own body—was evil, and only by purifying oneself of attachment to the world and its attendant appetites could one be saved. (This heresy has by no means been expunged from modern Christianity, by the way. How many people do you know who look forward to release from "this body" and "eternity in heaven" instead of the resurrection?) The founder of Thomas's order, St. Dominic, traveled through the area of southern France where Catharism had most firmly taken root and repeatedly debated Cathar leaders.

The controversy continued into Thomas's day. According to a famous anecdote, when Thomas was invited to a banquet with Louis IX, the Crusader king of France, he sat mostly silent through dinner, apparently lost in thought. Suddenly, long after the partygoers had gotten used to his silence, Thomas pounded on the table and shouted, "And that will settle the Manichees!" Supposedly, Louis had a secretary fetched so Thomas could get his idea down while it was still fresh.

The story may or may not be apocryphal, but it illustrates something true about Thomas: the debate was never far from his mind, and the more serious the disputed question the more that was the case. But again—this care for the debate was always infused with charity. Charity was not, to Thomas, mere affection or the bundle of feelings and lusts that passes for love today, but specifically the habit of "friendship of man for God" which unites man to God, who is charity. This divine friendship, as God works through us, reflects like sunlight off of us onto those around us:

“The aspect under which our neighbor is to be loved, is God, since what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God. Hence it is clear that it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbor. Consequently the habit of charity extends not only to the love of God, but also to the love of our neighbor.”

Loving your neighbor is loving God. So debate, but debate charitably, because bringing your neighbor to the truth is the loving thing to do. After all, that's what God is doing to us.

Abelard offers an instructive counterexample. Famous for his arrogance, Abelard was seldom content to defeat someone in debate on points—he wanted an intellectual knockout. He tried to humiliate his opponents and pointedly criticized major theologians and philosophers, including his old teachers, saying of one that he was famous out "of long established custom" and not because of "the potency of his own talent or intellect." After impregnating a student, whose relatives caught and castrated him, Abelard fled to the Abbey of St. Denis outside Paris—until he insulted the abbot and fled again. For the rest of his life, he resurrected old controversies and picked new fights. Like Galileo, who also provoked most of the hostility he encountered himself by being rude and pigheaded, Abelard found himself accused of heresy and facing excommunication by the time he died. A number of Abelard's ideas, particularly his dabbling in rationalist deconstructions of the Trinity, would still have put him beyond the pale doctrinally speaking, but his reception may have been warmer—more forgiving, more charitable—had he practiced a little charity himself.

I reflected a few weeks ago on the difference between quarreling and arguing. I think charity is the difference; it's the oil that reduces friction and overheating. We might be tempted simply to disengage, to shut off the engine, but that's a mistake. The truth is real and worth pursuing, and it's worth persuading others to join you in the pursuit—what's the point of debate if not to persuade? Charity makes debate, rather than screaming, tribalism, and virtue signalling, possible. Assume the best of your opponents, assume their good faith, and always give them yours.

If we can learn anything from Thomas right now, we can start there.

My top nine Civil War novels

For the upcoming release of Griswoldville, here’s a list of my personal favorites from the vast body of Civil War literature. This is by no means an exhaustive list—there's a lot of good stuff out there and plenty I still haven’t read, like Thomas Keneally’s Confederates, Mackinlay Kantor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Andersonville, or even Gone With the Wind—but simply a list of the books I’ve been most moved by, have most enjoyed, and have most often returned to over the years.

So here, in no particular order, are my nine favorite Civil War novels, with a few honorable mentions or bonuses thrown in just because:

Rifles for Watie, by Harold Keith

My mom ordered Rifles for Watie from the God’s World Book Club flyer when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I remember plowing through the novel, simultaneously disappointed that it did not take place in the Civil War I was familiar with—the Eastern Theatre—and fascinated by the war it did depict. Rifles for Watie is a story of intrigue, in which Jeff Bussey, a young Union soldier, infiltrates the Confederate Indian cavalry of Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader. Watie hopes to acquire repeating rifles for his cavalry troopers, and Jeff, despite the friendships he has formed, must stop him. The novel respectfully depicts the Cherokees, their attitudes toward the war, and the chaotic Western Theatre, and is unusually realistic for children’s fiction thanks to the author’s many interviews with elderly Civil War veterans. Rifles for Watie won the Newbery Medal in 1958. 

Also recommended: The Perilous Road, by William O. Steele, about a young pro-Confederate Tennessean who discovers his brother has joined the Yankees; G. Clifton Wisler’s Red Cap, the story of a drummer boy imprisoned in Andersonville; and Brotherhood, by Anne Westrick, a daring novel about a boy in post-war Richmond who finds his humanity tested when his brother joins the Ku Klux Klan.

Shiloh, by Shelby Foote

If you find yourself daunted, as I do, by the sheer size of the late Shelby Foote’s three-volume, 2,900 page, 1.2 million word The Civil War: A Narrative, start with Shiloh instead. Shiloh is a short, beautifully written and poignant novel taking place across about three days but encompassing the beginning of the war, the secession crisis, and the conflicts within the United States as a whole. Told through multiple points of view, from commanding generals on down to yeoman privates and a squad of volunteers, Foote’s novel gives you glimpses of all the major events of the battle through several perspectives and hints broadly, because of the battle’s course and results, at what the outcome of the war must be. More importantly, it brings you into the battle, giving you that difficult to achieve feeling of what it must have been like, to make you understand the experiences of the soldiers themselves. A great book.

Also recommended: Shelby Foote also edited Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories, a collection of short stories from authors including Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Eudora Welty. More about Bierce below.

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara

I came to The Killer Angels through Gettysburg, the 1993 film adaptation. As a kid I had a VHS copy of the movie, recorded off TNT, which I watched on a near endless loop, but when I finally read the novel I found the only thing superior to the film. Shaara’s book is much like Foote’s Shiloh in that it is the dramatic, beautifully written story of a single battle that, through its multiple points of view, offers a sweeping look at the whole war. But it differs from Shiloh in its scope thanks to the sheer scale of the battle, the largest ever fought in North America, and in the thoughtful, melancholy introspection of its major characters, especially James Longstreet, Lewis Armistead, and Joshua Chamberlain. One of the most popular Civil War novels ever published, justifiably so, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.

Also recommended: Promise of Glory, by C.X. Moreau, covers the September 1862 Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam) and owes a lot to The Killer Angels in terms of structure, focus, and tone. Promise of Glory doesn't reach the heights of Shaara's work, but it’s a solid fictional recreation of another important moment of the war.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

Justly regarded as a classic, The Red Badge of Courage suffers somewhat from its near constant presence in high school reading lists. This is the story of Henry Fleming, a young Union army private, and his experiences during the (unnamed) Battle of Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863. While Crane was not a veteran of the war, he did his homework and crafted a short novel of unflinching psychological realism, capturing every vicissitude of dread, cowardice, and reckless courage over the day or so that Fleming wanders through the battlefield. While this novel clearly made later works of grim, realistic war fiction like The Naked and the Dead possible, Crane’s story is apolitical, unembittered by ideology, and narrowly focused on one thing—courage—and what it means. Actual veterans praised Crane’s work, and it’s still worth reading a century on.

Also recommended: Ambrose Bierce, an older contemporary of Crane and a veteran of the war's western theatre, wrote a number of short stories based on his experiences. “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” is an early stream-of-consciousness story about a Confederate saboteur who is about to be hanged, and “Chickamauga” depicts the horrific aftermath of battle as seen by a child. Bierce’s image of the wounded and their terrible suffering still haunt me from reading this as a kid.

Traveller, by Richard Adams

Probably the strangest book on this list, and one of the strangest I routinely recommend, Traveller is the story of Robert E. Lee—as told by his horse. Adams, who is most famous for his other animal epic, Watership Down, retells the course of the war through a goodhearted but ignorant animal witness. Through Traveller we get a narrative of the majority of the major campaigns of the Eastern Theatre from an unusual perspective. It sounds goofy, but the story works well because it brings a fresh sense of pathos to the war through a narrator who only half understands what is going on. In a half-comic, half-tragic irony, Traveller ends the war thinking his side has won, and the note of triumph he brings to his storytelling only deepens the reader's sense of loss. Surprisingly engaging, and even more surprisingly moving.

Also recommended: For another outside angle on a major Civil War figure, read A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, by Stephen Harrigan. This novel offers a portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a young, ambitious frontier lawyer and brims with colorful real life characters and incidents even if the narrator, a failed New England poet, is fictional. Though the story transpires decades before the war, this novel, like Traveller, is freighted with irony and sadness because of what we know is coming.  

Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell

Like Rifles for Watie, mentioned above, Woe to Live On tells a story from an out-of-the-way corner of the war, one where most of the usual narratives and assumptions about North and South don’t apply. Set in Missouri, the novel follows Jake Roedel, son of a German immigrant, his best friend Jack Bull Chiles, their planter friend George, and George's slave Daniel as they fight with a group of Bushwhackers, Confederate guerrillas led by Col. William Quantrill, in the confused, morally grey irregular warfare of the back country. Rivalry with other fighters, the Lawrence Massacre of August 1863, liberation, friendship, love, death, and birth all play a part in this dramatic, surprisingly funny, and moving novel. Woe to Live On is also the basis of Ride With the Devil, a film adaptation directed by Ang Lee.

Also recommended: While taking place postbellum, True Grit, by the great Charles Portis, is deeply informed by the war. The narrator Mattie's father was a Confederate veteran, as is Texas Ranger LaBoeuf. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who refers to hanging Judge Parker as “an old carpetbagger,” lost his eye while fighting with Quantrill’s bushwhackers in Missouri, an often overlooked bit of characterization.

Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

A combination of Homer and Appalachian family lore, Cold Mountain tells the parallel stories of Inman, a Confederate soldier returning to his home in western North Carolina as a deserter in late 1864, and Ada, his beloved, who is working desperately to keep her farm afloat after the unexpected death of her minister father. Episodic in the manner of the Odyssey, with grotesque and monstrous dangers along the way, Cold Mountain is full of brilliantly realized characters and evokes both a real time and place—and their dangers—as well as the world of myth. It’s a magnificent novel, full of longing, hope, melancholy, and meditation on danger and death, and deservedly won the National Book Award in 1997.

Also recommended: The Second Mrs. Hockaday, by Susan Rivers, tells the story of the teenage wife of a Confederate officer who is recalled to his regiment the day after their wedding. Through letters, diary entries, and court records, a mystery involving adultery, slavery, hidden pregnancy, and murder uncoils across the decades following the war. I didn’t quite buy the ending, but the novel is a powerfully evocative and brings postbellum piedmont South Carolina to life.

The Black Flower and The Judas Field, by Howard Bahr

These are the books I’ve most recently discovered, and how I missed them until two years ago I don’t know. The central event of each is the disastrous 1864 Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, a few hours of appalling waste that shape the rest the characters’ lives. The Black Flower, Bahr’s first novel, takes place over the day of the battle and follows Bushrod Carter, a teenage private, and Anna Hereford, a young woman staying with cousins at a house near the center of the battlefield. The Judas Field is the post-war story of Cass Wakefield, a middle-aged veteran, as he accompanies a dying friend on her quest to find the bodies of her brother and father. Both are powerful, beautifully written works that evoke the time and place well and bring home the war’s horror, pain, and overwhelming loss—the war’s fruits for most of the ordinary people who took part.

Also recommended: The Year of Jubilo, by Howard Bahr, the second book of this loose trilogy, centers on the return of Private Gawain Harper to Mississippi after the war. Harper hopes to marry his sweetheart, but her father will only consent if he helps kill the brutal leader of the local Home Guard. Another vivid evocation of early Reconstruction.

Griswoldville is in the final stages of proofing and will be available soon. I hope you'll read and enjoy it, and that you'll check out some of these other great books as well. Thanks for reading!

Addenda

Since writing this post I have read Andersonville, which may not quite crack my top nine but is an epic of the kind American writers don’t produce any more. You can read my review here. I’ve also read the first two novels in Ralph Peters’s Battle Hymn series, Cain at Gettysburg and Hell or Richmond, and both are excellent. I hope to review the entire series once I’ve finished it.

Also, Griswoldville came out just over a month after I published this post. My readers have given it generous reviews. Please do check it out! It’s available in both paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. Click here to shop for it, or read more about it, including a collection of reader comments, by clicking here. I’ve also published two excerpts on my website that you can read here and here. Thanks again!

Ancient Asides 6 on City of Man

Yesterday morning I recorded another episode of "Ancient Asides," a now eleven-part series on Roman political history, with my friend Coyle Neal of the City of Man Podcast. Yesterday afternoon, episode six of the series, "The Final Background to the New Testament," dropped, and I listened to it on my commute this morning. This episode jumps backward in time a bit to catch our discussion up on the history of the Jews and Judaea since the time of Cyrus, with attention given to Alexander and the Successor Kingdoms, the revolt of the Maccabees, the establishment of Roman hegemony, Judaea's fluid and changing relationship with Rome, and much more. Always a pleasure to sit down and talk Roman history with Coyle.

I've embedded the episode below via Stitcher, but you can listen on iTunes and other podcast apps. Be sure to subscribe to City of Man to get their excellent usual content as well as the semi-regular Ancient Asides episodes on which I'm proud to be a guest. As you can guess, there are several more waiting in the wings. Enjoy! 

Previous Ancient Asides episodes, in case you want to catch up:

Ancient Asides 5: The Roman Crisis—On Roman imperial government through the end of the third century.

Ancient Asides 4: The Roman Emperors—On the successors to Augustus and their relative merits, demerits, and craziness

Ancient Asides 3: The Roman Revolution II—On the death of Julius Caesar and the aftermath for Cicero, Antony, Octavian, and the Republic.

Ancient Asides 2: The Roman Revolution—On the Republic in crisis, from the Punic Wars to the death of Julius Caesar.

Ancient Asides 1: Roman Government—On the birth, early history, and development of the Roman Republic and the culture that undergirded it.

Richard Weaver on toughness and heroism

From Weaver's great Ideas Have Consequences, published in 1948, seventy years ago:

“Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. ”

This passage comes from a chapter entitled "The Spoiled-Child Psychology," in which Weaver documents the degeneration of virtue in the modern world and ascribes our afflictions, crises, and upheavals to an essentially immaturity: a discontent, a raving for a norm of comfort and self-fulfillment that is both unattainable and–the real root of the problem–materialistic. Without the transcendental, an idea he develops later in the same chapter, heroism is meaningless struggle and discomfort. And with the transcendental stripped out of our cultural imagination–so that every human endeavor is nothing but economics, or competition for resources, or, our explanation du jour, simple power–all we can do with the leftovers is squabble like toddlers over the choicest bits.

Richard M. Weaver (1910-63)

I don't entirely agree with some of Weaver's diagnoses. He sees Aristotle as part of the problem, for instance, which is a notion I vehemently disagree with. But few writers have lamented the modern world as thoughtfully or eloquently or with as little hysteria or mordant self-pity as Weaver did in Ideas Have Consequences.

The quotation above, in a bit more of its context. Note Weaver's explicit references to World War II as symptomatic–even on the Allied side: 

The trend continues, and in a modern document like the Four Freedoms one sees comfort and security embodied in canons. For the philosophic opposition, that is of course proper, because fascism taught the strenuous life. But others with spiritual aims in mind have taught it too. Emerson made the point: "Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar plums and cat's cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard, which rack the wit of all human society?" Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man. 

The modern temper is losing the feeling for heroism even in war, which used to afford the supreme theme for celebration of this virtue. 

I last read Ideas Have Consequences four or five years ago and have been meaning to reread it since. Do check it out–it's a short, punchy book full of challenging ideas, and it will be well worth your time. Weaver's Southern Essays is also a wonderful collection on a favorite topic of mine, and also worth reading. You will also see a quotation from Weaver as an epigraph to my soon to be released Civil War novel Griswoldville.

A warning for fellow bookworms

From Leftism, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a word of caution to those with lots of theories and little experience:

“The distance of a bookworm from reality can be considerable.”

Kuehnelt-Leddihn is making this point to explain the failure of Karl Marx's theories to come true, the failure of Marxists once they come to power, and more broadly why revolutionaries tend to be bourgeois autodidacts or pure cranks rather than actual members of the classes they claim to represent. Those oppressed peoples–be they the workers, the peasants, or something else–are too busy in the real world for sloganeering. Plumbers rarely throw bombs at the Tsar's troops. College dropouts often do. And once they come to power, millions starve precisely because of this teething problem in their intellectual-real world transmission.

I include myself in this word of caution. Work with the concrete. Avoid abstractions. Get out in the world and get dirty. It's good for your intellectual immune system.

Saving Private Ryan at 20

Saving Private Ryan came out twenty years ago today. For a long time this was my favorite film. It grew with me; I recall watching it for the first time in a while, after having had two years of German in college, and reacting with shock as I realized I could understand the German commands and insults shouted during the battle. 

I don't call it my favorite movie now, simply because I don't think I can narrow my favorites down to one any more and not because I've lost my appreciation for it or it hasn't aged well. Quite the contrary. 

This film came out in a different world. Bill Clinton was president and had two years left in his second term. This was nearly three years before September 11th; before the eight years of the Iraq War or the seventeen and counting in Afghanistan; before George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump; before the great recession and the bailouts; before not only Parkland or Sandy Hook, but before Columbine; ten years before the first Marvel MCU movie; before iTunes, Netflix, Facebook, and MySpace; before Twitter. There were five and a half million World War II veterans alive then. There are about half a million now.

In a smaller context, as a small measure of the changes that have happened in the intervening decades: I was fourteen when Saving Private Ryan came out and, since was rated R, I didn't see it until a few years later, when a teacher loaned me her VHS copy. I had to get my parents' permission, and I'm grateful that they gave it.

STEVEN SPIELBERG AND TOM HANKS ON THE OMAHA BEACH SET IN IRELAND

I was a Stephen Ambrose-devouring WWII geek, slowly establishing a serious interest that has lasted to the present, and had begun collecting World War II movies (again, on VHS), which I watched over and over again. I particularly liked A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day, large-scale, top-down epics of major campaigns, and the narrower fictional stories in The Guns of Navarone and The Bridge on the River Kwai. I still like—or love—these movies to a greater or lesser degree, and appreciate them on a much deeper level as an adult.

But Saving Private Ryan was different. Saving Private Ryan changed me.

It changed movies, too. If you're wondering where the last twenty years of desaturation and handheld shaky cam came from, look no further. But Saving Private Ryan outshines its many imitators, and still shocks and thrills, because it wasn't aping another film's style. Far from it; Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, both of whom won Oscars for this film, were aping the combat camera footage of the war itself, where the shaking was an artifact that the cameramen sought to reduce as much as possible given the horrible conditions in which they filmed, at risk to their own lives. Another measure of the changed world: this movie was shot on film and photochemically desaturated. The digital intermediate, allowing computer-controlled fine-tuning of a film's color, was still two years off. And because Spielberg and Kaminski adopted the style they did purposefully, for a carefully calculated effect, it still works. It's organic to the picture, not a stylistic tic. 

This style was integral to the effect the film had on me as a kid. Saving Private Ryan was the first film to immerse me, to present to me not just meticulously staged action scenes with authentic period detail, but to show me what it was like to live through the events it depicts. I still remember the first time I watched it; during the lead up to the final battle, when the characters know the Germans are approaching and can only wait for the inevitable, I found myself desperately thinking up alternatives. I know the film backwards and forwards now, but it still involves me that much.

It also moves me, and often in unexpected ways. As a kid, my heart went out to Hanks's Captain Miller, especially as he dies fighting at the end, for a mission even he has struggled to believe in, or Vin Diesel's Caparzo, bleeding out in the rain. Jeremy Davies's Corporal Upham enraged me, as it doe so many viewers. Now my heart breaks for Mrs. Ryan, glimpsed only in one dialogue-free scene, or the French family Caparzo was trying to help, or Wade, begging for his mother as he dies. Even the cowardly Upham I can sympathize with, if only as a fellow human being who has also felt overpowering fear.

Spielberg is often criticized or outright mocked for his sentimentality or schmaltz, but I don't think Saving Private Ryan's ending detracts at all from the film. If the purpose of any war is simply to protect lives and ways of life, Private Ryan's humble, common man attempt to "earn this" was the point all along. So in addition to teaching me that war is not fun, that combat has consequences, that human lives are senselessly wasted even in worthwhile conflicts, and that the good guys will inevitably sin too, Saving Private Ryan reaffirmed something my parents had taught me from childhood: human life matters.

In an era of entertainment offering cynical, prurient depictions of violence and suffering, self-congratulatory political platitudes, or messaging that simply affirms us where we are without challenging our comfortable vision of the present, we could all stand to revisit this brutal war film.

Chesterton (and Orwell) on careless language

From "New Religion and New Irreligion," an April 4, 1908 piece in the Illustrated London News:

“It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else.”

In its fuller context: 

Our generation professes to be scientific and particular about the things it says; but unfortunately it is never scientific and particular about the words in which it says them. It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else. If an astronomer is careless about words, one cannot help fancying that he may be careless about stars. If a botanist is vague about words, he may be vague about plants. The modern man, regarding himself as a second Adam, has undertaken to give all the creatures new names; and when we discover that he is silly about the names, the thought will cross our minds that he may be silly about the creatures. And never before, I should imagine, in the intellectual history of the world have words been used with so idiotic an indifference to their actual meaning. A word has no loyalty; it can be betrayed into any service or twisted to any treason. 

Chesterton goes on to give examples, 110 years old now, of one of my least favorite moves in the political rhetoric playbook: claiming one's position is the truer form of one's opponents' position, e.g. this recent op-ed asserting that supporting abortion is more pro-life than opposing it. This is surely an iteration of "no true Scotsman," but if it's been named I'm unaware of it. "Of all the expressions of our current indifference to the meaning of the words," Chesterton writes later, "I think that the most irritating is this cool substitution of one kind of definition for another." That, as it happens, does have a name. 

Before moving on to the religious controversy surrounding the "New Theology" of R.J. Campbell, Chesterton concludes:

“The fact is, that all this evasive use of words is unworthy of our human intellect.”

"Mr. Campbell has excellent brains," Chesterton continues, "but thinks it more advanced and modern not to use them. . . . He is guided in his choice of phrases by mere aimless sentimentalism." We cheat ourselves when we cheat with our language. We were made for finer things. Our minds are precision instruments.

Chesterton here anticipates some of the arguments in Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" by almost forty years. Writing in 1946, Orwell argued that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought," and devoted the bulk of his essay to examples which he surgically dissects. Compare: 

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Slovenliness is a good word for it. Not chaos, not anarchy, but an utter "you know what I mean" indifference to good order–a linguistic dorm room. A pervasive slovenliness degrades not just political discourse but all communication today. I'm not talking about emojis, slang, and memes, but rather the intellectual path of least resistance onto which all of us route our thoughts, "gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug." The appeal, Orwell writes, is that this mode of communication, this way of thinking, is easy.

But will it lead us to truth?

Quick: What is the difference between a country and a nation? Between enhanced interrogation and torture? Between racism, prejudice, and bigotry? Between faith and a faith? What is love? What is violence? What does the word free mean in free speech, free country, free love, free will, free with any purchase?

Burke on Independence Day

Edmund Burke (1729-97) was an Irish-born politician, writer, and political philosopher. He served as a member of parliament for nearly thirty years, from 1766-94—three decades spanning the political crises that birthed the United States and the French Republic.

As MP, he urged Parliament to respect the rights and privileges of the American colonies, arguing that the British Empire should either leave them alone, as they had largely done up to that point, or let them go. Any other course threatened to poison Anglo-American relations. He also condemned the French Revolution, accurately predicting the Reign of Terror and the rise of a military dictator out of the chaos, and produced the founding tract of Conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in France, a still-relevant denunciation of revolution for revolution's sake.

There are four quotations to which I often return and have special relevance for Independence Day.

Don't interfere with custom for the sake of expediency

From his "Speech on American Taxation," April 19, 1774, in which he argued for the full repeal of the Townshend Acts, which Parliament had passed to increase revenues from the colonies following the exorbitantly expensive Seven Years' War:

Be content to bind America by laws of trade: you have always done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burden them by taxes: you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this be your reason for not taxing. . . . But if, intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government, by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into slavery.

The importance of unwritten laws to liberty

From his "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly," 1791, in which he developed a lengthy and damning argument against Rousseau, who valued ideological abstractions about liberty and license above concrete reality:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity;—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

A warning about bad leaders

From his "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America," 1777, warning of the kinds of people who may seek power and that one should always beware of, the kinds democracies are always in danger of encouraging:

But I cannot conceive any existence under Heaven, (which, in the depths of its wisdom, tolerates all sorts of things), that is more truly odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.

Evergreen advice

From his "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents," 1770:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

A visit to Antietam

Bloody Lane, Antietam National Battlefield Park

Friday I got to visit Antietam National Battlefield Park for the first time. Despite my interests, studies, and profession, this is only the fourth Civil War battlefield I've been able to visit, after Gettysburg (twice), Kennesaw Mountain, and Griswoldville. (I could count Atlanta, but that battlefield is buried beneath Jimmy Carter Boulevard now.) 

The Battle of Sharpsburg, a.k.a. Antietam, occurred September 17, 1862 in the fields surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland. Major General George McClellan, the Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, having accidentally acquired a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's marching orders for his invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, moved to confront Lee while his army was divided. Lee drew his army up around the town of Sharpsburg, where a few bends of the Potomac River created a defensible position. McClellan attacked, and his troops kept up pressure on Lee all day, but the battle proved indecisive. McClellan refrained from attacking the next day and Lee was able to escape across the river into Virginia. 

Two things make Antietam significant: First, it is the bloodiest single day in American military history. 23,000 men were killed and wounded in just twelve hours of combat. Second, as Antietam was the closest thing to a victory the Union had achieved in the east up to that point, the battle offered President Lincoln, hitherto an advocate of a limited war to preserve the union, an opportunity to expand the war's scope and put extra economic pressure on the Confederacy by announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, which would theoretically liberate all slaves in areas still under Confederate control if the war were not ended by January 1, 1863. This was not actually a popular move, especially since further disaster awaited the Union armies later that year.

I arrived before the visitors' center opened and the first spot I walked to was the western end of Bloody Lane, where the 24th Georgia Volunteer Infantry deployed in support of Colquitt's Brigade during the battle. Among the privates of the 24th's Company E, "Rabun Gap Rifles," was Abraham Lafayette Keener, an ancestor on my maternal grandfather's mother's side. Abraham has a small role to play in my forthcoming novel Griswoldville.

I walked the length of Bloody Lane to the park observation tower. Bloody Lane was a deeply rutted road at the time of the battle--natural entrenchments for the defending Confederates under D.H. Hill. Despite repeated assaults by much larger Union forces, Hill's men held out for nearly four hours. During that time, over 5,000 men were killed and wounded along that stretch of road. The Confederate dead lay three deep in a few places.

After climbing the observation tower I walked to Dunker Church, scene of some early fighting and maneuvering during the morning of the battle, and watched the excellent half-hour film available at the park visitors' center. I am, to be frank, usually underwhelmed by the films at national parks, but this one was produced to a high standard and featured dramatic and moving reenactments of some of the major events of the battle. I bought a DVD copy for use in the classroom.

From there I drove to Burnside's Bridge to complete my visit. 

If you haven't visited Antietam, do so. It's an important site for Civil War history and the park is well-maintained and beautiful. Strikingly so. Walking around on a sunny, cloudless June morning, I found it hard to imagine all the death that occurred there. But it's important to try.

A gallery of the photos I took. I forgot my Nikon before I got on the road, but I hope my phone's camera suffices.

The penalty for ignoring two thousand years

“The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred.”

The Paris Review has shared an interesting piece from their archives, an undated letter between Donald Hall, their first poetry editor, and founding editor George Plimpton. The subject is poetry, and while the discussion suggests the mid- to late-1950s very specifically, Hall makes points about art, sincerity, and fakery that are still timely. Most striking is his assertion that you can't produce good art without attending to the tradition you find yourself in. From near the end of the letter:

You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that. 

Belong to a tradition. Embrace it. You'll produce better art and not "get stuck in the last hundred years," an eternal provincialism that will render you irrelevant faster than any particular subject matter could.

That line on "the penalty for ignoring two thousand years" is wonderful. But as far as penalties go, even being stuck in the last hundred years is probably optimistic now. Even my sincerest, hardest working students, who come to me so profoundly ignorant of the past, are often stuck in the last five. 

Naturally, C.S. Lewis's introduction to St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation came to mind, as it so often does when I try to encourage people to read the old stuff. Making a point broadly similar to Hall's, Lewis writes that

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook . . . The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

See also my thoughts from a few weeks ago on the value of studying the past, complete with two thousand year-old references to Polybius and Cicero.

Hall died last week aged 89.