My least favorite trope in historical fiction

Well, perhaps not my least favorite trope in historical fiction, but certainly in the top three.

From a Chicago Tribune review of a recent historical novel about the great Anglo-Saxon abbess St Hild of Whitby. I haven’t read the novel in question and don’t intend to critique it or its author, but this paragraph raises an important issue:

[The author] does not always seem to understand how deadly cheap authorial irony is to historical fiction. There is a clumsy scene in which the Irish priest Fursey tells Hild of a dragon’s skeleton he saw embedded in a cliff. The sole purpose of the exchange, as with certain scenes in the first season of “Mad Men,” is to make the reader feel smug for understanding something the characters do not and could not: in this case, that Fursey has stumbled upon a fossilized dinosaur. To make sure we don’t miss the point, [the author] has Fursey reveal his ignorance of sedimentation and the tremendous age of the earth: “It must have been a cataclysmic event: such a beast hurling itself into solid rock.” The past on the page is a fragile reality, and the more distant the more fragile.

We’ve all encountered this: a few characters stumble across or discuss something someone else told them about, and through their faltering if not dumbfounded speculations we recognize something that we, Scientific Man of the 21st century, easily recognize. The characters misinterpret what they see and either credulously accept some ridiculous explanation for the phenomenon or, especially in a certain kind of fiction, superstitiously flee from or moralistically denounce it. And then the characters move on. The scene is purely there for us, we future-dwellers.

I don’t know if this has a name on TV Tropes, but if it doesn’t, it should. Let us call it “past forwarding.”

Hitting the “past forward” button

I could populate a very long list of examples. The simpleminded version is the time-traveler whose every accessory, from his watch to his zippers, is interpreted as witchcraft. (Blame this on Mark Twain.) Often these are not as threatening and intended to be humorous asides, as in a scene in the terrible World War II film Windtalkers in which Ox (Christian Slater) describes his plans to go into business after the war selling a Scandinavian confection called… yogurt. His buddies scoff, but we know better, and say, Hey, I know what yogurt is! and chuckle.

But just as often these little scenes are there to do precisely what the critic above says—flatter the reader at the expense of the characters in the story, characters who would all be long dead were they real people and thus unable to defend themselves. The critic’s mention of “Mad Men” is apt; the first several seasons are full of unsubtle moments in which the characters say and do cartoonishly offensive or thoughtless things—a girl pulls a plastic dry-cleaning bag over her head and her mother nonchalantly scolds her for messing up her dress, a family has a picnic and dumps their trash on the side of the road, leaving it there in a lingering wide shot as we, with Iron Eyes Cody, weep—not so much to illustrate the period but to settle the viewer comfortably in a position of moral superiority.

Now, “past forwarding” can be done well—I can think of good examples from two of Frederick Buechner’s novels, Godric and Brendan, and “past forwarding” of a peculiar kind in Walter Miller’s great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz—and it is not always used for the self-satisfied back-patting I describe above. But, as with any form of irony, it is a delicate tool so often misused that I think the writer of historical fiction is better off not attempting it without a really, really good reason. Certainly, if you’re confident that your planned case of “past forwarding” with be entertaining or amusing or offer the reader a good laugh, you should cut it.

Why? “Past forwarding” annoys me for three reasons, and writers of historical fiction would do well to avoid it for the same reasons:

It’s condescending

The characters in a story almost never come out of a moment of “past forwarding” looking good. The joke is almost always at their expense, leaving them looking credulous or stupid or, worse, dogmatic. (See the Evil Priest in virtually every medieval novel out there.) It casts your characters in an unnecessarily negative light—unnecessary because these things so seldom matter to the plot or the story. Allowing your characters to live and breath on their own terms and in their own context without this kind of intrusion—which amounts to their own narrator heckling them—will make them more fully human, their world more real and meaningful, and your story better. Treat your characters with charity, as equals, and your readers, receiving and responding to that charity, will take them more seriously, as they should.

It’s self-congratulatory

“Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.”

— John Gardner

Note that I said the joke is almost always at the characters’ expense. There is often a character who, finding himself in an incident of “past forwarding,” gets it—or at least knows that no one else is getting it. This character is often the author surrogate or meant to be the most sympathetic (read: most mentally and philosophically modern) character in the story. In one of Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels, the characters meet an elderly hermit. The Christians ooh and ahh over the holy man as the drooling maniac paws at and gropes the women who have come to receive his blessing, and not one of them realizes they’ve been had by an insane pervert except aloof, pragmatic, cynical Uhtred—and us.

Self-congratulation is perhaps the most distasteful aspect of “past fowarding” to me. It undermines the moral dimension of storytelling, as rather than challenging or at least broadening the reader through an encounter with the strange and different world of the past, it flatters modern sensibilities, conflates the familiar with the superior, and offers up straw men to mock or scapegoats to blame. This is a dangerous tendency in any art, but especially storytelling. As John Gardner writes in On Becoming a Novelist, “Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.”

It’s bad art

Implicit in the first two criticisms—that “past forwarding” reduces your characters, even if only momentarily, to punching bags and flatters the reader rather than telling them truth—is that “past forwarding” is bad art. It calls attention to itself, and necessarily—by design—breaks the reader’s “vivid and continuous fictive dream.” As the Tribune critic quoted above writes, “[t]he past on the page is a fragile reality, and the more distant the more fragile,” and so to make asides or jokes at the expense of our characters and their period “jostles our belief in the world [the author] has constructed.” Just as you wouldn’t put modern slang into the mouths of Attila’s Huns or buttons on Roman clothing or potatoes on the plate of a Viking, don’t mock the characters in the dream—it will wake the dreamer.

Conclusion

“[O]ur own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.”

— CS Lewis

I’ve written about topics adjacent to what I’m calling “past forwarding” here many times before: flippancy, presentism, chronological snobbery, bigotry as a failure of the imagination, and pietas. Let me commend those posts to you, as well as two others. This post from earlier this year offers up some of the benefits of studying the past as expressed by historian Christopher Dawson, and this essay from CS Lewis (quoted in the latter) makes similar arguments. Perhaps most important of all is Lewis’s assertion that one must reach

the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

The result should be a certain charity toward those who lived before us.

While neither Dawson’s nor Lewis’s arguments touch on the writing of historical fiction per se, they do overlap with a concern that runs through this post and those I linked above: character, or virtue. Charity, pietas, humility—both a humble recognition of one’s own contingency in time and a humble receptivity to the past—all of these are crucial to a writer’s exploration and recreation of the past, and putting in the work to discipline and shape your own character will inevitably shape and enrich your fiction. It will make it better—or at least keep you from making cheap jokes.

Bede on corruption and plague

In that order.

From St Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book I, xiv, describing the situation of the British in the early 5th century just before the invasions of Germanic peoples (the English, eventually) from the Continent:

St Bede at work, from a 12th century manuscript of his Life of St Cuthbert in the British Library

When the depredations of its enemies had ceased, the land enjoyed an abundance of corn without precedent in former years; but with plenty came an increase in luxury, followed by every kind of crime, especially cruelty, hatred of truth, and love of falsehood. If anyone happened to be more kindly or truthful than his neighbors, he became a target for all weapons of malice as though he were an enemy of Britain. And not only the laity were guilty of these things, but even the lord’s flock and their pastors. Giving themselves up to drunkenness, hatred, quarrels, and violence, they threw off the easy yoke of Christ. Suddenly a terrible plague struck this corrupt people, and in a short while destroyed so large a number that the living could not bury the dead. But not even the death of their friends or the fear of their own death was sufficient to recall the survivors from the spiritual death to which their crimes had doomed them. So it was that, not long afterwards, an even more terrible retribution overtook this wicked nation.

I am not one to argue that natural disasters, pandemics, and other misfortunes are God’s punishments meted out to particular groups or for particular sins—that leads by a short road to callousness, boorishness, and buffoonery. I don’t doubt that God has his reasons and that he judges and punishes the nations, but that lies deep within the “for me to know and you to find out” zone of his will.

But the parallels between Bede’s description of post-Roman, pre-migration Britain and our own day are hard to set aside. A time of unbelievable plenty filled with discontent, licentiousness, consumption, and brutality, in which even the Church—both its people and its leadership—has proven complicit, and a culture actively hostile to truth and goodness and so smitten and hungry for its own evil that nothing can dissuade the people from pursuing it. And what phrase seems more pointedly relevant than Bede’s description of the people’s “hatred of truth, and love of falsehood”?

But notice that the plague only comes when the people are already corrupt. While God may have sent the plague upon the 5th century British as punishment or “retribution”—something about which Bede, notably, carefully avoids being dogmatic—they had already created many of their own problems. They had already compromised their own spiritual immune systems long before physical disease struck them down. And worse was coming, brought on by their own corrupted will:

For they consulted how they might obtain help to avoid or repel the frequent fierce attacks of their northern neighbors, and all agreed with the advice of their king, Vortigern, to call on the assistance of the Saxon peoples across the sea. This decision, as its results were to show, seems to have been ordained by God as a punishment on their wickedness.

Food for thought.

The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics. You can also read public domain translations at Project Gutenberg and Fordham’s excellent medieval source site. It’s worth your while. Penguin has another good volume called The Age of Bede that includes Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert and other saints’ lives and religious texts from his lifetime.

Waugh in the time of COVID

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) on set for his 1960 interview on “face to Face”

From Evelyn Waugh’s interview on the BBC program “Face to Face,” an interview Waugh suspected—with some justification—of being a setup by political enemies. In the words of his biographer Selina Hastings, while the interviewer, a former Labour MP, “was exquisitely courteous . . . he was also perceptive and persistent, and the results were memorable, Waugh’s instinctive hostility only just restrained by a carefully assumed pose of world-weary boredom.”

I’ve written about this interview here before. It’s full of good stuff, especially where Waugh corrects his interviewer’s assumptions about his religion—and religion writ large. But I revisited it the other day while doing some chores around the house, and the following may well be my favorite exchange:

BBC: Looking at yourself—as I’m sure you are a self-critical person—what do you feel is your worst fault?

EW: Irritability.

BBC: Are you a snob at all?

EW: I don’t think.

BBC: Um, irritability with your family, with strangers...?

EW: Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.

Waugh is my spirit animal.

If you’ve ever read anything by Waugh his answer is probably not a surprise. How one could read Black Mischief or Scoop or The Loved One or even Sword of Honour and not come away impressed with the author’s sharp eye for stupidity, absurdity, and humbug and respecting his ability to ruthlessly, even gleefully skewer them is beyond me, but I’m sure it’s happened. That irritability proved one of his artistic virtues. But, as Waugh owns in that interview, it is not a purely positive trait. Far from it.

I’ve actually reflected on that first question and Waugh’s almost immediate reply quite a lot—I am a generally irritable person, usually at the low level of frustration with daily inconveniences, which is its own problem—but I’ve meditated more deeply on it recently. Forget coronavirus—the pandemic of my soul this year is irritability. I’ve been irritated almost continually for months, an aggravation of a preexisting condition. I suffer excess of choler, which cannot be prevented by a mask or social distancing and for which there is no vaccine. Far from worrying about the pandemic, shutdowns, electoral politics, riots and mindless vandalism, and the oceans of cliche and sentimental cant that pass for conversation today, I have worried most over the utter contempt with which I now view almost everyone, including people I used to respect.

I recognize this is a flaw—a sin. So did Waugh.

BBC: Yes. Have you, uh, do you remember—if I may put a Catholic question to you out of the catechism—do you remember the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost?

EW: I should do. I don’t.

BBC: Well, they include charity, joy, patience, benignity, mildness—

EW: Yes.

BBC: Do you, do you fall short in these?

EW: Yes.

One question slightly later in the interview is suggestive of a partial solution. The interviewer is probably fishing for some kind of gotcha statement about the Labour Party’s socialist welfare state, of which Waugh had been sharply critical, satirizing it in such stories as Love Among the Ruins, but Waugh deflates the question in a way that I think hints at a way forward from mere repentance, which after all is only the first step:

BBC: How high in your scale of virtues do you put the Christian duty of service to others?

EW: It isn’t for me to make these scales. Um, my service is simply to bring up one family. 

This reminded me of something else I’ve written about here before, from a Catholic and near contemporary of Waugh’s, but a very different kind of man: JRR Tolkien. In The Return of the King, Gandalf says that “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know.” Waugh’s duty, as he sees it, is best performed by limiting his scope to those things within his God-given ambit.

Of course, keeping within the bounds of that ambit is the challenge, especially now. Modern media—especially social media—have widened our scope. That’s the challenge.

You can watch the entirety of Waugh’s “Face to Face” interview on YouTube here. It’s well worth your while—even if Waugh is cagey with his interlocutor, he still says a lot of things worth consideration, or a laugh or two. And you can read about Waugh’s death, which was worthy of any of his novels, here. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. After all, humility is good for the soul.

Justice and Open Debate on City of Man Podcast

Harper’s made a splash at the beginning of the month with the publication of “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” an open letter about the assault on free speech in the name of justice and inclusion. The letter attracted a surprising variety of big-name signatories like Noam Chomsky, David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, John McWhorter, Garry Wills, and, the biggest of them all, JK Rowling. The letter immediately provoked controversy, both for what it said and for who signed it.

In the interests of accuracy, let me make a slight emendation: For “splash” and “controversy” above read “Twitter poo typhoon.”

Last week The City of Man Podcast’s Coyle Neal invited Nathan Gilmour of The Christian Humanist Podcast, former Maryland state representative Sam Arora, and me on to the show to discuss the Harper’s letter. Tune in as we recap some of the background to the controversy, especially the role played by Rowling in all of this; talk about which signatories stood out to us and why; and finally dig into what the letter is saying and whether it says it well. This was a good talk about an important topic and I was glad to be a part of it.

You can listen to this episode of The City of Man Podcast via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by clicking on the player embedded in this post.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to the show! I’m happy to say that Coyle, a mutual friend, and I are a couple episodes into a new project for podcast that we’re all pretty excited about. Subscribe to the show and you’ll get those as soon as they start to drop.

Thanks for listening!

9. April

The men of LT. Sand’s bicycle platoon prepare to deploy in 9. April

A few days ago I had a chance to watch 9. April, a 2015 Danish war film starring Pilou Asbæk, (of Overlord, which I’ve seen and enjoyed, and Game of Thrones, which I have not). I’ve wanted to see this film since I first watched a trailer for it some years ago, when it first came out, and I finally watched it thanks to Amazon Prime.

April 9, 1940 is the day Nazi Germany, flush with victory in Poland the previous fall and undeterred by the declarations of war of Britain and France, who had done almost nothing to stop German aggression, invaded both Denmark and Norway. While the fighting in Norway lasted well into the summer, beyond even the fall of France and the evacuations from Dunkirk, Denmark capitulated in less than a day.

9. April begins the day before, and tells the story of a platoon of bicycle infantry led by 2nd Lt. Sand (Asbæk). Sand’s men have been called up and placed on standby as Danish intelligence has gathered evidence of a German buildup on the border. Sand arrives as his men engage in target practice, and he has them repeatedly run through tire-changing drills for their bicycles. The men are so-so. Sand only barely conceals his lack of confidence.

Recalled to the barracks, the men are given the ominous order to sleep in their field uniforms and boots and to have their gear ready. The officers, gathered in grim conclave, exchange what little information they have and debate German intentions before retiring to the barracks, where they break up fights and smoke since no one can sleep. Sure enough, the word comes during the night that the Germans have crossed the border. Sand’s men mount up and head toward the invaders.

The rest of 9. April plays out over the single day of resistance, as Sand’s light bicycle infantry try to slow the onslaught of the Germans, who attack with truckloads of infantry, armored cars, and tanks, and whose air force fills the sky with fighters and bombers. Sand watches his platoon dwindle to six, including himself, and struggles with the tension between giving up and saving his men’s lives or withstanding the enemy at all costs. Asbæk’s subtle, soft-spoken performance is excellent, and one feels the weight of the decisions that come to rest upon him well before the film’s conclusion.

The film does a good job of bringing the viewer into a small unit battle, and allowing the viewer to feel—rather than laboriously explaining—the logic of each ambush, retreat, and attempt at regrouping to fight again. The realistic, grounded action increases in tension scene by scene. By the end I genuinely felt fear for the characters. The moody cinematography makes the misty, rolling landscapes of Jutland feel palpably cool and almost medieval in their desolation, and capably captures the shock and brutality of battle without descending into visual chaos.

And the film, without speechifying or bombast, offers a profound meditation on leadership under pressure in the person of Sand, who must both learn to lead once his platoon has lost contact with the chain of command as well as instruct his men in both leading and following, roles for which they may not be prepared. It’s subtly done and excellently presented.

Finally, 9. April portrays the agony of defeat better than many much larger and longer epic war films I’ve seen. One understands why—despite acquitting themselves honorably, continuing to fight long after others have fled, and bowing only to overwhelming force—the defeated feel such humiliation. In this age of endless “winning,” of an obsession with success and with zero-sum scoring against enemies real and perceived, it is worth our while to reckon with defeat and its meaning.

To quote Richard Weaver,

It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who were left behind.

If you’re looking for a fresh, unusual perspective on World War II, war in general, or the relationship between leaders and followers, or simply for a riveting story populated with interesting characters and that offers some genuine food for thought, check out 9. April.

Finding Narnia

Young Warnie and Jack at home in Little Lea in Jessica Lanan’s beautiful, evocative artwork for Finding Narnia

Did you know that CS Lewis had a brother? If you’ve only casually read the Chronicles of Narnia, or even dipped into his other fiction or his apologetics or even his academic work, you may not have known. But pick up any biography of Lewis and the importance of his big brother, Warren “Warnie” Lewis, becomes clear immediately. Just a few weeks ago I was reading Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming CS Lewis, which examines young Jack Lewis’s relationship with Warnie in great detail, and, coincidentally, I discovered a lovely new picture book called Finding Narnia: The Story of CS Lewis and His Brother.

The book begins in Jack and Warnie’s home, Little Lea, outside Belfast. This house, which features so prominently in the adult Jack’s memoir Surprised by Joy, shelters the boys and nurtures their imaginations, providing them with books and stories and a caring family. Jack, the younger of the two, loves high adventure and the dragon-slaying heroes of Norse myth. Warnie, who we see gazing out the window at the cargo ships in the harbor, loves trains and ships and other machinery. They create their own worlds—a land of talking animals for Jack, an elaborately imagined version of colonial India complete with railroads and timetables for Warnie—and together they imagine Boxen, their own fantasy playworld that combines the best parts of both.

Darkness intrudes when their mother dies and the boys leave for school, a section of Jack and Warnie’s story that the author, Caroline McAlister, mostly elides—understandably, I think. We see Jack and Warnie separated by schooling and by war, with both serving in France during the First World War in one of the book’s most melancholy but touching illustrations, and after the war by their professions, which keep Jack in his college at Oxford and Warnie in the army, manning his typewriter in colonial outposts as far from the British Isles as China.

But even here, their love for each other and their childhood collaborations return. In another striking and evocative image, the adult Jack, now a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, his shoulders hunched against the cold and his arms loaded with papers and books, glances into the quad to see, in the snow, a faun beside a lamppost.

The brothers reunite and their work together returns. We see Jack at his desk, writing longhand, and Warnie at his, typing, hunt-and-peck, to turn his brother’s scrawls into legible typescripts. From this teamwork we see elements from the earlier parts of their lives grow and interweave—the wardrobe from their childhood attic, the children hosted at Lewis’s home during the Second World War, the rainy day in which a child must explore or grow bored—and in the book’s final pages, thanks to Warnie’s friendship and partnership, we follow Jack’s imagination through the wardrobe and into Narnia.

When I discovered Finding Narnia (at a nice new bookstore on St Simons Island), I was struck by how much it reminded me of another wonderful picture book I reviewed here when this blog was young—John Ronald’s Dragons, about the childhood and youth of JRR Tolkien. There’s a good reason for that, one I could have known if I had bothered looking at the dust jacket flaps: the books are by the same author, and the care and gentleness with which McAlister tells both stories are complemented by the pictures, which are carefully researched and beautifully imagined. Finding Narnia’s pictures are by Jessica Lanan, and they’re marvelous.

My one very minor complaint about the book is the title—Finding Narnia, as a title, is kind of generic, and easily confused with a few other books with similar titles. It doesn’t grab you or given any indication of what its story is about the way John Ronald’s Dragons does. It’s up to the subtitle—The Story of CS Lewis and His Brother—to carry that weight, and I just wish there were a more direct way to bring the focus of the story into the title (and maybe Warnie’s name, too). But, again, that’s a minor complaint, and if you’ve read this far I hope you already know what a good book this is.

Through clear, simple text and lovely pictures, Finding Narnia presents the story of Jack and Warnie as two brothers who, though quite different, with different talents and interests that led them into dramatically different careers, enjoyed a lifelong loyalty and friendship that complemented and enriched them both. In a word, Finding Narnia is about brotherhood, and this is a story I hope a lot of young brothers will enjoy and learn from.

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands

Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020)

Since Sir Roger Scruton died in January, I have been on what I call the Roger Scruton Farewell Tour, reading those books of his that had until then sat unread on my shelf—and then some. Last night I finished Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, a hefty critique of leftist philosophers and theorists. Rather than write a more traditional review of the book, I wanted to offer some choice bits.

This is a long post. It could be longer. If you read no further, at least least my recommendation of the book: it’s excellent.

On Newspeak

One of the through-lines of Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands is the origin and development of Newspeak. While it was Orwell who coined the term, “the capture of language by the left is far older, beginning with the French Revolution and its slogans.” The variety parodied by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four was that of “the Socialist International and the eager engagement of the Russian intelligentsia,” but Newspeak is a worldwide phenomenon.

Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language—which is to describe reality—is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance.

And, later in the book, in response to a blanket dismissal of most modern philosophers—thinkers as different as Descartes, Hegel, and Kant—as “empiricists” by the French leftist (n.b. the worst kind of leftist) Louis Althusser:

“Someone acquainted with the real history of philosophy might be so astounded by this travesty as to overlook the purpose of Newspeak, which is not to describe the world as it is, but to cast spells.”

Newspeak is the language of repudiation and denunciation, of argument by assertion and the sorting of the world into immutable good and bad categories. Where “ordinary language warms and softens; Newspeak freezes and hardens.” It imposes ideological rigor on the messy world, with which ideologues only dare engage at arm’s length anyway. Reality destroys their plans, and their language is actively at war with reality, seeking both to reshape it and to prevent its being understood (almost exactly Orwell’s depiction of Newspeak).

On Newspeak and its plans:

Newspeak does not merely impose a plan; it also eliminates the discourse through which human beings can live without one. If justice is referred to in Newspeak, it is not the justice of individual dealings, but ‘social justice’, the kind of ‘justice’ imposed by a plan, which invariably involves depriving individuals of things that they have acquired by fair dealing in the market. . . . It is not the expression of a pre-existing social order shaped by our free agreements and our natural disposition to hold ourselves and our neighbors to account. It is the creator and manager of a social order framed according to an idea of ‘social justice’ and imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees.

Why would this appeal to self-described intellectuals, and why have they spent so much time in the twentieth century (and before) thinking about, writing about, and agitating for it?

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”

Scruton’s humor

Which brings me to Scruton’s sense of humor. As I’ve written before, Scruton’s wry, understated wit is one of his best and most underappreciated traits. He expertly seasons his writing and speaking with it, offering up subtle one-liners to emphasize a point, to give important ideas an intellectual hook to hang on, or simply for comic relief, a generous concession from someone who handles such heavy ideas.

But in the service of critique, his humor could have a razor-blade-and-turpentine bite. Here’s Scruton on the endlessly uncoiling mass of jargon and obscurantist vocabulary typical of leftist theory:

‘[R]eification’ became an important cult word in 1968 in Paris. But the subsequent discussions of the term in the New Left Review added nothing to the rhetoric except pseudo-theory: a morose prowling of the intellect around an inexplicable shrine. The lamest observation, expressed in the language of subject and object, could excite the most solemn respect. Marx’s declaration that ‘the bureaucrat relates himself to the world as a mere object of his activity’ is typical: trite, snobbish and slightly precious in suggesting that one is less an object the more time one spends in the British Museum Reading Room.

Burn.

Here’s another, of Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

The following comes from a passage describing György Lukács’s contention that “the knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat stands on a higher scientific plane objectively,” an assertion that, with a heaping helping of Foucault, certainly led to the modern obsession not with truth but with who is saying what from what position and with what identity, and the straight-faced assertions that some identities must be believed:

Lukács expands on this idea at considerable length, in prose of supererogatory greyness. But what is he asking us to believe? Apparently the working class, unlike the bourgeoisie, ‘always aspires towards the truth, even in its ‘false’ consciousness, and in its substantive errors’. To understand our situation, therefore, we must see it through proletarian eyes.

Who then should be our authorities—the articulate offspring of the true working class? D.H. Lawrence, Conrad, Céline? Don’t be ridiculous? says Lukács, who devotes many pages to anathematizing such counterrevolutionary lackeys of the bourgeoisie. It seems that proletarian thinking is not to be found in the works of proletarian writers, but only in the Marxist classics. . . . But when did Marx dirty his hands with manual labor? Or Engels, the factory owner, or Lenin, the gentleman in exile? Or Lukács himself—hereditary baron of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, heir to a banker’s fortune, scholar, aesthete and relentless conspirator among the ruling elites? A proletarian thinker? Consider his remedy for reification:

It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development.

Is that an authentic proletarian utterance? Come off it, mate!

That stinger actually made me laugh out loud when I read it. And coming as it does at the tail end of this summary of a tendentious and—as we are now seeing—dangerous set of ideas, flavored throughout with a condemnation of leftists for their (concealed) self-loathing and (obvious) hypocrisy, it really stung.

Apropos of nothing

And that brings me here, to a few passages that don’t at all remind me of anything going on right now.

Naturally, most of the mid- and late-twentieth century Marxists and other assorted leftists Scruton critiques are obsessed with class. Why class?

By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty—these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us. It is in terms of them that we attempt to articulate the fundamental togetherness that mitigates social rivalries, whether of class, status or economic role. Hence it has always been a vital project on the left . . . to show these things are in some way illusory, standing for nothing durable or fundamental in the social order.

For class substitute identity—any form of identity and, as we have seen, if you are unhappy with the selection you can always create your own!—and you have much of today’s impassioned, aggressive non-discourse, Newspeak motivated by resentment and a furious demand that one’s subjective feelings be granted the status of Newtonian law.

Subjectivity is the order of the day. When Pilate asked Jesus “What is truth?” at least he was inquiring. Truth is a matter of virtually no concern now. At least some of this attitude we owe to Richard Rorty. In response to Rorty’s argument for what he called pragmatism, an “intersubjective agreement” as a replacement for “a natural and trans-cultural sort of rationality”—that is, objective truth accessible to reason regardless of one’s background or present context—Scruton writes:

There is no point to the old ideas of objectivity and universal truth; all that matters is the fact that we agree.

But who are we? And what do we agree about? Turn to Rorty’s essays, and you will soon find out. ‘We’ are all feminists, liberals, advocates of today’s radical causes and the open curriculum; ‘we’ do not believe in God, or in any inherited religion; nor do the old ideas of authority, order and self-discipline carry weight for us. ‘We’ make up our minds as to the meaning of texts, by creating through our words the consensus that includes us. There is no constraint on us, beyond the community to which we have chosen to belong. And because there is no objective truth but only our own self-engendered consensus, our position is unassailable from any point of view outside it. Pragmatists not only decide what to think; they protect themselves from whoever doesn’t think the same.

Later:

In place of objectivity we have only ‘inter-subjectivity’—in other words, consensus. Truths, meanings, facts and values are now regarded as negotiable. The curious thing, however, is that this woolly-minded subjectivism goes with a vigorous censorship. Those who put consensus in the place of truth quickly find themselves distinguishing the true from the false consensus. And inevitably the consensus is ‘on the left’. . . .

Thus the ‘we’ of Rorty rigorously excludes all conservatives, traditionalists and reactionaries. Only liberals can belong to it; just as only feminists, radicals, gay activists and anti-authoritarians can take advantage of deconstruction. . . . The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to Gramsci’s new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment.

And, later, more on that spirit of censorship:

And that is why, paradoxically, the postmodern curriculum is so censorious—in just the way that liberalism is censorious. When everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid the forbidder. All serious cultures are founded on the distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, good and bad taste, knowledge and ignorance. It was to the perpetuation of those distinctions that the humanities, in the past, were devoted. Hence the assault on the curriculum, and the attempt to espouse a standard of ‘political correctness’—which means, in effect, a standard of non-exclusion and non-judgement—is also designed to authorize a vehement kind of judgement, against all those authorities that question the orthodoxy of the left.

Unsurprisingly, if there is no objective truth and all that remains is a totalizing political commitment, base feelings will rise to the surface as motivation. Chief among these—manifested in the French Revolution and Marx, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, the Parisian students of 1968 and the radical activist movements now—is resentment. Scruton addresses resentment thus, which I quote at length:

Resentment is not a good thing to feel, either for its subject or its object. But the business of society is to conduct our social life so that resentment does not occur: to live by mutual aid and fellowship, not so as to be all alike and inoffensively mediocre, but so as to gain others’ cooperation in our small successes. Living in this way we create the channels through which resentment drains away of its own accord: channels like custom, gift, hospitality, shared worship, penitence, forgiveness and the common law, all of which are instantly stopped up when the totalitarians come to power. Resentment is to the body politic what pain is to the body: it is bad to feel it, but good to be capable of feeling it, since without the ability to feel it we will not survive. Hence we should not resent the fact that we resent, but accept it, as a part of the human condition, something to be managed along with all our other joys and afflictions. However, resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage.

That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.

Thus far all of this has played out in the academy, where leftism has triumphed in the United States, and in what are broadly called the culture wars. The self-loathing of the university elite and their embrace of subjectivism and resentment-driven radicalism “have ended in America in a near-universal victory for the left. Many of those appointed as the guardians of Western culture will seize any argument, however flawed, and any scholarship, however phony, in order to denigrate their cultural inheritance.” One thinks of the 1619 Project, perhaps the most mendacious journalism to appear in the New York Times since Walter Duranty, an ahistorical, ideologically motivated attempt to create an utterly new conception of American history—Scruton’s description of Newspeak “casting spells” and “conjuring” again—a project that has already borne fruit. Scruton writes:

“The final result of the culture wars has been an enforced political correctness, by which the blasted landscape of art, history and literature is policed for the residual signs of racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking.”

Anyone who is paying any attention—to the university, to the media, to popular literature (especially the cesspit of YA), to the arts, and to public commemoration—will recognize the truth in this description. But of course this “enforced political correctness” no longer plays out solely in academic institutions. One wonders what the next stage of this will look like. We are already seeing some of it.

Regardless, in Scruton’s assessment:

“We have entered a period of cultural suicide.”

In conclusion

That’s a grim note to leave off on, but I’ll conclude here. I could triple or quadruple the length of this post with more quotations. Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands is an excellent book. It’s going to continue to be relevant longer after our day, but in the meantime it offers an excellent critique of the schools of thought—and Newspeak—that have led us to where we are now.

And Scruton does not end on the note of doom and gloom that I do here. He proposes his own vision of an alternative—indeed, an alternative that can actually exist and actually has—a society founded on free association, private institutions, tradition, and meaning. He notes as well that the leftists profiled in his book are engaged in an essentially religious project, and that the resentment and violence they spawn come from the attempt to meet a religious need with thoughts that give no place to religion, and that this leftist faith—detached from any mediating institution or tradition, but with nothing like reason or a belief in truth to hang onto—blinds them. He does not directly address an alternative to this attempt to meet this need, but his silence on the point is powerful.

Sappho's wedding songs on Core Curriculum

Amo te, ama me, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

I’m particularly excited about this third episode of the Core Curriculum podcast’s series on Sappho because, in keeping with its theme of epithalamia—marriage songs—host Katie Grubbs invited my wife to join her, her husband David, and me for the discussion!

This is Sarah’s first podcast appearance and we had a great time discussing Sappho, what exactly an epithalamion is, these specific poems and their sometimes troubling, sometimes amusing, often touching themes, and marriage both then and now. It’s a wide-ranging discussion and Sarah and I really enjoyed it. Please listen in!

You can find this episode’s excellent and detailed shownotes—including the specific poems under discussion as well as the translations we used for this episode—at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site here. You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or listen to this episode via the embedded player in this post. Please also like the CHRN’s Facebook page to get updates on new shows and episodes as they arrive.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

McClay on history as narrative

A Reading From Homer, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Last week I started reading Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, a new one-volume narrative history of the United States. I’m up to the post-Revolution period of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention, and so far it’s been measured, nuanced, and carefully balanced, with McClay falling into neither of the traps laid on either side of the historian’s path, traps that have caught (often quite willingly) a lot of other recent histories of the US—pathological suspicion and denunciation to the left, mindless jingoism and nationalism to the right. It’s excellent so far.

I started reading the introduction just for kicks and immediately knew I was going to dive into the book. Here’s McClay on the very first page, explaining the purpose of the book:

Its principle objective is very simple. It means to offer to American readers, young and old alike, an accurate, responsible, coherent, persuasive, and inspiring narrative account of their own country—an account that will inform and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. “Citizenship” here encompasses something larger than the civics-class meaning. It means a vivid and enduring sense of one’s full membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of one’s own country.

McClay takes this as the jumping off point for explaining why he wrote Land of Hope as a narrative. Every semester I begin each of my classes with a short presentation on how I approach the past and how I plan to teach it, emphasizing—using quotations from Marc Bloch, LP Hartley, and Cicero—the past as the study of humanity (as opposed to endless eons of geological and biological forces) as it changes over time, with the ultimate purpose of expanding our own limited store of memories.

With that in mind, I read McClay’s introduction with greater and greater excitement. I quote at length so you can get the full import of his argument, and to enjoy his prose, which is elegant and economical throughout:

Let me emphasize the term story. Professional historical writing has, for a great many years now, been resistant to the idea of history as narrative. Some historians have even hoped that history could be made into a science. But this approach seems unlikely ever to succeed, if for no other reason than that it fails to take into account the ways we need stories to speak to the fullness of our humanity and help us orient ourselves to the world. The impulse to write history and organize our world around stories is intrinsic to us as human beings. We are, at our core, remembering and story-making creatures, and stories are one of the chief ways we find meaning in the flow of events. What we call “history” and “literature” are merely the refinement and intensification of that basic human impulse, that need.

The word need is not an exaggeration. For the human animal, meaning is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Without it, we perish. Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory, and without the stories by which our memories are carried forward, we cannot say who, or what, we are. Without them, our life and thought dissolve into a meaningless, unrelated rush of events. Without them, we cannot do the most human of things: we cannot learn, use language, pass on knowledge, raise children, establish rules of conduct, engage in science, or dwell harmoniously in society. Without them, we cannot govern ourselves.

Nor can we have a sense of the future as a time we know will come, because we remember that other tomorrows also have come and gone. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized, even if it is technologically advanced. The incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention and defeat all our efforts to connect past, present, and future, thereby diverting us from an understanding of the human things that unfold in time, including the paths of our own lives.

McClay says here what I've been saying at the start of all of my classes for years, and says it far better than I ever have. No one, I tell my students, really hates or is uninterested in history, because if I asked one student about her favorite TV show or another about how his favorite college football team is doing, both would immediately give me a narrative history—with cause and effect, careful attention to context, discrimination between important and unimportant events, probably a few heroes and certainly some villains. That often seems to click, and for those for whom it doesn’t, I can always ask How did you get here this morning? The answer, again, will be a narrative.

That said, I only add two short glosses or comments, because I can’t really improve on McClay.

We need history because we need a story with which to frame our lives, otherwise we are stuck in those “incessant waves,” that “unrelated rush of events.” We become stuck in the present—not just the present era but the present year, even, thanks to the brain-eroding forces of social media, the present day and hour and minute. That’s how animals live and perceive the world, which is why animals don’t meaningfully change. History is a critical part of what makes us human and is, I think, part of the mysterious imago Dei.

But I’m not going to draw any facile conclusions about how “relevant” this is, because worrying about relevance is another symptom of being enslaved in the present. Narrative history is “relevant” the same way bedrock, or the ocean, or our own skeletons are relevant, as things that support and give shape—and will outlast us.

McClay has much more to say in his introduction, and the history itself, as I said, is great so far. I definitely recommend it if you are at all interested in the past in general or the American story in particular.

That Hideous Strength, Part II, on City of Man Podcast

The City of Man Podcast’s final episode on CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the second half of our discussion of That Hideous Strength, arrived earlier this week. In Part I, Coyle, David, and I introduced the novel, summarized the plot, and started talking about some of the subplots and themes in this rich and complicated book. We also talked about Mr. Bultitude—how could we not?

In this episode, we pick up with David’s examination of NICE’s system of programmatic degradation and alienation and continue to talk about the novel’s parallel dramatic structure, its themes of rightly ordered love and marriage, NICE’s Babel-like project and the eventual confusion of speech that wrecks it, violent animal attacks, and the final surreal cataclysm that swallows up NICE and the village of Edgestow (much to my delight). We also discuss a little more of the novel’s historical context—wondering what That Hideous Strength might have looked like if Lewis had written it just a few months later, after the debut of the atomic bomb—as well as the novel’s Arthurian content and whether it works with the rest of the story, and what exactly “that hideous strength” is. We also have a lot of reading to recommend, and one great YouTube channel.

You can catch up by listening to Part I of this episode here, or go even further back to listen to our chats about the first two books in the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

You can listen to City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or to this particular episode of the show via the embedded Stitcher player in this post.

Thanks as always for listening! I had a great time revisiting this trilogy and talking it over with some sharp and insightful friends, and I hope y’all enjoy it as much as I did.

Sappho and the gods on Core Curriculum

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)

The Core Curriculum returns! After a first series on the Iliad, in several episodes of which I took part, and a second on Plato’s Republic, which, to my regret, I sat out, the show’s third series will take a close look at the fragmentary body of work of Sappho.

Sappho was a native of the island of Lesbos and lived the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. Though widely respected in the ancient world for the quality of her lyrics, most of her poetry has come down to us in fragments or quotations in other writers. Only one of her poems survives in full. She is also the only known named female poet of the Greco-Roman world.

In this first episode, host Nathan Gilmour, fellow guest Michial Farmer, and I look at a selection of Sappho’s poems about the gods. We read through the poems individually, including that single, priceless complete lyric—and discuss their often highly allusive contents, the god or gods invoked by each, and what these poems can tell us about how the Greeks—and, more specifically, Sappho—conceived of the relationship between gods and mortals.

I really enjoyed this discussion and have to say I emerged from this episode—and the series as a whole—with a deepened appreciation for Sappho’s verse.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services, or via the embedded player in this post. You can find this episode’s excellent shownotes, including a full listing of this episode’s poems, the translations we used for reading, comparison, and discussion, and links to some of things we incidentally talk about, at the Christian Humanist Radio Network homepage here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

That Hideous Strength on City of Man Podcast

The last installment of our City of Man series on CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy has arrived! Well, sort of—after discussing Out of the Silent Planet and its sequel, Perelandra, longish but single-part episodes, host Coyle Neal, fellow guest David Grubbs, and I found that That Hideous Strength proved so long and so rich that our discussion had to be split into two parts. Join us as we talk about the strange final chapter of Lewis’s already unusual science fiction trilogy.

How strange is it? In a series that so far has mostly involved interplanetary journeys, alien life, and a dash of the supernatural, That Hideous Strength features an evil government laboratory and think-tank trying to establish communication with demons, an amiable house-trained bear, a hyper-rational Ulsterman, a literal talking head, an unusual number of college faculty meetings for a sci-fi novel, a lot of sex stuff, and way, way more than one fatal animal mauling.

Also, Merlin is in it.

Tune in to Part I to hear us discuss all this and more, including the novel’s context in Lewis’s life and body of work, some of the themes and concerns Lewis develops from the previous books, the elements new to this third volume of the trilogy, and just what Coyle thinks pets are good for.

We had a great time talking about That Hideous Strength, and I hope you enjoy this first chunk of our discussion of this strange but rewarding novel. I listened to it while cooking dinner this evening and enjoyed every minute. You can look forward to Part II soon.

If you’re just now tuning in, you can catch up on our discussion by listening to our previous episodes on Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. In the meantime, you can listen to City of Man Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or to this particular episode of the show via the embedded Stitcher player in this post. Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.