Bede on a medieval Scrooge

From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V, xii, a chapter in which he relates the story of Dryhthelm:

About this time, a noteworthy miracle, like those of olden days, occurred in Britain. For, in order to arouse the living from spiritual death, a man already dead returned to bodily life and related many notable things that he had seen, some of which I have thought it valuable to mention here in brief. There was a head of a family living in a place in the country of the Northumbrians . . . who led a devout life with all his household. He fell ill and grew steadily worse until the crisis came, and in the early hours of one night he died. But at daybreak he returned to life and suddenly sat up to the great consternation of those weeping around the body, who ran away; only his wife, who loved him more dearly, remained with him, though trembling and fearful. The man reassured her and said: ‘Do not be frightened; for I have truly risen from the grasp of death, and I am allowed to live among men again. But henceforward I must not live as I used to, and must adopt a very different way of life.’ Then he rose and went off to the village church, where he continued in prayer until daybreak. He then divided all his property into three parts, one of which he allotted to his wife, another to his sons, and the third he retained and distributed at once to the poor. Not long afterwards, he abandoned all worldly responsibilities and entered the monastery of Melrose, which is almost completely surrounded by a bend in the river Tweed. There he was given the tonsure and entered a separate part of the house allotted him by the abbot, where he entered upon a life of such physical and spiritual penance to the day of his death that, even if he had kept silence, his life would have witnessed that he had seen many dreadful and many desirable things that remained hidden from others.

First, because I am me, I cannot read Bede’s account of Dryhthelm’s shocking return to life without thinking of Ray Stevens and his Uncle Fred.

Second, one of the stranger lines of criticism I have heard of Dickens’s Christmas Carol is that no one, especially not a hardened moneygrubbing capitalist like Ebenezer Scrooge, would change his ways because of one night’s bad dreams. This critique has always struck me as odd—and is probably more ideological than artistic anyway—but in case any proof were needed that Dickens’s fable has some truth to it, here is a real world example. Even if you explain away Dryhthelm’s death and resurrection and his vision—which I am disinclined to do, though this story seems tailor made for the kind of pop debunking common today—we’re still left with someone who radically reordered his entire life on the basis of what he saw over the course of one night. And Bede goes on to tell us that Dryhthelm “forwarded the salvation of many by his words and life.”

One side note—a big difference between Dryhthelm and Dickens’s Scrooge is their starting point, as Dickens takes pains to show just how much of a wretched miser Scrooge is while Bede notes that Dryhthelm already “led a devout life with all his household.” A good example of how the devout are not necessarily holier than anyone else, just more aware of their own need for repentance—as Dryhthelm would have been the first to admit.

If you want to find out what, exactly, Dryhthelm saw of hell, purgatory, and heaven during the hours he lay dead, you can read the rest of this passage at Project Gutenberg here. It’s striking. The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics, from which I’ve quoted here before.

Come and See

Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko) witnesses German reprisals in Elim Klimov’s Come and See

Come and See is one of the great war films, made the greater by dramatizing a slice of World War II rarely remembered—if known at all—by Western audiences. Released in 1985 after years of trouble in the writing and production stages—all owing to Soviet censorship—Elim Klimov’s film is a harrowing depiction of the war in Byelorussia (now Belarus). It is a surreal, dreamlike, but utterly real and horrifying film, and it should be required viewing.

And I looked, and behold

Two striking group portraits, just about half an hour from both the beginning and end of the film, bookend Come and See.

The first portrait

The first features a band of colorful Soviet partisans, guerrilla fighters with whom the main character, a teenage boy named Flyora (Aleskey Kravchenko) has joined up. He is a babyfaced youth eager to fight, to strike back at the Nazis, who in the early parts of the film are present only as a single scout plane, enemies as distant from Flyora and his world as fairytale giants. Having dug up a rifle from the abandoned trenches of the earlier years of the war, he leaves the family farm despite the frantic and tearful protests of his mother and joins up. The partisans are bluff and vigorous, exuberant men and women with patchwork uniforms and castoff equipment. As they pose for their photo they spot Flyora, wearing one of his father’s far too large suits and carrying his oversized rifle, and they gleefully work him into the front of the group—a hilarious adornment. He beams.

And then he is put to work scrubbing pots, forced to trade his new boots for a veteran’s disintegrating ones, and left in the camp while the others march out to fight.

With the fighters in the band gone, Flyora goes off by himself to weep and meets Glasha (Olga Mironova), whom we intuit is the teenage lover of the partisan band’s leader, Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevicius). Flyora and Glasha bond, albeit uneasily, and Glasha shares her hopes and dreams—a husband, a home, and motherhood. Like Flyora, she aspires to step into a meaningful role and to belong. Then the scout plane returns.

Come and See takes its title from Revelation, from one of the eeriest and most powerful passages in Western literature, and immediately following the return of the German plane we see the film’s own version of the four horsemen—four paratroopers descending into the forest, the vanguard of a German assault on the partisans’ camp. Their arrival, as in Revelation, brings conquest, war, famine, and death. Hell follows with them.

German artillery pounds the forest and Flyora, shellshocked and deafened, reunites with Glasha. They flee. His village is nearby and he means to shelter with his family. When they arrive, the village, which we have already seen crowded and full of life—from the village elder to children and animals—stands empty and silent. Flyora’s mother and sisters are not home, though there is uneaten food on the table and his sisters’ dolls lie lined up on the floor. Flies crawl over everything; their buzzing fills the barnyard and the house.

Glasha seems to catch on before Flyora, who excitedly suggests that his family has hidden on an island in one of the million forest marshes of Byelorussia. That must be it, he thinks, and he leads Glasha there. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, Glasha takes one last look back at Flyora’s farm. She cries out and they run on.

After wading through the muck of the bog Flyora does meet survivors of his village, which has been destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for partisan attacks—exactly what Flyora’s mother had predicted. Flyora is by now almost mad. He is also filthy, and a camp barber snips his hair down to untidy shocks that have already begun to lighten and turn grey.

For lack of anything better to do he joins a few partisan stragglers, scroungers led by the chipper but experienced Rubezh (Vladas Bagdonas), who intends to steal a cow to feed the refugees. The scout plane returns, and Rubezh, Flyora, and the others’ errand, which plays out almost comically for nearly half an hour, does not end well.

A pale horse

It is after the failure of this mission that Come and See’s most excruciating sequence plays out. Flyora, waking stunned in a pasture, wanders until he comes upon an elderly farmer from whom he tries to commandeer a haycart, but the Germans arrive. The old man helps Flyora hide his rifle and equipment and insinuates Flyora into the population of his village—the village that will provide the backdrop for the second group portrait to feature Flyora as a prop.

The Germans have come on an anti-partisan mission, there to exact a reprisal for a vaguely described “insult” to German soldiers. They arrive in force, approaching out of the morning fog as shadows that resolve into a large, heavily armed unit of SS men and collaborators. They empty every house in the village and call for everyone to assemble before an old church. More men arrive by truck. They set up speakers and play festive music. The villagers turn out, ready for the bureaucratic negotiation they expect from the Germans. (The old man suggests a family that Flyora can hide with, as they have lost one family member whose death might not appear on the Germans’ records.) The Germans tell them to bring toothbrushes, towels, and other goods so that they can be relocated, but almost immediately the true nature of the SS unit’s purpose manifests itself as they gleefully herd the entire population into the church and bolt the doors. The people cry out in terror and frustration and fall silent only once—when the Germans offer to let any able-bodied man live if he will leave his women and children in the church. Not a man moves or speaks—the most heroic silence I have ever seen in a film. Flyora climbs out the window and is hauled away by the Germans. A mother climbs out with a child. She is dragged away by her hair; her childr is thrown back in through the window, and then the Germans throw in grenades.

And the sequence does not end. Will not end. It seems to last forever. The soldiers use grenades, Molotov cocktails, machine guns, and finally flamethrowers, and the Germans—many clearly drunk—laugh and applaud at the antics of their inept Ukrainian collaborators, who for their part clown and pratfall and abuse their handful of prisoners. Flyora—now grey-haired, trembling with bottled up screams, his face prematurely wrinkled and his eyes set in an agonized ten-thousand-yard stare—watches.

Finally, with the screams silenced and the burning church collapsing in on itself, the Germans’ carnival atmosphere abates. They load the trucks and set off on foot. Just when we think Flyora has been forgotten, he is hauled to his feet by one of the collaborators and a group of German soldiers force Flyora to his knees. One puts a pistol to Flyora’s temple. Another casually walks up and joins them and we understand—they are posing. Flyora waits, kneeling, as another soldier indifferently winds his camera and snaps a photo. Then they push him aside and leave.

His name that sat on him was Death

The second portrait

This is not the end of Come and See, but it feels like an end—for Flyora at least. How can relief from the dread we have been experiencing through him be so cruel? How can being spared make things worse?

Flyora, when he rouses from his coma-like faint in the smoldering village, wanders again. Just outside the village he comes across the wreckage of the German column. The partisans have ambushed them and now have a handful of survivors at their mercy.

I will leave it for you to find out what happens there—as I have, despite the length and detail of this review, have still left out a lot—but this final passage leads us to the most powerful and surreal and disturbing moment in a film that is full of them.

Staggering away with his broken and still unused rifle, Flyora comes across a poster of Hitler lying in a puddle. The people of the village had produced it before the massacre as evidence of their cooperation with the Nazis, to no avail. Flyora shoulders his rifle and in an agonized fit of anger and trauma shoots the poster. Between each shot we see Hitler’s career play out in reverse, from the corpses of the Holocaust to the beginning of the war to the Nuremberg rallies to the Beer Hall Putsch to his time in the army during World War I to—

Each time Flyora fires we rush further backward through the life of the author of Flyora and his people’s suffering until Flyora is, finally, brought up short. This moment is perhaps the most famous in the movie—meaning I was expecting it—and it still wrecked me. It is the most pointed challenge to the audience I’ve ever seen in a war film and one of the few really serious moral statements I’ve ever seen played out in a movie, a seriousness made only more emphatic coming at the end of two hours of unstinting atrocity.

And Hell followed with him

Come and See is almost impossible to describe or explain without simply relating what happens, which I think is part of the point. But even a barebones recapitulation of its events—it doesn’t really have a plot, certainly not one of the Hollywood stamp—cannot convey what it is like to watch it.

A lot of that has to do with its style, which the director, Elim Klimov, very carefully designed to draw the viewer in without allowing the viewer to become comfortable. The cast are mostly amateur actors; the lead, Alexsey Kravchenko, was cast after accompanying a friend to the film’s auditions, and his performance is indescribable—the thing that holds the movie together tonally. The costumes and props, especially the weapons, look lived-in and much used, and many were apparently real World War II surplus from both sides. Several combat scenes included live ammunition, and the actors respond accordingly. This top-to-bottom authenticity is abetted by the film’s cinematography. Shot mostly with natural light and often beautiful, it sometimes wanders, following the characters via Steadicam, or holds still, waiting, allowing the viewer’s dread to build. The prolonged massacre scene is the film’s most powerful example, as documentary-style handheld blends seamlessly with carefully composed static shots. I cannot imagine that, when Spielberg came to shoot the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in Schindler’s List, this film wasn’t on his mind.

And yet for all its realism in many regards the film is also surreal, with extended sections of impressionistic, dreamlike filmmaking. Characters stare into the camera, making eye contact with the viewer and seeming to address us directly; animals take center stage, as when a stork follows Flyora and Glasha in their wanderings or when a cow, the picture of gentle ignorance, faces death; and we get many, many closeups of Flyora’s anguished face. All of this works to unsettle the viewer, so that even the moments of relative calm thrum with foreboding. The result is apocalyptic—dreading the inevitable, we can only await its revealing.

This is the kind of film that people, because of what it portrays, rather lamely call “hard to watch.” I didn’t find it so—at least not in the sense of struggling to stay interested. It is bleak, filled with a steadily gathering and unremitting dread punctuated with indescribable horrors. It is eerie, as character after character looks unblinking into the camera, the soundtrack drones tonelessly, as utterly real imagery dissolves into the otherworldly. And it is deeply disturbing, as any film set in the bloodlands of eastern Europe during the war should be. But I did not find it “hard to watch”—which was part of its terror. Come and See arrests you from the very beginning with that dread, those images, and the world it recreates. You can’t look away, and the film doesn’t let up. It is no more hard to watch than it is to sleep through the worst kind of nightmare.

What is awful about Come and See is precisely that nightmare, which you do not so much watch as live through. The film brings us into a world in which the people live with an unimaginable burden of dread, fear, and grief and makes us feel it without offering any phony hope of rescue or relief. There is no attempt to explain or make sense of it, no theodicy or catharsis, and the ideologies and politics behind the war feel so remote from the war’s reality that the only time they intrude, near the end of the film, we feel just how unreal, how inadequate they are. And what is more, all these things actually happened to real people. An overwhelming reminder of what World War II was like for millions.

Come and See is a masterpiece, a film everyone should see once, especially those of us for whom discomfort is alien, and who would react with self-justifying rage if their world were upended. Like the scriptures it invokes, it is a challenge, and like a nightmare—or a vision, the kind of nightmare that we occasionally need—it should wake us up changed. True to its title, the film commands us to come, to see, and we behold.

CS Lewis against the judgement of history

From CS Lewis’s 1950 essay “Historicism,” in which Lewis takes on “the belief that men can, by the use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process”:

“Some who in general deserve to be called true historians are betrayed into writing as if nothing failed or succeeded that did not somehow deserve to do so. We must guard against the emotional overtones of a phrase like ‘the judgement of history’. It might lure us into the vulgarest of all vulgar errors, that of idolizing as the goddess History what manlier ages belaboured as the strumpet Fortune.”

For “the judgement of history” see also “Progress,” the direction of “the arc of history,” being on “the right side of history” or its opposite, etc. etc. etc.

Greyhound

Burial at sea in Greyhound

Last week I finally had the chance to see Greyhound, a film I’ve been anticipating ever since I read the book two years ago. When the first trailer dropped in the Spring I was optimistic, albeit with some questions or reservations, and eager for June to come. Then COVID-19 did its thing and with theaters closed Sony lateraled to AppleTV+—a service I don’t have. So it took a get-together with family to give me the opportunity. I’m glad I finally got to see it.

Greyhound tells the story of Cdr. Ernest “Ernie” Krause (Tom Hanks), a career US Navy officer in command of a destroyer during World War II, and the roughly three days it takes to lead a convoy of merchant ships through “the black pit,” the zone of the North Atlantic out of reach of air cover from Canada, Iceland, or the British Isles, a zone infested with U-boat wolfpacks. More specifically, Greyhound takes place just months after Pearl Harbor, in the grim days when it was unclear whether the Allies would or could win the war, and Krause, despite his long career, is new to command. He has never seen combat. Appropriately, the film opens with the devoutly religious Krause on his knees by his rack, praying.

Krause and his destroyer, the Keeling—radio callsign “Greyhound”—will make contact with the Germans before the end of that day. Despite an early victory over this first U-boat, the wolfpack closes in and contact is unrelenting. The U-boats harry the convoy, whose four escorts—an American, a Canadian, and two British destroyers—shuttle continuously back and forth to oversee rescue operations for stricken ships, locate and pursue the U-boats, and—above all—provide coverage to the vulnerable cargo ships.

These competing duties stretch Krause and his crew, but Krause most of all. He does not eat or sleep for forty-eight hours and only occasionally stands still. By the final night his feet bleed and his speech slurs. But always he returns to the same problems—looking for and locating the U-boats, engaging them with a supply of depth charges that immediately runs low, conserving fuel, looking out for slower cargo ships or damaged stragglers, calculating and recalculating the time it will take to reach air cover and help.

And here I should mention the thing that holds the whole movie together—Tom Hanks. Hanks wrote the screenplay himself, adapting CS Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd, and it’s clear that this is a film he’s thought a lot about. All of the pressure and stress of command, even Krause’s short murmured prayers or quotes from the Bible at crucial moments in the story, come to us through the smallest changes in Hanks’s face. We read his decisions in his expressions, in the anxious glances he throws toward a damaged ship or the set of his jaw as he sweeps the horizon with his binoculars. It’s a powerful and gripping performance, but not a flashy one. Krause finds himself confronted with the first real test of his career, a career in which he has been “fitted and retained” for years—that is, good enough not to be let go from the peacetime Navy, not good enough to be promoted—and now he is eager to do the right thing, make the right decisions, and lead the men and vessels that depend on him through the wolfpack to safety. He wants to be a good shepherd, and the earnestness of Hanks’s performance as Krause is one of the film’s greatest strengths. (Tellingly, in the novel he is George Krause. In Hanks’s adaptation he is Ernest.)

A few critics have knocked Greyhound for its underdeveloped supporting characters, but I think the film makes up for this in casting. The film is full of interesting and—importantly—distinct looking faces, so that even as a new officer of the watch rotated to the bridge to join Krause I could remember his face if not his name. The cast also convey a lot about their characters without words—much of the dialogue is, after all, the spare and precise language of military command—through meaningful glances and small looks exchanged behind Krause’s back. We understand that one young lieutenant questions Krause’s leadership and judgement, and another is as eager to do well in his subordinate position as Krause is as the captain. So while these secondary characters may not be fully fleshed out, we feel who they are by watching them work together, which I will always prefer to those scenes in which happy-go-lucky GIs talk about their Ma or their Best Girl back home over a game of cards.

A few supporting characters do stand out. Krause’s XO, LtCdr Charlie Cole (Stephen Graham), is Krause’s second-in-command and confidant, the only one Krause briefly opens up to with his doubts—a moment they quickly downplay when they note a rating listening to their conversation. Krause relies on Cole; Graham, in a performance that makes the most of his limited dialogue and screentime, makes us understand why. We also get to know one of the ship’s mess attendants, Cleveland (Rob Morgan), one of only two black men shown aboard the ship, and Cleveland and Krause’s relationship leads to one of the most moving moments in the film.

The film has its problems. There is some dodgy CGI, something I was concerned about when I first saw the trailer, but I don’t know how the filmmakers could have overcome this without a worldhistorical Christopher Nolan-sized budget. The special effects mostly look good, especially one evocative shot that rises from the Keeling into a night sky illuminated by the flares and tracers of the convoy and the exploding torpedoes of the U-boats and higher and higher into the clouds, which flicker and glow with the combat beneath. It’s mostly CGI, but it provided a moment of repose and poetry in this otherwise efficient and machinelike war thriller. Other shots, especially frenetic shots of digital close combat between the various ships and the U-boats, don’t look as good.

The film also feels overedited in some portions, as if, in the long delays between shooting and releasing Greyhound, the filmmakers or the studio (not unlikely given Sony’s history of meddling with productions) were unsure of some stretches of the film. This is particularly the case at the very beginning, in a short scene that establishes Krause’s thwarted love for Evelyn (Elisabeth Shue), and in the final battle, which feels like something is missing in the buildup to the climax.

But the CGI and editing are not insuperable problems. More questionable to me is the decision to show the audience some of what the U-boats are up to. We get occasional cutaways to the subs surfacing or rising to periscope depth to target the convoy. While I think this is meant to give the audience an Oh no, look out! feeling of tension, waiting for Krause and crew to spot and react to the threat, for me they more often deflated the building tension. One of the most powerful aspects of the book was that its point of view was utterly confined to that of Krause, and his continuous scrabble for mere knowledge of his situation made it exhausting and unbearably tense. By providing the viewer of the film with more information than Krause, it separates us from him at a few crucial moments when I think it would have been better to stick with him and watch and wait. Fortunately, the strength of the storytelling and Hanks’s performance carry us through the film, so this is another issues that doesn’t sink the film. (Sorry.)

The only outright artistic misstep, I think, is the decision to have a U-boat commander (voiced by Thomas Kretschmann) hijack the frequency of the Keeling’s ship to ship radio to taunt Krause—and occasionally howl at him. While surely intended to be creepy or threatening, it felt like neither and more like another slip in the filmmakers’ confidence in the foreboding mood that they had created.

(It was also impossible with the technology available and, moreover, inadvisable for a sub trying to hide and escape depth-charging.)

So, those issues aside, here are a few other things I appreciated about Greyhound:

• It’s short and fast-paced. Critics used the word “efficient” repeatedly, something I think a few of them intended to be condescending. I think it’s a strength. The film clocks in at just over an hour and a half and there’s not an ounce of fat on it.

• It’s got an enviably authentic feel. Greyhound shot some scenes aboard a surviving Fletcher-class destroyer that has been maintained in WWII-condition as a museum piece, and the sets, equipment, and uniforms look great. The characters also act like men from the period, which is always a plus.

• Greyhound includes some aspects of the war that don’t often make it into movies. The Keeling catches ricochets from another ship’s anti-submarine fire and there is at least one straightforward friendly fire accident. The men also show their inexperience and make mistakes—a big problem in a military trying to grow quickly from its minuscule interwar size to something that could take on the Axis.

• The film is subtle. I’ve mentioned the power of Hanks’s quiet, unshowy performance, but the film brings in a lot of other things without calling attention to them or giving us an exposition dump. This is particularly the case with the mess attendants, Cleveland and Pitts (Craig Tate), a nod toward the racially segregated roles in the US military at the time that allows us to see it in context without derailing the story for a sermon.

• The film also treats Krause’s religion seriously, allowing him to be specifically and meaningfully Christian. A rare thing in films today. This also provides a few little moments of kinship with Cleveland.

• Greyhound was shot digitally by DP Shelly Johnson. I prefer and always will prefer the look of film, but Johnson’s work looks fantastic and the dreary blues and greys of the wintertime North Atlantic set the mood exceptionally well. Look for the return of sunshine as the film’s hope spot.

• The film is also pretty clean, language-wise. This isn’t usually a concern for me, but the film’s relative lack of profanity, its short running time, and its attention to details of life aboard ship and background issues like segregation mean I’m already thinking about this film for classroom use. The characters’ own attention to policing their language also hints at the elaborate traditional protocols of the Navy, something I appreciated.

• Finally, as I’ve already hinted, Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed the audience. One of my favorite things in any historical film is for the filmmakers to drop us into an unfamiliar world and trust us enough to keep up and learn (cf. Valkyrie, The Alamo, and the masterpiece of this kind of storytelling, Master and Commander). Greyhound does that admirably, establishing how things are done and why without the use of clumsy exposition. The first U-boat attack and Krause’s countermeasures do an excellent job of this.

Greyhound may not make it into the top tier of World War II films, but it is a finely-crafted film that tells a good story well, and it gripped me from beginning to end. It’s clearly a labor of love for Tom Hanks, and I think his efforts in shepherding this film into existence have proven worthwhile.

If you get the chance to see Greyhound, its availability limited as it is by streaming on AppleTV+ rather than having a theatrical release, do so. For myself, I hope to see this on the big screen someday.

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.