Four years worse than 2020: 1945

Shellshocked 16-year old German soldier Hans-Georg Henke weeps after surrendering to American troops, April 1945. Read more here.

This is the fourth and penultimate post in this short series on years worse than 2020. We began with 1315, a year of natural disaster and continent-wide starvation; continued with 1348, a year of pandemic like our own, but exponentially worse; and followed that yesterday with brief looks at six other terrible years I considered including. We resume with two years from within living memory. I start with the year that I think best qualifies to be called hell on earth:

1945

For Americans, who lost 400,000 servicemen killed but remained relatively untouched by a war fought on the other side of two oceans, it is easy to identify 1945 with V-E Day and V-J Day and imagine people cheering in the streets and sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. But that’s a moment in one corner of the globe at the tail end of the bloodiest war in all of human history.

The war in Europe

About that war: As 1945 began, in Western Europe the Battle of the Bulge, a massive German counterattack that aimed to break through the Allied lines and sunder the British and the Americans, had petered out and January saw the mopping up operations. American troops, angered over German massacres of American prisoners during the battle, committed their own massacres of surrendering Germans.

As the western Allies pressed across the Rhine and into Germany, they discovered Nazi labor camps, the most notorious being Dachau, liberated by the Americans, and Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British. Skeletal survivors greeted the soldiers who captured the camps. The soldiers discovered railroad cars or storage buildings full of emaciated corpses, and sometimes neat rows of prisoners executed in batches before the guards abandoned the camp. At Dachau, some of the guards remained behind. The American infantry who caught them machine gunned them.

On the Eastern or Russian Front, the Soviets began massive assaults on the German lines in two zones—along the Vistula and Oder Rivers and against the German redoubts in East Prussia, offensives that committed four million men to the fighting, before making the final drive on Berlin. Along the way the Red Army liberated several concentration camps, including the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which the Nazis had evacuated at the beginning of they by sending the surviving prisoners on forced marches to the west. Thousands died. Some of the female survivors liberated by the Russians were raped.

A refugee crisis began as soon as Russian forces entered German territories like East Prussia or Pomerania, with millions of German civilians fleeing ahead of the Red Army. Many went on foot in the dead of winter. Eyewitnesses wrote of women staggering westward clutching babies that had already frozen to death. Those that were caught by the Red Army were brutalized; from the beginnings of the 1945 offensives through the fall of Berlin and beyond, Russian soldiers raped as many as two million women, sometimes gang-raping a single woman over a dozen times and raping any females from grandmothers to eight-year olds. German evacuations of civilians along the Baltic coast in Operation Hannibal resulted in the largest ever maritime evacuation, moving over two million people to the west, as well as the largest ever loss of life from a sinking ship, when a Russian submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff, killing almost 10,000 people, most of them civilian women and children.

By the time Berlin fell, Hitler had killed himself and taken millions with him—including hundreds of thousands of old men and boys conscripted as militia, the vast majority of whom were slaughtered. In just the three offensives it took the Soviets to capture Berlin, a quarter million Soviet soldiers died and almost 900,000 were wounded. Half a million German soldiers were captured, many of them not to be released until the mid-1950s, and an unknown number—but likely in the hundreds of thousands—were killed. And reflect again on the civilians caught in between. Thousands committed suicide, sometimes en masse.

The war in the air

The air forces of the Allied countries continued strategic bombing campaigns both of Germany and Japan, wreaking widespread destruction and massive civilian casualties. The most notorious single incident in Europe occurred in February of 1945, when Dresden was annihilated overnight, killing over 20,000 people.

Meanwhile, long-range bombers stationed on Pacific islands captured from the Japanese in the previous years of the war—and always captured with heavy loss—began fire-bombing Japanese cities. Incendiary bombs of the kind dropped on Dresden had even more devastating effect in the timber- and paper-constructed houses of Japan. In one nighttime raid in March, firebombing destroyed sixteen square miles of Tokyo and killed at least 90,000 people—the most destructive air raid of the war, even including those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Piles of bodies clogged the streets where civilians fleeing the fires bottlenecked and were trapped. Most of the corpses were too badly burned to be identified and were buried in mass graves.

67 cities in Japan were targeted with firebombing, and some suffered much greater destruction than Tokyo. Millions who survived the bombings were left homeless.

The war against Japan

Through the Spring and Summer in the Pacific the Allies—chiefly the British and Americans, but with help from other Allied countries including offensives launched by the Chinese—pressed in toward the Japanese home islands and did so with renewed vigor following the surrender of Germany. The British pressed through the jungles of Burma; the Americans landed on the islands of the Philippines and the volcanic island of Iwo Jima. The US Marine Corps committed over 100,000 Marines to the latter, an island of eight square miles, and lost almost 7,000 killed and 20,000 wounded. Almost all of the Japanese defenders were wiped out.

Worse yet was the Battle of Okinawa, which lasted from April 1 to mid-June and saw American casualties, both killed and wounded, doubled. These losses were controversial at the time and would only prove more so following the revelation of the atomic bomb.

The two bombs that ended the war are probably the most notorious single thing to come out of 1945, and justifiably so. The figures are murky, owing both to the nature of the bombs, which vaporized their targets instantaneously, and to the political debate surrounding them, which has tempted people to fudge the numbers both upward and downward for decades. But by a conservative estimate, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima instantaneously killed 70,000 people and wounded as many more; the bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed at least 35,000 and wounded almost twice as many. And this is not even to raise the issue of the firestorms started by both bombs, or the much longer-lasting effects of radiation poisoning.

The aftermath

And so the war ended. But the killing did not. The German refugee crisis was ongoing and would continue for years, as “ethnic cleansing” purged the bloodlands of Eastern Europe of unwanted elements, especially ethnic Germans. A million Germans would die in the year after the war ended. Eastern Europe saw widespread ethnic cleansing, including waves of anti-Semitic violence, even before the war had ended, violence to which Soviet authorities turned a blind eye, often allowing it continue for years.

The Soviets were busy, after all; they continued systematic purges both of their own ranks—it was at this time that Soviet authorities netted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had served in the East Prussian campaign, for criticizing Stalin in a private letter and sent him to the Gulag—and of any possible resistance to Soviet overlordship of the lands they had “liberated” from the Nazis. They were really fighting two wars—one against the Nazis and one against any local resistance that arose to reclaim control of their countries following the expulsion of the Nazis. In some places, especially remote regions of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the fighting would continue into the 1950s. The last Polish soldier fighting the Soviets would not be killed until 1963.

Ultimately 70-85 million people were killed in the war itself—a number that has been continually revised upward. The majority of these deaths were civilians and the vast majority of those were Chinese and Russian, many of the latter being victims of the Holocaust. Here are some very safe, lowball estimates of the death toll. For the many who apparently like infographics, let me recommend this chart, which also includes some conservative estimates but is carefully designed to convey the proportion of dead from each country pulled into the war. This widely shared video makes a similar point. Averaged out across the six years from 1939 to 1945, 27,000 died per day.

And, in addition to the manmade destruction that peaked in this year, there were typhoons and earthquakes.

Just the beginning

The events of 1945 brought about the end of World War II, to be sure, but history does not consist of discrete episodes that begin and end on precise dates, and, as I hope I’ve made clear in the descriptions above, 1945 not only saw tremendous upheaval and loss of life but set up future conflicts, disasters, and upheavals. The entire endgame of the war created the conditions out of which the Cold War would emerge, including not only the overarching US vs USSR conflict but the many proxy wars in which satellites of the First and Second Worlds would bleed each other for fifty years.

To name just one example, in 1945 a Communist guerrilla leader who had spent years fighting the Japanese occupiers of his country declared the newly liberated French territory of Indochina the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. That leader was Ho Chi Minh.

That will prove relevant to this series in its final installment, tomorrow.

Further reading

The literature on these events is enormous. What follows is a short selection of some of the best books I’ve read or consulted on these topics over the years.

Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 is a well researched and powerfully presented account of the war in Europe’s climactic months. This book’s account of the fall of Danzig to the Russians depressed me so much that I took a two-week break in the middle of it. For a broad look at the war’s terrible aftermath in Europe read Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent, which first made me aware of the ethnic cleansing and warfare that continued long after the war. Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe tells the story of Soviet domination of half of Europe beginning during the war. For yet broader Eastern European context, read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

For the end of the war against Japan, I recommend Downfall, by Richard B Frank. Though parts of its examination of World War II’s most famous photograph are dated owing to subsequent research, James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers is a good popular history of the Battle of Iwo Jima—and the only book that has ever given me nightmares. A good short history of the Battle of Okinawa is that by Marine veteran Robert Leckie.

Good histories of the war that do not neglect the massive losses of life and the scale of human suffering involved include those of Andrew Roberts, Max Hastings, and Antony Beevor. The book I recommend for a comprehensive history of the Nazi camp system, from beginning to liberation, is Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL.

For grunt’s eye views of some of these events: Siegfried Knappe’s memoir Soldat begins with a long description of the final battle for Berlin. Knappe served as the adjutant to the commander of the city’s defenses, in which capacity he met Hitler several times. His memoir is also valuable for including his years spent in Soviet captivity after the war. The Forgotten Soldier, by French-born German soldier Guy Sajer, describes in nightmarish detail the final stages of the war along the Baltic coast. Novelist George MacDonald Fraser’s memoir Quartered Safe Out Here recounts his experiences in the Burma campaigns of 1945 and deserves to be more widely read among Americans, who are mostly unaware of the British contribution to the defeat of Japan. And the great memoir to come out of the war is EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed, the second half of which offers a harrowing account of the 24/7 nightmare of Okinawa.

I also recommended some books about the fall of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide back in the Spring.

Four years worse than 2020: An Interlude

Monday I began a series on four years worse than 2020. That day I covered 1315, a year of famine and starvation. Yesterday we looked at 1348, the first full year of the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe commonly known as the Black Death. This year struck a little closer to home, albeit with much greater mortality and severer political, economic, and cultural effects. Today I want to take a step back for

An interlude

I had initially planned on including five years in this series, but lowered it to four as what began as one blog post grew longer and longer and longer. But even narrowing “worse years than 2020” to five was difficult at first. Here are six I considered including, both from the ancient and the more recent past, but that I want to at least look at briefly as way of further broadening our perspective.

1177 BC

I decided not to include this one because there’s no set, specific year for the Late Bronze Age Collapse. This is just the year the archaeologist Eric H Cline used as the title of his excellent book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Invasion, warfare, the widespread and destructive raiding of the mysterious Sea Peoples, and natural disasters drove the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean—Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and others—into total collapse, with a domino effect that took down the Assyrians and Babylonians.

AD 536

I include this date because I had several people independently mention it to me during the earlier parts of the year, when there was more hysteria and less numbness than now. 536, like 1177 BC above, is a bit of a catch-all for a series of events that played out over a decade or so in the 6th century, including a massive volcanic eruption that caused years of climatic disruption with knock-on effects including crop failure and the first major round of bubonic plague in Europe (“Justinian’s plague,” so called). Serious demographic decline, economic stress and collapse, military upheaval, and other problems resulted everywhere from Britain to China. This year was popularized as a “worst ever” by an article in Science a few years ago. You can read that here.

1863

To look at the United States alone:

At the beginning of the year the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a measure that has been lionized in the mythology of the national civic religion but actually accomplished little and was extremely unpopular, creating further upset in a North still reeling from the losses of defeats like Fredericksburg late in the previous year. Resentment over the draft and the unpopular shift of the war aims toward emancipation led to the New York City draft riots, racially-inflected mob violence that ripped through the city for almost a week. Several hundred were killed and many more beaten, including freedmen living in the city. The threat of violence was so serious that at one point a Gatling gun was even deployed on the roof of the pro-draft New York Times’s offices.

The Confederacy continued to struggle with supply problems and runaway inflation, and the heavy taxation necessary to support the war effort as well as draft laws viewed as tyrannical caused widespread dissatisfaction among ordinary Southerners. Women in overcrowded, underfed Richmond rioted when turned away by the governor of Virginia, who refused to hear their complaints. Numerous similar incidents occurred in other cities across the South.

On the front, Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill carried out his second raid on Lawrenceville, Kansas; several of the largest and most consequential battles of the American Civil War took place including Chancellorsville, the siege of Vicksburg, the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge; and the two bloodiest battles of the war, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. Just the latter two accounted for over 85,000 casualties.

1916

The years of the Spanish Flu took more lives but have been talked about a lot this year, but 1916 was no less awful. World War I looms large as it continued to rage on multiple European fronts and in Africa and the Middle East. The wasteful Gallipoli Campaign ended in failure, the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, a revolt that had as its aim the creation of a unified Arab nation-state and ended in the partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Western powers, began; and the Battles of the Somme and Verdun took place which, between the two of them, killed over 600,000 men and wounded many more; and the Russians launched even bloodier offensives in the east. The Armenian genocide, begun by the Turks the year before, continued, with hundreds of thousands more Armenians killed in concentration camps, forced marches through the Syrian desert or in harsh winter conditions, and thousands of women raped. Natural disasters made the war even worse, as on the alpine Italian front, where avalanches in the Dolomites buried thousands. Elsewhere, the United States became further involved in the Mexican Revolution, committing thousands of troops in futile border raids to catch Pancho Villa, as well as invading the Dominican Republic; and the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin.

1933

In Germany: the seizure of power by Hitler and the Nazi Party; the construction of the first Nazi concentration camps; the establishment of the Gestapo; the arrest and brutalization of Jews and political opponents; and the first moves toward rearmament, war, and the Holocaust.

In the United States: peak unemployment as part of the Great Depression and the first Dust Bowl storms; the beginnings of years of political controversy (for those who are into that kind of thing, especially where it concerns the Supreme Court) as FDR is sworn in.

In the Soviet Union: the completion of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, an infrastructure project using political prisoners that killed over 25,000; and peak starvation as a result of a man-made famine in the Ukraine, a punitive measure undertaken by Stalin the knowledge of which is suppressed with the active collusion of Western journalists. The famine ultimately kills over three million through starvation.

Natural disasters: earthquakes in California, China, and Japan, the latter with a resulting tsunami.

2001

This one really shouldn’t need an explanation. Not for my generation, at least.

Next

Tomorrow and Friday we’ll discuss the remaining two years that I’ve chosen for this project. Both of these years occurred within living memory.

Four years worse than 2020: 1348

Death comes for a peddler in a woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543)

Yesterday, heartily sick of complaints that 2020 is the “worst year ever” and hoping to bring a sense of historical perspective to our times, I began a short series on four years that were demonstrably worse than 2020. The first, 1315, was a year of famine and starvation. This, in the following generation, was a year of epidemic—something with which we are all too familiar, albeit on a much smaller scale.

1348

The Plague or Black Death, the second major epidemic of bubonic plague in recorded history, devastated both Europe and Asia. I know the most about the European outbreak, so that’s where I’ll concentrate for this post, but be aware that much of what I’m describing occurred in the Middle East and as far away as China, as well. The world was much more deeply interconnected back then than is often assumed.

Already under way

But the Plague arrived in a Europe that already had problems. Agriculture was still recovering from the famines of the 1310s and 20s and from the economic, demographic, and social disruptions that resulted. Politically there was upheaval in Italy, as usual; the already weakened Byzantine Empire was fighting a civil war; the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Muslims who had invaded in the 8th century, had recommenced after one of many lulls; the Swedes were at war with Novgorod, the kingdom that would eventually grow into the Russia we know and love; and the Hundred Years’ War between England and France was in its tenth year. Religiously, the Church remained mired in controversy over the Avignon Papacy, a seventy-year period in which a series of popes served—in France, rather than Rome—as yes-men to the French king, weakening the power and moral authority of the office of Bishop of Rome and worsening preexisting political crises.

So why 1348? While, as I mentioned above, the Plague entered Europe through port cities like Messina and Split in the fall of 1347, I choose 1348 because by the summer the Plague had reached much of Western Europe, with cases as far north as England. The effects were already severe. COVID-19 and the Plague are both highly contagious, virulent diseases. But where COVID kills about 1.9% of those it infects (based on my reading of data at the CDC and Johns Hopkins as of today), the Plague had a mortality rate possibly as high as 80%. (In American records from before the availability of antibiotics, the rate was 66%, still catastrophically high.) The Plague eventually killed a third to over half of the population of Europe—an estimated 75,000,000-200,000,000 people in Europe and Asia combined.

What happened

So much for statistics. What happened in Europe in 1348 in concrete terms?

First, the Plague attacked the human body. The bacterium responsible, Yersenia pestis, can infect a human in several ways, most famously through flea bite but also through airborne transmission or touch, resulting in bubonic, pneumonic, or septicemic plague. The three related infections attack the body in different ways. According to medieval historian Morris Bishop:

In the bubonic plague the bacilli in the bloodstream settle in the lymph glands. They act against the walls of the blood vessels, producing hemorrhages, dark patches that eventually cover the entire body, and the tongue turns black. . . . Under the arms and in the groin appear swellings and carbuncles, the buboes that give the plague its correct name. Sufferers from the bubonic form of this disease occasionally survive, but most die within three days. In the septicemic form, the blood is fatally infected. The pneumonic form causes gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs, resulting in violent pains in the chest, vomiting and spitting of blood, and a foul smell. Victims of the pneumonic form almost always die; fortunately death comes to them very quickly.

We’ve discussed the mortality above. Now imagine watching the spread of this disease among your region, your parish, you neighbors, and your family, and the winnowing that followed—and how suddenly it began.

The food supply was affected as the Plague struck the peasantry. Theft and other crime, as in the Great Famine, increased. Prices rose. Kings could not marshal armies—the Hundred Years’ War entered a de facto truce. Entire families died. Others abandoned sick family members to their fates. Priests and doctors died while attending to victims. Cities and villages emptied, further spreading the disease to the countryside. Wolves scavenged among the corpses. So many people died that they could not all be given customary burial, and mass graves became common. According to an English chronicler writing in Rochester:

A great mortality . . . destroyed more than a third of the men, women and children. . . . Alas, this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves, from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard.

Here’s a contemporary depiction of a mass burial in Belgium. Here’s a modern photo of a partially excavated mass grave in France. Note that in the medieval depiction from Tournai the living have at least been able to build coffins for the dead. Even this luxury would not last. Here’s Boccaccio, in the shockingly vivid introductory passages of the Decameron, describing the effects of the Plague in Florence:

And many would meet their end in the public streets both day and night, and many others, who met their ends in their own houses, would first come to the attention of their neighbors because of the stench of their rotting corpses more than anything else; and with these and others all dying, there were corpses everywhere. And the neighbors always followed a particular routine, more out of fear of being corrupted by the corpse than out of charity for the deceased. These, either by themselves or with the help of others when available, would carry the corpse of the recently deceased from the house and leave it lying in the street outside where, especially in the morning, a countless number of corpses could be seen lying about. Funeral biers would come, and if there was a shortage of funeral biers, some other flat table or something or other would be used to place the corpses on. Nor did it infrequently happen that a single funeral bier would carry two or three people at the same time, but rather one frequently saw on a single bier a husband and a wife, two or three brothers, a father and a son, or some other relatives. And an infinite number of times it happened that two priests bearing a cross would be going to bury someone when three or four other biers, being borne by bearers, would follow behind them; the priests would believe themselves to be heading for a single burial, and would find, when they arrived at the churchyard, that they had six or eight more burials following behind them. Nor were there ever tears or candles or any company honoring the dead; things had reached such a point, that people cared no more for the death of other people than they did for the death of a goat: for this thing, death, which even the wise never accept with patience, even though it occur rarely and relatively unobtrusively, had appeared manifestly to even the smallest intellects, but the catastrophe was so unimaginably great that nobody really cared.

That’s just an excerpt, selected arbitrarily from the horribly detailed descriptions he gives. Read more here.

Fake news

And, then as today, there were conspiracy theories. (Incidentally, the story of “thieves oil” we’ve all heard from the MLM ladies at church is nonsense.) Notoriously, some directed their suspicions toward Europe’s Jews, whom a widespread rumor accused of poisoning wells. Despite a papal bull placing the Jews under the Pope’s protection and arguing vigorously against the illogical rumors, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out and some Jews were lynched or executed on trumped up charges or confessions extracted under torture, as in these accounts from Geneva and Strasbourg.

The consequences

The year 1348 saw the Plague already working destruction to its fullest, and it had not yet run its course. By the end December of 1349 the Plague had reached Scotland, Denmark, Norway, and the heavily populated river valleys of central Germany. By the end of 1350 it had reached al of Scandinavia as well as the Baltic.

In addition to outbreaks of violence against Jews, other popular movements emerged. German penitents known as flagellants took to the roads. According to a French chronicler,

They were men who did public penance and scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying that it was miraculous blood. While they were doing penance, they sang very mournful songs about the nativity and passion of Our Lord. The object of this penance was to entreat God to put a stop to the mortality.

The flagellants were excommunicated.

With the ranks of every class depleted and the agricultural economy a shambles, authority tottered, and the generations after the Plague saw multiple peasant uprisings. The largest and most famous occurred in France in 1358, ten years after the time we’ve discussed in this post, and in England in 1381—the famed rebellion under Wat Tyler, the participants of which were also fired with the populist religious teachings of John Ball. Both uprisings destroyed and were destroyed in their turn.

Between 30 and 60% of the population died regardless of age, sex, or social status. Everyone lost someone—a reality reflected in the art of the next several generations—and Europe would stagger through these years and the rest of the century, a civilization hobbled by the chunks taken out of its body at every level.

Next

Tomorrow we’ll step back for have a brief interlude in which I talk about a few of the years I thought about including but didn’t.

Further reading

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a classic popular history that covers a thick slice of the 1300s. She includes a vividly written and detailed chapter on the Plague.

You can read more of Boccaccio’s descriptions of the Plague’s devastation of Florence at the link above or here. You can read more of the descriptions of the flagellants and the French peasant revolt from Jean Froissart, a French chronicler famous for his account of the Hundred Years’ War, here and here, respectively.

Yesterday I recommended the Penguin Monarchs volume on Edward II, who was king during the Great Famine. His son, Edward III, reigned for fifty years—from the lean years following the famine to end of the Avignon Papacy—and Jonathan Sumption’s entry in the series, Edward III: A Heroic Failure, is also worth your while, especially to see how the Plague influenced the long reign of a very busy monarch.

The University of Kansas lecture I linked to about the Great Famine yesterday also covers the Plague and includes a useful map of its spread through Europe; you can visit that page here. You can also see an animated .gif of the disease’s spread on Wikipedia here.

Four years worse than 2020: 1315

“You know what I’m craving? A little perspective.” —Anton Ego in Ratatouille

A week or two ago the Babylon Bee published the story “2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History”—a precision strike piece of satire. Not to be outdone, but missing the joke, last week Time published this.

The Worst Year Ever. While I thought perhaps the internet-inflected childishness might just be an attention-grabber, the cover story embraces it. The author of the piece, a film critic, makes a formal acknowledgement that “[t]here have been worse years in U.S. history, and certainly worse years in world history,” such as those of the Spanish Flu, the Depression, or World War II. But from there the writer turns inward, self-ward, implying that, where previous generations were somehow prepared for the Spanish flu or the Depression, we “have had no training wheels for this.”

That metaphor says more than I think the writer intends.

Back in the Spring, when all of this was just getting started, I shared a post on CS Lewis’s essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.” That essay is worth revisiting in its entirety, but let me quote one of its great lines and leave it at that:

“[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.”

— CS Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age

Lewis’s essay was written and delivered to students in the late 1940s, then living with the new and unprecedented fear of atomic warfare. The line above, which comes early in the essay, introduces what I think is the most helpful concept in the essay: perspective.

With that in mind, in September I began to fiddle with a blog post about the many, many years that are demonstrably worse than 2020. That Time piece finally irritated me enough to complete it—not as a single post, but as a short series I’ll be sharing this week. What I hope to accomplish with these posts is what I hope to accomplish anytime I get to talk about history: to offer perspective, to participate in broadening the range of our experiences so that the now, the tyrannical present, cannot dominate us with its fleeting concerns, however serious they may be. “One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves,” Christopher Dawson once wrote. A vaccine against the hysteria of the present, if you like.

2020 has not been a good year. But there have been worse years—much, much worse years, unimaginably worse years—and it is not hard for a history teacher to think of a few. Here are four—two from the more distant past and, since it became abundantly clear this year that many do not care about anything that happened before the present, two from within living memory.

1315

The obvious choice for a bad year in the 14th century is some date in the late 1340s because of the Plague. Granted—and we’ll take a look at that shortly. But I’m starting with 1315, as it was not only a bad year in its own right but began a century of calamity.

How it happened

Contrary to “Dark Ages” myths, the early Middle Ages was a time of flourishing and growth. Thanks in part to the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from the 10th to the 13th century, growing seasons lengthened, crop yields increased, and the population of Europe exploded. That changed in the 14th century. After the Medieval Warm Period ended in the mid-1200s the summers slowly shortened and average temperatures slowly, slowly fell, eventually to bottom out in the “Little Ice Age.” 1315 is the year western Europe felt the first serious effects.

What happened

First, it began to rain. It rained and rained and barely stopped—for two years. Flooding became a continent-wide problem, especially in many already marshy coastal areas, and many coastal settlements, including well-established and prosperous towns, were partially or totally abandoned.

Most seriously for a world built entirely on farming and the stewardship and control of farmland, agriculture became nearly impossible. There was too much rain and therefore not enough sunlight, the temperatures were too cool, and even those crops that could be planted failed, either not germinating or rotting on the stalk. In other places the rains reduced fields to mud or washed the topsoil away. Other broad, flat regions of ploughland in northern France or England became lakes. Hay could not be kept dry and so livestock starved for lack of fodder or succumbed to disease.

The lack of food caused prices to rise exponentially and the vast peasant population of Europe was reduced to scavenging for wild plants, eating their livestock—even draught animals like horses. Perhaps as much as 80% of livestock died of disease or were eaten during the famine. Some ate dogs, pigeons, or bird droppings. The most desperate ate their seed grain, the grain set aside for the next year’s planting, thus only postponing starvation. Others, it was darkly rumored in many places, resorted to cannibalism.

According to one English chronicler:

Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children.

Armies could not march or fight because the ground was so swampy, and the king of England, perhaps the wealthiest kingdom in northwestern Europe in these centuries, could not find food during some of his progresses through the country. Grain proved so scarce in his kingdom that even brewing beer was prohibited. The peasantry, unable to survive in the villages and on the manors to which they were bound, sometimes abandoned their ancestral homes to live wild or to roam in search of work and food. As the chronicler quoted above noted: “There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.”

And, as I mentioned earlier, 1315 was just the beginning. The rains continued through 1316 and into 1317 before the weather returned to its more accustomed patterns.

The consequences

But the damage had been done. Widespread starvation led to a breakdown of social order, with sharp rises not only in prices (for those mostly concerned economic effects) but in crime and violence, food riots, and even the prevalence of conspiracy theories—rumors that so-and-so in the village, often the miller, had a secret stash of grain, sometimes leading to lynching and disappointment when the stash was not found—and, of course, most fundamentally, a massive loss of life. According to historian Christopher Given-Wilson, in his short biography of England’s king at the time, Edward II:

Around 10 per cent of the population starved to death, not just in England but in much of northern Europe, a terrible human tragedy compounded by war and social unrest. Flocks of sheep were decimated, and wool exports, the basis of England’s customs revenue, fell by 40 per cent between 1313 and 1316.

Even those that got enough to eat to survive remained more susceptible, owing to the wet weather and their dramatically diminished nutrition, to disease. The population growth typical of the Medieval Warm Period was not only ended but reversed, with huge numbers dying as a result of the famine. The consequences were not limited to the time of the famine itself, though, as it took years for European agriculture to recover, with many localized famines in the coming decades.

And, finally, the Great Famine of 1315-17 left Europe—its economy, its political and social institutions, and most of all its people—weakened ahead of the arrival of the Plague.

We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Further reading

The book I quote on the effects of the famine on England is, Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship, by Christopher Given-Wilson, part of the excellent Penguin Monarchs series. While this book’s treatment of the Great Famine is brief, it will give you a view of the broader context of the famine, especially the difficult and complicated political situation of the time and how Edward in particular, already a weak king, struggled with the aftereffects. You can read the transcript of a short lecture on the famine by Lynn H Nelson of the University of Kansas here. Note that he links the famine directly to the later Plague. Medievalists.net’s listicle “10 Things to Know About the Great Famine” is a handy introduction to the events of 1315-22. Finally, you can read a lengthier excerpt of English chronicler Johannes de Trokelowe’s eyewitness description of the famine here.

When authors throw shade at each other

Novelists Ursula K Le Guin (1929-2018) and Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)

Last month I read the sci-fi novelist Ursula Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. It’s a brisk, delightful book of practical writing advice for those who already have some experience and are dedicated to refining the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, of their writing—hence her emphasis on craft. It was very good.

A small thing that caught my eye, especially coming in “An opinion piece on paragraphing” at the tail end of a chapter on sentence length and syntax:

“Rules” about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, “If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,” but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style—a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.

This is an obvious dig at Elmore Leonard, an author of westerns and crime thrillers. I happen to be a fan.

In a famous 2001 piece in the New York Times titled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Leonard published his rules for writing. There are ten. His rules include things like “Avoid prologues,” “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue,” “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” and “Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly,” and at the end of his ten rules, Leonard includes another “that sums up the 10”:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

LeGuin apparently interprets this as pretension, a phony posture of unmannered prose—as if Leonard is claiming to pick his sentences off a tree somewhere and do nothing to them. But it’s clear from the piece itself—and from the rule itself!—that Leonard too is talking about craft, about the rules he sets himself “to remain invisible” and how many tries it may take to achieve the desired effect. It takes conscious effort, something Leonard himself, who was unfussy about his craft and refused to make it mysterious in the manner of some writers (usually hacks), freely admitted. From an interview with Charlie Rose about the rules (and his short story collection When the Women Come Out to Dance):

Rose: A lot of people say that great writers never let their technique show. Does your technique show?

Leonard: Well, I say that my style is the absence of style. And yet, it is obvious, because people say they can tell by reading a passage that I wrote it. I mean when they read one of my books they know it’s my book and not someone else’s book.

Rose: Is that good?

Leonard: Sure. I think it’s good.

Rose: Because it has a certain… style, a certain zing.

Leonard: Because it has a certain sound. Whether it’s a zing or… I think of style as sound.

Leonard goes on to describe how a writer’s sound originates in his attitude, which brings to mind LeGuin’s accusation that Leonard writes in a “macho style,” something I’ve seen repeated elsewhere. I’ve read a bunch of Leonard’s novels now and honestly can’t say where this comes from. My sense of his narration is that it is terse, detached, and matter-of-fact; masculine perhaps, if we’re going to have this argument about omniscient third person narration, but by no means the bro-ish tough guy grunting that LeGuin implies.

(And for what it’s worth, Leonard has written a lot of compelling female characters. Read Out of Sight and Rum Punch for two of them. Both were adapted into films with strong female leads.)

A final thing about Leonard’s rules, and something I’ve noted here before, is that everywhere Leonard wrote or talked about his rules he made it clear that they were his rules. They were not for everybody. In the opening paragraph of the New York Times piece he writes that

If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

This is a pretty weak and genial “boast,” especially considering the number of counterexamples—Tom Wolfe, Jim Harrison, Margaret Atwood, and others—he offers in the same piece, often immediately following one of his own rules. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about listening to Leonard in interviews is his straightforwardness about his work and his self-effacing attitude about it. I think that bespeaks a humility about his craft that comes through in that most difficult piece of advice to give—What works for me works for me and might not for you. Do what works.

So is LeGuin’s criticism fair? No. It’s strikingly uncharitable. But it got me to revisit a favorite writer and really pore over his advice, and made me appreciate it more—which also made me appreciate her book more. Because even with this short, one-paragraph jab LeGuin offers much of the kind of advice I think Leonard would have appreciated, too, and much of it comes down to that difficult piece of advice above.

More if you’re interested

Steering the Craft was very good. You can find it on Amazon here. The New York Times sometimes paywalls Leonard’s original piece; you can also find almost all of it here—with a delightful illustration of the opening scene of Freaky Deaky—or the rules themselves at the Guardian here. You can also buy the article as a lavishly illustrated hardback gift book. By all means read the older blog post I linked to above, in which I compare Leonard’s rules with those of George Orwell and CS Lewis and find some helpful commonalities. And I highly recommend watching Leonard talk through his rules in some detail here.

The Odyssey VIII-IX on Core Curriculum

Odysseus and Polyphemus, by Arnold Böcklin (1898)

The Core Curriculum Podcast’s odyssey through Homer continues! This morning the fourth episode of the season dropped, in which David Grubbs and I discuss books VIII and IX of the Odyssey.

These are two of the most well-known parts of Odysseus’s story, relating the feast and games held in Odysseus’s honor by his host Alcinous, who finally prompts the mysterious stranger—who may or may not be a god in disguise—to tell his story. This gives us the beginning of Odysseus’s story of woe and perhaps the most famous incident in the book, his story of his encounter with and narrow escape from the cyclops Polyphemus. Along the way David and I talk more about the poem’s rich theme of hospitality as well as a possible cameo by Homer himself, the (mostly) bloodless and (totally) sacred aristeia of athletic competition, and whether or not Odysseus is a bad guest.

Had a great time hosting this conversation with David and talking about one of the great works of the Western canon. I hope y’all will enjoy listening as much as we did recording.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s excellent shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Andrew Roberts on how to write history

History, a mosaic in the Library of Congress by Frederick Dielman

National Review recently published an excellent short piece by British historian Andrew Roberts entitled “How to Write History.” Roberts—an accomplished military historian who has written studies of Waterloo and the Second World War and, most recently, big fat biographies of Napoleon and Churchill—offers a surprisingly simple reminder of what makes good historical writing:

When our forefathers sat around the fire in their caves telling stories about the famous mastodon hunts of yesteryear, they found it easy to do, because their listeners always wanted to know the answer to the eternal question “What happened next?” When the veterans of the Trojan War enthralled their grandchildren, and the Vikings told their sagas of long-ago raids, they knew they had their audiences riveted because they could tell them the next stage of the story. Nobody ever asked them to tell the tale thematically or in modules or in a postmodernist format; they just wanted to know what happened next.

He goes on to write about mankind’s innate sense of story and chronology. At the beginning of every semester, when I explain to my students how I approach history and how I will present it, I point out that if I asked them “How did you get to class this morning?” they would almost certainly tell me a story—they could craft it instantly, in fact, without thinking about it. Telling stories comes naturally to us (one of the many ways in which we are subcreators) both as explanation and entertainment. Ideally as both.

But Roberts notes one other serious advantage to narrative history:

The chronological approach also has the great advantage over other ways of writing history in that it is true (something the postmodernists ignore, since they despise the concept of truth in history per se).

We explain ourselves chronologically because that is how we experience our lives and literally everything else.

The inside of history

Roberts goes on to address something I care very, very deeply about: “To try to immerse oneself in the mindset of the long-dead is easily the hardest part of the historian’s craft, and the most treacherous. The further one goes back in history, the harder it is.” I’ve written about this before here, here, here, and here, for starters.

Alas, Roberts gives one good example, and then missteps into stereotype:

Reach back much earlier than the Western Enlightenment and one must be good at theology, because educated people spent what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about God and how He should best be worshiped. Go back much further than the Renaissance, and people spent a good deal of their time simply being scared. Recall the very earliest moments of COVID-19 a year ago, when we didn’t know how lethal it was but a lot of people were starting to die. That was what it was like living in the Dark Ages all the time, only with a good deal less information.

This is hardly giving the medievals their due; anyone even casually acquainted with the literature—of any variety—of medieval people can’t help but think of the exuberance, the piety, the joy with which they embraced life. Even their horror or mourning, as in the accounts of the plague in the 14th century, have a gusto to them that stands in marked contrast to our own time. Modern people have proven a good deal gloomier, even with all their information. Food for thought.

But Roberts’s overall point stands. I strive every semester to get my students inside the departed people we study, “to immerse [them] in the mindset” of our subjects. Every semester I see some successes but also conclude discouraged. As it happens, the very last item I graded today was a paper heavily salted with social justice platitudes, that roundly condemned members of several long-gone societies for their racial prejudices and inequality, and that overlooked the manifest evidence to the contrary. So Roberts’s essay, and this point particularly, struck me especially hard. Roberts:

Trying to impose our mindset—let alone our values—upon the past is self-evidently ludicrous, however often it is tried and however well intentioned. There is no such thing, for example, as “the right side of history.” We might want people in the past to be more like us, but they resolutely refuse to be, and we must respect their right to be different.

To understand the dead is difficult work, but worthwhile. The work must continue. And in the meantime, I may save that paragraph to copy and paste into student feedback in the future.

Words, words, words

Roberts also indulges in one of my favorite pastimes—hating on specific words:

Any book with too great a reliance on the words “perhaps,” “maybe,” “possibly,” or—the worst—“probably” is usually one to approach with caution. When the great Oxford historian Martin Gilbert saw the word “probably” in a history essay, he would circle it in red and write in the margin “Probably not?”

Similarly, never, ever use the word “inevitable,” because nothing is inevitable in history. (Except, as my Cambridge professor Norman Stone used to say, for German military counter-attack.) Marxists and other determinists will disagree, but unless you are one of them, beware the word as profoundly philosophically unsound.

This is fun to read but also excellent advice. Watch out for probably and bayonet every inevitable you come across.

Conclusion

Roberts touches on several other big topics—conspiracy theories, tendentious monocausal explanations of history like the 1619 Project, and woke or intersectional history and its popularity in the academy—before bringing his essay back to its starting point: Answer the question What happened next? and you’ll be on your way to good history.

None of which, I should add, is to suggest that analysis or the deep dive into the archives, German-style, is irrelevant. Roberts is no stranger to the archive, having dug up previously unknown or unpublished sources for his history of the Second World War and having read every single one of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters for his biography of the man. But all of that was in the service of chronology, of keeping the pages turning and the reader asking that question.

To keep readers or students interested, to make your history true, it should be a story.

Addenda

You can read the entirety of Roberts’s essay, which appears in the December 17 print edition of National Review, at NRO here.

A few months ago I quoted a longish excerpt from Land of Hope, a one-volume narrative history of the United States by Wilfred McClay. (I am, in fact, still reading it, the Gilded Age having had its usual effect on me by killing my interest for a few months.) McClay makes similar and, as the introduction to a book rather than an essay, deeper arguments in the same vein. You can read that excerpt and my glosses on it here.

Ancient Racist Aliens on the Sectarian Review

Last month I posted some thoughts on the implicit, and sometimes not so implicit, racism of the assumptions behind ancient astronaut theories of the kind peddled by authors Erich von Däniken and Zechariah Sitchin and, most recently and popularly, by the History Channel via the series “Ancient Aliens.” That post got a lot of traffic, including my friend Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review podcast. Danny read and enjoyed it and suggested we discuss the post itself and the broader implications—and dangers—of ancient astronauts theories.

That episode dropped today. Joining us is David Grubbs of the Christian Humanist Podcast, whom you might remember from our discussion of CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy on City of Man earlier this year.

Between the three of us we have enough interest in the “weird and old” to sustain a spirited and fun discussion of ancient astronauts, racism old and new, the mystery of existence, and good old fashioned chronological snobbery. I had a great time and hope y’all will enjoy this as much as we did.

The Sectarian Review is a show on the Christian Humanist Radio Network. You can listen to the episode via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or via the MixCloud player embedded below. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, and dig through Danny’s extensive back catalog. You can read the blog post that inspired our episode here or at the link in the first paragraph above. Take a look at Danny’s shownotes for the episode here. And be sure to visit the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site and Facebook page for more.

Thanks for listening. Hope y’all enjoy!

The Odyssey I-II on Core Curriculum

Athena, disguised as Mentor, leads Telemachus in one of John Flaxman’s illustrations for The Odyssey (1810)

Series 4 of Core Curriculum has arrived! Previous seasons have tackled the Iliad, Plato’s Republic, and the selected poetry of Sappho. This season we’re talking through Homer’s Odyssey book by book.

In the first episode of this series, Michial Farmer of the Christian Humanist Podcast hosts my friend Coyle Neal, of the City of Man Podcast, and myself in a discussion of Books I and II of the Odyssey. We discuss the Odyssey’s relationship to the Iliad and even touch on the vexed and unanswerable question of authorship as well as talking about the events of these books, which follow the title character’s son Telemachus as he begins a journey in search of his missing father. We discuss the poem’s theme of hospitality and honor and, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, compare Homer’s work to everything from blatant parodies or homages like O Brother, Where Art Thou? or “Duck Tales,” to the perspectives of modern war movies, to other heroic poems like Beowulf, and to less obviously related stories like Home Alone and Back to the Future.

It’s a ton of fun. As much as I adore the Iliad and loved talking through that a year ago, I think I enjoyed our discussions of the Odyssey even more and am excited to listen to all of them as they come out.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. It appears Stitcher will no longer allow me to embed the episode, so if you’re looking for a web player you can listen to it on the episode’s page there. You can look at Michial’s detailed shownotes, including all of our references and allusions to outside material, on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you don’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.

I’m not saying Ancient Aliens is racist…

…but it’s racist. Or can be.

The other day I ran across this excellent short post by Michael Heiser. Heiser is an Old Testament scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages who has side interests in UFOs, cryptozoology, esotericism, and pretty much “anything old and weird,” as he puts it. A lot of his work in these areas is to correct or debunk the pseudoarchaeology of “ancient aliens” theorists like Zechariah Sitchin, who popularized the Annunaki as the extraterrestrial explanation for everything, or the godfather of the whole movement, Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken. In this post he addresses some of the racialist assumptions behind these “ancient aliens” theories.

Bad assumptions

Like Heiser, I’ve had an interest in “anything old and weird” since childhood and, like Heiser, I have an interest in learning why people believe things like “ancient aliens” theories. My main concern, as an historian, has usually been to expose the chronological snobbery behind theories like this. As Heiser summarizes it:

some presume that humans in antiquity were so primitive they could not build these things without the assistance of non-human intelligence.

The presumption, inherited from the Enlightenment and given a scientific gloss by Darwinism, is that our technological sophistication somehow indicates our superior position in the eternal upward climb from barbarism. We today are superior technologically, scientifically, and—skipping over a number of premises—therefore morally.

With this assumption fixed firmly in place by years of progressive education, crude and condescending depictions of the past in popular media, and now historically illiterate activist messaging on social media, the recipient of “ancient aliens” theories is primed to believe that the pyramids, the Nazca lines, Stonehenge, etc. are too carefully constructed, too perfectly aligned with things “we” only understand now through “science,” to be the work of ancient man. Heiser:

All (and I mean “all”) of the examples of “impossible” architecture foisted on viewers of shows like Ancient Aliens were indeed built by humans. They weren’t primitive savages just because they didn’t have cars, cell phones, or the internet. Their technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours. All the techniques they used are demonstrable from applied physics (which isn’t a physics that needs atom smashers).

Side note: I’m struck that aliens seem to have assisted all the fantastically remote civilizations of antiquity with projects like pyramids—a pile of stones with a square base, laborious to build but by no means difficult to design—but not the Romans with their extremely sophisticated hydro-engineering projects or the medievals with the gothic cathedral. The gravitation of these theorists to things that already have a certain mystique should be suspicious.

The race card

I’m a fanatic on the topic of chronological snobbery, but Heiser’s post directs us to another dimension of “ancient aliens” theories: the racial. A number of such theories rely on a narrative proposing that

an elect super-race taught by aliens could mediate that esoteric knowledge to poor savages in the New World by a select / advanced super-race descended from the Atlanteans, the original inheritors of alien knowledge.

Or something similar. Call such theories legion, for they are many.

Heiser links to two longer posts by archaeologists Jason Colavito and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews. Both concern a specific book by the aforementioned von Däniken in which he apparently makes a lot of assertions about prehistorical races that are cartoonishly off-base, and both provide good examples of racism in discredited archaeology like Nazi racial theory (based on the work of Madison Grant, which gave us the notion of “Aryanism” we associate with the Nazis) or the racially-motivated misreadings of sites like Great Zimbabwe. Colavito even notes how von Däniken’s alien theories lead him not only into racialist ideas of human development but to eugenics and all sorts of other mad scientist projects:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.

Both posts are worth reading, but Fitzpatrick-Matthews—whose post “Is pseudoarchaeology racist?” prompted the other two—demonstrates how the chronologically snobbish assumptions behind “ancient aliens” theories can bleed over into racialist thinking. Fitzpatrick-Matthews:

In part, this is a reflection of the discredited view that human history follows a linear progression from technologically unsophisticated to sophisticated . . . Bad Archaeologists are unwilling to do the background research into the societies that produced the monuments they present as mysterious, so either they do not appreciate the evidence for ancient complex societies or they deliberately withhold this evidence from their readers. What is more pernicious, though, is that while they can accept that locals (Greeks, Romans and so on) were responsible for the ancient monuments of Europe, they are unwilling to countenance the same explanation for people on other continents, especially Africa and South America.

He concludes by noting the use such theories have been put to by radical racialist groups. Having both personal and academic interests in early medieval Germanic peoples, Anglo-Saxon England, the Norse, and similar topics, I run across these people all the time. The unwitting aid given to racists by bad historical theories—whether they involve aliens or not—only muddies the waters and casts doubt on those with a legitimate interest in these fascinating peoples and their lives.

In short: ideas have consequences.

The ultimate failure

To take it back to Heiser, who brought all this to my attention:

I’ll point out again that there are no Bible verses that have the nephilim building anything, or possessing super-knowledge. . . . The reason is simple: books like 1 Enoch were concerned with the idea of intelligent evil lurking behind the human propensity toward self-destruction and idolatry, not architectural prowess or tyranny of the less enlightened savages through technology. Books like 1 Enoch and material in the Bible never put forth the idea of advanced human technology being bestowed to a master race for control of inferior races, or to condescendingly pass on their super knowledge. The concern is theological or moral, not the singling out of an elite race “blessed” by such knowledge.

And that’s the ultimate irony. Chesterton described bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” People who adopt “ancient aliens” explanations for our history don’t just demean the past through their assumed superiority, they show that they are not even interested in the past for its own sake. “Ancient aliens” theorists don’t do the hard work of trying to perceive what the people who built the pyramids or took the effort to write ancient texts were themselves interested in or why they chose to do what they did. See Heiser’s comment from near the beginning of this post that ancient peoples’ “technology solved their problems and met their needs, not ours.” The theorists, having lost sight of the humanity of the ancients, can only see these things as evidence for their own pet theories of extraterrestrial influence.

Whether for reasons of chronological snobbery or racism, whether naively or knowingly, their fault is a lack of charity.

More if you’re interested

Read Heiser’s full post here and the longer posts by Colavito and Fitzpatrick-Matthews here and here, respectively. Heiser also runs an excellent video channel at Vimeo (though he still uploads most of his videos to YouTube as well) in which he briefly investigates popular esoteric theories and sheds some critical light on them. For a good sample, here are his videos on the Annunaki and supposed depictions of aliens in Egyptian art. Erich von Däniken also gets namedropped in several of the late great Charles Portis’s novels, notably Gringos, which you should definitely read. And I’ve written about chronological snobbery many times here before, notably here.

How to Run a Country

Detail from Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, by Benjamin West

Yesterday I read How to Run a Country, a wide-ranging collection of excerpts from the political writings of Cicero and part of Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. I’ve reviewed another volume from the series, Cicero’s How to Grow Old, here before. While How to Grow Old translated a single long treatise, How to Run a Country anthologizes bits and pieces from Cicero’s works and organizes them thematically, covering such topics as leadership, corruption, and war.

So far I haven’t found the anthology or selection volumes of the series as fulfilling as those that translate a complete single text—those like How to Grow Old, How to Win an Election, a practical treatise by Cicero’s brother Quintus, or another favorite, Cicero’s How to Be a Friend—and as How to Run a Country was one of the very first volumes published in this series it’s clear that the series hadn’t nailed the format yet. But it’s still very good. How to Run a Country, thanks especially to the short, thoughtful introduction by editor and translator Philip Freeman, gives the reader a good precis of Cicero’s political thought in a format that can be read in about forty-five minutes.

Cicero as traditionalist, moderate, and statesman

In his book Roman Realities, Finley Hooper writes that

Cicero was a man of the middle class all his life. He opposed the selfish interests of a senatorial oligarchy and the selfish interests of the Populares, who had their way in the Tribal Assembly. When one side appeared to have the upper hand, he leaned toward the other. He was very conscious of a decadent ruling class which insisted on its right to rule regardless of whether it ruled well or not. The demagogues of Clodius’s stripe were even more frightening to him, and most of the time their activities kept him estranged from the people.

Freeman, in his introduction to How to Run a Country, describes Cicero as “a moderate conservative,” though I might have said traditionalist instead of or as well as moderate, and notes that this is “an increasingly rare breed in our modern world.” Cicero “believed in working with other parties for the good of his country and its people. Rather than a politician, his ideas are those of a statesman, another category whose ranks today grow ever more diminished.”

I emphasize the traditionalism of Cicero’s thought because, as we will see below, he was keenly aware of the collapse of tradition and his existence as a relict in a decaying republic. As Hooper notes elsewhere in his book, “The old Roman days of honor and virtue were almost beyond recall to all save men like Cicero.”

Freeman’s ten lessons to take from Cicero

In his introduction, Freeman offers the following ten-point summary of Cicero’s key political ideas. I only explore a few of them in the quotations below, but it should be clear how each reflects Cicero’s broader philosophy. I include the ten points without the paragraph-length explanations Freeman provides after each:

1. There are universal laws that govern the conduct of human affairs.

2. The best form of government embraces a balance of powers.

3. Leaders should be of exceptional character and integrity.

4. Keep your friends close—and your enemies closer.

5. Intelligence is not a dirty word.

6. Compromise is the key to getting things done.

7. Don’t raise taxes—unless you absolutely have to.

8. Immigration makes a country stronger.

9. Never start an unjust war.

10. Corruption destroys a nation.

Rather than write a longer, more traditional review—and because this is election day—I want to give most of the space here to Cicero himself, and I’ll conclude with the ten lessons in politics that Freeman argues we can learn from Cicero’s thought. Despite the often vast differences in cultural climate and basic assumptions about the world, the specific issues Cicero and his contemporaries faced are still relevant, and still offer us something to learn and reflect upon.

All quotations below are Freeman’s translations from How to Run a Country.

What we fight for

To continue on the thought of tradition and custom, in Pro Sestio (In Defense of Sestius), a legal case defending a friend of his brought up on charges by political enemies, Cicero describes the purposes for which the Republic was founded, what kind of dangers threaten it, and what kind of men it takes to defend the Republic:

The founding principles of our Republic, the essence of peace with honor, the values that our leaders should defend and guard with their very lives if necessary are these: respecting religion, discovering the will of the gods, supporting the power of the magistrates, honoring the authority of the senate, obeying the law, valuing tradition, upholding the courts and their verdicts, practicing integrity, defending the provinces and our allies, and standing up for our country, our military, and our treasury.

Building on these “founding principles,” in De Officiis (On Duties), a philosophical treatise from late in his life, Cicero describes the job of the state and the things it should and should not handle—especially when it comes to the perennial interests of the revolutionaries and demagogues:

Whoever governs a country must first see to it that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. When Philippus was a tribune, he proposed a ruinous law to distribute land, though when his bill was voted down he took it very well and accepted defeat graciously. However, when he was defending the bill he pandered shamelessly to the common people, saying that there weren’t two thousand people left in the city who owned any property. That kind of hyperbole must be condemned, along with any proposals advocating an equal distribution of land. . . .

As for those politicians who pretend they are friends of the common people and try to pass laws redistributing property and drive people out of their homes or champion legislation forgiving loans, I say they are undermining the very foundations of our state. They are destroying social harmony, which cannot exist when you take away money from some to give it to others. They are also destroying fairness, which vanishes when people cannot keep what rightfully belongs to them.

On a similar note, from Pro Sestio again:

For among the crowds are those who would destroy our country through revolution and upheaval, either because they feel guilty about their own misdeeds and fear punishment, or because they are deranged enough to long for sedition and civil discord, or because of their own financial mismanagement they prefer to bring the whole country down in flames rather than burn alone. When such people find leaders to help them carry out their wicked plans, the Republic is tossed about on the waves. When this happens, those helmsmen who guide our country must be vigilant and use all their skill and diligence to preserve the principles I mentioned above and steer our country safely home with peace and honor.

What it takes

Cicero uses the “helmsman” metaphor over and over again in his writing on politics; it appears multiple times just in this short collection, and it is a useful one, evoking as it does the manifold and constantly shifting dangers that threaten the body politic and the myriad skills required of the captain of a vessel. In Pro Sestio, Cicero provides the following shortlist of necessary skills: “Those who would be guardians of such important principles must be people of great courage, great ability, and great resolve.”

To return to the helmsman metaphor, Cicero develops the picture in greater detail in discussing the art of compromise in a letter to his friend Lentulus Spinther:

In politics it is irresponsible to take an unwavering stand when circumstances are always evolving and good men change their minds. Clinging to the same opinion no matter the cost has never been considered a virtue among statesmen. When at sea, it is best to run before a storm if your ship can’t make it to harbor. But if you can find safety by tacking back and forth, only a fool would hold a straight course rather than change directions and reach home. In the same way, a wise statesman should make peace with honor for his country the ultimate goal, as I have often said. It is our vision that must remain constant, not our words.

And what else? Naturally the most gifted and influential speaker of his day has ideas about the ability of a statesman to communicate. From De Oratore (On the Orator):

If a person has not acquired a deep knowledge of all the necessary disciplines involved in oratory, his speech will be an endless prattle of empty and silly words. An orator must be able to choose the right language and arrange his words carefully. He must also understand the full range of emotions that nature has given us, for the ability to rouse or calm a crowd is the greatest test of both the understanding and the practical ability of a speaker. An orator also needs a certain charm and with the cultured ways of a gentleman, and the ability to strike fiercely when attacking an opponent. In addition he needs a subtle grace and sophistication. Finally, an orator must have a keen mind capable of remembering a vast array of relevant precedents and examples from history, along with a thorough knowledge of the law and civil statutes.

This goes deeper than mere rhetorical technique—the speaker’s manner and style of speaking not only should be but is illustrative of his character. Food for thought.

Why we fail

Good men are made, not born, but in some generations it is easier to cultivate virtue. Elsewhere in De Officiis, he writes “Indeed, when you praise the integrity of a man you are also praising the age in which he lived.”

As I mentioned, Cicero lived among a decayed and corrupted generation in a decaying and corrupted Republic, and bore with him a lifelong cognizance of the fact. In De Re Publica (On the State), which only survives in fragments, Cicero takes this line from the Roman poet Ennius—“The Roman state is founded on ancient customs and its men”—and meditates on how the Republic has failed and who is to blame:

The poet who wrote these words so brief and true seems to me to have heard them from a divine oracle. For neither men by themselves without a state based on strong customs nor traditions without men to defend them could have established and maintained a republic such as ours whose power stretches so far and wide. Before our time, the cherished customs of our forefathers produced exceptional and admirable men who preserved the ways and institutions of our ancestors.

But now our republic looks like a beautiful painting faded with age. Our generation has not only failed to restore the colors of this masterpiece, but we have not even bothered to preserve its general form and outline. What now remains of the ancient ways of our country the poet declares we were founded upon? These traditions have so sunk into oblivion that we neither practice them nor even remember what they were. And what shall I say about the men? For the reason our customs have passed away is that the people who once upheld them no longer exist. We should be put on trial as if for a capital crime to explain why this disaster has happened. But there is no defense we can give. Our country survives only in words, not as anything of substance. We have lost it all. We have only ourselves to blame.

Freeman titles this excerpt “Cicero’s Epilogue: The Fallen State.”

More if you’re interested

I recommend How to Run and Country and all of the other volumes of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, especially those by Cicero. I return to Cicero again and again because of the truths—the “permanent things”—that he tapped into and related both in word and example. I think it is especially important to return to the thought of men like Cicero as our culture goes more and more overtly to war with the truth. As you might gather from the quotation I chose to end on—and the one that Freeman ends his collection with—I am not sanguine about the future. But I do not despair, either.

I explore this poignant mixture of grief, resignation, and paradoxical hope—and hint a bit at where to look for hope—in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero, which dramatizes the day politics and tyranny finally caught up to this champion of the Republic. I hope you’ll check it out, and that you’ll read it in light of the real man’s thought.

I also recommend Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, and any of the works by Cicero quoted here, especially De Officiis.

Chesterton on monuments

More from Chesterton’s essay collection The Defendant, specifically “A Defence of Publicity.” In response to criticism of the public monuments of his day as “pompous,” Chesterton writes:

Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous. Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence.

I think the trend he describes is still current—quite clearly—though we have other euphemisms for this sin, reverence being a largely unknown concept nowadays.

Later, on the purpose of memorializing anything (a live question now as then):

It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

These observations may pair well with this, which I recently recommended, and most especially this.