Breakout at Stalingrad

German prisoners march out of the ruins of Stalingrad, January 1943.

Three years ago I read Unknown Soldiers, by Väinö Linna, one of the best and most powerful war novels I’ve ever come across. Unknown Soldiers follows a company of Finnish machine gunners through the Continuation War, a three-year war against the Soviets that ran parallel to the German invasion of Russia. Following some initial successes and some years of sitting tight in trenchlines, in the final third of the book the war turns against the Finns and the story becomes one of pell-mell retreat, of sacrifice to buy time and save lives, and ever increasing desperation. The characters suffer, fight and run, scrape together whatever they can to survive, and all too frequently die.

Take that feeling of desperation, the weight of unavoidable, inescapable impending defeat, stretch it out to six hundred pages, and shift the scene from a largely forgotten war to one of the most famous battles in history, and you have Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad.

Encirclement

Gerlach’s novel tells the story of a handful of men from the intelligence section of a German division’s staff. The most prominent among them is Lieutenant Breuer, whom we meet in the first chapter as he returns to the front outside Stalingrad after a trip to the rear. Through Breuer we get to know various other officers in the middle rungs of divisional leadership, and through his driver, the kindhearted and optimistic Lakosch, we meet a number of the enlisted men who work as drivers, cooks, and mechanics for headquarters. The cast is large and wide-ranging, including the divisional commander, a newly promoted colonel; haughty Sergeant Major Harras, a man more concerned with the finery of his uniforms than with discipline or combat effectiveness; Padre Peters, a hardworking chaplain; and the officers who distribute food and pay and who command the division’s small contingents of tanks, antiaircraft guns, and other defensive measures. The commander of the Sixth Army himself, General—later Field Marshal—Paulus, even appears a few times, as does Hitler, a faraway figure in more than one sense, a man detached from and cold to the reality of what is about to happen at Stalingrad.

Our meeting with Breuer comes at an inauspicious time—mid-November 1942. The rumor, to which Breuer is privy as a member of the division’s intelligence section, is that the Russians are massing their forces along the Don River north of the city with the apparent intent of cutting off the German army there and encircling them.

Exactly that happens. The Russians attack in overwhelming numbers, and despite manful resistance, Breuer and the rest of the German army begin a constant retreat. In a skillfully described series of incidents through the middle of the book, Gerlach describes the Germans pulling up stakes and falling back to new defensive lines only to have these collapse, leading them to repeat the process. Little things go awry, and thanks to the slow accumulation of details with each retreat, we first sense and then see these tactical withdrawals turn into chaotic routs.

The Russians complete their encirclement quickly and the supply lines fail. The Germans run short of food, ammunition, and medical supplies. They eat their draft horses and every farm animal they come across before turning to civilians’ pets and strays. The Luftwaffe attempts an airlift that proves only partially successful, bringing in not nearly enough supplies and flying out only the most desperately wounded, the most important, and the most devious. As the Russians close in on the airfields the planes themselves come under attack, and even getting a pass to board a flight out is no guarantee of escape. At one point Breuer, having been wounded in the eye, finally has a chance to get out via cargo plane, and the suspense and desperation of the scene is unlike anything I’ve read in other war novels.

The final act of the novel takes place in Stalingrad itself, which Breuer and company have slowly withdrawn toward for weeks before they actually enter. The city is a tomb, full of the shells of buildings, which are themselves full of wounded and dying men. The conclusion plays out here, in these contested ruins, and even the clearly approaching end of the siege can prove no comfort—the men go on dying right up to the moment they are captured, even after the city’s surrender. Plans to escape, using German-allied Romanian troops or Russian collaborators for cover, come to nothing. The wounded linger and die. Soldiers freeze to death in their foxholes. Others go insane. And those that live to be captured can look ahead and see nothing but Soviet captivity.

What makes Breakout at Stalingrad great

You might notice that, while I describe a broad sequence of events above, I do not exactly summarize a plot. Like many other war novels, Breakout at Stalingrad is episodic, a reflection of the actual experience of these events—about which more below. What makes this a great novel is not its plotting, but Gerlach’s attention to three things.

First, Gerlach peoples this novel with vivid and interesting characters. Breuer, the character with whom we spend the most time, is an effective everyman, a dedicated soldier without much interest in politics and a whole lot to live for, and who is nevertheless burdened by terrible premonitions. His driver, Lakosch, is a hopeful true believer in the Nazi cause—which, as he understands it, is anti-Bolshevism, a cause to which he is committed owing to his miserable youth as the child of Socialist parents. The disillusionment of both characters—symbolized by different things for each man, like the moment Lakosch has to abandon his beloved but now broken down Volkswagen field car—provides two of a dozen or so fully realized character arcs in the novel.

A few of these arcs prove surprising. In the final chapters of the novel, Breuer finds himself awaiting his fate with an officer of a much more ideological mindset than himself, and in the quiet before catastrophe they have a chance to reflect that their conversation would have been impossible for both of them when the siege began. Stalingrad has changed both of them, a wry realization. But not all of these arcs are redemptive or result in any kind of epiphany. Sergeant Major Harras leads a two-month career of utter villainy, and like him some of the convinced Nazis among the German officers only fall lower and lower as the siege gets worse and they commit themselves more and more totally to either victory or annihilation.

The most powerful and haunting character to me was the chaplain, Padre Peters, a rare religious character in this kind of fiction who is treated seriously and depicted as sincere, who works himself to exhaustion and psychological collapse. The incident that awakens him from his fugue state near the end of the novel is one of the most moving and haunting depictions of religious devotion and the power of the scriptures and the sacraments that I’ve ever read.

Second, Breakout at Stalingrad abounds in vivid, carefully selected details, which is the lifeblood of realistic fiction. Gerlach’s descriptions of combat, of the sudden appearance of Russian tanks or the steady approach of a horde of Russian infantry across the snow, of the wounds and frostbite and infections and ramblings of the pitiful final survivors of the battle, of the way a half-mad crowd of men press forward toward the hatch of a cargo plane, and—throughout—the rapidly changing mental states of these exhausted and overextended men are gripping. This novel does what all the best war novels do—shows what it was like—and does it exceptionally well.

Finally, Breakout at Stalingrad is full of terrible irony. This is not to say that Gerlach’s tone is cynical, though he certainly presents the entire story as a bitter critique of Hitler’s leadership, Nazism, and the whole Nazi project. The characters, who are so vividly drawn, will be marked by this experience for life, provided they survive.

Gerlach’s irony does not stem from his tone or treatment of the story but from the story itself. Unwelcome surprises and awful turns of events occur throughout. A general who is thankful that his pilot son is flying cargo planes in some other part of Europe, Lakosch and his love for a stray dog he has adopted and keeps miraculously well fed, Harras and his attempt to blow up a wrecked aircraft to deny its use to the Russians, the trust of the more fervently Nazi or simply patriotic officers in their leaders back home—all have terribly ironic outcomes brought about by the situation at Stalingrad itself. Even the very first chapter, in which we meet Breuer and Lakosch driving through the night, is by the end an ironic memory: their trip down that road is the last time that that road into—or out of—Stalingrad will be open to any of them. It’s masterfully done, and the irony with which Gerlach generously sews the story only adds to the weight of the characters’ impending doom.

The story of Gerlach’s novel

A final, external factor that makes Breakout at Stalingrad interesting is the story of the novel itself. Gerlach was, like Breuer, a low-ranking intelligence officer at Stalingrad and was among the hundreds of thousands of men captured when Paulus capitulated. Held in prison camps in Russian for years even after the war’s end, Gerlach spent time with many other survivors of the siege and, by the end of his captivity in 1950, he had written the manuscript of Breakout at Stalingrad. But before he could be released and repatriated, the Soviets went through his papers. They confiscated the manuscript.

Following his return, Gerlach eventually decided to write his novel again, and used hypnosis to assist his recall of the original manuscript. This second “remembered” version of the novel was published in Germany as Die verratene Armee in 1957, as The Forsaken Army in 1958. It was a hit, and enjoyed great success throughout his lifetime. He died in 1991.

Then, in 2012, a German professor of literature doing research on leftist German writers in a Moscow archive stumbled upon something remarkable—the confiscated original manuscript of Gerlach’s novel. The professor, Carsten Gansel, edited and published the newly rediscovered novel in 2016, a quarter century after Gerlach’s death.

The English translation I read includes a 150-page appendix by Gansel recounting Gerlach’s wartime experiences and imprisonment and discussing the rediscovery of the manuscript itself. The chief draw of Breakout at Stalingrad is and must be the novel itself, and so while you won’t be missing anything if you don’t look into this remarkable background story, it is worth reading for its own sake. I, for one, am thankful that Gansel happened across the manuscript and that he saw it into print.

Conclusion

Is Breakout at Stalingrad an anti-war novel? I don’t know. Certainly no one would choose to live through the things Gerlach describes, and certainly Gerlach depicts the battle as a waste of brave men caused by the cruelty of far-off leaders. But the strength of whatever message Gerlach has for us lies in its story, in its characters and the things that happen to them. It condemns the war without sermonizing, like Johnny Got His Gun or All Quiet on the Western Front in its more hamfisted moments; shows the disintegration of human minds and souls without filling the story with men who are already degenerates, like The Thin Red Line or The Naked and the Dead and their casts of perverts and psychopaths; and brings us into moments of extraordinary pathos, tragedy, camaraderie, and—just occasionally—heroism without the cloying phoniness or sentimentality of so many war movies.

As I mentioned above, Breakout at Stalingrad accomplishes one of the most important things a novel of any kind, but most especially a war novel, sets out to do: create that dreamlike state of vicarious experience that conveys what it was like. Drawing on his own experiences and those of his fellow survivors of Stalingrad, Gerlach carefully constructed this novel around a diverse set of believable characters and freighted their stories with shocking and often bitterly ironic incidents that show us, the readers, the brutality and waste of the battle. Like Linna’s Unknown Soldiers, the result is not only a great war novel, but a great novel, a story we could all stand to learn from—and can be grateful we didn’t live through.

The danger of do-gooders

Helen Andrews, whose very good Lytton Strachey-inspired book Boomers I read just last week, has an energetic and fantastically cutting review of a new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt at the Claremont Review of Books. The review, entitled “Do-Gooder in Chief,” begins with an anecdote about Hillary Clinton’s attempt to contact Mrs Roosevelt via medium and leads into the subject with this incisive paragraph:

The irony of Eleanor Roosevelt, feminist political icon, is that her career was a 50-year vindication of every misogynist cliché about women in politics. Her politics were sentimental rather than rational. She was impulsive and easily swayed, a busybody who meddled in every issue under the sun without bothering to master anything intellectually. She honestly believed we could end poverty and war by all being a little nicer to each other.

While nodding to Eleanor Roosevelt’s better qualities, such as her self-sacrificial longsuffering and concern for others, which would have been commendable if put to other uses, Andrews catalogs her chain of blithely attempted failures—social, political, philosophical, and even, in her marriage to Franklin and her mismanagement of the White House, personal and domestic—and the doggedness with which she pursued solving intractable real world problems despite having no insights of any particular value to offer. All she had was a sentimental pity for the downtrodden and the optimism to try things, not to mention a name and position that afforded her plenty of guinea pigs. Andrews:

Her inability to graduate from sentimentality to principle meant that Eleanor was easily blown hither and yon by the gust of events. When Neville Chamberlain signed the peace deal at Munich, she applauded as a pacifist. When her husband advocated war against Hitler, she applauded as a humanitarian, with no sense of inconsistency.

So what? one might ask. Today Eleanor Roosevelt functions primarily as a talisman—like the portraits of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright that Leslie Knope, another insufferable do-gooder, kept in her office—and an icon of sentimental goodwill, and there are certainly more pernicious activist figures one could invoke. Here are kids’ books about John Brown and Che Guevara, and a YA graphic novel about Emma Goldman.

But when all one has to offer is compassion and innocent goodwill, and these mere inclinations are never subjected to hard questions or challenged by the wisdom of experience, the results can be worse than if no one had meddled in the first place and all the more far-reaching precisely because they seem to be, in the person of the do-gooder, so unobjectionable. And worst of all, the do-gooder is an easy mark, something that every panhandler and swindler knows.

All of which brought to mind this passage from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism, a book perhaps even more scathing than Andrews’s review:

Was Mrs. Roosevelt deeply imbued with pro-Communist ideas or merely naive? Probably both. Witness an article she published in McCall’s (February 1952) about the President’s unease with Stalin at the Teheran Conference. “My husband was determined to bend every effort to breaking those suspicions down, and decided the way to do it was to live up to every promise made by both the United States and Great Britain, which both of us were able to do before the Yalta meeting. At Yalta my husband felt the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and he did say he was able to get a smile from Stalin.” Indeed, how many people would not sell millions into slavery to get a smile from that dear old man?

Per Andrews, Franklin Roosevelt was a “glib charmer whose emotional default was to take and take without giving back,” a quality exemplified by his relationships with Churchill, the American people, and Eleanor herself. Between Franklin’s reliance on superficial charm to get by and Eleanor’s warm-and-fuzzy nicety, they were the perfect marks for an aloof and canny con-man like Stalin, and it was Eastern Europe that paid the price.

Scruton and the Preacher on foretelling the future

The first book I recall reading by Sir Roger Scruton was The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope—a title and theme that are right up my alley. In the introduction of the book he explains his purpose:

My concern . . . is with certain fallacies that seem to justify hope, or at least to make disappointment bearable. My examples come from many areas, but they share a common characteristic, which is that they show, at the heart of the unscrupulous optimist’s vision, a mistake that is so blindingly obvious that only someone in the grip of self-deception could have overlooked it. It is against this self-deception that pessimism is directed. A study of the uses of pessimism will reveal a most interesting feature of human nature, which is that obvious errors are the hardest to rectify. They may involve mistakes of reasoning; but their causes lie deeper than reason, in emotional needs that will defend themselves with every weapon to hand rather than relinquish the comfort of their easily-won illusions.

He begins the next paragraph with this devastating line:

“The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament.”

— Sir Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

That particular line—and especially its allusion to the Old Testament—came back to me yesterday morning during church, when, as I leafed through one of my oldest Bibles, I came across the following verse from Ecclesiastes (which, me being the pessimist that I am, is one of my favorite books of the Bible, along with Job and Jonah). Some version of myself in years past had underlined it in heavy black ink.

“A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?”

— Ecclesiastes X, xiv

A lesson that, per Scruton’s observation above, should be obvious from even a cursory familiarity with history or literature. But as the Preacher reminds us near the beginning of his book, “There is no remembrance of former things,” and, lest we get on our high horse, presentists that we are, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

The reminder we may need most in our technocratic and unscrupulously optimistic age.

Cicero on friendship and falsity

Kevin D Williamson, in his newsletter today, has a trenchant examination of disordered priorities. Specifically, when we mistake “second things” for “first things” we fail to attain either, as in discarding principles for political expediency. He reflects at length on lying and invokes Cicero’s De Amicitia, “On Friendship,” from which we get the principle Esse quam videri—To be rather than to seem. Cicero, speaking through the main character of the dialogue, Laelius:

“Many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue. Such men delight in flattery, and, when a complimentary remark is fashioned to suit their fancy, they think the empty phrase is proof of their own merits. There is nothing, therefore, in a friendship in which one of the parties to it does not wish to hear the truth and the other is ready to lie.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XXIV

Those who don’t want to hear the truth, and those who are prepared to lie—a familiar arrangement, but not friendship. It’s more akin to prostitution, as Cicero makes clear in an allusion to a comedy by Terence, in which a prostitute uses hyperbole to praise the prowess of a recent john. The same example was picked up Dante, who placed the prostitute in the circle of the flatterers in Inferno.

These are perversions of friendship. Elsewhere in De Amicitia, Cicero, through the speaker, Laelius, writes prescriptively:

“Therefore, let this law be established in friendship: neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XII

Truth is both the basis and the fruit of real friendship, which is founded on virtue. “Virtue,” Cicero writes, “both creates the bond of friendship and perserves it,” but can’t be gotten by a mercenary pursuit of either virtue or friendship.

“But [friendship] is nothing other than the great esteem and affection felt for him who inspires that sentiment, and its is not sought because of material need or for the sake of material gain. Nevertheless even this blossoms forth from friendship, although you did not make it your aim.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, XXVII

Williamson also invokes CS Lewis in this passage of his newsletter, and while he did not mention this particular line of Lewis’s, the following from Mere Christianity inevitably came to mind:

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation along as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

Be, don’t seem, and you might find that, simply by being, you begin to seem.

The translation of De Amicitia above is that of WA Falconer, from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. You can read the whole thing here. An excellent recent translation is that of Philip Freeman for the Ancient Wisdom of Modern Readers series. Read the entirety of Williamson’s newsletter here. Come for the dachshund puppy story, stay for the razor sharp Cicero-inspired examination of the sacrifice of truth for political gain. It’s worth your while.

Three quotations on the artificiality of civilization

Detail of A View Through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum, by CW Eckersberg

First—by artificial I do not mean fake, but rather the product of art in the old sense or craftsmanship, the result of creativity and hard, skilled work.

From Chapter 10, “Primitivism and History,” of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses:

Nature is always with us. It is self-supporting. In the forests of Nature we can be savages with impunity. We can likewise resolve never to cease being so, without further risk than the coming of other peoples who are not savages. But, in principle, it is possible to have peoples who are perennially primitive. Breyssig has called these “the peoples of perpetual dawn,” those who have remained in a motionless, frozen twilight, which never progresses towards midday.

This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilisation which is ours. Civilisation is not “just there,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation—you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air.

Ortega’s concern throughout The Revolt of the Masses is with the “mass-man,” the creature of the West’s middle class following the explosion of industry, technology, and prosperity in the 19th century, and most especially with the fact that the mass-man takes civilization and everything that has made his life possible for granted:

The mass-man believes that the civilisation into which he was born and which he makes use of, is as spontaneous and self-producing as Nature, and ipso facto he is changed into primitive man.

When I read these passages they reminded me of the following from CS Lewis’s essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” which I have revisited many times over the last few years. Having begun with a quotation from Malory on the character of Sir Launcelot, “Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; thou wert the sternest knight to they mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest,” Lewis meditates on the fusion of meekness and sternness:

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

Like Ortega, Lewis has a clear picture of the consequences of neglecting, of not maintaining this artificial work:

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be ‘meek in hall’, and those who are ‘meek in hall’ but useless in battle—for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. The ancient history of the Near East is like that. Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilisation. Then they become civilised themselves and go soft. Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. Then the cycle beings over again. Modern machinery will not change this cycle; it will only enable the same thing to happen on a larger scale. Indeed, nothing much else can ever happen if the ‘stern’ and the ‘meek’ fall into two mutually exclusive classes. And never forget that this is their natural condition. The man who combines both characters—the knight—is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.

Finally, the line from the late Sir Roger Scruton that served as the keystone of his thought:

Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

I’m reading the authorized English translation of Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, which is available in its entirely online here. You can watch CSLewisDoodle’s rendition of “The Necessity of Chivalry” here. It is collected in Present Concerns, which is where I first read it. Perhaps the best place to start with Scruton’s thought as encapsulated in that last line is Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged, which I read last year.

Chesterton on the besetting sin of progressivism

In GK Chesterton’s 1906 book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, Chesterton, an admirer of Dickens, nevertheless points out some of Dickens’s flaws. One of the most characteristic was his chronological parochialism, a tendency typical of the “sturdy, sentimental English Radical with a large heart and a narrow mind”—a recognizable activist type even today. In Chapter VII, “Dickens and Christmas,” Chesterton observes that

“[Dickens] could not help falling into that besetting sin or weakness of the modern progressive, the habit of regarding the contemporary questions as the eternal questions and the latest word as the last.”

— GKC

Chesterton spoofs the progressive tendency to read current politics into every past event with a funny (but dated) example, writing that Dickens “could not get out of his head the instinctive conception that the real problem before St. Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John Russell or Sir Robert Peel.” The political crises of these two sets of men—an Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury and two of Victoria’s prime ministers—were separated by almost a thousand years.

Dickens “could not help seeing the remotest peaks lit up by the raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis. He lived for the instant and its urgency.” This weakness is not limited to the modern progressive’s view of the past, either. The problem with such a politically informed perspective, writes Chesterton, is that one ends up, like Dickens, “liv[ing] in an eternal present like all simple men.”

As I’ve noted here before (re. Donald Hall’s warning that “the penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred”), such narrow-mindedness can cut an artist off entirely from artistic tradition and strangle his work. The consequences on a society-wide scale, a political scale, are manifestly more serious. Fortunately for Dickens, he lived in an age that was still deeply enough informed by the past and by tradition not to neglect it entirely—unlike some other periods I could mention—and after his death he had a cheerleader—Chesterton himself.

Chesterton’s Charles Dickens helped revive interest in and critical appreciation of Dickens’s work. It’s a worthwhile read, especially if you enjoy both men’s work and want an incisive but appreciative appraisal of Dickens. The whole book is available from Wikisource here.

The Odyssey XXII-XXIV on Core Curriculum

Odysseus killing the suitors in an illustration by John Flaxman (1755-1826)

Our journey is ended! This morning the final episode of Core Curriculum’s slow read through Homer’s Odyssey dropped, concluding the show’s fourth series. It’s been great.

In this episode, host David Grubbs talks to Coyle Neal, Jay Eldred, and me about the three climactic books of the Odyssey. Among the topics we discuss are Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors and the numerous action movies it reminds us of; whether justice was served in the killing of the suitors and, especially, the slave girls who had collaborated with them; the duel of wits and cunning between Odysseus and Penelope upon their reunion; and the final restoration of order, with a little assist from Athena. There’s much, much more, but this is a good précis of a very rich discussion.

I had a great time on this episode and on all the Odyssey episodes I got to participate in. If you haven’t been following along, I hope you’ll go back to the first episode of the series. These are great discussions and have only deepened my appreciation of some of my favorite books.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s detailed shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! And stay tuned for the forthcoming fifth series of the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Core Curriculum!

James Fenimore Cooper on demagogues

About a week and a half ago—the timing is important—I was rearranging some shelves in my library and riffled the pages of an oft-forgotten book on politics. I stopped and flipped back to a chapter heading I thought I had seen. Ten minutes later I had finished reading the chapter; I’ve revisited it several times since.

The book is 19th century novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 treatise The American Democrat, and the chapter that arrested my attention is entitled “On Demagogues.”

Cooper begins with a basic definition:

A demagogue, in the strict signification of the word, is “a leader of the rabble.”

This is, he notes, “a Greek compound.” The word’s specific component parts are demos, “the people” or “the mob,” and agogos, “leader,” from a proto-Indo-European root for words meaning “to draw out” or even “to drive.” Compare pedagogue, ”leader of children,” i.e. a teacher.

Cooper considers what demagogues might be after:

The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people. Sometimes the object is to indulge malignancy, unprincipled and selfish men submitting but to two governing motives, that of doing good to themselves, and that of doing harm to others. The true theatre of a demagogue is a democracy, for the body of the community possessing the power, the master he pretends to serve is best able to reward his efforts.

How does one identify a demagogue? Cooper is particularly attentive to this topic, since “it is all important to distinguish between those who labor in behalf of the people on the general account, and those who labor in behalf of the people on their own account.”

The motive of the demagogue may usually be detected in his conduct. The man who is constantly telling the people that they are unerring in judgment, and that they have all power, is a demagogue. Bodies of men being composed of individuals, can no more be raised above the commission of error, than individuals themselves, and, in many situations, they are more likely to err, from self-excitement and the division of responsibility. The power of the people is limited by the fundamental laws, or the constitution, the rights and opinions of the minority, in all but those cases in which a decision becomes indispensable, being just as sacred as the rights and opinions of the majority; else would a democracy be, indeed, what its enemies term it, the worst species of tyranny. In this instance, the people are flattered, in order to be led; as in kingdoms, the prince is blinded to his own defects, in order to extract favor from him.

The demagogue always puts the people before the constitution and the laws, in face of the obvious truth that the people have placed the constitution and the laws before themselves.

The local demagogue does not distinguish between the whole people and a part of the people, and is apt to betray his want of principles by contending for fancied, or assumed rights, in favor of a county, or a town, though the act is obviously opposed to the will of the nation. This is a test that the most often betrays the demagogue, for while loudest in proclaiming his devotion to the majority, he is, in truth, opposing the will of the entire people, in order to effect his purposes with a part.

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management, instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes.

Also dangerous are the demagogue’s enablers, men who deliberately take on the traits of the demagogue or of the people whose support they covet by debasing themselves:

There is a large class of political men in this country, who, while they scarcely merit the opprobrium of being termed demagogues, are not properly exempt from the imputation of falling into some of their most dangerous vices. These are they, whose habits, and tastes, and better opinions, indeed, are all at variance with vulgar errors and vulgar practices, but, who imagine it a necessary evil in a democracy to defer to prejudices, and ignorance, and even to popular jealousies and popular injustice, that a safe direction may be given to the publick mind.

“Such men deceive themselves,” Cooper comments.

How, then, to identify sincere leaders when democracies breed demagogues like a basement breeds mildew?

The man who maintains the rights of the people on pure grounds . . . does not flatter the people, even while he defends them, for he knows that flattery is a corrupting and dangerous poison. Having nothing to conceal, he is frank and fearless, as are all men with the consciousness of right motives. He oftener chides than commends, for power needs reproof and can dispense with praise.

And:

The considerate, and modest, and just-minded man, of whatever social class, will view all this differently. In asserting his own rights, he respects those of others; in indulging his own tastes, he is willing to admit there may be superior; in pursuing his own course, in his own manner, he knows his neighbor has an equal right to do the same; and, most of all, is he impressed with the great moral truths, that flatterers are inherently miscreants, that fallacies never fail to bring their punishments, and that the empire of God is reason.

Why does this matter? Because the truth matters, and these questions are not of merely temporal importance. Cooper:

All good men desire the truth, and, on all publick occasions on which it is necessary to act at all, the truth would be the most certain, efficient, and durable agency in defeating falsehoods, whether of prejudices, reports, or principles. The perception of truth is an attribute of reason, and the ground-work of all institutions that claim to be founded in justice, is this high quality. Temporary convenience, and selfish considerations, beyond a doubt, are both favored by sometimes closing the eyes to the severity of truth, but in nothing is the sublime admonition of God in his commandments, where he tells us that he “will visit the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations of their children,” more impressively verified, than in the inevitable punishments that await every sacrifice of truth.

There’s more. You can read the entire chapter at the link above, and you can find the the entirety of The American Democrat online at Wikisource here. I first learned about Cooper’s political writing in a chapter of Russell Kirk’s study The Conservative Mind, which is worth your while.

The Odyssey XIX-XXI on Core Curriculum

Odysseus and Eurycleia in an illustration by john Flaxman

With the arrival of the penultimate episode of this season of Core Curriculum, both we and Odysseus are in the homestretch.

In this episode, covering books 19-21 of the Odyssey, Victoria Reynolds Farmer hosts Christina Bieber Lake and me in a discussion of Odysseus’s scouting trip into his own house, the light shed by Athena, the varying relationships of characters like Odysseus, Penelope, and the slave nurse Eurycleia, whether Odysseus enjoys his disguises too much, and a lot more. This was a really enjoyable episode to record and I hope y’all will enjoy listening.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes. There’s only one more on the Odyssey to go!

Thanks for listening!

2020 in books: Roger Scruton

The late Sir Roger Scruton interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge in 2017

Today marks the first anniversary of Sir Roger Scruton’s death. When he died, the foremost voice for a traditional conservatism rooted in virtue, a proper understanding of human nature, and love of home—in traditions and ideas rather than personalities and slogans—died with him.

His death came as a shock to me. I had received an invitation to an event to be held in his honor in 2019 but couldn’t afford to go and passed it up, thinking there would come another chance someday. Now I know there won’t. But what I did have were many of Scruton’s books—some of which I had read, many of which I just hadn’t gotten around to yet. With his passing I decided to set myself a project of reading as many of them as I could in the remainder of 2020.

It turned out to be a good year for it.

The Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour

I called my project “the Sir Roger Scruton Farewell Tour” both as a wry joke and as a way to draw out the goodbye. Learning of his death was an unwelcome surprise; a “farewell tour,” on the other hand—that would take a while, offering a chance for appreciation. I enjoyed it greatly, and ended the year more grateful than ever for Scruton’s life and work.

I read twelve books as part of the tour. All of them were good, but five were standouts even among the Scruton books I’ve read. I’ve given that top five its own section below. But first, here are the other seven:

Runners up

The Soul of the World—A dense but strongly and beautifully argued case against the scientific reductivism of modern atheism and a careful examination of the many hints of the transcendent that fill our lives—whether art, music, the world around us, or simply living with and knowing other people. This book builds upon his 2010 Gifford lectures, published as The Face of God, and is further refined by On Human Nature.

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism—The longest of Scruton’s books that I’ve read, this one argues that conservation of the environment is, properly speaking, a conservative issue, and notes the irony of environmentalism’s place among the odd assortment of other modern progressive causes. He offers trenchant critiques of the dogmatism of activists and their search for universally applicable top-down solutions, as exemplified by the bungling environmental measures undertaken by the unaccountable bureaucracy of the EU. Scruton’s view of conservation and the environment, by contrast, is one rooted in what he calls oikophilia, love of home, and piety toward our inheritance. Conservation must be local and meet local needs. Long and detailed but compellingly argued. I shared a passage from this book on the blog back in the spring.

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left—A recently revised edition of his most controversial book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands works through the most important Leftist ideologues of the twentieth century, from the New Left’s roots in pre- and immediately post-War German philosophy through its flowering in first French and then American universities. Scruton is most concerned with what he, borrowing from Orwell, calls “Newspeak,” which is the leftist use of language to conjure or cast spells rather than to describe an independent reality. Dense but rewarding reading, with clear and scathingly written critiques of the ideologies that have birthed the worst of our modern mental confusions. I posted a selection of excerpts on the blog over the summer.

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy—A good short guide to major issues in modern philosophy, written in a friendly conversational style.

The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat—A short, compelling response to September 11. Scruton considers the post-Enlightenment political and social trends of the West that created a world in which non-Westerners, confronted with the rapidly spreading global challenge of secular liberal politics and culture, could find terrorism a viable response, and in which non-Westerners and the West would respond half-heartedly and with incomprehension. A considerably more nuanced assessment than most offered either in the aftermath or since.

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction—One of Scruton’s best and most accessible books, a witty and wide-ranging introduction to the concept of beauty—what it is, how to judge it (and whether we can judge it), why it matters, and what it says about us as human persons. Possibly the best starting point for reading Scruton.

Souls in the Twilight—The first of Scruton’s fiction that I’ve read, a collection of short stories about individuals struggling to find meaning in a world in which all of the old avenues to transcendence—family, community, faith—have disappeared, replaced with nihilism. Bleak but well written, this set of stories sold me on his fiction—I have his novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared on standby now.

Top five

While I would recommend any of the books in this post, these five were my favorites—the ones I most enjoyed and that gave me the most food for thought, both as I read them and in the months since. Presented in no particular order, my five favorite Scruton books of the farewell tour:

A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism

An excellent collection of essays on a variety of topics of political importance, including marriage, evil, animal rights and vegetarianism, and the obscure bureaucratese of unaccountable government agencies. The best essay in the collection, and one especially relevant to our moment, is “The Totalitarian Temptation,” a critique of totalitarian government, an examination of its origins, and a warning against the appeal of power driven by resentment. Scruton delivered this address in 2003 but it reads like an explanation of all that has happened over the summer of 2020. You can read my more detailed Goodreads review here.

Confessions of a Heretic

Another excellent essay collection, this one ranging more broadly than mere politics. In each essay Scruton offers his “heretical” opinions on a given subject, whether art, dancing, modern architecture, conservationism, the proper role of government, Western civilization and its defense, or death. Every essay is wittily argued, gracefully written, and offers sometimes surprising insight into familiar topics. This may be the Scruton book I most enjoyed this year.

Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged

An excellent short account of Scruton’s views on culture, especially its collapse into ephemera, vulgarity, and vandalism in the modern world. This is also one of his most concise, clearly stated arguments against what he called “a culture of repudiation,” a culture we saw running in high gear through much of 2020. It’s excellent—a great starting point for Scruton’s philosophy and cultural critiques if you’re just beginning to read him. As a bonus, when Scruton summarizes he is at his wittiest and most trenchant, making this book a good deal of fun.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

This was the first book in the Farewell Tour, read before I even knew it would be the farewell tour. I finished it three days before Scruton died. It’s excellent.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition offers the reader a guide to the prehistory and origins of conservatism, from Aristotle and Cicero in the ancient world to Burke, the father of the modern movement, and traces multiple sometimes competing lines of conservative thought from Burke to the present. Along the way Scruton examines such disparate figures as Hegel and De Maistre, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville; cultural conservatives like Coleridge, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, and CS Lewis; and Americans like John Crowe Ransom and the Southern Agrarians or William F Buckley and Russell Kirk, opposite sides of the fusionist conservative coin. Especially helpful are Scruton’s examinations of the way conservatism, as an anti-ideology, has pivoted to account for or counteract new threats, from liberalism and radicalism in Burke’s day to socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century to the Soviet Union and big government liberalism in the post-war United States. Scruton’s Conservatism is a big-tent review of centuries of thought, and makes clear the variety and richness of the tradition. (Every conservative will find at least one person profiled here that they don’t think belongs.) It’s also short and deftly written, making it an excellent introduction to a movement far richer and deeper than is often credited.

The book includes a long list of recommended reading at the back, so that if any one of the numerous thinkers outlined here piques your interest you can follow that trail deeper in. A few months after reading the book I borrowed the audiobook, read by Mark Meadows, from the library via Hoopla and listened to it on my daily walks. Excellent the second time around, too.

Conversations with Roger Scruton, with Mark Dooley

The last book I read in the Farewell Tour, and appropriately so. This book, though written several years ago based on a few days’ worth of talk with Scruton while Dooley stayed at his farm in Wiltshire, feels like a sendoff. Nevertheless the book is light and hopeful, wonderfully brisk and—as I’ve said so many times before of the other books in this post—wide-ranging. Think of this as a Roger Scruton sampler.

Conversations begins with Scruton’s life story, growing up in urban Britain with a resentful Labour Party father and discovering literature, art, and music; discovering, thanks to the student protests of 1968, which he witnessed, that he was a conservative; and following from there his forty years of academic and journalistic work in support of conservative philosophy. Scruton touches on specific books; works through the growth and development of his ideas over time; describes his repeated denunciations—both as an academic and a journalist—by Leftist colleagues and total strangers; and talks about work for underground universities behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Europe, work that got him arrested by the secret police in Czechoslovakia and honored, years later, by Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for his efforts.

There’s much, much more. I ended the book struck by the busyness and variety, the ups and downs, of his life, something he himself comments on a number of times.

Throughout Scruton is frank, humorous, understated, and self-effacing. Dooley also gives us some nice vignettes of Scruton at home on his farm with his family, giving the reader some sense of the environment which Scruton—this man to whom the oikos, the home, is so fundamentally important—has fashioned with his wife and children. When the conclusion comes, it’s hard not to want to stay.

I highly recommend Conversations with Roger Scruton. It would probably help to be somewhat familiar with Scruton’s work beforehand, but if you’re not this book could work as an excellent, friendly and accessible introduction both to his ideas and to the man himself. This intimate and personal book was, for me, a most welcome way to end the Farewell Tour.

Previously read

One reason I embarked on this Farewell Tour was because, despite my appreciation of Scruton, I felt like I had only read a fragment of what he had written. Which is not to say that what I had previously read was unsatisfactory. Far from it. I needed to make up for lost time.

Here, in no particular order, are the five books I remember reading before 2020. I would recommend any one of them:

• The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope—The first book by Scruton I read, a caution against unwarranted and uncritical optimism and an argument in favor of low expectations. Full of wry wit. Right up my alley.

• The Face of God—Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. A critique of scientific reductionism. Thoughts established here are further developed in The Soul of the World (see above).

• On Human Nature—Clarifies and further develops some ideas from The Soul of the World (see above). I read these three way out of order. One of these days I’m going to go back through chronologically.

• Modern Culture—Much of Scruton’s pithy cultural critique in Culture Counts (see above) is foreshadowed here in deeper, more detailed and specific form. An excellent examination of the fragmentation and vulgarity of modern culture.

• How to Be a Conservative—Perhaps Scruton’s most famous book, this is an excellent introduction to conservatism via chapters explaining the truth and the error in prominent modern ideologies. Linked below are a couple of interviews Scruton gave specifically about this book. They’re worth your while.

Video and audio

Scruton not only wrote every day, he appeared frequently in interviews, documentaries, and recorded lectures until not long before he died. The following is a selection of my favorites, ranging from ten-minute audio essays from BBC Radio to full length lectures with Q&A sessions.

• Why Beauty Matters—One of his greatest legacies. In a number of interviews in his last few years Scruton mentioned that this documentary was one of the projects that students, correspondents, and others mentioned most often to him, the documentary having “found a second life” online. I blogged about this wonderful one-hour film last fall. You can read that here; Why Beauty Matters is embedded in a Vimeo player in that post.

• Apprehending the Transcendent—Another video that I’ve blogged about before, Apprehending the Transcendent is the title of the moderated discussion Scruton had with psychologist Jordan Peterson at Cambridge a few years ago. A thoughtful and wide-ranging set of critiques and meditations. You can read my blog post about it here; the discussion is embedded in a YouTube player.

• BBC audio essays—A number of Scruton’s audio opinion pieces are available on YouTube. These are a goldmine. Here are a few that offer short (usually ten minutes or less), pithy introductions to some of his representative concerns, especially art and its relation to human nature and society: “The Tyranny of Pop Music,” “Art Today, Fake & Kitsch,” “On Harry Potter,” “Offensive Jokes,” “Animals,” “The Religion of Rights,” and “The Witch-hunt Culture.”

• Uncommon Knowledge: How to Be a Conservative—A good interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution on Scruton’s book. Watch the interview here.

• Christian Humanist Profiles: How to Be a Conservative—An especially good podcast interview from 2016 conducted by my friend Nathan Gilmour of the Christian Humanist Podcast. Listen here.

• On The Future of Conservatism & Debate—A friendly conversation between Scruton and Spectator editor Douglas Murray. This wide-ranging discussion is especially worthwhile because of the wry, sometimes mordant British wit both men wield so well. Watch here.

• A Thing Called Civilization—In 2019, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute selected Scruton for its Defender of Western Civilization award. Scruton recorded his gracious acceptance speech on video. As far as I know this was his last semi-public appearance—an appropriate note for his career to end on. Watch here.

There is much, much more good stuff from Scruton out there; these are just the best places to start.

Conclusion—what Scruton has to teach us

Scruton is missed. We need his insight, his careful work, and the model he offered of a thoughtful conservatism grounded in virtue and ideas more than ever. If I were to summarize what we need most of Scruton right now, it might be:

• A proper understanding of human nature—what we are and what we need as rational and transcendent beings

• Love of home—not as mere places to exist, but places where human persons are rooted and connect with each other

• An understanding that persons are not free-floating individuals but exist in community

• An understanding of tradition and organic development rather than revolution as the source of freedom

• The necessity of order and the rule of law and its derivation from the bottom up, from a place and its people

And, finally, his most frequently repeated reminder, learned as he watched student revolutionaries trash Paris in 1968, that:

• Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

There is much, much more to Scruton’s philosophy than these, but these are good starting points. It is clear, after not only the last week but the last year—or perhaps decade—that even those who claim the title of “conservative” need to start over from fundamentals.

Appropriately, Scruton died on the birthday of Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism. Burke took a set of traditions, intuitions, and dispositions and gave them coherent shape as a response to ideological radicalism, revolution, and political violence. That response has survived, in one form or another, to the present, though it is now in a bad way—certainly in America. My hope is that Scruton’s legacy will prove a similar cohering influence, shaping of a new generation of real conservatism in the face of a new generation of vandals menacing our homes from all sides.

Roger Scruton, RIP.

Local Author Expo 2021

Last night was the much-anticipated Greenville County Library Local Author Expo. This year the event was held virtually. I was one of thirteen authors who participated and we had a great turnout, with an especially fun Q&A session following five-minute introductions from all of the authors. We each had a chance to talk a little about ourselves and our books. It was great.

This morning the Library shared a recording of the entire event to YouTube, which you can watch either here or embedded in this post. The Library has also made a lot of good Expo-related resources available online. Be sure to visit the Expo page at the Library’s website, where you can find a listing of all the authors represented, including sample chapters (mine come from Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville, if you’re interested) and links to the authors’ websites, social media, and more.

This is my third year at the Expo and I’m grateful as always to the Library for putting it on. Please check out what they’ve made available, and join up for the Library’s adult Winter Reading program. One of the goals for the program is to read a book from the Local Authors collection. As the event itself makes clear, you’ve got lots of good choices.

CS Lewis and too much news

This week I started reading an excellent volume called CS Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, by political scientists Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J Watson. In their opening chapter the authors contest the widespread perception of Lewis as apolitical, as either uninterested in or uninformed about politics. I won’t get into that argument—suffice it to say that any perception of Lewis as apolitical should not survive a reading of his essays—but in passing they quote from the following February 18, 1940 letter to his brother, Warnie, written after a visit from their friend Owen Barfield, who was greatly agitated about world affairs.

This letter grabbed my attention for two reasons. First, Lewis specifically mentions the Winter War or Russo-Finnish War, an interest of mine for some years. In November of 1939, the Soviet Union had invaded Finland in an attempted takeover. The outnumbered Finns fought the Russians to a standstill. Especially important was the tenacious Finnish defense of the Mannerheim Line, a network of trenches dug in across the Karelian Isthmus and the scene of unbelievably brutal fighting. (And Lewis knew something about trench warfare.) The war would end just under a month after Lewis posted this letter.

Second, and more to my point, Lewis’s frustrated reflections on the amount of grave news we’re expected to keep up with still seem fresh, even though he didn’t have to contend with the 24-hour news cycle or, God help us, social media.

Lewis:

[Barfield] is very much depressed having a greater faculty than you or I for feeling the miseries of the world in general—which led to a good deal of argument, how far, as a man and a Christian, one ought to be vividly and continuously aware of, say, what it’s like on the Mannerheim line at this moment. I took the line that the present rapidity of communication etc. imposed a burden on sympathy for which sympathy was never made: that the natural thing was to be distressed about what was happening to the poor Jones’s in your own village and that the modern situation, in which journalism brings us the Chinese, Russians, Finns, Poles and Turks to your notice each morning really could not be met in the same way. Of course I know the more obvious reply, that you can’t do them any good by being miserable, but that is hardly the point, for in the case of the Jones’s next door we should think ill of the man who felt nothing whether his feeling did them good or not.

I am afraid the truth is in this, as in nearly everything else I think about at present, that the world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam’ thing about it.

A year and a half ago I wrote a post called “Against the News,” in which I examined some of Neil Postman’s account of the way the modern media “elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” Glutted with the news, impotent to do anything, all that’s left is opinion—or, worse, fervid, sanctimonious admonitions—“about which you can do nothing.”

This is as specific as I’ll be: for days now my newsfeeds across all social media have been full of inescapable nothing.

Please revisit that post in full—I develop these ideas with more detail and less irritation than here—and consider seriously cutting down on your diet of current events. Maybe limit yourself to those for which it would be possible for you to be physically present.

That’s the negative. A positive suggestion: direct your sympathy and action toward the Joneses of Lewis’s letter. Not for nothing is the language of the Bible to love one’s neighbor—literally a near-dweller. Or, as Tolkien put it in a passage I’ve challenged myself with again and again, “uproot evil in the fields you know.” More on that here.