PTSD and the fallacy of the universal man

From the great historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought:

The fallacy of the universal man falsely assumes that people are intellectually and psychologically the same in all times, places, and circumstances. It is an error which has ruined the designs of innumerable utopians, revolutionaries, schematizers, prophets, preachers, psychiatrists, mystics, cranks, and social scientists of [every] shape and hue. Every unitary solution, without exception, which has ever been proposed as a panacea for the hopes and misfortunes of mankind, has been fatally flawed by this fundamental fallacy.

People, in various places and times, have not merely thought different things. They have thought them differently. It is probable that their most fundamental cerebral processes have changed through time. Their deepest emotional drives and desires may themselves have been transformed. Significant elements of continuity cannot be understood without a sense of the discontinuities, too.

Fischer supplies examples from the Enlightenment—a period particularly prone to this error, bent as the philosophes were on discovering the universally applicable laws of everything—as well as, more specifically, the twentieth century historiography of American slavery. Fischer credits the spread of the fallacy of the universal man to

two hopeful tendencies in the modern world. The first is a powerful reaction against the fatal fallacy of racism. The repudiation of this bloody error by most historians, and many others, is surely cause for rejoicing. But some have overreacted and insufficiently allowed for the existence of cultural differences among men.

The fruits of this fallacy, fifty years on from Fischer’s book, are manifest in popular understandings—or misunderstandings—of history. I find a great deal of my effort in the classroom, semester after semester, goes into making students understand that people in the past weren’t just like them, modern people in funny clothes. They react with blank incomprehension to ancient or medieval people and well-rehearsed outrage to more recent subjects.

Or, in the best possible scenario, genuine curiosity and openness to the strange. I have had many veterans in my classes over the years, and they are always interested in my background as a military historian. One question that comes up repeatedly is the history of PTSD, previously known as combat fatigue, previously known as shell-shock, and before that?

I recall a conversation I had with a student almost a decade ago. The subject was George Washington. In my lecture that day I had given a thumbnail character sketch of Washington, mentioning specifically his lifelong project of total self-control, particularly with regard to his explosive temper. This student, a combat camera veteran of Iraq, asked me after class if Washington’s temper could have been PTSD-related, as one of the vast constellation of potential PTSD symptoms is uncontrollable rage. A good question.

My answer, in short, was that I didn’t think so. Washington’s effort to control his temper was lifelong, rather than resulting from his war experiences, and, on a broader historical level, there’s just not that much evidence for PTSD in that period.

Here we butt up against that vast cultural gulf yawning between us and Washington. Per Alexander Rose, writing about the men who fought at Bunker Hill in his excellent book Men of War:

[T]here was no inkling of combat stress, shell shock, or what would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), since eighteenth-century soldiers lacked much of what we might term psychiatric self-awareness. . . . [T]roops simply did not understand what happened to them in war in the same way as those born in later centuries. . . .

Much of what we can gather from their diaries and letters, British and American alike, is an uncomplaining acceptance of death, hardship, and scarcity—not surprising given their routine experiences of cold, hunger, pain, sickness, and cruelty even during peacetime. Jarring to today’s sensibilities is the soldiers’ propensity to list in the most matter-of-fact way the whereabouts and number of their wounds while remaining silent as to the suffering that accompanied them. The pension applications that they submitted many decades later accordingly restrict themselves to citing, say, an elbow or knee that has been “troublesome” since the battle or a shoulder injury that has prevented them from working. There is never a hint of self-pity.

Rose goes on in his book to contrast this generation of American soldiers with those of the Civil War and World War II. These are conflicts in which you do get incidents of what is clearly PTSD, and, notably, conflicts fought by generations divided from Washington by the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements on the one hand and the late-Victorian and Progressive eras of domesticity, government nurture, and the closing of the frontier on the other. Cultural changes.

To return to George Washington, here’s the twenty-two year old Washington writing to his brother after his first battle, the ambush that started the French and Indian War:

I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed & the rest wounded. I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.

Being shot at in a wilderness ambush is, for Washington, “charming.” Compare the twenty-five year old Winston Churchill, for whom “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Not only are there people who can tolerate war as another of the dangers they’ve already faced in life, there are people who enjoy it.

Perhaps Washington and Churchill are just putting up a front here, trying to look tough because of some kind of expectation of manliness? That’s a common enough spin and, strictly speaking, possible. But look at the game you’ve already begun to play with the sources, and look at how much of yourself you’re infusing into them.

A simpler answer—and I think the correct one—is that Washington and Churchill saw, experienced, and understood the world utterly differently from us, with utterly different results. Our categories, theories, and pathologies do not adequately explain them or, worse, distort them.

The solution is to try to get outside ourselves, reach across that gulf, and understand them on their own terms—from the inside, as I’ve mentioned here before. Or, to put it in the succinct expression of LP Hartley, a shopworn but dependable quotation with which I begin every class I teach:

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

For most of the students with whom I’ve had the Washington-PTSD conversation, I can see that this makes sense to them. The lightbulb comes on—visibly, if not literally. A mystery has been solved for them and new ones beckon. They suddenly grasp not only Washington but something of themselves, thanks to the perspective history can offer. It’s why I enjoy these conversations and have benefited from them so much myself.

But there’s a negative alternative, which is embracing the fallacy of the universal man—all people everywhere are the same. The result, if you operate long enough and stubbornly enough under the assumptions of the fallacy, is that you see anyone who differs substantially from you as either deluded or wicked. And most people today assume the latter.

Hence the hunt for the ulterior motive behind everything. The Greeks excluded women from the Olympics because they were bad, not because of their religious customs. The Romans fought their enemies because they were greedy and mean, not because of an ever-shifting pragmatic policy of alliance and defense. And medieval Christians couldn’t have been sincere about all that Church stuff; it had to be about something else—power, wealth, sex, the control of women, whatever. Fischer describes this approach as “the furtive fallacy,” a hermeneutic of suspicion whose results, well…

Look around.

The Green Knight

Ralph Ineson in David Lowery’s The Green Knight

When the first trailer for The Green Knight appeared, five or six people immediately sent it to me. That’s speaking my love language. Y’all get me.

But I wasn’t sure what to make of the trailer. I hoped for a relatively faithful adaptation of one of my favorite poems, a truly great work of literature and Arthuriana, but I feared the filmmakers would simply use the skeleton of the story as a frame for weird, arthouse ambiguity, special effects, and sex.

As it turns out, I was kind of right about both.

The story (for those unfamiliar with it)

The Green Knight is an adaptation of the fourteenth century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The story, in brief: One year during King Arthur’s Christmas celebrations at Camelot, a strange knight—entirely green—arrives in the midst of the festivities and offers a challenge: give him one blow of whatever kind or severity on the condition that the man who strikes also receive a blow a year and a day later. Sir Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, steps up and beheads the knight, who then picks up his severed head, makes a speech, and leaves.

A year later Gawain leaves on a quest to find the Green Knight and keep his word. He stops for several days at the castle of Sir Bertilak, who engages Gawain in another game of exchange: Bertilak will trade whatever he kills while hunting for whatever Gawain gets while resting at his house—alone with Bertilak’s wife. Over three days and three hunts, Gawain resists all of Lady Bertilak’s advances except one: an offer of an enchanted belt that will render its wearer invulnerable. This Gawain accepts, a fact he hides from Bertilak during their exchange that evening.

Gawain leaves to meet the Green Knight, they spar verbally, and the Green Knight ultimately gives Gawain only a nick on his neck before revealing that he is, in fact, Sir Bertilak, and the entire scenario is a test engineered by the enchantress Morgan le Fay. Ashamed, Gawain and Bertilak make amends and Gawain returns to Camelot, chastened.

Pretty much everything in the poem is in the film The Green Knight, but often trimmed, rearranged, or expanded upon. Fair enough—an adaptation has to adapt. So, for instance, Morgan le Fay, now Gawain’s mother rather than his aunt, is present from the beginning; Sir Gawain’s quest to find the Green Knight, which in the poem gets a few offhand allusions to giants and wandering in the wild, takes up about half the film; and the time Sir Gawain spends with his host Sir Bertilak are streamlined into about two days. Again, fair enough—that kind of repetition, so thematically rich in the poem, might pose mind-numbing pacing problems in a film.

The positives

So I’m fine with the film not being 100% faithful to the source material, and went in prepared for that. Allowing for restructuring and artistic license, there was a good bit of The Green Knight that I enjoyed, or at least admired. But, on balance, I didn’t like the film, and that has a lot to do with the worries I had about the trailer.

Let me start with several things I liked:

• Despite not looking a thing like the man described in the poem (huge, unarmed and unarmored, entirely bright green, quite loquacious), the Green Knight was mesmerizing every moment he was onscreen, in no small part thanks to Ralph Ineson’s amazing voice. The rejiggering of the events at Arthur’s Christmas feast was calculated to give maximum impact to the Green Knight’s act of picking up his head and then addressing Gawain, and it worked. (In the theatre where I watched the film, I heard someone gasp when the Green Knight, headless, stood up. This is certainly one of those stories I would like to experience for the first time all over again.)

• The film has tons of atmosphere—perhaps too much (about which more below)—but I generally liked the look of things, most especially the wild Irish landscapes where much of the film was shot.

• Relatedly, the film’s music and sound design were quite good. Even though in some closeups you can tell the Green Knight is a man in a rubber mask, the sound of creaking, groaning timber and the bassy thud of his footsteps gave him tremendous gravitas.

• The strength of the source material shines through in the characters of the Green Knight himself, as I mentioned, and in Sir Bertilak, unnamed in the film but played by Joel Edgerton (recently of Netflix’s Henry V film The King, another mixed bag that I reviewed here). Edgerton’s performance is bluff, hearty, warm, and welcoming, exactly right for Sir Gawain’s host, and the trimming of Gawain’s stay with him was a detriment.

• Sean Harris (another veteran of The King) plays an older, more tired King Arthur, a performance that I liked quite a lot. I’d like to see Harris in his own King Arthur movie.

• A single scene with giants was interesting. It was simultaneously eerie—the shot that introduced the giants reminded me of that famous Goya painting—and a little unintentionally comedic. After the initial surprise wore off the scene started to look like a prog rock album cover. So this one doesn’t go down entirely in the win column, but I mostly liked it.

• One change to the source material that was quite clever: Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel for his “appointment” with the Green Knight early. In the poem the Green Knight is waiting for Gawain and sharpening his axe—a nerve-wracking image of patience. In the film the Green Knight is in some kind of hibernation and Gawain, after placing the Knight’s axe at his feet, has to wait for him through a night and a day. This recreates the night-long prayer vigil that a squire was expected to undergo before being knighted, a nice touch and thematically appropriate.

So credit where credit is due: The Green Knight is skillfully made, and I enjoyed some aspects of it. That said, the film’s style and its fast-and-loose thematic relationship with the source material do it no favors.

On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot

I’ll be brief on style. In discussing The Green Knight with several people since I saw it yesterday, the phrase I keep falling back on is artsy-fartsy. This being 2021, that means awkward editing, titles in big funky typefaces, intentionally discomforting ambient sound, an elephantine pace, dark, dingy digital cinematography, and, most especially, all of the above rolled into a whole lot of surrealist imagery. Some of this works—I enjoyed the variety of blackletter fonts used in the titles and some of the fever dream imagery. This could have been fun. But much of the rest is overwrought or simply twee, the markers of a self-aware hipster deconstruction. Another bother is the bleak, often low-contrast cinematography; some scenes are so dark it was difficult to make out what was happening.

Also: The Green Knight is “a fantasy retelling” of the story. Fine—Arthurian literature is all basically fantasy anyway. But keep your Medieval Myths Bingo card handy; the film leans hard on medieval stereotypes. The film opens on a shot of a peasant passed out in a straw-strewn yard full of livestock as seen from the window of a brothel, for crying out loud, and many scenes in mucky fields or foggy woods reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

More serious are the thematic changes. The filmmakers have given Gawain the Prince Hal treatment (it’s him waking up in the brothel in the opening scene) and depict him as an aspiring but wayward knight. The film is therefore a coming-of-age story. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this in reviews of the film, and it is mostly well-done. For instance, an invented scene in which Gawain meets the ghost of St Winifred and, when she asks him for a favor, asks what she plans to give him in exchange, shows succinctly just how much he still has to learn. But this arc is warped and complicated—if not compromised—by events near the film’s climax.

Rereading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight over many years, I’m struck more and more by how thoroughly, deeply Christian it is. There are the obvious things, like the story beginning and ending during the Christmas season, or Gawain’s shield—the shield that launched a thousand sophomore Brit Lit papers. (As a measure of the film’s regard for its source material’s themes, the shield is smashed by bandits early in the proceedings.) But this is rooted deeper than obvious symbols. Few stories are as unified in theme and plot as Sir Gawain, and separating the elements of its plot from its original themes guts it.

This is why deconstructionist versions of Beowulf always fail, and it’s why The Green Knight follows after them. A coming-of-age story is all well and good, but the Christian elements in the story offer hope of redemption for the youth who fails as he comes of age, as Gawain does.

So when The Green Knight’s Gawain is tempted by Lady Bertilak with the belt that will render him invulnerable against the Green Knight, he not only takes it but submits to a sex act (off screen) with her. How will he get out of this one when Sir Bertilak gets home and expects their gift exchange? He doesn’t—he flees, bluntly telling Bertilak that he doesn’t want his hospitality. And when the moment of truth comes and the Green Knight prepares his blow, Gawain first fantasizes about running away, becoming King himself, losing everyone he loves, and dying under siege—living a life of temporary success based on a lie. A powerful montage.

But Gawain snaps out of this fantasy sequence, removes the belt, and tells the Green Knight he is now ready. And, after a “Well done” and a wry joke, the Green Knight kills him.

Hony soyt qui mal pence

Well, it is heavily implied that the Green Knight kills him. The director thinks The Green Knight benefits from this ambiguous non-ending. The friend I watched it with was insulted that the film concluded on a punchline. The climax of the poem is a moment of grace that leads to repentance. The climax of the film gives us bravery in the face of failure but no redemption.

Finally, The Green Knight is missing the joy that runs through the poem from beginning to end. It’s a fun story to read despite the high stakes and lethal danger. The film is dour, consumed with its own grit and grime, its rare humor grim and no relief.

What The Green Knight’s filmmakers have accidentally crafted is exactly the kind of movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail was spoofing—stilted, grotesque, an anachronism stew heavy on medieval clichés, with muddy smoke-swept landscapes sparsely populated by people in rags, and, worst of all, self-important. The film delights in weird images and non-answers, which can be fine, but both there and where it matters most it simply isn’t the story of Sir Gawain.

An adaptation is free to be an adaptation, but in this case, despite the often handsome design, the wonderful atmosphere, and a handful of good performances, I’ll still take the original.

More if you’re interested

The source material is still worth reading. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been a favorite of mine for twenty years, ever since I started it one Sunday afternoon as a college freshman and couldn’t put it down. That was Burton Raffel’s translation, which is still in print and still worth your while. Perhaps my favorite is JRR Tolkien’s, still commonly read thanks to the name attached to it but a good translation first and foremost. Other good ones include those by contemporary poets Simon Armitage, who takes an odd ecological tack on his interpretation, and WS Merwin. Penguin Classics has four (!) editions—two modern English translations by Brian Stone and Bernard O’Donoghue, one edition entirely in the original Middle English, and a massive volume of the complete works of the Gawain Poet. Many others above present the text bilingually, which can be informative.

If you’re familiar with the vast tangle of medieval Arthurian literature (do take a minute to look at that map), you know that Sir Gawain varies wildly in characterization—sometimes courteous and principled, other times proud and boorish or even the instigator, because of a refusal to forgive, of the final war that destroys Arthur’s kingdom. Modern interpreters therefore seesaw on what kind of man he is. My least favorite version is The Once and Future King, in which Gawain and his clan are semi-barbarians dogged by Freudian complexes. Humbug. Inkling Roger Lancelyn Green, on the other hand, offers a convincing arc for Gawain that accounts for both the courteous knight of this poem as well as a later, compromised figure, in his King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

In a bit of serendipity, I ran across this excellent essay by Alexander Larman a few weeks ago: “Why can Hollywood never get the King Arthur story right?” An excellent question. The essay was occasioned by an announcement from Zack Snyder that he is working on an Arthurian project. One shudders to think of the result.

On tattletales

Elizabeth Bruenig has an interesting report in The Atlantic on a scandal involving Yale Law School. Apparently a well-known or notorious professor and two students were the target of accusations of… something. As Bruenig notes, the reporting has been vague, with the result that the rumors are wild, not to mention histrionic and self-righteous. (A lot of this is happening on Twitter after all.) The scandal apparently began when a “friend” of one of the students involved submitted a personally-prepared 20-page “dossier”—“complete with screenshots of text messages, summaries of conversations, a reference to a secretly recorded phone call, and some offhanded musings on his peers’ moral laxity”—to Yale Law’s relevant authorities. I’ve had a handful of bad friends, but never one on that order.

I was totally and blissfully ignorant of the scandal and the circumstances surrounding it until this morning, but I’m glad I read Bruenig’s report because of this valuable aside:

When I was a little girl growing up in suburban North Texas not so very long ago, my grandmother, a housewife of the ’60s, would turn my cousins and me outside to play in the summer so she could sit at her kitchen table and chain-smoke her way through her library of paperback bodice-rippers. And when one of us would inevitably bolt back inside to complain about being annihilated with a Super Soaker at close range or nailed with a Nerf dart to the eye, she would always eject us with the same dismissal: Don’t be a tattletale. As far as childhood admonishments go, it was an interesting one—she wasn’t telling us not to do something, but rather not to be something.

As it happens, this is counsel I and my siblings and cousins were given under similar circumstances in our day, and that I am daily dispensing to my kids. (For fellow parents: when you get reports of sibling misconduct, I’ve found “Why are you telling me this?” a useful followup question.) Bruenig continues:

I don’t credit homespun wisdom with any special salience. But the suggestion that it may be useful to morally evaluate oneself before volunteering to monitor everyone else’s conduct isn’t a ridiculous one.

Emphasis mine.

This “suggestion” dovetails with a “rule” from a very different person, namely Jordan Peterson: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” And from a source much older and—I think they would also agree—more authoritative than either Bruenig or Peterson:

[W]hy beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Bruenig insightfully expands on her observation before returning to her report:

It’s wise to be careful that, in one’s zeal for justice or fairness or the more prosaic things that ride beneath those banners, one doesn’t lose sight of one’s own moral obligations or aspirations. And it’s decent, if you have a problem with someone, to take it up with them before running it up the nearest flagpole. But this is something people with the right views and the best degrees, it seems, simply do not do; just as the distinction between tattling and whistleblowing—resting, as it does, on a sober evaluation of one’s own motives and the stakes at hand—is one they often fail to make.

Bruenig’s entire piece is worth the read, if only to get a glimpse of how debased and petty the supposed elite can be, especially those positioning themselves as our—and their own—moral watchdogs. Alan Jacobs, through whom I discovered this article, offers two good questions about the story the article relates.

On “realistic” war stories

An astonishing true story from the Battle of Suomussalmi, recounted in William R Trotter’s A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40:

In one such skirmish two Red tanks attacked a Finnish squad caught in lightly wooded terrain near the village [of Suomussalmi]. A lieutenant named Huovinen taped five stick grenades together and crawled toward the tanks; his friend, First Lieutenant Virkki, intended to provide covering fire, despite the fact that he was carrying only his side arm. At a range of forty meters Virkki stood up and emptied his 9 mm. Lahti automatic at the vehicles’ observation slits. The T-28s replied with a spray of machine-gun fire, and Virkki went down. Those watching felt sure he had been killed. But he had only dropped down to slap another magazine into the butt of his weapon. That done, he jumped up and once more emptied his pistol at the tanks. Altogether this deadly dance step was repeated three times, at which point the Russian tankers seemed to become unnerved. They turned around and clanked back to the village. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Huovinen had been crawling closer to them from the rear and now had his arm cocked to throw the grenade bundle. Just at that moment the tank nearest him put on speed and retreated. He lowered his grenades in astonishment. Surely there were not many instances in modern warfare of tanks being repulsed by pistol fire.

Beyond the obviously astonishing outcome of this incident, there are lots of factors that can “explain” what happened. The Finns attacked in the way they did because, though the Finns had the Russians surrounded in this incident, the Russians were still vastly numerically superior. The Finns had no armor and very few effective anti-tank weapons, hence the improvised anti-tank grenade mentioned here. And the Russians had little coordination between their armor and infantry, hence the lack of infantry support for these tanks. It was desperate on both sides.

But put this in a movie and you’ll hear howls about “realism” and what either the Finns or Russians or both “would never do.”

I think it was in an episode of Core Curriculum on the Iliad some while ago that I observed that there’s almost no such thing as a “realistic” war story, true or fictional, owing to the bizarre and random things that happen in the chaos of warfare. Read any war memoir and you’ll come across incidents that defy imagination—things that, again, if you put them in a movie, would get people crying foul.

So I’m always a little forgiving of war movies that do “unrealistic” things, because in real life soldiers are seldom at peak performance, seldom operate in ideal tactical conditions, seldom do the 100% correct thing in the heat of the moment, seldom have the knowledge granted to a moviegoer by an omniscient camera, and seldom have the kind of training we modern couch potatoes expect of SEALs. Even soldiers that are lucid and cool-headed when the unforgiving minute comes sometimes do the opposite of what their training drilled into them if the situation demands it. And that’s not even accounting for the random, the coincidental, the improvised, and the unpredictable—like a lone lieutenant’s pistol fire scaring off two tanks. But these are the things that make real life interesting.

I should finish Trotter’s book later today and highly recommend it, both for its excellently presented history of a conflict little known outside Scandinavia and for its continuous parade of hair-raising stories.

I conclude by deferring to two authorities on fiction and weirdness:

Per Mark Twain, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

Per TV Tropes, reality is unrealistic.

Hate-reading's uglier cousin

An irritation: people talk now about “hate-watching” a movie or TV show or “hate-reading” something, be it book, newspaper, magazine article, or blog post, “with the intention,” per Dictionary.com, “to mock or criticize.” That’s a very soft definition. Mockery and criticism both have their places, as does reading or watching something you know you’ll disagree with. You can’t grow intellectually or artistically unless you encounter and engage with things you disagree with or find lacking in one degree or another.

But the hate-reader or -watcher does so purely for performative spite and scorn and in anticipation of the approval of right-thinking comrades. This habit or hobby is widespread. Visit Goodreads sometime and you’ll see plenty of splenetic, fevered one-star reviews, sometimes with the same reviewers plowing through an entire series just to savage each and every book for misogyny, racism, homophobia, inadequate representation, cultural appropriation, fat-shaming, ableism, ageism, writing with too many adverbs—whatever sin the reviewer is particularly concerned with. I’ve had to repent of hate-reading myself in the specific case of Dan Brown, whose work I decided some years ago simply to pass by.

So hate-reading and -watching is annoying, but it’s not the irritant that’s on my mind—rather, it’s a related phenomenon that needs a name.

Browsing Goodreads reviews of the recent polemic Forget the Alamo, a predictably tendentious attack on the “heroic Anglo narrative” of the Texas Revolution, I came across this plum introduction to a five-star review:

When I started reading this book, I couldn't help but think of all the die hard Alamo fans who would foam at the mouth about it.

Here’s spite not at the authors of the book (and Forget the Alamo somehow took three people—all apparently Anglos, for those who care about that sort of thing—to write), but at imaginary political or ideological opponents, people so benighted that they have animalistic physical responses to things they disagree with. Not reading in spite but reading to spite. And in the last few years I’ve probably seen as much of this as I have pure, simpleminded hate-reading.

I’m not sure what to call this, and I’m also not sure if, in its pride and condescension and utter lack of charity, it’s not actually uglier than hate-reading.

Dalyrmple on exactitude and evasion

Writing at the British journal The Critic, Theodore Dalrymple has an interesting short meditation on the phrase “correctional facility.” Dalrymple is a psychologist and former prison doctor, and the recent execution of a particularly heinous murderer at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana provoked in him a question about the term itself:

The word correctional in this context is not without interest. Who, exactly, is being corrected by an execution? Unless you believe that the lessons learned in this world are carried over into the next, it surely cannot be the person executed. The whole of society, then? But in this case, the “Complex”, or that part of it devoted to executions, and also to the keeping of life-term prisoners, is a Deterrent rather than a Correctional facility. If you imprison someone for life, after all, you are not correcting him, whatever beneficial effect long-term incarceration and the passage of time may have on his character.

Dalrymple has a gift for aphorism, and the one that struck me later in this piece, which began with a meditation on euphemism, was the following broader observation:

“Inexactitude, the handmaiden of evasion, is commonplace.”

Not only commonplace, but epidemic.

Dalrymple notes two motives behind inexactitude of expression: euphemism and evasion. One of these may be unconscious, a flinching away from reality, or, if conscious, simply a matter of politeness, sentimentality, or misplaced delicacy—in all cases a concern for taste over truth.* The other is of necessity conscious. It is dishonesty.

Our epidemic of inexactitude most commonly serves as “the handmaiden of evasion” by concealing the truth behind fogbanks of semi-scientific jargon—especially the language of criticism, sociology, and pop psychology—that is both vague enough and capacious enough to cover anything you want it to. Big, important words, most especially the devil terms of denunciation without which activists would be robbed of speech, are used and misused interchangeably and more and more completely confused.** Vaguery means you can waffle, sidestep, hedge, dodge, fudge, and evade—that is, you can lie—about whatever and via whatever means are more convenient and for whatever purpose serves you in the moment. Jargon, as I implied above, is especially useful for this.

The danger is that sloppy thinking and sloppy expression are mutually reinforcing, especially when there are political points to be gained from euphemism and evasion.

Here’s George Orwell, in a passage I’ve quoted here before and that is more and more often on my mind: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

Perhaps most especially among those who know better.

You can read more of Orwell’s thoughts in his essay “Politics and the English Language” here. I’ve previously paired quotations from it with similar ideas in Chesterton here. And here are the same two writers in a more recent post on jargon, in which, prophetically, the topic of evasion comes up.

*E.g. talking about someone “passing away,” a phrase I now try to avoid. Death is real and I want to acknowledge that. The problem is even worse when someone is described as having “passed away” or even just “died” when they have, in fact, killed themselves. One does not want to be callous, and there is a place for courtesy, but there is also a categorical difference between dying by some process—accident, disease, old age—and killing yourself. Obscuring that difference by inexactitude, for whatever reason, is the kind of evasion we need less of.

**E.g. racism, bigotry, and prejudice mean strikingly different things but are used almost totally interchangeably.

Calvin and Hobbes on City of Man Podcast

Every once in a while my friend Coyle at The City of Man Podcast drops an episode we had recorded and archived so long ago that I had forgotten about it—which is a treat, because I get to listen to the discussion as a listener with no idea what we’re going to say. Well, today is one of those days, and this episode is a particular treat.

Coyle invited me and Joshua Herring on to talk about “Calvin and Hobbes,” Bill Watterson’s great comic strip that ran from 1985-95, which for me at least were some formative years. We talk about Calvin and Hobbes’s relationships to work, school, imagination, enchantment, the environment, whether or not it’s appropriate for kids (spoiler: we think so), and whether it’s possible to have any joy in your life if you don’t love Calvin and Hobbes (spoiler: we don’t think so). We also hit on a lot of other topics and favorite tidbits—the Transmogrifier, the wagon, macabre snowmen, Spaceman Spiff and Tremendous Man, Susie Derkins and Miss Wormwood, Watterson’s artwork itself, and many more—along the way.

This was a really fun and freewheeling discussion and I’ve enjoyed listening to it again almost for the first time.

You can listen to The City of Man by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s page 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 and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Writing updates

One of the things I started this blog to do was to provide updates on my writing, especially my books, and I’m glad to say I have a few things to bring y’all up to date on.

The Wanderer

My latest novel’s working title is The Wanderer. It’s set in 6th-century Britain and was inspired by movies like Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Miller’s Crossing, and Last Man Standing; as well as the work of writers I admire like Cormac McCarthy, particularly Blood Meridian; and, most important of all, what remains us of Anglo-Saxon literature—obviously things like Beowulf, but also shorter works like “Waldere,” “Deor,” “The Sea-Farer,” and, of course, “The Wanderer,” which inspired the whole book. I’ve joked that this novel is a Western, just not set in the West you usually think of. I’m pretty excited about this story.

I began the rough draft in June 2019 and finished it a few months later, in October. In the new year, 2020, I spent a few months reading through the rough draft and marking it up in red pen and highlighter, and that summer, during all the shutdowns and the travel my family did, I began making changes based on my first read-through and markup.

Those corrections moved very slowly—with mostly myself to blame—but I’m glad to say I completed those manuscript corrections earlier this week.

I’ve now got the manuscript in the hands of a few early readers who are going to give me feedback, upon which I’ll base my next round of rereading and revision. After that stage of revision, I’ll hand out a hopefully improved manuscript to a new round of readers and repeat. These stages are especially crucial, since, as the writer, you get into your own story up to the eyeballs and need people who aren’t privy to the inside of your mind to tell you if what you were doing worked and made sense—or not. The Wanderer is in many ways the most ambitious novel I’ve written, so I’m both hopeful and not a little anxious.

The goal is to get the book out soon, but also to get the book out in the best shape it can possibly be. While I don’t have a set-in-stone timeline, I am trying to step up my efforts now.

More to come, but like I said—I’m excited about this one.

Other stuff

My primary creative attention has been on The Wanderer for several years now, but I have been preparing a lot of other stuff, including whatever I’m going to write after I’ve finally finished (or simply prayed over and released) The Wanderer. These include some short stories and novellas and three or four novel-length projects (out of approximately twenty pretty detailed ideas I have in my notebooks) that I think are in enough of a state of preparedness to go ahead with soon. But the less said about those projects the better.

One I will mention is a project adjacent to The Wanderer but in a different medium, one that I hope to present to y’all in the future as an appetizer for the novel. Stay tuned!

The blog

After some incredibly fertile months on the blog this winter and spring I let it cool off a bit from the last week of June onward. This was precisely to devote the last mad burst of energy needed to get my first corrections on The Wanderer across the finish line. Now that I’ve accomplished that, I’ll be returning to the blog. I have several book reviews I’ve been meaning to write, and plenty of opinions I’ve been trying to work out in writing.

Again—stay tuned.

Happy Independence Day!

I hope y’all have all had a good Fourth of July week and a pleasant weekend. I return to work from vacation Monday but still have some traveling to do before the end of the summer, and I’m glad to say the last week has been great.

Thanks as always for reading!

Animaling verbs

There’s a well-known “Calvin & Hobbes” strip in which Calvin declaims on the joy of “verbing words.”

Calvin: I like to verb words

Hobbes: What?

Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when “access” was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed.

Calvin goes on to reflect that “verbing weirds language.”

But this is by no means original to Calvin; English words have been verbed from the beginning, and a post I wrote last week left me thinking in particular of the way the characteristic traits and foibles of animals have given us not just a zoo’s worth of adjectives (perhaps my favorite is mulish), but many verbs that are simply the names of the animals themselves.

Here are a few I thought of immediately, along with a grab bag of observations and reflections about the origins, use, and most especially the many fine shades of connotation and meaning of each.

cow

This is the one, which I used in my post last week about attempts to “cancel” specific lines of text in recent novels, that got me thinking about these words, and it’s probably the one I use most often.

Unlike some of these other verbs, the metaphor behind cow, the mental image I’m supposed to get from the word, isn’t particularly clear to me. Cowing someone suggests intimidation—a coercive, overbearing persuasion. Someone who has been cowed has fearfully, submissively given in. Beyond the fear that plays a role here, I’m not sure what this has to do with cows, which are generally unflappable unless spooked en masse. Where I grew up, when teenaged morons amused themselves by trying to frighten or chase cows, the animals usually just began a phlegmatic retreat that ended no farther away than it had to.

But in reading about this verb I learned that it’s possible cow, in this sense, came into English from the Old Norse kúga, a word meaning to force, tyrannize, or oppress. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that this word in turn developed from the standard Old Norse word for cow, kýr, the idea being that cows are “easily herded.” A tantalizing possibility, but I doubt we can know for sure. There’s clearly a lot of figurative work going on here.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting that this is yet another of the many English loanwords from Old Norse that—like knife, die, outlaw, ransack, berserk, and slaughter—has forceful and potentially violent implications.

badger

Badger as a verb is interesting because it vividly evokes a specific animal—an animal that doesn’t actually behave the way the verb would imply. This has to do with the idiom’s origin in early modern gambling and bloodsport. Badger-baiting, akin to cockfighting, bear-baiting, and dogfighting, involved putting a badger in a box or barrel and sending dogs in after it. Though “normally quite docile” and shy, badgers put up a ferocious defense when cornered, and apparently a single badger could last through multiple bouts with the dogs in a badger-baiting contest. These were timed events, with dogs going into the badger’s artificial den many times and the spectators wagering on the dogs’ speed and tenacity, and so badgering is actually what the dog does in this scenario—repeatedly attacking in an attempt to draw the prey out.

With the decline of badger-baiting as a sport this meaning apparently transferred to the badger itself, giving it an outsized reputation for ferocity. The word has also weakened in meaning, I think, as its normal use implies pestering, merely annoying harassment—but nothing lethal for either badger or dog.

ferret and squirrel

Both of these verbs usually take on a preposition (about which more below), often out or away, as in: The guard ferreted out the entrance to the tunnel or He squirreled away the snack for later. I pair these because while one implies searching and the other implies hoarding, both suggest a feverish, jittery quality. There’s a smallness to these images that suggests petty but hyper concern, the kind that can cause problems. Someone ferreting something out is searching too eagerly and minutely for anyone’s good; someone squirreling something away is fussy and anxious, or at least overcautious in preparing for the lean times.

Unlike the actual animal, ferret can take on sinister connotations. As the example I came up with above makes clear, I associate ferret very strongly with The Great Escape, in which the German guards at Stalag Luft III are called “ferrets” and do plenty of ferreting, with sometimes fatal results.

dog and hound

Dogs today are ersatz children and treated as such; there is no more repulsive set of slang terms to me than those built around dogs-as-kids: “fur babies,” “granddogs,” “dog mamas,” etc. These represent a nauseating and poisonous sentimentality.

Dog and hound as verbs, however—The bank is dogging him about his mortgage payment and My boss is hounding me about that expense report—are clearly hunting metaphors. Hound has been in use in this figurative sense for at least 400 years, and dog for at least 500. Both convey continuous, close, unwavering pursuit, with hound carrying a further connotation of nagging or harassment, possibly unjustified. There’s also a neat elaboration on these with the verb bird-dog, in which one pursues a target on behalf of someone else.

The closer we get to the world that first used these words in these senses the better.

wolf

Often with down, as in: He wolfed down his supper and fell asleep on the couch. Another canine metaphor, and I imagine a pretty ancient one, though the Online Etymology Dictionary only records its use in this sense from 1862. As sinister as wolves are in European tradition and folklore, it’s interesting to me that wolfing down one’s food suggests little more than a lack of manners rather than something potentially more wicked.

parrot and ape

Here’s a case study in subtle differences. Both of these are commonly used to mean “imitate” or “mimic,” but note the connotation of each. Parroting someone suggests a mindless, lockstep repetition, as in: He’s just parroting what everyone else is saying about the new Star Wars movie. But aping someone suggests clumsy or offputtingly crude imitation; it carries much more contempt than the other. (Compare monkey below.)

An effect of the uncanny valley, the creepiness of not-quite-human primates doing human things? Maybe, maybe not—but I think it’s an interesting subtlety.

monkey

If aping someone suggests a contemptible attempt at imitation, to monkey around or monkey with something suggests purely foolish, probably childish, and, in the worst case, aimless and destructive tinkering. What all three have in common is a deadly combination of ingenuity and lack of intelligence. Based on my handful of visits to the primate exhibits in zoos, this is apt.

rat

As the above entries make clear, I’m interested in the way some of these verbs take prepositions and others don’t. Rat can take a couple: you can rat on somebody, which is bad enough, but ratting them out is even worse—a total betrayal. Why rats, highly social animals that take good care of each other, should suggest this kind of disloyalty and dishonesty is unclear to me; I reckon it has more to do with rats’ ancient association with darkness, decay, and disease than anything about their behavior.

chicken out and pig out

If you’ve studied German at all you are familiar with the dreaded separable-prefix verb. This is a verb that has a base or root, which is always a recognizable verb, the meaning of which is changed by a preposition that is a prefix in the infinitive form but moves to the end of the sentence when used. These bedevil new students of the language not least because there’s not always a clear logic to which preposition results in which meaning. (Here’s a game effort at explaining some of them, though Mark Twain’s observations on the “rules” of German grammar should always be kept in mind.)

Something similar happens with certain idiomatic expressions in English, as the way we use the verbs chicken and pig shows. Why does one chicken out under pressure rather than chicken up or chicken around? My only guess is that it’s purely intuitive—it just feels right. And we’ve said it this way for so long that saying it any other way feels unnatural.

Regardless, with chicken out and pig out we have two barnyard animals acting on vices—cowardice and gluttony. And not just acting on them; these expressions hint at indulgence. One could be a chicken but still hang on when danger comes, thus proving oneself and building a little character, but to chicken out in the crisis is unforgivable. The sense of indulgence is especially clear with pig out, a verb no American who has ever been to Golden Corral needs to have explained.

hog

Unlike pig above, hog needs no preposition, just an object—one simply hogs something. This was a common complaint when and where I grew up, as in: Quit hogging the couch! or Clint is hogging the crayons! or Don’t hog all the pork rinds! Succinct and potentially vivid—especially if, like us, you accompanied your accusation with snorting—I think it’s been used so much it’s probably lost most of its original power.

buffalo

I began with the verbed animal that I most commonly invoke; here’s one I have less occasion for, but that always amuses me when I run across it. Journalist Kevin D Williamson is particularly fond of it, not only in writing, as here:

They’re hoping that conservatives can be buffaloed with a bit of cheap free-market rhetoric into not noticing that something is excruciatingly amiss here.

but in speech, as in various interviews and podcasts I’ve heard him on, as here:

[T]hey are fools and self-interested, and they know that people are easily scared and easily misled and easily buffaloed into doing whatever it is you want them to do, which is why they become politicians in the first place.

As it happens, these illustrate the two related but different things that may have happened to someone who has been buffaloed: either baffled, confused, or outright hoodwinked, or overawed and intimidated—a sense probably derived from the animal’s real-world effect. You’ll notice that there’s an overlap between these two senses both in definition and in the way they are used in the examples above.

But what I especially love about buffalo as a verb is the faint air of ridiculousness that hangs around it. To be buffaloed is not only unfortunate but preposterous, and I’m glad we have a word for precisely that occasion. We should get a lot of use out of it nowadays.

Conclusion

Merriam-Webster has a longer, more detailed “Words at Play” post on some of these here. I suspect there are plenty more—I can think of goose, beetle, bitch, fox and outfox, and horse (as in horsing around) offhand—especially in more recent or subcultural slang.

At any rate, English is fun, and I hope it stays that way. Try using one of these in writing or conversation this week—just don’t let all my grammatical mumbo jumbo cow you.

More notes on history and presentism

17th century portrait of Clio, muse of history

Today, via my Facebook memories, I revisited this line from the great Herbert Butterfield’s great study The Whig Interpretation of History:

[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.

A serendipitous quotation to run across, as yesterday I read this post from Alan Jacobs’s blog, an extract from the longer Substack essay “On Compassion” by philosopher Justin EH Smith. (The full essay is, unfortunately for me, paywalled.) Smith, as quoted by Jacobs:

History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It has long seemed to me that one of the more noble uses of history is to help us convince ourselves of the contingency of our present categories and practices. And it is for this reason, principally, that I am not satisfied with seeing history-of-philosophy curricula and conferences “diversified” as if seventeenth-century Europe were itself subject to our current DEI directives.

One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse—the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them. 

Compare with this from Niall Ferguson, whom I quoted here two years ago in another post against presentism (having begun that post with the same Butterfield quotation):

In my view, applied history, making history, as it were, useful, is all about trying to learn from the past, to understand the experience of the dead, and see how it can illuminate our own predicament. The exact opposite approach is to say “Let’s take our norms and let’s export them to the past and wander around the early seventeenth century going ‘Tut-tut, wicked white supremacists’ at all the people we encounter.” But that’s become the mode in history departments all over this country to the point that they are deeply dull places that don’t in fact illuminate the past, they just import an anachronistic set of values and rather arrogantly condescend to the past.

(Side note: I’m struck that both Smith and Ferguson, in dramatically different contexts, used the seventeenth century as examples.)

All of this falls under the concept, which I borrowed from Chesterton, of “the inside of history”—a concern never far from my mind. (So maybe the above coincidence wasn’t so serendipitous after all.) I’ve written about getting at the inside of history, the charitable attempt to understand our dead forebears from the inside out, in more detail here.

What can we get out of history when we try to do it this way? A final line from Smith:

[A] thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences.

Bloody big ship

Bond looking at JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012)

One of the underappreciated aspects of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels is their elegiac tone—a rich vein of reflection and melancholy, a sense of the passing of things, that runs through all of them but thickens considerably in the final few.

Consider this seemingly minor passage from the tenth full-length novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I just finished for the second time this morning. The scene is not M’s office at the beginning of the story but M’s private home on Christmas day:

They had coffee in M.’s study and smoked the thin black cheroots of which M. allowed himself two a day. Bond burnt his tongue on his. M. continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.

The comfortable personal setting, the father-son, veteran-rookie dynamic, the Christmas at a Regency manor house—this is a world rooted strongly in the past, a vanishing world. The note of mourning in the final sentence is palpable.

And this is in a novel that begins with Bond seriously considering—and not for the first time—resignation and retirement and, most famously, ends with his half-day marriage to Tracy, who, after a drive-by shooting on the final page of the book, lies dead in his arms. In the penultimate paragraph Bond, concussed and in shock, says to a young German patrolman who has stopped to help:

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see—’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair—‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’

This note of elegy, of ubi sunt, is perhaps the most English thing about Bond, and is both personal and professional. As Jeremy Black outlines in his book The Politics of James Bond, Bond’s experience as a veteran of World War II, of the British Empire at the height of its powers fighting its coldest, most dastardly, and most obvious enemy, colors all of his subsequent adventures—that is, makes them look gray and tedious by comparison. Throughout, as the Empire declines in both geographic terms and reputation, Bond and others speculate grimly about what will happen to both Britain and her colonies as they come unmoored from one another, and many, many of Bond’s nemeses go out of their way to mock the diminution and meaninglessness of the Empire. For Bond, whose worth is bound up in his work in defense of Her Majesty’s realm, this decline is also his own, and he spends at least half the series nearly buckling under the weight of his job, struggling to find a purpose in it, deciding to quit and then finding himself unable to shirk his duty. The Royal Navy proves a profoundly meaningful symbol for all of this. Recall that Bond is officially Commander James Bond.

The movies mostly lose this sense of passing. It’s there a bit in the film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the faithful adaptation of the book’s downer ending doesn’t mesh well with the more carefree earlier portions, which lack the reflective tone of passages like the one in M’s study above. There’s a bit more in GoldenEye, in which Bond has to adjust to the post-Cold War world, and Daniel Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale captures a great deal of that novel’s sense of tragedy and loss at the end.

But so far the only film to fully mine that vein is Skyfall, which not only establishes and maintains a Fleming-esque tone of the long defeat from beginning to end but also makes the passing of things the overt subject of one of its quietest but greatest scenes.

Sitting in the National Gallery before JMW Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire, Bond has this exchange with Q:

Q: Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. [sighs] The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Perfect. And in keeping with Fleming’s Bond, the dismissive quip is a tell. It’s Bond reorienting, shaking off a melancholy he can do nothing about but put his nose back to the grindstone and work.

I don’t know whether No Time to Die, which concludes Craig’s run as Bond, will bring more of this to the fore—it’s certainly a good opportunity to do so—but I hope it will. Fleming’s Bond has always been a more fully rounded, complete and realistic man than even the best film versions (and I am a fan of the films), and I think a lot of that is down not only to grit of the stories, but to the melancholy that grows in him and that he wrestles with over those fourteen original novels—a sense of the loss of the good things to which one has dedicated one’s life, and the sense of the unknown approaching out of the murk.

Lewis and Orwell on bad words

Or, that is, words for things we want to label as bad.

George Orwell, under the heading “Meaningless words” in his essay, written in 1945 but published in Horizon in 1946, “Politics and the English Language”:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

CS Lewis in his 1944 Spectator essay “The Death of Words”:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

Let the reader understand.

Some years ago I wrote in more detail about carelessness with language and thinking, with reference to Orwell and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.