Men of Terror

Imagining what it was like—Angus McBride’s depiction of Olaf Tryggvason’s final moments at the Battle of Svolder

Old friends or longtime readers of this blog will know that one of the most important questions I bring to my historical study, and the question that bridges the gap between my academic work and my love for writing fiction, is What was it like? Instinctual and unarticulated, this question drove my earliest interests in history, and my formal study always ran parallel to my imagining being there. Then I read John Keegan and, later, Victor Davis Hanson, and their work gave substance and form to those instincts, allowing me to shape my work, from my graduate thesis onward, deliberately to pursue answers to What was it like? in addition to everything else of big-picture importance in historical research.

William R Short and Reynir A Óskarson’s Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat fits snugly into that important interest of mine, pursuing the same question—or set of questions—with regard to warfare in the Viking Age.

I say set of questions because Short and Óksarson don’t stop with imaginative you-are-there reconstructions or interpretations, but collect as much empirical, scientific data as possible on as wide an array of topics as possible in their research into Viking combat. This includes not only collecting archaeological evidence about, say, the build and strength of Viking Age people, but also mining the literary sources, most especially the Sagas of Icelanders but others where necessary, for information on what kinds of weapons and gear were used, and how.

So, for example, based on the numerous violent incidents described in the sagas, Short and Óskarson are able to show that Viking swords were used for slashing or cutting an overwhelming majority of the time and only rarely for thrusting. Furthermore, these data correlate with the design of the thousands of surviving Viking Age swords, which almost always have cutting edges on both sides—some of which, they note, are still sharp a thousand years later—but less tapered, more spoon-shaped points that would be less suitable for stabbing. Here the archaeology and literature back each other up.

Short and Óskarson are also, however, alive to the limits of the available sources and data, and are rightly cautious in their conclusions. They frequently invoke what they call “the coin-toss problem.” Imagine flipping a quarter three times and attempting to derive reliable statistical conclusions about the results of coin tosses from those three examples. While the vast number of surviving swords make conclusions based on attacks described in literary sources more reliable, in many other areas their conclusions have to be much less certain. There is, for instance, exactly one surviving example of a Viking Age helmet, making extrapolation and sweeping conclusions about the design, use, and commonness of helmets unwise. Here one must look more closely at descriptions of helmets in literary sources—all the while keeping in mind that many of these post-date the Viking Age by centuries.

This is a delicate balancing act, but Short and Óskarson are admirably judicious in their use of all available sources and refuse to draw unwarranted conclusions. I have to say that this was enormously refreshing, especially when it comes to contentious topics like Hollywood’s favorite Viking, the “shield-maiden.”

But their willingness to embrace the difficult work of squaring what we know from often fragmentary archeological knowledge with the literary sources and all their potential flaws is not the only strength of Short and Óskarson’s book. They also bring a great deal of practical, empirical knowledge to their analysis. Through research conducted through Short’s “experimental archaeology” group Hurstwic, the authors tested their conclusions using reconstructed Viking Age weapons, armor, and clothing. This includes measuring the force of sword blows using scientific instruments, the cutting power of various Viking weapons using animal carcasses, and even much simpler experiments. The sagas recount great heroes swimming fully armed and armored. Is this possible? Short and his collaborators found out by suiting some swimmers up and dumping them in the water. Inexperienced swimmers sank almost immediately, but some Scandinavian participants accustomed to cold water swims carried on just fine. Fascinating, even exciting stuff.

After early chapters on sources, methodology, and their attempt to understand the Vikings from the inside out (about which more below), Men of Terror settles into a series of chapters exploring specific topics—the numerous kinds of weapons used throughout the Viking Age as well as armor, shields, dueling, raiding, naval combat, mass infantry battle, and grappling or “empty-hand” combat. Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with pictures of surviving archeological examples, drawings or reconstructions based on research, maps and photos of actual locations of fights and ambushes in Iceland, pictures of Hurstwic experiments and reenactments, and charts laying out all kinds of data—average blade length of surviving swords, the causes and results of duels in the sagas, the relative lethality of attacks with different kinds of weapons, and more.

These weapon by weapon and tactical chapters, with their mix of literary and archaeological research as well as real-world experiment, make up the bulk of the book. But one early chapter is perhaps the most valuable and sets the tone for all the rest: Short and Óskarson’s chapter on “the Viking mindset.”

This, too, is speaking my language. I’ve invoked Chesterton’s vision of “the inside of history” here time and time again. Short and Óskarson drive straight at this, seeking to understand the warriors of the Viking Age on their own terms rather than importing the ideals of the present day to the past. I use the phrase their own terms deliberately: Short and Óskarson work through some key Old Norse vocabulary—most especially drengskapr, manliness, and orðstirr, word-glory or fame—to establish why Vikings did what they did. They follow this up throughout the book by staying on guard for the intrusion of their own modern mindsets, always aware that what strikes them as most “efficient” or “likely” may never have occurred to a man of the Viking Age. This is a selfless, genuinely openminded approach to understanding a long-departed culture, and it’s one of the things that makes Men of Terror especially good.

I could go on much longer, but hopefully this has given you a taste for this excellent book. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in the Viking Age or medieval military history at all.

More if you’re interested

I discovered Short and his organization Hurstwic through Jackson Crawford, who has interviewed Short on his YouTube channel. These interviews are excellent resources in and of themselves. Here are Part I and Part II. If this “mindset” or “inside of history” approach resonates with you and you have an interest in the Viking Age, especially the literature thereof, let me also recommend Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die, which I read this summer.

Eaters of the Dead

“When Eaters of the Dead was first published, this playful version of Beowulf received a rather irritable reception from reviewers . . . But Beowulf scholars all seem to enjoy it, and many have written to say so.”

— Michael Crichton, "A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead," 1992

I first read Eaters of the Dead in high school and didn’t know what to do with it. I sought it out primarily because it had a famous name attached to it and because many of my friends were gaga for its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. (I hadn’t yet taken my plunge into early medieval northern Europe, a plunge I still haven’t come up from.) I got ahold of a copy with the movie tie-in cover and alternate title somewhere and started to read it.

My reaction, per Crichton’s later comments above, wasn’t so much irritable as bewildered—and slightly disturbed. What was this? A novel? A translation of a medieval manuscript? Are all these footnoted manuscripts real? Is any of it real? It couldn’t be real—I knew enough of the story already to know that—but if not then what was this thing?

Bewilderment

What’s funny is that, at the time I was reading Eaters of the Dead, I was doing much the same thing as Crichton. I just didn’t have it published. Besotted with half-formed pictures of the Middle Ages, my recent discovery of the riches of Dante, and certain artistic preoccupations that haven’t gone away (snow; almost all my books have snow in them), I was spending my free time hammering out line after line of an epic poem about the Teutonic Knights, a brutal war, and forbidden romance made the sweeter by vows faithfully kept—and liberally peppering the manuscript with footnotes, dates, alternate translations of contested terms, and excerpts of related text from other poets and chroniclers. I had discovered the fun part of scholarship, the digging and puzzle-piecing.

I finished high school and went on to college and Eaters of the Dead mostly receded from my mind. But some part of it, the part that had unconsciously jibed with my artistic and intellectual sensibilities, stayed on. While I had been confused and unimpressed with the book at first, I never hated or disdained it—a sure sign that there was something there I had missed.

Then 2020 happened, and to pass part of last summer teaching remotely and sheltering in place with family, I revisited it. Wow.

The story

Eaters of the Dead purports to be a translation of a text by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a real 10th century Arab courtier and diplomatic envoy. On a journey north (up the eastern side of the Caspian Sea to modern-day Russia) on behalf of the caliph in 922, Ibn Fadlan encounters a wild pagan people called the Rus or the Northmen. While staying with them he observes their customs, witnesses a chieftain’s funeral involving brutal human sacrifice, and is present for an emergency meeting following the arrival of a high-status messenger from the north.

The messenger is Wulfgar, son of King Rothgar, and he seeks the help of the local chieftain Buliwyf in dealing with a literally nameless threat. Ibn Fadlan observes the usually cheerful Northmen’s distress and foreboding and asks for an explanation, but his translators offer little and he senses it would be unwise to inquire much further. All he learns is that, in accordance with the decree of the Angel of Death, an elderly female shaman who had assisted in the sacrifice of a slave girl at the earlier funeral, he must go with Buliwyf and his warriors on their journey as a thirteenth, and foreign, member of the party.

Ibn Fadlan therefore unwillingly joins the Northmen on their long, circuitous trip northward by river. They portage between rivers, avoiding nameless threats in certain forests and riding as swiftly as possible through others, until they reach the Baltic and sail to Denmark. Finding Buliwyf’s home destroyed—again, by a threat the Northmen refuse to name or explain except to say that it comes with “the mists”—they journey on to Rothgar’s kingdom.

Everywhere in this kingdom there are signs of violent, grisly attack, and the only clues left behind by the attackers are grotesque figurines of uncertain meaning. Ibn Fadlan’s dread only grows.

Buliwyf and his men, including Ibn Fadlan, defend Rothgar’s hall against repeated attacks by a host of bearskin-clad savages that, Ibn Fadlan finally learns, are known as the wendol or “the mist monsters.” Short, ugly, stinking horribly, but powerfully built and apparently fearless, the wendol attack en masse, kill indiscriminately, and take the heads of their victims, never leaving any dead or wounded behind—until Buliwyf takes the arm of one of their number. The fighting is ugly and the losses heavy, and Ibn Fadlan is sorely tested. He also grows to admire the Northmen and forms friendships with them, especially Herger, who interprets for Ibn Fadlan until the Arab can speak the language well enough to be understood. Ibn Fadlan also learns to drink and wench—a lot.

After a nighttime wendol attack in which the monsters assault the hall on horseback while carrying torches—an attack dubbed by the Northmen “the glowworm dragon Korgon”—Buliwyf and his band ride out in search of the wendol homeland across “the desert of dread,” visit a colony of dwarves living on the fringes of Northman society, and finally infiltrate the central wendol stronghold, where Buliwyf slays “the mother of the wendol” and is in turn mortally wounded by her. He holds out long enough to repulse a final, desperate wendol attack before he himself dies, and Ibn Fadlan witnesses a second, more moving funeral. The text ends abruptly as Ibn Fadlan journeys home.

The rest of the story

So much for the plot. If you’re just reading Eaters of the Dead for the story, you should finish it satisfied—it’s a real rip-snorting adventure tale, a classic quest full of exotic locales, strange customs, plenty of action, and a splash of horror.

But don’t some elements of that story sound familiar?

The movie tie-in edition I read in high school

It’s Beowulf. Crichton, as he writes in “A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead” included in some editions of the book, wrote Eaters of the Dead on a dare, as a demonstration that, viewed with fresh eyes or from a new angle, the “bores” of English literature survey classes are still exciting, dramatic, and meaningful.

To do so, Crichton took an actual text about a real journey by the real Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, deftly interwove elements of fiction into the early parts, and from the first funeral scene forward constructed an entirely new, fictitious story for the cosmopolitan Arab narrator. This story positions Ibn Fadlan as the foreign observer in a party of warriors led by a brave and charismatic nobleman responding to a crisis in a faraway kingdom beset by bloodthirsty attackers. Later, our reading of Ibn Fadlan implies, these events would become the story of Beowulf saving Hrothgar and his people from the depredations of Grendel.

All of this makes Eaters of the Dead, in addition to an adventure story:

• a euhemeristic take on Beowulf, a “real” version of what happened “before” the development of the mythic one that has come down to us in the poem;

• a parallel story, one retelling familiar events from a different perspective; and

• a fictional book, a version of Ibn Fadlan that, according to the story, Crichton and previous scholars cobbled together from multiple fragmentary manuscripts in several languages.

There are plenty of other examples of all of these things, but what I notice about many others is their often po-faced ideological didacticism. Witness the recent rash of deconstructive parallel novels about “marginalized voices” (i.e. minor characters) in famous stories. What sets Eaters of the Dead apart from so many of these is how much fun it is. Not only is it, again, a rip-snorting adventure, but it’s a fun send-up of scholarship, containing as it does an introduction, information on the provenance of Ibn Fadlan manuscripts, parodically pedantic footnotes (some of them much longer than the passages they seek to illuminate), explanations of variant readings, a bibliography, and an appendix on the “predictable debate” surrounding the wendol.

Jazzing around

Crichton is—as John Gardner, author of another parallel novel about Beowulf, put it in one of his books on writing—“jazzing around.” And it’s a hoot.

It’s even more of a hoot if you know the period or something about history and anthropology generally. Crichton tucks away lots of “Easter eggs” as bonuses for those in the know to enjoy. He has Buliwyf’s party visit the ring fortress of Trelleborg, which Ibn Fadlan describes in unmistakable detail, and of course the wendol are relict headhunting Neanderthals who worship bears and shamanic fertility goddesses, as evidenced by the instantly recognizable figurines they leave behind.

This is an anachronism stew—whatever historical events lie behind Beowulf probably occurred in the 6th century and Trelleborg wasn’t built until at least sixty years after Ibn Fadlan’s real journey, and that’s not even to address the survival of Neanderthals—and Crichton admits as much in his “Factual Note.” What makes all of these things fun is the little thrill of recognition you get when they come along, a bit of authorial irony that stays fun by never coming at the characters’ expense. Crichton knows and enjoys this stuff and wants us to play along.

Again—jazzing around.

What was most remarkable to me about Eaters of the Dead, as I reread it last year and listened to the audiobook this week, is how many levels it works on. It’s a satisfying historical action adventure. It’s a genuinely creepy horror story, with a carefully structured buildup and wonderful atmosphere and tension. It’s an engaging, vividly imagined, and just-barely-realistic-enough science-fiction story—the kind of book Crichton would become famous for—pitting Vikings against prehistoric headhunters. It’s a fun—and sometimes hilarious—pastiche of modern scholarship. And it is, in the end, a great celebration of Beowulf, definitive proof of Crichton’s assertion that great literature isn’t boring.

It took me twenty years to grow into, to see what Crichton was doing and to enjoy it, but I’m thankful that I did. Check out Eaters of the Dead sometime soon and see what level it works on for you.

More if you’re interested

There is, of course, the film adaptation, The 13th Warrior, which I haven’t watched since high school and can’t really comment on except to say that it has one of the best cinematic attempts to tackle the language barrier I’ve seen. I intend to rewatch it soon.

You can read the real Ibn Fadlan’s account of his travels among the Rus in a recent translation for Penguin Classics, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. Jackson Crawford has an excellent short video on the “Viking funeral” witnessed by Ibn Fadlan, described in his writings, and dramatized in both Eaters of the Dead and its film adaptation, The 13th Warrior. You can watch that here.

I reread Eaters of the Dead for the first time since high school last year. As I mentioned above, I just revisited it again in the form of Simon Vance’s excellent audiobook performance. Vance narrates Ibn Fadlan with a slight accent, which actually sounds more Indian than Arab but that helps differentiate Ibn Fadlan’s narration from the footnotes. I didn’t know how well this work work going into it, but I greatly enjoyed it.

Likelihood: an addendum

Yesterday I started reading David Horspool’s entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Cromwell: The Protector. So far it’s excellent. Considering my recent meditation here about “likelihood” and imagination in historical interpretation and writing, I found this aside (emphasis mine below) particularly striking:

Cromwell’s early biographers, permanently on the lookout for signs of future greatness, seized on the story of a childhood encounter between the young Oliver and the future Charles I, James’s son, on one of these royal visits to Hinchingbrooke. Naturally, the toddler-prince and his slightly older nemesis are meant to have fought at this play-date pregnant with historical significance, and Oliver is meant to have won. If the tale is too good to be true (which is no argument against its being true), then it is still a reminder that, as a guest in his uncle’s house, the young Oliver is likely to have been in the presence of royalty. Despite the gulf in upbringing and expectation that separated Prince Charles and Oliver Cromwell, they did not occupy entirely different worlds.

This is an eminently sensible approach.

I don’t know if it’s the postmodern or literary turn of historical interpretation, deconstructionism, or the generalized hermeneutic of suspicion pervading everything today, but the common assumption about textual evidence seems to be that if a source draws a didactic lesson from an incident, or if an incident conforms to a literary pattern, or has parallels to a commonly known story from the time the source was written down, the incident can and must be treated as invented.

I think that approach is wrong, not only for the reasons of enjoyability and interest—or pure oddity and surprise—that I’ve already written about, but for implicit human reasons: this is not how we experience our own lives. We constantly tell others about odd or surprising things that have happened to us, and we very often enlist shared stories for comparison’s sake. (There was a time in my life when everything that happened to a friend and I was fitted into an incident from “The Office.”) And of course we revisit our memories—finding foreshadowing after the fact in light of later events or drawing lessons from the things that have happened since—all the time. Identifying every instance of these natural human traits as fiction or lies not only betrays and demeans our ancestors, it leaves us with very little to work with.

But then again, based on the way history is used and abused these days, that’s probably the point.

Sticks and stones... so to speak

Speaking of odd and colorful stories that you wouldn’t be able to make up—or that might strike you as unlikely—here’s an, er, oddball anecdote from the memoirs of Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End, which I read earlier this week.

Heinz Linge was Adolf Hitler’s valet or body servant for ten years. He interacted with Hitler daily, often being the first to see him in the morning, and accompanied him everywhere (in an introduction, historian Roger Moorhouse notes that millions of people probably recognize Linge’s face without even knowing it, so often is he standing just behind Hitler in photographs). He was also the first man into Hitler’s chambers in the Führerbunker following Hitler’s suicide, and the man who personally lit the fire to cremate Adolf and Eva Hitler’s bodies.

The point is that Linge was really, really close to Hitler, in the way of personal servants. When he was captured by the Russians during the attempted breakout from Berlin, his proximity to Hitler made him a person of intense interest. Which leads to this unexpected item:

In Russian captivity under interrogation I was often asked if I had seen Hitler’s genitals, and if so had they been normal. I had no idea why the Russians wanted to know this, but I told them what I knew. Naturally I had not seen Hitler fully naked even once. When the Russians interrogators [sic] alleged that Hitler ‘had only had one ball’ I had to laugh, and for doing so they gave me a whipping.

Anyone who was once a fourth-grade boy with an interest in history and a healthy appreciation of potty jokes will recognize here a joke that, for Linge, has gone horribly wrong. Stalin and the Soviets really had no sense of humor.

Again—you couldn’t make this stuff up.

I conclude with a hilarious Armstrong and Miller sketch on this very topic that, like so much of their stuff, brings together formal perfection with lowbrow humor in a way that hits my comedy sweetspot.

Make history interesting again

St Dunstan tweaks the devil’s nose with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs

Here’s something I’ve been chewing on for a while—a seemingly minor irritation that has a lot of real significance.

My point will require some context. The following comes from a book I recently read that has otherwise excellent standards of research, interpretation, and writing. I don’t want my thoughts to be a knock on the author, whose books I’ve both enjoyed and learned from, so I omit the title and the author’s name here. The passage below is the author’s paraphrase of a story in the medieval Vita S. Dunstani or Life of St Dunstan, a saint’s life ascribed to the otherwise nameless scribe “B.” The story concerns the relationship between Dunstan, a Benedictine monk, abbot, and royal adviser and Edmund, the newly ascended teenaged King of the English:

When [King] Æthelstan died in October 939, the crown passed to . . . Edmund, who was eighteen years old. The dowager queen, who was probably around forty, returned triumphantly to court, where she appears to have played a dominant role. It seems fairly certain that she was behind the decision to summon Dunstan to her side, intending that he should become one of her son’s principal advisers.

Edmund, alas, did not share his mother’s high estimation of his new monastic counsellor, and nor did his aristocratic companions. Some of the king’s thegns, says the Life of St Dunstan, admired the saint for his way of life, but many of them soon came to detest him, and eventually Edmund himself lost his temper. One day, when the royal household was at Cheddar, about twelve miles north of Glastonbury, the teenage king exploded in rage, and ordered Dunstan into exile. Distressed at this development, the holy man sought the protection of some foreign visitors who happened to be at court, and made ready to leave the kingdom.

Happily, God soon intervened to redress the situation. Cheddar, which lies on the edge of the Mendip Hills, was a royal hunting lodge, and, a day or so after banishing Dunstan, Edmund and his men rode out to amuse themselves in the surrounding forests. When they came across a group of stags they chased them in different directions, the king charging off in pursuit of one particular animal, accompanied only by his braying pack of hounds. Caught up in the thrill of the chase, he was oblivious to a hidden hazard, described in the Life of St Dunstan as a cleft in the hill that ‘drops to an astonishing depth’. This must have been the famous Cheddar Gorge, where the ground does indeed fall away vertically for over 400 feet. The frightened stag ran headlong into his ravine, plummeting to its death, as did the excited dogs running close behind it. Edmund, suddenly realizing the danger, tried to restrain his horse, but it stubbornly refused to slow. In what seemed to be his last few seconds, the king recalled his treatment of Dunstan, and vowed to make amends if his life was spared. ‘At these words,’ says the saint’s biographer, ‘the horse stopped on the very brink of the precipice, when its front feet were just about to plunge into the depths of the abyss’.

Having recapped and glossed B’s short version of the story from the Vita (you can read B’s entire account of the events above here), our author offers some commentary:

It is a good story, not least because it gives us an early glimpse of an English king engaged in a favorite royal pastime. Naturally, we do not have to believe that it is true in every respect, or that it reveals ‘some secret plan of God’s’ as Dunstan’s biographer insists was the case.

Fair enough, but does it really need to be said that we don’t have to accept every particular detail of a source’s story? There’s also a faintly dismissive, condescending tone here that rubs the wrong way. Some English historians never really get away from the baleful influence of Gibbon.

But here’s where we get to the specific subject of this post. Emphasis mine in the passage below:

A more likely explanation for Edmund’s change of heart would be an intervention on the part of his mother, or by another of Dunstan’s supporters at court: it is shortly after this episode that we learn the saint had an older brother, Wulfric, who witnesses royal charters as a king’s thegn. The essential point is that, whatever influences were brought to bear on him, divine or otherwise, the young king recalled Dunstan and proposed a new way of resolving their differences.

My concern is the “more likely” and what follows. Two things I’ve been mulling since first reading this (again, otherwise excellent) book during the summer:

First, to invert the perspective in that paragraph, what precisely is unlikely about this story? Teenaged boys, especially those with a degree of privilege and power and not a lot of experience using the two responsibly, are not known for their piety or patience, and they are known for irresponsibility, disrespect toward spiritual authorities, reckless behavior, inattention to danger, wild emotional highs and lows, and sudden and highly public religious experiences. In other words, for sudden changes of heart.* What happened to Edmund during his hunt makes plenty of sense—why bother searching for a “more likely” explanation?

Second, why bother searching for a “more likely” explanation that is so… boring? As I hope is clear, this backroom wheeling-and-dealing explanation is no more likely than the one B gives us, so what we’re looking at is not a matter of likelihood but of preference.

A certain kind of historian develops a kneejerk skepticism toward anything colorful—that is, anything human and interesting—they come across in their sources, especially if that color plays a role in causal explanations for events. That backroom string-pulling and calling in favors sounds “more likely” to the author than the fearful repentance of a teenaged boy in danger says more about the author and his or her ability to imagine other minds than it does about the likelihood of B’s story.**

Likelihood is in the eye of the beholder.*** So work hard to broaden your subjective sense of what is likely the same way a novelist works to develop his ear for dialogue. Otherwise, it would be wise not to argue over a story’s likelihood and reflexively second guess sources unless:

1. contradictory evidence demands it, and/or

2. one exercises one’s imagination outside the faculty lounge a little more often.

Footnotes:

*I had a friend in high school who destroyed his collection of rap CDs as penance after losing a big basketball game.

**See also: People who prefer the “realism” of Game of Thrones, which is really just a bland, incessant, enervating cynicism, to The Lord of the Rings.

***I wrote about likelihood as a matter of people’s subjective judgments of “realism” earlier this year.

Norm Macdonald on subversion, suffering, and art

Comedian Norm Macdonald died of cancer earlier this week aged 61. Yesterday I came across this long, wide-ranging, and surprisingly poignant interview with him by a writer at Vulture in 2018. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a couple insightful moments on matters I care a lot about.

Art and subversion

From a discussion of Bob Dylan, who began to “say things” with his music rather than simply sing love songs, Macdonald and the interviewer move into a discussion of satire, parody, and political messaging in comedy:

Macdonald: Comedy has a specific thing about it. I don’t really like satire. I think it’s very minor; I think parody is very major comedy. Like, Nabokov to me is the highest form of parody. But that stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about—I read that. It sucked.

Vulture: Gulliver’s Travels?

Macdonald: Yeah, it’s horrible. So I don’t like satire that much, and also these guys [contemporary talk-show hosts] are nightclub comics. They’re not Bob Dylan. They’re just guys, and they get talk shows and suddenly they’re telling me how I shouldn’t be sad because of the Manchester bombing and I can escape the horrors of life because they’re going to interview someone from Two Broke Girls or whatever the fuck they do. When I was a kid, if I’d heard Red Skelton talking about the government I would’ve thought, This is fucking weird. To me, it hurts the comedy any time anything real creeps into it. I know people have different thoughts. I keep hearing how great Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and Mort Sahl are. People have their own taste, but to me, all three of those people are just shit. They’re not comedians in my mind.

There’s a digression about a particular stand-up comic—including Macdonald, true to form, making a phone call in the middle of the interview—before they return to the idea of artists trying to get a message out:

Vulture: I guess my larger question is if you think this shift in the kind of attention paid to comedy, and the work that’s held up as a result, is a bad turn for comedy as a whole or if you just think this is not for me?

Macdonald: It’s hard for me to say . . . but anybody that tells me that stand-up is no good—I take that personally because I’m a stand-up. But I understand these people are trying to be heard and, you know, I was guilty of having that stupid idea that Drew Michael already did. I probably wouldn’t have done it anyway.

Vulture: Why not?

“Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first.”

— Norm Macdonald

Macdonald: Because stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it—the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.

Vulture: And you see the kind of subversion we’re talking about as a form of intellectual grandstanding?

Macdonald: Certainly. And for stand-up, a lot of it is bragging.

Too much art today tries to subvert its own form without first mastering it, and thereby earning the right to poke at the form. You could say such an artist is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on, but that cliché assumes there’s already a tree there. These artists are sawing off limbs that were never growing from trees. Per Macdonald, a great deal of this trend is down to political messaging and intellectual pretension.

(The classic example of subversion done right is Picasso, who could actually paint but made conscious artistic decisions to depart from more realistic representational traditions. Also: Monty Python, who as a group knew the Arthurian legend backwards and forwards when they set out to spoof it.)

Art and self-revelation

I mentioned that the interview is poignant, because Macdonald mentions cancer as the kind of suffering that self-consciously self-revelatory, soul-baring comedians and performers think makes them authentic. “They seem to think they’re singular in their story when their story is the most common story that could possibly be, which is suffering and pain.” Simply feeling pain and talking about it is not art, Macdonald suggests. Art requires more.

Questioned on this by the interviewer, who notes Macdonald’s admiration for Canadian writer Alice Munro, Macdonald replies: “But Alice Munro doesn’t wallow in self-pity.” An important difference. “Munro finds beauty in what she writes, and that’s what every artist does because life sucks, you know?”

And then the other passage of Macdonald’s comments that I really appreciated:

“I guess there came a time . . . when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.”

— Norm Macdonald

I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art. And I still believe that, because comedy is a vulgar art; it’s an art that’s just beginning to take form because it’s so young. But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up. It’s the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people aren’t interested in comedy. They’re interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform. That’s not to say that comedy can’t make a greater point, because it can. But it can’t make a greater point by screeching to a stop in the middle of the comedy show, making a point, and then going back to the jokes. You’ve got to craft the point into the joke. I always bristle when people say, “The comedian is the modern-day philosopher.” There are modern-day philosophers.

And, again, Macdonald is making these comments while suffering from cancer.

That’s a real authenticity that places Macdonald in the company of Chadwick Boseman, whose untimely death from colon cancer last year came as a shock. For Macdonald and Boseman, their personal suffering—much less their political views—wasn’t the stuff of art, and they wanted what they presented to their public to be the best they could make it. An admirable and selfless devotion to craft.

Deathbed confessions

I’ll conclude with the excerpt—little more than a quip—that brought the interview to my attention yesterday when Alan Jacobs shared it on his blog:

Vulture: I can imagine being on my deathbed and thinking, Why did I waste so many meals on yogurt?

Macdonald: Absolutely. You know, I think about my deathbed a lot.

Vulture: What do you think about it?

Macdonald: I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.

Norm Macdonald, RIP.

Summer reading 2021

Paramilitary infantry of the Freikorps gather around an armored car in Berlin, 1919

This was a great summer for reading. I got through 37 books before my more or less arbitrary cutoff date of Labor Day, including a lot of very good history, and almost all of the 37 were worthwhile. Here are my favorites, sorted broadly into non-fiction (all of which are history this time around), fiction, and some old favorites I revisited.

Favorite non-fiction

My ten favorite books of history from this summer, presented in no particular order:

The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell—An interesting short look at the tension between two different philosophies of technology, warfare, and bombing during World War II—and the horrible consequences of the debate—told in the distinctive Gladwell style. A good, brisk introduction to these topics for newcomers. I read it in two days and reviewed it in much more detail here.

Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England, by Michael Livingston—In the Venn diagram of famous battles and consequential battles, Brununburh falls in the consequential circle but far, far outside the overlap. Fought in 937 between the army of King Æthelstan of England and a coalition army of Vikings from Dublin, Scots, and the Britons of Strathclyde, Brunanburh was a resounding Anglo-Saxon victory and helped preserve Athelstan’s united kingdom, a fact celebrated in a short alliterative poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later remembered in chronicle and saga. (The battle plays a large role in the story of Egill Skallagrímsson, for instance.) But despite this, and because of the trickiness of interpreting those sources, we don’t know nearly as much about the battle as we’d like, with even the location being in dispute for a long time. In Never Greater Slaughter, Livingston, a professor of history at the Citadel, makes a compelling case not only for a specific location for where the battle took place, but for a lot of other disputed or uncertain aspects of the battle. His judicious use of an enormous variety of evidence, his care not to push too hard on tenuous or speculative evidence, his thorough investigation of the ground of the likeliest candidate for the battlefield, and his clear and vigorous writing make this not only an excellent narrative of an important battle, but a good case study in how to do this kind of difficult history.

Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Frontier, 1944-45, by Prit Buttar—Research for a future project. A long and well-researched narrative history of the battles for East Prussia and Pomerania, German territories brutally conquered by the Soviets, at the end of World War II. This is one of the handful of times and places in history, in my opinion, where people experienced literal hell on earth. A grim and brutal story but one Buttar presents well here, with many telling quotations from the memoirs of participants and survivors on both sides. If I have any criticism, it is of the inadequacy of the book’s maps—a minor quibble but a constant bother in trying to place what you’re reading about geographically. Otherwise an excellent book.

Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, by Earl J Hess—A finicky, difficult, brusque, and gloomy man who could dish out harsh criticism even of his benefactors, Braxton Bragg made enemies in the pre-Civil War US Army and continued his parade of unpopularity right through the war. His difficulties commanding subordinates and coordinating campaigns did not help his reputation either, and post-war writers of the so-called “Lost Cause” school found in him an easy scapegoat for the failure of Confederate armies in the Western Theatre. I’ve always been curious about Bragg, as I’ve always had my curiosity piqued by what are obviously whipping boys, and so I’ve looked forward to Earl Hess’s reassessment of Bragg for some time. It didn’t disappoint. While not airbrushing any of Bragg’s manifest failures and flaws, Hess demonstrates that Bragg was also the subject of unfair, politically motivated criticism and backbiting and was a capable organizer and planner. His untimely death after the war also contributed, as only his widow remained to defend him against an continuously mounting tide of criticism and blame. A very good analysis of a controversial figure.

The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066, by Marc Morris—An excellent narrative of my favorite period of English history. Morris ably describes the years from the Roman abandonment of Britain to the Norman Conquest by focusing on several key figures—kings, abbesses, churchmen, and others—as windows into the cultural, political, religious, and military changes wrought in those roughly seven centuries. Like Livingston’s more narrowly focused study above, Morris has authoritative command of the sources and makes judicious, careful use of them. It’s also a pleasure to read—not something you can always count on in a book on this topic. Highly recommended.

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, by William R Trotter—An excellent narrative history of the Winter War, the massive Soviet invasion of Finland that was thwarted by the Finns over the course of several months of desperate and costly fighting. Trotter capably describes both the big-picture strategic and diplomatic side of the war as well as the gritty, grunt’s-eye level, which saw some of the most brutal and wasteful combat in the Second World War. A highly readable testimony to Soviet duplicity and Finnish guts. For a good two-book combination, read this alongside Jonathan Clements’s Mannerheim, which I read back in the spring.

The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs—A deep dive into the historiography of Hitler as it stood in the late 1990s, I recognize this book is not for everyone, but Lukacs’s encyclopedic grasp of the literature surrounding his subject, his historical and moral judgment, and the oceans of footnotes and asides made this an endlessly intriguing and surprising read for me. I based two blog posts on it—one on the popular conception of Hitler as insane and another on what Hitler has in common with the spirit of Antichrist.

Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, by Mitchell Zuckoff—An amazing feat of research and organization, this is a comprehensive look at the events of September 11th through the experiences of several hundred individuals ranging from businessmen at the World Trade Center and Army staffers at the Pentagon to pilots, air traffic controllers, firefighters, paramedics, cops, priests, and ordinary people who either ran toward the danger to help, barely survived, or did not make it out of the day alive. A hard book to read at times, but powerfully moving. I highly recommend it.

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, by Tom Shippey—A wide-ranging work on the Vikings—not early medieval Scandinavians generally, the majority of whom were farmers, but the seafaring warrior class specifically. Shippey, one of the great Tolkien scholars, displays encyclopedic and authoritative command of Old Norse literature and other sources to examine the Vikings on their own terms, from the inside. I read this immediately after another study of the Vikings, one that claimed to do what Shippey does here but that had constant recourse to the language of the modern sociology department and woke identity politics—an annoying trait that will also instantly date it. So reading Shippey, who treats his written sources seriously and examines them on their own terms, was a breath of fresh air. This is an engaging presentation of how the Vikings viewed the world and themselves.

America’s War for the Greater Middle East, by Andrew Bacevich—A sweeping and comprehensive look at forty years of American warfare, from Jimmy Carter’s botched Iranian hostage rescue through Lebanon, Somalia, the Balkans, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice) to the very eve of the 2016 election. (A source of bitter historical irony: as Bacevich winds down the book he mentions the frontrunners for the Republican nomination as of late 2015, a who’s who of the critics of Obama’s waning days but with not a New York real estate mogul to be seen.) I read this immediately after Zuckoff’s book above and as our final withdrawal from Afghanistan was turning into an embarrassing catastrophe, and Bacevich’s narrative of multi-generation mishandling of resources, misapplication of force, and constant, total misunderstanding of the enemy, the region, and the purpose of these conflicts was damning. Of course Afghanistan would end the way it did—it was ever thus. A grim but important read, and one I’d be very interested to see updated with all that has happened in the last five years.

Honorable mentions:

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman—An excellent Conservative critique of three different varieties of American nationalism.

• Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, by Jeffrey Bilbro—Right up my alley. An incisive and constructive critique of the dominant and largely negative role news media play in our lives.

• Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe—Elite promotion of radical political causes and the patterns of failure built into bureaucracies notionally designed to help the poor, acidly observed. Still relevant. Goodreads review here.

• Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs—Meditations on the inherent failings of democracy, populism, and nationalism by a learned and witty reactionary. Worth reading in our present state of confusion about… everything.

• The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic, by Ross Douthat—An incisive and balanced look at our tired, cynical, and above all repetitious culture. I just wish Douthat had the killer instinct of someone like Helen Andrews to make this accurate critique really sting. Been thinking about this one a lot ever since I read it.

Favorite fiction

Like the works of history above, these are presented in no particular order, though I have to say the first one is almost certainly the best fiction I read this summer.

In the Valley, by Ron Rash—A very good collection of short stories, plus a novella that continues a few stories from Rash’s novel Serena. Among my favorites were “Neighbors,” a Civil War story pitting a widow against a North Carolina Home Guard commander; “Sad Man in the Sky,” a profoundly moving story about a unusual helicopter tour of the mountains; “L’homme Blesse,” a story about a family mystery involving an inexplicable reproduction of the Pech Merle cave paintings in a mountain cabin; “The Baptism,” a wonderfully ironic historical piece about a violent ne’er-do-well and the preacher who unwillingly agrees to baptize him; “The Belt,” in which an elderly Civil War veteran struggles to save his infant grandson from a flash flood; and “In the Valley,” the novella featuring many of the characters from Serena. The novella steadily builds in tension and in gothic grandeur until a final, fatal confrontation. I read the novella in one go, late at night—the best possible circumstances for this kind of story. I mean to revisit Serena soon.

Beowulf, Dragonslayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff—A very good novelistic adaptation of Beowulf for young readers which, like Sutcliff’s version of the Iliad I reviewed during the spring, does not soft-pedal its subject or condescend to its readers. Goodreads review here.

Peace, by Richard Bausch—A handful of American GIs on patrol in Italy, probing for the retreating Germans, during a harsh winter in completely unknown territory. A well-realized setting, steadily mounting tension, strongly drawn characters who, like real people, are at first easy to place and then surprise you, and a compelling series of moral questions make this very short novel worth reading.

The Dig, by John Preston—The basis of the Netflix film, which I still haven’t seen, The Dig is a fictionalization of the real-life archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo in Essex, a dig that uncovered one of the most important finds of the early Anglo-Saxon period. The novel is narrated in long chapters by a handful of important characters, and is told with apparent simplicity but great subtlety. It was only after I read it and explained some of what it was about to Sarah that I realized how carefully constructed and meaningful it was. I aim to reread it sometime in the future—it will definitely reward it.

The Outlaws, by Ernst von Salomon—Ernst von Salomon was a 16-year old cadet in a Prussian military academy when World War I ended and he was almost immediately swept up in the post-war violence—pummeled by Reds on the day he learned of the armistice, joining the paramilitary Freikorps units and taking part in the suppression of the communist Spartacist uprising in Berlin, war against sundry enemies in the Baltic states, war against Polish nationalist forces in Silesia, and finally an abortive Putsch. From there he joined an organization called the OC that operated like the mafia and plotted the assassinations of members of the Weimar government whom the OC’s members viewed as traitors. Because of his minor role in the successful assassination of Walther Rathenau, von Salomon found himself tried, convicted, and imprisoned at 20. War, terrorism, prison—these are the three acts of his drama. By the time a despairing von Salomon was released, his world seemed gone forever, with figures like Hitler—whom von Salomon, a nationalist but not a Nazi, rejected—in the ascendant. Though von Salomon does not stop for the usual novelistic conventions like characterization and his more obscure references may fly over a modern reader’s head, the cumulative effect of this sort-of memoir, sort-of novel is staggering. One feels the weight of the disaster that has swallowed Germany, as well as the reasons someone like von Salomon—young, patriotic, angry and aimless, devoted to honor rather than to the imported liberal politics reshaping his country—would strike back against it. A gripping, chilling, and challenging book.

The Encircling Sea, by Adrian Goldsworthy—The second in Goldsworthy’s first trilogy (he’s just released the first book in another) about Flavius Ferox, a Briton in the Roman army. The plot is a bit more diffuse and harder to follow, and the writing isn’t quite as good as in Vindolanda, the first book, which I read last year, but it’s a gripping adventure nonetheless and I greatly enjoy Goldsworthy’s characters, not to mention the realistic look at a workaday polyglot army on a farflung and dangerous frontier.

A Most Dangerous Innocence, by Fiorella De Maria—A British boarding school drama about a young half-Jewish Catholic girl attending a school on the southern coast of England in the early days of World War II. She darkly suspects the headmistress of being a German spy; the woman is certainly an anti-Semite. The schoolyear starts badly and only gets worse—and more mysterious. Fast-paced and well-written, I really enjoyed this and intend to read some of De Maria’s crime mysteries in the future.

Honorable mentions

• The Glass Bees, by Ernst Jünger, trans. by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer—An idiosyncratic work of science fiction in which a former soldier seeks out a job with a world-renowned manufacturer of robotics, including microscopic robots we would now call nanotechnology. An odd but eerily prescient novel. One observation based on a passage from this book on my blog here.

• Touch, by Elmore Leonard—An intriguing departure for Leonard, a novel following a young man possessed of seemingly miraculous powers. I felt like the story lost its way somewhat in the final act, but until then it is a touching and often startling meditation on what miracles might look like in the modern world.

• Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, trans. Stephen Dodd—Another idiosyncratic but incisive work, a darkly humorous story of a young Japanese man who, utterly stricken with ennui, offers himself for sale in a classified ad and goes on a series of sometimes funny, sometimes grim adventures as a result. Commodification, atomization, the false hopes of a liberal society—it’s all satirized here with hallucinogenic immediacy.

Rereads

Old favorites freshly revisited. Audiobook listens marked with an asterisk.

• The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming*—The worst of the original Bond series, albeit not for lack of effort. Short Goodreads thoughts here.

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by Ian Fleming*—Perhaps the last great book in the Fleming Bond canon, but certainly the most moving. Short Goodreads thoughts here.

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh—Reread aloud to my wife a bit at a time before bed. Still hilarious. Short Goodreads review here.

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis—Read for a second time to the kids for a bedtime story. One of the greats, and adored by both parents and children—something you shouldn’t take for granted.

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—Reread for the umpteenth time ahead of the release of The Green Knight, which apparently impressed a lot of people who haven’t read the poem, but not me so much.

• You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming*—The penultimate Bond adventure, and the last Fleming lived to see through the revision and publication process. Detailed Goodreads review here.

• The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway—Last read my freshman year of college, a time when I was utterly unimpressed with Hemingway. I now see that this is a work whose riches and meaning are utterly lost on young readers.

• The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming*—The sad end to the Bond novels, a clearly unfinished novel that nevertheless has moments of the old Fleming pizzazz. Detailed Goodreads review here.

• Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming*—A very good collection of Fleming’s Bond short stories. Goodreads review here.

• Grendel, by John Gardner*—At least my third trip through. An old favorite. Short thoughts on Goodreads here.

Coming up this fall

Since my summer cutoff date I’ve already read the early medieval Welsh elegy Y Gododdin and I’m a good way into a couple of other books, both fiction and non. I’ve got more big histories ahead and I’m reading whatever fiction strikes my fancy at a given moment, though I do have one massive modern classic that’s been waiting in the wings the whole year. I hope to get to that before the year is out, and you’ll certainly hear about it here.

Hope y’all can find something good to read from among these. I’d recommend any of them. Enjoy, and thanks as always for reading!

Chesterton on cave art

This week Michial and Josh of the Before They Were Live podcast, a monthly show working its way through the Disney Classics canon, dropped their latest episode. In it they discuss Brother Bear, which I have never seen, but a part of their discussion that I greatly enjoyed was a rabbit trail on cave paintings.

Any mention of cave paintings is going to bring Chesterton’s 1925 book The Everlasting Man to my mind, and just after I thought of this Michial raised exactly the passage I was thinking of. (I actually did a fist-pump in my car this morning.) I quote at length—from Part I, Chapter 1, “The Man in the Cave”—to give Chesterton space to make his point, which is a critique of the nasty modern assumptions a lot of people bring to the life of the “cave man”:

A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. . . . This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.

In discussing the stylization and artistic judgment evident in cave paintings, recall that Chesterton was himself a trained artist, and many of his books, notably The Man Who Was Thursday, which begins and ends in a garden at sunset, have a painterly quality in their description. He recognized artistic sensibility when he saw it.

Chesterton continues from the paintings’ artistic merit to the character of the artist:

Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.

But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be drawn from them.

Here is where Michial begins quoting Chesterton on this month’s Before They Were Live:

That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man's work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.

And Chesterton concludes this paragraph with:

But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.

Following this is my own favorite part of this passage, which I mention on the first day of every Western Civ course I teach when I show pictures of the cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet:

Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school.

A wonderfully human suggestion, without an ounce of condescension in it. Chesterton goes on to complete one strand of his critique of uncharitable modern assumptions about “cave men”:

And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another cavern and another child.

That other child is the subject of Part II, Chapter 1, “The God in the Cave.”

There’s a lot going on here that I won’t belabor. Chesterton’s goal throughout “The Man and the Cave” is to question and critique recent archaeological and anthropological speculations, especially those he saw as grounded in assumptions of cave man crudity and inferiority. (This was later called “chronological snobbery” by CS Lewis and Owen Barfield. I’ve blogged about that before here.) It’s a great passage, and one that has profoundly affected my own approach to studying the past.

The Everlasting Man was published too early for this to be a reference to Lascaux (discovered in 1940) or Chauvet (discovered in 1994), though his reference to a priest and a boy’s explorations is strikingly close to the story of Lascaux, probably the most famous group of cave paintings in the world and, indeed, discovered by some boys, who then brought in priest-archaeologist Fr Henri Breuil through their schoolmaster. Chesterton may be referring to Pech Merle, also in southern France, which has a similar story of discovery from 1922, and was therefore still recent news when he wrote The Everlasting Man in 1925. Pech Merle was opened to the public a year later. Chesterton’s descriptions of the paintings themselves as accomplished works of art are very broadly applicable, though, as are his summaries of scholarly uninterest in the actual human reasons the painters may have done their work. (Cf. the early controversy around the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain.)

I recently got the early reader Discovery in the Cave and read it with my kids. It’s a nice retelling of the story of the discovery of Lascaux, and gave me a chance to talk about some of what Chesterton brings up above. I highly recommend it if you want a kid-friendly introduction to cave art.

And check out Before They Were Live. I’ve enjoyed plenty of Disney cartoons in my time, but I’m by no means an aficionado. Michial and Josh bring an enthusiasm and charity to their discussion—both celebration and criticism—that makes their show a joy to listen to.

They and their hidden knowledge

Someone recently brought this to my attention: back in April, a socialist MP in the UK tweeted out this map, showing the division of territory in Africa among the powers attending the Berlin Conference of 1884:

Her gloss on the map: “This map has been hidden from you all your life. This is how they carved up Africa”

Punctuation aside, I have questions. First of all—and a useful question with which to begin any discussion of paranoia—who is “they”? I ask because, based on my reading of both professional and amateur conspiracists, I’ve been impressed with how much “they” have been able to accomplish over the centuries.

But also, note that the first sentence above is passive: “This map has been hidden.” Who is the subject doing the hiding? Is that “they”? Is it the same “they” in the next sentence? Or did one “they” carve up Africa knowing another “they” would hide the evidence?

But the kicker is the idea that the Berlin Conference—which lasted over three months and had fourteen countries in attendance, which brought about results that were manifest immediately and for decades afterward, which has been taught as one of the most important geopolitical events of the Victorian era ever since, and which has Britannica and Wikipedia articles and many nicely designed maps readily available right there in Google Images—was somehow “hidden.”

The best response I saw to this set of vague insinuations: “So hidden that it was in my 8th grade social sciences classroom.”

But of course, insinuation and outrage bait is the game now, because people are ignorant and the frisson of discovering secret gnosis is everything. It’s the ignorant, the people who didn’t pay attention in school, that this kind of thing—everything from Howard Zinn to the 1619 Project and its supposedly patriotic counterparts to that deconstruction of the “heroic Anglo myth” of the Alamo I mentioned recently, none of which brings in any new information but relies on the reader’s ignorance to effect shock—is designed to work on.

So, a pro tip: Just because you haven’t been paying attention doesn’t mean someone is hiding something from you.

This is a cultural problem—starved of the revealed and transcendent, we crave occult knowledge and this-worldly insights—but it is also a failure of our educational system. Per CS Lewis, in a quotation I can’t believe I haven’t used on this blog before: “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”

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.