Kershaw on history and junk psychology

Last night I listened to several episodes of The Rest is History’s back catalog while I worked on a project, among them an excellent two-part interview with Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the preeminent experts on Nazi Germany and author of the two-volume biography Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis.

After introducing Kershaw and talking about his background as a medievalist who stumbled into expertise on the Third Reich, hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook turn toward the interview’s main subject: Hitler himself. In discussing Hitler’s ideas and motivations, they raise the questions of popular myth and psychology (at approximately the 28:00 mark in Part I of their interview), especially as causal factors in major historical events:

Holland: Because it becomes almost a kind of comfort, doesn’t it, the idea that you can explain what Hitler does, say, come across some core psychological flaw. So people often talk about “Was Hitler’s grandfather a Jew? Was this something that he worried about?” or something like that—

Kershaw: That answer to that is no he wasn’t.

Holland: So the answer to that is the grandfather wasn’t Jewish and Hitler didn’t worry about that. So that as an idea is a nonsense.

Kershaw: That’s right. I think these psychological theories are best treated in a very critical and conservative fashion. That is to say, that, again, it’s an easy operation for any biographer to take up psychological theories which are usually non-provable because the subject had never been on a psychologist’s couch even, and then read into that an entire intricate and complex historical development. And I tried my best in the biography to avoid that and discarded the various psycho theories of Hitler—mainly in footnotes rather than in the text itself—and I’ve never had very much trouble with those ideas whether it’s Hitler or anybody else for that matter. So I think what we have to deal with are political processes that explain these things rather than psychological hangups.

I’ve written a lot about what Chesterton called “the inside of history.” Understanding what mattered to people of the past, and how and why, is one of the crucial tasks of the historian. But it is another thing entirely to pretend to actual psychological insight or even diagnosis of psychological problems. These are almost always, as Kershaw notes, unfalsifiable. Such theories or explanations are pretty weak stuff on a purely personal level and make for misleading history, but made to bear the weight of historical causality they become positively nefarious. And the more causal weight, the worse.

To stick with the topic in question, stated baldly, such theories—that the Holocaust happened because Hitler had some kind of self-loathing about being part Jewish or (a deeper cut for a certain kind of amateur) because the doctor who failed to save his dying mother was Jewish—sound properly silly. But this kind of history is simple, and therefore easy to repeat and spread, and therefore almost ineradicable when it reaches the popular level. Here there be monsters—the monsters of popular myth.

Last spring I read the late John Lukacs’s The Hitler of History, a historiographical study, and blogged about it twice along similar lines: on the too-easy explanations of Hitler as madman and Hitler as Antichrist. For more on Chesterton and “the inside of history,” see here.

Revisiting Orwell on history: faster, more intense

A few weeks ago I wrote about Orwell’s contention that modern ideological attacks on history were a threat to objective truth itself. The passage I quoted from and glossed came from a 1944 “As I Please” column. That’s still worth reading. But yesterday I ran across this passage in a much longer essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” from 1942:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

This somehow manages to put the point even more pithily.

A little more, because I can’t help it:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. . . . It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

You can read more here. These passages come from a paragraph in § IV.

Compare my thoughts on cynicism in the study of history, which went viral on a small scale last month following a share from Tom Holland himself. For the mathematical implications of the denial of objective truth, see again Chesterton.

Prester John

This month on the blog, a month I’m calling John Buchan June, is dedicated to reading and writing about as much of author’s classic adventure fiction as I can. Today’s entry proved one of his first great successes, a 1910 thriller of exploration, veld-craft, religious apocalypticism, empire-spanning conflict, and sheer tenacity entitled Prester John.

Prester John begins with its narrator, a young Scot named David Crawfurd, reminiscing about an odd childhood episode. After skipping out on a service at the local Free Kirk, at which a black African minister was visiting to talk about about missionary work, Crawfurd and his friends roam the shore far past dusk. There, in the darkness below the cliffs, they spot a bonfire and a solitary man. It is the visiting minister himself, John Laputa, engaged in inexplicable but demonic-looking rites. The boys attempt to flee, Laputa spots and chases them, and Crawfurd and his friends escape, terrified.

Years later Crawfurd, his family having fallen on hard times, takes a job with a British company and is assigned to manage the trading post at Blaauwildebeestefontein, in one of the most obscure and difficult to reach quarters of South Africa. On his voyage south, he finds himself sharing the ship not only with one of his childhood friends, a fellow witness to Laputa’s nighttime ecstasies, but Laputa himself. The minister is traveling in the company of a suspicious-looking Portuguese man named Henriques, with whom he confers secretly. Crawfurd and his friend are disturbed to see Laputa again after so many years and suspect some untoward reason behind his travels, but simply avoid him until they reach port.

Once in South Africa, Crawfurd takes his place in Blaauwildebeestefontein alongside a British schoolmaster given charge of a colonial school and tries to get on with the established local representative of the company, a drunkard whose groveling behavior with native customers strikes Crawfurd as not only degrading but sinister. Slowly, as Crawfurd settles into his role and sets out into a yet remoter corner of the region under orders to set up a new store, Crawfurd meets more unusual characters—among them Captain Arcoll, a British scout who is a master of disguise—and observes strange changes in the landscape and its people: the school empties of native students, the locals behave oddly, strange rumors pass his way, his coworker shows clear signs of involvement in diamond smuggling, and both the Henriques and John Laputa reappear.

What Crawfurd and the authorities gradually uncover is not only a network of the illicit diamond trade, but a plot to overthrow the British Empire in this place and set up a new pan-African kingdom under Laputa. The minister, traveling under the guise of Presbyterian evangelism, has claimed the name and authority of the mythical Christian king Prester John for himself and preaches a mystical gospel of destiny and liberation. With the warriors of tribes from all over sub-equatorial Africa streaming into the area and Captain Arcoll scrambling both to divine Laputa’s intentions and muster the strength to resist his massive coalition army, Crawfurd finds himself taking more and more important roles in the conflict and getting closer and closer to Laputa.

Though swept up in events far greater than himself and seemingly beyond his ability to influence, Crawfurd does not shy from any of the severe tests that come his way, even as the uprising begins and Laputa becomes not only a political danger to the Empire but a personal danger to Crawfurd.

It was mere happenstance that led me to read Prester John shortly after A Lost Lady of Old Years, a novel published just over a decade before this one, but it proved an instructive example of how a skilled writer can grow and improve. Prester John has brilliantly sketched characters, a solid and believable plot, beautifully described settings, excellent episodes of action and suspense, and, above all, superb pacing. Prester John is a slow burn, with Buchan steadily building suspense and tension throughout its first several chapters. A sense of foreboding hangs over the early passages, so that even as Crawfurd manages a frontier store or hires natives to help with construction the reader senses that all is not well, that something big is coming. And unlike A Lost Lady’s Francis Birkenshaw, David Crawfurd has a significant and meaningful role to play in the story’s events all the way through, his importance growing along with the stakes of the plot.

Crawfurd himself is a large part of what makes Prester John so compelling. Young and inexperienced but not naïve, upstanding but not priggish, clever but not guileful, capable of fighting but not bloodthirsty, and always willing to embrace hardship and danger uncomplainingly, he is a hero in the mold of David Balfour or Jim Hawkins. And his first-person narration is a masterful piece of work, tonally perfect from chapter to chapter and always conveying exactly the right amount of menace, surprise, danger, or humor.

Crawfurd is also, much like Buchan himself, openminded—though not in the wishy-washy modern way of Oprah relativism and hashtag affirmation. Writers as diverse as Ursula Buchan, John Buchan’s granddaughter and one of his most comprehensive biographers, and the late equal opportunity gadfly Christopher Hitchens have noted Buchan’s powers of sympathy, of imagining himself in someone else’s shoes and represent them fairly. Crawfurd displays the same trait throughout Prester John and combines it with the moral rectitude and exacting religious belief (Crawfurd explicitly owns up to the fatalism of his Scottish Calvinism) that also animated Buchan.

These traits together make Crawfurd a man who can see both the deep differences between himself and his enemy Laputa as well as Laputa’s good qualities, even his greatness as a thinker and leader. Crawfurd’s loyalty to the Empire and his belief in what he sees as its civilizing mission is uncompromising but not uncritical, and does not preclude respecting and evening admiring a leader as gifted and courageous as Laputa proves himself. The end result—without giving too much away—is a victory over Laputa that is tinged with and softened by sincere regret.

This, the clash of honorable men whose virtues are intelligible to each other across those things that divide them, made Prester John especially refreshing for me.

I haven’t sought such opinions out, but I can easily imagine Prester John being faulted for its imperialism, colonialism, exoticism, et cetera ad nauseam. Such criticism writes itself these days. But what I found interesting about the cross-cultural and imperial conflict imagined in this book was, again, the respect accorded Laputa by Crawfurd and the story; relatedly, the story’s utter lack of jingoism, cynicism, or self-flagellation; and, on a purely historical level, the way Buchan predicts the advent of non-Western nationalist revolutionaries motivated by purely European pathologies. Laputa—with his rigorous European education, his borrowing and repurposing of its ideologies, his syncretistic and political Christianity, and his twinned senses of grievance and destiny—prefigures many mid-twentieth century anticolonial leaders. Buchan even contrasts him with earlier, purely tribal leaders like the Zulu king Cetshwayo in order to underscore the new breed of threat to imperial order that Laputa represents. He is a worthier and more dangerous opponent as a result.

This level of nuance only enhances the believability of what could have been a potboiler of imperial adventure peopled with caricature ethnic villains. There are plenty of old books like that. Prester John isn’t one of them.

Finally, I’ve called and seen Prester John elsewhere called a thriller, but that’s not exactly right. It sits not only chronologically but also stylistically midway between Robert Louis Stevenson and Ian Fleming, an important point for the adventure, action, or thriller genre—a broad point in the stream before it narrows into other branches. As in so many of Stevenson’s adventures, a young man goes abroad and finds adventure and danger and endures it with bravery, tenacity, and unsullied honor. As in so many of Fleming’s, the danger stems from a foreigner’s ingenious plot to suborn the empire and aggrandize himself, and the hero even falls into his clutches more than once. But the combination of the two in Prester John is pure Buchan.

But all of that, as Buchan would be the first to say, is beside the point. What Prester John offers is a good story, well told, full of excitement and danger and characters made all the more compelling by the fairness and roundness in which they are rendered. Prester John may have appeared over 110 years ago, but it’s one of the most enjoyable and imagination-stirring novels I’ve read this year, and that, for Buchan, was the point.

If you’re looking for a story offering high adventure, good characters, and gripping action this summer, you could do much worse than Prester John. I highly recommend it.

A Lost Lady of Old Years

June seems to be the month for themed celebrations, so some weeks ago during my leisure reading I conceived of my own. This is the inaugural post of what I’m calling John Buchan June, a month dedicated to the enjoyment and appreciation of classic adventure fiction. I’ll be reading as many of Buchan’s novels and posting about as many of them as I can. We’ll see how well I can emulate Buchan’s characters in embracing and enduring difficulty.

Today, I begin with the novel that inspired this celebration: A Lost Lady of Old Years.

This, one of Buchan’s earliest novels, takes place in Scotland during “the ‘45,” the last and greatest Jacobite uprising, and tells the story of young Francis Birkenshaw. Francis was born into an austere Highland family that had disowned his mother following an inappropriate marriage. Francis could provide the textbook example of the “callow youth.” A striver unwilling to hold down a desk job that might, with hard work, lead to prominence and respectability; a familiar of seedy neighborhoods, dive bars, and low company; and not a little entitled despite his station, he has something of the prodigal son about him. Having been reared by a mother supported by the quiet largesse of the current head of the family, Francis has assumed that she controls a hidden fortune and demands his share of it.

Having unwittingly deprived his mother of her whole month’s support, he takes ship for France, where he aims to join one of the many Scots mercenary units serving the King of France and so gain some experience of the world. As he departs Scotland, he determines to live utterly unto himself, as a pure pragmatist, devoid of moral scruple. This seems to him the proper mercenary spirit, and so far he is off to a good start.

As it happens, Francis never makes it out of Scotland. He picks fights, makes one friend, and abandons ship within a few days, and the remainder of the novel follows him in his wanderings through the Scottish countryside, seeking his fortune.

Everywhere he goes he is asked about his loyalties—does he support the Hanoverian King of England or Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite pretender? Francis doesn’t much care—he’s in it for himself—but finds himself drawn steadily into the Jacobite orbit, especially once he has made the acquaintance of two crucial characters: the aging and infirm but charismatic Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, who confides and trusts in him; and, even more important to a young man, the beautiful Margaret Murray, the wife of one of the rebellion’s leaders. Francis becomes infatuated with her and, for her, willingly undertakes a dangerous mission to deliver secret messages to the Jacobite forces in the field where they face off against the army of the King of England.

I don’t want to give much more away, except for two facts: First, Francis’s adventures ultimately take him through the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, the mopping up operations following the Pretender’s defeat, and the capture and executions of some of the people whom he has followed and grown to admire; and second, all along, and completely unbeknownst to him, he has been used. By whom, and to what purpose, I’ll leave to you to find out.

Buchan wrote A Lost Lady of Old Years in his early twenties, while still a student at Brasenose College, Oxford. It was published in 1899, one of his first published works—and it shows. Despite its well-realized Scottish settings, its excellent level of historical detail, its wry and witty writing, and its vivid fictional portraits of real people—the most striking of which is the ill-fated Lord Lovat—A Lost Lady of Old Years is clearly the early work of a gifted but inexperienced writer. Those familiar with Buchan’s later books, especially the short, sharp, rapidly moving The Thirty-Nine Steps, will be surprised at how often the pacing flags in this novel.

Further, Francis Birkenshaw himself is largely passive throughout, wandering through events far larger than himself and far beyond his ken. Such characters can make for good novels. The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which Richard Hannay spends much of the story on the run from a seemingly omnipotent enemy, is an instructive counterexample. Where Hannay is an older, wiser, and more experienced man accustomed to danger and alert to deception, giving him some control despite the odds against him, Francis is naïve, flighty, and easily hoodwinked. This is a realistic picture of a pugnacious young man, but he often feels like a side character in his own story. Note my use of the phrases “unwittingly” and “unbeknownst to him” above.

However, what makes Francis interesting is his explicitly stated quest to live beyond the rules, as a purely amoral pragmatist, and his constant failure to live up to that dark ideal. Whether Francis is a Jacobite or not is not the only test he faces everywhere he goes; he also often wanders into situations that test his resolve to live amorally, as when his shipboard friend steals the only food in an old peasant woman’s house and Francis, despite himself, is outraged.

So A Lost Lady of Old Years, in addition to a striking portrait of a real historical moment and a study of loyalty, honor, and betrayal, also reflects the importance of moral formation, of properly oriented affections and piety. One can also sense something of Buchan’s Calvinism in the story in the way that Francis sets his own goals but is consistently drawn to something else, something higher, that changes Francis for the better despite his bad intentions. In the end, Francis’s signal failure in the novel, to live entirely unto himself and his own good, paradoxically proves his only success—bitterly earned, but worthwhile.

A Lost Lady of Old Years is an enjoyable read, with many of the hallmarks of Buchan’s later fiction—eager young men from straitened circumstances, beautifully rendered exotic settings, picaresque and episodic journeys into greater and greater danger, the inevitable Scottish connection—while showing some of the limitations of the beginner. It’s a lesser-known work of the Buchan bibliography, but one with its own strengths and charms and well worth seeking out.

Top Gun: Maverick

I’ve only seen the original Top Gun once. Twenty years ago, around the time I graduated from high school. And I fell asleep during part of it. So my anticipation of Top Gun: Maverick has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with my lifelong interest in military aviation and action movies and my more recent esteem for Tom Cruise’s action career.

It was worth the wait. And while I can’t make any direct comparison to the original, I’d be willing to bet Maverick, this much later sequel, is actually the better movie.

Top Gun: Maverick opens with Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) working as a test pilot, pushing the envelope with an experimental prototype. When the contract for the prototype is terminated and the program shut down, Maverick is saved—not for the first time—from discharge by the intervention of Iceman (Val Kilmer), who is now commander of the US Pacific Fleet. Ice has Maverick reassigned to their old flight school in San Diego, where he is tasked with training a batch of previous graduates for a specific, extremely difficult mission.

An unnamed “rogue state” is nearing completion of a high-tech uranium refinement facility. It is imperative that the facility be destroyed; it is almost impossible to reach it. The lab lies underground at the bottom of a narrow valley hemmed in on either side by steep mountains, and the mountains are topped by SAM sites.

Maverick develops a training regimen designed to push the younger pilots selected for the mission—who are already the best of the best—to their limits and force them to accept that they still have things to learn. He tests their skills, confidence, and endurance as well as their teamwork. Though still a daredevil and risk-taker, Maverick was chastened by the death of his partner Goose in the first film, and the presence of Goose’s son Rooster (Miles Teller) among his trainees renews this old guilt.

The personal dimension is further complicated by Maverick’s reacquaintance with Penny (Jennifer Connelly), an old flame who runs the aviators’ dive bar nearby, and by the hostility or distrust of many of Maverick’s superiors. Maverick awkwardly reconnects with the former, and struggles to avoid being grounded by the latter.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot. It will come as no surprise that Maverick not only trains the young pilots but ends up leading the mission, but there are other surprises in store and a lot of good action along the way.

The story of Top Gun: Maverick is simple but effectively told. This movie exists within a long, grand tradition of military mission movies in which elite units have to rise above even their own excellence to achieve an impossible objective with very narrow parameters for success: think The Dam Busters. What makes the movie work is not a convoluted story with numerous subplots or bloated action sequences, but efficient, well-paced storytelling, good acting, and exciting action. This film does what all great films of this genre do: make the challenges, stakes, and threats clear, make the action meaningful by giving us characters to care about, and then present the climactic action comprehensibly and suspensefully.

The strongest character in the movie, by far, is Maverick. In addition to being a plot-driven action adventure this film is a character piece, and Tom Cruise, proving he need not be limited to motorcycle chases and sprinting, does a very good job giving depth to an erstwhile hotshot as he confronts age and the danger inherent to his work. This Maverick begins the movie as an expert loner with a callous disregard for danger and has to learn—through his trainees, through Penny and her daughter—that men ultimately derive meaning and purpose not only from vocation and leadership but attachment.

The supporting cast is less well developed but not one-dimensional. Jon Hamm and Jennifer Connelly are good as Maverick’s antagonistic commander at Top Gun and Maverick’s love interest, respectively, and giving depth and personality to characters it would be easy to play as clichés. The standout among the trainees is Goose’s son Rooster, who gets the most substantial writing among them and is well-performed by Miles Teller. The other pilots have essentially one personality trait but still feel like real people we could feasibly get to know better, a testament to the actors cast in those parts.

But Top Gun: Maverick’s big selling point—and my main interest going into the movie—is the action. Most of the aerial sequences were shot with the actors really sitting in real F/A-18 Super Hornets (and one F-14 Tomcat) really doing the things they purport to be doing in the movie, and the result is a series of flight scenes that convey the speed and G-forces and general danger of fighter combat as well as the amazing skill of a seasoned pilot. One reason the action works so well is that it’s comprehensible—director Joseph Kosinski stages the action so that we see and understand what’s going on. The action is also helped by the writing. Key moments in the finale are properly set up during training, so that by the time the climactic action is unfolding at supersonic speed we grasp what’s happening intuitively. It’s excellently done.

In the end, I found Top Gun: Maverick not only enjoyable and exciting but refreshing. It’s a throwback in the best ways possible, and not just stylistically—though it does a good job emulating the golden-hued long-lens cinematography of the original and includes just enough 80s music to be fun without being cloying. More importantly, it’s not cynical, has good characters and a dash of humor, doesn’t overstay its welcome, doesn’t pander to the present-day political sensibilities being shoehorned into every other entertainment being shoveled our way, tells a good strong story straightforwardly, is undergirded by some positive and goodness-affirming themes that arise organically from the plot, and has a genuine feel-good quality that makes it a joy to watch with an audience.

Top Gun: Maverick is not deep, but it’s well-crafted and engaging and pure, solid fun. When I saw it last night, people gasped, laughed, and applauded unironically, and that only enhanced it. I look forward to watching it again.

Orwell on history and objective truth

I doesn’t take much to get me on an Orwell kick, and the most recent started with an interesting piece in First Things entitled “What Orwell Learned from Chesterton.” Somewhere during this most recent dip into Orwell’s essays, I came across an “As I Please” column from February 4, 1944—the spring before Operation Overlord, when an Englishman could visit Dover and look over the Channel into the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating short reflection, and right up my alley.

Orwell begins with an arresting apocryphal tale:

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

Orwell tells this story to introduce the topic of the investigation into truth in history, and considers how well Raleigh might have succeeded in his historical project. “Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison,” Orwell writes, Raleigh “could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events.” Why? Because

“A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it.”

— George Orwell

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts—the casualty figures, for instance—were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

That’s because of ideology; everyone now has ideological reasons to obscure, hide, or attempt to alter the truth. Orwell supplies numerous examples from his personal experience and contemporary events, most notably the Spanish Civil War, in which he was a participant, as well as the Battle of Britain, Trotsky’s supposed betrayal of the Soviet Union, and the factuality of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “In no case,” he writes, “do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.”

I was particularly struck by that last line, as it’s a perennial favorite of a certain kind of eager student who wants to let others know he’s not naïve. That is, it’s usually a species of the cynicism I wrote about last week. (It’s also easily disproven by visiting the History section at any Barnes & Noble, where you can find apologia, exonerations, and revisions in favor of any number of “losers” in history.)

But Orwell isn’t using it that way here. Rather than a universal statement about unreliability or bias, he is describing the end result of ideological struggle. This is how history will be written—even if our side wins—if we are not careful, as his next line suggests: “In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries.”

The Allies could rightly claim to have salvaged something from the wreck of the war if they would at least be truthful about it after the fact. It’s still not entirely clear that that was the case, and insofar as even the “good guys” in a conflict like World War II take the same ideologically motivated approach to the truth as their totalitarian enemies, subjecting the truth to the claims of usefulness rather than subjecting themselves to it, they become totalitarians, too. Indeed, they share the most important characteristic of their enemies:

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

— George Orwell

This is broadly applicable, because it’s true, and this is why history in particular is so hotly contested right now—along with everything else. Totalitarianism is, after all, total.

After a few caveats and notes about the effects of the war on freedom of the press, Orwell concludes by suggesting that “[t]here is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don’t envy the future historian’s job.”

Me neither.

You can read the entire “As I Please” piece in several places online. I found it here. I definitely recommend the MD Aeschliman piece on Orwell and Chesterton mentioned above, and if you want to begin or complement an Orwell kick like mine, let me also recommend a 2017 piece from Ben Sixsmith that gets at one of the things I most like about Orwell: “George Orwell Would Dislike You, Me, and Our Opinions.”

Spring reading 2022

This has been a busy semester. I had classes on three different campuses of my college and spent a great deal of time driving. I’m thankful to say, however, that despite a long and arduous semester I was able to get a lot of reading done. Here are the highlights, sorted by genre.

(For the purposes of this post, as usual, “spring” runs from January 1 to roughly the beginning of summer classes, give or take a few days. One tries to stay flexible.)

History

You’ll be Sor-ree! by Sid Phillips*—Sid Phillips may be familiar to readers of EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed or viewers of the HBO miniseries “The Pacific,” in which he was a secondary character. You’ll be Sor-ree! is his memoir, originally published privately and circulated among friends and family in the late 90s. Phillips combines terse narration of the harshness of Guadalcanal and Peleliu and the horrors of combat with a wry wit and an insistence that, despite it all, these young Marines occasionally laughed and had fun. It’s not as powerful a memoir as his best friend Sledge’s, but it conveys more clearly than any other book I’ve read the youthfulness of the teenagers and twenty-year olds who went to war in 1941, many of whom never came back.

Copse 125, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Basil Creighton—Ernst Jünger is best remembered today for his memoir of First World War infantry combat Storm of Steel, but in the mid-1920s he also published this memoir, which is based on a single month of his war diaries from the summer of 1918. Slower paced and more philosophical, filled not only with the nitty-gritty of trench life but also with the musings of a dedicated young officer in tough circumstances, Copse 125, in its stalwart tribute to guts and endurance, is also reflective of the humiliations and uncertainties of the postwar Weimar Era. A thought-provoking, insightful, and gripping window into the experience of the trenches.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—An excellent succinct history of the Second Reich, from its origins in the nationalist unification movements of the mid-19th century to its collapse and destruction at the end of the First World War. For a book of its size, I was astonished at how much Hoyer fit in, with the book straddling the political and military, the economic and commercial, the imperial, the ideological, and with some space left over for individual personalities (Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II especially) and German culture. Culture proves especially important, as one of the book’s major narrative threads is the artificial shaping of a unified “German” culture out of the disparate and diverse cultures of the 39 states of the former Holy Roman Empire for political purposes.

The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy, and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream, by Charles Spencer—A readable, well-paced popular history of the reign of Henry I and the disastrous consequences of the sinking of the White Ship, which went down in 1120 with only one survivor. Among the drowned was Henry’s only legitimate son. The subtitle misleadingly suggests the whole book is about this event; in fact, it tells the whole history of Henry’s reign and the beginnings of the Anarchy, a period of contested rule directly caused by this fatal accident.

General non-fiction

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and thought-provoking look at one of the most bewildering characters to appear in The Lord of the Rings and a passionate defense of the good and the beautiful. Full review on the blog here.

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, by Jed Perl—A good short meditation on the tension between creative freedom and adherence to artistic tradition, a tension that gives vitality to art, whether painting, architecture, music, or writing. I especially appreciate Perl’s insistence that art should not be used for mercenary political purposes, an insistence we need more than ever.

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—Murray’s previous book, The Madness of Crowds, appeared just before the world went into lockdown and the United States spent a summer tearing itself apart. (The edition I read included an afterword added in the wake of the summer of 2020.) This, his follow-up, is a direct response to that explosion of ideological furor. Murray characterizes wokeness and its repercussions as a moral panic akin to the Salem witch trials or the Satanic Panic, an analogy that has crossed my own mind more than once in the last few years. He catalogs sustained, systematic attacks on Western culture, philosophy, ideals, art, and civilization writ large in several specific areas, including race, religion, and history (an excellent chapter of particular interest to me). Interspersed with these chapters are “interludes” on narrower topics, the most incisive and damning of which concerns the West’s obsequious relationship with China. Where The Madness of Crowds suggested forgiveness as a way forward from the insanities already gripping the West before the pandemic, here Murray argues that a blinkered ideological resentment has caused the last few years’ upheavals and he encourages—insists upon—gratitude as the antidote. Absolutely correct. This is an excellent book—well-written, sharply observed, carefully structured and argued, and its diagnoses and prescriptions spot on. I just wonder how many people who don’t already agree will listen, much less change.

Against the Tide, by Roger Scruton, Mark Dooley, Ed.—A very good collection of journalistic pieces on a variety of topics spanning fifty years of work. This will probably become my go-to suggestion for introducing people to Scruton, as the fifty-odd essays, op-eds, and personal reflections collected here are short, accessible, and often witty. (An interesting coincidence: Murray, in The War on the West, quotes from the final piece in this collection, a poignant meditation on gratitude that was Scruton’s last published work in his lifetime.)

On the Passion of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, trans. Joseph N Tylenda—A worthwhile devotional work organized as a series of prayers of thanks for every stage of Jesus’s suffering and death, from his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane to his entombment. Quite moving and convicting throughout. Read over Good Friday and Easter weekend, which I would highly recommend.

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, by Russell Kirk—A meditation on the decay of cultural norms, especially in literature and politics, with special attention to the philosophical “abnormities” that evacuate both of meaning and morality. For me, this accurately hit the sweet spot between culture and politics. This was rich enough that I mean to revisit it soon.

Fiction

Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson—A vividly written and moving short novel set in Reconstruction Texas. You probably know some of the story. You probably also know what happens to Old Yeller. It’s still absolutely worth reading.

Slow Horses and Dead Lions, by Mick Herron—The purest enjoyment I got out of my reading this spring. I got into Herron’s Slough House series courtesy of my friend JP Burten, who described them to me as “John LeCarre crossed with ‘The Office.’” Sold. Intricately plotted, well written, briskly paced spy stories with plenty of twists and surprises and suffused with wry, often dark humor, this has become my new favorite fictional series. I already have Real Tigers, the third, and look forward to reading it.

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, by Alexander McCall Smith*—The second installment (unbeknownst to me at the time I listened to it) of the misadventures of Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a set of loosely interconnected short stories about a German philologist of the Romance languages whose academic intrigues and public embarrassments are made hilarious by his combination of pomposity and excruciating politeness. A real hoot.

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—An impulse buy at my local used book store, this novel by a now almost-forgotten writer was a fun, wittily written mystery in which the question is not who killed the narrator’s obnoxious Uncle Titus, but who is going to kill him. I read this to my wife at bedtime for a couple weeks and we both really enjoyed it.

A Lost Lady of Old Years, by John Buchan—One of the earliest novels by Buchan, this one follows ne’er-do-well Francis Birkenshaw, the dissipated scion of an austere Highland clan, on a series of adventures and misadventures through the Jacobite Rising of 1745, culminating in the Battle of Culloden and its aftermath. Somewhat slower-paced and with a less proactive main character than in many of Buchan’s later books, but still vividly realized and enjoyable.

Kids’ books

Macbeth, adapted by Bruce Coville, illustrated by Gary Kelley—A very good picture book adaptation of my favorite of Shakespeare’s tragedies, with beautiful and often genuinely spooky illustrations. Coville incorporates enough of the Bard’s own language (and Macbeth is eminently quotable) to give a flavor of the original while making the plot understandable to kids. Really enjoyed introducing mine to this story.

Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin—A beautifully illustrated picture book retelling of the story of Cædmon, a shy cowherd who miraculously received the gift of song and the boldness to sing about God to his friends. Nice attention to detail and realistically rendered early medieval settings, including a cameo appearance by St Hild of Whitby. A nice introduction to a famous story from Bede and the Anglo-Saxon period for kids.

The Second World War, by Dominic Sandbrook—Part of Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series, which includes The First World War and Alexander the Great (both of which I own and mean to read soon) and forthcoming volumes on Cleopatra and the Vikings. This is an excellent narrative retelling of World War II for young readers (approximately 9- to 12-year olds). Sandbrook judiciously selects ordinary people—children, civilians, grunts—as point of view characters for the action and also provides good, age-appropriate introductions to the major figures of the war, especially Churchill and Hitler, as well as genuinely global coverage of the war. He manages to include not only the big events in Europe and the Pacific but the broader context, including the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and 30s and Japanese aggression toward China in 1930s. I look forward to sharing this with my kids as they reach the age where they’ll be able to read and appreciate it.

Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections: Castle—Another excellent medieval picture book, this one a layer-by-layer cross-sectioning of a thirteenth-century castle during a siege. Every picture is loaded with fantastic details, and each two-page spread also has side bar illustrations and explanations of specific topics like vassalage, food and drink, medieval games and entertainment, and crime and punishment. My kids and I have enjoyed leafing through this one and finding new things hidden away every time.

Disappointments

Fatelessness, by Imre Kertész, trans. Tim Wilkinson—Based on the author’s experiences as a teenage prisoner and slave laborer at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, this is a curiously muted and dull book, with individually involving scenes of great vividness set in a great stretches of discursive exposition. And lacking most of the conventions of fiction, such as dialogue, it barely qualifies as a novel. I am still unsure about whether this was intentional or a problem with the translation, Hungarian being a notoriously difficult language. I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it, at least not as a novel.

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan—You know how certain kinds of people criticize Tolkien? Saying that he over-describes insignificant details, has indistinguishable underdeveloped characters, gets lost in his own lore, lards his writing with awkward archaisms, wanders down too many plotting rabbit trails, generally goes on too long, and is tedious, simplistic, and derivative? Those criticisms aren’t true—of Tolkien. But they describe Robert Jordan 100% accurately.

Rereads

I continue my project of making myself revisit good books I’ve read before. Most of these I’ve listened to on Hoopla or Audible during my commute. Lemonade out of lemons. As usual, audiobook “rereads” are marked with asterisks.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*—A Bond continuation novel that Faulks wrote in imitation of Fleming’s style, mostly successfully. Especially interesting for its pre-Revolution Iranian setting.

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*—A succinct handbook of traditionalist conservative thought in the tradition of Burke. A much-needed corrective to whatever it is that “conservatism” is today. Full review from 2019 on the blog here.

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman*—A helpful and thought-provoking study of what “nationalism” means in a country with none of the usual sources of national identity.

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—Far and away the best thing I reread this spring; almost certainly the most rewarding reread I’ve ever undertaken. A real masterpiece. Related blog reflections on finding hope in McCarthy’s work here.

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*—The book that got me into Paul Johnson; a witty and engagingly written popular introduction to the Father of Philosophy, with careful—perhaps too much—attention to his life and times.

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien—Read to my children for bedtime. One of the highlights of my seven years as a dad.

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*—A sci-fi action classic clearly inspired by the author’s experiences in Vietnam, but also startlingly prescient in many ways. Not only action-packed, with all the trappings of good intergalactic, time-dilating space travel and alien combat you could want, but also thoughtful and moving.

On the horizon

I’m very much looking forward to the summer, as my schedule is considerably more relaxed (no commuting between campuses for a few months) and my wife and kids will soon be on their break. I’m currently halfway through with Simon Callow’s Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived, about a quarter of the way into the mammoth Stalin’s War, by Sean McMeekin, and have just started And the Whole Mountain Burned, a war novel set in Afghanistan by combat veteran Ray McPadden. And I have lots more lined up.

Hope y’all have a restful summer full of good books, too. Thanks for reading!

Three storytelling tips from Aristotle

I just finished revisiting Aristotle’s Poetics via an excellent new translation by Philip Freeman, titled How to Tell a Story, part of Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. It’s been at least a decade since I last read the Poetics, but it’s striking how much of Aristotle’s insight remains applicable despite the drastic differences in art and literature between his day and our own.

The entire book is still worth reading, and I’d certainly recommend Freeman’s translation as the clearest and most accessible version I’ve yet encountered. As a sample, here are three of Aristotle’s ideas about storytelling that I found particularly striking on this readthrough. Think of them less as “tips” than as reminders:

Narrow your scope

Don’t attempt to get the whole world into your story, much less the entire, all-encompassing narrative of a huge event. Start with a discrete, limited plot that fits in as a part of the whole and build outwards from there. Aristotle goes for the greatest available example from his own day:

And so, as I said earlier, Homer’s inspired excellence in respect to other poets is clear in this respect as well. Although he has a beginning and end, he doesn’t try to cover the whole Trojan War in the Iliad. If he had, the plot would have been much too large and impossible to comprehend in one story. Instead he covers only one small part of the war, though he uses the episode on the catalogue of ships and other such episodes to work in other incidents.

Compare Tolkien’s thoughts, in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” on how the Beowulf poet situated that epic’s narrow set of events within a wider world, and how Tolkien himself did this in The Lord of the Rings.

Consider the strengths and limitations of your medium

Perhaps the last quarter or so of the Poetics is taken up with Aristotle’s adjudication of a debate surrounding two rival poetic media: epic and tragedy. He does not denigrate either medium but carefully examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of each, noting, for example, that

Epic has a special quality which allows it to be longer. In tragedy the plot cannot of course cover simultaneous actions at once since there is only one stage. But epic, because it is a narrative, can cover many actions taking place at the same time. If these simultaneous actions fit together as a whole, they can make an epic a powerful story. Thus epic has the advantage of variety and a diversity of episodes that contribute to its grandeur. Tragedy lacks this variety and can grow dull and tedious, causing many tragedies to fail.

That said, Aristotle is concerned that stories be presented in the medium most suited to the events that occur in them. He draws another example from Homer:

If someone tried to put the scene from the Iliad onstage in which Hector is pursued by Achilles around Troy, it would look ridiculous, with actors standing around while Achilles tells them to stay away. But in epic, this works perfectly well.

Not all stories are suitable for all media. Consider the phenomenon of “unfilmable novels.”

Don’t overexplain

This one is a bit trickier, as the passage below is presented by Aristotle as a counterargument in the tragedy vs epic debate that he is preparing to refute. Nevertheless, I think Aristotle’s imaginary debate partner raises a valid point:

If the more tasteful art is always superior and what appeals to a better kind of audience is always best, then it’s perfectly clear that art that displays everything is more lowly and common. Those who practice such art assume that the audience is incapable of understanding anything the actors don’t make very clear onstage through movement and gesticulation.

There’s a lot going on here, not least that Aristotle is teeing up his final, unassailable arguments in favor of the superiority of… tragedy. A perspective I pretty strongly disagree with, and for reasons articulated earlier by Aristotle himself. But the incidental argument that poor quality storytelling overexplains is a sound one regardless of medium or genre. If you’ve ever complained about a movie “spoonfeeding” the audience or a novel tediously overloading its readers with expository “info dumps,” you’ve noted a literary flaw first described over 2300 years ago.

Give your readers credit—or at least the benefit of the doubt—and don’t insult their intelligence. Your storytelling will be better for it.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, there’s much, much more to be mined from this little handbook. But I think these stood out to me as sorely needed reminders in our age of decadent, diffuse, chaotic, incoherent stories. (Aristotle has a lot to say, for instance, about stories that sacrifice believability for spectacle or plots that go nowhere.) If you want to read, write, and think better about storytelling and art, the Poetics is a good book to start with, and How to Tell a Story is an excellent edition.

Tom Holland vs undue cynicism

English chronicler Matthew Paris’s illustration of the war between Edmund Ironside and Cnut

Last week brought about one of the best podcast crossovers I’ve ever listened to, as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook hosted Dan Carlin of Hardcore History on their show, The Rest is History. (Repetitious diction, I know, but if there seems to be too much history in that sentence, you will fail to grasp the appeal of these podcasts to their listeners.) Holland and Sandbrook grilled Carlin with ten “great” questions from history, ranging from what-ifs (e.g. What were the CSA’s longterm prospects had it won, or simply not lost, the Civil War?) to amusing would-you-rather questions.

Among the latter was this from Holland (at approx. 22:40 in the second episode): “Dan, you are the ruler of a Eurasian state in AD 1000. So, anywhere in Eurasia. Which one of the following inventions would you choose to have? And you can only have one: gunpowder, the printing press, or the germ theory of disease.”

A fun hypothetical discussion ensued, weighing the pros and cons of having anachronistic knowledge of any of the three, eventually leading to this exchange shortly before they moved on to the next question:

Sandbrook: Germ theory, I mean—I’m thinking about rulers in the year 1000, so, Cnut—
Carlin: Yes.
Sandbrook: Or Æthelred the Unready—
Carlin: Yeah.
Sandbrook: What are they—what are they going to do with the germ theory?
Carlin: Infect the Mercians, you know.
Holland: Well, well, um. Actually, the setting up of hospitals is, uh, caring for the sick is very important.
Sandbrook: I don’t see Cnut doing that, Tom.
Holland: Of course he did!
Sandbrook: Did he?
Holland: He went on pilgrimage to Rome.
Sandbrook: That was for his own purposes. That made—
Carlin: That’s a power move, right there.
Sandbrook: Right, exactly. That’s nothing to do with being kind to people who’ve got smallpox.
Holland: I think you’re being unduly cynical.

And this was after Holland had already pointed out that—contra Carlin’s suggestion that the printing press is necessarily a destabilizing technology that monarchs would only want to suppress—medieval rulers (his example is Alfred the Great) were great proponents and supporters of literacy.

It’s not much, but while I like and respect and enjoy all three of these guys’ work, this is why I love Tom Holland.

History post-Gibbon, post-Marx, and most especially post-Foucault is a deeply cynical discipline, and a certain kind of comfortably modern historian constantly projects that cynicism backward onto his subjects. To stick with the time period in question, pick up a book on Edward the Confessor and you’ll be hard pressed to follow his life story because the narrative will repeatedly bog down in parsing which chronicler is secretly supporting which side of whatever dispute. Further, these assertions about the biases of sources usually have to admit huge caveats later, as when source X, described as obsequiously toadying to Bishop Y, nevertheless strongly criticizes him for A, B, and C. These contradictions or exceptions seem never to raise doubts about whether this elaborate backroom politicking has been perceived accurately—or whether it’s there at all.

Surely it’s best to interpret historical figures’ words and actions as sincere at least some of the time. Cnut wrote a lengthy letter about his purposes for going to Rome, including negotiating ecclesiastical matters for the English church and repentance for his own sins. He must have meant some of that. Probably more than a modern person would guess. Compare my thoughts on modern historians’ judgment of what is and isn’t “likely” from last fall.

At any rate, bully for Tom Holland, and for Sandbrook and Carlin for being serious and enthusiastic students of history, even if they take theirs with a pinch more cynicism than is due. This two-part podcast series is fun, amusing, and wonderfully wide-ranging, and at several times also turns into a serious and thoughtful discussion of the historian’s art. It’s well worth your while.

In memory of Corporal Phillips

This is my old M41 field jacket, which I’ve shared photos of before but probably never really talked about. This is a reproduction item I found at a now-defunct army surplus store in Westminster, SC and saved up to buy when I was fourteen or fifteen. The 1st Infantry Division “Big Red One” insignia and WWII-era corporal’s chevrons I got from Medals of America (which was also the first place I ever heard of Fountain Inn, SC, where I now live).

Why the Big Red One, and why a corporal? Because this was the jacket that belonged to one of my first serious fictional characters, Cpl John Phillips.

Cpl Phillips was born in 10th grade keyboarding, a class in which I quickly outstripped our weekly typing exercises and was left with free time. A lot of free time. I would run out the clock hammering away at you-are-there scenes of the first wave at Omaha Beach—climbing down net ladders from their transports into Higgins boats that pitched and yawed in the heaving Channel; riding in to the smoking shore, some laughing, some throwing up; dashing into hell down a steel ramp; and working up the beach, through the wire, up the bluffs, and inland, scraping together what ad hoc forces they could along the way; culminating in the destruction of a German pillbox defending one of the beach’s critical draws. Cpl Phillips told me all about it, dispassionately, in great detail. He was my narrator.

Over my last three years of high school I spun out Phillips’s entire wartime career—from Oran and Sicily to the Hürtgen Forest and the Reich itself—and wrote two whole novels about it, both set in Normandy and the bocage, with its fortress-mazes of hedgerows.

Phillips’s stories owed a lot to the grunt’s-eye view stories in Stephen Ambrose and the first-person present-tense style of All Quiet on the Western Front, and were heavy on action, especially inspired improvisation in the face of surprising reversals. They were juvenilia in the purest sense—sincerely, straightforwardly imitative, learning by copying, and almost sweet in their naïve tough-mindedness and their desire to simultaneously shock, thrill, uplift, and move.

I spent a lot of imaginative time with Cpl Phillips. And well into college I’d occasionally check in with him mentally. He was born in 1920, and while I never got around to writing down all of his adventures or exploring all of the tragedies that befell his platoon, it really was like visiting an old family friend to think back and say, yes, Phillips survived the war, and got back to his wife Katherine, and he’s still alive and well at 82 (high school graduation). Or 87 (college graduation). Or 90 (grad school graduation).

But of course that would make him 102 now, and Phillips was too much of an average joe to have made it that long.

Suddenly this jacket, which I got in high school and added accurate patches to and actually wore around a lot (I was even cooler then than I am now, you see), has somehow become an heirloom to me, its original owner. So when I think about this fictional character, about whom I haven’t written a word in twenty years, a little part of me grieves. Were he real, he would have died sometime since he first told me those stories. And of course he was real enough to me.

Part of the curious and melancholy magic of imagination, of storytelling—even when those stories have never seen (and never will see) the light of day.

Not to end on a downbeat note, of course. Because in another part of me, Cpl Phillips is still alive and kicking, still cleaning his Thompson submachine gun, or sleeping in his foxhole, or swapping stories with Pfc Friday and Pfc Brown, or writing yet another letter home to Katherine.

Let me offer this as a coda: While Phillips himself has been minding his own business and I’ve mostly left him alone, his platoon commander did show up in Dark Full of Enemies, where he’s placing Pfc Grover Stallings under arrest in the Big Red One’s camp in southern England six months head of D-Day. That’d be 1/Lt Roberts, who I’m sad to say went on to die in late June of 1944 despite Phillips’s heroic efforts to carry him to an aid station. (I did mention All Quiet on the Western Front as an inspiration, didn’t I?) And let me here apologize that, on his way into the plot of Dark Full of Enemies, Pfc Stallings stole his pistol. Roberts may have died in my imagination, but the last time we see him alive in that novel he’s young, irritated, overawed and a little bewildered by the arrival of a Marine in the OSS, and still hasn’t discovered the theft. Though I’m sure Phillips and everyone else will hear about it later.

I’m sure they’re still laughing about it.

Difficult art and striving upward

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I recently read about the collapse of “cultural aspiration,” the desire of people to seek out, encounter, and enjoy the excellent in literature, music, art, architecture—you name it. Sooner or later I’m going to write at length about that essay and some of my thoughts on what has brought about this collapse. But part of it is surely resentment, the envy endemic to populism.*

Two items I’ve been reflecting on re. that essay and this cultural trend:

Item one—this blog post on “accessibility” in literature. The key passage:

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand—repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

Item two—from Letter 215 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, an incomplete draft of a letter on children’s books and aiming higher than one’s station, so to speak, in one’s reading:

We all need literature that is above our measure—though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time. But the energy of youth is usually greater. Youth needs then less than adulthood or Age what is down to its (supposed) measure. . . . Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life. But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in the right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Charges of “elitism” have always seemed, to me, to be a Trojan horse for becoming complacent. It begins by assuring yourself that failing to measure up to the standards of snobs is okay and ends with denying that there is any qualitative difference between the bad and the excellent. And so people who could enjoy the best are not only happy but congratulate themselves for staying put and reveling in the mediocre (or worse).

A final note: All my favorite books I have discovered either by 1) intentionally finding something reputed as good and stretching myself to understand it or 2) taking the recommendations of good friends who have already done #1.

Food for thought.

*Cf. CS Lewis in his essay “Democratic Education”: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you,’ is the hotbed of Fascism.”

Let us use it against him!

I am here fulfilling my obligation to have thoughts about Twitter’s change of ownership. I mostly find the “black hole of discourse” surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of the company hilarious. Such nonevents as a corporate takeover should primarily amuse us if we take note of them at all, especially when they are accompanied by such hysteria and hypocrisy. There’s a great Evelyn Waugh novel waiting to be written about this whole thing.

I’m struck that the two best things I’ve read about this come in the form of lists—in one case, theses. I present these as reading recommendations and conclude with one actual personal thought.

First, a friend passed along a post from Matt Yglesias’s blog Slow Boring entitled “Twenty-three theses on Elon Musk and Twitter.” Yglesias considers the odd transformation of Musk into the left’s current Emmanuel Goldstein, some technical problems of both Twitter and Musk’s Mars colonization project, and what consensus, moderation, and free speech mean in a medium like Twitter. I don’t agree with all of it, but Yglesias brings some seemingly unconnected subjects together in an interesting way and I’ve been pondering his post for several days. A sample:

The concept of “free speech” on Twitter strikes me as inherently problematic due to the platform’s reliance on algorithmic amplification and suppression of certain tweets. There are completely valid and understandable business reasons for operating that way, but free speech is fundamentally about neutrality with regard to content, and the fact is that Twitter is not a neutral platform, not a dumb pipe, and not a utility-type information-disseminator. I would in some sense like them to operate that way, but they don’t. And given that they don’t, the question of what they do and don’t promote is a valid thing to scrutinize.

Second, via Alan Jacobs’s blog, novelist Robin Sloan posts a shorter, broader list of thoughts on the same topic. Unlike Yglesias, who notes both technical problems presented by the way Twitter works as well as his own enjoyment of the platform in spite of it, Sloan is overtly critical of Twitter as a medium and a technology. Yglesias notes Twitter’s tendency to become a time sink; Sloan condemns its narrowness, the stranglehold it gets on the imagination of those who take up residence there:

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

Precisely correct. Twitter is not real life.

Sloan asserts that the best-case outcome for everyone is the “MySpace-ification” of Twitter, the “total abandonment of the platform.” (Jacobs on his blog a few days ago: “Elon Musk could become the world’s greatest hero by buying Twitter and then immediately shutting it down.” Endorsed.) I gave up Twitter cold-turkey five years ago this fall and Sloan tells the truth when he writes that:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

As it happens, the Coen brothers have shown us what to do when we unwittingly invite this kind of creature into our homes. But of course Musk is not going to destroy Twitter, and it may be decades before it gets MySpace-ified.

Read both Yglesias’s and Sloan’s pieces. I’ve gotten a lot out of them.

I can’t add anything to the political and culture war over Musk’s purchase of Twitter that hasn’t already been said, but let me note my support for free speech and my skepticism of technology, much less “content moderation,” as a solution. Everyone arguing about this seems to flatter themselves with the thought that Twitter will be good as long as they, the good people, have or take it under their control. But the problem isn’t misinformation on Twitter, the problem is Twitter. The temptations of a technological medium like this one, regardless of who owns or controls it, are part of the problem. For a parallel case of the temptations presented by technology, read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Bomber Mafia, which I reviewed here last year, and take a while to think about it.

In the end, what all of this sound and fury sounds like to me is just so much debate over, having decided not to destroy it, how best to use the Ring to defeat Sauron.