History has no sides

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

I started this post some weeks ago, but sickness—mine and others—intervened. Fortuitously so, since it seems appropriate to finish and post this as a New Year’s Eve reflection, a reminder as 2023 gives way, irretrievably, to 2024.

Writing in Law & Liberty a few weeks ago, Theodore Dalrymple takes the recent conflict between Venezuela and Guyana, a large area of which Venezuela is now claiming as its own territory, as an opportunity to consider an idea invoked by Guyana’s rightly aggrieved foreign minister: “the right side of history.”

This is now a common term for an idea that was already fairly widespread, a sort of popularized Whig or Progressive view of history’s supposed outworkings that, as Dalrymple notes, “implies a teleology in history, a pre-established end to which history is necessarily moving.” History has a goal, an ultimate good toward which societies and governments are moving, a goal that offers an easy moral calculus: if a thing helps the world toward that goal, it is good, and if it hinders or frustrates movement toward that goal, it is bad. This is how history comes to have “sides.”

As worldviews go, this is relatively simple, easily adaptable—whiggishness, as I’ve noted, tends to be its conservative form, and Progressivism or doctrinaire Marxism to be its liberal form—and offers a clarity to thorny questions that may have no easy answer. This is why people who believe in “the right side of history” are so sure both of themselves and of the perversity and evil of anyone who disagrees with them.

But “the right side of history” has one problem: it doesn’t exist. Dalrymple:

“[H]istory has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the ‘verdict of history,’ but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

But history has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the “verdict of history,” but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts, and the verdicts that they bring in often change with time. The plus becomes a minus and then a plus again. As Chou En-Lai famously said in 1972 when asked about the effect of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.” It is not merely that moral evaluations change; so do evaluations of what actually happened and the causes of what actually happened. We do not expect a final agreement over the cause or causes of the First World War. That does not mean that no rational discussion of the subject is possible—but finality on it is impossible.

“It is true,” he continues, “that there are trends in history, but they do not reach inexorable logical conclusions.” This is the false promise of Hegel or, further back, the Enlightenment. Outcomes are not moral judgements, and victories of one side over another are not proof of rightness. Dalrymple:

History is not some deus ex machina, or what the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, called the ghost in the machine; it is not a supra-human force, a kind of supervisory demi-urge acting upon humans as international law is supposed to act upon nations. . . . Are we now to say that authoritarianism is on the right side of history, as recently liberal democracy was only thirty years ago, because so much of the world is ruled by it?

To equate victory with goodness or to view success as superiority—the inescapable but usually unstated Darwinian element in “the right side of history”—is, as CS Lewis put it, to mistake “the goddess History” for “the strumpet Fortune.”

Dalrymple concludes with an important question, one he is unusually reticent in answering:

“History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

Does it matter if we ascribe right and wrong sides to history? I think it could—I cannot be more categorical than that. On the one hand, it might make us complacent, liable to sit back and wait for History to do our work for us. Perhaps more importantly, History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour as if we were acting as only automaton midwives of a foreordained denouement. But if history is a seamless robe, no denouement is final.

I’m going to be more categorical and say that it certainly matters whether we believe history has sides, and for the latter of the two reasons Dalrymple lays out. History—with a right and wrong side and a capital H—offers a rationalization, a handy excuse. Armed with an ideology and a theory of history’s endpoint and the post-Enlightenment cocksureness that society is malleable enough to submit to scientific control in pursuit of perfection, group after group of idealists has tried to shove, whip, or drag the world forward into the light. And when the world proves intractable, resistant to “the right side of history,” it is easy to treat opponents as enemies, blame them for failure, and eradicate them.

This is true even, and perhaps especially, of groups that start off making pacifist noises and decrying the violence and oppression of the status quo. The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks are only the most obvious examples, though our world in this, the year of our Lord 2023, is full of groups that have granted themselves permission to disrupt and destroy because they are on “the right side of history.” What do your puny laws, customs, and scruples matter in the face of History?

That’s the extreme danger, but a real one as the last few centuries have shown. Yet the first danger Dalrymple describes is even more insidious because it is so common as to become invisible—the smug complacency of the elect.

What kind of grim New Year’s Eve message is this? It’s a denunciation of a false idea, sure, but also a plea to view the change from 2023 to 2024 as no more than that—the change of a date. Year follows year. Time gets away from us. Everything changes without progress, things neither constantly improving nor constantly worsening and with no movement toward a perfect endpoint of anyone’s choosing.

Unless, of course, something from outside history intervenes. History, like war, like gravity, like death, is a bare amoral fact in a fallen world. If it is to have meaning and moral import at all it must come from somewhere other than itself. For those of us who believe in God, this is his providence. He has an endpoint and a goal and a path to get there but, tellingly, though he has revealed his ends he has kept his means, the way there, hidden. Based on what I’ve considered above, this is for our own good. The temptation not only to divine his hand in our preferred outcomes but to seize control of history and improve the world is powerful. We haven’t reached the end of it yet.

Until then, if history has sides at all, they are only the two sides of Janus’s face—looking behind and ahead, observing but never reaching either past or future. The more clearly we see this, the more deliberately we can dispel the luminous intellectual fog of thinking about the movement of History with a capital H, the more we can focus on the things nearest and most present with us. Celebrate the New Year, pray for your children, and get to work on the little patch that belongs to you, uprooting evil in the fields you know. That’s my goal, at least.

Thanks as always for reading. Happy New Year, and best wishes to you for 2024!

More if you’re interested

Dalrymple’s entire essay is worth your while. Read it at Law & Liberty here. The sadistic violence of the ostensibly pacifist French Revolutionaries is fresh on my mind because of David A Bell’s excellent book The First Total War, which I plan to write more about in my reading year-in-review. For CS Lewis on the false idea of “the judgement of history,” see here. And for one of my favorite GK Chesterton lines on progress, see here. For a view of history and progress and the pursuit of human perfectibility that closely aligns with my own, see Edgar Allan Poe here. Let me also end the year with another recommendation of Herbert Butterfield’s classic study The Whig Interpretation of History, the fundamental text in rebuking ideas of progress.

Buchan on the American Civil War

From John Buchan’s posthumously-published memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, Chapter IX, “My America,” which is a collection of his Tocqueville-esque observations of American culture:

Then, while I was at Oxford, I read Colonel Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson and became a student of the American Civil War. I cannot say what especially attracted me to that campaign: partly, no doubt, the romance of it, the chivalry and the supreme heroism; partly its extraordinary technical interest, both military and political; but chiefly, I think, because I fell in love with the protagonists. I had found the kind of man that I could whole-heartedly admire. Since those days my study of the Civil War has continued, I have visited most of its battlefields, I have followed the trail of its great marches, I have read widely in its literature; indeed, my memory has become so stored with its details that I have often found myself able to tell the descendants of its leaders facts about their forebears of which they had never heard.

What Buchan describes has—until pretty recently, anyway—probably been the case for many of us who first came to a love of history through the Civil War. Courage, cowardice, tragedy, glory, horror, and sentimentality; equipment, logistics, industrial outputs, orders of battle, and casualty figures; and a huge cast of colorful and shocking characters with ever-shifting soap opera-like relationships (think of the unease between Grant and his superior Halleck and the irony of Grant’s eventual promotion over Halleck, or all the bickering among the generals of Bragg’s army)—whether you study history for the drama, the ordinary people, or the numbers there for the crunching, there’s not just something for everyone in the Civil War, there’s a lot of it.

And for those of us who stuck with the Civil War or returned to it more seriously later, it furnishes a lot of ready imaginative and intellectual material for contemplation and comparison. Here’s Buchan himself from earlier in his memoir, on the early years of the First World War and General Douglas Haig specifically:

This was the attitude of all the principal commanders, British, French and German, at the beginning of the War. The campaign produced in the high command no military genius of the first order, no Napoleon, Marlborough or Lee, scarcely even a Wellington, a Stonewall Jackson or a Sherman. Its type was Grant. Hence changes of method had to come by the sheer pressure of events after much tragic trial and error.

This is the power of deep reading and study and the well-chosen allusion—one knows exactly what Buchan means by this, and it illuminates rather than obscures the situation he describes.

Buchan, who spent a stretch of the 1920s mentally recuperating from the First World War by writing biographies of men he admired—Montrose, Augustus, Cromwell—at one point planned to write a biography of Robert E Lee. He abandoned the project when he learned that a friend from Virginia was already working on one, a promising multi-volume work. The friend was Douglas Southall Freeman and the book was RE Lee.

But what I wouldn’t give to have Buchan’s perspective on that life.

End-of-semester book recommendations

I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?

Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.

In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.

I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates

A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.

Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz

John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)

The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.

I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands

For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.

The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis

One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.

Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne

This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)

Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.

A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson

Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.

Others

Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.

• Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.

• Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.

Conclusion

This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!

After-action report: 16th International Conference on World War II

An M4 Sherman of the 14th Armored Division crashes through the fence of the POW camp at Hammelburg, April 1945

Last weekend was the annual International Conference on World War II at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Learning last year—thanks to my friend and colleague Kirk at another college here in South Carolina—that online attendance was free was a major discovery, and this is the second year I’ve been able to tune in from afar.

As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve been sick all week, and though I began with grand intentions to read a lot, catch up on my significant backlog of correspondence, and publish several blog posts that have been simmering in draft form, pretty much all I’ve been able to do is lie in bed and read. I even started to go through my drafts folder deleting partially completed posts that I now deemed irrelevant, but just before I clicked delete on this one I took one more look at my outline and the few synopses I had already written.

I’m glad I did. I decided to buckle down and finish writing these up these, because the conference was excellent and I found blogging about it helpful last year. I hope these brief summaries will be helpful to y’all, too, and that you’ll seek out the recordings of these sessions at the museum’s Vimeo channel.

Thursday, December 7—Pre-conference symposium

The theme of Thursday’s pre-conference symposium was Finding Hope in a World Destroyed: Liberations and Legacies of World War II. The panel discussions therefore primarily focused on things happening immediately after the war or caused by the war rather than the war itself.

Europe in the Rubble, chaired by Jason Dawsey, panelists Robert Hutchinson and Gunter Bischof

A good opening session that paid particular attention to war crimes trials and sentencing. Dawsey outlined Soviet participation in—and manipulation of—the international war crimes trials at Nuremberg as well as the way Soviet concepts like “crimes against peace” have made their way into present-day intellectual norms. Hutchinson, in an especially interesting talk, discussed the often naïve ways American war crimes prosecutors, in the interests of fairness and with the goal of a kind of universalist liberal pedagogy, modeled their sentencing, appeals processes, and standards of “rehabilitation” for former Nazis on the American judicial system. The concept of the Nuremberg trials as “liberal show trials” that were meant, like Soviet show trials, to instruct observers was enlightening. Bischof’s talk briefly covered some major aspects of the Marshall Plan, including its popularity in Austria and the devastating results for Soviet-occupied countries of Soviet refusal to participate.

Books recommended: After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals, by Robert Hutchinson

Aftermath in Asia, chaired by John Curatola, panelists Yuma Totani and Rana Mitter

An opening talk on the eventual adoption by Japan of democracy and Western-style concepts of rights and equality as Douglas MacArthur’s greatest victory was somewhat interesting, though I have read enough Yukio Mishima to be suspicious of the supposed benefits of the Westernization, democracy, and capitalism imposed upon the Japanese. The second talk, on the trial and punishment of Japanese war criminals, began with some odd finger-pointing at Russia and the United States (over the invasion of Ukraine and the detention of terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, presumably, though this was not totally clear) as examples of moral failure before moving on to a very hard-to-follow narrative of Japan’s war crimes trials—which, knowing what kind of brutality the Japanese got up to during the war, makes the opening remarks seem silly by comparison. I struggled to follow this one.

The real draw for me was Rana Mitter, whom I have heard on The Rest is History and who always presents his work with enviable enthusiasm and mastery of the material. He didn’t disappoint. His talk on the role of China during the war was excellent, especially his attention to Chiang Kai-shek’s participation in the Cairo Conference, the subsequent reversal of what he accomplished there by the Soviets at Tehran just a few days later, and the lingering relevance of the war in modern China, which still uses the Cairo Declaration as grounds for claiming islands in the South China Sea, for example.

Follow-up Q&A for this one was more interesting, with one audience member asking pretty bluntly whether Emperor Hirohito should have stood trial for war crimes (Totani’s answer: “Yes”) and another describing how his elderly Chinese neighbor, who grew up during the war, is “adamant” that no one gave help to China because of the sheer number of funerals she remembers then.

Books recommended: Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, by Rana Mitter

A New World Order and Postwar US Responsibilities, chaired by William Hitchcock, panelists Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jeremi Suri, and Lizabeth Cohen

I found myself thinking of this one as “the liberal panel” in the sense of the sentimental, do-good liberalism of FDR. Indeed, the first talk was from a senior scholar of Eleanor Roosevelt and covered Mrs Roosevelt’s involvement in the development of the postwar UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As befit its subject, it was full of gassy positivity about equality and abstract political and social rights as well as gentle, disapproving shock that the US has still not signed onto some of the Declaration’s economic provisions. The third talk was an expert discussion of the ideals and, of course, the failures of “the consumer republic” created by the postwar economic boom, suburbanization, GI Bill education, and so forth, with a heavy emphasis on the failures, exclusions, and inequalities that persisted or were purportedly worsened as a result. You can read precisely the same yes-but approach to 1950s prosperity in the textbook I used for US History II this fall.

The panel ended with the chair suggesting a major lesson of the war was the power of the federal government to solve problems if it were only allowed to grow to the size necessary to handle them, as well as a breathless discussion of “the war on education” being waged in the US right now, with the first panelist admitting she hadn’t looked into its causes but still disapproved. I’d mildly suggest finding out why people are upset and what specifically they’re upset about before dismissing them as waging war on something as abstract as “education.”

However, the second of the three talks, by Jeremi Suri, was a masterful explanation of the quiet political revolution the United States underwent as a result of the war. Suri clearly laid out the ways participation in the war caused a massive extraconstitutional—and often unconstitutional—shift in the way the US government approached foreign policy and the military. The result was a country that began the 20th century with a mostly isolationist stance, an entrenched tradition of a small peacetime army made up of volunteers, and tight congressional controls on warmaking ended the 20th century entangled in the whole world’s affairs, maintaining vast alliances and with troops deployed to dozens of countries, and an enormous military under almost unchecked executive control. This was an excellent short talk and I hope to either assign it or play it in class for future sections of US History II.

We Shall Overcome: From Wartime Service to Social Change, chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Marcus Cox, Kara Vuic, and David Davis

Unfortunately I was only able to catch the first of the panelists, Marcus Cox, but he gave an exceptionally interesting talk on the challenges and, especially, the opportunities armed service during World War II presented to African-American men. He began with a moving personal reflection on his own grandfather’s US Army career from 1941 to retirement in 1972 and ended with brief snapshots of the roles played in the civil rights movement by black WWII veterans. A strong, worthwhile talk.

Rethinking World War II, Gen Raymond E Mason Jr Distinguished Lecture on World War II, Jeremy Black and Rob Citino

A very good freeform chat ranging across a variety of topics but concentrating mostly on the scale and scope of the war as well as some of its legacies. Black is by some measures the most published historian in the world (he publishes an average of about four books per year; here’s one I reviewed a couple years ago) and an expert on strategy. He had plenty to say on that not only from a theatre but a global perspective—some of his discussion of Japan, China, and the East dovetailed nicely with Mitter’s talk earlier in the day—as well as more nitty-gritty topics. Black is also, like Citino, his interlocutor in this discussion, funny and engaging as well as an expert who can always add more, making them well-matched and enjoyable to listen to. (“Easiest interview ever,” Citino joked at the end of the talk.)

Books recommended: Military Strategy: A Global History, A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps, and Air Power: A Global History, by Jeremy Black

Friday, December 8

Nimitz and His Commanders: Leadership in the PTO, roundtable discussion chaired by Jonathan Parshall, panelists Craig L Symonds and Trent Hone

A good discussion, based on Symonds’s book, of the character and leadership of Admiral Nimitz and the challenges he faced in his role as the Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet from after Pearl Harbor to the end of the war. One especially interesting topic was Nimitz’s Eisenhower-like ability to get difficult subordinates to work together.

Books recommended: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, by Craig L Symonds

In the Rubble, roundtable discussion moderated by Allan R Millett, panelists Keith Lowe and Donald Bishop

I was especially keen to listen to this discussion since Lowe’s Savage Continent strongly affected my understanding of the end and outcomes of the war when I read it about ten years ago. Both Lowe and fellow panelist Bishop, who primarily focused on Asia, were excellent, explaining graphically but dispassionately both the immediate challenges facing those left in the rubble—disease, starvation, homelessness, prostitution, rape—as well as longer-term problems like the plight of DPs (displaced persons), many of whom languished in camps for years. Lowe also discussed the often-overlooked ethnic cleansing that took place throughout Eastern Europe at the end of the war—at the same time the Soviets were violently suppressing native opposition in order to install puppet regimes—with millions of Germans from historically ethnically mixed regions of Poland, the Baltic, and Czechoslovakia either murdered or driven out, actions that caused the deaths of millions more Germans even after the war’s end. Lowe in particular was able to draw on conversations with a survivor of the aftermath for striking and poignant anecdotes.

Books recommended: A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955, by Ronald Spector, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe, War Trash, by Ha Jin

To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945, John C McManus in conversation with Conrad Crane

Another good book-based discussion, this one based on the recent final volume of McManus’s trilogy covering the US Army’s role in the Pacific Theatre, which is popularly associated more with the Navy and Marines. (I have the first volume, Fire and Fortitude, but haven’t read the entire book yet.) Some discussion of New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa.

Books recommended: McManus’s US Army in the Pacific trilogy, Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943, Island Infernos: The US Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944, and To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945.

Missed sessions:

• Our War, Too! chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Catherine Musemeche, Dave Gutierrez, and James C McNaughton

• Legacies of World War II, chaired by Gordon H “Nick” Mueller, panelists William Hitchcock and Jeremi Suri

Saturday, December 9

Dauntless: Paul Hilliard in World War II, WWII veteran Paul Hilliard in conversation with Rob Citino

Last year the Museum hosted centenarian veteran John “Lucky” Luckadoo, a B-17 pilot who flew 25 missions over Europe. This year the younger—at age 98!—Paul Hilliard gave a talk about his experience as a Marine dive bomber pilot in the Pacific. He also talked about growing up a Wisconsin farm boy and how, despite the Depression, he was largely unaware that his family was poor (“When you’re born on the floor you don’t spend a lot of time worrying about falling out of bed.”) Especially touching was his memory of the train ride from Wisconsin to California when he joined the Marines; he didn’t sleep for three days as he watched the magnificent American landscape roll past his window. After the war he went to college and wound up, through an odd series of circumstances, in the oil business, which settled him in New Orleans, where he has practiced philanthropy toward the WWII Museum, an art museum, and other institutions for decades. I greatly enjoyed Hilliard’s talk, especially since, with his genuine rags to riches story, toughness, and hard work coupled with good humor, he reminded me so much of my granddad.

Books recommended: Dauntless: Paul Hilliard in World War II and a Transformed America, by Rob Citino, Ken Stickney, and Lori Ochsner

Monuments Men and Women: A Never-Ending Story, with Robert M Edsel

The most flat-out enjoyable session of the conference. Edsel is a businessman who first became interested in art preservation during a trip to Italy. Wondering how it was that local people managed to preserve their artistic and architectural treasures during the most destructive war in history, few people were able to offer him answers. He set out to learn for himself. The result was several books, including The Monuments Men, the basis of the George Clooney film ten years ago, and The Monuments Men and Women Foundation, which Edsel helped establish. The MMWF exists to promote the memory of the people, mostly middle-aged academics with no military experience, who worked with troops on the frontlines to protect, recover, and return artwork stolen by the Nazis during the war. It also actively seeks lost artwork—there are still millions of works unaccounted for from the war—for restitution and has worked with the US military to reestablish a unit dedicated to art protection in war zones.

Edsel spoke with great passion as he told the story of the original monuments men—a much larger group and who worked for far longer than the Clooney film could convey—and the work of his foundation. He briefly described the careers of some important members of the unit, as well as the handful who were killed or wounded in action as part of their work. He also told some especially interesting and even moving stories about works of art either stolen by the Nazis or simply taken as souvenirs by GIs at the end of the war being restored to their rightful owners many decades after the war.

But I was most moved by Edsel’s passionate advocacy of the place of art in the memories and souls of people. In an age of ideologically-motivated vandalism and destruction of art, in which crowds cheer the toppling of statues and activists destroy paintings in the name of political platforms, to hear someone speak up so forcefully on behalf of preservation in the name of the dead and for future generations was more refreshing than I can express.

Books recommended: The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which is the basis of the film The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney, Rescuing Da Vinci, and Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, by Robert M Edsel

Mass Murder and Memory in Eastern Europe, the George P Shultz Forum on World Affairs, Christopher Browning in conversation with Alexandra Richie

A grim but outstandingly good discussion. Richie was one of my favorite panelists last year, when she covered the 1944 Warsaw Uprising among other things, so I was excited to hear her talk with the great historian Christopher Browning. They focused primarily on Browning’s classic study Ordinary Men, which examined the role played by a single battalion of reservist military policemen in killing tens of thousands of Jews in one region of Nazi-occupied Poland during the first phase of the Holocaust, when local populations were shot in batches rather than shipped to extermination camps. Browning and Richie walked through the book’s major points—that the reservists in question were not die-hard Nazis but middle-aged, bourgeois types, that there was no penalty for refusing to participate in the killings, that most of them participated in the beginning and all of them participated by the end.

Richie and Browning also discussed some of the aspects of social psychology he used to understand—rather than explain—how these men, who were neither Nazis nor psychopaths, could do what they did, including the Milgram tests, which found that physical and psychological distance were key factors in enabling the maximum infliction of suffering on other people at the behest of authority, and the Stanford prison experiment. They also helpfully talked through some of the controversies about methodology and interpretation surrounding the book.

I routinely recommend Ordinary Men when I teach World War II in class and will certainly use or assign this one-hour talk in the future, offering as it does a succinct but still chilling summary of the book’s themes, the most important of which is the challenging truth that there’s not as much difference between mass killers like these and ourselves as we’d like to think.

Books recommended: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning

Missed sessions:

• Forgotten Heroes, chaired by Jeffrey Sammons, panelists Maj Gen Peter Gravett and Cameron McCoy

• General Lesley J McNair: Unsung Architect of the US Army, Mark Calhoun in conversation with John C McManus

Conclusion

I was able to catch a majority of the conference sessions this year, and it was exceptionally rewarding. I’m grateful again to the National WWII Museum for hosting this event and making it available to attend online for free. Their hard work in educating the public and remembering the war and the men who fought it is, I hope, paying off. I’m certainly looking forward to next year.

Thanks for reading! I hope this has been helpful to you and that you’ll check out some of these sessions online as well as some of the books mentioned during the conference.

Ciceronian political moderation

I’ve been slowly, slowly reading through John Buchan’s posthumously published memoir Memory Hold-the-Door over the last couple of months. I’m sick for the third or fourth time since October, and while resting yesterday I dived back into Buchan’s book again and reached the point in his career when he entered politics, standing as a Conservative candidate for the Commons in 1911. Buchan:

My political experience at the time was nil, and my views were shallow and ill-informed—inclinations rather than principles. I believed profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world peace, and as a factor in the solution of all our domestic problems, but I no longer accepted imperial federation, and I had little confidence in Mr. Chamberlain’s tariff policy. For socialism I had the distrust that I felt for all absolute creeds, and Marxism, to which I had given some attention, seemed to me to have an insecure speculative basis and to be purblind as a reading of history. On the other hand I wanted the community to use its communal strength when the facts justified it, and I believed in the progressive socialisation of the State, provided the freedom of the personality were assured. I had more sympathy with socialism than with orthodox liberalism, which I thought a barren strife about dogmas that at that time had only an antiquarian interest. But I was a Tory in the sense that I disliked change unless the need for it was amply proved, and that I desired to preserve continuity with the past and keep whatever of the old foundations were sound. As I used to put it in a fisherman's simile, if your back cast is poor your forward cast will be a mess.

There’s much to both agree and quibble with here—not least whether it’s even possible to have “freedom of the personality” under an ever more socialist state, though one has to forgive Buchan for having no idea just how bloated and all-smothering a bureaucracy could become—but the thing about Buchan is I know we could have a good-faith conversation about it. And I agree with most of the rest of it, especially the barrenness of liberalism and the need for continuity.

Buchan seems to have been ill-at-ease in the world of politics, not only because of his “inclinations” and his lack of striving ambition but because of his broad sympathies, fairmindedness, and honesty.

I had always felt that it was a citizen’s duty to find some form of public service, but I had no strong parliamentary ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment which I felt impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent.

Ditto. This is actual political moderation, not the phony and elusive “centrism” promoted as the cure to our ills.

Buchan then quotes a passage from Macaulay’s History of England that describes the political stance of the 1st Marquess of Halifax, a political attitude that Buchan owned he “was apt to fall into”:

His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector.

This description of his inclinations and positions, and most especially the passage from Macaulay, brought to mind Finley Hooper’s summary of Cicero’s politics, one I’ve often felt describes my own “inclinations” and that I now try consciously to hold myself to. Hooper, in his Roman Realities:

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

Hear hear. But while both Cicero and Buchan were sensitive to the cultural rot and decadence that manifested itself among the political elite and the wider culture, both would also aver that politics is not the solution. In Cicero’s own, words: “Electioneering and the struggle for offices is an altogether wretched practice.”

I’ve been savoring Memory Hold-the-Door, a warmly written and often poignant book, and I look forward to finishing it. And the above is not the only distinctly Ciceronian passage. Buchan, no mean classicist, describes his friend and publisher Tommie Nelson, who was killed in the First World War, this way:

His death made a bigger hole in the life of Scotland than that of any other man of his years. . . . In the case of others we might regret the premature loss to the world of some peculiar talent; with Tommie we mourned especially the loss of a talent for living worthily and helping others to do likewise. It is the kind of loss least easy to forget, and yet one which soon comes to be contemplated without pain, for he had succeeded most fully in life.

This could come straight from Cicero’s De Amicitia (On Friendship), another favorite essay of mine from late in his life. Interesting how a long life and nearness to an unexpected death sharpened the insights of both men.

For more of Cicero on politics, see this election day post from three years ago. For Buchan’s nightmare vision of individual moral rot leading to civilizational decline, see here.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

On lunatics and cranks

Last week a friend shared a screenshot of an interesting theory propounded, as all world-changing theories are, in someone’s Instagram comments. You know the Vikings? The old Norse raiders who terrorized all of Europe from the Baltic and the North Sea to the Mediterranean, laid the foundations of Russia, served generations of Byzantine emperors, and traded as far away as Baghdad and the Caspian Sea? Made up. Totally made up. A fictional scapegoat for the crimes of Christians. The Vikings were invented, you see, to cover up for the Knights Templar everywhere the Templars went a-pillaging.

It shouldn’t be hard to see problems with an idea like this—which shouldn’t even really be dignified with the name “theory.” In addition to all the basic factual stuff like when these groups lived and were active and where they lived and were active, it neglects the veritable Himalayas of evidence supporting the existence of the Vikings: letters, chronicles, charters, linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence on three continents… Name a field of historical investigation and there is a branch dedicated to the Viking Age. Just to deal with texts alone, Michael Livingston’s recent study of one battle between the Anglo-Saxons and a Viking coalition, Brunanburh, used sources in Old English, Latin, Irish, Old Norse, and Welsh to reconstruct what we can know about it. Was all of this manufactured and planted later?

Whatever. Anyone proposing an idea like this doesn’t know how we know what happened in the past; they don’t know how history works. Perhaps they should get into filmmaking.

But the hypothetical culprit behind Viking violence in this particular theory reminded me of a favorite line from Umberto Eco that I once shared here many years ago. This passage comes from Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum:

“A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

— Umberto Eco

“[E]verything proves everything else” should be a recognizable pattern nowadays. A theory like the one above is lunacy.

Revisiting Eco’s diagnostic passage also brings to mind one in which Joseph Bottum defines the crank, a type similar to but with important differences from the lunatic. Here’s Bottum with his useful working definition that manages to nail three common crank fixations, all of which have gotten plenty of play recently:

“There are three infallible signs of the crank—that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”

— Joseph Bottum

To put the distinction another way, there’s no arguing with a lunatic, but a crank will argue you under the table. Not that a crank is any nearer the truth than the lunatic, but whatever fixation a crank has will lend itself to tabulation, nitpicking, and a kind of big-data hairsplitting that feels like thought in a way the world-bestriding historical revisions of the lunatic do not. That guy you know who thinks the CIA shot down Flight 370 in order to cover up the fake moon landing on behalf of Satan-worshiping lizard people is a lunatic. That guy you know who posts three times a day about crypto—or the Fed, or the Mossad, or “the Zionists,” or, yes, Shakespeare—is a crank. And there’s a reason you avoid engaging.

For a case study in anti-Shakespeare crankery, see Jonathan Kay at the National Post here. (And I would recommend Kay’s book Among the Truthers for a broad and insightful study of lunatics, cranks, and other similar species.) And here’s a short reflection from Sonny Bunch, inspired by Bottum’s line about cranks and overlapping somewhat with Chesterton’s observations, about how conspiracy theories can reveal a lot—just not about the subject of the theory.

I posted that Eco quotation in the early days of this blog as an addendum to a long passage from Chesterton about the biased of motivated thinking of cranks. You can read that here. For crank-on-crank combat, see the world-class observer of the scene, Charles Portis, in Gringos, here.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.

Napoleon

Scope: Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) invades Egypt in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

Back in the summer I briefly meditated on scope and depth as storytelling principles. Not every novel or film can afford to have scope, the sweeping vision of epic fantasy and high historical drama, but every story should have depth. Should. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon may be the ultimate example of scope without depth.

Beginning with the execution of Marie Antoinette during the Jacobin Terror, Napoleon follows its main character (Joaquin Phoenix) through his first campaigns as a young officer—storming the British-held fortress at the port of Toulon, invading Egypt—and into the political machinations, plotting, and blunt strong-arming that elevated him not only to highest ranks of the French Republic’s army but to the throne as Emperor. During this ten-year segment, he meets, woos, marries, is betrayed by, and himself betrays the older widow Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), the first act of a tumultuous and unpleasant lifelong relationship.

The second half of the film, covering another eleven years, charts Bonaparte’s greatest triumphs—victory over the Austrians and the Holy Roman Empire, alliance with Russia—as well as his two downfalls: first after the disastrous invasion of Russia and his exile to Elba, second after his return to the throne and “the Hundred Days,” the campaign that ended at Waterloo and with a final exile to the farthest reaches of the South Atlantic. It also dramatizes the collapse of his marriage to Joséphine, his remarriage to an Austrian archduchess, and Joséphine’s loneliness and death. A brief coda on Saint Helena, subtly suggesting the theory that Bonaparte was poisoned, ends the film.

In all, Napoleon covers 27 years in the life of one of the busiest, most important, and most complicated figures in modern history. And with Ridley Scott directing, the film has scope in abundance. From the drawing rooms of Paris and the deserts of Egypt to the battlefields of central Europe and the freezing steppes of Russia, and with energetic, powerful battle scenes featuring hundreds of extras, galloping horses, and thunderous explosions, Napoleon is visually stunning.

What Napoleon does not have, unfortunately, is depth. It can only offer a whirlwind tour of some of the most important moments of Bonaparte’s long and brutal career—Toulon, the Royalist uprising of 13 Vendémiaire, the Egyptian campaign, his coronation, Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo, and negotiations galore—as well as a breathless, simplified account of his tempestuous and unfaithful marriage to Joséphine.

This would not in itself be bad, if it could at least suggest depth, but most of the events of the film have been simplified to the point that they misrepresent what happened. One would think, based on Napoleon, that Bonaparte abandoned the campaign in Egypt just because he was jealous of the cheating Joséphine, or that he was deposed and exiled by his own people immediately after returning from Russia. In fact, he was far from done—the biggest battle ever fought in Europe to that point occurred between his Russian campaign and exile, a battle that doesn’t even make the casualty list in the closing credits.

All of which could, again, be forgivable, since Scott was apparently more interested in crafting a character study punctuated by violent battles, but the characters themselves are presented in the same shallow manner. This is especially evident in the film’s treatment of the central relationship between Bonaparte and Joséphine. Though just as canny, calculating, and amoral a user as Bonaparte, the film presents Joséphine as a doe-eyed victim. Bonaparte, once the naïve puppy dog stage of his obsession with Joséphine has been ended by her infidelity, spends the rest of the film as a randy nerd. (This particular aspect is not inaccurate but it’s hardly the full picture.) These were two nasty, deeply unpleasant characters, and a deeper, more honest portrayal could have made an interesting study of a relationship that genuinely deserves the cliché “toxic.”

Part of the problem may be cuts made to get the film to theatrical length. Scott has, annoyingly, already trumpeted the existence of a theoretically superior director’s cut that is more than two hours longer and that apparently includes more relationship drama. That could well smooth out the choppy middle of the film and allow more time for us to understand these two.

But another part of the problem is Joaquin Phoenix as Bonaparte. To my surprise, I wasn’t bothered by Phoenix’s age (he’s about the age now that the real Bonaparte was when he died, making him more than twice the right age for the siege of Toulon at the beginning of the film), though Kirby’s far more youthful looks obscure the fact that Joséphine was the older and worldlier of the two by six years. What did bother me was that Phoenix’s performance never gelled into a believable portrait of a single individual. In some scenes he’s brilliant, capturing his insight, confidence, and bluff, rough humor, and his scenes with Joséphine are realistically uncomfortable, vacillating as Bonaparte does between childish infatuation, coldness, frat boy lust, and cruelty. But missing from the entire film is any sense of the charisma and drive that united all of these other Napoleons and that unmistakably come through in any book about the man. Napoleon tells you a lot about Bonaparte, but not why anyone would follow him, much less admire him.

Again, perhaps more footage would help, though one wishes the director would just release a coherent film and not lean on the crutch of the after-the-fact director’s cut.

The film’s lack of depth also makes some of the few events it does depict incomprehensible. I am no expert on the Napoleonic era, but I wondered as I watched how well someone without even my limited understanding would be able to follow it. Not well, as it turns out. Two of the three other people I watched it with said they found it “confusing.”

I’ve dwelt on Napoleon’s flaws, but I actually did enjoy it. It’s well-shot, with moody cinematography, and certain sequences are as good as anything else Scott has directed. The scenes at Toulon, the Russian campaign—especially the burning of Moscow, when Bonaparte finally comes up against an enemy he doesn’t understand and can’t intimidate—and the Waterloo scenes are the best in the film. I had also heard that the film was unexpectedly funny; it was, with some authentically Gallic barbs exchanged. I also liked much of the score, including this haunting Kyrie that plays over the (wildly inaccurate and exaggerated) Austerlitz scene, though the film also uses the most recognizable track from Dario Marianelli’s Pride & Prejudice score twice, and in tonally inappropriate ways. As the film belongs strictly to Bonaparte and Joséphine, few other characters get a chance to shine, but Rupert Everett’s Wellington dominates his few scenes late in the film. I would like to have seen more of him. The climactic Waterloo sequence also offers a simple but effective dramatization of how the pressures of time and geography shaped Bonaparte’s choices that day, as well as the outcome.

You’ll notice that I haven’t said much about the film’s accuracy. I don’t see why anyone should bother. Not long after I critiqued some of his remarks on historical accuracy to HistoryHit’s Dan Snow, Scott demonstrated his contempt for history even more clearly in a New Yorker profile. His film deals loosely with the facts, giving Joséphine, in just one obvious example, an extra year of life so that her death coincides with Bonaparte’s return from Elba. Napoleon offers an adequate bullet-list overview of its subject’s career but shouldn’t be trusted on any specifics.

That’s a shame, a missed opportunity, but unfortunately Scott decided at some early point in his career that he need not take pains over story and Napoleon finds him true to form, arrogantly indifferent both to the truth and to the people who care about it.

Despite it all, I found Napoleon entertaining and mostly liked it. If it had depth to match its scope, and if it had a less promiscuous relationship with the facts (taking a cue from its subjects, perhaps?), it might have been great. But as it is, it’s a sometimes rousing entertainment with a few standout action scenes and a curious central performance, but little else—an interesting footnote to a storied career. Not Scott’s Waterloo, but perhaps his Saint Helena.

Poetry of reinforcement

From Tom Shippey’s preface to his new translation of Beowulf, in which he notes some of the strange poetic artifacts of the poem’s alliterative form and explores their deeper implications—both for the poem’s original audience and for us:

King David as Anglo-Saxon bard in the Vespasian Psalter

One may sum up by saying that, rather oddly, the words in the poem which receive the greatest sonic emphasis are sometimes the ones which carry the least information. They are there to help the poet with the first of his major aims: which is, one might say, to maintain the beat and the meter of his poetic lines.

This seems a rather humble aim to us, for our idea of poetry is that its wording should be exact, unexpected, provocative—to paraphrase the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who has just been introduced to Shakespeare—words which make you feel like you'd sat on a pin. But we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet's second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.

The modern vision of the poet as an outsider speaking truth to power and challenging norms is not only historically recent but a sadly narrow and limiting vision of what poetry does. It requires a posture of continuous antagonism to everything that grows both tedious and phony. The stereotype of the tiresome and hypocritical modernist poet and his or her predictably transgressive free verse exists for a reason.

But worse, this vision of poetry and the poet warps the interpretation of the great poetry of the past. People go galloping off in search of the hidden subversion in Homer or Beowulf and, having searched long enough and screwed their jeweler’s loupe of critical theory tightly enough into their eye, find it. Turns out these poets were just like the longhairs at the campus poetry slam. But, satisfied with presentist political interpretations, they miss what’s actually going on—and the chance to encounter people radically unlike themselves.

Good poetry can challenge, certainly. But I’d argue that the most effective and lasting prophetic verse challenges from within a culture—thus the entire power of the Old Testament prophets—rather than from some self-congratulatory political margin. But just as often, if not more so, good poetry reminds its audience of who they are. Remember, it says, This is us. This is what we love. This is what we must protect. And, with striking frequency, This is what we have lost. Consider the worlds in which the Iliad and Beowulf were composed and the poetry of reinforcement and shared love and loss makes much more sense.

Recovering the ability to “feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition” may prove a crucial part of the modern man’s great spiritual task.

Shippey has an online Beowulf “masterclass” coming up at the beginning of December. I’ve already signed up. It should be well worth your while if you’re interested in this period and its poetry. You can find information about the class here.

Homer's imaginative sympathy

Earlier this week I ran across a book called The World of Herodotus at our local used book store. The author sold me on it instantly—Aubrey de Sélincourt, whom I know best as a translator of Livy and Herodotus for Penguin Classics in its early years. When I got home and was leafing through it, I happened across this passage, which expresses what is to me one of the strongest and characteristic features of Homer’s poetry:

“[T]he burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy.”

— Aubrey de Sélincourt

Is the Iliad the tragedy of Hector, who is killed, or of Achilles, who loses his friend—and is himself doomed, as we know, to early death? The question is idle, because the burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy. It is no part of Homer’s purpose to exalt the Greeks at the expense of the Trojans or the Trojans at the expense of the Greeks. He does not take sides. If Mycenae is ‘golden’, Troy is ‘holy’; if Achilles is ‘splendid as a god’, Hector is ‘glorious’, and Priam as well as Agamemnon is shepherd of his people. We are moved by the grief of Achilles when his friend is killed, but we are moved as deeply by the noble scene in which the King of Troy humbles himself to come to Achilles’ tent and beg for the body of his son. Greeks and Trojans—all are men, splendid in manhood, and the poet looks upon them with benign and indifferent love. They fight to the death, for it is the nature of men to do so—of men proud of their strength and skill, hungry for honour and fame, glorying in the sunlight and the world of sense, but doomed so soon to fall like the leaves of a tree and to go down into the eternal darkness. It is a view of life stripped of complexity, bare of speculation, unburdened by any mystery but the ultimate mysteries of beauty and of death.

I’ve taken pains to explain Homer’s fair and sympathetic presentation of both sides of the Trojan War—his concern being less with political rights and wrongs or regional loyalty and more with arete regardless of who demonstrates it—to my students for many years. This puts it beautifully.

I especially like how de Sélincourt talks of sympathy rather than its weakling modern cousin, empathy. Sympathy, which is not coincidentally a Greek word, is what Homer evokes so powerfully throughout, even—or perhaps especially—in those vignettes that introduce us to a character as he’s dying violently. Remember that, at root, sympathy means to feel with or even to suffer with, and who hasn’t finished the Iliad feeling as if he’s suffered alongside Hector, Achilles, and Priam?

I have to anticipate at least one modern rejoinder, though, provoked by de Sélincourt’s repeated use of the word men there. Wouldn’t a dead white man’s sympathies be narrow and bigoted? Aren’t the Iliad and the Odyssey just war stories for boys? Aren’t the main characters all afflicted with toxic masculinity? Certainly the readership for the present fad of feminist parallax fiction based on Greek myth would think so, to judge by the way they talk about these stories. To which I can only say that they haven’t read Homer very well, if at all, and that it’s not Homer whose “breadth of imaginative sympathy” is limited.

If Homer, in his world, could reach across boundaries and battle lines to feel and understand—and to make his audience feel and understand—I think he deserves as much or better from us.

500 blog posts!

Not quite a year ago I celebrated the fifth anniversary of this blog. I wasn’t sure, at that time, precisely how many posts I had on here, but knew it was just over 400. I’ve kept better track since then, and as far as I can tell this post is the 500th in just under six years.

To celebrate, I looked back at my analytics from the beginning of this site in December 2017 to the present to see what the biggest hits have been. It’s an interesting grab-bag—a few things I consciously tried to make as appealing as possible, a few things that made almost zero impression when I first wrote them but slowly gathered momentum over years, a couple that have crept into the top Google results for very specific terms, and a few personal pieces that made it big in surprising ways, including getting linked from a New York Times op-ed. I offer these up as a top-ten, with a little commentary.

10 most popular blog posts to date

Ranked in order of popularity:

• Willy Wonka’s Hidden Nazi Joke, May 2, 2020—A favorite bit of trivia that I wrote about in the structure of clickbait as an experiment. Apparently it worked. This is far and away the most popular thing I’ve ever posted here and is the top Google result for several related searches. Three and a half years on and I can still count on it going viral on Facebook or Reddit a couple of times a year.

• Kingdom of Heaven, March 26, 2018—The most popular—and probably the best—of my short-lived Historical Movie Monday series, this post has gotten a steady drip of traffic for five and a half years. I still refer back to it myself, as I recently did when responding to Ridley Scott’s ideas about history and historical accuracy.

• Jon Daker, RIP, February 24, 2022—I was as surprised as anyone that this post blew up. When I found out that internet legend Jon Daker had died early last year, I was moved to pay tribute and reflect a little on what we can both enjoy and learn from his public access TV humiliation. It seems to have resonated with a lot of people. Note that this is easily the most recent post on this list and you should get some idea of the speed with which it spread.

• My top nine Civil War novels, August 2, 2018—A personal favorites list that I published ahead of the release of Griswoldville. Needs updating but still gets traffic. Every once in a while someone looks at Griswoldville after reading it, but only every once in a while. I guess I should try the Willy Wonka clickbait approach.

• What’s wrong, Chesterton? February 28, 2019—I wrote this one day after driving back and forth between two campuses of my college. The famously misattributed/misquoted Chesterton line “Dear sirs: I am” had crossed my mind and I determined to find the source for myself, definitively. When I did, I transcribed and shared the whole original source so that it’d be more easily accessible. To my surprise, a lot of people were also keen to find it. Even more surprising, this post is now in the footnotes or bibliographies of at least four books (here’s one, and here’s another that came out just last month), which I accidentally discovered early this year, and was cited in a David French op-ed in the New York Times this summer.

• I’m not saying it was aliens, August 9, 2018—A slightly labored reflection on the pseudo- or ersatz-religious role played by aliens in many popular imaginations. An important idea to me, but perhaps not expressed as well as it could be. I’ve been considering revisiting this topic one of these days, especially considering how much more I hear about Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock, and the pyramids than “Ancient Aliens” now.

• I’m not saying Ancient Aliens is racist… November 6, 2020—Curiously, despite a gap of more than two years this post only has a few hits less than the one above, meaning that these two, which both play on an old meme, are almost tied in this top ten. This one has gotten more traffic in less time thanks to a few prominent shares on Facebook and Twitter and the attention given to pretty much any accusation of racism. As it happens, I think the racism of ancient astronauts theories is an accident born of their chronological snobbery (as Charles Portis noted in Gringos), which I tried to suggest in this post.

• The Winter War, May 14, 2018—Another Historical Movie Monday post, one made possible by the loan of a DVD copy of this hard-to-find Finnish war epic from a Finnish coworker who has now retired. A seriously impressive and hard-hitting movie that I hope this post has made more people seek out. Now if some enterprising home media company would just release a good Region 1 Blu-ray…

• Jefferson on ignorance and freedom, October 3, 2019—A short reflection on a relatively well-known passage from one of Jefferson’s late letters. I’m glad this one has (again, unexpectedly) gotten so much attention, because the quotation is often garbled or misattributed and I think it’s an important idea well worth meditating on.

• Hacksaw Ridge, April 16, 2018—One of the last Historical Movie Monday posts before that series petered out, a post that I remember getting little response at the time but which snuck into the top ten most popular posts on the blog over the last five years. A good movie I need to revisit.

Ten most popular blog posts of the last year

You might note a kind of inverse recency bias in the top ten list above, as older posts have had more time to collect hits and work their way up in Google search results, which is still where I get most of my traffic. But I’m also struck that it’s not the most representative sample of what I typically post here. To get a better glimpse, to give more recent posts a chance to shine for anyone who hasn’t looked at them, and to unnecessarily drag out this celebration, here are the ten most popular posts from the last year, a top ten I’m pretty proud of:

• Borges on the two registers of English, June 7, 2023—A response to a clip of William F Buckley and Jorge Luis Borges discussing the relative strengths of English and Spanish on “Firing Line,” this clip got picked up by two much more popular blogs (one on linguistics, one on Catholic homeschooling) and a professor with a lot of Facebook followers and really blew up. I really enjoyed these reflections so I’m glad others have found them enlightening.

• Frozen II’s big dam problem, December 13, 2022—This post started as an e-mail to my friends at Before They Were Live, a Disney animation podcast, and turned into a protracted grumble about one of the many things in Frozen II that don’t make sense and why it’s not just an artistic failing.

• Notes on rereading Storm of Steel, December 3, 2022—Exactly what it says on the tin: a less structured series of observations and reflections based on my first reading of Ernst Jünger’s great World War I memoir since grad school. Storm of Steel is an astonishingly powerful book that, like its author, has often been misrepresented. I hope those who have stumbled across this post have found it helpful, and that if they haven’t read the book they do after reading these thoughts.

• Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math, March 16, 2023—2+2=5 is a commonplace example of denial of reality. It’s strongly associated with Orwell, but when the author of an essay I came across suggested that Orwell got it from Camus, I had to go back further and suggest that one or both of them were riffing on Chesterton. This post has gotten interesting traction in the months since I shared it.

• On the term “Anglo-Saxon,” November 11, 2022—One of the most important posts, to me, in the last year, a response of the foolish, politically-motivated movement to avoid or censor the term “Anglo-Saxon” as racist.

• History must be written forward, May 10, 2023—A short reflection on historical perspective and presentism inspired by a passage in the introduction to a history of Germany that I didn’t finish reading. I’ll return to it one of these days on the strength of passages like this.

• 2022 in books, January 2, 2023—My favorite reads of last year. These posts usually don’t get sustained traffic but people keep coming back to this one. I hope they read at least some of what I recommend, because last year was a very good reading year for me.

• All Quiet on the Western Front, March 19, 2023—My ambivalent but mostly negative review of the new German-language film adaptation of Remarque’s novel. Short version: a technically magnificent bad adaptation.

• My problems with Glass Onion, February 10, 2023—Another film post, of which I’ve written more this year, this time sorting through some things that hung on and bothered me in the otherwise entertaining Rian Johnson whodunnit Glass Onion, which Sarah and I saw last fall.

• On ancient and medieval “propaganda,” January 16, 2023—Another post parsing a controversial term, this one a term that seems to me to have a purely modern and political valence that is distorting and anachronistic when applied to the past. I picked apart several examples that have been bugging me for years. I still see and hear people do this, so the struggle isn’t over yet.

Conclusion

As always, I appreciate y’all’s readership. This little bit of practice, this commonplace book, has been a fun and rewarding outlet, and the fact that people read and enjoy it still humbles me. It’s been a busy month, but I’ve got more things line up to write about once I can scrape together the time. It means a lot that y’all will be here for it. Thanks again! Here’s to 500 more posts!