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Stagger onward rejoicing

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the state and the people

A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by which people have become “legible” to the state. At that point I had not read a classic, though a somewhat controversial classic, of history, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. I am reading it right now, and when I saw the book’s first two paragraphs I thought, Damn, I wish I had known this when I wrote that essay. Here they are:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since I January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

Highlighting mine. Of course it would be war that created the bureaucratic mechanisms of modern identity, for, as Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”

I’m just making notes for later reflection here, but: The creation of this identity system led to a complex and ever-shifting pattern of relation between the state and modern capitalism. James Burnham, in his landmark book The Managerial Revolution, argued that the comprehensive power of the state would lead to the rise of a managerial class that would take power away from the capitalists. But it hasn’t really worked out that way, has it?

When I come back to these issues — which I will do eventually — I expect to say a little more about Bourne and Burnham, about George Orwell’s reviews of Burnham, and about anarchism. And maybe even about the Church.

styles of acting, styles of being

One of my favorite YouTubers is Thomas Flight, who makes videos about movies. In a recent video, he contrasts the “theatrical” acting style of classic Hollywood movies with the “naturalistic” style of today’s movies. Flight’s treatment of this issue is better than most, but he overlooks a key point — one that almost everyone who discusses this issue overlooks.

The difference in acting styles is real enough, and obvious to all. And if you ask people who are bothered by older acting styles why they are bothered, they’ll almost always say something like this: “People just don’t talk that way.” To which the proper response should be: “Are you sure about that?”

After all, how do we know what ordinary people — unphotographed people, unrecorded people — talked like 80 or 90 years ago? That’s not information we have access to, because we weren’t there. Even if we know people who are very old, we can’t confirm that their speaking style now is identical to what it was when they were young. Everyone’s speech is, to some greater or lesser extent, shaped by their social context. We don’t learn our words from dictionaries, but from other people. Surely everyone notices the way that people pick up words, phrases, intonations, and gestures from friends. Our verbal acquisitiveness slows down as we get older but it never stops — and a lot of humor arises from this, as senior citizens have a tendency to appropriate language inaccurately.

(Among filmmakers, the Coen brothers are specially aware of how all this works. For instance, Maud Lebowski refers to a penis as a “Johnson,” which puzzles the Dude — “Johnson?” — but then later in the movie he’s using the term himself. I could cite several examples from other Coen movies. And among scholars the best writer on this subject is of course Bakhtin.)

Moreover, everyone code-switches to some extent — that is, employs different linguistic resources according to audience and context — and how they talk in any one situation is but a partial indication of “how they really talk.” So, when public figures get secretly recorded, listeners often feel that they’ve received some insight into “what they’re really like,” but that’s not true. We’re just finding out how they behave in one context among many. And public figures, like all of the rest of us, are constantly assessing what kind of language a given situation calls for and adjusting their talk (or writing) accordingly. The idea that there is one linguistic mode which is “authentic” or “natural” to us is a fantasy.

Which also means that the concept of “naturalistic acting” is pretty fuzzy. “Natural” in what context, and in comparison to what? The assumption most people (including Thomas Flight) make when discussing these matters is that, for any given situation across time, there’s a standard “way that people talk” in relation to which some styles of acting are more “theatrical” and others more “natural.” Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert talk to each other in one style, while Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson talk to each other in a different style, and the latter is more natural than the former — on the assumption that unphotographed and unrecorded couples, in privacy, spoke pretty much the same way in 1934 as they do in 2019.

But we don’t know that, do we?

What if the conventions of private speech between two lovers were more formal then than they are now — or anyway would strike us as more formal? And what if the dominant style of acting in 2019 isn’t quite as close to private speech as we assume? It could be that

Gable/Colbert : 1934 private speech :: Driver/ScarJo : 2019 private speech

We just don’t know for sure, and maybe (probably) can’t know.

I’ve had a version of this post in my drafts folder for some time, though it didn’t mention Thomas Flight, because he hadn’t made the relevant video then. One of the writers Flight quotes in his video is The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, by Isaac Butler, and what originally prompted this post was Simon Callow’s review of that book. In it he writes,

The notion that there is some sort of immutable gold standard for truthful acting is deeply unreliable: cometh the hour, cometh the actor. When David Garrick, nimble and quick-witted, first leaped onto the scene with his dazzling realism and lightning changes of mood, the portly and impressively slow-moving James Quin, hitherto the darling of the pit, was heard to remark, “If the young fellow was right, he, and the rest of the players, had all been wrong.”

Garrick’s quicksilver transformations, so expressive of the Age of Enlightenment, were in turn supplanted by Edmund Kean’s dark and dangerous Romantic intensity. Each was initially admired for being more real than his predecessors; actors are never admired for being unnatural. In 1935 Laurence Olivier’s performances in Romeo and Juliet (he alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio) were regarded as ultrarealist; ten years later, in his Shakespeare films, it is clear that he was a somewhat stylized actor; on stage twenty years after that he was dismissed by many as monstrously mannered. His acting had not changed; the temper and taste of the times had. The shock of the new has a built-in decay, and it is in the nature of pioneers to believe that they have finally reached the promised land, the end of the rainbow.

Actors are never admired for being unnatural.” Every development in acting style is praised for drawing closer to “real life,” to “the way people really talk.” But maybe styles of acting change because styles of being-in-the-world have already changed. Maybe we change first — we, “those wonderful people out there in the dark,” as Norma Desmond so memorably calls us — and the actors obediently follow our lead.

Guadalcanal: 6

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Around the rim of the shield Hephaestus made for Achilles is the Ocean River, the great water that (Homer believed) rings our world — Middle-earth, it’s sometimes called: the place where we live and, often enough, fight and kill and die. And, as I have noted, Guadalcanal Island is ringed by that very ocean. Guadalcanal is thus a kind of microcosm, but one in which the agonistic character of life, the struggle that reveals who we are, is accelerated and intensified. 

Hephaestus’s ocean is a kind of frame, and these stories of Guadalcanal I’ve been exploring are all necessarily framed by the passage across the waters to and from the place of struggle. But what Terrence Malick does in his film The Thin Red Line is add another layer of framing. His version of Guadalcanal does not begin with the crossing of the liminal sea, but rather with two additional contexts. 

The first shot of the film shows a crocodile slipping into water; the last shot of the film shows a small young leafy palm standing, somewhat unexpectedly, in shallow water on a beach.

That first shot is followed by a scene in which we see Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt enjoying the company of a seaside Melanesian community. (We later learn that he’s not taking a vacation, he’s gone AWOL.) Then we shift to the transport ship taking the soldiers to Guadalcanal. 

That last shot is accompanied by a sound: the sound of a Melanesian a cappella choir singing one of the songs we heard them singing in that early scene. This is immediately after we see a transport ship removing the soldiers from Guadalcanal. 

So The Thin Red Line gives us four … let’s call them existential layers

A key question for any one soldier — well, actually, any one human being — is: How many of these layers do you perceive? How much of what is is perceptually and epistemologically available to you? 

There’s something fundamentally disorienting about Malick’s movie. On the one hand, as I noted in an earlier post, the soldier who confronts another soldier in battle, in the agon, is confronting himself. And this is existentially harrowing. 

But notice that Private Witt has no interest in the agon. After he goes AWOL among the Melanesian islanders and is forcibly returned to his unit, Sergeant Welsh removes him from battle duty and makes him a stretcher-bearer. Later, he pleads to be returned to battle, not because he wants to fight, but simply because C-for-Charlie Company is, he says, “my people.” We see him tending to the sick and then, at the end, drawing Japanese soldiers away from the other members of his company — and by so doing sacrificing his life. He lifts his weapon in that last moment, but not to fire — rather, to draw fire from the soldiers who surround him. 

Private Witt undergoes his own agon, but it is not that of the warrior. Before that final confrontation, he has already faced himself — not as Hector faces Achilles but in a very different way. He had received a kind of revelation, and he is capable of receiving it, I think, just because, rather than immersing himself wholly in the war, he has already attended to those existential layers that his fellow soldiers never notice.

About two-thirds of the way into the movie, when C-for-Charlie company has just ventured well inland to destroy a small contingent of Japanese soldiers, some of them reflect on what they have done. Corporal Fife (Adrien Brody) remembers a conversation in which another soldier told him that dead people were just like dead dogs. And then we see Witt staring intently at something. After a few seconds we are allowed to see what he sees: the half-buried face of a dead Japanese soldier. 

And then the soldier (who is not a dead dog) speaks to him — speaks to the one person in this whole company who has been formed and equipped in such a way that he can hear. The Japanese soldier says: 

Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness … truth? 

And it is this revelation, I think, that enables Witt to do the great work of self-sacrifice that forms the climax of this film. 

Guadalcanal: 5

If, as I said in my previous post, to confront another soldier in war is to confront yourself, then … isn’t that other soldier … you? Yes. Necessarily. 

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It is this necessity that produces a constant hum of meditation in Malick’s The Thin Red Line: “Maybe all men got one big soul,” thinks one of the soldiers.

Many of the voiceovers in this movie are clearly identified soliloquies: Nick Nolte’s Col. Tall, for instance, or Elias Koteas’s Captain Staros. But three characters in this movie — Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), and Private Train (John Dee Smith) — have distinct Southern accents, and it’s not always easy to tell their voices apart. And I think that is intentional. That is, these thoughts are not supposed to be identifiable with one soldier. They are the thoughts of all the soldiers. (I suspect it matters that all of these speakers are privates, the lowest rank — the ones not differentiated from their neighbors by holding command.)

Sometimes their voices are identifiable. It is Private Witt, the central character in the film, who speculates that all of us share a soul — what Emerson called the “Over-Soul”: 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 

And it is Private Bell who muses, “Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out.” In us. The flame of humanity, “the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.”

But I believe, as some of the more attentive viewers of this film have argued, that the character we hear from most often, in voiceover, is Private Train, whom we see at any length only twice: Once as the soldiers are approaching the island, confessing his fear, and once as they are leaving the island, saying that he has had a lifetime of experience already and has earned some peace. Surely in these points as in others he speaks for his colleagues. One big experience for C-for-Charlie Company; one big soul. 

(Private Train also has a tattoo on his upper arm, which reads: 1 JOHN 4:4. For those of you keeping score at home, that verse reads: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” We may return to this.) 

But the Over-Soul is bigger than what can be held on an American troop ship. One of those American soldiers says to a Japanese soldier — see the image at the top of this post — “Where you’re going you’re not coming back from.” And it’s true. But it’s equally true of the man who speaks those words. What you say about your enemy you say about yourself, whether you know it or not.

When I hear that sentence I think of a poem by Horace. David Ferry’s translation follows.  


Aequam memento (Odes II.3) 

When things are bad, be steady in your mind;
Dellius, do not be
Too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune.
You are going to die.

It does not matter at all whether you spend
Your days and nights in sorrow,
Or on the other hand, in holiday pleasure,
Drinking Falernian wine

Of an excellent vintage year, on the river bank.
Why is it, do you suppose,
That the dark branches of those tall pines and those
Poplars’ silvery leafy

Branches love to join, coming together,
Creating a welcoming shade?
Have you not noticed how in the quiet river
The current shows signs of hurry,

Urging itself to go forward, going somewhere,
Making its purposeful way?
By all means tell your servants to bring you wine,
Perfumes, and the utterly lovely

Too briefly blossoming flowers of the villa garden;
Yes, of course, while youth,
And circumstance, and the black threads of the Sisters
Suffer this to be so.

You are going to have to yield those upland pastures,
The ones you bought just lately;
You are going to yield the town house, and the villa,
The country place whose margin

The Tiber washes as it moves along.
Heirs will possess all that
Which you have gathered. It does not matter at all
If you are rich, with kings

Forefathers of your pride; no matter; or poor,
Fatherless under the sky.
You will be sacrificed to Orcus without pity.
All of us together

Are being gathered; the lot of each of us
Is in the shaking urn
With all the other lots, and like the others
Sooner or later our lot

Will fall out from the urn; and so we are chosen to take
Our place in that dark boat,
In that dark boat, that bears us all away
From here to where no one comes back from ever.

Army.mil 2007 03 26 111222.

The story of the Nisei linguists — who served in the Second World War as translators, interpreters, and intelligence officers, while their parents were imprisoned in internment camps — is a remarkable one. James C. McNaughton’s book about them is available as a PDF here.

Guadalcanal: 4

As I noted in my previous post, the peculiar nature of the Guadalcanal campaign creates a kind of narrative frame — the arrival by sea, the fighting, the departure by sea — that any account of the campaign is bound by. This traversing of emptiness surrounding a tragic agon

I think it was Jakob Burckhardt, in his famous book The Greeks and Greek Civilization, who first identified the agon — the contest or competition — as “the paramount feature of life” in ancient Greek civilization. 

Thus after the decline of heroic kingship all higher life among the Greeks, active as well as spiritual, took on the character of the agon. Here excellence (arete) and natural superiority were displayed, and victory in the agon, that is noble victory without enmity, appears to have been the ancient expression of the peaceful victory of an individual. Many different aspects of life came to bear the marks of this form of competitiveness. We see it in the conversations and round-songs of the guests in the symposium, in philosophy and legal procedure, down to cock- and quail-fighting or the gargantuan feats of eating. In Aristophanes’ Knights, the behaviour of the Paphlagonian and the sausage seller still retains the exact form of an agon, and the same is true in Frogs of the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, with its ceremonial preliminaries. The way that life on all levels was influenced by the agon and by gymnastics is most clearly illustrated by Herodotus’ account of the wooing of Agariste (VI.126). Cleisthenes of Sicyon announced at the Olympic games, where he had just won the victory in the four-horse chariot race, that he invited applicants for his daughter’s hand. The wooing, itself an agon, is a kind of mirror image of the mythical wooing of Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus. Thirteen suitors came forward, all personally outstanding and of high birth; two were from southern Italy, one Epidamnian, one Aetolian, one Argive, two Arcadians, one from Elis, two Athenians and one each from Euboea, Thessaly and Molossus [in Epirus). Cleisthenes had a stadium and a palaestra prepared for them, kept them with him for a year and tested their courage, temperament, upbringing and character; he accompanied the suitors to the gymnasium and observed their behaviour at feasts. 

(This book, assembled from Burckhardt’s lectures, was published after his death in 1897 and against his will. The early modern period was his area of specialization, and he did not think himself qualified to publish a book on the Ancient Greek world. But the idea got around, to Burckhardt’s annoyance, thanks to a former colleague: “The mistaken belief that I was to publish a history of Greek culture derives from a work of the unfortunate Professor Nietzsche, who now lives in a lunatic asylum. He mistook a lecture course that I used often to give for a book.”) 

The agon is a kind of domestication and confinement of the battle encounter, of the confrontation of people who are determined to kill one another. The ancestor of the agon, and in a way its heart and soul, is the confrontation of Hector and Achilles in the 22nd book of the Iliad. Perhaps the most important thing to be said about the agon as depicted by Homer that it is only secondarily a competition with your enemy, with the Other; it is primarily a contest with yourself

Homer makes this abundantly clear through one distinctive element of the encounter between Hector and Achilles. Recall that Achilles has returned because of his grief and guilt at allowing his dearest friend Patroclus to enter the battle wearing his armor. Hector has taken that armor from the dead body of Patroclus and is now wearing it. Meanwhile, Achilles has had new armor made for him by Hephaestus, including a great shield. In my introduction to Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles I describe what Hephaestus has made: 

In Homer’s poem, the shield is complexly figured, but at the heart of its depiction is a simple contrast. First, there is a world of peace, in which the arts (both the artes mechanicae and the artes liberales) may be cultivated: dancers and acrobats and musicians appear there, well-cared-for fields of crops, vineyards full of ripe grapes, and herds of animals domesticated for human use. Evil things happen in this world: two lions kill a bull; a man has killed another man. But herdsmen watch over their cattle to limit the ravages of wild beasts; and in the city of peace judges determine a penalty for murder, a penalty that the angry family of the slain man agree to. Such agreements are what make a city peaceful. But none of these arts and agreements obtain in the second city, the city of war; there, all is sacrificed to the cultivation of a single “art”: that of killing. 

All through the Iliad Hector is depicted as a reluctant warrior. In Book VI he tells his beloved wife Andromache that he has learned to fight in the front ranks of the Trojans — he does it because he must, to protect the city he loves; but fighting does not come naturally to him, as it does to Achilles, who doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s not fighting.

So when these two men met on the field of battle, what do they see? Hector sees the world he loves, the world of peace and art and hot baths, with war only an interruption of that better human story; and Achilles sees his own armor, the armor of the ultimate warrior. Each confronts himself, and this is the essential character of the agon

In Malick’s The Thin Red Line, this is what battle does to the men: it forces each of them to confront himself. Again and again that confrontation is revelatory.  

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1998 The Thin Red Line 07.

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Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier:

The [CrowdStrike] catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. […] This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing — as opposed to personal computing — a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable — at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability. 

A reminder that presentism is perhaps an even bigger threat to our economic infrastructure than it is to our common culture. 

Guadalcanal: 3

The above is a drawing by Howard Brodie, an artist James Jones much admired. 

The distinctive way the Allied commanders organized the campaign for Guadalcanal, coupled with certain features intrinsic to island warfare, shaped the structure of Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Here’s how the novel begins:

The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them. Now, in the fresh early morning of a lovely tropic day they lay quietly at anchor in the channel, nearer to the one island than to the other which was only a cloud on the horizon. To their crews, this was a routine mission and one they knew well: that of delivering fresh reinforcement troops. But to the men who comprised the cargo of infantry this trip was neither routine nor known and was composed of a mixture of dense anxiety and tense excitement. 

In this respect the story of these soldiers resembles the Normandy invasion: it begins with a sea crossing. You must get on a ship and traverse the ocean to get to the place where you will fight. 

But the attackers on D-Day in Normandy didn’t finish their war that way, not collectively anyway. Of course, some of them returned the way they came; but many others pushed deeper and deeper into Europe, and when they were done, made their way back home by airplane, or in transport ships with highly miscellaneous passengers. 

What’s distinctive about The Thin Red Line is that C-for-Charlie Company travels to the island on a ship and then step onto the beach from landing craft — and then when it is relieved it returns in precisely the way it came. (“Ahead of them the LCIs waited to take them aboard, and slowly they began to file into them to be taken out to climb the cargo nets up into the big ships.”) It’s like entering and leaving a gladiatorial arena, except that there are these long sea journeys, crossings of empty liminal space, a space that radically separates what happens on the island from everything else in life, before and after. It’s more like Purgatory, then, than an arena — except for those who die. For them, I suppose, it’s Hell. 

That some of them die while others survive means that C-for-Charlie Company is not precisely the same on its arrival and its departure. But the way Jones tells his story, the deaths are not presented as the deaths of individual whole persons but rather as the loss of appendages. Jones repeatedly speaks of the Company as a single entity: “But before that happened the whole of C-for-Charlie had gotten blind, crazy drunk in a wild mass bacchanalian orgy which lasted twenty-eight hours and used up all the available whiskey….” “Meanwhile back at the bivouac C-for-Charlie was still trying desperately to solve its liquor shortage.” When the Company comes across a dead soldier: “D Company had found him while pursuing the Japanese patrol and had placed him on the ledge behind C-for-Charlie for safekeeping at a time when C-for-Charlie was too engrossed in its firing to notice….” When stretcher-bearers take the dead man away: “C-for-Charlie had watched all this action wide-eyed and with sheepish faces.” One entity that happens to have many faces. 

All of this is deeply relevant to the film Terrence Malick would make from James Jones’s novel. 

Guadalcanal: 2

How vividly did the Guadalcanal campaign impress itself on the American imagination? Well, this movie was released around nine months after the last Japanese soldiers were driven from the island.

But all the media were moving at fast pace in those days. In propaganda, as in so many other things — internment of undesirables, terror-bombing of civilians —, the Nazis established the standard that their enemies emulated. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and by November the official documentary film, Sieg in Polen, was being shown in New York City, where it was seen by, among many others, W. H. Auden and Thomas Merton. (This was the subject of one of my first scholarly articles.) Likewise, in June of 1942 John Ford carried a camera with him to record what would become known as the Battle of Midway, and the edited footage appeared as a short film in September, with a score by Alfred Newman and narration by Henry Fonda.

And when the Guadalcanal campaign began shortly afterward, a young journalist for Life magazine named John Hersey accompanied the American troops, as did Richard Tregaskis, a reporter for the International News Service. Both of them sent dispatches from the front which were published immediately, and then quickly turned them into books: Hersey’s Into the Valley and Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary were both published on the first day of 1943. The latter was, in a vague sort of way, the basis for the movie. 

Tregaskis’s book — and this is a point to which I will return in later installments of this series — is bookended, as any account of an island battle is likely to be, by sea journeys: an arrival and a departure. Landing craft deliver soldiers to the island; the soldiers enter the hell of battle; eventually those who survive, relieved by new soldiers, return to the landing craft and are conveyed to a place of rest. (The First Marine Division, who had begun the invasion in August, were relieved in early December and taken to Melbourne, where they were greeted, quite properly, as great heroes.) There’s something intrinsically ritualistic, almost mythic, about this pattern. 

But there’s also, in the context, something consoling about it.

The movie of Guadalcanal Diary maintains this structure: the first twenty minutes show the Marines on ship headed towards battle, demonstrating camaraderie among regions and races: a very young black soldier has a speaking part! One of the chief characters is a Mexican-American! (One of the few times in his career that Anthony Quinn played his own ethnicity.) They grow slightly more anxious, though, before landing on … an undefended beach. (This is one of the better effects of the movie — the anticlimax of arriving for battle and finding no one to fight.)

Eventually they encounter the enemy first in small numbers — the initial battle set-piece enacts an event Tregaskis made famous, the Goettge patrol — and then in larger numbers, until we approach a final battle, preceded by prayers, confessions of dis-ease, and letters home to families. In that battle one of the leading characters — it had to be Alvarez, didn’t it? — is killed, and then the Marines are relieved. At the end they’re marching towards the ships that will take them away, and the narrator — a version of Tregaskis — is pleased to say that they’ll receive “a well-earned rest, the job superbly done. The Army is coming in to take over. Into their hands we commit the job, with full confidence in their ability to perform it.” 

And that’s the consoling message, for soldiers but perhaps especially for the families of soldiers: the fighting will be tough, but it won’t last too long, and almost everyone will survive. No need to get too anxious. 

When the movie came out, James Agee wrote that it “is unusually serious, simple, and honest, as far as it goes; but it would be a shame and worse if those who made or will see it got the idea that it is a remotely adequate image of the first months on that island.… I think it is to be rather respected, and recommended, but with very qualified enthusiasm.” In that note Agee said that he hoped to write at greater length about the move, but, alas, it appears that he did not. I would very much have enjoyed hearing what his reservations were. Mine, as the above summary suggests, are significant. I thought it clichéd and profoundly unrealistic in every respect; though perhaps in comparison to still-more-jingoistic endeavors it was not. 

(Also: the movie has quite a number of Asian or Asian-American actors playing Japanese soldiers — not one of whom is named. I would give quite a lot to know who those men were, how they were cast, and what they thought about the whole business.) 

Now, back to real life: one of those Army men who relieved the Marines on Guadalcanal was James Jones, and he wrote about his experience in the novel The Thin Red Line (1962). Soon after that book’s publication, Jones wrote an essay for the Saturday Evening Post called “Phony War Films.” He explains how, after his return from the war — he was discharged from the Army in 1944 because of a bad ankle, an experience that he gives to Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line — he found himself laughing incredulously at war movies. Sometimes he even walked out on them. Then, almost two decades later and in preparation for writing his article, he watched a bunch of more recent films about the war he had fought in. His verdict: 

When I finished, I was not only almost cross-eyed from watching film, near death from explosive sound effects, I was more depressed with the essential adolescence of America (maybe I should say of the race) then I have perhaps ever been. If our war films are indication of our social maturity in an age when we have the capacity of destroying ourselves, there is little hope for us….

Now, why is this? Why, after so much soul-searching by Americans, so many advances in so many other fields during the past twenty years, have war films remained at the same, essentially adolescent level as the war films of 1943?

Jones’s basic answer is that the film studios are giving people what they want. 

By the way, that essay — which as far as I can discover is not available online — is reprinted in the booklet that accompanies the magnificent Criterion Collection edition of Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line. And yes, that’s where this series is headed … but we still have business with James Jones and his novel. 

Guadalcanal: 1

From December of 1941 through the middle of the next year, the Japanese Army and Navy enjoyed an unbroken series of victories that carried them to the doorstep of Australia. The conquest of Australia was indeed their next major endeavor. They planned to begin it by taking Port Moresby, on the southern coast of New Guinea, from which the whole of northern and eastern Australia would be easily reachable.

Their first setback came in early June 1942 at the Battle of Midway, which John Keegan called “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.” It was that; but the Japanese forces still held all the territory they had conquered in the previous seven months. What Midway did, more than anything else, was to demonstrate with an absolute conclusiveness that Japan was not invincible — indeed was quite vulnerable.

Two steps followed for the Allied forces. (By Allied forces I mean Americans and Australians; the division of labor had left the British to focus on China, India, and Burma.) One was to prevent the taking of Port Moresby; the second was to begin reclaiming territory that had great strategic importance. From the Allied perspective, a key piece of land was Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, east of New Guinea. The Japanese, having occupied the island in May, had immediately begun constructing an airfield from which they would be able to send aircraft to disrupt, or prevent altogether, shipping between the United States and Australia. Since the Japanese already had a major air and sea base at Rabual on New Britain, a functioning airfield on Guadalcanal would establish dominance over a large chunk of the south Pacific.

It was vital, the Allied commanders believed, to drive the Japanese off Guadalcanal, complete the airfield for their own use, and thereby (a) protect shipping lanes and (b) establish a staging ground for an assault on Rabual and New Britain more generally. Guadalcanal was, then, the first island in the island-hopping strategy that would eventually lead the Allied forces to Japan.

When Allied troops landed on Guadalcanal in the early morning of 7 August, the Japanese soldiers and workers at the airfield abandoned it immediately, having been taken wholly by surprise. Indeed, the Japanese command had not expected an Allied counterattack of this size for some time. One of the first consequences of the Allied landing on Guadalcanal was the shifting of Japanese troops from the assault on Port Moresby — where Australian forces had been holding off Japanese forces in terrible conditions and with extraordinary determination — to the Solomons. So Port Moresby was safe, at least for a while.

The Japanese were determined to show the Allies that the re-taking of territory was impossible; the Allies were equally determined to make their first major counter-attack a successful one. The consequences of failure on Guadalcanal were, for both sides, too dire even to contemplate.

In the battle for the island — a battle which did not definitively end until February of 1943 — three points were established that dictated the remainder of the war. First: that the resources, in personnel and equipment, that the Allies could bring to bear on the conflict were unprecedentedly enormous. Second: that, Japanese assumptions to the contrary, American soldiers would fight bravely and indeed relentlessly. Third: that Japanese soldiers would fight to the death — death by the enemy’s hand or by their own or by starvation — rather than be taken prisoner. These were the lessons of Guadalcanal and they were learned with great pain on all sides. The Japanese came to call Guadalcanal “Starvation Island” and “Death Island”; to the Americans, William Manchester says, it was “that fucking island,” and the fighting there “worse than Stalingrad” — though (or therefore) to this day the insignia of the First Marine Division bears the single word “Guadalcanal.”

Something about the War in the Pacific was, and still is, summed up in that one campaign for that one not-obviously-important island. It has resonated in memories and minds through the decades. It seems to have something it wants to tell us about war.


Sources:

victimology

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a brief post about Freddie deBoer’s case for forcing mentally ill people into treatment — or rather, about one element of the story. And then today I see a new post by Freddie on this review of this book by Jonathan Rosen, and that got the wheels turning. 

None of this is within my own area of expertise or experience. I have no authority here. I just want to call attention to one point. Rosen’s book is about his friend Michael Laudor, who in 1998 murdered his fiancée Caroline Costello during a psychotic episode. I have not read the book, but when I heard about it, I think originally from Freddie’s Substack, I immediately remembered a book that made a great impact on me when I read it forty years ago: The Killing of Bonnie Garland, by an eminent psychiatrist named Willard Gaylin. I was reminded of it because of of one small detail linking the two situations: Yale University, which Laudor, Costello, and Rosen all attended in the early 1980s, as did Bonnie Garland and the man who killed her, Richard Herrin, in the mid-1970s. 

Here’s how Gaylin describes the origins of his book: 

Richard Herrin, then twenty-three, had killed his college sweetheart, Bonnie Garland. He had hammered her to death in her sleep in her parents’ home. This was the tragic culmination of a three-year romance. Richard Herrin, a poor Mexican-American boy, had been a junior at Yale University when he met seventeen-year-old freshman Bonnie Garland. Bonnie was a child of affluence. Daughter of Joan and Paul Garland, she had spent much of her childhood in Brazil, where her father was establishing a very successful international law practice. She had attended the fashionable Madeira School and went on to Yale, her father’s alma mater.

Bonnie Garland was an unlikely victim of a killing. But then again, Richard Herrin was an unlikely killer. And the course of events following the killing was strange and unpredictable. Within two months of killing Bonnie, Richard Herrin was not in prison but attending classes at the State University of New York in Albany, working in a religious bookshop there, and being unstintingly supported both emotionally and financially by a Catholic community.

I am not a devotee of crime news; I rarely read it in the papers. But there was something unusually bizarre about this crime and its sequelae. I remembered one brief phrase from the reporting; Richard had been quoted as saying within hours of the killing, “Her head broke open like a watermelon.” Who speaks in those terms? What kind of human being even thinks that way? One might expect a general revulsion, a turning away from the vile and indecent. But many did not turn away. The Catholic community at Yale University, where both Richard and his victim, Bonnie Garland, had been students, mobilized by Ashbel (“A.T.”) T. Wall, a former roommate of Richard’s and a member of an affluent and socially prominent New England family, along with Father Peter Fagan and Sister Ramona Pena, Catholic associate chaplains at Yale, began a crusade of compassion for Richard. The Garlands — her room in their house still soiled with their daughter’s blood and brain tissue — started a counter-crusade. This would eventually include hiring a private eye, appearing on a TV talk show, and interviews in such gossip sheets as the Star and National Enquirer

Gaylin followed the case closely and came to focus on one question: In the aftermath of this killing, why were there so many more tears for Richard Herrin than for the young woman he killed? And this is his answer: 

Our mechanisms of identification and empathy are central to our concepts of what is good and what is right. From the day of the killing, Richard attracted a host of concerned and compassionate defenders. When one person kills another, there is immediate revulsion at the nature of the crime. But in a time so short as to seem indecent to the members of the personal family, the dead person ceases to exist as an identifiable figure. To those individuals in the community of good will and empathy, warmth and compassion, only one of the key actors in the drama remains with whom to commiserate and that is always the criminal. The dead person ceases to be a part of everyday reality, ceases to exist. She is only a figure in a historic event. We inevitably turn away from the past, toward the ongoing reality. And the ongoing reality is the criminal; trapped, anxious, now helpless, isolated, often badgered and bewildered. 

Gaylin attended Richard Herrin’s trial and noticed that the prosecuting attorneys did nothing to remind the jury of the former existence of Bonnie Garland. They did not even introduce a photograph of her. Meanwhile, the defense suggested that Bonnie — who had dated Richard for the better part of three years but had grown less interested in him — had not been sufficiently attentive to his emotional needs, had not really understood how difficult life was for him, a kid from the barrio, at Yale. Richard’s attorney did not accuse her of anything; as Gaylin notes, “the slight suggestion of her complicity and insensitivity was sufficient.” But gradually the defense was able to shift the jury’s attention in such a way as to suggest that she was really the one on trial. “She was diminished, and, in suggesting that she was somewhat responsible for her own fate, made an accomplice to her own killing. She was on trial, and was given no voice, no presence. No real attempt was made by the prosecution to bring her to life.” 

So the jury’s sympathies, like those of the Catholic community at Yale, shifted towards Richard. Later, after the trial, the villains in the story become Bonnie’s parents, rich white people who in their arrogance and entitlement wouldn’t forgive the troubled boy from the barrio

François Truffaut was the first person to note that the key scene in Psycho comes when Norman Bates cleans up the shower where Marion Crane has been murdered. For 45 minutes we, the audience, have been learning to sympathize with this imperfect young woman, obviously the protagonist of the story, and now she’s dead. What do we do? Truffaut says that we transfer our sympathies to Norman Bates, and the lengthy clean-up scene — which also involves the disposal of her body, which we never see again — gives us the chance to do that. 

But we don’t know that Norman Bates is Marion’s murderer. Wouldn’t things be different if we did know that he’s a killer? Gaylin’s argument is: Not necessarily. Not if the victim is dead and gone, absent, invisible. In the absence of the victim, Gaylin says, the murderer “usurps the compassion that is justly his victim’s due. He will steal his victim’s moral constituency along with her life.” The living sympathize with the living, not with the dead. And — this is in some ways Gaylin’s key concern — his own profession, psychiatry, does more than any other force in American life to facilitate the transfer of compassion from the murdered to the murderer. 

All this says nothing about the case of Michael Laudor and Caroline Costello — I know little about that and, again, haven’t read Rosen’s book. But I was greatly taken, all those years ago, with Gaylin’s explanation of how we transfer our sympathies from the dead to the living, from any absent victim to any present offender — whom, thanks to the mechanical workings of our criminal-justice and mental-health systems, we can easily perceive as “the real victim here.” It’s worth noting, perhaps, that when I first posted this reflection I read through it and noticed that the first sentence of this paragraph referred to “the case of Michael Laudor” — I had left out the name of the woman he murdered. 

the rise of detective fiction

In The Long Week-End, their entertaining, sardonic, and often insightful social history of England between the two world wars, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge assert that in the years immediately following the Great War, “Detective-novel writing was not yet an industry; Sherlock Holmes stood alone.” (That comment, like this post, refers only to the British situation; the American situation was quite different.) 

This is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Historians like Graves and Hodge tend to ignore the Sexton Blake stories, presumably on the grounds that they were mass-produced, by multiple authors who worked from simplistic templates, and were aimed primarily at younger audiences. But they were extraordinarily popular and it seems that almost everyone read at least some of them. (When Dorothy L. Sayers was ill at school — the Godolphin School in Salisbury — she wrote to her parents to ask them to send her some Sexton Blakes.) And then, on what one presumes G&H would have thought a higher level of literary ambition, there were the Father Brown stories — but Chesterton, having written a pile of them between 1910 and 1914, did not write another until 1923.

Meanwhile, the Sherlock Holmes wagon continued to roll, though with a pause (as many things paused) in the war years, during which Conan Doyle published only one Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” which was an exercise in patriotism and, moreover, a spy story rather than a tale of detection. But Conan Doyle would, with great reluctance and annoyance, resume Dr. Watson’s accounts of Holmes’s adventures in 1921.

Two other data points should be introduced here. First, the publication in 1913 of what would become one of the most influential novels of detection ever written, E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. And second, the 1910 trial and conviction of Dr. Crippen, which renewed interest in what we now call True Crime.

If you look at these matters from the perspective of the year 1914, here’s what I think you see:

  • the Sexton Blake stories rolling ever onward, but according to a fixed formula; 
  • the Holmes stories continuing but more slowly, and at a far lower standard than Conan Doyle had established in the 1880s and 1890s; 
  • an interesting experiment in a type of detective radically different than Holmes (Father Brown), which appeared to be complete; 
  • another interesting experiment, this one a playful questioning of the plot conventions of the tale of detection (Trent’s Last Case); 
  • a renewal of interest in True Crime. 

So the future of tales of detection did not appear to be bright, and there was no reason to think that it would become a central genre of fiction.

Then the War came, and such topics were placed, not on the back burner but off the stove altogether. It was difficult, or embarrassing, or just plain shameful to think about a domestic murder or a crime of passion or a killing for money when the greatest slaughter in the history of humanity was ongoing. One could easily imagine that period marking the end of the detective story as a popular genre of fiction. 

When the War ended, though, it became possible and indeed desirable to think about such matters again. It was presumably a kind of relief to be able, once more, to consider malice and death on a human scale — death as a tragedy and a misery but not an unimaginably vast horror. So Conan Doyle resumed his Holmes stories with “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” in 1921, and Chesterton his tales of Father Brown with (I think) “The Resurrection of Father Brown” in 1923. But even more to the point:

  • Agatha Christie published her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920;
  • Freeman Wills Crofts published his first, and by far most influential, mystery novel, The Cask, also in 1920;
  • Dorothy L. Sayers wrote her first detective novel, Whose Body?, in 1921, though it was not published until 1923;
  • The Thompson-Bywaters trial was held in 1922, and after the execution of the convicted murderers in January of 1923, their story became a matter of extravagant public fascination for a very long time.

And so we were off to the races. The Golden Age of detective fiction — influenced at least as much by True Crime as by previous stories and novels — had begun. And I cannot help thinking that it was shaped, then and later, by the great shadow of Death hanging over Europe in the aftermath of the Great War. 

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Hume’s characters

In the Oxford English Dictionary, definition II.12.a. of “character” is: “A description, delineation, or detailed report of a person’s qualities. Now chiefly historical.” As an example, one R. Lucas wrote: “He undertook to write characters of Pitt and Bonaparte.” The originator of this practice — in some formal sense; surely people have been doing it as long as there have been people — seems to have been Theophrastus. He certainly gives us the term. 

“A character,” in this sense, is what we might call a “character sketch” — a brief summary of a person’s essential nature or … well, character. (There’s not, it occurs to me, a close synonym.) One of the most fascinating features of Hume’s History of England is his “characters,” that is, his summative accounts of the key figures in his narrative, most of them monarchs. Sometimes Hume can do this briefly, and when he is brief he is often fierce, as in this “character” of Richard III

The historians who favour Richard (for even this tyrant has met with partisans among the later writers) maintain, that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown: But this is a poor apology, when it is confessed, that he was ready to commit the most horrid crimes, which appeared necessary for that purpose; and it is certain, that all his courage and capacity, qualities in which he really seems not to have been deficient, would never have made compensation to the people for the danger of the precedent, and for the contagious example of vice and murder, exalted upon the throne. 

That’s Richard, done and dusted. But other figures are more complicated. One of the most notable in this regard is his summary judgment of Henry VIII

It is difficult to give a just summary of this prince’s qualities: He was so different from himself in different parts of his reign, that, as is well remarked by lord Herbert, his history is his best character and description. The absolute, uncontrolled authority which he maintained at home, and the regard which he acquired among foreign nations, are circumstances, which entitle him, in some degree, to the appellation of a great prince; while his tyranny and barbarity exclude him from the character of a good one. He possessed, indeed, great vigour of mind, which qualified him for exercising dominion over men; courage, intrepidity, vigilance, inflexibility: And though these qualities lay not always under the guidance of a regular and solid judgment, they were accompanied with good parts, and an extensive capacity; and every one dreaded a contest with a man, who was known never to yield or to forgive, and who, in every controversy, was determined, either to ruin himself or his antagonist. A catalogue of his vices would comprehend many of the worst qualities incident to human nature: Violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, injustice, obstinacy, arrogance, bigotry, presumption, caprice: But neither was he subject to all these vices in the most extreme degree, nor was he, at intervals altogether destitute of virtues: He was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, and capable at least of a temporary friendship and attachment. In this respect he was unfortunate, that the incidents of his reign served to display his faults in their full light: The treatment, which he met with from the court of Rome, provoked him to violence; the danger of a revolt from his superstitious subjects, seemed to require the most extreme severity. But it must, at the same time, be acknowledged, that his situation tended to throw an additional lustre on what was great and magnanimous in his character: The emulation between the emperor and the French king rendered his alliance, notwithstanding his impolitic conduct, of great importance in Europe: The extensive powers of his prerogative, and the submissive, not to say slavish, disposition of his parliaments, made it the more easy for him to assume and maintain that entire dominion, by which his reign is so much distinguished in the English history. 

One of the most Humean elements of this account — and one of the wisest — is his insistence that circumstances conspire to reveal certain aspects of a person’s character, with the implication that in different circumstances the person’s career could have been very different. And since circumstances are always subject to change — “Events, my dear boy, events” — one cannot safely write a person’s character until he or she is dead. 

Among those circumstances is, of course, the very fact of kingship itself. James II, for instance, is someone who could have been admirable if he had not been king: “He had many of those qualities, which form a good citizen: Even some of those, which, had they not been swallowed up in bigotry and arbitrary principles, serve to compose a good sovereign.” (By “bigotry and arbitrary principles,” Hume means, of course, James’s Catholicism.) And: 

In domestic life, his conduct was irreproachable, and is entitled to our approbation. Severe, but open in his enmities, steady in his counsels, diligent in his schemes, brave in his enterprises, faithful, sincere, and honourable in his dealings with all men: Such was the character with which the Duke of York mounted the throne of England. In that high station, his frugality of public money was remarkable, his industry exemplary, his application to naval affairs successful, his encouragement of trade judicious, his jealousy of national honour laudable: What then was wanting to make him an excellent sovereign? A due regard and affection to the religion and constitution of his country. Had he been possessed of this essential quality, even his middling talents, aided by so many virtues, would have rendered his reign honourable and happy. When it was wanting, every excellency, which he possessed, became dangerous and pernicious to his kingdoms. 

If he had remained Duke of York, his vices or shortcomings would have been regrettable but not especially consequential; but when he became King, they ended the dynasty of the Stuarts. I find myself remembering, in this context, a comment Northrop Frye makes in his discussion of tragedy in Anatomy of Criticism

Aristotle’s hamartia or “flaw,” therefore, is not necessarily wrongdoing, much less moral weakness: it may be simply a matter of being a strong character in an exposed position, like Cordelia. The exposed position is usually the place of leadership, in which a character is exceptional and isolated at the same time, giving us that curious blend of the inevitable and the incongruous which is peculiar to tragedy. 

“Inevitable” because of the circumstance, the position; “incongruous” because one can easily imagine circumstances in which that particular person had been not cursed but blessed, not ruined but flourishing. Hume is exceptionally attentive to this irony of human life. 

Hume puts his cards on the table

I mentioned in an earlier post Hume’s purpose in writing this history — or what anyway I believe to have been his purpose: To account for and celebrate (a) the diminishment of the rule of superstition and enthusiasm and (b) the corresponding rise of “civility and sciences.” This purpose can only be fulfilled if Hume follows certain practices in assessing evidence.  

Look for instance at his account of the rise and fall of Joan of Arc, in Volume II. Hume writes long paragraphs, but they consistently manifest a beautiful architecture, so I will here quote the whole of the first paragraph of his account: 

In the village of Domremi near Vaucouleurs, on the borders of Lorraine, there lived a country girl of twenty-seven years of age, called Joan d’Arc, who was servant in a small inn, and who in that station had been accustomed to tend the horses of the guests, to ride them without a saddle to the watering-place, and to perform other offices, which, in well-frequented inns, commonly fall to the share of the men servants. This girl was of an irreproachable life, and had not hitherto been remarked for any singularity; whether that she had [not] met with an occasion to excite her genius, or that the unskilful eyes of those who conversed with her, had not been able to discern her uncommon merit. It is easy to imagine, that the present situation of France was an interesting object even to persons of the lowest rank, and would become the frequent subject of conversation: A young prince, expelled his throne by the sedition of native subjects, and by the arms of strangers, could not fail to move the compassion of all his people, whose hearts were uncorrupted by faction; and the peculiar character of Charles, so strongly inclined to friendship and the tender passions, naturally rendered him the hero of that sex, whose generous minds know no bounds in their affections. The siege at Orleans, the progress of the English before that place, the great distress of the garrison and inhabitants, the importance of saving this city and its brave defenders, had turned thither the public eye; and Joan, inflamed by the general sentiment, was seized with a wild desire of bringing relief to her sovereign in his present distresses. Her unexperienced mind, working day and night on this favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations; and she fancied, that she saw visions, and heard voices, exhorting her to re-establish the throne of France, and to expel the foreign invaders. An uncommon intrepidity of temper made her overlook all the dangers, which might attend her in such a path; and thinking herself destined by Heaven to this office, she threw aside all that bashfulness and timidity, so natural to her sex, her years, and her low station. She went to Vaucouleurs; procured admission to Baudricourt, the governor; informed him of her inspirations and intentions; and conjured him not to neglect the voice of God, who spoke through her, but to second those heavenly revelations, which impelled her to this glorious enterprize. Baudricourt treated her at first with some neglect; but on her frequent returns to him, and importunate solicitations, he began to remark something extraordinary in the maid, and was inclined, at all hazards, to make so easy an experiment. It is uncertain, whether this gentleman had discernment enough to perceive, that great use might be made with the vulgar of so uncommon an engine; or, what is more likely in that credulous age, was himself a convert to this visionary: But he adopted at last the schemes of Joan; and he gave her some attendants, who conducted her to the French court, which at that time resided at Chinon. 

The key point to be noted here is Hume’s refusal even to entertain the possibility that Joan was indeed inspired by God. He unhesitatingly gives a psychological account: “Her unexperienced mind, working day and night on this favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations.” It is noteworthy that he doesn’t accuse her of lying, nor suspect that she was in someone else’s control. That, I assume, is because her subsequent conduct — especially when tried, convicted and burned at the stake — is hard to reconcile with either of those explanations.

But in any case, here is where he pulls back the curtain to explain to his readers one of the fundamental assumptions of his historiography: 

It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and the marvellous; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony, as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances. 

This is carefully put. To understand Hume’s point here, we need to make a distinction that I learned from the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, between metaphysical and methodological naturalism. 

Metaphysical naturalism is the belief that the “natural world” is all there is. No gods, no spirits, no secret causes, just the material cosmos. 

Methodological naturalism is agnostic on the question of whether there is something beyond the material cosmos — as philosophers like to say, it “brackets” that question, and pursues its intellectual and scholarly inquiries without reference to any spiritual or trans-material cause. For instance, I wrote for a general audience a biography of C. S. Lewis, and while I might in my heart believe that God raised up C. S. Lewis to confute the infidels and persuade the uncertain to follow Jesus, that thought could play no part in in the story I told. It might well be that a non-Christian would be unlikely to write the kind of book I wrote, but a non-Christian could have. There’s nothing affirmed in that book that requires, for its composition or its acceptance, religious belief. And that was intentional on my part: I strategically adopted methodological naturalism. 

Hume’s argument in the “business of history” passage cited above is not that the divine inspiration of Joan is impossible — though in fact Hume believed it impossible, or at least so improbable that the idea should be ignored — but only that it is not the job of the historian to deal in such matters. At least, this is true if the historian is narrating political and social history, i.e., “merely profane and human” matters. 

But why should Hume adopt this methodological naturalism? I have my own reasons for doing so, when I do so, but what reasons had Hume?

Because he thinks that societies which are free from the enthusiasm and superstition that characterize religious belief are happier societies. That is, setting aside the question of whether religious belief is true or not, Hume thinks that less religious societies are happier ones. Hume seems to think that even if God exists, which in his view is almost certainly not the case, there is no reason to think that God’s interests are compatible with the interests of human beings who must live with one another. 

In the concluding passage of his history’s second volume that I wrote about in my last post, Hume says of the “barbaric” millenium-and-a-half that he has just described, 

Nor is the spectacle altogether unentertaining and uninstructive, which the history of those times presents to us. The view of human manners, in all their variety of appearances, is both profitable and agreeable; and if the aspect in some periods seems horrid and deformed, we may thence learn to cherish with the greater anxiety that science and civility, which has so close a connexion with virtue and humanity, and which, as it is a sovereign antidote against superstition, is also the most effectual remedy against vice and disorders of every kind. 

The superstition and enthusiasm that accompany religion bring with them “vice and disorders of every kind,” which is why even the “marvelous,” as opposed to the “miraculous,” needs to be credited only grudgingly. (Don’t let people get excited about strange events! It’s bad for them and bad for the rest of us.) But when those powers are replaced by “science and civility,” then you get “virtue and humanity” and therefore a stronger, better grounded, more just social and political order. And a better social and political order is the object at which the philosophic historian aims. 

Hume and literature

As previously indicated, I will eventually return to Moonbound, but I need to think some things through first. For now, let’s go back twelve thousand years or so and revisit David Hume’s History of England.

When Hume was writing his History of England, the word “literature” only occasionally referred to a body of texts, or a kind of text; instead, it typically meant something like “learning.” For example, Samuel Johnson in his Life of Milton says that Milton’s father “had probably more than common literature,” because Milton addressed a complex Latin poem to him. The meaning here is not far from our “literacy.” When a person not only read but wrote, especially for publication, then that person would be “a man of letters,” or “devoted to the life of letters,” etc. 

Today “literature” means something more like “poetry, fiction, drama, and sometimes essays” — what might have been called in some earlier time belles lettres, fine letters, though the correspondence in meaning is rough rather than exact. Insofar as the learned had any concept of what we now call literature, it would certainly have included poetry, fiction, drama, and essays but also history and biography. Historians and biographers were composers of artful narratives and in that sense no different than the composers of novels and tragedies. Their material was different, but their objects and purposes often very similar. 

Academic historians today distinguish what they do from “narrative history,” a genre practiced by non-academics — and they do this even on the rare occasions when they admire the narrative historians. See for instance Anthony Grafton’s forward to C. V. Wedgwood’s history of the Thirty Years War: it is obvious that he reveres Wedgwood but equally obvious that he understands what she does as something quite distinct from what he does. But in the 18th century, readers and writers alike would not have had such clear distinctions in mind. They would have evaluated Hume’s History of England and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by ways and means quite close to those they would employ in evaluating a novel by Samuel Richardson.

And Hume and Gibbon expected that kind of attention. They worked very hard to get their facts right and to assess them accurately, but they also strove to achieve the virtues that novelists and dramatists and epic poets pursued: to portray vivid characters, to generate narrative momentum and tension, to resolve such tension satisfyingly. 

Moreover — I have suggested this in my earlier posts — they saw the writing of historical narratives as a means of pursuing philosophical ends: the events and persons of the past serve as models, exemplars, and warnings. Historical figures enact philosophical positions and in so doing test them. 

Has historical knowledge progressed since Hume? Do historians today have a sounder understanding than Hume did of the facts and events of the past? Of course. But our historians today have neither the literary nor the philosophical ambitions that drove Hume. And it is because he had those ambitions, and fulfilled them, that I am reading him now. 

political proverbs

Nothing good ever comes from indulging the egos of old men. 

Nothing good comes from indulging the ego of any politician, but the you-can’t-tell-me-I’ve-seen-it-all arrogance of old men is especially dangerous. 

If you want political success, it’s better to be fortunate in your enemies than in your friends. An incompetent enemy can do more for you than a devoted friend ever could. 

When Congress will not do its job, attempts by the other two branches to do Congress’s job will always create more problems than they solve. 

It is said that Marcus Aurelius had a servant whose sole talk was to whisper in his ear, “You are but a man, you will die.” Every Supreme Court justice should have a clerk whose job is to whisper “The more times you tell yourself that you’re not a legislator, the more effectively you hide from yourself your temptation to legislate.” Not as terse, but just as needful.  

No one is less trustworthy in reporting on the Supreme Court than a periodical’s “Supreme Court reporter.” 

There is no correlation between memes and votes.

People elect performers rather than genuine representatives because they think our social and economic system will continue to function without human intervention, like a solar-powered street light. 

To put the same point otherwise: The besetting sin of the people who talk politics ceaselessly is a failure to take politics seriously. 

In the country of the Know-less-than-nothings, the Know-nothing is king. 

un-football

Barney Ronay:

Even England, this England’s version of hole-in-the-head football will give you dramatic interventions, trapped energy, last-minute overhead kicks. Somehow France entered this game as the only team at the Euros not to have registered an assist. Before this semi-final they played five games during which nobody on either team had scored from open play.

This isn’t “anti-football”. It’s un-football, non-football. It’s time being killed, athletically, talent reduced to furniture. Watching France is like watching someone do accounts, brilliantly, like watching a team of your favourite elite entertainers very diligently assembling a shed, and then realising towards the end that actually, they really are just assembling a shed. 

Watching France and England in this tournament first bored me, then frustrated me, then made me actually angry. Both sides played the whole tournament as though they had been told that excessive movement would deplete their oxygen supplies and cause them to faint. They just stood and passed the ball around until someone on the other side took the ball away from them, at which point they reluctantly trotted back to defend. 

Bukayo Saka has been almost the only English player to get exercise, and exercise produced a goal. For France, Mbappe occasionally tried, but when he did he got closed down by three or four defenders because they weren’t worried about what anyone else in the France jersey would do. It was dire.

The most frustrating thing is: There’s nothing that can be done when teams choose to play this way. It’s not against the rules, and you can’t change the rules in any way that would fix the problem, unless it’s possible to give players electrical shocks when they stand in one place for too long. 

But you have to ask yourself: Why do they choose to play this way? I think pressure is a relatively small part of it. The real issue is that these players play far too many games. If you want to have good Euros and World Cups, then you have to eliminate some of the competitions, both domestic and trans-domestic. 

Spain has been very good and sometimes fun in this tournament; the Dutch have had their moments; Switzerland, Austria, and Georgia were all great. So it’s not all bad news. But far too much of Euro 2024 has indeed been bad news, because it’s been played largely by exhausted players. 

UPDATE 2024-07-10: Today against the Netherlands England played much more positively for a half, after which they looked worn-out. It took Southgate a loooong time to make the necessary substitutions, but when he did — wow: two subs, Palmer and Watkins, combining for the winning goal. 

So: the Three Lions in the final! I am excited! Do I repent of my criticisms of Southgate? I do not. I have said all along that he (a) sets up his defense excellently, (b) allows or encourages too much caution in attack, and (c) is too slow to make changes. I still think all that. Because England defend so well, they are always in a position in which one goal can make the difference for them. But crossing your fingers and hoping for a late moment of brilliance isn’t a good strategy, even if you happen to get that moment of brilliance three matches in a row: Bellingham, 95th minute; Saka, 80th minute; Watkins, 90th minute. You’re trusting your luck too much, and even when luck shows up, there are better ways to play the game. 

But I will say this: the first half today, in which England were so much more dynamic and endeavoring and footbally than they have been all tournament, suggests that Southgate knows that he’s been too cautious. The problem is that the players simply couldn’t sustain that level of energy. So here’s my prediction for the final: If Southgate makes two or more subs before the hour mark, England will win … or at least take it to penalties. (Kinds hedging my bets there.) 

Moonbound revisited

A while back I said that I had read Robin Sloan’s new novel Moonbound and hoped to read it again. Wrong! I had not genuinely read it. Now I have, and I love this book


Several decades ago, the semiotician A. J. Greimas claimed that all stories are comprised of six actants, in three pairs: 

  • Subject/Object 
  • Sender/Receiver 
  • Helper/Opponent 

Moonbound is a book that readily lends itself to this analysis. 

We (you and I and the other humans on this planet) are the Anth — the Middle Anth, as it happens. Our descendants will do some amazing things but tragedy will eventually befall them. But, anticipating their downfall, they prepare a message, in the form of a girl in cryogenic sleep, for those who will occupy the Earth after them. (Sender/Receiver.)

The girl eventually joins forces with a boy, Ariel, the protagonist of our story, who wants to know how to combat the dragons who live on the moon and have cut earth off from the rest of the cosmos. (These dragons are made of information. It’s complicated.) The dragons have made Earth the Silent Planet, as it were, and Ariel wants to end that silence, that isolation. In this quest he is forever pursued by an angry wizard, but also regularly finds help from unexpected friends. (Helper/Opponent.) 

It is through the mediation of some of those friends, a college of scholars, that Ariel encounters the most important Helper of all, who makes for him the one thing he needs to deal with the dragons. (Subject/Object.) 

See? It’s brilliant. And the pattern is reinforced by constant references to another story, the one on which this one seems to be modeled: the matter of Arthur. But then, it’s a lot like many other stories as well. For instance, at one point our small hero is led through the wilderness by a rough customer he meets in a tavern, one who is called by a nickname beginning with S, and who provides him with a means of swift escape from his pursuers. It’s true that this fellow is a trash-picker rather than the descendent of kings, and that he’s called Scrounger rather than Strider, but the commonalities are strong and that’s what matters, isn’t it? 

Or is it? 

What makes a story matter to us? Does interest lie in the ways it resembles other stories, as Greimas’s scheme seems to suggest, or in the ways it differs from them? 

At one point, early in Moonbound, when Ariel is still living in the village of Sauvage, at a desperate moment he runs towards a prominent feature of the village: a sword plunged into a stone. His companion, the narrator of this book (again: it’s complicated), thinks, “I knew this story! The words inscribed on the sword read — The boy hurried past. Ignored it completely.” He retrieves a very different sword that, as it turns out, is much more helpful to him — though this greatly angers the wizard who has plotted Ariel’s life. (One man’s Helper is another man’s Opponent.) 

Having gone off-script, Ariel is confronted by the enraged wizard: 

“The stone is my design. As is the village. As are you.” The directness of his speech made the boy’s blood sizzle. “Yet you did not pull the sword. Why?”

“I found another,” Ariel said simply.

The wizard frowned. “Another sword ought not to have sufficed. The pattern is burned into your cells. Don’t you feel it? Or is my design so poor?” 

“Of course I feel it,” Ariel said quietly. First, triumph and terror; now, dread and calm. “But there are other designs, too.” 

And maybe not just designs. If you were to ask me why Ariel found the other sword, the sword that wrecked the plans of the manipulative, controlling wizard, I’d say that he just got lucky

Luck, this tale suggests, is a big factor in human affairs. From a conversation that happens later in the book, between Scrounger and Durga, the girl awakened from sleep, “the last daughter of the Anth”: 

“The way I’ve heard it, the Anth destroyed themselves,” said Scrounger. “Maybe you’re right, and maybe your future yanked you straight into disaster. Maybe there’s a lesson there.”

”The end of the Anth wasn’t hubris,” Durga said. “I know that’s an easy story to tell, but it’s not true. We were beyond that.”

”A lot of hubris, saying you’re beyond hubris.”

”Yet I am saying it.”

”All right, I’ll allow it wasn’t hubris. What was it, then? What doomed your cause?”

”Bad luck,” Durga said simply. “There is such a thing, in history, as miserable bad luck.” 

So, to sum up, what makes a story go off-piste? Luck, bad or good. Luck makes for stories rather than Story. Luck is the presiding spirit of the Garden of Forking Paths. Where Luck is present, you can’t map the scene with Greimas’s three pair of actants — that only gets you the X, Y, and Z axes. And as one of the characters — well, kind of a character: it’s complicated — explains to us, only a massive multidimensionality is genuinely adequate to the world.  

Perhaps most important: Luck defeats the would-be Controllers, the ones who would dictate every step in everyone’s story — or maybe even bring stories to an end. 

Well, probably. This too could be complicated.

  • Let us grant, per argumentum, that Ariel wasn’t destined to find the sword he needed, or to meet the Helpers he needed to find. There’s no wise elder to tell Ariel, “You were meant to find that sword, and not by the wizard. And that may be an encouraging thought.”
  • But Ariel, when we first meet him, says, “I know I am meant for something important. I can feel it. I have always felt it.” 
  • But the wizard programmed him to think this way: “The pattern is burned into your cells.” 
  • But the feeling persists in Ariel even after he liberates himself from the wizard’s tyranny. And if he is lucky, then his luck is extraordinary. 

I am not sure that there is an answer to this conundrum, but we may find a way of negotiating it by reflecting on what Robin calls “Gibson-Faulkner Theory.” (The name is explained in this interview.) In the novel we merely learn that the “central premise of Gibson-Faulkner Theory” is: “The present is a function of the future, not the past.” As Durga explains, 

“What I mean is — we have minds! We dream, and we plan, and then we take action. For that reason, our present is a function of the future we imagine. It is forged in response to vision. If we lack vision — well, then the ghosts will play, and that is our own fault. You can believe it or not. I know it is true, because I was born in San Francisco, the city the future reached back and made, because it was going to be needed.” 

Now, I could (and probably will, in another post) argue with this — and as one of the progenitors of Gibson-Faulkner theory, I think I have a right to say that Durga’s articulation contains too much Gibson and not enough Faulkner. But the point is a powerful one. We act towards the future we have envisioned. And “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).  

We love the old stories — we love stories that do what we expect them to do, what we know in advance they will do. But we also love it when they surprise us. Repeatedly in Moonbound we are told that “the great question of the Anth” is: “What happens next?” And we only ask that question when a story is surprising us, or when we hope it will. 

We need themes, and we need variations on themes. And Moonbound provides both, and provides them delightfully. What a cool book. Hey Robin: More, please. I want to know what happens next. 

the arc of Hume’s history

I’ve been reading David Hume’s massive and magnificent History of England, and it’s generally fascinating — though there are, it must be said, extended passages in which he’s just dutifully relating what his researches have been able to discover about events which are not as well-attested as he would like. At the end of Volume II, when he has completed his narration of the Wars of the Roses with his account of the life and death of Richard III, he heaves a great sigh of relief: 

Thus have we pursued the history of England through a series of many barbarous ages; till we have at last reached the dawn of civility and sciences, and have the prospect, both of greater certainty in our historical narrations, and of being able to present to the reader a spectacle more worthy of his attention. 

That is, he’s about to enter the era in which increased political and social order (“civility”) and the invention and adoption of the printing press (“sciences”) yield far greater documentation of events. 

In a famous essay, Arnaldo Momogliano argued that Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, sought to unite two kinds of historiography that previously had been quite distinct: the antiquarian history of les erudits and the philosophical history of writers like Voltaire. Gibbon was a great fellow for archives and inscriptions and ruins, but he was also determined to tell a story that enlightened and instructed. Hume — writing roughly a generation before Gibbon: the History of England was published between 1754 and 1762, while the Decline and Fall appeared between 1776 and 1789 — is very much the philosophical historian. His virtues, in his own estimation, are those of critical judgment rather than antiquarian assiduity. When he has more documentation, documentation that needs to be sifted and assessed with a shrewdly philosophic eye, his distinctive excellences come into play. 

In one important sense his orientation is almost identical to that of Gibbon. Gibbon, famously, begins his history thus: 

In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall: a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth. 

That the first centuries of the Empire marked the high point in human history is a view that Hume had already articulated, though he places the apex a little earlier. But the sweep of his account is somewhat larger:  

Those who cast their eye on the general revolutions of society, will find, that, as almost all improvements of the human mind had reached nearly to their state of perfection about the age of Augustus, there was a sensible decline from that point or period; and man thenceforth relapsed gradually into ignorance and barbarism. The unlimited extent of the Roman empire, and the consequent despotism of its monarchs, extinguished all emulation, debased the generous spirits of men, and depressed that noble flame, by which all the refined arts must be cherished and enlivened. The military government, which soon succeeded, rendered even the lives and properties of men insecure and precarious; and proved destructive to those vulgar and more necessary arts of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; and in the end, to the military art and genius itself, by which alone the immense fabric of the empire could be supported. The irruption of the barbarous nations, which soon followed, overwhelmed all human knowledge, which was already far in its decline; and men sunk every age deeper into ignorance, stupidity, and superstition; till the light of ancient science and history had very nearly suffered a total extinction in all the European nations. 

“Ignorance and barbarism” is Hume’s version of what Gibbon calls “Barbarism and religion.” But while Gibbon is content to describe what happened to the Roman Empire, ending with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Hume wants to describe the fate of “all the European nations.” 

Gibbon but briefly gestures at renewal. In his final chapter, having declared that his narrative describes “the triumph of Barbarism and religion,” he adds: “But the clouds of Barbarism were gradually dispelled; and the peaceful authority of Martin the Fifth and his successors restored the ornaments of the city [of Rome] as well as the order of the ecclesiastical state.”

Hume, though, wants to do much more in this line. So, to return to the conclusion of his second volume, he writes: 

But there is a point of depression, as well as of exaltation, from which human affairs naturally return in a contrary direction, and beyond which they seldom pass either in their advancement or decline. The period, in which the people of Christendom were the lowest sunk in ignorance, and consequently in disorders of every kind, may justly be fixed at the eleventh century, about the age of William the Conqueror; and from that aera, the sun of science, beginning to re-ascend, threw out many gleams of light, which preceded the full morning, when letters were revived in the fifteenth century. 

Fascinatingly, Hume believes that the key event, the one that more than any other turned the descent into an ascent, came when the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian was rediscovered, in (Hume believes) Amalfi. That provided a direct link to the wisdom of the ancient world: the Justinian Code, which was itself a summary and codification of much older Roman laws, became a standard against which the legal practice of the present day could be measured, found wanting, and, slowly, remedied. 

(Gibbon was so strongly committed to his narrative of decline that, though he wrote extensively about Justinian’s reign, he could not grant strong praise to anything that emperor did. If Justinian expanded his empire, that’s a sign of corruption and failure: “The fortifications of Europe and Asia were multiplied by Justinian; but the repetition of those timid and fruitless precautions exposes to a philosophic eye the debility of the empire.” Likewise the attempt to deal with moribund traditions: “Justinian suppressed the schools of Athens and the consulship of Rome, which had given so many sages and heroes to mankind. Both these institutions had long since degenerated from their primitive glory; yet some reproach may be justly inflicted on the avarice and jealousy of a prince by whose hands such venerable ruins were destroyed.” As for the great Code, there’s too much of it and it was badly administered: “The government of Justinian united the evils of liberty and servitude; and the Romans were oppressed at the same time by the multiplicity of their laws and the arbitrary will of their master.” Hume is always more generous.)

As already noted, Hume thinks that the ascent is due to the increase in power and influence of “civility and sciences,” which are both disciplinary: “civility” disciplines the passions of men and thereby brings increasing order to the political system and civil society alike, while “science” is a synonym for the disciplined, the methodical and orderly, pursuit of knowledge. Hume deplores religion because religion — coming as it does in two varieties, the superstitious and the enthusiastic — is consistently antidisciplinary. Superstition refuses the discipline of science, enthusiasm refuses the discipline of civility. 

(By the way, I have written about how Hume’s superstition/enthusiasm binary helps to explain our current politics.) 

In the first two volumes of his history, Hume covers around 1500 years; in the last four, fewer than 200. And increased documentation is only one reason for that disproportion: more important, for Hume the philosophical historian, is the fact that those 200 years reveal an inconsistent but unmistakable diminishment of enthusiasm and superstition and increase of civility and sciences. To discern the means by which that ascent occurred is, for Hume, the primary reason for studying that history. We know that we rose from barbarism — but how did we rise? If we know that, then we may be able to avoid sinking back into the mire; and should it happen that we do sink again, well, at least we can know the way out. 

human voices

My friend Rick Gibson makes a fascinating argument here. You need to read the whole thing, but a brief summary would go like this: No matter how vast the corpus of text on which chatbots currently draw, in order to be successful in the future they will need to have an ever-expanding and ever-developing corpus. They won’t be useful to us unless human beings keep adding high-quality information, high-quality ideas, high-quality text, that they can draw upon. 

I’m trying to decide whether this is right — or rather, I know that it’s at least partially right but I’m trying to decide how right it is. I can conceive of certain circumstances in which it would not be true. For instance, programmers often use chatbots to write code for them, and one of the things that they often say is that the code written by bots is verbose and ugly. It gets the job done, sort of, but in a bloated and inelegant way. But it’s easy to imagine that the bloated and inelegant code written by bots will eventually become the norm. Programmers who become habituated to getting their code written or at least drafted by chatbots will never develop a sense of what concise and elegant code is; and when they don’t have that sense they won’t value it and therefore won’t miss it when it’s absent. Elegance in code could just cease to be a thing. 

I guess what I’m asking is whether in programming — and in certain other areas, for instance business correspondence — what the bots provide could reshape our sense of what counts as good enough

I’m thinking here about something I wrote about a few years ago, also at the Hog Blog:  

Why can computers sometimes pass a Turing Test? Erik Larson, in his book, points out that in one test a few years ago people were told that the computer was human but not a native English speaker — which didn’t fool everyone who interacted with it but fooled enough people to make some of us worried. Why were the deceived deceived? I suggest that there are two likely answers, neither of which excludes the other.

The first was offered some years ago by Big Tech critic Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier writes that the Turing Test doesn’t just test machines — it also tests us. It “cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?” That is, many of us have interacted with apparently thoughtful machines often enough — for instance, when on the telephone and trying, often fruitlessly, to get to a customer service representative, that we have gradually lowered our standards for intelligence. And surely this erosion of standards is furthered by situations in which, even when by some miracle we do get to speak to another human being, we find that they merely read from a script in a way not demonstrably different from the behavior of a bot. Lanier says flatly that “the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” 

What if that’s what the pervasive presence of AI does? — reduce our mooring to reality sufficiently that we cease to notice the difference between text written by chatbots (however out of date the corpus on which they draw) and actual human language? I think about the phenomenon of young singers singing like Autotune because that’s what they think singing sounds like. Standards of quality, like standards of beauty, are mutable. 

Will Baude:

The court is motivated by statesmanship, which the country sorely needs today. The problem is that this statesmanship is a form of the kind of outcome-oriented policymaking that the court disparages in other contexts. It trusts states to handle the homelessness crisis but not ballot access for insurrectionists, even though the Constitution trusts states with both. It trusts juries to handle fines for securities fraud but not punishment for abuse of the presidency, even though the Constitution trusts juries with both.

I think there are some better things to say about the majority’s decision in Trump — I might write at some point about how it slyly explains to courts just how to prosecute rogue Presidents — but overall I think Baude’s argument is compelling. 

re-humanization

A couple of years ago I wrote about a shift in my writerly focus from a decade-long inquiry into the enemies of attention to an inquiry into how we might live a human life at a human scale. Those are related themes, of course: identifying and critiquing what Tim Wu calls “the attention merchants” is indeed vital: an ethic and maybe even a theology for our time begins, as I have argued in an essay on Thomas Pynchon, with suspicion of our would-be overlords. But suspicion is only the first step, and a largely useless one unless we’re willing and able to redirect our attention to worthier objects than those being sold to us by the machinery of surveillance capitalism.

But the idea of living “a human life at a human scale” makes sense only if the human is a meaningful category, and therefore one of my related themes in recent years has been the need to recover a belief in the integrity of that category — that is, to help people believe that we have a distinctive bond with, and distinctive obligations to, our fellow humans. (N.B. This is not to say that we have no bond with or obligations to the rest of Creation: the key word in the previous sentence is “distinctive.”)

A Humanism of the Abyss,” my essay from last year on Oliver Sacks, is one contribution to this cause; my new essay in Harper’s, “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method,” is another. I’m looking to describe those moments in our experience when the various divisions of our current identity politics fade into the background and something more fundamental forces itself upon us.

Also: my mind continually returns to the Second World War, because I believe it was in that era — starting in the decade preceding the outbreak of hostilities — that our current antihumanism has its roots. That was the period when modern governments, with modern administrative structures and procedures, started building entire socio-political systems based on fundamental oppositions of race or class. That was the period in which we all became habituated to “seeing like a state.” (And, not incidentally, my writing about anarchism is an exercise in countering that panoptic gaze.) 

Another clarification: This is not to say that racism and class antagonism did not exist prior to the Second World War, but the intimate connection between race/class/sex and the administrative state is a necessary prerequisite for our identity politics today, and that began in the lead-up to the war, first in Nazi Germany and then elsewhere. I often wonder whether the internment of Japanese-Americans would have been thought of had the Nazis not provided a pre-existing playbook for such action. But then, of course, the Nazi system drew on the principles of Taylorism, which in turn drew on experiments in workplace management pioneered several decades earlier by Robert Owen — nothing in this world is wholly new, wholly without precedent, but I think the Nazis did a lot to show just how far Taylorist principles could go in organizing a whole society and especially in excreting its racial refuse. (And then, of course, in making us all self-Taylorizing, building our entire lives on principles of efficiency and productivity.) 

I often meditate on this passage from Antony Beevor’s history of the Second World War:

On 15 December [1944], Hitler and his entourage moved in his personal train to the Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest) Führer headquarters at Ziegenberg, near Bad Nauheim. Rundstedt’s headquarters were already in the adjacent Schloss. To the horror of the generals, Martin Bormann’s Nazi Party Chancellery came too, and Bormann complained that the facilities were insufficient for all his typists. Nazi bureaucracy, both in Berlin and at local levels, seemed only to increase as disaster threatened, no doubt to give the impression that the Party was still in control of events. Instructions, directives and regulations cascaded forth on every subject just when the transport and therefore also the postal system were collapsing under the weight of Allied bombing.

Of course, this entire system is built on maniacal hatred — I have heard historians say that the Nazis fought as long as they did in a hopeless cause because that was the only way to keep the trains going to Auschwitz — but I think it’s even more strongly built on a fantasy of perfect control, the channeling of hatred into a flawless System. And the very presence of the ovens, the need for them, is evidence of an imperfect system. 

Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face — forever” is something that will only happen when a system of control has failed. As long as it’s properly functioning it will produce — and produce via documentation — what Foucault called “docile bodies,” and what Auden, some decades earlier, had already envisioned as

An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Once the degenerates and subhumans have been exterminated, the “unintelligible multitude” remains.

I think we can all agree that such systems, even in imperfect form, are radically dehumanizing — we feel this to some degree even in our most trivial encounters with bureaucratic administrivia — but what acts, what commitments, what beliefs, what loves, are required to begin a rehumanizing movement? That’s the key question I’m asking myself these days. And I believe the answers are to be found largely in the arts, especially works of art that precede the Tayorization of the world and the self. It is not the technological futurists who will show is the way out of this iron cage; it is our artful ancestors. 

A final word: this is a question everyone should be asking, I think, but especially my fellow Christians. For what is the Gospel if not a message to human beings? It is a message that concerns the whole of Creation, but human beings are the ones to whom the Good News is addressed. And I don’t know how people can hear that News if they don’t know themselves and their neighbors as fellow humans, under the same Judgment, and offered the same Salvation.  

donkey work

John Gregory Dunne, from The Studio

The Studio was simplicity itself to write. It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes. That there were no surprises—I knew exactly what I was going to do—was for me the problem. Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in The Studio. My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge. 

This chimes with my experience. The two books I most enjoyed writing are Original Sin and The Year of Our Lord 1943, because they posed serious structural challenges. It was not obvious to me how those stories might best be told. 

Man Hunt (1941)

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In theory, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt faced the same problem that many other Hollywood films of the same era (Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, for instance) faced: How to be anti-Nazi while maintaining a fig leaf of objectivity — a necessary fig leaf, given the supposed neutrality of the United States. But this movie is about as anti-Nazi as it’s possible to be. That said, opposition to Nazism isn’t what the movie is about. To explain why I say that, I have to tell the story. 

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Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) is a famous English big-game hunter who is caught in the woods near Berchtesgaden and accused of attempting to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Under interrogation by a Nazi official (played with exquisite sliminess by George Sanders) he denies the charge, but is told that he will not be released, indeed will be killed, unless he signs a confession. He refuses, but eventually escapes to London, pursued by Nazis. 

Overall, the movie doesn’t have a very Lang-like look and feel, but there’s a terrific pursuit scene in the Underground that reminds me strongly of M.

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In any event: the Nazis chase Thorndike about the city and eventually, though quite accidentally, into the arms of a cockney girl called Jerry (Joan Bennett), whom he charms. She falls hard for him, though the feeling is not quite mutual. He’s attracted to her but not besotted; she’s a kid to him. In the end Thorndike kills his Nazi pursuers, though not before they find Jerry and kill her, because she refused to betray his location. (There’s a strong dose of poetic justice in the way he does this, but that’s one detail I won’t spoil.) 

Thorndike is wounded in the final confrontation with his enemy, and two scenes follow. In the first, Thorndike is in the hospital, deliriously replaying in his mind his time with Jerry; in the second, he parachutes out of an airplane — not under orders, but on his own initiative — and into Germany. His descent is accompanied by much bombast. It’s the same kind of pseudo-patriotic noise that defaces the conclusion of Foreign Correspondent.  

What the bombast (including a final voiceover) obscures is the real point of the story, which is this: Thorndike is on a suicide mission. At a moment when the Nazis control most of Europe and any meaningful contesting of their continental domination is years away, he floats down to German soil carrying only a high-powered hunting rifle. At the beginning of the film he had told his interrogator that he didn’t enjoy killing any more — he had come to prefer the “sporting stalk” in which he finds and targets his quarry but doesn’t bother to pull the trigger — but now his only thought is killing. He will not come back; he does not want to come back. 

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It is clear that he has but one goal: atonement. He had stumbled into Jerry’s life, charmed her, allowed her to assist him, and by those means he had led her straight to her death. And the only way he can think to atone is to kill as many Germans as he can and then suffer death himself. Man Hunt isn’t a patriotic drama; it’s an existentialist tragedy. 

on the edge

Above you see what I believe was the key moment in today’s match between Portugal and Slovenia. After having a penalty saved, astonishingly, by Jan Oblak, Cristiano Ronaldo collapsed in tears, and I mean collapsed: during the break between the two halves of extra time, his shoulders were shaking, he was inconsolable. Several teammates came up to hug him and pat him on the back, but only Palhinha gave him what he needed, which was a stern pull-up-your-socks talking-to.

Given the excessive deference Portuguese football exhibits towards Ronaldo — manifested today by allowing him to take several terrible free kicks which should have been taken by Bruno Fernandes, with Ronaldo in the box trying to get his head on the ball — Palhinha’s initiative was brave, and it may have saved the match. Without his intervention, would Ronaldo have been able to get himself together for the penalty shootout? Maybe. But I’m not sure. 

Surely Ronaldo is the most unlikeable of the truly great footballers. He has always been petulant, whiny, preening, and selfish, and has often been on the edge of losing self-control altogether. As a starlet at Manchester United, he took more dives than Greg Louganis … but eventually he realized that his behavior was counterproductive — he was not getting calls that he deserved because the refs assumed that he was diving once again — and he stopped. Just stopped. 

Ronaldo strikes me as a narcissistic asshole who wants so desperately to be great at football that he manages — with enormous difficulty — to control his bad disposition sufficiently that it doesn’t prevent greatness. His devotion to preparation is, I think, unparalleled. Consider for instance how good he is with his “off” leg — he’s scored around 175 left-footed goals in his career — and think about how many thousands of hours of practice enabled that success. His conditioning is likewise superlative: he’s 39 years old and just played 120 minutes, but of all the Portugal players he’s the one I’m least worried about being tired for the Friday match with France. 

It would have been so easy for his own temperament to destroy his career, but it didn’t. I don’t like him, I don’t like him one bit, but I have to admire him for that. I’m talking here only about his play, not about the rest of his life, but: Whether his demons are inbuilt or whether he has indulged them, they’ve been afflicting him his entire career, and yet in every essential way he has throttled them. That’s remarkable. 

All that said, I wish he’d have missed that second penalty as well, and that Slovenia had sent him home. 

P.S. Palhinha’s full name is João Maria Lobo Alves Palhares Costa Palhinha Gonçalves. 

UPDATE after the Portugal loss to France, from Jonathan Liew

In a way, it’s hard not to feel resentful of him: resentful of the way this grand, galaxy-sized occasion is ultimately reduced to a function of one man’s ego. This could have been an all-time great quarter-final, and instead a part of it was stolen: stolen ball possession, stolen attention, stolen minutes from better players who actually deserve to be there, rather than a pure anachronism trotting out simply because no one has the clout to tell him not to.

Liew points out that Ronaldo was the only Portugal player on the pitch not to console Joao Felix after the kid missed his penalty. He just turned and walked away, even though he had received consolations in the previous match. 

supple and athletic minds

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871):

A new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers. 

A recommendation more important now than ever. 

Will Republicans Save the Humanities?

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey:

At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, about 200 tenure- and career-track faculty lines are being created in new academic units devoted to civic education, according to Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. These positions are being filled by faculty members trained in areas including political theory, history, philosophy, classics, and English. Since there are only about 2,000 jobs advertised in all those disciplines combined in a typical year, the creation of 200 new lines is a significant event. […] 

Criticism of these new programs is both understandable and premature. Most of them have just been founded and have yet to demonstrate exactly how they intend to fulfill the mandates that have set them in motion. They have not had time to create a track record by which they might be judged, and they will each develop in different ways. For now, understanding the motivations of the faculty members who join them may be the best way to discern where those programs are headed. Who are the academics working in these programs? Why have they moved from other colleges? How do they think about their responsibility to the legislative mandates that created these projects? And how do they plan to build academic programs with integrity under intense and conflicting political pressures, from both on and off campus? 

A sharp and fair-minded report. I would add that almost all of these endeavors are rooted not in conservatism but in classical liberalism — which is how they attract non-conservatives. This is not a MAGA project but an Enlightenment project, especially the Enlightenment of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. (Thus the centrality of political philosophy — literature and the other arts just come along for the ride, but they seem to be welcome.) 

I especially appreciate this paragraph from late in the piece: 

The final challenge these schools face, in our view, is to articulate their programs as a renaissance rather than a reaction. Many of the faculty members moving to these schools bring with them powerful memories of elements of their own academic training that are underappreciated: great books programs at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, courses in grand strategy at Yale University, curricula that focus on the American founding or British constitutionalism. To be part of a renaissance that endures, efforts to revive neglected subfields and forgotten courses must resist the temptation of nostalgia for a lost golden age. The Renaissance we remember did not simply revel in old texts of Cicero, it gave birth to novel forms of art and thought that focused on the distinct challenges of its moment.

I’ve seen a number of comments from LPC* academics about these new programs, and their view, unsurprisingly, seems to be that they’d rather see the humanities destroyed altogether than see such programs succeed. I get it; it’s hard, when one has wielded unchallenged power for so long, to deal with resistance. 

* Left Purity Culture 

counterparts

More Trollopean spoilers here. 

One of Trollope’s more interesting habits as a novelist is the tendency to create counterparts: a character in one novel will mirror a character in another. The proper counterpart of Lady Arabella in Doctor Thorne, whom I discussed in my previous post, appears in the next Barsetshire novel, Framley Parsonage: I refer to Lady Lufton. Like Lady Arabella, Lady Lufton is a woman of high rank who treasures that rank, and a woman with one son who treasures that son and desperately wants him to marry appropriately. 

But whereas Lady Arabella is fretful and nervous, Lady Lufton is a masterful woman. Her circumstances are different: she is a widow and must make her own decisions; and far from being financially embarrassed she is quite rich. Moreover, she is exceptionally generous with her wealth. Mark Robarts, a clergyman who is a recipient of her patronage, thinks of her thus: 

He knew a good deal respecting Lady Lufton’s income and the manner in which it was spent. It was very handsome for a single lady, but then she lived in a free and open-handed style; her charities were noble; there was no reason why she should save money, and her annual income was usually spent within the year. Mark knew this, and he knew also that nothing short of an impossibility to maintain them would induce her to lessen her charities. She had now given away a portion of her principal to save the property of her son — her son, who was so much more opulent than herself, — upon whose means, too, the world made fewer effectual claims. 

But Lady Lufton’s habit of generosity has this effect on her: it makes her more accustomed to getting her way. She does not give with conditions, but she expects her generosity to be properly acknowledged. She loves Mark Robarts, who has been her son Lord Lufton’s closest friend since childhood; but she expects that a mere country vicar, the son of a provincial doctor, and his wife Fanny will know better than to think that his sister Lucy could be a proper mate for her son. Mark and Fanny do nothing to promote the match; but they don’t send Lucy away either. 

Lucy herself is mindful that she is far below Lord Lufton on the social scale, and, though she loves him, refuses his proposal of marriage; then, when he renews it, she tells him that she will only marry him if his mother explicitly endorses the marriage. When Lufton presses his mother to accept Lucy, she is in agony. She knows that her son loves Lucy, but all along she has hoped for him to marry the stately and elegant Griselda Grantly (daughter of Archdeacon Grantly, whom we came to know back in Barchester Towers). 

When pressed to explain her disapproval of Lucy, Lady Lufton feels that she can’t risk being too blunt. (“But her father was a doctor of medicine, she is the sister of the parish clergyman, she is only five feet two in height, and is so uncommonly brown! Had Lady Lufton dared to give a catalogue of her objections, such would have been its extent and nature. But she did not dare to do this.”) So she equivocates: 

And then at last Lady Lufton spoke it out. “She is — insignificant. I believe her to be a very good girl, but she is not qualified to fill the high position to which you would exalt her.”

“Insignificant!”

“Yes, Ludovic, I think so.”

“Then, mother, you do not know her. You must permit me to say that you are talking of a girl whom you do not know. Of all the epithets of opprobrium which the English language could give you, that would be nearly the last which she would deserve.”

“I have not intended any opprobrium.”

“Insignificant!”

“Perhaps you do not quite understand me, Ludovic.”

“I know what insignificant means, mother.”

“I think that she would not worthily fill the position which your wife should take in the world.”

“I understand what you say.”

“She would not do you honour at the head of your table.” 

Lady Lufton’s objections are largely pictorial — they involve her sense that the grace and stature and elegance of the Lufton family must be visually manifested in the next Lady Lufton, a personage so “exalted.” And these objections loom large in her mind; but, it turns out, not as large as her genuine love for her son, and her desire that he be happy. 

After much soul-searching and inward struggle, Lady Lufton visits Lucy Robarts — who has in the meantime (and Lady Lufton has noticed this) devoted herself to charity not through money but through self-sacrificial generosity, at some risk to her own health — to put a question to her: 

“He is the best of sons, and the best of men, and I am sure that he will be the best of husbands.”

Lucy had an idea, by instinct, however, rather than by sight, that Lady Lufton’s eyes were full of tears as she spoke. As for herself she was altogether blinded and did not dare to lift her face or to turn her head. As for the utterance of any sound, that was quite out of the question.

“And now I have come here, Lucy, to ask you to be his wife.” 

Trollope can be fierce, as I noted in my previous post, but he can also be sweet, and one of the sweetest moments in all his voluminous works comes in Lady Lufton’s final words, in this scene, to Lucy, when they agree on a time for Lucy to return to Framley Court: 

“Well, dearest, you shall be quiet; the day after to-morrow then. — Mind we must not spare you any longer, because it will be right that you should be at home now. He would think it very hard if you were to be so near, and he was not to be allowed to look at you. And there will be some one else who will want to see you. I shall want to have you very near to me, for I shall be wretched, Lucy, if I cannot teach you to love me.” 

Here Lady Lufton has wholly humbled herself: she is no longer “stern and cross, vexatious and disagreeable,” demanding and censorious. She does not insist on her status, but casts it aside and woos Lucy. “I shall be wretched, Lucy, if I cannot teach you to love me.” Her desire to love and be loved proves stronger than her image of Lufton greatness. 

Needless to say, Lady Arabella Gresham would be capable of none of this: not the self-critique, not even a moment of self-reflection; not the weighing of the claims of rank against the claims of happiness. Lady Arabella is by birth a de Courcy, and one of the regular themes of the Barsetshire novels is the sheer rapacity of the de Courcys. In the next novel in the series, The Small House at Allington, we see them ceaselessly working to consolidate their status, like a mafia clan. (The Countess de Courcy is like a British female equivalent to the mature Michael Corleone, only less decent.) They represent the British class system at its worst; in Lady Lufton we see — it is a rare enough thing in Trollope — a path to moral redemption for the rich and lofty. 

money is magic

Spoilers ahead, but come on, you know how books like this end.

Trollope’s Doctor Thorne is the classic story about the poor orphan girl who turns out to be a princess, but with a twist: Trollope asks how a poor orphan girl can become a princess, and his answer is: With money. Mary Thorne doesn’t have a fairy godmother; but she has an unexpected inheritance. That is to say: money is magic. Money is indeed the most powerful magic imaginable, at least in some circumstances, and all of the major characters in Doctor Thorne know it, and indeed talk about it openly.

Look for instance at this extraordinarily blunt conversation between Frank Gresham and his father. Frank is pressing his father to explain why, if he thinks Mary’s illegitimate birth so terrible, he allowed Mary to associate with his own children. At first Mr. Gresham is somewhat evasive:

“It is a misfortune, Frank; a very great misfortune. It will not do for you and me to ignore birth; too much of the value of one’s position depends upon it.”

“But what was Mr Moffat’s birth?” said Frank, almost with scorn; “or what Miss Dunstable’s?” he would have added, had it not been that his father had not been concerned in that sin of wedding him to the oil of Lebanon.

(Mr Moffatt is a rich man without birth whom the Greshams eagerly sought as a husband for their eldest daughter Augusta; and Frank’s mother and aunt had flatly ordered him to woo Miss Dunstable — one of Trollope’s finest creations, incidentally —, the heiress to a fortune her father acquired through inventing and selling a patent medicine.)

“True, Frank. But yet, what you would mean to say is not true. We must take the world as we find it. Were you to marry a rich heiress, were her birth even as low as that of poor Mary —“

“Don’t call her poor Mary, father; she is not poor. My wife will have a right to take rank in the world, however she was born.”

“Well, — poor in that way. But were she an heiress, the world would forgive her birth on account of her wealth.”

“The world is very complaisant, sir.”

“You must take it as you find it, Frank. I only say that such is the fact. If Porlock [a cousin] were to marry the daughter of a shoeblack, without a farthing, he would make a mésalliance; but if the daughter of the shoeblack had half a million of money, nobody would dream of saying so. I am stating no opinion of my own: I am only giving you the world’s opinion.”

“I don’t give a straw for the world.”

“That is a mistake, my boy; you do care for it, and would be very foolish if you did not. What you mean is, that, on this particular point, you value your love more than the world’s opinion.”

Mr. Gresham is simply pointing out to his son that birth and money alike are means of exchange — tradable in the social marketplace. (The social marketplace, in which people bargain and buy and sell to raise their position, is what Mr. Gresham means by “the world.”) That one must do one’s best in that marketplace is a given for all of the Greshams except Frank. Mr. Gresham is the only member of his family who in any way questions this view of things, the only one who, as can be seen in the quotation above, understands Frank’s love for Mary; but he will not rock that boat, even though he knows that he and his wife are wholly responsible for Frank’s financial difficulties. He expects Frank to blame him for his fiscal imprudence, perhaps even to hate him for making marriage with Mary impossible; but he also expects that Frank will acknowledge and obey the cold logic of the marketplace. “We must take the world as we find it.”

Similarly, Frank’s sister Beatrice, Mary Thorne’s most intimate friend, thinks it obviously impossible that Mary should marry Frank and is disconcerted to discover that Mary does not necessarily agree.

The great ogress in this story — or, the wicked witch who stands in the way of the hidden princess — is Frank’s mother, Lady Arabella, and she is truly horrible. But late in the book, when she is making one more attempt to dissuade her son from pursuing Mary Thorne, Trollope pauses in his narration to say this:

Before we go on we must say one word further as to Lady Arabella’s character. It will probably be said that she was a consummate hypocrite; but at the present moment she was not hypocritical. She did love her son; was anxious — very, very anxious for him; was proud of him, and almost admired the very obstinacy which so vexed her to her inmost soul. No grief would be to her so great as that of seeing him sink below what she conceived to be his position. She was as genuinely motherly, in wishing that he should marry money, as another woman might be in wishing to see her son a bishop; or as the Spartan matron, who preferred that her offspring should return on his shield, to hearing that he had come back whole in limb but tainted in honour. When Frank spoke of a profession, she instantly thought of what Lord de Courcy might do for him. If he would not marry money, he might, at any rate, be an attaché at an embassy. A profession — hard work, as a doctor, or as an engineer — would, according to her ideas, degrade him; cause him to sink below his proper position; but to dangle at a foreign court, to make small talk at the evening parties of a lady ambassadress, and occasionally, perhaps, to write demi-official notes containing demi-official tittle-tattle; this would be in proper accordance with the high honour of a Gresham of Greshamsbury. We may not admire the direction taken by Lady Arabella’s energy on behalf of her son, but that energy was not hypocritical.

Her position, and the “energy” with which she defends it, are not hypocritical because neither she nor any other member of her family pretends to think in any other way. Their vice pays no tribute to any virtue. When dissuading Frank from pursuing Mary, they could have found a thousand ways to camouflage their greed, to disguise it as something else altogether, but they never bother to do so. They simply say, in precisely these words, “Frank, you must marry money.” And when Lady Arabella says to Mary that Frank is regrettably pledging himself to “you who have nothing to give in return,” she doesn’t even think she is insulting Mary: she is merely describing the plain facts of the case, for Mary has neither family nor rank nor money — she has no currency.

Trollope’s forthrightness on these points is rarely matched in novelists; one of his few peers in this regard is his great predecessor Jane Austen. As Auden writes in his “Letter to Lord Byron,”

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

Ditto with Trollope. And both writers disguise with brightness of tone the fierceness of their condemnation.

But Trollope bites deeper than Austen does, at least in this novel. The scene in Doctor Thorne in which Lady Arabella tries to compel Mary to renounce Frank is closely modeled on the scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Lady Catherine tries to compel Elizabeth Bennett to renounce Mr. Darcy. Neither attempt works; in each case the socially inferior younger woman proves capable of resisting the demands of the socially superior older one. But Elizabeth benefits from no unexpected inheritance; in the end she is accepted simply because Mr. Darcy need please no one, and his enormous wealth ensures that everyone will want to please him. (Elizabeth’s father slyly notes this.) And her path is smoothed, to some extent anyway, by the social currency she does have: as she says to Lady Catherine about Mr. Darcy, “He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal.”

In Doctor Thorne, by contrast, we enjoy the spectacle of an entire family who had found the bastard Mary Thorne unthinkable as a mate for Frank welcome her with hosannas as soon as she acquires a shitload of cash; not one of them learns a damned thing or changes in any way — indeed, if anything they are confirmed in the rightness of their views of the world, because in the end they get precisely what they want. And Trollope makes no comment on this at all; he reports, we decide.

when you’re ready to stop eating grass

This is a kind of follow-up to my previous post, in which I described this blog as a venue for conserving and transmitting what I believe to be valuable and worthy of our attention. But I don’t want to argue with people about how they spend their time and what they devote their attention to. Now, sometimes I forget this principle and end up arguing anyway. But why would I even try to avoid it? 

In 1940 C. S. Lewis gave a talk, later to be published as an essay, called “Why I Am Not a Pacifist.” Lewis begins this talk by discussing conscience, which makes sense, since pacifists often account for their position by appealing to their conscience. Their conscience tells them that fighting in a war is wrong. But to say merely this is to obscure a question that Lewis thinks important: How does one arrive at moral judgments, e.g. the judgment that fighting in a war is wrong? Lewis addresses this question by saying that arriving at judgments about right and wrong is functionally or structurally similar to arriving at judgments about truth and falsehood. So how do we do that?

Lewis says that there are three elements to “any concrete train of reasoning”:

Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about. These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. But each man’s experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority. Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. This act I call intuition. Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering. 

Lewis is especially interested in the second step, intuition. (By the way, it is not just Lewis who uses the term in this way: he’s borrowing from Thomas Aquinas.) And one point he makes about intuition is especially important: 

The second, the intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. You can give the man new facts. You can invent a simpler proof, that is, a simpler concatenation of intuitable truths. But when you come to an absolute inability to see any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing. No doubt this absolute inability is much rarer than we suppose. Every teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they “can’t see” some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a refusal to see, resulting either from some passion which wants not to see the truth in question or else from sloth which does not want to think at all. But when the inability is real, argument is at an end. You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition. Proof rests upon the unprovable which has to be just “seen.” Hence faulty intuition is incorrigible. It does not follow that it cannot be trained by practice in attention and in the mortification of disturbing passions, or corrupted by the opposite habits. But it is not amenable to correction by argument. 

And as with rational intuition, so also with moral intuition. If you simply cannot see that, for instance, eating people is wrong, then no one will be able to come up with an argument to convince you. Your mind may be alterable, but not by that means. 

Think about the hundreds of millions of people who spend their days shitposting; dragging political enemies on social media; writing to complete strangers to tell them that they’re stupid or evil; scrolling through TikTok for endless hours — I can’t find the link now, but one person recently reported noticing that the person sitting just in front of her on a 10-hour transoceanic flight never stopped watching TikTok for the duration —; drooling enviously over perfect Instagram lives; constantly self-diagnosing their own manifold mental illnesses; constantly pursuing their porn preferences into darker and darker places … a properly functioning intuitive faculty would tell them that all this is an absolutely shitty way to live … but their intuitive faculty is broken, or has never been developed. 

You just have to wait for the moment when they realize that all this time they’ve been eating grass. And then, when that happens, you need to have something better, something that’s tastier and more nutritious, waiting for them. 

what love wants to say

Cheryl Mendelson is a philosopher, a lawyer, a novelist, and the author of a legendary book about housekeeping. (We’ve been using our copy for a quarter-century now.) And her new book, Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite, stands somehow at the intersection of all those things. After all, a wedding ceremony, with vows at its center, is a peculiar rite indeed. To make such a vow is to promise; is to enter into a kind of contract; is the fruit of a decision for two people to make a home together. And of course, the events that lead up to a marriage, the events that constitute a marriage, and (sometimes) the events that end a marriage, are endlessly productive of stories. This is all to say that Cheryl Mendelson is probably the perfect person to write this book. 

(Disclosure: I don’t know Cheryl Mendelson but have known her husband Edward for many years now. He is W. H. Auden’s literary executor and has always been of inestimable aid and support to my work on Auden.)  

Mendelson begins the book by describing her first marriage, one made impulsively when she was quite young; she concludes by describing her happily enduring second marriage. And it is her belief that we can grasp why one marriage failed and the other succeeded by understanding how the couples felt about, how they thought about, how they understood (or failed to understand) the vows with which they began their lives together. It’s a brilliant notion and one that frames the whole narrative, which is largely historical but also sociological, psychological, moral — and (often) religious, since the wedding vows we all know arose through the long development of Christian rites of Holy Matrimony. 

After describing her hasty first marriage, Mendelson writes, 

It’s hard to imagine a world in which our absurd decision to marry wouldn’t have ended in divorce. But I could see that friends whose marriages had more propitious beginnings than ours had to fight many of the same battles. The general atmosphere of suspicion toward the institution seemed to me to seep into actual marriages, exaggerating their frustrations and minimizing their satisfactions. Most marriages in our circle of friends broke up. Social hostility toward marriage and even toward love, expressed in contempt, disapproval, and unfriendly theorizing, took a toll on both. 

This widespread social hostility to, or at best irony about, marriage is, it seems to me, the primary impetus for the book. Mendelson challenges it, and challenges it compassionately but forcefully. She knows that her celebration of marriage (and its classic vows) will be a hard sell for many: 

To write about the marriage vows … is to pick one’s way through a cultural minefield. Whether wedding vows need rethinking, updating, or, possibly, discarding is now a wide-open question. Having thought, read, and rethought, I concluded – for reasons that this book exists to lay out – that the answer is a solid no. The traditional marriage vows, though they contain phrases composed a thousand or more years ago, are a form of words that say exactly what love still wants to say. 

Vows is a remarkable book, and I hope it gets a wide readership. The defense and, more, celebration of fidelity (Chapter 9) is itself worth the price of admission, and I wonder how many readers will reckon seriously with the case Mendelson makes. More generally, I would be especially interested to hear how people who despise marriage reckon with the book’s arguments. They won’t find Mendelson easy to refute. 

unconditional love

Clare Sestanovich

I sat across from the missionary, pretending to drink a beer. I was new to beer, and it still tasted bad to me, the way it tastes to children. The second-floor boy was there, too, our shoulders touching. The missionary was talking about love again. The most important thing about God, he told us, was that he loved you unconditionally. For some reason, this startled me. It almost angered me. Who, I asked the missionary, taking a fake sip from the beer bottle, would actually want to be loved like that? All-encompassing, all-permitting love sounded indiscriminate. And what were we doing here — at our fancy school, in our charmed lives — if not learning to discriminate, to value things in and for their particulars? 

“All-encompassing” and “all-permitting” are not synonyms. God doesn’t permit everything; God doesn’t approve everything; God’s discriminations are infinitely subtler than ours. He sees all your sins and names them as sins; he sees all your errors and names them as errors. He is ruthless in His exposure of your deceptions of others and your self-deceptions. He doesn’t miss anything, and he doesn’t think your poems are as good as Keats’s, or your essays as good as Joan Didion’s, unless your poems and essays actually are that good. But he loves you anyway, all the time, and all the way — just as much as He loves that person down the street, that dimwit, that asshole, that person you never want to see again. The love of God shines on the excellent and the assholes alike. 

The Good News here is that if you ever stop being excellent and start becoming a dimwit or an asshole or both at once, God will see it, he will know it, he will know it better than you do, he won’t call it anything except what it is … but he will love you just as much as he did when you were excellent. Because Love doesn’t keep score

Robert Farrar Capon:

I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over — until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on The Sin of the Elder Brother. Give us the Workers in the Vineyard, and we will concoct spurious lessons on The Duty of Contentment or The Moral Aspects of Labor Relations.

Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at four A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance. 

a numbers game

The Supreme Court of the United States has been busy this week (notes this SCOTUS-watcher, whose pinned tabs include supremecourt.gov). You hear a lot these days about a “polarized” and therefore somehow illegitimate court. A 6-3 court, we always hear, with six Republican appointees (Chief Justice Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) and three Democratic appointees (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson). The Court has handed down nine opinions in the past two days. Let’s break down the votes, using the bold/italic formatting used above to make things clear:  

Texas v. New Mexico

JACKSON, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS, ALITO, and BARRETT, JJ., joined.

Department of State v. Munoz

BARRETT, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, ALITO, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN and JACKSON, JJ., joined. 

Erlinger v. United States

GORSUCH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, J., filed concurring opinions. KAVANAUGH, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which ALITO, J., joined, and in which JACKSON, J., joined except as to Part III. JACKSON, J., filed a dissenting opinion. 

Smith v. Arizona:

KAGAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which SOTOMAYOR, KAVANAUGH, BARRETT, and JACKSON, JJ., joined, and in which THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ., joined as to Parts I, II, and IV. THOMAS, J., and GORSUCH, J., filed opinions concurring in part. ALITO, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which ROBERTS, C. J., joined. 

United States v. Rahimi

ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion for the Court, in which ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, BARRETT, and JACKSON, JJ., joined. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which KAGAN, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., KAVANAUGH, J., BARRETT, J., and JACKSON, J., filed concurring opinions. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion. 

Gonzalez v. Trevino

Per curiam decision — that is, by the whole court with no one justice writing the opinion. A rare thing, done in this case for reasons too complicated to get into here.  

Moore v. United States

KAVANAUGH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and JACKSON, JJ., joined. JACKSON, J., filed a concurring opinion. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which ALITO, J., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GORSUCH, J., joined.

Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon

KAGAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and SOTOMAYOR, KAVANAUGH, BARRETT, and JACKSON, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which ALITO, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

This is a pretty typical set of SCOTUS decisions in one major way: only one of the decisions (Munoz) follows the 6-3 split that, we are told by almost all who write about such matters, shitposters and professionals alike, simply defines the character of the court. But as Adam Feldman has written on the invaluable Empirical SCOTUS blog, “While the justices often vote across predictable lines, less predictable individual votes often get overshadowed by decision outcomes that come down as predicted.” That is, Court observers simply ignore the decisions that don’t fit their simplistic ideological frame — it’s as though such decisions don’t happen. A decision in which the dissenters include Samuel Alito and Ketanji Brown Jackson? Unimaginable! A Court in which the supposedly all-powerful right-wingers, Thomas and Alito, are the most likely to be in the minority? Inconceivable! 

Sarah Isgur co-wrote that piece I just linked to, and Advisory Opinions, the podcast she hosts with David French, is consistently very good at pointing listeners to useful articles that explore some of these nuances, and usually very good at explaining those nuances directly.* Empirical SCOTUS, as I have said, is an excellent blog, and the place to start on any given issue or case is SCOTUSblog.  

If you have any interest in American law, these resources are worth exploring, because they can rescue you from the sheer infantilism that characterizes almost all commentary on SCOTUS, including most of what appears in such august venues as the New York Times. Our commentators are infantile because they have only one criterion for evaluating legal decisions on any level: Did this decision give me what I want? The law doesn’t matter to them, the facts of the cases don’t matter to them, legal reasoning is completely inaccessible to them. They just want what they want, and a judge who gives it to them is Good, and a judge who doesn’t is Bad. As I say: infantile. Don’t be that way.  


* Usually but not always. I have one major beef with the podcast: both hosts, but especially Isgur, use too many pronouns. I’m always hearing “it” and asking What?? Or hearing “they” and asking Who?? Isgur and French are good friends and each can often read the other’s mind, but we listeners are not so privileged — especially those of us who are not lawyers. Similarly, sometimes they’ll say of a given case “It’s pretty obvious where this one is going” — but then they don’t say where! Or they’ll say “So this one was 7-2” without saying which way it went. I think they’re assuming that their listeners are reading the opinions, or at least reading the news, before listening to their podcast, and while sometimes that’s true for me it isn’t always. I learn a lot, but I often find myself confused as I listen, and unnecessarily so. Sarah and David just need to slow down sometimes and establish the basic facts of a given case for their audiences before going on to their analysis. Isn’t that something good lawyers always do for juries and judges? 

the uncanny valley of blogging

I used to call my blog Snakes & Ladders, because that reflected my belief that culture – culture-as-a-whole – is never simply ascending or declining, but is undergoing in its various locations constant ups and downs. But beneath that point is an image of myself as an observer and critic of this cultural moment. Now I call the blog The Homebound Symphony, in honor of the Traveling Symphony in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, because I have stopped thinking of myself as an observer and critic and started thinking of myself as a preserver and transmitter. Another way to put this: Whereas I once tried to be a public intellectual, I now just want to be a … I dunno, maybe a convivial conservator.

There’s no money in being a conservator, no prestige either, and almost no attention. I am dramatically less visible now than I was a decade ago, or even five years ago. But for me that’s a feature, not a bug; I have consciously worked to make my audience smaller, chiefly by focusing on what interests me, especially when it interests almost no one else. (I have my number.) That focus warms my heart and gives me peace, so I’m going to keep doing it, even if nobody notices. Looking at the whole public-intellectual game now, I think: I’m way too old for that shit.

This change of focus has also led to a renewed commitment to blogging. If you’re a public intellectual, you may need to write books and essays to make arguments, and to intervene in the Discourse via social media, to change minds. If that’s your thing, then maybe you’d want to use Substack, since it pushes its writers towards (a) hosting comments and (b) engaging with readers via the comment section and Notes. But that is soooooo not my thing; by contrast, a blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission. It’s a great way to put ideas and images and musical compositions in meaningful relation, including creative tension, with one another. It’s an attention cottage

What’s funny about all this is that a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me. 

a parable

In 1969, when the Beatles were recording the album that became Abbey Road, Paul McCartney would come in every day to record a vocal track. (He lived near the studio, so it was easy for him to drop by.) The vocal he was trying to get right was “Oh! Darling” — a song that, some years later, John Lennon would say was better suited to his voice than Paul’s — and each day Paul would perform one take and one take only. There’s some serious shouting on that song, and Paul was taking care to protect his voice; several takes might do damage that would take time to heal. 

Six years earlier, when the lads were recording their first album, they did the whole thing — fourteen songs — in one day, and they saved “Twist and Shout” for the end because John knew that once he had done that one, he wouldn’t have any voice left to do anything else. 

Soyinka and the mythical method

I have an essay in the new issue of Harper’s called “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” It traces the interest in myth and myth-making from Giambattista Vico to George Lucas, tries to explain why myth has ceased to be an appealing and useful category to our intelligentsia, and asks whether there might be a case for restoring it to a place in our conceptual toolbox. 

I do think such a case can be made, and while I do not in this essay make that case in any formal way, I conclude by pointing to the example of Wole Soyinka, who (I’ve been saying this for decades) just may be our greatest living writer. If you don’t know anything about Soyinka, here’s an introductory essay I wrote about him more than twenty years ago. 

I’d love to make a few converts to Soyinka. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend two of the plays in the first volume of his Collected Plays: The Strong Breed and The Swamp Dwellers. Then move on to his greatest play, and one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, Death and the King’s Horseman

Soyinka has also written several volumes of memoirs, the best of which are the first two: Aké: The Years of Childhood and Ìsarà: A Voyage around “Essay” — “Essay” being the nickname of Soyinka’s father, S. A. Soyinka. The former is still in print and easy to find; the latter has been ignored, which is a great shame. They are wonderfully rich, evocative, and perceptive accounts of childhood, and a window into a certain class of Nigerian Christians around the time of the Second World War. (The passages in Aké about the widespread fear that Hitler would invade Nigeria are very funny. In fact, you will find yourself smiling often as you read these memoirs.) 

The next level of difficulty would be his more ambitious plays (A Dance of the Forests and — I discuss this one in my essay — his Yoruba/Christian/Greek version of Euripides’s Bacchae), and then his remarkable novel The Interpreters

Also, here are some photographs of the Soyinka family I put up for one of my classes and have yet to annotate. The third photo is of the formidable Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, whose women’s march for tax relief is the climactic scene of Aké — she was a pioneering Nigerian feminist and activist, Soyinka’s great-aunt, and the mother of the great Fela Kuti. Which means the one of the greatest African singer-songwriters and one of the greatest living writers are cousins. 

Finally, here are some photos I took in 1991 when I visited the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in the heart of Yorubaland. 

Thomas of London

The inchoate and incomplete “theology of the city” that I wrote about last week has always, is my mind, been connected to London as strongly as to Jerusalem and Babylon and Rome. Here’s a new entry in my longstanding if intermittent series about the great city on the Thames. 


He is known to us by another name, and linked in our minds with the city in which he was murdered, but throughout much of his adult life he would have been known as Thomas of London. Thomas, because he was born, probably in the year 1118, on the the feast-day of St. Thomas the Apostle, December 21; and London because he was born in that city, on the street called Cheapside. His father had come to England from Rouen, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; his mother was from Caen. Later stories that Thomas was Anglo-Saxon are wholly untrue. He was, as his shrewdest biographer says, “perhaps the first of England’s great men to be essentially and professedly a Londoner.”

“Cheapside” is derived from Old English words meaning “marketplace,” and we know what people would have brought to sell at the market by the nearby street names: Bread Street, Milk Street, Poultry, Honey Lane. When Thomas was born the place was more of an open area in the growing town than what anyone today would call a street, but it was a major thoroughfare, and when the Kings of England made royal progress from the Tower of London at the eastern end of the city to the Palace of Westminster, arcing along the great bend in the River Thames, they always passed along Cheapside.

Just to the west of his birthplace Thomas would have seen, rising above the rest of the town, London’s greatest work in progress: St. Paul’s Cathedral. Construction had begun in 1087, after a great fire destroyed its predecessor and indeed much of the city — a story that would be repeated in 1666, leading to the building of yet another St. Paul’s, the great domed one that we know today. Scholars believe that the church Thomas saw going up, which is usually called Old St. Paul’s, was already the fourth church to be built on that site, which makes one wonder why the people of London didn’t give up and try elsewhere. But the site was both an intrinsically good one — situated on a small hill overlooking the Thames — and one hallowed by sanctity, for St. Erkenwald, a Bishop of London who died in 693, was buried there, and many pilgrims visited his grave to seek his intercession.

Later in life, when Thomas had become a great man, indeed the greatest churchman in England, he had learned clerks who worked for him, and one of them — William Fitzstephen, who was present at his murder — wrote a biography of Thomas that he prefaced with an account of the city in which Thomas was born. London was William’s native city too, and he took great pride in it and believed that its character explains a good deal about Thomas. London was the place of Thomas’s “rising,” as Canterbury was of his “setting.” William’s Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae — Description of the Most Noble City of London — ranges widely over the customs and practices of the city: for instance, we learn of a magnificent riverside restaurant that not only created lavish feasts but prepared takeaway meals for customers in a hurry. We learn also about commerce, sports and games, green meadows, wells of sweet water, and places of learning.

But William also wishes that we should know how pious a city London was, how “blessed in Christ’s religion.” Though we now believe that no more than 20,000 people lived there, William says that the city boasted thirteen major churches and 126 smaller ones. The major ones were monastic foundations of one kind or another, the smaller ones parish churches. It was this atmosphere of piety, William believes, that nourished the boy who would one day become St. Thomas Becket, St. Thomas of Canterbury. By the time Thomas was ten years old, William says, the boy already radiated holiness. At that age Thomas was sent for his schooling across the river to Merton Priory — situated in what is now a part of the metropolis but then was in the countryside, well beyond what William would have thought of as the boundaries of London — and when Thomas’s father Gilbert came to visit him there he found the prior, Robert, prostrating himself before the boy. When Gilbert expressed horror at this reversal of proper roles, the prior replied, “I know what I am doing. This boy will be a great man before the Lord.”

A likely story, one might be pardoned for thinking. And even at that time there were many in England who doubted that London could such an incubator of holiness. Richard of Devizes, a monk from Winchester and a contemporary of William’s, wrote bluntly: “If you do not wish to dwell with evildoers, do not live in London.” For him, and for many outside the capital, the city was already known as a place of all kinds of sin, but especially of naked avarice. And if one revisits William’s Descriptio with this in mind, one might notice that he spends more time describing the commerce and sports and games than the churches. He is never anything less than admiring of the worldly greatness of his native city. It was that particular greatness to which Thomas of London was a natural heir; but in the end he chose a different inheritance.

When Thomas was a very small boy, another Londoner had a vision. We do not know much with certainty about this man, not even his name. He is usually called Rahere or Raherius. He was clearly associated in some way with the court of King Henry I: in the fragmentary and confused records that have come down to us, he is sometimes referred to merely as a courtier, sometimes as Henry’s herald, though most often as the King’s jester. But in a document from 1115 his name is listed as one of the canons of (that is, priests attached to) St. Paul’s Cathedral. The taking of holy orders is not necessarily incompatible with playing the fool in a king’s court, especially in a period when kings had wide latitude to make gifts to their favorites; but the stories about Rahere do make for a curious amalgamation.

In any event, Rahere’s story now takes a turn: When he was on pilgrimage to Rome he fell ill, and when he was near death St. Bartholomew appeared before him and pledged to spare his life, but only on the condition that Rahere return to London and build a hospital. (In some versions of the story, Rahere in his vision is attacked by a terrifying monster, which the saint drives away.) Upon his return Rahere got busy. With royal and episcopal approval, he acquired a site next to the great livestock market of Smithfield, about half a mile north-west of Cheapside, and began, in 1123, to build both a church and a hospital, both named for the saint who has rescued him from death. He became the prior of the church, a position he held until his death in 1144; and there he is buried.

Thanks to the Great Fire of London in 1665 and the general depredations of time, nothing remains of the Cheapside of Thomas Becket, but some of what Rahere built remains to be seen. The site stands just at the northwestern edge of the City of London, which is why the Fire, which started in Pudding Lane in the eastern part of the city and near the river, never reached it; and when Henry VIII chose to re-found the hospital after he had dissolved England’s monasteries, it became formally known as the “House of the Poore in West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London of Henry VIII’s Foundation.” The original hospital and its several chapels are long gone — though a late-medieval replacement for one those chapels remains as the church of St. Bartholomew the Less — so the chief embodiment of Rahere’s great project is the church known as St. Bartholomew the Great, or, more familiarly, Great St. Bart’s.

The visitor, or worshipper, today enters the church by passing along a walkway that is almost a tunnel — an urban version of a holloway, an old path sunk below the surrounding ground and overgrown by vegetation. For the city has been built up, level by level, in the nine hundred years since Rahere’s workmen laid the foundation for the church, and the surrounding streets run six fit or more above the entrance. Opening the doors, you find yourself in a tiny area, a dark wooden partition blocking any view. But you may well smell incense. And then you walk through one of the little interior doors and and ancient walls rise up around you, the heavy thick Norman stonework, the rounded arches, the windows that seem small if you have been in Gothic or new-Gothic churches recently. Around you is great mass, and a sense of the numinous, as though prayers that have risen up from this place for nearly a millennium have lest behind some invisible, yet palpable, residue.

I have visited Great St. Bart’s many times, but when I think of it I always recall the time I attended Evensong when a visiting Russian choir sang music from Rachmaninoff’s Vespers. The somber and gorgeous music, which though composed in the twentieth century is shaped by ancient forms and tones of Russian music and prayer, seemed uncannily congruent with the dim and forbidding beauty of the old church. I was almost surprised when I looked around me to see people in modern clothing rather than robed and cowled monks.

Meanwhile, just a few feet away, the work of Barts (as the hospital is now generally called) went on, its multifarious electrical machinery humming, its practitioners generally oblivious not only to the worship going on in the church but to the curious and wonderful fact that that worship and their own labors on behalf of the sick arose from a single impulse, a single obedience, on the part of a man who once had found himself far from home and close to death and helpless in the face of his own suffering. The call of those who served in that hospital at its founding was “to wait upon the sick with diligence and care in all gentleness,” as the call of the monks was to pray for all who suffered in this life, and in the next too, if their place in the next life was Purgatory.

And we should remember too the goings-on a few feet on the other side of the church from Barts, in the great Victorian edifice of Smithfield Market, where the lorries come and go all day and most of the night, where the gods of commerce receive their proper worship as they did when William FitzStephen looked upon his city with such admiration. But this was also once a place of execution too; and also nearby was the site of Bartholomew Fair, that “school of vice which has initiated more youth into the habits of villainy than Newgate itself” (so the Newgate Calendar said). All the world’s wisdom and folly in a few square yards, with an ancient and beautiful church in the middle of it.

more on beauty

Ted Gioia:

Ortega y Gasset’s entire essay [on “The Dehumanization of Art”] is brilliant, and should be required reading in college humanities programs — it’s more relevant now than ever before…. But instead it’s almost never read. Instead, grad students are assigned Walter Benjamin’s essay from 1935 on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” — which embraced mass production as a “progressive” way to provide “visual and emotional enjoyment” in an “intimate” manner to millions of people. I have sympathy for Benjamin, but he was betrayed by the mass producers — much as we are getting betrayed by today’s tech overlords of creative ‘content’.

A great post by Mr. Gioia, and consistent with my recent comment that a Ruskinian account of contemporary culture must begin by attending to beauty. And we might begin that endeavor by considering Aphorism 19 from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture: “All beauty is founded on the laws of natural forms.” 

starting over

Around a month ago, I mentioned that I had just read and really enjoyed Robin Sloan’s novel Moonbound. And that’s true! But what I didn’t say at the time is that I definitely didn’t get the most out of my reading experience, didn’t have full concentration as I read. And I know why. It was because of one page near the beginning of the galley I read, a page with three words on it: 

As I read, I kept looking back at that page, as though hoping that the words would dissolve and be replaced by the promised cartography. Because when I am reading a work of fiction there are few things I love more than a map

I think I would have missed the map even if I hadn’t been told that there would be one, but to know that a map was being made but I did not have it was agonizing. Thus my inconsistent attentiveness. 

But today, this very afternoon, my very own hardcover copy of the book arrived, and when I opened it up I saw this: 

Ah. Ah yes. I will now be re-reading Moonbound, and this time I’ll get the full and proper experience. 

the wanderers and the city

My earlier posts in this series (which began by reading Genesis but has since expanded) are: 

The Pentateuch concludes with the death of Moses and the arrival of the children of Israel at the doorstep of the Promised Land. As in the next books (Joshua and Judges) they consolidate their position, we’re moving, as I noted in an earlier post, from a world of nomadic pastoralists to a world of city dwellers — or, anyway, a world in which the embodiment of the Israelite identity is a city, Jerusalem, conceived first as the residence of the King and only later as the center of the cult of Yahweh. 

This change raises certain questions about the theology and ethics of building, especially building a city, and as it happens I wrote a series of posts about that some years ago on my old Text Patterns blog: 

The invocation of the Diaspora leads to a reflection on the city that in Scripture opposes Jerusalem: Babylon. Here are the entries in my Encyclopedia Babylonica:

I stopped writing then because I was confused about a number of things. But I am now seeing certain connections. The series on building (which focused on the Davidic era) and the series on Babylon (which focused on the era that ended the Davidic line) are, properly speaking, elements in a larger theology of the city, which I explored by writing about Augustine’s City of God

(There’s some overlap to these series because they were written independently of one another and sometimes in forgetfulness.) And I have many other posts and essays that seem to be on unrelated subjects but may not be. For instance, Ruskin — my admiration for whom I recently reaffirmed — begins The Stones of Venice by claiming that three cities associated with the mastery of the sea stand above all others: Tyre, Venice, and London. His theology of art and architecture is also a theology of the city, meant for Londoners, as the successors to the Venetians, to heed. There’s even a strange passage early in Stones in which Ruskin claims that all three of Noah’s sons founded cultures that contributed to the rise of architecture, thereby reconnecting the theme of the City to the book of Genesis.

Related: there is a long and powerful tradition of writing about London as the city, the paradigmatic or exemplary city, the city as a “condensed symbol,” to return to a theme from my last post: this is what Blake does repeatedly, and Dickens, and H. G. Wells, especially in Tono-Bungay. There are some powerful connections between Tono-Bungay and Little Dorrit that I want to explore in a future post. 

It’s strange that I have written a book’s worth of reflections on all this stuff. But what does this non-book say? Heck, what do I even mean by “all this stuff”? 

I think these concerns arose in my mind because (a) I was, and still am, frustrated by the ongoing dominance of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, a book that still establishes the categories for thinking about how Christians live in “the world”; and (b) I felt that a richer, deeper picture is offered, however obliquely, in the poetry and prose of W. H. Auden in the decade following the end of the Second World War. (It’s noteworthy, I think, that Auden’s work is contemporaneous with Niebuhr’s: that WW2 prompted full-scale reconsiderations of the ideal character of culture and society is what my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is all about.) Auden, instead of writing about “culture,” writes about “the city,” and that reformulation strikes me as especially resonant and full of promise, especially given the prominence of the Jerusalem/Babylon opposition in the Bible. 

Now, Auden writes about these matters in The Shield of Achilles, which I have edited — but he writes about them more extensively in his previous book Nones, which I may also edit. Even if I don’t get the chance to make a critical edition of that collection, I’m going to be re-reading it, and maybe after I do I’ll have a better idea of how to put all these thoughts, which have obviously been occupying my mind for quite some time, into better order. 

But whether I should try to turn all this into an actual book? I have my doubts about that. For one thing, few if any publishers would be interested in publishing something that is largely available online for free. For another — and this actually may be more important — do all these thoughts really belong in a book, between covers, with a beginning an ending? Some projects ought not to be closed and completed; some projects ought to be ramifying and exploratory. I suspect this is one such project. I may have more to say about that in future posts. 

character

The book of Genesis features a large number of distinct and memorable characters: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Esau and Jacob, Joseph. Our attention is captured for the longest periods by Abraham and Jacob, but often we see them in relation to their children and other family members. They rarely occupy the stage alone. But the rest of the Pentateuch really only has one character: Moses. A few others hover around the margins, but they are mere sketches of persons. Only Moses is fully a character

After the Pentateuch, with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, the narrative resumes its proliferation of personages — only to narrow its focus again with David. We stay with David for a very long time before the story pulls back out to describe the wide range of kings and prophets who follow him.  

So in the Hebrew Bible we see this regular alternation of (a) sweeping narrative that emphasizes ongoing familial or cultural patterns and (b) intensely focused stories that trace the development of individual lives. Sweep is the default, but you never know when the story will zoom in for an extended close-up. 

One way to think about this: Certain patterns of behavior — most of them involving waxing and waning devotion to YHWH and obedience to His commandments — characterize the children of Israel; but some people seem to embody these patterns in powerful, profoundly exemplary ways. You could say that someone like David is, to adapt a concept from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, a human condensed symbol. (Cf. p. 10: “For Christian examples of condensed symbols, consider the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and the Chrisms. They condense an immensely wide range of reference summarized in a series of statements loosely articulated to one another.”) The complicated and inconstant history of Israel is condensed and made visible and comprehensible in a handful of key figures. This is how Abraham functions in Paul’s letters: a condensed symbol of faith in action. 

And I wonder if a character can only serve as this kind of symbol if he or she is complex, with hidden depths. Here I am thinking of Erich Auerbach’s famous contrast between the Homeric poems and the Hebrew Bible. The “basic impulse of the Homeric style” is

to represent phenomena in a fully extemalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. 

By contrast, the narration of Genesis features 

the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.” 

Perhaps only the character “fraught with background” can become a condensed symbol. 

the Pentateuch in brief outline

CDN media


  • Prologue to the whole: The Creation (Genesis 1) 
  • The history of humanity (Genesis 2–11) 
    • Making and naming 
    • Commanding and disobeying
  • Zooming in: Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12–36) 
    • Hospitable and inhospitable 
      • Abraham and the three visitors 
      • Lot in Sodom 
      • Abimelech
      • Dinah and the family of Hamor   
    • Barrenness and fertility
      • Sarai/Sarah
      • Rebekah
      • Rachel
    • Elder and younger 
      • Ishmael and Isaac 
      • Esau and Jacob 
      • The children of Leah and the sons of Rachel 
  • The children of Israel in Egypt (Genesis 37-Exodus 12) 
    • Beneficiaries: Genesis 37–50 
    • Slaves: Exodus 1–12 
  • The children of Israel in the wilderness (Exodus 13-Deuteronomy 34)
    • Wandering begun (Exodus 13–18) 
    • Ascent to Sinai (Exodus 19-Leviticus 27)
    • Response to Sinai (Numbers 1–8) 
      • Ordering
      • Cleansing
      • Dedicating 
      • Remembering 
    • Wandering resumed (Numbers 9-Deuteronomy 33)
    • Ascent to Nebo/Pisgah (Deuteronomy 34) 

This kind of thing can seem reductive, and if you rely on it overmuch it certainly will be, but note how it calls attention to the relentless patterning of the narrative. As Robert Alter has pointed out, the long-time obsession with sources among scholars of the Hebrew Bible — their slightly mad-eyed teasing out of the contributions of their posited authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assumption that “the redactors were in the grip of a kind of manic tribal compulsion, driven again and again to include units of traditional material … for reasons they themselves could not have explained.” Yet if that were true, why does an outline of the Pentateuch look so orderly — indeed, almost excessively so? 

Gabriel Josipovici has argued in his wonderful and lamentably neglected The Book of God that “the inventors of the documentary hypothesis” — the leading biblical scholars of a century to a century-and-a-half ago — 

believed that by trying to distinguish the various strands they were getting closer to the truth, which, in good nineteenth-century fashion, they assumed to be connected with origins. But in practice the contrary seems to have taken place. For their methodology was necessarily self-fulfilling: deciding in advance what the Jahwist or the Deuteronomist should have written, they then called whatever did not fit this view an interpolation. But this leads, as all good readers know, to the death of reading; for a book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have already decreed should be there. 

What my little outline shows is what anyone can see if they read the text — that however many authors and redactors worked on the Pentateuch, it’s anything but a chaotic assemblage of contradictory traditions; rather, it is almost obsessively built upon readily identifiable patterns, patterns that work like musical themes or Wagnerian leitmotifs

I’ll conclude with a more general point. You should not be able to get a doctorate in the humanities without having this declaration tattooed on the back of your hand: “A book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have already decreed should be there.

excerpt from my journal

I want to write a post about why my “Cosmotechnics” essay ended up being a dead end for me. Though I need to think harder about just why I believe that’s the case. I was looking for a way to think about technology that did not involve critique or enthusiasm but rather a kind of ironic detachment. But having made that point I think I exhausted the relevance of Daoism to me. Daoism could teach me ironic detachment from Technopoly but it could not teach me how to get from such detachment to the love of God and my neighbor. 

N. B. I’m posting this excerpt instead of writing that post. 

automating bullshit jobs

Me, a year ago:

Of course universities are going to outsource commentary on essays to AI — just as students will outsource the writing of essays to AI. And maybe that’s a good thing! Let the AI do the bullshit work and we students and teachers can get about the business of learning. It’ll be like that moment in The Wrong Trousers when Wallace ties Gromit’s leash to the Technotrousers, to automate Gromit’s daily walk. Gromit merely removes his collar and leash, attaches them to a toy dog on a wheeled cart, and plays in the playground while the Technotrousers march about. 

And lo, this from Cameron Blevins (via Jason Heppler): 

There is no question that a Custom GPT can “automate the boring” when it comes to grading. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to grade one student essay (leaving comments in the margins, assigning rubric scores, and writing a two-paragraph summary of my feedback). Using a Custom GPT could cut this down to 2-3 minutes per essay (stripping out identifying information, double-checking its output, etc.). With 20 students in a class, that would save me something like 5-6 hours of tedious work. Multiply this across several assignments per semester, and it quickly adds up.

In an ideal world, this kind of tool would free up teachers to spend their time on more meaningful pedagogical work. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Instead, I worry that widespread adoption would only accelerate the devaluing of academic labor. Administrators could easily use it as justification to hire fewer instructors while loading up existing ones with more classes, larger sections, and fewer teaching assistants. 

Alas, I must agree. “Now that we’ve automated grading, we can hire fewer instructors and give them more students!” But then (thinks the same administrator) “Why not train bots on all those lectures posted on YouTube, create professorial avatars — maybe allow students to customize their virtual professors to make them the preferred gender and the desired degree of hotness — and dismiss the instructors also? That’ll free up money to hire more administrators.”  

That will surely be the deanly response. But there’s another way to think of all this, one I suggested in my post of last year. Think about the sales people who use chatbots to write letters to prospective clients, or prepare reports for their bosses. People instinctively turn to the chatbots when they see a way to escape bullshit jobs, or the bullshitty elements of jobs that have some more human aspects as well. For most students, writing papers is a bullshit job; for most professors, grading papers is a bullshit job. (Graeber, p. 10: “I define a bullshit job as one that the worker considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious — but I also suggest that the worker is correct.”) 

What if we all just admitted that and deleted the bullshit? What if we used the advent of chatbots as an opportunity to rethink the purposes of higher education and the means by which we might pursue those purposes? 

But I suspect is that what universities will do instead is to keep the bullshit and get rid of the humans. 

Genesis: the country and the city

Raymond Williams, in his great The Country and the City, shows how ancient this contrast is, and how standardized its terms are. The contrast is almost always between (a) the innocence and simplicity of the countryside and (b) the noisy corruption of the city. Juvenal begins his third Satire thus: Quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio — What will I do in Rome? I don’t know how to lie. 

In Genesis, it is Cain, the first murderer, who builds the first city (Chapter 4). Surely the building of the Super-Tall Tower is a classic urbanist project (Chapter 11). In the patriarchal narrative, to visit a city is to expose yourself to sexual temptation (Chapter 39) or assault (Chapter 19). The definitive urban societies of the Hebrew Bible are Egypt and Babylon, morally chaotic places that allure, ensnare, and enslave. (See my earlier Encyclopedia Babylonica, in which I also point out how Rome becomes the New Babylon.) 

But I think the City in the Pentateuch is most fundamentally an image not of corruption but of human self-reliance.

In Chapter 15 of The Country and the City, Raymond Williams says of Dickens’s London that “its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness movement, were the most apparent things about it, especially whe seen from inside.” But “this miscellaneity and randomness in the end embodied a system: a negative system of indifference; a positive system of differentiation, in law, power and financial control.” The “miscellaneity” is the means by which people are removed from their familial context and made vulnerable to the depredations of the System. The rulers of a city, aided and abetted by most of the residents, build a controlling system that seeks to eliminate uncertainty, to bring everything under human control. 

(It’s not really appropriate here, but at some point I’d like to write about Dickens’s Dombey and Son, which concerns the desperate struggle of those Londoners who have no means of escape from the city to avoid being dehumanized by its incitements to pride, its scorn of all human dependency on one another. The City wants us to depend, not on human kindness and compassion, but on its own financial and social System — and to call that enslavement “freedom.” Williams’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Dombey and Son, borrowed in part from The Country and the City, is one of the best critical essays I have ever read, and it touches on just these themes, and others of great import.) 

By contrast, the pastoral life — the life of those who herd animals and live in tents — is continually aware of its own fragility. The standard-issue pastoralist can but placate the gods and seek their aid, which may or may not come. The children of Israel place their trust wholly in the LORD. They live by faith; that is to say, they entrust their lives and goods to the promises of the LORD. 

I’m looking well ahead, but … is it not significant that when the Israelites finally have a home, when the LORD brings them out of their Egyptian enslavement and their subsequent years of wandering are finally over, they want to build a city and be ruled over by a King? That is: finally to be able to trust in themselves and their own powers of self-protection and self-governance?

It’s impossible to deny the central place of Jerusalem in the Biblical story: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.” But is not the connection between the city and human “cunning” somewhat problematic? (The right hand is cunning, that is to say, dexterous, capable of manipulation and control.) I understand of course the eschatological hope of the New Jerusalem, that ecstatic vision of the concluding chapters of the book of Revelation, but I can’t help reflecting on the odd fact that from the perspective of the Pentateuch, settlement in a city looks like a catastrophic error and a failure of trust in the LORD. 

Genesis: fertility

If the defining axes of Genesis 1–11 were making/naming and commanding/disobeying, those of the Patriarchal narratives are fertility/barrenness and pastoral/urban.

Over and over again the LORD promises fertility to the barren, and to the childless a multitude of descendants. The primary sign of the LORD’s covenant with the children of Abraham is circumcision, the marking of the organ of generation. But the women these circumcised men fall in love with are all beautiful but barren — barren for a long time anyway. Sarah is, famously, ninety when Isaac is born, but it’s not often noticed that Rebekah is childless for twenty years before giving birth to Esau and Jacob. (We’re not told how old Rachel was when she finally gave birth to Joseph, but internal evidence suggests that she was in her late thirties.) The line of descent of the covenant promise is perilously thin at first but then grows thicker: first one son, Isaac; then two, Esau and Jacob, though in effect only one, because Esau sells his birthright to his younger brother; then a dozen; and from that dozen, the Twelve Tribes in their multitudes.

But though this line of descent is the key one in the story that is to follow, it’s not the only one that matters. Re-reading the story this time, I was especially drawn to Chapter 21, and struck by the LORD’s great compassion for Abraham’s other family (as it were). Because Sarah was barren for so long after Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, and because Ishmael is by one reckoning Abraham’s eldest son, she despises both of them and will not even call Hagar by name, instead referring to her contemptuously as “this slavegirl.” (This will be repeated in the next generation when Rebekah will only refer to Esau’s wives Judith and Basemath as “the Hittite women.”) When she demands that Hagar be cast out of the household and into the wilderness, “the thing seemed evil in Abraham’s eyes,” but

God said to Abraham, “Let it not seem evil in your eyes on account of the lad and on account of your slavegirl. Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice, for through Isaac shall your seed be acclaimed. But the slavegirl’s son, too, I will make a nation, for he is your seed.”

And when Hagar and Ishmael run out of water in the wilderness, and she sets the child aside and goes to sit “at a distance, a bowshot away” so she will not have to hear his dying cries, the LORD speaks to her (“What troubles you, Hagar?”) and consoles her with a mighty promise: “Rise, lift up the lad / and hold him by the hand, / for a great nation will I make him.”

What’s fascinating about this story is how closely it mirrors the much more famous story from the next chapter, the binding of Isaac. In that second story “Abraham rose early in the morning” to take Isaac to his death; in this one “Abraham rose early in the morning” to send his son Ismael into the wilderness where he is likely to perish. In each story there is a moment of hopelessness, when death for “the lad” seems inevitable. In each story that hopelessness is banished by a sudden providence: a ram appears to take Isaac’s place, and a hitherto unseen well of water appears to rescue Ishmael and his mother. Each “lad” survives, and thrives, and inherits his promise.

In Chapter 16, which recounts the birth of Ishmael, the Lord’s messenger appears to Hagar and says,

“Look, you have conceived and will bear a son
and you will call his name Ishmael,
    for the LORD has heeded your suffering.
And he will be a wild ass of a man —
his hand against all, the hand of all against him,
    he will encamp in despite of all his kin.”

(The ambiguity of this blessing is echoed in Chapter 27. There Esau, having had the blessing meant for him pre-empted by the deceitful Jacob, pleads for some blessing at least, and all his aged father Isaac can manage to say is “By your sword you shall live and your brother shall you serve. And when you rebel you shall break off his yoke from your neck.” These “blessings” are really prophecies of lives of struggle and conflict.)

The name Ishmael means “God has heard” — God has heard Hagar’s pleas even when Sarah would not. God does not forget her, nor her son, though he warns her that his way will be hard, and his kin will not accept him. This conflict between the children of two divine promises will continue throughout the history of the Ishmaelites, the ancestors of those whom today we call Arabs. But the descendants of Isaac and the descendants of Ishmael have one father. In Genesis 25 we are told that at his death “Abraham gave everything to Isaac” — one cannot doubt that Sarah and her child are essential to him in ways that Hagar and her child are not — but we are also told that

Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the Machpelah cave in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite which faces Mamre, the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites, there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.

And what follows this burial is an account of the lineage of Isaac — and that of Ishmael. Both lineages matter because Isaac and Ishmael, and later the Israelites and Ishmaelites, are alike the children of Abraham. Whether they realize it or not, whether they accept it or not, they are bound together forever by this common lineage. 

Genesis: orientation

The story begins with creation, and creation is largely a matter of dividing: dividing the region of order from the region of chaos (tohu wabohu), then light from darkness, then the waters above from the waters below, then the waters below from the dry land, then “the lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night,” then the system of division that we call time (“the fixed times and … days and years”).

Once this creation (bara’) is complete, nothing like it ever happens again. The Lord himself does not create any more, but rather engages in yatsar – making or fashioning or fabricating, that is, working from pre-existing materials. He is now no longer a Creator but a Craftsman. He “fashions” a man from the dust of the earth, and then a woman from the rib of the man. (“The LORD God built the rib He had taken from the human into a woman.”) He also names what he has fashioned.

After fashioning and naming, he gives commands, which are disobeyed – and with that we have the elemental axes of the first eleven books of Genesis:

  • making/naming
  • commanding/disobeying

Almost everything that happens until the appearance of Abram can be understood in these terms. When Eve gives birth to her first son, she declares “I have got me a man with the LORD,” and Robert Alter (whose translation I am using here) points out that the verb “got” can connote “make” – like God himself, Eve may be saying, I have made a man. Cain’s name means “smith,” and so the third human being becomes the first technologist: the builder of a city (4:17) whose descendants include “the first of tent dwellers with livestock,” “the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe,” and one “who forged every tool of copper and iron”: the pastoralist, the artist, the metalworker, all people dependent on technology, though very different technologies. Makers and doers.

It is perhaps significant that this first technologist and first urbanist is also a disobeyer, indeed a murderer. (Did he use a tool to murder his brother, I wonder?) Later, in Chapter 11, when we see the massive coordinated effort to build a great Tower that reaches up to Heaven, we see perhaps the inevitable tendency of technological urbanism, as Garrison Keillor suggested many years ago in a piece on the Tower Project:

In answer to concern voiced by personnel about the future of the Super-Tall Tower project, the Company assures them that everything is fine. Also, all questions raised by Tower Critics have been taken care of: 1) While it’s true that money is needed for cancer & poverty, it will create 100,000 new jobs. 2) We’ll be able to see more from it than from any other tower. 3) With the Communist nations well along with the development of their tower, national prestige is at stake, & our confidence to meet the challenges of the future. 4) In answer to environmentalist groups, there is no viable data on which to base the whole concept of the “unbearable” hum of the elevator; anyway it would provide a warning to migrating birds. The problem of its long shadow angering the sun can be taken care of with certain sacrifices.

Re: building and making, we may – employing the strategy of division and distinction that characterized the Creation – say that the kinds are:

  • What the LORD himself makes
  • What He commands people to make (the Ark being the first example; there will be others)
  • What he allows people to make (e.g. clothing woven from fig leaves to cover their nakedness)
  • What he punishes people after the fact for making (e.g. a Super-Tall Tower)
  • What he pre-emptively forbids people to make – e.g. a graven image to worship – after which he punishes them for making it anyway

In any case, these are the great themes, as I see them, of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.

I might add one more theme (one which appears in Chapter 10), a development that will fundamentally shape the Patriarchal narratives: the rise of a diversity of human cultures, including the Sea Peoples, the Babylonians, the Ninevites, Sodom and Gomorrah (the “cities of the plain”), etc. This diversity is counterbalanced by the fact that there was on the earth only one language (11.1). When that changes, then diversity forever after exceeds commonality. And thus confusion and mistrust grow.

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