Tag: history (page 1 of 2)

June 14, 2025

Buckley

I’ve just finished Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, which is magisterial. I have many, many thoughts, only a few of which I’ll share here.

Buckley’s greatest virtue and greatest vice was loyalty. Again and again we see him behaving with exceptional generosity to friends and family, even when that generosity was costly to him in dollars, in reputation, or in both. Once he came to think of someone as belonging in some way, in any way, to “us,” then it was almost impossible to dislodge his loyalty to them — even when they had, by any serious measure, betrayed that loyalty. Having settled on anything — a spouse, a friend, a house, a belief, a political stance — he couldn’t face abandoning him or her or it.

Buckley begins his book In Search of Anti-Semitism by frankly acknowledging that his own father was an antisemite, though he doesn’t go into any detail. (Tanenhaus does, though, and it’s not pretty.) But immediately after acknowledging his father’s views, he goes on to say that “the bias never engaged the enthusiastic attention of any of my father’s ten children…, except in the attenuated sense that we felt instinctive loyalty to any of Father’s opinions, whether about Jews or about tariffs or about Pancho Villa.” Okay … but what is that “attenuated sense”? The passage goes on without a break, as though to explain:

Seven or eight children in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young. Suffice it to say that children as old as 15 or 16 who wouldn’t intentionally threaten anyone could, in 1937, do that kind of thing lightheartedly. Thoughtless, yes, but motivated only by the desire to have the fun of scaring adults! It was the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank. None of us gave any thought to Kristallnacht, even when it happened (November 9, 1938 — I was 12, in a boarding school in England), and certainly not to its implications. But then this is a legitimate grievance of the Jew: Kristallnacht was not held up in the critical media as an international event of the first magnitude, comparable to the initial (1948) laws heralding the formal beginning of apartheid or the triggering episodes of the religious wars of the seventeenth century.

The is strangely evasive, except in one respect: Buckley bluntly refuses to distinguish himself from his siblings simply because they burned the cross and he didn’t. Loyalty! If they are to be condemned, then he will share in their condemnation!

But should they be condemned? Should they have known that this was something rather more serious than “a Halloween prank”? Does he expect us to believe that the cross-burning just happened to have been done on a site belonging to Jews and that any other place favored by “adults” would have done just as well? (If not, why does he bring in the “scaring adults” line at all? And why does he include it in a paragraph about the relationship between his father’s antisemitism and the beliefs of his children?)

Does he now, at the time of writing, think it something that should have been seen as a serious offense? Or, rather, that no one could have been expected to take it seriously in 1937 but should have done so after Kristallnacht? Or even that it wouldn’t have been seen as serious in 1938 but on that point Jews have a “legitimate grievance”?

Who can say?

But note that every possibility listed reminds us that Buckley is only seeing this from the perspective of the people who had their “lark,” not the Jews who looked out their hotel window to find a cross burning on the lawn. For them he does not spare a thought. (Something similar occurs in his discussion of Joseph Sobran, a blatant Jew-hater whom Buckley allowed for a long time to write for National Review and dismissed only under significant pressure: when Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, protested Sobran’s writings Buckley replied that “you are strangely insensitive to the point that his essay is much more damaging to me than it is to you.” I’m the real victim here!)

Similarly: he knew what Joe McCarthy was, knew what terrible sins and crimes he committed, and he was too honest to deny those sins and crimes; but out of loyalty he minimized them and said — well, what he always said from the beginning of his career to the end: The other side is worse and therefore hypocritical. “They” are worse than “we.” The people unjustly smeared by McCarthy simply don’t show up on Buckley’s radar at all.

He took the same approach to Southern racists who thought of themselves are preserving Southern traditions — people like his parents, to whom of course he was loyal. (His father was a Texan and his mother from New Orleans, and they split their time between a home in Connecticut and one in South Carolina. Buckley grew up in both worlds.) In 1959 he wrote a column for National Review that astounds me:

In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white — as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status. It is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural advantage of white over Negro; but the statistics are there, and are not easily challenged by those who associate together and call for the Advancement of Colored People. There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities. The problem is not biological, but cultural and educational. The question the white community faces, then, is whether the claims of civilization (and of culture, community, regime) supersede universal suffrage.

He answers Yes: indeed, “the claims of civilization” justify denying black people the vote. That’s not the astonishing part, though: what strikes me is Buckley’s quite explicit denial of the central claim of the Southern segregationists, which is that blacks are intrinsically and necessarily inferior to whites. Nonsense, Buckley says: “There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities.” White culture is superior to black culture because of the “preternatural advantages” granted by “tradition, training, and economic status.” But because it is superior, it should be allowed to rule. Which is no different than saying that a man who steals all my money should be allowed to keep it because he’s richer than I am. The plain old racists have at least the merit of consistency.

Now, in his famous Cambridge debate with James Baldwin in 1965, when a man in the audience shouted that black people in Mississippi should be allowed to vote, Buckley said, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” But then he went on to say “I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are are are voting.” He then went on to suggest an elevation of the standards of voting — presumably by refusing the vote to those unable to pass a civics test — that would dramatically reduce the number of white people allowed to vote but at the same time, given the racial inequities in the Mississippi education system, would certainly reduce by an even greater degree the number of black voters.

In 2004 Buckley told an interviewer: “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” A pundit admitting error is a remarkable thing, seen but a few times a century. That is admirable. But I do wonder how he could ever have believed, even in 1959, that people whose entire lives were built on the conviction of white supremacy would somehow “evolve” into something different? I doubt that he ever did believe it, though he may have wished for it. Primarily what he was doing in that column was being loyal to his parents and to their social world.

All that duly noted, I came away from this biography admiring Buckley for some things, and maybe most of all for his commitment to debate, especially on his TV show Firing Line. The very first episode of that show featured the socialist Michael Harrington, and at the end of it Buckley commended Harrington for making the most eloquent defense of President Johnson’s anti-poverty programs that he had ever heard.

And as Tanenhaus notes, Firing Line became the place to go if you wanted to hear what the radical black activists of the Sixties and Seventies — Huey Newton! Eldridge Cleaver! Roy Innis! — actually thought:

Buckley interviewed these activists, and opened his microphones to them, at a time when their exposure on mainstream television was limited to footage of violent demonstrations. “Amazingly,” writes the media historian Heather Hendershot, “a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism [broadcast] some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power from [its] era outside of the underground press and other alternative sources.”

(Link added.) That’s pretty cool.

I have a great deal to think through after reading this remarkable book. There may be more thoughts later — I feel that I ought to say more about what Buckley got right, because there were a few things. But for now I’m out of time.

February 3, 2025

Areopagitica

Few works are more routinely misdescribed than Milton’s Areopagitica, which is almost always said to be a defense of “freedom of the press.” It isn’t. So what is it?

It is an argument, addressed to the House of Commons and House of Lords, against a proposed law mandating the licensing of any book before it can be published in England. Anyone wanting to publish a book would submit it to a governmental censor, who would read it and either approve or deny its publication. Milton thinks this is a terrible idea, for many reasons:

It imitates Catholic practice, with its inquisitors and Imprimaturs and Nihil obstats;
it has no ancient or biblical warrant;
it would only affect law-abiding people — the truly scurrilous would just print without license and seek to avoid capture;
it would not stop the spread of evil and false ideas, which have a long history of moving through even an illiterate population with lightning speed;
the job of reading everything submitted for publication would be so vast that the government would need an army of censors;
the job would be so tiresome that no one with the wit and judgment to do it well would agree to do it at all;
the law would discourage writers, many of whom would scarcely go to the trouble of writing a whole book when a dim-witted or ill-tempered censor could quash it in an instant;
it would insult the public by presuming them incapable of making their own judgments about truth and falsehood,
and would deprive them of the responsibility of growing in genuine virtue by exercising and testing their discernment.

That last point is expressed in one of Milton’s most famous outbursts of eloquence:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Above all, says Milton, such a law presumes that our possession of the Truth is complete, which it manifestly is not and will not be until our Lord’s return. Those who can add to our store of genuine knowledge and understanding will, inevitably, deviate from current opinion as much as will the mendacious and the mistaken, but the censors will be unable to know in advance which deviations are worthy of praise and which worthy of condemnation.

Thus, concludes Milton, there should be no law in England mandating the pre-publication licensing of books.

But what happens then?

Ah, now we’re getting to the good stuff. First of all, if a book is deeply controversial, the contest between Truth and Falsehood is fought out in the public square:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

(Another famous passage.To Milton’s question, by the way, I would answer: I for one have often seen Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.) And if a book is deemed false, or anyway dangerously false? Well, then, of course it is suppressed:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind — as who looks they should be? — this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that may be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.

Many shall be tolerated, but not Catholicism. Lines must be drawn, and the intolerable not tolerated but rather “extirpate.”

Milton doesn’t explicitly say so, but this would surely be done through the usual legal means in accordance with the laws of England — laws prohibiting blasphemy, for instance, or sedition, or libel (though libel had a rather different meaning in those days than it does today, a topic I explore in this essay). An author accused of crime would be given a fair trial, allowed to submit evidence and to make arguments on his behalf, and so on.

Moreover, while Milton is against government censorship of books, he strongly supports a law requiring that all books to be published are registered with the government. And if they are not?

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next before this, “that no book be printed, unless the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, be registered.” Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.

Burn the book and hang the printer and/or author. And even if a book is properly registered, what if it then “be found mischievous and libellous”? I think we can guess what Milton would recommend.

September 7, 2024

the smog of unknowing

Peter Hitchens:

I think [Arthur] Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly.

Two thoughts about this:

Hitchens mentions with sadness many cultural productions, major and trivial, that were prominent in his childhood but are unknown by young people today. Is he aware that precisely the same lament could have been, and almost certainly was, made by people thirty or forty years older than him? And yet he does not feel deprived through his ignorance. Time passes.
You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.

August 19, 2024

metaphysics and history

A follow-up to my recent post on Adam Roberts’s new novel Lake of Darkness. I said in that post that Adam is a metaphysical writer, and that’s something that fascinates me about his fiction. But metaphysics is not my native tongue; I am able to grasp most prominent metaphysical concepts, but not easily, and I don’t employ them comfortably.

One interesting development in Christian theology in recent years has been a resurgence in metaphysical argument after a long period in which theology was governed and directed by an attention to salvation history. David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has been perhaps the most important and influential book in this regard; I think I see Hart’s influence in the decision by Katherine Sonderegger to begin her systematic theology with The Doctrine of God – God conceived within the conceptual frame of classical metaphysics – before moving on to the specifically Christian understanding of God as Triune. I find this development interesting; but for me personally it is not welcome. I am not a metaphysical thinker but a historical thinker, and in trying to grasp the Christian Gospel, salvation history is where I begin and end. I am strongly more sympathetic with a (Lutheran or Barthian) theology that starts with the Cross and works backward and forward from that.

So I read a book like Lake of Darkness with delight, but its theological framework is essentially alien to my way of thinking about God. I can appreciate and enjoy – and I do, very much – but as a kind of outsider; again, like someone speaking a laboriously acquired second or third language. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said; for me, it’s “No ideas but in people and events.” And no theology except the Theology of the Cross.

August 9, 2024

colonialist owls

This is a fascinating report: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl.” The argument appended to the report is that this proposal is unwise.

The key passage, I think, is this:

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

The authors don’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the federal campaign against the barred owl depends on a reading of human political history. The movement of the barred owl westward is analogized to the movement of Europeans into the North American continent and across it.

Without that history in mind, the increasing dominance of the barred owl over the spotted owl would be just One of Those Things that happens in nature. But by using human political history to interpret such events, the government teaches itself to see barred owls as “invasive” — like they’re on the Oregon Trail or something.

It’s silly, but it’s also one of the subtler forms that the politicization of science takes.

July 17, 2024

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.

July 15, 2024

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.

July 12, 2024

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.

July 8, 2024

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.

November 2, 2023

beyond belief

Last month I published a piece over at the Hog Blog on biblical and theological illiteracy among scholars — basically a summary of some recent work by Tim Larsen. I thought I had noted a few distressing examples there … but wow, did I just have a you-ain’t-seen-nuthin’-yet moment.

This review in the WSJ of a new book on the hymn “Amazing Grace” set my spidey-sense a-tingling — or rather, one passage from it did. I’ve been on the wrong end of reviewers’ careless dispensing of misinformation, so when I read this:

Mr. Walvin is compelling in his description of the deep presence of “Amazing Grace” in Anglophone, especially American, culture. He is less persuasive in some of his theological observations: I find it vanishingly unlikely that the famous 19th-century evangelist Dwight Moody “portrayed Christ himself as a sinner . . . with whom armies of ordinary people could identify.” The 18th-century Church of England did not consist of a “Latin-based priesthood” conducting “impenetrable Latin-based worship” — that had been decisively seen off 200 years earlier.

— I thought, That can’t be right. The author, James Walvin — a pretty eminent historian (primarily of The Atlantic slave trade) from the University of York — simply can’t have said those things. But lo and behold, here he is describing the D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey revival meetings in England:

Their down-to-earth style filled the largest of city venues wherever they appeared. They held 285 such meetings in London alone. Theirs was a style which, inevitably, was heartily disliked by the more solemn corners of British worship. When Ira Sankey performed in the parish church in the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith, one parishioner was so outraged that he thought the local bishop “will have something to say” to the curate who had invited him.

Throughout, Moody portrayed Christ himself as a sinner, a person with whom armies of ordinary people could identify. If Christ could be saved, so too could the humble and ordinary people in the audience. Salvation was there for all. This simple, seductive point, a potent message for the poor in the late nineteenth century, was exactly what John Newton himself had pressed home, in his letters and hymns a century before. Salvation was available to all who repented.

And about Latin in the Church of England? Yep:

Throughout his teenage years at sea, John Newton had been an avid reader, buying books wherever he landed and struggling with the religious principles imparted by his devout mother. Elizabeth Newton had instilled in her son a highly disciplined love of reading — and worship. She read Bible stories to him, teaching him to respond to the catechisms and to memorize hymns and psalms, especially those written for children. Elizabeth loved the hymns of Isaac Watts and her son inevitably followed. They were hymns noted for their simplicity, using ordinary, comprehensible language and were quite unlike the impenetrable Latin-based worship of the Church of England at that time. Watts’s hymns were an aspect of the ongoing Reformation that wrenched worship free from an exclusive, Latin-based priesthood and relocated it among ordinary people, simply by using the common vernacular.

A few comments, typed with quivering hands:

The reviewer, Priscilla M. Jensen, calls these “theological observations,” but they are no such thing: they are historical statements that are catastrophically, outrageously wrong — the equivalent of saying that Benjamin Franklin was a Buddhist and that Frederick Douglass was a native speaker of French. They are so wrong, and wrong about facts so elementary, that I couldn’t possibly trust one word of Walvin’s book. Nor should any of you.
If Walvin thinks that “Christ could be saved,” by whom might that be accomplished? If Jesus Christ is one of the saved, who is the Savior? Perhaps Walvin could reflect on that name “Christ” — does he think that it’s Jesus’s surname, and that especially respectful people would refer to him as Mr. Christ?
If “throughout” his evangelistic sermons D. L. Moody called Mr. Christ a sinner, I would love to see just one example of it. But there isn’t one. It is not, as Jensen said, “vanishingly unlikely,” it is impossible. Moody’s entire theology — like that of every other orthodox Christian — was completely governed by his belief that, as the letter to the Hebrews says, “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
James Walvin appears to be a Briton, in any case has certainly lived a number of years in Great Britain, and moreover has received a doctorate in history. How can he not know that the English prayer book was composed, issued, and mandated — with the Latin Mass correspondingly forbidden — nearly two hundred years before John Newton’s birth?
As Tim Larsen noted in the essay that got me onto this subject, “It takes a village” to disseminate ignorance this gross: James Walvin wrote the sentences I have quoted, but no peer reviewer noticed anything wrong, no editor, no copy editor — not one person in the whole complex process at the University of California Press knew enough even to question the claim that an evangelical preacher regularly proclaimed that Jesus Christ is a sinner, or that the average Church of England parish in the eighteenth century featured priests mumbling prayers in Latin. Never at any point was it thought necessary to have a manuscript on an English Christian hymn looked at by someone with an elementary knowledge of English Christianity.
Finally: Why — why, oh why, oh why — do people (scholars especially!) insist on writing books on subjects that they cannot be bothered to learn the basic facts about? Write on something you’re sufficiently interested in to learn about, for heaven’s sake!

P.S. People often ask, “Don’t these presses have fact-checkers?” No. No, they don’t. Many magazines have fact-checkers — the ones at Harper’s, for instance, work me like a dog to justify my every claim — but publishing companies, even academic presses, typically don’t. They hope that their copy-editors — almost always freelancers — will catch howlers, but that’s about it. Certain kinds of books, biographies for instance, will get read by lawyers, but that’s not about avoiding statements that are wrong, that’s about avoiding statements that are actionable. (When I was writing my biography of C. S. Lewis a lawyer-reader flagged a comment I made about Charles Williams’s habit of asking pretty young women to sit on his lap so that his eros could be transformed miraculously into agape — Might Williams take exception to this statement, I was asked. I replied that, since he died in 1945, I didn’t think it likely.)

October 19, 2023

But even at night …

Tom Johnson:

Clockmakers, flush with commissions, let their horological imaginations run wild. They mounted every last thing they could think of on their clocks: trumpeting angels, wheels of fortune, planets and stars wheeling around in epicycles – take that, astrolabe – and panoplies of bells to add to the din of holy clanging. The still-extant clock of Wells Cathedral, constructed about 1390, is a carnival of time. A face of three concentric circles shows the 24 hours, the position of the sun and the phases of the moon, all decorated with stars, angels and depictions of the four cardinal winds. Every fifteen minutes, four knights come out to joust. Above the clock an automaton (‘Jack Blandifer’) kicks his heels on bells every quarter hour. In the 15th century an exterior clock was geared onto it: two axe-men stand and strike two more bells on the hour. Nequid pereat, runs the inscription – let nothing perish, no matter how whimsical.

Here is the marvelous clock of Wells Cathedral:

Wells clock

(Larger version, well worth inspecting, here.) And here, at least as admirable, is Simon Armitage’s glorious poem “Poetry”:

In Wells Cathedral there’s this ancient clock,
three parts time machine, one part zodiac.
Every fifteen minutes, knights on horseback
circle and joust, and for six hundred years

the same poor sucker riding counterways
has copped it full in the face with a lance.
To one side, some weird looking guy in a frock
back-heels a bell. Thus the quarter is struck.

It’s empty in here, mostly. There’s no God
to speak of — some bishops have said as much —
and five quid buys a person a new watch.
But even at night with the great doors locked

chimes sing out, and the sap who was knocked dead
comes cornering home wearing a new head.

July 4, 2023

patriotic effusion for Independence Day

I have always, I feel, been somewhat deficient in patriotism — I just don’t have the instinct for it, somehow — but listening to the recent Rest Is History series on the American Revolution got my red-white-and-blue blood up. (I say this, by the way, as a fully paid-up Wang — i.e., member of The Rest Is History Club.) George Washington had wooden teeth (ha ha ha) — Benjamin Franklin went around London “dispensing his wisdom” (ha ha ha) — Aren’t the colonists’ complaints obviously bogus? (ha ha ha) — Why do Americans have a holiday celebrating a press release? (ha ha ha) — Thomas Jefferson is a “phrasemaker” and the American Robespierre … wait, what? I don’t seem to recall Jefferson’s presiding over a Reign of Terror.

In general, I think Brits are the least trustworthy commenters on the United States — in any venue, from the left or the right, I avoid such commentary, because I know it will be filled with overconfident generalizations and smug condescension. Both of those faults arise from the writers’ belief that they have as it were a Special Relationship with the U.S.A. and can therefore interpret it authoritatively. (People from other nations might be even more critical but they are less likely to write or speak from that particular variety of smugness.) I think it telling that when Tom and Dominic did a series on the Irish quest for Home Rule they got an Irishman to guide them — Paul Rouse, who was great — and were highly deferential to his judgments, but when it came time to cover the American Revolution they saw no need for an American perspective.

At the very end there was a brief acknowledgment that George Washington did not become a tyrant when he had the opportunity to do so, and that that’s admirable, but then they immediately went on to talk about his owning of slaves. The overall tone of the episodes converged on a kind of ironic mockery, which I found disappointing not just because I’m an American (I think) but mainly because of its inaccuracy. The leaders of that Revolutionary generation were extraordinary men — it’s almost unimaginable that one moment in history, in so small a nation, would produce figures as prodigiously and variously gifted as Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the ever-underrated Madison. (Though Madison was a little too young to have much of a role in the Revolution proper, he was essential thereafter.)

For a better, clearer, juster view, I would recommend John J. Ellis’s excellent Founding Brothers, but even more than that an extraordinary book that is unaccountably out of print: Garry Wills’s Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment. No other work that I know of so fascinatingly illuminates the character of George Washington – and the way he was understood by his most thoughtful contemporaries. Thus this statue on the Lawn of the University of Virginia:

Note the fasces, which Washington is about to set aside – you can’t quite see it, but behind him is a plow. If, looking at that statue, you were to turn 180º, you’d see across the Lawn a companion statue, this of a seated Jefferson, gazing contemplatively at Washington — perhaps to admire, but perhaps to make sure Washington does indeed follow the example of Cincinnatus. For it is a model easier to invoke than to imitate.

In this spirit, we might also read an essay from 2021 by my friend Rick Gibson on Washington’s Farewell Address.

Let’s conclude by delivering to these unrepentant monarchists some home truths, as articulated by Jefferson in a letter to John Langdon (1810):

When I observed however that the king of England was a cypher, I did not mean to confine the observation to the mere individual now on that throne. The practice of kings marrying only into the families of kings, has been that of Europe for some centuries. Now, take any race of animals, confine them in idleness & inaction whether in a stye, a stable, or a stateroom, pamper them with high diet, gratify all their sexual appetites, immerse them in sensualities, nourish their passions, let every thing bend before them, & banish whatever might lead them to think, & in a few generations they become all body & no mind: & this too by a law of nature, by that very law by which we are in the constant practice of changing the characters & propensities of the animals we raise for our own purposes. Such is the regimen in raising kings, & in this way they had gone on for centuries. While in Europe, I often amused myself with contemplating the characters of the then reigning sovereigns of Europe. Louis the XVIth was a fool, of my own knowledge, & in despite of the answers made for him at his trial. The king of Spain was a fool, & of Naples the same. They passed their lives in hunting, & dispatched two couriers a week, 1000 miles, to let each other know what game they had killed the preceding days. The king of Sardinia was a fool. All these were Bourbons. The Queen of Portugal, a Braganza, was an idiot by nature & so was the king of Denmark. Their sons, as regents, exercised the powers of government. The king of Prussia, successor to the great Frederic, was a mere hog in body as well as in mind. Gustavus of Sweden, & Joseph of Austria were really crazy, & George of England you know was in a straight waistcoat.

And so on that note: All praise to the Founders, and confusion to degenerate monarchies!

P.S. This is unrelated to the diatribe above, but I can’t resist adding it. Adam Smith, the scholarly guest on the podcast, comments at one point that Benjamin Franklin’s only interest in George Whitefield was in determining the range at which he could project his voice. Franklin was certainly interested in that, but not in that only. Here’s my favorite passage in the whole of Franklin’s Autobiography:

Mr. Whitefield, in leaving us, went preaching all the way thro’ the colonies to Georgia. The settlement of that province had lately been begun, but, instead of being made with hardy, industrious husbandmen, accustomed to labour, the only people fit for such an enterprise, it was with families of broken shop-keepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the jails, who, being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land, and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. The sight of their miserable situation inspir’d the benevolent heart of Mr. Whitefield with the idea of building an Orphan House there, in which they might be supported and educated. Returning northward, he preach’d up this charity, and made large collections, for his eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance.

I did not disapprove of the design, but, as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen, and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expense, I thought it would have been better to have built the house here, and brought the children to it. This I advis’d; but he was resolute in his first project, rejected my counsel, and I therefore refus’d to contribute. I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the silver; and he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.

May 31, 2023

Cities 4: Secondary Epic

My previous post discussed the way Augustine sets up his City of God as antithetical to the Aeneid. Auden’s witty poem “Secondary Epic” may be seen as a kind of pendant to Augustine’s critique. It focuses not on the prophetic narration of Anchises in Book VI, but rather on a complementary moment, the description in Book VIII of the Shield of Aeneas. About this description Auden has some questions:

How was your shield-making god to explain
Why his masterpiece, his grand panorama
Of scenes from the coming historical drama
Of an unborn nation, war after war,
All the birthdays needed to pre-ordain
The Octavius the world was waiting for,
Should so abruptly, mysteriously stop,
What cause could he show why he didn’t foresee
The future beyond 31 B.C.,
Why a curtain of darkness should finally drop
On Carians, Morini, Gelonians with quivers,
Converging Romeward in abject file,
Euphrates, Araxes and similar rivers
Learning to flow in a latinate style,
And Caesar be left where prophecy ends,
Inspecting troops and gifts for ever?
Wouldn’t Aeneas have asked: — ‘What next?
After this triumph, what portends?’

And then the poem concludes, returning to Anchises:

No, Virgil, no:
Behind your verse so masterfully made
We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.
Your Anchises isn’t convincing at all:
It’s asking too much of us to be told
A shade so long-sighted, a father who knows
That Romulus will build a wall,
Augustus found an Age of Gold,
And is trying to teach a dutiful son
The love of what will be in the long run,
Would mention them both but not disclose
(Surely no prophet could afford to miss,
No man of destiny fail to enjoy
So clear a proof of Providence as this)
The names predestined for the Catholic boy
Whom Arian Odovacer will depose.

The names of that “Catholic boy”? Romulus Augustulus. What poet could resist the irony?

Auden borrows the title of his poem from A Preface to Paradise Lost, in which C. S. Lewis distinguishes primary epic — poems like the Iliad and Beowulf that show no obvious awareness that what they’re doing is, you know, epic — from secondary epic, which is always aware of its tradition its inheritance. Poems like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost are always gesturing towards their predecessors to make sure you know they are indeed epics. Secondary epics tend therefore to be at least somewhat polemical, in tension with their predecessors, because after all if those predecessors has said everything and said it perfectly there would be no need for later poems. Virgil has therefore set himself up to make an argument through his narrative, an argument about the destiny of Rome and the nature of heroism, and Auden joins Augustine in pointing out that the argument doesn’t work: No poet writing in the midst of history can plausibly convince us that a historical city is eternal and that heroic service to it can therefore have eternal consequences. The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the power of change. “No, Virgil, no.”

May 29, 2023

Cities 3: hypothesis

Here’s the hypothesis I’m working with now: The problem with every theology of culture is that “culture” isn’t a biblical concept — isn’t clearly rooted in salvation history. And that is why I’m turning to Augustine. The idea of the two cities is deeply rooted in the biblical story and may be generative of certain important ideas that we can’t get through the use of a term like “culture.”

I think this is especially true because, as David Knowles points out, Augustine really isn’t interested in political theology, or for that matter in ecclesiology. In Book XV he says, “I classify the human race into two branches [generis]: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically [mystice]. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings [duas societates hominum].” Two societies — this is what we might call a sociological or an ethnographic inquiry, and that’s much of what we’re after, or anyway I’m after, in a theology of culture. But, as James Davison Hunter says, with an emphasis on the symbols by which a given society is constituted and sustained. This is also where — see my previous post — Augustine’s application of rhetorical strategies to salvation history is especially imaginative and potent. I find remarkable and stimulating the idea that God’s providential shaping of history is a rhetorical act. For one thing, it implies that cities are in a sense rhetorical acts, saturated with symbolic and even archetypal meaning.

Also: it’s somehow typical of Augustine that when he’s trying to think sociologically he looks first at the city that Cain founded and then at the City of God in Revelation 21, and hangs his whole inquiry on a line suspended between the two. What a peculiar and fascinating mind, and that’s why, I suppose, we keep returning to him.

P.S. I wrote a bit about why I’m pursuing this project here over at my Buy Me a Coffee page.

March 28, 2023

Jenkins

Forthcoming from my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins. A kind of intro or overview here. I’m excited that this is coming.

January 2, 2023

Dominic Sandbrook:

There’s no way our podcast, presented by two white Oxbridge-educated middle-aged men, would be commissioned by the BBC these days. Instead of just letting us talk, they would bring in some alleged comedian to make it ‘accessible’ to younger audiences.

And not a single week would pass without the appearance of some ultra-woke U.S. academic to lecture us about slavery or to flagellate us about the imagined sins of the British Empire.

The great irony is that while the average age of Radio 4 listeners is 56, more than half of our listeners are under 34. So if the BBC want to know what’s happened to its younger audience, the answer is that they have signed up to The Rest Is History.

That’s about the size of it.

November 25, 2022

ark head

Venkatesh Rao:

One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality — an ark — and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake. […]

… it’s gotten significantly harder to care about the state of the world at large. A decade of culture warring and developing a mild-to-medium hatred for at least 2/3 of humanity will do that to you. General misanthropy is not a state conducive to productive thinking about global problems. Why should you care about the state of the world beyond your ark? It’s mostly full of all those other assholes, who are the wrong kind of deranged and insane. At least you and I, in this ark, are the right kind of deranged and insane. It’s worth saving ourselves from the flood, but those other guys can look out for themselves.

I think this is largely true, but I think some other things as well — primarily that any such retreat-to-the-ark is an inevitable response to the inflexible limits of our Dunbar’s Number minds.

“That’s perhaps the way out — keep trying to tell stories beyond ark-scale until one succeeds in expanding your horizons again.” Nope. We don’t need our horizons expanded, we need our attention narrowed and focused.

November 24, 2022

A German map of the Valley of the Kings, from the Bodleian Map Room Blog.

September 16, 2022

Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ – Dara Horn:

Burns has a soft spot for Franklin and Eleanor, the subjects of one of his prior films, and here he treats them with kid gloves, blaming most of the missteps on State Department antagonists. The series makes a point of establishing the bigoted, racist atmosphere of the U.S. at the time, showing Nazi rallies in New York, clips of the popular anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, and colorized footage of a Nazi-themed summer camp in New Jersey. But the film goes out of its way to outline the pros and cons of Roosevelt’s decisions, leaving his reputation intact. To be clear, Roosevelt is an American icon and deserves to remain one. The problem with this approach is less about Roosevelt (there are plenty of convincing arguments in his favor, not least that he won the war) than about how it contradicts the rest of the film’s premise. The goal of the series is seemingly to reset America’s moral compass, using hindsight to expose the costs of being a bystander. But every bystander, including Roosevelt, can explain his choices. The film’s refusal to judge the commander in chief plays into a larger political pattern: offering generosity only toward those we admire.

Or whom we perceive to be on Our Team. The whole essay is excellent, but I especially appreciate the unpacking of this point: “Democracies, for all their strengths, are ill-equipped for identifying and responding to evil.”

September 13, 2022

how history doesn’t work

This is great from Freddie:

The bigger thing for me, beyond the death of art and criticism I mean, is just how easy it is to inspire identitarians, just what they’re willing to consider a major political success. They are the cheapest dates imaginable.

Then he quotes the headline of an article: “Disney’s black Ariel isn’t just about diverse representation. It’s also about undoing past wrongs” — and asks:

Is it? Is it really? The article is profoundly unconvincing on this score. Yes, Disney did some racist portrayals in the past. That’s bad. I don’t see how you’re evening up the score by putting more Black people in your films, really; history doesn’t work that way.

This is the key: “history doesn’t work that way.” History doesn’t work that way. History doesn’t work that way! Can we just grasp this point?

August 6, 2022

“One Manner of Law,” by Marilynne Robinson:

Hugh Peters, most disparaged of Puritans, wanted to exclude poor artists from taxation. He proposed that there be peacemakers appointed to settle disputes before anyone could be arrested or imprisoned. Writing as someone who was forced to flee England under the threat of persecution, and whose fellow dissenters had experienced prison and worse, he does not call for any equivalent punishment or any punishment at all for his (temporarily) defeated persecutors, but instead for an alleviation of the punitive bent in the assertion of public authority.

A fascinating historical essay.

August 4, 2022

The New York Times:

Born in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. [Freeman] Hrabowski came of age in the thick of the Jim Crow era. The notion that Black children didn’t deserve a quality education brought out the fighter in the self-described “fat, nerdy kid who could only attack a math problem” at a very young age.

He was 12 when he participated in the historic Children’s March inspired by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. He was among the hundreds of boys and girls arrested while they marched for equal rights, and spent five days in jail.

Dr. Hrabowski has largely declined to discuss the details of what he saw and experienced in the Birmingham jail. Some of it will forever remain unspeakable, he said. But in an interview, he recalled a visit from Dr. King.

“What you do this day will have an impact on children not yet born,” Dr. Hrabowski remembered him telling the jailed children.

I was five at the time, living about two miles from the site of the march. Children just a few years older than me were thrown in jail. God bless Dr. Hrabowski. He has fought the good fight for a long time.

July 31, 2022

R.I.P. Bill Russell, one of the greatest Americans of our era — the best team athlete in American history, and an icon of Black Americans’ quest for full civil rights. One not-so-random fact worth remembering: Bill Russell’s father Charlie — raised in Louisiana, as his son would be until age eight — in his childhood knew people who had been enslaved. As I keep saying: The past is not dead etc.

June 29, 2022

The Best and the Brightest

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I’ve been reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest for the first time in 40 years or more, and returning to it after all this time my primary response is that it has been somewhat overrated.

To be fair, Halberstam has an incredibly difficult task, because in order to pursue his main goal, which is to explain how it is that “the best and the brightest” of American society, the intellectual elite of the nation – highly educated, exceptionally intelligent, shrewdly perceptive – nevertheless managed to immerse us in a quagmire in Vietnam, he has to give us huge chunks of the history of Southeast Asia in the 20th century. He chose to to do this by introducing each chunk of history only when it appears to be necessary to the stage of the narrative that he is in. The relevant history gets doled out in bits and pieces – a little bit when we’re hearing about LBJ, a little bit when we’re told about the appointment of an ambassador, a little bit when we’re learning about the relevant figures in the State Department or the Department of Defense. We hear a lot about the French in Indochina and how that involvement shaped the later American involvement before we hear about the Communist takeover in China, which was the very event that made the U.S. so willing to intervene in Southeast Asia. This kind of historical mosaic can be an effective technique – it’s what Rebecca West does in what I have said many times is the best book of the twentieth century, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – but it is exceptionally difficult to pull off, and I don’t think Halberstam does it well at all. As I read I struggled to assemble all his little chunks of historical narrative into a coherent arc or structure.

There are also a good many errors, mostly minor. For instance, Halberstam writes of “the great English novelist Joyce Carey,” but his name is spelled Cary, he was born and mostly raised in Ireland and is therefore better described as Anglo-Irish, and I doubt anyone ever called him great. Another problem is repetition: we are twice told, in detail, the story of how General Maxwell Taylor was thought by the Kennedys to have resigned from the Eisenhower administration when in fact he retired at the end of his term.

This is a book whose thesis is strong, original, and highly significant, and whose weaknesses in exposition and development have therefore been perhaps too readily excused. I don’t totally quarrel with that perspective. The great strength of the book is the same as that of Breaking Bad: it shows how you can get from one moral condition to another radically different moral condition without ever planning or even wanting to go there. Halberstam is especially good at character sketches: he shows how people of vastly different personality types – Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, JFK himself – can nevertheless all be caught up, in their different ways, in a situation that seems to have its own momentum, a momentum that could only be arrested by people of exceptional self-awareness and even more exceptional courage and decisiveness.

That’s a lesson worth learning, though, of course, no one in politics ever learns it.

McGeorge Bundy John F Kennedy 1962

June 2, 2022

Friday 4 July 1662 (The Diary of Samuel Pepys):

Up by five o’clock, and after my journall put in order, to my office about my business, which I am resolved to follow, for every day I see what ground I get by it. By and by comes Mr. Cooper, mate of the Royall Charles, of whom I intend to learn mathematiques, and do begin with him to-day, he being a very able man, and no great matter, I suppose, will content him. After an hour’s being with him at arithmetique (my first attempt being to learn the multiplication-table); then we parted till tomorrow.

That’s right: Pepys — a graduate of St. Paul’s School in London and a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge University (Magdalene College) —, when he began his career as a civil servant, had to hire a tutor to teach him the times tables.

May 22, 2022

a story

In my first years at Wheaton College I had a colleague named Julius Scott. (He retired in 2000 and died in 2020. R.I.P.) Julius was a New Testament scholar, but earlier in life, in the 1960s, had been a Presbyterian pastor in Mississippi. He was raised in rural Georgia and loved the South, but he knew a good deal about our native region’s habitual sins also, and as the Civil Rights movement grew stronger and stronger, he understand that he had a reckoning to make. So he did.

After much prayer and study of Scripture, he decided that nothing could be more clear in Scripture, and nothing more foundational to Christian anthropology, than the belief that each and every human being is made in the image of God; that every human being is my neighbor; and that to “love your neighbor as yourself” is required of us all. Julius could not, therefore, avoid the conclusion that the Jim Crow laws common to the Southern states were incompatible with the Christian understanding of what human beings are and who our neighbors are; but even if those laws proved impossible to dislodge, and even if his pastoral colleagues thought them defensible, it was surely, certainly, indubitably necessary for all churches to welcome every one of God’s children who entered their doors, and to welcome them with open arms, making no distinction on the basis of race. When his presbytery — gathering of pastors in his region — next met, Julius felt that he had to speak up and say what he believed about these matters.

He did; and thus he entered into a lengthy season of hellish misery. He was prepared for the condemnation and shunning he received from almost every other member of the presbytery; what he wasn’t prepared for was what happened when word of his speech got out to the general public, I believe through a newspaper article: an ongoing barrage of threats against his life and the lives of his wife and children. For years, he told me, he had to sleep — and sleep came hard — with a loaded gun under his bed; the fear for his family didn’t wholly abate until he left Mississippi. (“I was afraid for my babies,” Julius said, and with those words the tears filled his eyes.) Of course he remained a pariah to most of his colleagues — and even the ones who respected him told him so in private, expressing their agreement with his theological conclusions only on condition that Julius never share their views with anyone else.

Think about that story for a while. Please understand that it’s not an uncommon one; and please understand, further, that Julius escaped with no worse than shunning and terror because he was white. (If you want to know more about Christians in Mississippi in that era, the persecuted and the persecutors alike, I recommend Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer. And if you want to know what life in that era was like in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up, read Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home.)

Now: the next time you’re tempted to say that American Christians today experience hostility unprecedented in our nation’s history, and can escape condemnation only if they bow their knee to the dominant cultural norms; that it didn’t used to be like that, that decades ago no American Christian had to be hesitant about affirming the most elementary truths of the Christian faith — the next time you’re tempted to say all that, please, before you speak, remember Julius Scott.

March 30, 2022

John Gallagher:

The judges asked Thiess why he had become a werewolf – what benefits did it bring to a poor man like him? He explained that many decades ago he had accepted an enchanted drink offered to him in a tavern by a ‘scoundrel’ from Marienburg. The same man had taught him a blessing invoking the sun and the moon and how to cure sick people and animals. Thiess’s knowledge of herbs and charms had made him well known among his neighbours. He recalled that he took on his new identity calmly, but ‘hadn’t thought it would involve so much evil’.

I know, right? Same with me and being a professor.

March 2, 2022

from the TLS:

On my first visit to Moscow, I met one of Lenin’s embalmers. “When I began, the body was in a poor state”, said Styopa, whose expertise was the use of electricity. Skin grafts and a new partial-vacuum glass sarcophagus had helped to inhibit decay, but Styopa’s shock treatment had reversed it. “Once every two or three months, a high-voltage charge was applied to keep up the tone. But the first time we tried it I overestimated the power needed. Lenin suddenly sat up from the table, his arms shook, and his lips started to quiver. I thought he was going to speak. It was quite a shock. After that, we reduced the voltage.”

January 9, 2022

Sidney was right

Sir Philip Sidney:

I conclude, therefore, that [the poet] excels history, not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward to that which deserves to be called and accounted good; which setting forward, and moving to well-doing, indeed sets the laurel crown upon the poet as victorious, not only of the historian, but over the philosopher, howsoever in teaching it may be questionable. For suppose it be granted — that which I suppose with great reason may be denied — that the philosopher, in respect of his methodical proceeding, teach more perfectly than the poet, yet do I think that no man is so much Philophilosophos as to compare the philosopher in moving with the poet. And that moving is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by this appear, that it is well nigh both the cause and the effect of teaching; for who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught? And what so much good doth that teaching bring forth — I speak still of moral doctrine — as that it moves one to do that which it doth teach? For, as Aristotle says, it is not Gnosis but Praxis must be the fruit; and how Praxis cannot be, without being moved to practice, it is no hard matter to consider. The philosopher shows you the way, he informs you of the particularities, as well of the tediousness of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way; but this is to no man but to him that will read him, and read him with attentive, studious painfulness; which constant desire whosoever has in him, has already passed half the hardness of the way, and therefore is beholding to the philosopher but for the other half. Nay, truly, learned men have learnedly thought, that where once reason has so much overmastered passion as that the mind has a free desire to do well, the inward light each mind has in itself is as good as a philosopher’s book; since in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evil, although not in the words of art which philosophers bestow upon us; for out of natural conceit the philosophers drew it. But to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc opus, hic labor est.

January 6, 2022

361 years ago today

Later they “affirmed to the last that if they had been deceived, the Lord himself was their deceiver.” Let the reader understand.

December 30, 2021

the mirror

The good folks at Plough have produced an e-book featuring two early Christian texts, and Rowan Williams has written an introduction to it that I believe essential reading for Christians in our moment. I love this kind of piece — a clear and patient exposition of ideas from the past that never once mentions current events but brilliantly illuminates the questions that face us. Please do read it all, but here are some choice nuggets:

“If you look at the eyewitness accounts of martyrdom in these early centuries – documents like the wonderful record of the martyrs of Scilli in North Africa in AD 180 – you can see what the real issue was. These Christians, most of them probably domestic slaves, had to explain to the magistrate that they were quite happy to pray for the imperial state, and even to pay taxes, but that they could not grant the state their absolute allegiance…. What made their demand new and shocking was that it was not made on the basis of ethnic identity, but on the bare fact of conviction and conscience. For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the limits of their political loyalty, and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.”
“The early Christian movement … was not revolutionary in the sense that it was trying to change the government. Its challenge was more serious: it was the claim to hold any and every government to account, to test its integrity, and to give and withhold compliance accordingly. But it would be wrong to think of this, as we are tempted to do in our era, in terms of individual conscience. It was about the right of a community to set its own standards and to form its members in the light of what had been given to them by an authority higher than the empire. The early Christians believed that if Jesus of Nazareth was ‘Lord,’ no one else could be lord over him, and therefore no one could overrule his authority.”
“The theology of the early centuries thus comes very directly out of this one great central conviction about political authority: if Jesus is Lord, no one else ultimately is, and so those who belong with Jesus, who share his life through the common life of the worshiping community, have a solidarity and a loyalty that goes beyond the chance identity of national or political life…. Humans love largely because of fellow-feeling, but God’s love is such that it never depends on having something in common. The creator has in one sense nothing in common with his creation – how could he? But he is completely free to exercise his essential being, which is love, wherever he wills. And this teaches us that we too must learn to love beyond the boundaries of common interest and natural sympathy and, like God, love those who don’t seem to have anything in common with us.”
“One of the lasting legacies of the early church, then, is the recognition that doctrine, prayer, and ethics don’t exist in tidy separate compartments: each one shapes the others. And in the church in any age, we should not be surprised if we become hazy about our doctrine at a time when we are less clear about our priorities as a community, or if we become less passionate about service, forgiveness, and peace when we have stopped thinking clearly about the true and eternal character of God.”

November 17, 2021

against the state

Justin E. H. Smith:

Who among these groups is “Indigenous”? We might in this case feel this is the wrong question to ask, but this feeling may in turn help to prime us for the further realization that the encounter zone of the Slavic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Paleo-Siberian peoples is in fact fairly representative of every corner of the inhabited globe, even those we take to be the most hermetic and (therefore?) the most pristinely representative of humanity in its original state. In their half-posthumous new book, the anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020) and the archeologist David Wengrow (1972-) suggest that “even” the pre-contact Amazonian groups we generally take to conform most closely to the definition of “tribe” or “band” were likely aware of the Andean empires to their west, and may also have had, at an earlier time, relatively complex state structures that they consciously abandoned because they were lucid enough to come to see these as inimical to human thriving. The groups Europeans first encountered in the rainforest, in other words, may also have been splinters that broke away from tyrannies, just like the Sakha fleeing the Mongols, and to some extent also like the Mountain Time Zone libertarians grumbling about the tax agents from the mythical city of Washington.

It may be that more or less all societies that appear to us as “pre-state” would be more accurately described as “post-state” — even if the people who constitute them are not in fact fleeing from the center to the margins of a real tyranny, they are nonetheless living out their statelessness as a conscious implementation of an ideal of the human good. […]

This is the sense of Pierre Clastres’s “society against the state”: societies that lack state structures are not in the “pre-” stage of anything, but are in fact actively working to keep such structures from rising up and taking permanent hold.

I’ll be starting Graeber and Wengrow’s book soon, but I suspect that — like much I have been reading in the last couple of years — it will further incline me to the suspicion that there is no remedy for technocracy that does not rely heavily and consistently on the best practices of the anarchist tradition. It’s time for a renewal of Christian anarchism — one that begins by accepting the clear fact that Anarchy and Christianity is Jacques Ellul’s worst book, by miles.

October 16, 2021

bad dispensations

The idea that we must choose between two intolerant illiberalisms, one on the Right and one on the Left, is, it seems to me, increasingly common today. It was also quite common in the 1930s. For instance, in 1937 the British House of Commons was debating whether or how to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, and a number of M.P.s insisted that it was necessary to choose between the Fascists and the Communists. But one Member of the House replied,

I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations…. It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself; and, having a strong feeling in regard to the preservation of individual rights as against Governments, and as I do not find in either of these two Spanish factions which are at war any satisfactory guarantee that the ideas which I personally care about, and to which I have been brought up in this House to attach some importance, would be preserved, I am not able to throw myself in this headlong fashion into the risk of having to fire cannon immediately on the one side or the other of this trouble…. I cannot feel any enthusiasm for these rival creeds.

The Member who so refused to make that choice was Winston Churchill. When many thought that liberalism and democracy were unsustainable, were not long for this world, he stood up for liberalism and democracy anyway. That was the wise course then, and it’s the wise course today.

October 1, 2021

taverns and churches

Nicholas Orme:

Looking at the rows and rows of seats in an English church, some of them dating back to the 15th century, invites questions. Why so many? Were they ever all filled, apart from an occasional wedding or funeral? The assumption is that they were full on Sundays, at least up to 1689, while parish-church attendance was compulsory. We tend to visualise an age of faith, especially up to the Reformation: a “world we have lost.”

There were, indeed, larger medieval congregations than today. Churchgoing was a valued social occasion when, especially in the countryside, there were few others. But the rows of seats are also misleading. They were put in so that people would have their own seats rather than take whatever was available. The congregation was laid out in an order of social precedence: gentry or merchants in the chancel or side chapels, yeomanry or citizens in the front of the nave, and lesser folk behind them.

They were almost all there on Easter Day, which, up to 1549, was a compulsory day of attendance to receive one’s single annual communion. Christmas and Whit Sunday were also obligatory days, although their congregations seem to have been a little smaller.

Attendance on an ordinary Sunday in medieval England was another matter, however. Contemporaries were clear that many people were absent. A succession of archbishops and bishops raged about the fact. The poet Alexander Barclay wrote in 1508: “the stalls of the tavern are stuffed with drinkers when in the church stalls [you] shall see few or none.”

September 24, 2021

waiting

I made an interesting discovery yesterday. (I’m sure others have already noticed it, but the insight is new to me.) Many readers will know this famous passage from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “n****r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I have taught this essay many, many times over the years, and I have always zeroed in on this passage as an excellent illustration of the use of imitative form. King wants his (largely white) readers to know what it feels like to wait … and wait … and wait … — so he makes those readers wait … and wait … and wait … for the conclusion of the 316-word sentence that’s at the heart of this paragraph.

Here’s my discovery. Right now I’m teaching Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, and in the final chapter of that mesmerizing book he writes this, an account of his experience as an escaped slave in the North when the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect:

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State. I have never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren — children of a common Father, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this — “Trust no man!” I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land — a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders — whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers — where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey! — I say, let him place himself in my situation — without home or friends — without money or credit — wanting shelter, and no one to give it — wanting bread, and no money to buy it, — and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay, — perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence and means of escape, — in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger, — in the midst of houses, yet having no home, — among fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist, — I say, let him be placed in this most trying situation, — the situation in which I was placed, — then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

A brilliant paragraph ending with a 239-word sentence that does exactly what MLK’s still-longer sentence would do more than a century later. I can’t help but think that MLK had this passage from Douglass in mind, if only unconsciously. Where Douglass uses dashes MLK uses semicolons; where Douglass uses “let him” MLK uses “when” — but the strategy and the effect are the same: holding the reader at a point of tension that the writer will offer release from only when the point is well-made. (The ultimate example of this strategy is Wagner’s use of the Tristan chord, which he resolves after fours hours or so, but only a madman would take the business that far.) “Notice how tense you were as you were waiting for the conclusion to that sentence? Imagine that intensified and prolonged by a factor of ten thousand.”

August 2, 2021

unknown unknowns

In the first printing of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer, I say that Thomas Cranmer was a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. This is incorrect. It was Jesus College, Cambridge.

Now, I knew perfectly well that Cranmer was a Cambridge man. I just had a brain fart when I put him in Oxford. But the error has still nagged at me. I keep thinking: Would I have done that if I were English? That is, would the difference between Oxford and Cambridge be so vivid in an English person’s mind, especially an educated English person, that such a brain fart would be impossible? Or was it just a brain fart? Maybe in other circumstances I could with equal ease write that, say, Clarence Thomas’s J.D. is from Harvard or that FDR attended Yale.

I can’t be sure. But the whole episode has made me more aware of all the things natives of a country know that foreigners, even affectionate and well-informed foreigners, have no clue about. My Cranmer error has had me musing about the fact that, while my academic speciality is 20th-century British literature, I may be completely, blissfully (or not so blissfully) ignorant about all sorts of matters concerning the world my writers grew up in that would be obvious to natives of their country.

Indeed I know I have such blanks in my knowledge. When I produced a critical edition of Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety, I annotated this passage:

Listen courteously to us
Four reformers who have founded — why not? —
The Gung-Ho Group, the Ganymede Club
For homesick young angels, the Arctic League
Of Tropical Fish, the Tomboy Fund
For Blushing Brides and the Bide-a-wees
Of Sans-Souci, assembled again
For a Think-Fest …

Here’s what I wrote:

These titles are only partly explicable but are meant to suggest, ironically, that the four new acquaintances are the sort of people who would create social organizations devoted to good cheer and moral improvement. Ganymede was a beautiful young mortal who was abducted by Zeus to serve as the gods’ cupbearer; Auden may also have remembered the Junior Ganymede Club frequented by Jeeves and his fellow valets in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. “Bide-a-wee” is a Scots phrase meaning “stay a while.” “Sans-souci” means “without care.”

None of this is wrong … but: that excellent writer (and biographer of Auden) Richard Davenport-Hines wrote me to say that

Sans Souci (in addition to being Frederick the Great’s summer palace at Potsdam) was together with Bide-a-Wee a common name, snobbishly mocked, given to cheap bungalows at down-market English seaside resorts to which lower-middle-class people might retire after a working life as a bank-teller, clerk in a town hall, supervisor in a small workshop, station-master on a small railroad, etc. This would be an immediate association to English readers of the 1940s, or to anyone of my generation.

I wanted to smack myself for forgetting, or neglecting, Frederick’s summer palace, but that other stuff? I had no idea. And that is extremely distressing to me.

Which leads me to my recently completed summer reading project:

Five thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine pages later, I know so much more than I did about the social history of postwar Britain: random people of brief notoriety, appliances, food products, radio and TV shows, catchphrases etc. etc. The dark question remaining, though, is: How much of it will I be able to remember?

Indeed: Will I even realize, when coming across an item unfamiliar to me, that I could look it up in these books? I am often haunted by a shrewd point C. S. Lewis makes in his Studies in Words: sometimes words change their meanings in ways that don’t call themselves to our attention. Using the current meanings of those words, we can make sense of old sentences — just not the sense that the authors intended, or that readers of their era would have readily identified.

Still, I am making progress, and Sandbrook’s books, while perhaps less scholarly than Kynaston’s in some respects, are wonderfully well-written and perfectly paced. They were a joy to read.

There’s one more problem, though. Sandbrook’s project is ongoing — he wants to keep drawing closer to the present day. But …

The first book in the series appeared in 2005 and covers seven years in 892 pages;
The second book in the series appeared in 2006 and covers six years in 954 pages;
The third book in the series appeared in 2010 and covers four years in 755 pages;
The fourth book in the series appeared in 2012 and covers five years in 970 pages;
The fifth book in the series appeared in 2019 and covers three years in 940 pages.

At that rate of progression I will be long dead by the time Sandbrook gets to Tony Blair.

June 20, 2021

giving breath back to the dead

Justin E. H. Smith:

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

One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse — the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them. Eventually, moreover, a thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences.

Anyone who happens to know what my most recent book was about will not be surprised at how vigorously I nod my head at this.

June 4, 2021

Berlins

SPYberlin2

One of the best stories in Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin involves a luncheon hosted at 10 Downing Street in 1944. Berlin had been for almost the whole of the war living in the USA, socializing and schmoozing and conspiring in his inimitable fashion and then sending back briskly incisive weekly reports on American attitudes towards the war effort and towards Great Britain in general. Churchill appreciated those reports very much and was pleased to have the opportunity to meet the man who had written them.

But when he started asking his guest questions about America, he was surprised and puzzled by the vagueness and diffidence of the answers. Eventually, having gotten nowhere and feeling a bit desperate, the Prime Minister asked him what he thought was the best thing he had written.

Came the reply: “White Christmas.”

Isaiah Berlin was in Washington. The P.M.’s luncheon guest, it turned out, was Irving.

Irving Berlin jpg

December 8, 2020

Palaiphobia

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of the present moment as a Power, a power in the Pauline sense of a massively distributed, massively influential, universal agency directing the course of this world. It seems to me that the Present is a jealous God: it wants us to think only of itself, and never of the past or the future except insofar as images of them serve this instant.

But if we must think of either the past or the future, the Present prefers for us to think of the future, for two reasons: one, any future we imagine is just that, imaginary, and is really a kind of projection of our hopes and fears for our own moment. And two, thinking about the future produces anxiety, which has the effect of driving us back towards the Present, where we can be distracted from that anxiety. That is to say, the future is potentially useful to the Present in a way that the past is not.

Now, to be sure, we can interpret the past in such a way that we reinforce our current habits and attitudes and prejudices. (I have written about this in Breaking Bread with the Dead.) But this is of limited usefulness to the Present and is not really worth the risks. From the perspective of the Present, any genuine immersion in the past is likely to complicate our understanding of this moment and make it harder for us to know precisely what to do, because of all the complexity, good and bad, of the behavior of those who lived and fought and prayed and loved before us. If we learn to have compassion for those people, we just might translate that into compassion for the people who share this world with us but do not think just as we think. And that the Present cannot have.

Why does the Present not want this? Because present-mindedness is instantaneousness, it is automatic response, it is the gratification of whatever emotion happens to arise. As the poet Craig Raine has said, “all emotion is pleasurable” — this fact is the constant pole star of the Present.

These thoughts, though they’ve occupied me for a long time, were recently brought to the forefront of my mind by an essay on Harper Lee by Casey Cep, which contains this passage:

There is an important and interesting conversation happening now about the relevance of To Kill a Mockingbird to our country’s pursuit of racial justice and how we teach civic virtues like tolerance. For a long time, Lee’s novel has been one of the most banned books in the country, first criticized by conservatives who disapproved of its integrationist politics, then by liberals who disapproved of its use of racial slurs, and all along by censors of all persuasions who object to its depiction of rape and incest. Lately, though, the novel’s detractors are not calling for a ban or censorship, just retirement: taking it off of syllabi in order to make room for books by a more diverse group of authors, offering students work written with an eye to the current fight for racial justice, not one from the last century.

I don’t really care whether people keep reading To Kill a Mockingbird. What interests me about this paragraph is the idea — and it’s not necessarily Cep’s idea, just one that she rightly discerns as common — that there is a “current fight for racial justice” that’s different from “one from the last century.” But, you know, Dorothy Counts is still alive.

And Ruby Bridges is still alive — indeed, just now reaching retirement age.

John Lewis, the last of the Big Six, just died a few months ago. I myself remember quite vividly the integration of Birmingham’s schools. This isn’t ancient history we’re talking about, and we shouldn’t allow the artificial convention of “centuries” deceive us into believing that it is. The story of Dorothy Counts and Ruby Bridges and John Lewis and all the rest of those amazing people who now get lumped into that comforting abstraction we call the Civil Rights Movement is our story, though the Present wants us to forget that, wants to separate us from our brothers and sisters, wants to break all chains that link us to one another — so that we can be wholly absorbed into Now and indulge our instantaneous emotions rather than reflect thoughtfully on the ways that the past is not dead, it is not even past.

The Present wants to infect us with what I have decided to call palaiphobia, from παλαιός, palaiós, old, worn out. That’s how it alienates us from one another, makes us wholly dependent on what it can offer: sentimentality and rage.

UPDATE: My friend Adam Roberts has, quite justifiably, wondered whether my coinage uses the right word. Here’s what I wrote in reply to him:

I have to say something about my decision to write of palaiphobia rather than archephobia. It was an agonizing one, I assure you. In these matters I take my bearings primarily from New Testament Greek, as you know, and of course there’s considerable overlap between the two words. When Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 that the old has gone and the new is here, he uses ἀρχαῖα; but when he talks about the “old leaven” in 1 Corinthians 5 he uses παλαιὰν ζύμην. As far as I can tell ἀρχαῖα and παλαιὰν would be interchangeable in those contexts. Both words can be neutral in their valence. But if you look at the overall patterns of usage, it seems that there’s something more generally disparaging about παλαιὸς, whereas there’s at least a potential dignity in ἀρχαῖα. When Paul talks, as he often does, about the “old man” that we must put off, he says παλαιὸς ἄνθρωπος. And παλαιὸς often has the connotation of something worn out, as when Jesus talks (in Matthew 9:16) about patching old clothes, ἱματίῳ παλαιῷ. I wanted to capture that disparagement in my coinage, the sense that the past is worn out, useless, of no value. I wonder if you think that makes sense?

UPDATE 2: after a conversation with Robin Sloan:

December 6, 2020

an intractable problem

For anyone who thinks about the relations between the past and the present, intellectual maturity consists in understanding that (a) the world is always getting better in some ways and worse in other ways, and that (b) we have no reliable calculus by which we might assign a single composite value to those changes.

October 19, 2020

If Then

There are many books that I admire and love that I never for a moment dream I could have written. Right now I’m reading an old favorite, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, to my wife, and as I do so I am every minute aware that I could not write this book if you gave me a million years in which to do so.

But every now and then I encounter an admirable book that I wish I had written, that (if I squint just right) I see that I could have written. I had that experience a few years ago with Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland, and I’m having it again right now as I read Jill Lepore’s If Then. What a magnificent narrative. What a brilliant evocation of a moment in American history that is in one sense long gone and in another sense a complete anticipation of our own moment. Oh, the envy! (Especially since if I had written the book it wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is.)

We are afflicted by our ignorance of history in multiple ways, and one of my great themes for the past few years has been the damage that our presentism does to our ability to make political and moral judgments. It damages us in multiple ways. One of them, and this is the theme of my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, is that it makes us agitated and angry. When we, day by day and hour by hour, turn a direhose of distortion and misinformation directly into our own faces, we lose the ability to make measured judgments. We lash out against those we perceive to be our enemies and celebrate with an equally unreasonable passion those we deem to be our allies. We lack the tranquility and the “personal density” needed to make wise and balanced judgments about our fellow citizens and about the challenges we face.

But there is another and still simpler problem with our presentism: we have no idea whether we have been through anything like what we are currently going through. Some years ago I wrote about how comprehensively the great moral panic of the 1980s – the belief held by tens of millions of Americans that the childcare centers of America were run by Satan worshipers who sexually abused their charges – has been flushed down the memory hole. In this case, I think the amnesia has happened because a true reckoning with the situation would tell us so much about ourselves that we don’t want to know. It would teach us how credulous we are, and how when faced with lurid stories we lose our ability to make the most elementary factual and evidentiary discriminations. But of course our studied refusal to remember that particular event simply makes us more vulnerable to such panics today, especially given our unprecedentedly widespread self-induced exposure to misinformation.

Even more serious, perhaps, is our ignorance – in this case not so obviously motivated but the product rather of casual neglect — of the violent upheavals that rocked this nation in the 1960s and 1970s. Politicians and pastors and podcasters and bloggers can confidently assert that we are experiencing unprecedented levels of social mistrust and unrest, having conveniently allowed themselves to remain ignorant of what this country was like fifty years ago. (And let’s leave aside the Civil War altogether, since that happened in a prehistoric era.) Rick Perlstein is very good on this point, as I noted in this post.

All of this brings us back to Jill Lepore’s tale of the rise and fall of a company called Simulmatics, and the rise and rise and rise, in the subsequent half-century, of what Simulmatics was created to bring into being. Everything that our current boosters of digital technology claim for their machines was claimed by their predecessors sixty years ago. The worries that we currently have about the power of technocratic overlords began to be uttered in congressional hearings and in the pages of magazines and newspapers fifty years ago. Postwar technophilia, Cold War terror, technological solutionism, racial unrest, counterculture liberationism, and free-market libertarianism — these are the key ingredients of the mixture in which our current moment has been brewed.

Let me wrap up this post with three quotations from If Then that deserve a great deal of reflection. The first comes from early in the book:

The Cold War altered the history of knowledge by distorting the aims and ends of American universities. This began in 1947, with the passage of the National Security Act, which established the Joint Chiefs of Staff, created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, and turned the War Department into what would soon be called the Department of Defense, on the back of the belief that defending the nation’s security required massive, unprecedented military spending in peacetime. The Defense Department’s research and development budget skyrocketed. Most of that money went to research universities — the modern research university was built by the federal government — and the rest went to think tanks, including RAND, the institute of the future. There would be new planes, new bombs, and new missiles. And there would be new tools of psychological warfare: the behavioral science of mass communications.

The second quotation describes the influence of Ithiel de Sola Pool — perhaps the central figure in If Then, one of the inventors of behavioral data science and a man dedicated to using that data to fight the Cold War, win elections, predict and forestall race riots by black people, and end communism in Vietnam — on that hero of the counterculture Stewart Brand:

Few people read Pool’s words more avidly than Stewart Brand. “With each passing year the value of this 1983 book becomes more evident,” he wrote. Pool died at the age of sixty-six in the Orwellian year of 1984, the year Apple launched its first Macintosh, the year MIT was establishing a new lab, the Media Lab. Two years later, Brand moved to Cambridge to take a job at the Media Lab, a six-story, $45 million building designed by I. M. Pei and named after Jerome Wiesner, a building that represented nothing so much as a newer version of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Brand didn’t so much conduct research at the Media Lab as promote its agenda, as in his best-selling 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. The entire book, Brand said, bore the influence of Ithiel de Sola Pool, especially his Technologies of Freedom. “His book was the single most helpful text in preparing the book you’re reading and the one I would most recommend for following up issues raised here,” Brand wrote. “His interpretations of what’s really going on with the new communications technologies are the best in print.” Brand cited Pool’s work on page after page after page, treating him as the Media Lab’s founding father, which he was.

And finally: One of Lepore’s recurrent themes is the fervent commitment of the Simulmatics crew to a worldview in which nothing in the past matters, and that all we need is to study the Now in order to predict and control the Future:

Behavioral data science presented itself as if it had sprung out of nowhere or as if, like Athena, it had sprung from the head of Zeus. The method Ed Greenfield dubbed “simulmatics” in 1959 was rebranded a half century later as “predictive analytics,” a field with a market size of $4.6 billion in 2017, expected to grow to $12.4 billion by 2022. It was as if Simulmatics’ scientists, first called the “What-If Men” in 1961, had never existed, as if they represented not the past but the future. “Data without what-if modeling may be the database community’s past,” according to a 2011 journal article, “but data with what-if modeling must be its future.” A 2018 encyclopedia defined “what-if analysis” as “a data-intensive simulation,” describing it as “a relatively recent discipline.” What if, what if, what if: What if the future forgets its past?

Which of course it has. Which of course it must, else it loses its raison d’être. Thus the people who most desperately need to read Lepore’s book almost certainly never will. It’s hard to imagine a better case for the distinctive intellectual disciplines of the humanities than the one Lepore made just by writing If Then. But how to get people to confront that case who are debarred by their core convictions from taking it seriously, from even considering it?

October 12, 2020

the Great Crumping revisited

A surprising number of readers of my previous post have written out of concern for my state of mind, which is kind of them, but I think they have read as a cri de coeur what was meant as a simple summary of the facts. Not pleasant facts, I freely admit, but surely uncontroversial ones. Stating them so bluntly is just one element of my current period of reflection.

The primary reason I am not in despair is simply this: I know some history. I think we will probably see, in the coming decades, the dramatic reduction or elimination of humanities requirements and the closure of whole humanities departments in many American universities, but that will not mean the death of the humanities. Humane learning, literature, art, music have all thrived in places where they were altogether without institutional support. Indeed, I have suggested that it is in times of the breaking of institutions that poetry becomes as necessary as bread.

Similarly, while attendance at Episcopalian and other Anglican churches has been dropping at a steep rate for decades, and I expect will in my lifetime dwindle to nearly nothing, there will still be people worshipping with the Book of Common Prayer as long as … well, as long as there are people, I think. And if evangelicalism completely collapses as a movement — for what it’s worth, I think it already has — that will simply mean a return to an earlier state of affairs. The various flagship institutions of American evangelicalism are (in their current form at least) about as old as I am. The collapse I speak of is, or will be, simply a return to a status quo ante bellum, the bellum in question being World War II, more or less. And goodness, it’s not as if even the Great Awakening had the kind of impact on its culture, all things demographically considered, as one might suspect from its name and from its place in historians’ imaginations.

This doesn’t mean I don’t regret the collapse of the institutions that have helped to sustain me throughout my adult life. I do, very much. And I will do my best to help them survive, if in somewhat constrained and diminished form. But Put not your trust in institutions, as no wise man has even quite said, even as you work to sustain them. It’s what (or Who) stands behind those institutions and gives them their purpose that I believe in and ultimately trust.

The Great Crumping is going on all around me. But if there’s one thing that as a Christian and a student of history I know, it’s this: Crump happens.

September 27, 2020

Proudhon to Marx

Lyon, 17 May 1846:

Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are realized, the process by which we shall succeed in discovering them; but, for God’s sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating the people; do not let us fall into the contradiction of your compatriot Martin Luther, who, having overthrown Catholic theology, at once set about, with excommunication and anathema, the foundation of a Protestant theology. For the last three centuries Germany has been mainly occupied in undoing Luther’s shoddy work; do not let us leave humanity with a similar mess to clear up as a result of our efforts. I applaud with all my heart your thought of bringing all opinions to light; let us carry on a good and loyal polemic; let us give the world an example of learned and far-sighted tolerance, but let us not, merely because we are at the head of a movement, make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason. Let us gather together and encourage all protests, let us brand all exclusiveness, all mysticism; let us never regard a question as exhausted, and when we have used our last argument, let us begin again, if need be, with eloquence and irony. On that condition, I will gladly enter your association. Otherwise — no!

Emphases mine. Edmund Wilson: “The result of this incident was that Marx was to set upon Proudhon’s new book with a ferocity entirely inconsonant with the opinion of the value of Proudhon’s earlier work which he had expressed and which he was to reiterate later” (To the Finland Station, p. 154).

September 26, 2020

readings

Gary Dorrien:

Here is where Temple still matters as a theorist of guild socialism. In the early 1940s, both before and after he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Temple got very specific about how to democratize economic power. He was incredulous that modern democracies tolerated big private banks, lamented that Christian socialists turned away in the 1890s from the land issue, and proposed a new form of guild socialism. The banks, he argued, should be turned into utilities or socialized; otherwise the rich controlled the process of investment. God made the land for everyone, and society creates the unearned increment in the value of land; therefore the increment should go to society. Above all, though Temple took for granted that certain natural monopolies must be nationalized, the centerpiece of his proposal was an excess-profits tax payable in the form of shares to worker funds. These funds, over time, would gain democratic control over enterprises. Economic democracy, he argued, can be achieved gradually, peaceably, and on decentralized terms, without abolishing economic markets or making heroic demands on the political system.

Randall Kennedy:

The ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019–20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”

The suggestion that these statistics show racial unfairness in hiring at Princeton is misleading. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African Americans in recent years earned only around 7 percent of all doctoral degrees. In engineering it was around 4 percent. In physics around 2 percent. Care must be taken to look for talent in places other than the familiar haunts of Ivy League searches. But even when such care is taken, the resultant catch is almost invariably quite small.

The reasons behind the small numbers are familiar and heart-breaking. They include a legacy of deprivation in education, housing, employment, and health care, not to mention increased vulnerability to crime and incarceration. The perpetuation of injuries from past discrimination as well as the imposition of new wrongs cut like scythes into the ranks of racial minorities, cruelly winnowing the number who are even in the running to teach at Princeton.

The racial demographics of its faculty does not reflect a situation in which the university is putting a thumb on the scale against racial-minority candidates. To the contrary, the university is rightly putting a thumb on the scale in favor of racial-minority candidates. That the numbers remain small reflects the terrible social problems that hinder so many racial minorities before they even have a fighting chance to enter into the elite competitions from which Princeton selects its instructors. The ultimatum denies or minimizes this pipeline problem.

Peter Brown:

Many of Ambrose’s contemporaries were quietly convinced that the ills of Roman society had a supernatural origin. Many of the sharpest critics of their age were not Christians; they were pagans. For them, bad times had begun with the “national apostasy” of Constantine. The rampant avarice denounced by pagan authors was thought to go hand in hand with the spoliation of the temples and the abandonment of the old religion.

Ambrose had to answer such views. He did so by subtly secularizing the contemporary discourse on decline. He turned what many thinking persons considered a religious crisis into a crisis of social relations. We moderns tend to applaud Ambrose for the perspicacity of his diagnosis of the weaknesses of Roman society. But pagans such as Symmachus would have regarded Ambrose’s criticisms of society as mere whistling in the dark. Symmachus knew why things had gone wrong. The moment that the first fruits of the fields of Italy that had fed the Vestal Virgins for 1,200 years were withdrawn (in 382), the link between the land and the gods was broken.

September 18, 2020

advice for journalists

Andrew Sullivan writes,

Online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether. […]

In the past, we might have turned to more reliable media for context and perspective. But the journalists and reporters and editors who are supposed to perform this function are human as well. And they are perhaps the ones most trapped in the social media hellscape. You can read them on Twitter, where they live and and posture and rank themselves, or on their Slack channels, where they gang up on and smear any waverers. They’ve created an insulated world where any small dissent from groupthink is professional death. Watch Fox, CNN or MSNBC, and it’s the same story.

Point out missing facts or context, exercise some independence of judgment, push back against the narrative — and you’ll be first subject to ostracism and denunciation by your newsroom peers, and then, if you persist, you’ll be fired. The press could have been the antidote to the social media trap. Instead they chose to become the profitable pusher of the poison.

This is precisely and tragically correct.

I immediately wrote to Andrew to tell him that he needs my new book, stat. But even Andrew, who writes on a weekly basis, who has stepped back from the moment-by-moment insanity of journalistic Twitter (and from the hour-by-hour insanity of the old Dish), probably doesn’t have time to step back a bit further still over the next few weeks and read some old books.

Or doesn’t believe he has time. Maybe, and maybe for journalists more than for anyone else, this is in fact the perfect, the ideal, the necessary moment to recover “real conscious life outside this virtual portal.” One might begin with the epistles of Horace, a man who in exile from Rome learned to love the countryside. Just a thought.

September 13, 2020

lessons for activists from Edmund Burke

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind…. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same “troublous storms that toss / The private state, and render life unsweet.” These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good…. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.

— Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

July 6, 2020

Mammon

Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon is a remarkable book, beautifully written and narrated with great verve. However, I do not find its argument persuasive. You can only find the argument persuasive if you accept the book’s two key axioms, and I don’t. I say “axioms” because McCarraher doesn’t argue either of them, he takes them as … well, axiomatic.

The first axiom is that the Middle Ages in Europe, especially western Europe, constituted a great coherent sacramental order — McCarraher loves the word “sacramental” and uses it to designate pretty much everything he approves of — a “moral economy,” a “theological economy,” in which “preparation for [God’s] kingdom was the point of economic life.” Even the vast waves of rebellion and protest that occurred throughout the Middle Ages weren’t protests against that order as such, only complaints that the political and ecclesial authorities weren’t properly fulfilling their duties. McCarraher cites rebellions (e.g. Wat Tyler’s) of which this could plausibly be said as characteristic, and ignores all the more radical protests. (See Chapter 3 of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium for examples.) Similarly, he presents the political-eschatological vision of Piers Plowman as though it’s typical of its age, when it isn’t typical at all, any more than William Blake’s poems are typical of England circa 1800. A fair look at what we know suggests that the Middle Ages was as governed by greed and lust and the libido dominandi as any other era, and if God had spoken to the rulers of that age he would have asked them, “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?” I think the great preponderance of the evidence suggests that McCarraher’s portrait of the Middle Ages is a pious fiction.

The second governing axiom of The Enchantments of Mammon is that modern capitalism, which was, he says, created by Protestantism, sacralizes wealth in a way that no previous system did. But I don’t think that’s true. In all times and all places that I know of, wealth is generally perceived as a sign of divine favor. The peculiarity of the Axial Age is that in that era there arise, in various places around the world, philosophical and theological traditions suggesting that human flourishing cannot be measured in money and possessions. (After all, one of the key features of the land that Yahweh promises to the wandering Israelites is that it flows with milk and honey, is a place in which the people can prosper economically. It’s only when we get to the book of Proverbs that we discern a serious ambivalence about all this. Proverbs 22:4: “The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life.” But also Proverbs 11:4: “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.”)

At one point early on McCarraher writes, “Talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism.” This is true. However, it could equally well be said that talking about capitalism is a way of not talking about money. “The love of money is the root of all evil” was written long, long before the rise of the capitalist order that McCarraher denounces. Moreover, talking about money can be a way of not talking about human acquisitiveness, about the sin of greed. The tension between acquisitiveness and a dawning awareness that acquisitiveness isn’t everything goes as far back as the Odyssey, the great predecessor (or maybe great initiator) of the Axial Age sensibility, the first major work of art against greed, which suggests that only tragic suffering — like that of Odysseus, exiled and imprisoned far from his homeland, or Menelaus, whose family is destroyed as he gains godlike riches — is sufficient to break the hold of greed upon us. It seems to me that McCarraher is blaming capitalism for something that is a permanent feature of human life.

Anyway: If you believe that the Middle Ages were a veritable paradise of sacramental order and that the sacralizing of greed is an invention of modern capitalism — which is to say, if you believe that pretty much everything bad in the world is the result of Protestantism — then you may well find McCarraher’s case compelling. But even if you don’t accept those axioms, it’s a terrific read full of fascinating anecdotes. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

May 30, 2020

lessons from the past

Once I saw how things were going I got away from Twitter and stopped checking my RSS reader. I didn’t want to hear any news, mainly because I knew that there wouldn’t be much news as such — though there would be vast tracts of reason-bereft, emotionally-incontinent opinionating. And I don’t need that. Ever.

Instead, I’ve just read Ron Chernow‘s massive and quite excellent biography of George Washington. It’s been a useful as well as an enjoyable experience. For one thing, it reminds me what actual leadership looks like; and for another, it reminds me of how deeply flawed even the best leaders can be, and how profoundly wrong. As is always the case when I spend some serious time with the past, I get perspective. I see the good and the bad of my own time with more clarity and accuracy. And if anything vital has happened over the past few days while I’ve been reading, I’ve got plenty of time to catch up. As I’ve said before, I prefer to take my news a week at a time anyway, not minute by minute.

One theme in Chernow’s biography particularly sticks with me. It concerns the end of Washington’s second administration and his brief period as an ex-President (he lived only two-and-a-half years after departing the office). That was a time when when political parties in something like the modern sense of the term — though many of the Founders referred to the power and danger of “Factions” — dramatically strengthened. It was also a time when journalists who supported one faction would say pretty much anything to discredit the other one, would make up any sort of tale. John Adams, violently angered by all the lies told about him and his colleagues — and there really were lies, outrageous lies, about him, just as there were about Washington near the end of his second term — strongly supported and oversaw the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts to punish journalistic bias and fake news, as well as to deter immigration — though Adams and his fellow in-power Federalists were only concerned to punish the lies that worked against their policies, not the lies that worked in their favor. (Plenty of those circulated also.) Washington, rather surprisingly and disappointingly, thought these laws good ones.

I draw certain lessons from this whole sordid history. Habitual dishonesty, on the part of politicians and journalists alike, inflames partisanship. You exaggerate the nastiness of your political opponents, and that leads people in your camp to think of the other side not as fellow citizens with whom you disagree on policy, but rather something close to moral monsters. Gratified by your increasingly tight bond with the like-minded, you stretch your exaggerations into outright lies, which gain even more rapturous agreement within your Ingroup and more incandescent anger against the Outgroup. Dishonesty begets partisanship, and partisanship begets further dishonesty. It’s a classic vicious circle.

And one more phenomenon is begotten by all this malice. Wheeled around in this accelerating circle of your own devising, you become incapable of comprehending, or even seeing, something that it is absolutely necessary for every wise social actor to know: In some situations all parties act badly. Sometimes there are no good guys, just fools and knaves, blinded to the true character of their own behavior by their preening partisan self-righteousness.

December 10, 2019

Lucy Ellmann and old books

We’re at the copy-editing stage of my next book, so it’s too late to add anything, but goodness, I wish I could squeeze in this from Lucy Ellmann:

Some time ago I pretty much decided to read only books written before the atom bomb was dropped, when everything changed for all life on Earth. The industrial revolution’s bad enough, but nuclear weapons really are party-poopers.

I don’t stick strictly to this policy, but I often find it more rewarding to read what people thought about, and what they did with literature, before we were reduced by war and capitalism to mere monetary units, bomb fodder and password generators. And before the natural world became a depository for plastics and nuclear waste.

Anger and alienation have resulted, and they’re fine subjects, but there are times when you’d like to remember some of the higher points in the history of civilisation as well, and the natural world before we learned to view it all as tainted. The intense humour, innocence, sexiness and play of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for instance – could this have been written after Hiroshima? Could Gargantua and Pantagruel? Don Quixote? Emma? I don’t see how. Thanks to the offences of patriarchy, a lot of the fun has gone out of being human, and I like books that look at life in less constricted ways.

I love this statement because of its provocations — provocations that should be assessed with some care. For one thing, I don’t see that the variety of books has especially diminished since Hiroshima — I mean, Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Shack and a whole bunch of adult coloring books have appeared since the end of that war — and if we’re missing the distinctive (and very funny) kind of “sexiness” in Tristram Shandy I think that has a lot more to do with the sexual revolution and its unanticipated consequences than with the atom bomb.

But the idea that before the industrial revolution, with its accompanying “war and capitalism” and reduction of persons to “mere monetary units,” the natural world was perceived in a radically different way — that’s promising. Though I think the main thing that should be said about pre-modern nature is not that it was untainted but that it was scary as shit. Which is just as much worthy of our interest and reflection.

We could debate such matters all day — and should! Because there’s no question that the past really is another country, though they don’t everything different there. Trying to understand the continuities as well as the discontinuities is what reading books from the past is all about.

Anyway, my book is going to be great on all that stuff. Make sure it’s the only book published in 2020 that you buy in 2020, okay? Otherwise, stick with the old stuff. You’ll be glad you did.

November 26, 2019

Automata, Animal-Machines, and Us

What follows is a review of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, by Jessica Riskin (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The review appeared in the sadly short-lived online journal Education and Culture, and has disappeared from the web without having been saved by the Wayback Machine. So I’m reposting it here. My thanks to that paragon of editors John Wilson for having commissioned it.

The last few decades have seen, in a wide range of disciplines, a strenuous rethinking of what the material world is all about, and especially what within it has agency. For proponents of the “Gaia hypothesis,” the whole world is a single self-regulating system, a sort of mega-organism with its own distinctive character. By contrast, Richard Dawkins dramatically shifted the landscape of evolutionary biology in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene (and later in The Extended Phenotype of 1982) by arguing that agency happens not at the level of the organism but at the level of the gene: an organism is a device by means of which genes replicate themselves.

Meanwhile, in other intellectual arenas, proponents of the interdisciplinary movement known as “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) and the movement typically linked with it or seen as its predecessor, “actor-network theory” (ANT), want to reconsider a contrast that underlines most of our thinking about the world we live in. That contrast is between humans, who act, and the rest of the known cosmos, which either behaves or is merely passive, acted upon. Proponents of OOO and ANT tend to doubt whether humans really are unique “actors,” but they don’t spend a lot of time trying to refute the assumption. Instead, they try to see what the world looks like if we just don’t make it.

In very general terms we may say that ANT wants to see everything as an actor and OOO wants to see everything as having agency. (The terms are related but, I think, not identical.) So when Bruno Latour, the leading figure in ANT, describes a seventeenth-century scene in which Robert Hooke demonstrates the working of a vacuum pump before the gathered worthies of the Royal Society, he sees Hooke as an actor within a network of power and knowledge. But so is the King, who granted to the Society a royal charter. And so is the laboratory, a particularly complex creation comprised of persons and things, that generates certain types of behavior and discourages or wholly prevents others. So even is the vacuum itself — indeed it is the status of the vacuum as actor that the whole scene revolves around.

For the object-oriented ontologist, similarly, the old line that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is true, but not primarily because of certain human traits, but rather because the hammer wants to pound nails. For the proponent of OOO, there are no good reasons for believing that the statement “This man wants to use his hammer to pound nails” makes any more sense than “This hammer wants to pound nails.”

Some thinkers are completely convinced by this account of the agency of things; others believe it’s nonsense. But very few on either side know that the very debates they’re conducting have been at the heart of Western thought for five hundred years. Indeed, much of the intellectual energy of the modern era has been devoted to figuring out whether the non-human world is alive or dead, active or passive, full of agency or wholly without it. Jessica Riskin’s extraordinary book The Restless Clock tells that vital and almost wholly neglected story.

It is a wildly ambitious book, and even its 500 pages are probably half as many as a thorough telling of its story would require. (The second half of the book, covering events since the Romantic era, seems particularly rushed.) But a much longer book would have struggled to find a readership, and this is a book that needs to be read by people with a wide range of interests and disciplinary allegiances. Riskin and her editors made the right choice to condense the exceptionally complex story, which I will not even try to summarize here; the task would be impossible. I can do little more than point to some of the book’s highlights and suggest some of its argument’s many implications.

Riskin’s story focuses wholly on philosophers — including thinkers that today we would call “scientists” but earlier were known as “natural philosophers” — but the issues she explores have been perceived, and their implications considered, throughout society. For this reason a wonderful companion to The Restless Clock is the 1983 book by Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility 1500–1800, one of the most illuminating works of social history I have ever read. In that book, Thomas cites a passage from Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children (1788), an enormously popular treatise by the English educational reformer Sarah Trimmer:

‘I have,’ said a lady who was present, ‘been for a long time accustomed to consider animals as mere machines, actuated by the unerring hand of Providence, to do those things which are necessary for the preservation of themselves and their offspring; but the sight of the Learned Pig, which has lately been shewn in London, has deranged these ideas and I know not what to think.’

This lady was not the only one so accustomed, or so perplexed; and much of the story Riskin has to tell is summarized, in an odd way, in this statement. First of all, there is the prevalence in the early modern and Enlightenment eras of automata: complex machines designed to counterfeit biological organisms that then provided many people the vocabulary they felt they needed to explain those organisms. Thus the widespread belief that a dog makes a noise when you kick it in precisely the same way for for precisely the same reasons that a horn makes a noise when you blow into it. These are “mere machines.” (And yes, it occurred to more than a few people that one could extend the logic to humans, who also make noises when kicked. The belief in animals as automata was widespread but by no means universal.)

The second point to be extracted from Trimmer’s anecdote is the lady’s belief that these natural automata are “actuated by the unerring hand of Providence” — that their efficient working is a testimony to the Intelligent Design of the world.

And the third point is that phenomena may be brought to public attention — animals trained to do what we had thought possible only by humans, or automata whose workings are especially inscrutable, like the famous chess-playing Mechanical Turk — that call into question the basic assumptions that separate the world into useful categories: the human and the non-human, the animal and all that lies “below” the animal, the animate and the inanimate. Maybe none of these categories are stable after all.

These three points generate puzzlement not only for society ladies, but also (and perhaps even more) for philosophers. This is what The Restless Clock is about.

One way to think of this book — Riskin herself does not make so strong a claim, but I think it warranted — is as a re-narration of the philosophical history of modernity as a series of attempts to reckon with the increasing sophistication of machines. Philosophy on this account becomes an accidental by-product of engineering. Consider, for instance, an argument made in Diderot’s philosophical dialogue D’Alembert’s Dream, as summarized by Riskin:

During the conversation, “Diderot” introduces “d’Alembert” to such principles as the idea that there is no essential difference between a canary and a bird-automaton, other than complexity of organization and degree of sensitivity. Indeed, the nerves of a human being, even those of a philosopher, are but “sensitive vibrating strings,” so that the difference between “the philosopher-instrument and the clavichord-instrument” is just the greater sensitivity of the philosopher-instrument and its ability to play itself. A philosopher is essentially a keenly sensitive, self-playing clavichord.

But why does Diderot even begin to think in such terms? Largely because of the enormous notoriety of Jacques de Vaucanson, the brilliant designer and builder of various automata. Vaucanson is best known today for his wondrous mechanical duck, which quacked, snuffled its snout in water, flapped its wings, ate food placed before it, and — most astonishing of all to the general populace — defecated what it had consumed. (Though in fact Vaucanson had, ahead of any given exhibition of the duck’s prowess, placed some appropriately textured material in the cabinet on which the duck stood so the automaton could be made to defecate on command.) Voltaire famously wrote that without “Vaucanson’s duck, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France,” but he genuinely admired the engineer, as did almost everyone who encountered his projects, the most impressive of which, aside perhaps from the duck, were human-shaped automata — androids, as they were called, thanks to a coinage by the seventeenth-century librarian Gabrial Naudé — one of which played a flute, the other a pipe and drum. These devices, and the awe they produced upon observers, led quite directly to Diderot’s speculations about the philosopher as a less harmonious variety of clavichord.

And if machines could prompt philosophy, do they not have theological implications as well? Indeed they do, though, if certain stories are to be believed, the machine/theology relationship can be rather tense. In the process of coining the term “android,” Naudé relates (with commendable skepticism) the claim of a 15th-century writer that Albertus Magnus, the great medieval bishop and theologian, had built a metal man. This automaton answered any question put to it and even, some said, dictated to Albertus hundreds of pages of theology he later claimed as his own. But the mechanical theologian met a sad end when one of Albertus’s students grew exasperated by “its great babbling and chattering” and smashed it to pieces. This student’s name was Thomas Aquinas.

The story is far too good to be true, though its potential uses are so many and varied that I am going to try to believe it. The image of Thomas, the apostle of human thought and of the limits of human thought, who wrote the greatest body of theology ever composed and then at the end of his life dismissed it all as “straw,” smashing this simulacrum of philosophy, this Meccano idol — this is too perfect an exemplum not to reward our contemplation. By ending the android’s “babbling and chattering” and replacing it with patient, careful, and rigorous dialectical disputation, Thomas restored human beings to their rightful place atop the visible part of the Great Chain of Being, and refuted, before they even arose, Diderot’s claims that humans are just immensely sophisticated machines.

Yet one of the more fascinating elements of Riskin’s narrative is the revelation that the fully-worked-out idea of the human being as a kind of machine was introduced, and became commonplace, late in the 17th century by thinkers who employed it as an aid to Christian apologetics — as a way of proving that we and all of Creation are, as Sarah Trimmer’s puzzled lady put it, “actuated by the unerring hand of Providence.” Thus Riskin:

“Man is a meer piece of Mechanism,” wrote the English doctor and polemicist William Coward in 1702, “a curious Frame of Clock-Work, and only a Reasoning Engine.” To any potential critic of such a view, Coward added, “I must remind my adversary, that Man is such a curious piece of Mechanism, as shews only an Almighty Power could be the first and sole Artificer, viz., to make a Reasoning Engine out of dead matter, a Lump of Insensible Earth to live, to be able to Discourse, to pry and search into the very nature of Heaven and Earth.”

Since Max Weber in the 19th century it has been a commonplace that Protestant theology “disenchants” the world, purging the animistic cosmos of medieval Catholicism of its panoply of energetic spirits, good, evil, and ambiguous. But Riskin demonstrates convincingly that this purging was done in the name of a sovereign God in whom all spiritual power was believed to dwell. This is not simply a story of the rise of a materialist science that triumphed over and marginalized religion; rather, the world seen as a “passive mechanical artifact world relied upon a supernatural, divine intelligence. It was inseparably and in equal parts a scientific and a theological model.” So when Richard Dawkins wrote, in 2006,

People who think that robots are by definition more ‘deterministic’ than human beings are muddled (unless they are religious, in which case they might consistently hold that humans have some divine gift of free will denied to mere machines). If, like most of the critics of my ‘lumbering robot’ passage, you are not religious, then face up to the following question. What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?

— he had no idea that he was echoing the argument of an early-18th-century apologist for Protestant Christianity.

Again, the mechanist position was by no means universally held, and Riskin gives attention throughout to figures who either rejected this model or modified it in interesting ways: here the German philosopher Leibniz (1646–1716) is a particularly fascinating figure, in that he admired the desire to preserve and celebrate the sovereignty of God even as he doubted that a mechanistic model of the cosmos was the way to do it. But the mechanistic model which drained agency from the world, except (perhaps) for human beings, eventually carried the day.

One of the most important sections of The Restless Clock comes near the end, where Riskin demonstrates (and laments) the consequences of modern scientists’ ignorance of the history she relates. For instance, almost all evolutionary theorists today deride Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), even though Lamarck was one of the first major figures to argue that evolutionary change happens throughout the world of living things, because he believed in a causal mechanism that Darwin would later reject: the ability of creatures to transmit acquired traits to their offspring. Richard Dawkins calls Lamarck a “miracle-monger,” but Lamarck didn’t believe he was doing any such thing: rather, by attributing to living things a vital power to alter themselves from within, he was actually making it possible to explain evolutionary change without (as the astronomer Laplace put it in a different context) having recourse to the hypothesis of God. The real challenge for Lamarck and other thinkers of the Romantic era, Riskin argues, was this:

How to revoke the monopoly on agency that mechanist science had assigned to God? How to bring the inanimate, clockwork cosmos of classical mechanist science back to life while remaining as faithful as possible to the core principles of the scientific tradition? A whole movement of poets, physiologists, novelists, chemists, philosophers and experimental physicists — roles often combined in the same person — struggled with this question. Their struggles brought the natural machinery of contemporary science from inanimate to dead to alive once more. The dead matter of the Romantics became animate, not at the hands of an external Designer, but through the action of a vital agency, an organic power, an all-embracing energy intrinsic to nature’s machinery.

This “vitalist” tradition was one with which Charles Darwin struggled, in ways that are often puzzling to his strongest proponents today because they do not know this tradition. They think that Darwin was exhibiting some kind of post-religious hangover when he adopted, or considered adopting, Lamarckian ideas, but, Riskin convincingly demonstrates, “insofar as Darwin adopted Lamarck’s forces of change, he did so not out of a failure of nerve or an inability to carry his own revolution all the way, but on the contrary because he too sought a rigorously naturalist theory and was determined to avoid the mechanist solution of externalizing purpose and agency to a supernatural god.”

Similarly, certain 20th-century intellectual trends, most notably the cybernetics movement (associated primarily with Norbert Wiener) and the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, developed ideas about behavior and agency that their proponents believed no one had dared think before, when in fact those very ideas had been widely debated for the previous four hundred years. Such thinkers were either, like Skinner, proudly ignorant of what had gone before them or, like Wiener and in a different way Richard Dawkins, reliant on a history that is effectively, as Riskin puts it, “upside-down.” (Riskin has a fascinating section on the concept of “robot” that sheds much light on the Dawkins claim about human robots quoted above.)

At both the beginning and end of her book, Riskin mentions a conversation with a friend of hers, a biologist, who agreed “that biologists continually attribute agency — intentions, desires, will — to the objects they study (for example cells, molecules),” but denied that this kind of language signifies anything in particular: it “was only a manner of speaking, a kind of placeholder that biologists use to stand in for explanations they can’t yet give.” When I read this anecdote, I was immediately reminded that Richard Dawkins says the same in a footnote to the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene:

This strategic way of talking about an animal or plant, or a gene, as if it were consciously working out how best to increase its success … has become commonplace among working biologists. It is a language of convenience which is harmless unless it happens to fall into the hands of those ill-equipped to understand it.

Riskin, who misses very little that is relevant to her vast argument, cites this very passage. The question which Dawkins waves aside so contemptuously, but which Riskin rightly believes vital, is this: Why do biologists find that particular language so convenient? Why is it so easy for them to fall into the “merely linguistic” attribution of agency even when they so strenuously refuse agency to the biological world? We might also return to the movements I mention at the outset of this review and ask why the ideas of OOO and ANT seem so evidently right to many people, and so evidently wrong to others.

The body of powerful, influential, but now utterly neglected ideas explored in The Restless Clock might illuminate for many scientists and many philosophers a few of their pervasive blind spots. “By recognizing the historical roots of the almost unanimous conviction (in principle if not in practice) that science must not attribute any kind of agency to natural phenomena, and recuperating the historical presence of a competing tradition, we can measure the limits of current scientific discussion, and possibly, think beyond them.”