Equipped to be a novelist

From John Buchan’s Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works, as Buchan narrates Scott’s turn from the craft of poetry and long ballads to historical fiction in his early forties:

“Few men have been better equipped than Scott for the task of novelist. To begin with, he had been from his earliest youth a skilled storyteller. Again, from his huge antiquarian reading, he was perfectly equipped for the reproduction of historical scenes and an older life. Moreover, his easy friendliness with every class and condition of society, his love of the ordinary man, his quick perception of everyday humours and oddities, made him an adept in the drawing of character.”

Writers—especially beginning writers—often worry whether or not they have what it takes to write novels. What Buchan writes of Scott is not a bad description of the fundamental tools, foremost among them a built-in talent for telling stories and the desire to do so. (It’s also a decent description of Buchan himself.)

Scott’s deep love of history provided plenty of raw material for stories and his familiarity with people—both through his “easy friendliness” with them as well as his work in the law—kept his stories true to life. But had he lacked a natural disposition and knack for telling stories, these latter qualities would have been moot.

Buchan wrote two biographies of Scott. This passage comes from the first, shorter one, originally published as The Man and the Book in 1925. I’m reading a nice recent paperback edition from Luath Press, a Scottish publisher. Buchan published a longer biography titled simply Sir Walter Scott in 1932. That one is available for free from Project Gutenberg.

Scruton on what children can teach us about art

From the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary “Why Beauty Matters”:

“Art needs creativity, and creativity is about sharing. It is a call to others to see the world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naïve art of children. Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images, nor are they wallowing in ugliness. They are trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel. Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.”

— Sir Roger Scruton

Scruton makes this aside as a point of contrast with modern art—which is intentionally insular, confrontational, transgressive, and over-intellectual if not ideological—but in doing so he makes a broader point about what art is and what it’s for. This description of children’s art is also honestly and accurately observed.

I’ve thought of this passage many times over the last few weeks, ever since my eldest son eagerly presented me with a picture he had drawn. It was a pencil and highlighter drawing that showed me holding my youngest son at the dinner table—a picture of his dad and one of his little brothers. It was drawn from life without my noticing, and joy he took both in drawing and giving it to me, the joy in and care taken over the details, including the stubble of my beard, and the simple, straightforward, honest love in the picture itself have stuck with me. My kids have drawn many things for me, but this one in particular struck me as a clear example of Scruton’s “pure delight” in “sharing.”

Last week I tacked it to the wall of my office at school. May any art I create be motivated as purely as my son’s.

“Why Beauty Matters” is worth your while, as I wrote here almost four years ago following Scruton’s death. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo here.

I’m just a Poe boy from a... chosen family?

Edgar Allan Poe was orphaned just a month before his third birthday, when his actress mother Eliza died in Richmond, Virginia. Her husband and Edgar’s father, David Poe, had abandoned the family some time before and died the same month in obscure circumstances. The three Poe children were divvied up: the eldest son, Henry, went to live with David’s parents in their hometown of Baltimore. The youngest, Rosalie, was adopted by a Richmond family. Edgar, the middle child, was fostered but never adopted by the wealthy John and Frances Allan, also of Richmond.

Edgar’s relationship with his foster father was famously volatile, at least once Edgar reached adolescence and especially after the death of Frances. Eventually, John Allan cut Poe off from all contact and assistance and did not even mention him in his will.

I note all this by way of introducing this passage from A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, an otherwise good Poe biography by Mark Dawidziak that I’m currently reading. Here the author quotes the director of a Poe museum to illustrate the important changes brought about by Poe’s relocation to Baltimore after having left the army and intentionally flunked out of West Point:

“The idea of your chosen family is a more modern idea, but you see that with Poe. . . . In Richmond, he ultimately finds rejection. The message is, ‘You don't really belong here.’ Then he goes to Baltimore and finds the family that says, ‘You’re one of us.’ He finds his chosen family here. This is the house where Poe sought refuge. Maria, no stranger to poverty, welcomed him into her household. He goes dark here and begins to write those short stories. This tiny little house is where a huge literary career has its real start.”

This is a truly bizarre bit of sentimentalism since Poe’s “chosen family” in Baltimore is, in fact, his actual family.

Poe—as the author describes immediately before that paragraph—moved in with his paternal grandmother, his aunt (the Maria mentioned above, his father’s sister), his older brother, and two cousins, one of whom, Virginia, he would eventually marry. “You’re one of us” is not just a statement of group affinity, it is literally true. If anything, Poe’s return to Baltimore and the love and support he found among the Poes there shows the power of real blood relation rather than the self-fashioned groups championed by so many in this atomized age.

To be fair to the person quoted here, the passage above comes not from a scholarly article or a book but from a taped phone interview, so it’s likely she was speaking off-the-cuff and blundered in trying to make Poe’s changing fortunes relatable. But it’s still a good object lesson in the danger of letting twee modern sentimentality color your view of history.

An effect of sense

When I reviewed Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories earlier this week I mentioned the pattern-finding processes built into our minds, the necessary, natural, and helpful instincts that can also lead us into error unless we carefully discipline our thinking. As it happens, I’ve run across two good examples of this kind of aberrant pattern-finding in the last few days (Coincidence??? Yes!), which I’ve decided to supplement with one more that I’ve personally encountered several times.

An ambiguous provocation

One of the pitfalls of writing fiction is the possibility of mistakes creeping in during revision, the stage when you’re supposed to be fixing mistakes. (I generate more typos in my own work during revision than at any other point of the process.)

This week I finally started reading The Name of the Rose, the great historical novel by Umberto Eco in which William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar, investigates a series of murders in an Italian monastery. Assisting him is Adso of Melk, a young German Benedictine, and opposing him is Bernard Gui, a real-life Dominican inquisitor. In his lengthy postscript to the novel, Eco relates the following anecdote:

As I read the reviews of the novel, I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I found a critic . . . who quoted a remark of William's made at the end of the trial . . . “What terrifies you most in purity?” Adso asks. And William answers: “Haste.” I loved, and still love, these two lines very much. But then a reader pointed out to me that on the following page, Bernard Gui, threatening the cellarer with torture, says: “Justice is not inspired by haste, as the Pseudo Apostles believe, and the justice of God has centuries at its disposal.” And the reader rightly asked me what connection I had meant to establish between the haste feared by William and the absence of haste extolled by Bernard. At that point I realized that a disturbing thing had happened. The exchange between Adso and William does not exist in the manuscript. I added this brief dialogue in the galleys, for reasons of concinnity: I needed to insert another scansion before giving Bernard the floor again. And naturally, as I was making William loathe haste . . . I completely forgot that, a little later, Bernard speaks of haste. If you reread Bernard’s speech without William’s, it becomes simply a stereotyped expression, the sort of thing we would expect from a judge, a commonplace on the order of “All are equal before the law.” Alas, when juxtaposed with the haste mentioned by William, the haste mentioned by Bernard literally creates an effect of sense; and the reader is justified in wondering if the two men are saying the same thing, or if the loathing of haste expressed by William is not imperceptibly different from the loathing of haste expressed by Bernard. The text is there, and produces its own effects. Whether I wanted it this way or not, we are now faced with a question, an ambiguous provocation; and I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there (perhaps many meanings do).

Here, the accidental repetition of a distinctive word creates “an effect of sense” in the reader, the feeling that there is some significant linkage between the two characters. And because its meaning is not immediately clear, it provokes the reader, who feels intuitively that there is something here that must be investigated and uncovered. Its very ambiguity suggests significance, so much so that a reader went to the trouble of asking Eco for an explanation.

It turns out there is no such linkage at all, but the feeling remains. Not a bad parallel to the kind of suspicions, arising seemingly out of nowhere, that commonly lead to conspiracy theories.

Cui bono?

I decided to follow up Suspicious Minds by reading the new revised edition of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, by Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders, a short academic study of conspiracy theories and other “anomalous beliefs.” In its chapter on the psychology and sociology of conspiracism, the authors introduce intentionality bias, which Brotherton covers well in Suspicious Minds, as well as a concept the authors call cheater detectors: “the willingness to suspect others of cheating,” especially when those others are perceived to benefit from an event. This can lead to “a tendency . . . to make an inferential leap from incentive to conspiracy.”

They continue:

For a real-world example, we could look to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Scalia's passing gave then-president Barack Obama the opportunity to shift the balance of the Court in his favor. Since he and his party had something to gain, some (including former president Trump) jumped to the conclusion that Obama had Scalia murdered. A more sober interpretation might be that an overweight, seventy-nine-year-old smoker with diabetes and heart problems isn’t exactly unlikely to die from natural (i.e., non-homicidal) causes. If we assumed that every time a grandmother passed away the grandchildren expecting to receive an inheritance murdered her, then every grandchild who inherits money must be a murderer! Such a view is obviously untenable.

That last example is a good takedown of one of the most annoying hermeneutical principles in modern popular discourse: the cui bono? (Who benefits?) principle. The question of cui bono? is staple of conspiracist thinking, which is a problem because of its simplifying, reductivist effect. Just because someone benefits in some relative way from an event does not mean that they intended or even wanted it to happen.

Kingfish

I’ve taught both halves of US History for eleven years now, and still use, with occasional updates and modifications, the PowerPoint slideshows I designed for my lectures during my first year. When I teach the Great Depression and introduce left-wing critics of the New Deal, one of the major figures I describe is Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana and eventually one of its two US senators. Long, a populist autocrat and vocal proponent of public spending and wealth redistribution, viewed FDR and the New Deal as insufficiently left-wing and vocally criticized both the policy program and the president himself.

I include some photos and usually take a detour to YouTube to show clips of Long giving speeches, but here are the points on my one slide about Long in a subsection I call “New Deal Backlash”:

• Huey Long of Louisiana

• Radical democratic populist

• “Share the Wealth” plan to make “every man a king”

• Popularity a challenge to FDR

• Possibility of presidential campaign, but assassinated

I’ve been meaning to modify these last two points for years, because do you know what a consistent minority of students immediately suspect when this information is presented in this way? Again—the effect is instantaneous. Such patterns seem to suggest themselves.

As it happens, Long’s assassination also offers a good example for how to discipline this kind of thinking: by simply delving into the details. In the last few years I’ve shown my classes an “Unsolved Mysteries” segment on the Long assassination from 1992. It’s as fun and sensationalistic as you’d expect (I vividly remember watching Long’s bodyguards blow the assassin away as an eight-year old), but it does a good enough job of conveying the complexity in the lives of Long and his aggrieved assassin, Dr Carl Weiss, to put a hypothetical FDR hitman firmly out of mind.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of two fruitful fields for conspiracy theories—the JFK assassination and Hitler’s suicide—is the way the very possibility of conspiracy dissolves the more specifically you look at the details. Each event involved not only the major names but hundreds of other people, all of whom can be studied and charted individually and all of whose stories interact with each other’s and hundreds more. And there are tons of documentation. It’s often possible to know, minute by minute, who is in which room of the Führerbunker at any given time in the days surrounding Hitler’s death, and the same is true of the people inside the Texas Schoolbook Depository on the day Oswald shot Kennedy. (Here’s an excellent recent video on precisely this topic.)

All of which shows that conspiracy theories are easier to formulate and to believe—these dots are easier to connect—when you forget that the figures involved in them are people with lives and attachments living in complex communities, not game pieces.

Conclusion

In all three of these cases you have patterns naturally detected and suggested by the mind. Merely noticing them is not enough. A pattern is not evidence of the truth of any conclusions you may draw from them—the pattern may not even exist. Our thinking has to be subject to standards of truth outside its own natural processes.

More if you’re interested

Definitely check out that Lemmino documentary on the people inside and near by the Texas Schoolbook Depository on November 22, 1963. It’s excellently done, and if it weren’t so long I would certainly show it to my students. Here’s one I always show them, about one of the individuals whose behavior on that day never could have been predicted. I especially like the interviewee’s macro vs micro view of history. For what really happened in Hitler’s busy, crowded bunker in April and May of 1945, I always recommend the sixth edition of The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the more up-to-date Hitler’s Death, by Luke Daly-Groves, which I reviewed here long ago. If you’d like to hear from one of the many people present, Heinz Linge’s memoir is a worthwhile read. And Umberto Eco was no stranger to conspiracy theories. His satirical novel Foucault’s Pendulum concerns academics who invent a wild conspiracy theory for fun, only to have the theory start coming true.

Finally, I can’t pass over the actor playing Huey Long in the “Unsolved Mysteries” reenactment. This is Coen brothers veteran John McConnell (“And stay out of the Woolsworth!”), who also originated the role of Ignatius J Reilly in a stage version of A Confederacy of Dunces.

Political prestige and pathetic dignity in a dying civilization

Yesterday was South Carolina’s Republican primary. Coincidentally, I also started a classic espionage novel I’ve been meaning to read for a while: A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler. Last night as the unwanted updates on the unwanted results of the unwanted primary slowed to a trickle I settled in to read a few more chapters before bed. And in the middle of Chapter 5 I read this:

“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.”

Apropos of nothing, right? After all, more than just about any other political process, a primary election is a popularity contest that is all about flattering, cajoling, and slinging enough mud to win. And winning is not the mark of distinction the candidates think it will be. Verily, they have their reward.

Ambler continues:

Yet there remains one sort of political prestige that may still be worn with a certain pathetic dignity; it is that given to the liberal-minded leader of a party of conflicting doctrinaire extremists. His dignity is that of all doomed men: for, whether the two extremes proceed to mutual destruction or whether one of them prevails, doomed he is, either to suffer the hatred of the people or to die a martyr.

Ambler was wryly describing the situation in many former Austro-Hungarian and especially Ottoman territories as part of the background plot of his novel, but the situation is instantly recognizable, not only in many other historical eras—I think immediately of Cicero—but in the present. Both major American political parties have plenty of doctrinaire extremists and doomed men to go around. But what we have too little of is that “pathetic dignity,” the attitude of the defeated who are truer to principle than to victory.

Maybe it’s my contrarianism, my commitment to a conservatism with little modern application, or my Reepicheep-like love of lost causes and last stands, but I hope to see more of that “pathetic dignity,” more people willing to lose than to flatter a terminal patient.

Werner Herzog on psychoanalysis (and the 20th century)

Coincidental to my reading and review of Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries last weekend, today I ran across this passage on psychoanalysis from filmmaker Werner Herzog’s recent memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All*:

“I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”

As in Watterson’s book, Herzog suggests here that the drive to illuminate and resolve—and, inevitably, to control—can only end in catastrophe. Food for thought.

Last year I read Herzog’s short novel The Twilight World and greatly enjoyed it. I haven’t delved deep into his filmography, which I keep meaning to correct, but his movie Invincible has proven uniquely haunting to me ever since I first watched it twenty years ago. I recommend it.

*German title: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle. The German-language audiobook is the only version currently available through my library. Might be a good opportunity to scrub some of the rust off my German.

How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.

Agatha Christie on historical perspective

Coincident to my recent posts about the “right side” of history and how our understanding of what happened in the past changes and, ideally, grows more thorough and accurate as time passes, here’s Agatha Christie in the short story “The Coming of Mr Quin,” which I’m reading in the collection Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery.

Briefly, a New Year’s Eve party at a comfortable home is interrupted just after midnight by the arrival of a Mr Harley Quin, whose car has broken down. Quin says that he knew the house’s former owner, one Derek Capel, who unexpectedly killed himself a decade prior. Notice how Quin invites the partygoers to revisit what they know about the incident:

‘A very inexplicable business,’ said Mr Quin, slowly and deliberately, and he paused with the air of an actor who has just spoken an important cue.

‘You may well say inexplicable,’ burst in Conway. ‘The thing's a black mystery—always will be.’

‘I wonder,’ said Mr Quin, non-committally. ‘Yes, Sir Richard, you were saying?’

‘Astounding—that's what it was. Here's a man in the prime of life, gay, light-hearted, without a care in the world. Five or six old pals staying with him. Top of his spirits at dinner, full of plans for the future. And from the dinner table he goes straight upstairs to his room, takes a revolver from a drawer and shoots himself. Why? Nobody ever knew. Nobody ever will know.’

‘Isn’t that rather a sweeping statement, Sir Richard?’ asked Mr Quin, smiling.

Conway stared at him.

‘What d’you mean? I don't understand.’

‘A problem is not necessarily unsolvable because it has remained unsolved.’

‘Oh! Come, man, if nothing came out at the time, it's not likely to come out now—ten years afterwards?’

Mr Quin shook his head gently.

“The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.”

— Mr Quin

‘I disagree with you. The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion. If you like to call it so, it is, like everything else, a question of relativity.’

Alex Portal leant forward, his face twitching painfully.

‘You are right, Mr Quin,’ he cried, ‘you are right. Time does not dispose of a question—it only presents it anew in a different guise.’

Evesham was smiling tolerantly.

‘Then you mean to say, Mr Quin, that if we were to hold, let us say, a Court of Inquiry tonight, into the circumstances of Derek Capel’s death, we are as likely to arrive at the truth as we should have been at the time?’

‘More likely, Mr Evesham. The personal equation has largely dropped out, and you will remember facts as facts without seeking to put your own interpretation upon them.’

Evesham frowned doubtfully.

‘One must have a starting point, of course,’ said Mr Quin in his quiet level voice. ‘A starting point is usually a theory. One of you must have a theory, I am sure. How about you, Sir Richard?’

Simple and tailored to the mystery genre, but not a bad explanation of how the greater perspective afforded by historical distance can lead to a more accurate understanding of important events. There are, certainly, parts of my own life I understand much better now than when I was an eyewitness living through them.

I’ve been trying to read more of Agatha Christie the last year or so after having made it to my late thirties with Murder on the Orient Express as my sole experience of her storytelling. My wife, on the other hand, has read a lot of Christie, and has done so over many years. But even she was unfamiliar with Christie’s Mr Quin, who is the subject of several short stories collected as The Mysterious Mr Quin. I’m enjoying him in this story so far—especially with this kind of sharp historical aside—and plan to check that out.

History has no sides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Theodore Dalrymple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More if you’re interested

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

Buchan on the American Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ciceronian political moderation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On lunatics and cranks

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

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

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

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

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

— Umberto Eco

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

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

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

— Joseph Bottum

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

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

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