history

Books, Huh! What Are They Good For?

By in books, history 2 Comments

To put things in perspective, consider that in 1907 the Social-Democratic Party had a membership of around 150,000. The Skopts, a millennarian sect who believed that salvation would come once they had managed to castrate 144,000 people, had around 100,000 members during the same period. Even at its peak, then, Marxism was not that much more popular than crushing men’s testicles between hot plates, a method of castration practiced by the sect. By 1910, it was much less popular, as membership of the Russian Social-Democrats had dropped to 10,000: it took a combination of both its squabbling factions to equal a tenth of the Skopts’ total.

— Daniel Kalder, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy

I remember reading a review by Theodore Dalrymple of Kalder’s book some time ago, so when I saw a copy at a library sale this past spring, I grabbed it. I’m sorry I let so much time elapse before finally starting on it, because this book is hilarious. Kalder has such a mordant wit, which I suppose you need if you’re going to subject yourself to reading the literary output of 20th-century dictators and summarizing it. He started from the puzzlement over the fact that these men, who achieved levels of power and influence akin to minor deities, produced the most unimaginably tedious writings. How could these gods among men be so incredibly boring, so bereft of insight? He notices the curious fact that most dictators start as writers, to which he attributes the megalomaniacal obsession with the awesome significance of their own words. He makes the counterintuitive case against literacy, arguing that the history of last century would surely have been better had Stalin gone on to be a drunken yokel cobbler like his father, rather than be sent to seminary to learn to read and eventually discover the works of Marx and Lenin. I think his tongue is mostly in his cheek, but then again, looking around at so many overeducated mediocrities causing so much trouble, maybe he’s on to something. Anyway, I’m not even finished with it yet, but it’s already one of my favorite books of the year.

You Know They’re Going to Come for You and Drag Your Silly Name Into the Mud

By in atheism, history, the great awokening No Comments

Ed West:

The writer Peter Juul has identified three religious strands to the awokening. Most important is anti-racism, with whiteness and white supremacy ‘as the mystical and all-pervasive source of evil in the world’. Juul writes how ‘the concept of “white privilege” stands in for the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, complete with ritual confessions of sin that can never fully absolve a person of their fallen state’. White supremacy is a form of evil that explains all sorts of injustice, however logically implausible.

Then there is climate apocalypticism, which has more straightforward biblical undertones. I’m concerned about climate change — I’m fairly pessimistic about most things — but I agree that there is an obvious apocalyptic element to the movement, which is not backed up by the (admittedly worrying) scientific models.

Finally, there is gender identity, whereby someone’s ‘soul’ might be separate from their body. This last belief is the most recent of the strands, and in some ways the most extreme. It also feels the most obviously religious; the endless wrangling debates about whether someone has a female or male essence is perhaps the most theological our politics has got in years.

That this is proclaimed by people who otherwise declare that we ‘trust the science’, including members of the scientific establishment, makes it doubly strange (of course, what many people say about this is issue in public varies with what they say in private). But then, I suppose, it is only strange if you don’t appreciate that politics and religion are inherently linked.

I don’t know that history is merely “one damn thing after another.” More accurately, we could say, “This again? Are you kidding me?” History displays less imagination in rebooting old ideas than Hollywood does. Is it really so strange to consider that we may be moving back toward a political definition of atheism, as in ancient Rome, in which failure to pay obeisance to the official state cults can get one charged with impiety and exiled from professional life? Not to me. Luckily, the Epicurean injunction to “live unnoticed” was in my DNA from the beginning. I’ve been secretly heresying all my life.  And so I say, to all my newly-minted “atheist” friends:

The Merry Duchess

By in books, history No Comments

While reading Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain, I came across a brief portrayal of a woman I’d never heard of before, Harriot Mellon. To summarize what Mortimer says: In 1777, she was born the illegitimate daughter of an Irish peasant woman. She makes an early living tending to the clothes of a group of traveling actors, which leads to her first role on stage at the age of ten. By her late thirties, she is making six hundred pounds a year from acting — “pocket money” for her at this point, Mortimer says. For she has attracted the amorous attention of Thomas Coutts, the principal partner of Coutts Bank. After his wife dies of dementia, the seventy-nine-year-old Thomas and the thirty-seven-year-old Harriot are married, and spend seven evidently-happy years together.

Coutt’s three adult daughters are unkind to her, fearing the possibility of being disinherited by this gold-digging tramp, and through this unkindness, they bring about, in a downright Greek-tragic twist, their fate: Thomas, dismayed by their attitude, leaves everything to his wife, including his partnership in the bank. Yet Harriot is not vengeful; she continues to provide her “stepdaughters” with an annual allowance of ten thousand pounds.

High society is no more welcoming to her, especially when, in 1827, she marries again, this time to the duke of St. Albans, twenty-three years younger than her. Society ladies shun her for rising above her station, but this marriage too is evidently a happy one. From penniless peasantry to life as a duchess with a personal fortune of two million (which she controls herself through her partnership in the bank) — quite a compelling story, I thought. I’m surprised she hasn’t been adopted as an inspirational heroine by popular culture. Wikipedia says there is one biography of her by Joan Perkin, The Merry Duchess, though Amazon also shows a public-domain printing of her memoirs, as well as this account of her life.

Mortimer’s series of “time-traveller” guidebooks to British history are always entertaining as well, if you’re unfamiliar with him.

History Rhymes

By in history, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit No Comments

While it is darkly hilarious to see the fabulously-wealthy former CEO of Twitter imagining himself in the vanguard of the revolution, making *pew pew* noises with his finger guns toward people who offend him, the main reason I noted this was to tell you that if you haven’t yet followed the numerous links in the last couple weeks to Gary Saul Morson’s article in First Things, you really should. It seems relevant.

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin—“When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope”—would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.

The Unacknowledged Legislator of the World

By in fresh hell, history, waiting for the barbarians 1 Comment

I’ve said before, with only the tip of my tongue in my cheek, that Oprah Winfrey is “no more a person now, but a whole climate of opinion under which we conduct our differing lives.” (Yes, technically, Auden first said that about Freud, but Sigmund has nothing on Oprah when it comes to the reach of their respective pernicious influence. I’m confident that W.H., were he around today, would agree with me.) Now, with the news that Oprah is going to bring the risible 1619 Project to film and TV, it looks like she’s going to add pseudo-history to her legacy, in addition to the pseudo-spirituality and maudlin therapeutic sensibility she’s already known for. As if we weren’t already close enough to living in Idiocracy.

Clio Shrugged

By in books, foolosophy, history, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Mark Athitakis:

Literary historian Robert Darnton points out that as private reading bloomed, some feared that the act would have physical consequences. He cites the German writer J.G. Heinzmann, who in a 1795 tract warned that excessive reading would increase “susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melancholy.”

There’s something so time-specific to this list of maladies, isn’t there? I mean, you read it, smile, and say, “That’s such an eighteenth-century image, like powdered wigs, quills and horse-drawn carriages.” I read this last week, but I thought of it again while reading a review of not one, but two new books about walking. Specifically, “questions of how and why we walk — what walking means.” (Apparently this hasn’t been settled by the previous umpteen books about the meaning of walking. I will never stop being amazed that people can produce so much verbiage from such a humble topic.)

We know that walking is good for us, that “if undertaken in regular doses,” as Shane O’Mara writes in “In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration,” “it provides the small, cumulative and significant positive changes for lung, heart and especially brain health.”

…For O’Mara, the answers are practical. “The emerging science,” he insists, “is giving us a clear picture: Regular walking confers enduring and substantial benefits on individuals, and on society at large.” It improves our “moods, clarity of thought, our creativity,” as well as “our connectedness to our social, urban and natural worlds.”

And yet, when we lived in a world built around the length of the human stride, when architecture was oriented toward pedestrians, and when towns were designed to be walkable, people still found ways to be unhappy and unhealthy. He’s not wrong, but it’s such a shallow, myopic way to look at it. It strikes me that this type of optimal-health-and-efficiency neurobabble will one day be seen as a stereotypical marker of our own time. “Hahaha, isn’t it weird that people back then were so obsessed with brain chemistry and the malign effects of smartphones?”

Another review, this time of a book about the history of Progressivism, suggests that the combination of Darwinian theories, philosophical pragmatism, and the disillusionment following the carnage of the Civil War was what set the stage for Progressive ideas to flourish. Of course, it has long been argued, convincingly in my opinion, that World War One was “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction,” as Jacques Barzun said. How many other wars have likewise served as punctuation marks at the end of an epoch? The cynical thought occurred to me that perhaps “history” is a record of the silly trends that preoccupy us while we wait for the next massive war to come along and wipe the slate clean. Will our contemporary plague serve as a similar cultural palate-cleanser? Or will we pick right up where we left off until the next big war alters our assumptions and priorities again?

Nor Awkward Claim Picked From the Wormholes of Long-Vanished Days

By in books, history, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Of course I knew what to expect when I picked up a copy of Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Still, though, there are times when I feel like turning around to tell Greenblatt that it’s hard to enjoy the book with him leaning over my shoulder, breathing on my neck, trying to make sure that I don’t miss any of the unsubtle parallels he draws. I mean, really — Jack Cade, in capturing Lord Saye, “has in his hands the realm’s highest fiscal officer, the emblem of the swamp that he has pledged to drain”? “He promises to make England great again”? Countless other examples, without being quite so on-the-nose, are still framed in unambiguous ways, as if we can’t be left to draw our own conclusions. Much of the book, simply by virtue of centering on  Shakespeare’s plays, is enjoyable enough to read — that is, when the reader is allowed to forget for a moment that THERE’S A RELEVANT LESSON TO LEARN HERE.

As it happens, I’ve added Shakespeare to my book-juggling routine these last few months, trying to read a scene here, a scene there, a sonnet before bed, etc. One of the many enjoyable things about doing so is that it’s a break from the incessant cicada-drone of omnipresent, up-to-the-millisecond media and its infatuation with the Eternal Now. At the risk of making it sound like just another utilitarian, productivity-enhancing “hack,” it’s good to spend some time considering the differences between, say, Elizabethan England and our own time. Granted, there are constant themes in human nature and history which we can’t help but notice. But we have to be careful not to force history onto the Procrustean bed of our fleeting obsessions, lest we end up finding social media in ancient civilizations, or Silicon Valley start-ups in colonial America.

Mr. Full, Mr. Have Kills Mr. Empty Hand

By in foolosophy, history, political philosophy No Comments

David French:

The Right is now having a new version of an old fight. Is a person’s success or failure mainly dependent on his personal choices or on the operation of larger, impersonal forces over which he has no control? The key word here is “mainly.” No reasonable person believes that economics, culture, and history have no influence over human choices. At the same time, no reasonable person believes that individuals — especially in contemporary America — are entirely imprisoned by circumstance.

…The populist wave built, and with it a tale that sounded very strange to conservative ears. The struggling white working class had been victimized. It needed primarily a political rescue. The notion that the government can help at the margins but that self-improvement is mainly up to the individual was replaced by an angry victim narrative. And the victimizers? The “elites,” of course.

History isn’t just “one damn thing after another,” of course; it seems more like “the same few damn things over and over again in recurrent cycles.” In his book The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch complained about the trendy mindset that saw the decade (or perhaps the generation) as the basic unit of historical time. Analyzing history in bite-sized ten-year chunks, he argued, encouraged a shallow perspective better suited to observing fashion trends and consumer goods. And yet, the longer I live, the harder it is to avoid the impression that every “new” idea is just one that’s been out of fashion long enough for an increasingly attention-deficient culture to have forgotten why it was discarded in the first place. The “rational” alternative to the revitalized socialism of both the national and international varieties is a STEM-mongering liberalism in thrall to the technocratic delusions of Auguste Comte. History seems like just as much of an absurd joke viewed through the wide-angle lens.

Schopenhauer, with his usual perkiness, said that human existence was primarily an oscillation between boredom and despair. A less-morbid perspective might say that there is a virtuous mean worth aiming for, however difficult it is to attain it, but most people occupy themselves rushing back and forth between the stupid ideas on either side of it.

Sic Transit Gloria

By in history, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

The Lady of the House spent the holidays visiting relatives in the homeland. She mentioned to me that her family apparently eats off of paper plates now due to the tedium of arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes.

This gave me a new way to think about the fall of the Roman Empire. From our perspective, we look back and wonder how shepherds and peasants could have lived among the ruins of Roman infrastructure without being motivated to replicate those technological achievements. Perhaps in addition to the usual answers given, we should consider the possibility of an entire culture essentially sitting back-to-back, arms folded, glaring straight ahead in silence. Oh, you think I’m going to be responsible for the maintenance on those giant stone buildings and paved roads? I guess we’ll just share this dirt-floor wooden hut with our livestock instead!

We moderns have inherited the Renaissance perspective that contemplation of the lost glories of antiquity was always tinged with melancholy and nostalgia, but the British historian Chris Wickham claims that the Roman ruins were seen in the early medieval period as emblematic of the righteous and inevitable triumph of Christianity over paganism. Likewise, perhaps the use of paper plates in lieu of perfectly good ceramic and china will be seen by future scholars as a symbol of the equally righteous and inevitable triumph of domestic egalitarianism over the gendered division of household drudgery.

The Birth of the Asylum

By in books, history, identity, non compos mentis, philosophy No Comments

Another pertinent excerpt from The Authenticity Hoax:

Arthur and I have an inside joke where, when commiserating over all the madness of society, we periodically shake our fists at the heavens while growling, “Jean-Jacques!” This developed out of our discovery that quite a few things that we consider unfortunate about our culture can be fairly traced back to the demented scribblings of that deranged lunatic. Like I said recently, it’s interesting to note how so many of the intellectual contests in our day and age are taking place on a playing field whose boundaries were painted by Burke and Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago. Here, we can clearly see the philosophical origins of today’s postmodern insanity, where passionate feelings count as irrefutable evidence.

1 2 3 4›»