history

Ripe For a Fall

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

[B]ut in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task. Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.

— Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith

A modern Westerner reading this:

Unhappy Endings

By in books, foolosophy, history

I recently read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy documenting his travels as a young man walking across Europe in 1934, from Holland to Constantinople. This is from The Broken Road, the third book, describing his encounter with what sounds to me like the Bulgarian Elmer Fudd. (The initial sentence, beginning on the previous page, starts, “an old man all in brown sat reflected…”) Most of the narrative throughout the trilogy is carried by Fermor’s descriptive density rather than excitement or adventure, but this was my favorite moment of genuine humor. It’s wonderfully dry because Fermor never steps outside the narrative to explicitly tell us that the man is ridiculous. He simply keeps adding details until the scene becomes a cartoon. A gun with a report like an exploding bomb; the hunter hidden by a cloud of smoke; zero ducks to show for it.

The gun itself sounds less like something designed to kill ducks than something designed by ACME Co. Another tremendous bang and cloud of smoke, and again the ducks sail on “undepleted” (with one, perhaps, pausing to rearrange his bill). The hunter’s response is not to reconsider his marksmanship, or his rickety weapon, but to shake his fist and call the ducks pimps. “Oooh, you scwewy pezewengi!” Fermor’s deadpan assent to this odd insult makes it even funnier. He could have written, “he cursed the ducks as pimps,” which would merely report eccentricity. Instead he momentarily lets the old man’s world govern the prose. The ducks have behaved without honor. They have evaded justice. Therefore: pimps. Why not?

This passage, from earlier in the book, is more representative of the general poignancy the reader feels throughout the trilogy, knowing with hindsight what “Europe, 1934” means. The Russian exiles were, in one sense, right. The Soviet regime was not eternal. It really was “rife with the germs of its own dissolution.” But a “temporary” madness can last longer than everyone who remembers the world before it. History did eventually turn the wheel, but these men were no longer there to be carried home.

Fermor’s best touch is “sudden giveaway silences.” The sighs express nostalgia; the silences betray doubt. Some part of them knows that Grand Duke Cyril and the double eagle are ceremonial props in a story they tell one another because the alternative is admitting that exile is permanent. Hope continues in speech, then falters whenever the room goes quiet. And “autumnal sadness filled the long room” is wonderful because the season is historical as well as emotional. These men are the scattered surviving leaves of a political and social world whose winter has already arrived.

The best sentence of the whole trilogy for me, though, is this one: “Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings.”

“As it turned out” is especially brutal in its mildness. No trumpet blast, no retrospective prophecy. Just the belated knowledge that history had already begun its work while everyone was eating, talking, flirting, offering beds, discussing history, and going about ordinary life. And “invisibly burning” avoids the smug consolation of inevitability. Fermor was walking through a Europe with Hitler and Stalin in power, but the people he met did not experience themselves as characters in the prologue to disaster. Their futures were hidden from them, as ours are hidden from us. Only afterward does the route appear strewn with powder trails.

The final phrase is almost painfully restrained. He could have named executions, exile, war, occupation, dispossession, suicide, disappearance. Instead he uses the language of stories — “unhappy endings” — as though the euphemism were the only way to hold all that accumulated knowledge without crushing the sentence. The reader almost leans forward to grab at Fermor’s lapels. “No, not ‘nearly all.’ Which ones? What happened to Nadejda? To Rosa? To Lise and Annie? Did anyone get across a border? Did someone marry and disappear into Switzerland?” Instead, “unhappy endings” leaves them where Fermor himself largely had to leave them: walking away from him into an approaching darkness.

One is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance: that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life; the many lengthening strands, in fact, which, plaited together, compose a lifetime. One should be able to detect the muffled bang of the starter’s gun.

Here the “muffled bang of the starter’s gun” announces beginnings. A book, a friendship, a love affair, an idea enters your life almost casually, and only afterward do you discover that the course has been set. You wish retrospectively that there had been some audible report: Pay attention. This is one of the moments from which the rest of your life will proceed. Later, the powder-trail sentence gives the image its terrible inverse. Those people too have already crossed an invisible threshold, but this time toward catastrophe. The fuse is burning while they are still talking, dancing, drinking, flirting, making plans. Nobody hears the match being struck.

We imagine a life as a sequence of recognizable turning points because retrospect supplies the punctuation. While living it, though, the crucial moments usually arrive disguised as ordinary afternoons. The conversation that becomes a lifelong friendship does not feel different from ten forgotten conversations. The person whose loss will divide your life into before and after is, at first, simply someone sitting across a table.

But we were talking about endings. And so, after all the extravagant precision of Fermor’s descriptive prose, he reaches the thing that matters most and can give us only a few restrained syllables of judgment: unhappy endings. The great raconteur suddenly has almost nothing to say.

Obiter Scripta, no. 163

By in books, foolosophy, history, obiter scripta

There is an interesting remark in the introduction which has some modern resonance (I think). The author writes — remember this is 1904 — of ‘That modern weakness of moral fibre, that false sentimentalism, which tends to make our sympathies go to the side of the criminal rather than his victim, was not characteristic of the Elizabethan age.’ But insofar as we now consider the Edwardian age in which Baildon wrote to be of great harshness by comparison with our own rather than one of sentimentalism, perhaps we ought to be careful of complaining of the softness of our times. Perhaps, indeed, they will seem harsh to our even more sentimental successors: or perhaps they will attribute their own travails to past sentimentalism, namely ours.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Not For the Proud Man Apart

Progressivism and declinism look like opposites, but both depend on the same picture: history as a line, with ourselves anxiously locating our position upon it. Are we farther along than our ancestors, or sliding backwards? Either way, the present becomes a referendum on the entire human adventure. A cyclical view would relieve some of the anxiety because it turns these alleged historical verdicts into recurrent human predicaments. Severity produces revulsion and a movement toward mercy; mercy decays into indulgence; indulgence provokes a demand for severity. Confidence hardens into arrogance, skepticism dissolves into confusion, confusion creates a hunger for certainty, and the wheel turns again. No generation permanently solves the problem because each solution cultivates the conditions of its own correction.

Write Supremacy

By in books, foolosophy, history

This prejudice about the authority of written stories soon extended to cultures that could write them. Humanity’s story of itself was rent in two at the moment of writing’s invention. Time was divided into “history,” after writing, and “prehistory,” before writing. Places were divided into “civilized,” with writing, and “uncivilized,” without writing. The word illiterate became a pejorative, and people who could write wrote to aggrandize the importance of writing. Writing became a form of supremacy. We know a lot about the achievements of written cultures because they were written, and little about the achievements of oral cultures because they were not. History may or may not be written by victors, but it is certainly written by those who can write.

— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

Much of what we call history is only the well-lit portion of the scene. Documents serve as the streetlight underneath which we search for the keys to the past, even if we dropped them somewhere else. This isn’t foolish; one can only use the sources that exist. But it should make us more modest. The dead did not all have equal access to posterity. Some left inscriptions, contracts, chronicles, and confessions. Others left tools, bones, songs, habits, and descendants. We know real things, but not evenly, not innocently, and not without distortion. Whole lives disappear because nobody wrote them down.

Try to render one ordinary day of your own life into prose while doing justice to it. Not the linear summary version — “I went to work, answered emails, ate lunch, came home” — but the day as it was actually lived: the stale taste in your mouth when you woke, the quality of the light on the kitchen counter, the half-formed worry that dissolved before you could name it, the happiness you felt over a passing memory, the song fragment that repeated itself for no reason, the smell of dust and cardboard, the precise texture of fatigue at 3:40 in the afternoon. Try to preserve not only what happened, but how it happened: the simultaneity, the pre-verbal awareness, the moods that overlapped without resolving into themes. Even Proust would need hundreds of pages and would still be falsifying by arrangement. Language does not record experience; it embalms selected portions of it.

Then consider the cheerful confidence with which we say things like “the Middle Ages believed,” “the Greeks thought,” “Victorian society was,” or “humanity before writing.” We cannot adequately narrate one day in our own life, but we will summarize five centuries over coffee. Of course we must generalize. Thought would be impossible without compression. But every such sentence should carry a small skull-and-crossbones label: contents under extreme pressure. The archive is partial, the witnesses are peculiar, the survivors are self-selecting, and the writers have already arranged the scenery before we entered. It is comic once you see it. We cannot fit one afternoon into language without losing most of it, but we confidently pour millennia through a funnel and call the residue history.

The Mundane Comedy

By in books, history, literature as moral fiber supplement, the statusphere

Roman Helmet Guy:

But if this answer is correct, it leads us to a troubling conclusion: New books are not worth reading. Why? Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything. Especially not those of us who are likely to get platformed by a major publisher.

…In conclusion I leave you with a rule of thumb for actually understanding the human condition by engaging deeply with a wide breadth of human experience and perspectives: Half the books you read must’ve been written before WW2, half of those must’ve been written before the American Revolution, and half of those must’ve been written before the fall of Rome.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the fashionable line among the cognoscenti was that reading literary fiction makes you “more empathetic.” Whatever the research actually said, the audience mostly heard the part it wanted to hear: Look at how admirable I am — so sensitive, so intelligent, so morally improved by my refined tastes. Now we get “long-ago-ism,” the mirror image of presentism: read “the classics” because modern culture is all groupthink, and old books will make you wiser and set you apart from the ignorant mob. And again, you can watch the audience seize the incentive: Look at how amazing I am for doing this.

It’s a perennial spiritual comedy. The self is infinitely adaptable. It can turn romance novels into “self-care,” and it can turn Thucydides into a caste marker. Either way, the point isn’t the book; it’s the glow. “I only read dead authors” can become its own Reddit — a pre-approved identity with pre-approved contempt.

The sober objection isn’t that old books are bad. It’s that they’re being sold, explicitly or implicitly, as a way to graduate from the human condition: read the right authors and you’ll become less stupid, less credulous, less vain, less herdlike. But no matter whether you read J. D. Robb or Herodotus, you’re still a confused animal, prone to the same rationalizations, the same fits of resentment, the same stupid mistakes, the same posturing and self-deception that humans have always practiced. Reading Thucydides won’t prevent you from wanting to be admired; it may simply supply better words for the desire.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James notes the deeper difficulty: the apparently unexceptionable call to support the classics against the fashions conceals a dilemma, because all the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and may arrive disguised as fashions when they do. That should be enough to ruin any attempt to outsource discernment to a publication date. “Old” is not a sacrament, and “new” is not a sin. Time may alter the odds, but it doesn’t relieve you of judgment. You never get to stop weighing, measuring, and deciding what’s alive and what’s dead.

In fact, the fetish for old books can produce its own refined version of cliché. We mock the man for whom every political event he dislikes is Hitler; the helmeted antiquarian can fall into a classier variant, where every modern event has its precursor in Herodotus. The past becomes a stencil. You get the pleasure of analogy without the burden of particulars. But the particulars are precisely what matter: technology, scale, speed, institutions, incentives — everything that makes this moment different from the ones you’ve read about. The classics are not an answer key; they are lenses, and lenses can distort as well as clarify.

There’s also a more mundane point: the raw material of “human nature” isn’t scarce. You can find it in Target as easily as in Tacitus. The difference is that the Target experience doesn’t come with an introduction by Penguin Classics. Vanity, cruelty, tenderness, boredom, status games, self-serving moralism, genuine decency — the whole human condition is on display in the food court and in the Facebook comments for anyone who cares to look.

But the mall and the timeline don’t arrive pre-sifted. The chaff is still attached to the grain, and the sorting has to be done by you. That’s exactly what the would-be aristocrats resent. They prefer the fantasy of sitting in a chair with a pipe, imbibing the “best of” insights through a curated narrative, spared the indignity of wading through the unwashed muck of reality where the same human motives appear without a classical frame. But if you can’t find human nature in the mall, you won’t find it in Plato either.

So yes: read old books. They puncture the spell of the present. They remind you that your era’s obvious ideas are contingent, and therefore questionable. But don’t read them as a way to feel inoculated against folly. The past is useful precisely because it shows how little we change — and how easy it is to tell ourselves that we have.

Like a Bird’s Chirp

By in books, history

They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But Machiavelli would say that this gets things backwards. The reason to study history is precisely so that you can repeat it, solving new problems with solutions that have worked in the past. As Machiavelli says in his Discourses on the Roman historian Livy, “he who wishes to see what is to come should observe what has already happened.”

— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

Adamson’s phrasing is a neat flip, but it risks making Machiavelli sound like he’s pre-refuting Santayana. (To be fair, his “They say…” probably refers to the refrigerator-magnet slogan as it circulates, not at the original meaning.) Santayana’s point, in context, is about memory — retentiveness — as the condition for any genuine progress. Machiavelli’s point is what you do with that retentiveness: you study the past not only to avoid repeating disasters, but also to repeat what works, on purpose. And Santayana even anticipates the failure mode: when retentiveness is exhausted, memory becomes self-repeating, and “a vain… repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation.” In other words: not amnesia, but cliché; the historical analogy as nervous tic. “Everything I don’t like is Hitler redux.” It’s a small irony that the pull-quote about remembering is so often remembered without remembering what it meant.

Everything Human Is Alien to Him

By in fresh hell, history

L. P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Rob Boddice, the subject of Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic profile, apparently imprinted on that line shortly after hatching. Boddice argues that we project our own emotional categories backward — pain, love, grief, even “human nature” — when in reality, experience is historically made, not universally shared. Even a carpenter’s smashed thumb is, in effect, a foreign language.

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons. Plenty of critics, starting with postcolonial thinkers, now understand this to have been an ideological attempt to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. But this impulse toward uniformity is not just an 18th-century one. Freudian psychology also reduced the dynamism of the human mind to a machine powered by predictable and shared drives. By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident.

Mwah! This is so perfectly calibrated to modern midwit pieties. The Enlightenment: a club of privileged European males in powdered wigs inventing “human nature” as a fig leaf to cover the White Phallus of Power as it raped its way through the diversity of history. Before that, apparently, nobody had ever noticed that human beings have anything in common, least of all the Christians, with their quaint doctrine that man is made in the image of God, and their bizarre hobby of preaching to all nations. Or the Stoics, who somehow developed a universal moral vocabulary without the benefit of a Paris salon. Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me”? Montaigne: “Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition”? Take a seat, boys, The Atlantic is here with the highly-credentialed to explain the world atcha.

To understand what the carpenter experiences, then, we need to begin with a series of questions that might help us reconstruct the meaning produced once the signal reaches its destination. Does this happen a lot? Is the sensation of hitting his thumb a daily or weekly occurrence—something that goes with the job? And then, if religion infused every second of his life, as might very well be true for a medieval carpenter, where would his concept of suffering come from? Does he think about Christ and perhaps feel purified? If suffering, sin, and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are “lived connections,” Boddice said, “and you’re surrounded by them,” how might he feel when that hammer hits his thumb?

It no longer seems so simple as just saying “pain.” We cannot put the carpenter in an MRI machine—we will never have total access to his feelings—but by building out his world in all of its dimensions, Boddice believes, we can get closer to appreciating the specificity of those feelings. This points to another radical element of Boddice’s thinking: To re-create an experience, you need to know all of the conditions that may have led the brain to originally create it, and this means bringing dozens of different academic disciplines to bear on the task, getting fields that don’t usually mingle to interact with one another.

This is the real work of art. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: here we’re told that to understand what it “felt like” for a medieval carpenter to hit his thumb with a hammer, you’ll need a kind of academic Avengers initiative: theology, archaeology, art history, material culture, semiotics, perhaps a visiting chair in Comparative Thumb Studies, and a grant. Only then may you begin to approach the mysteriously foreign experience known as “pain.”

Now, I’ll grant the modest point hidden under the grandiosity. People don’t just feel sensations; they interpret them. The same event, a hammer-smashed thumb, can be filtered through pride, shame, religion, habit, fear of lost wages, or the general anxiety of living in a world where God is watching and your tools are trying to kill you. Fine. Culture supplies scripts. Narratives matter. Buddhists, who of course didn’t appear until the Enlightenment, would call it clinging: the thumb hurts, but the story you attach to it — “I’m a clumsy failure and this is why my wife left me,” “This always happens to me, why am I so cursed” — hurts extra.

Still, the fact that meaning is flexible does not mean meaning is infinite. It doesn’t follow that slave labor under the desert sun was a rollicking good time in the right cultural context. It doesn’t follow that the medieval carpenter might have experienced a broken thumb as a wave of orgasmic rapture. The space of plausible interpretations may be wider than first thought, but it isn’t boundless. Human beings can be culturally varied without being mythical creatures. This is where Boddice’s extreme skepticism resembles something like travelogue-fantasy: the fetishization of difference as an end in itself. It reminds me of Pliny the Elder dutifully describing faraway islands where the inhabitants are all ears, or Marco Polo’s dog-headed cannibals. The past becomes an exotic zoo, and the historian becomes the docent.

And you’ll notice how selectively the skepticism is applied. If “experience” is sealed inside a vault unless we reconstruct “all the conditions,” there’s no reason to stop at medieval carpenters. My neighbors are also concept-laden brains in dark skulls with culturally trained categories. Taken seriously, the view doesn’t just make the past foreign; it makes the present unknowable, and logically points the way to solipsism. (And yet, miraculously, the academic Avengers can still deduce the “true” feeling from texts and artifacts.) But ordinary life plainly assumes the opposite — that we can understand one another well enough to cooperate, console, forgive, punish, and love. My assumption is that Boddice, with his tedious “down with empathy” provocations, is probably making a bid to be the next pop-academic superstar milking the Freakonomics template of counterintuitive insights. I can easily imagine “people in the past didn’t feel the same emotions we do” becoming the next “Eskimos-have-200-words-for-snow.”

Which brings me to the correct research method, and it requires only one professor: Samuel Johnson. If someone tells you we can’t understand an injured thumb without dozens of academic disciplines, a Johnsonian response suggests itself: pick up a hammer, hit his thumb, and say, over top of his howls and curses, “I refute Boddice thus.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 148

By in books, history, obiter scripta

History, consisting mainly of diabolical cruelty—why do I read it if I have nothing in common with any of its cruelties—torture and killing, killing and torture, and I keep rereading it in myriad ways; always the same. Without the dates that stick in it like pins, you could never tell all these things apart.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

As much as I enjoy reading the Durant’s Story of Civilization series, I have to take a break from it occasionally because of exactly that — one instance after another of a nation rising to prosperity on the back of merciless conquest, only to slouch into decadence and get overrun by invading barbarians. Maybe history is best taken as microdoses, not mainlined. Big narratives blur into the same triptych of despair — war, famine, societal collapse — until the cerebral nerves go numb. Small, regular hits work better. Think of the genre known as “microhistory.” Each small-scale event or story is a pinprick of light you can actually look at rather than the atrocity-sun that burns your retinas.

Newsless and Nameless

By in books, foolosophy, history

We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more frequent in a Roman’s life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popular today. History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and ourselves: they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.

— Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325

Everyday Romans might have worried about plague, barbarians, unstable government, inflation, and we…well, we worry about much the same things to greater or lesser degrees. It’s true that we don’t crucify petty criminals along the highways, or feed prisoners to wild animals on pay-per-view, but much of our violence is technologically mediated and far away, like drone strikes, or covertly-funded wars. I guess we have better plumbing, at least, and while we don’t fear famine anymore, we do have to deal with obesity and its side-effects at the other extreme. Still, I raise my glass in salute to my fellow insignificant nobodies of times past, living their quiet lives, getting by as best as they could.

An Eighteenth-Century Traveler Logs On

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies

All this was helped by the enormous development of print culture, which itself benefitted from the huge population growth in the last half of the 1700s, and in turn books and pamphlets and newspapers, together with coffee houses and clubs, helped broadcast a campaigning emphasis on improvement throughout all walks of life, and in all territories of empire. With the opening up of so many public spaces, and so many publications of so many different kinds, there was a lively concern with politeness, polite letters and polite behaviour in particular – the convenient belief that in commercial society we ‘polish’ one another, in a collective attempt at harmony – and with sensibility, an aspect of politeness in which the proper appreciation of complex behavioural and aesthetic matters became of first importance for many people for the first time, given that, to begin with, eighteenth-century Britain was somewhat backward in the visual arts (unlike theatre, which was stronger than ever). Sensibility was widely explored in the continuing development of the novel.

— Peter Watson, The British Imagination: A History of Ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II

The time-traveler arrived with a pocket copy of The Spectator and the serene conviction that posterity would have perfected Addison’s dream: a great coffee-house of mankind. The innkeeper pointed him to a glowing slate and said all conversation now took place “online.” He imagined mahogany tables without dust, quills without blot, a universal Tatler humming with agreeable raillery.

At the door he met a bouncer named CAPTCHA who bade him, “Select all squares that contain oil street lamps (no mere shop-lanterns).” Past this doorman sprawled countless rooms without walls. “Where is the proprietor?” he asked. “The algorithm,” said a passing boy, “keeps order.” It appeared to be an invisible master of ceremonies who pressed the most agitated speakers onto the central dais.

He opened a pamphlet called a “thread.” The first sentence was a trumpet for reform; the second blew it to pieces; the third accused the trumpeter of bigotry; the fourth insisted trumpets were violence. Everyone spoke in the tone reserved, in his time, for duels. “Sir,” he ventured in the comment box, “might we distinguish the thing itself from its abuses?” Twenty notifications arrived to inform him he was history’s villain.

He sought the Letters to the Editor and found instead a bazaar where every stall sold indignation by the yard. In the coffee-houses of his day, a witticism earned a bow and perhaps a corrected fact; here, a witticism was repeated through ten thousand parlors, each adding a crudely-drawn symbol of mirth. He watched a lady compose what looked like a sermon in the language of a street brawl and earn medals called “likes.” A gentleman who published a mild emendation was pelted with turnips conjured from nowhere and everywhere at once.

He asked after moderation. “We have it,” they said, and showed him a scaffold erected in the square. “Do you punish libel?” he said. “No, just ‘cringe’.” Off to one side a thoughtful essayist spoke softly; the algorithm hid him behind a tapestry of shrieks for insufficient performance.

In Bath they had once hired Beau Nash to teach men how to bow; here the instructors, represented by miniature heraldic crests of a sort, advised citizens to “ratio” or “dunk on” their enemies. He remembered the old promise that commerce would polish manners, that repeated dealings would tame the temper. But there was no polishing here; only masks, a million first meetings, and profits wherever tempers frayed, which was often.

He closed the slate and stared at his own pale reflection in it. “Progress,” he murmured, “has abolished the coffee-house by building an infinite Bedlam, where the crowd pays a penny to prod the afflicted and call it conversation.” Before taking his leave, he wrote a short apology to the age for the disturbance his visit had caused. The algorithm locked it in Possible Spam alongside the handbills and crypto-bots.

Bliss, Was It?

By in foolosophy, history

I was a senior in high school when the Berlin Wall came down. I was in my late twenties on 9/11. What was it like in between those events? It wasn’t “like” anything. It was the thing itself. It was just…life. Phones stayed attached to desks and walls, and it was still possible to live a normal routine without involving the internet, but other than that, it was the same blooming, buzzing confusion that we have right now. On July 3rd, 1995, I saw Type O Negative play a show at a small club in my hometown. I had no idea that in another thirteen months, they would release an album that would still be one of my favorites today, or that Peter Steele had just under fifteen years left to live. I certainly wasn’t huffing any Spenglerian/Hegelian flatulence about the grand scheme of History, nor was I conscious of any sense of turning and turning in some widening gyre or what the hell ever. What Hochman seems to be fantasizing about is what it would be like to live in the 1990s with the self-consciousness of a visitor from the 2020s. But the 1990s, when we were in them, were just “now,” just like July 3rd, 2024, is “now,” and in both instances, anyone who claimed to have a god’s-eye-view was full of it. Nostalgia is always contaminated by this kind of observer effect. That’s the bitch of linear time — context and clarity only appear in hindsight. Ahead of the present moment, there is only fog.

Ploosa Shawnje

By in history, religion

At the same time a social revolution was being inaugurated  under the direction of Jan Matthys. His first step was to confiscate the property of the emigrants. All IOUs, account books and contracts found in the houses were destroyed. All clothing, bedding, furniture, hardware, weapons and stocks of food were removed and placed in central depots. After praying for three days Matthys announced the names of seven ‘deacons’ who had been chosen by God to administer these stores. The poor were encouraged to apply to them and received commodities according to their needs.

However popular these measures may have been with the beneficiaries, the fact that they were carried out at the bidding of a foreigner, a newcomer to the town, aroused resentment, and a blacksmith spoke out against Matthys. The propheta at once had him arrested and taken to the marketplace. The whole population was also summoned there, and Matthys, surrounded by a bodyguard, made a speech in which he declared that the Lord was outraged at the slandering of his prophet and would take vengeance on the whole community unless this godless smith was cut off from the body of the Chosen People. The few eminent citizens who protested against the illegality of the proceedings were themselves thrown into prison and Matthys first stabbed and then shot the smith. The crowd was warned to profit from this example and dutifully sang a hymn before it dispersed.

The terror had begun and it was in an atmosphere of terror that Matthys proceeded to carry into effect the communism which had already hovered for so many months, a splendid millennial vision, in the imagination of the Anabaptists. A propaganda campaign was launched by Matthys, Rothmann, and the other preachers. It was announced that true Christians should possess no money of their own but should hold all money in common, from which it followed that all money, and also all gold and silver ornaments, must be handed over. At first this order met with opposition; some Anabaptists buried their money. Matthys responded by intensifying the terror.

— Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” “Wherever you go, there you are.” “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” You read history out of a sense of wonder about times and places different from your own, and you end up wondering if anything has ever changed at all.

Books, Huh! What Are They Good For?

By in books, history

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

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

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

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.

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