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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

April 21, 2025

Francis

I am by no means glad that Francis is dead, but I must admit that I am relieved that his papacy is over — or would be, if I didn’t suspect that even worse is to come. 

Pope Francis was consistently and unreasonably generous towards those he deemed his theopolitical allies, regardless of their moral failings; consistently and unreasonably mean-spirited towards those he deemed his theopolitical enemies, regardless of their piety and devotion to the Church; and habitually prone to sowing confusion about what that Church teaches, as well as about its authority to teach it. 

However: Francis offered much wise and vital teaching in Laudato Sí — I wish that were more widely discussed in assessments of his legacy. (I wrote about it here.) 

There’s a good chance that his successor will be more impartial than Francis was — less Schmittian in his deployment of a Friend/Enemy scheme in dealing with people — and that he will be clearer in his articulation of what Catholicism teaches and why. 

I’m less confident, though, thanks to Francis’s work at reshaping the institution in his image, that the next Pope will be as independent of the Zeitgeist as he ought to be. Pio Nono got many individual judgments wrong, but when he (rather indignantly) denied that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself to and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” he was spot on. It is the task of Christ’s Church to preach and teach the Gospel and help the world to come to terms with it. I am of course not Roman Catholic, but any branch of the church that does that particular work earns my gratitude.

My fear is is that Francis has reshaped the imperatives of the Roman communion in ways that make it overly sensitive to the indignation of the bien-pensant and insufficiently sensitive to the unchanging message of the Christian Gospel. My hope is that my fear is unwarranted.  

April 17, 2025

Moses the roadgiver

As I was drafting my previous post about the changes that the middle of the 20th century brought about, I realized that it was long past time for me to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. So now I have read it, and it is as great as everyone says — or almost everyone anyway. Some of those who have criticized the book write as though it merely denounces everything Robert Moses did, but while the book is indeed fierce in its exposure of Moses’s arrogance, cruelty, and short-sightedness, it’s not a hatchet job.

What Caro shows is a man whose desire to improve life for the residents of his native city was sincere and genuine — as was his belief that he knew better than anyone else in the world what improvements were needed and how they might be implemented. Over time, his compassion and desire to serve the public gradually withered as his arrogance metastasized. After many years in power, Moses lost the ability to distinguish between what he wanted to do and what needed to be done, and became completely unreflective about such questions – a thoughtlessness best manifested in his mantra-like recital of the cliché that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

As Caro points out, even if Moses had wanted to take time to reflect he could not have done so, simply because he had so many obligations, held so many positions, ran so many organizations. Of course, he only carried so many burdens because he sought the power that they made possible, so what you see in The Power Broker is the precise way in which a brilliant and at least initially compassionate man drives himself into a doom-loop of libido dominandi. But even as Caro describes the spiral of this doom-loop, he nevertheless always also shows the great benefits that accrued to many from Moses’s endeavors. He shows you both those who benefited from what Moses built and those whose lives were effectively destroyed by it, and allows you to draw your own conclusions about how much of what Moses did was justified, and how much we would keep if we could.

For instance: Moses built a series of state parks that gave pleasure to countless millions and became models for parks in many other states — and built roads that enabled city-dwellers to get to those parks — but could only do so through an astonishingly complex set of legal and political and administrative maneuvers to appropriate the relevant land from the mega-rich who were hoarding it, from feckless and clueless local administrators who had no clue what to do with it, and, yes, from farmers who made a living from it. Would you wish those parks unmade, and the land still held by plutocrats, or turned into subdivisions?  The question has to be asked because no one other than Moses would have or could have achieved what Moses achieved. No one else had the necessary combination of skills, coupled with endless energy and determination. 

Some of the best passages in The Power Broker capture both sides of the story at once. For instance: 

During the 1930’s, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World. He gouged great gashes across it, gashes that once had contained houses by the hundreds and apartment houses by the score. He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall’s Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. And he made it greener, planting within its borders two and a half million trees, shrubs and vines, bringing a million others back to bloom, reseeding lawns whose area totaled four square miles and creating a full square mile more of new ones. He filled in its marshes and made them parks. He yanked railroad trestles off its avenues, clearing an even dozen from Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue alone as part of a grade-crossing elimination program he considered so minor that he seldom mentioned it. 

And: 

Part of Moses’ Long Island formula — the vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality — was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it the city would never be able to build parks and roads and bridges — or, for that matter, housing or hospitals, sewers or schools — on the scale its citizens needed. But Moses’ formula could be successful in the city only as the basis of a new, vastly more complicated and subtle and sophisticated formula, one that would turn public works into a far truer reflection of the subtle and complicated human needs they had to serve in the city. A whole new input — a factor of humanity — would have to be added. And Moses would not allow it to be added.

Caro constantly keeps these two visions before our eyes. 

The method that Caro develops in The Power Broker is continued and improved — I am tempted to say perfected — in his biography of LBJ. To take but one example: Many readers have been moved by Caro’s admiring and heartwarming portrait of Coke Stevenson, the immensely popular governor of Texas who lost to LBJ in a Senate race in 1948 – or rather, had the election stolen from him by LBJ. There is absolutely no doubt at this point (partly because of Caro’s deep research) that the election was indeed stolen, and that a nasty, dishonest, manipulative, and power-hungry man stole it from an honest and upright public servant. But Caro portrays the character contrast between the two men so in such contrastive terms because he wants us to understand that if Coke Stevenson — who was an honorable man, but also was a garden-variety Southern racist — had won that campaign it almost certainly would have meant the end of LBJ’s political career, which in turn would have meant that the civil-rights legislation that helped to overcome centuries of structurally-embedded racism in this country would not have happened — or would have been delayed perhaps for decades. (It was precisely because powerful Southern Senators profoundly committed to segregation recognized LBJ as one of them that he was able to bring them around to supporting, or at least accepting, massive changes in the segregationist system.) 

Both Moses and LBJ were nasty men who did terrible things — but also did great things. And there was no way to get the great things without the terrible things coming along for the ride. Do you accept the deal? That’s the question Caro presses on all his readers, and that’s the key to his greatness as a biographer and historian. 

P.S. Denunciation of Robert Moses has often been accompanied by reverence for Jane Jacobs (no relation), but in this outstanding essay Philip Lopate shows why those paired assessments need to be complicated. 

April 14, 2025

Orange Man v Harvard (2024)

The Promise of American Higher Education – Harvard University President:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. 

I certainly hope that Harvard and any other universities that take the same path of resistance win … but: The question is not whether private universities can determine their own identities, but rather whether private universities can determine their own identities while receiving government funds. If Harvard didn’t take federal funding, the Trump administration would have no leverage over it. (Except possibly the threat to end its tax exemptions, which would be unlikely to survive in court.)  

Without federal funding, of course, even Harvard would struggle to afford certain vital scientific and medical research, which is why I hope they win. But I also hope that they’re serious when they say that they plan to “broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community.” I very much doubt it, though. 

(Take my views on that with a grain of salt, though: as I’ve often said, no matter how much I publish or where I publish it, I am, as a vocal Christian and disposition ally if not programmatically conservative, absolutely unemployable outside the Christian college/university world. So I have a beef.) 

The letter from Harvard’s counsel makes two main arguments, both of which will probably be adjudicated in court: that Harvard has already been making the changes to its institutional culture that the Executive Branch is demanding — which is interesting as an acknowledgment that changes need to be implemented — and that the government cannot cut funding without due process. We’ll see whether the courts endorse or reject those claims. I’ll be watching closely. 

UPDATE: I like this from the WSJ editorial board: 

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to “viewpoint diversity.”

The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that “if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously” to ensure the recipient “voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms.”

Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose. President Trump has enough balls in the air without also trying to run Harvard. 

And this: 

The demands were designed to blow up negotiations, not move the two parties closer to a deal, said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of the Harvard Medical School and member of the Council on Academic Freedom, which has been working toward expanding viewpoint diversity on campus.

“You can’t suddenly turn a switch and things change overnight,” he said. Many in the Trump administration “have said that they don’t think the institutions can be reformed from within, and they need to be burned down and rebuilt from the edges.” 

This sounds right — but what does “burned down” mean? Presumably not closed; I guess it means a complete organizational restructuring, with all-new top administrators and a replacement for the Harvard Corporation. Presumably also this new leadership would restructure the academic programs of the university. But perhaps no one in the Trump administration is thinking that far ahead. This may be not a plan but rather just another example of what Steve Bannon calls “flooding rhetoric zone with shit.” 

If anyone associated with the administration does have a plan, though, it would definitely be Christopher Rufo. 

April 14, 2025

on humanism: the big picture

The word “humanist” has several meanings, but they tend to fall within two broad camps. (There are other, more specialized, meanings, but we won’t deal with them here.)

The first holds that “man is the measure of all things,” and that there is no God, or at least no God to whom we owe worship and obedience. This is the sort of thing preachers denounce when they speak of “secular humanism.”

The second sees humanism as a project – moral, intellectual, artistic – to restore, improve, and perhaps even perfect the human species. To usher us into our true and noble inheritance.

The first camp is not compatible with Christianity, but I would argue that the second camp pursues a project of which Christianity is the proper fulfillment. Christianity is the true humanism because Jesus Christ as man is what humanity ought to be, and by his death and resurrection he makes it possible for that “ought” to become “is.” Augustine: “As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way“ (City of God XI.2).

The decline of Christianity in the West and its replacement as a key motive agent of society by liberalism entailed the exchange of a thick description of the human for an exceptionally thin one. Under liberalism, the human becomes the one who chooses its own way, and the role of society, including the political realm, becomes the facilitation of each human’s choice. This account is thin because it’s so simple, but the simplicity has certain virtues: in the light of liberalism’s one principle it becomes obvious, to many anyway, that the racist and sexist structures of the traditional social order are unjust and must be abandoned or at least seriously reformed. And this has been done, albeit inconsistently and imperfectly.

But as the thinness of liberalism’s anthropology – what Charles Taylor called the “Is That All There Is?” problem (A Secular Age, Chapter 8) – became more evident, alternatives with a thicker (if often also a coarser) account of human life began to emerge. And most of these are antiliberal and therefore antihumanist – because, remember, liberalism is a humanism, if an inadequate one. The various illiberalisms, on the Right and on the Left alike, have no room for the concept of the human.

Pause for what I hope will be a useful analogy: Back when I was devoting a good bit of my energy to cultivating ecumenical endeavors among small-o orthodox Christians, I discovered that there are some Roman Catholics for whom “non-catholic Christian” is a functional concept and some for whom it definitely is not, for whom the distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic is the only one that matters. The former might be willing to pursue ecumenical endeavors; the latter would not see the point. If I had pressed any people in that second group, they probably would have acknowledged that there are non-catholic Christians, but the fact was not relevant to them. It did not function as a concept in their ordering of the world. It cut no ice.

Something similar may be said of the illiberalisms of the Left and Right: they would probably acknowledge the existence of the category of the human, but not its relevance. They order the world by three categories: Us, Allies, and Enemies – that last being populated largely by the Repugnant Cultural Other. Thus in the assaults on liberalism humanism is also eviscerated.

In addition to those of the Right and the Left, there is one other antihumanism at work in the modern era, and that is the antihumanism of Capital: the reduction of men and women to machine, parts, instruments of commerce, either as Tools or as Targets. The great critic of Capital is usually thought to be Marx, but Marx’s response to the rise of a thoroughly dehumanizing industrial capitalism with an equally antihumanist account of the world has divided — so he and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto — between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. There’s no room in this analysis for the human. No, the great humanist critic of Capital is John Ruskin, who in The Stones of Venice and elsewhere denounced Taylorism before Frederick Winslow Taylor was even a gleam in his father’s eye.

Whether the antihumanism of modern Capital is a covert repudiation of liberalism or its natural and inevitable culmination is a question I don’t feel obliged to answer here.

But in any case, as the various illiberalisms and antihumanisms have risen and risen in power, we’ve seen various attempts to restrain and subdue those forces. Three such attempts are:

  1. The reassertion of the liberal version of humanism as a secular alternative to the various illiberalisms and Christianity alike, all of which are seen as “extremist” and “intolerant.” (See Karl Popper, and, quite recently, Alexandre Lefebvre.)
  2. The assertion of the vague colorless construct of “Judeo-Christian values” as the protector and guarantor of liberalism – liberalism’s Daddy, as it were.
  3. The assertion of a robustly Christian anthropology as the only viable alternative to all antihumanisms. (This movement, in the intellectual realm as opposed to the populist realm in which Billy Graham and the larger evangelical movement largely operated, is the subject of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943.)

As the “humanism” tag on this blog suggests, I have thought quite a lot about these matters, and the one Great Conundrum for me continues to be this: Is the renewal of humanism a prerequisite for the renewal of Christianity – or the other way around? That is, does an embrace of humanism make Christianity more plausible, or must one become a Christian – one who believes that all humans are (a) made in the image of God and (b) ”fallen into sin, and become subject to evil and death” (BCP) – before the concept of the human becomes a living and vibrant one?

Beats me.

What I do feel sure of, though, is this: While there are great predecessors to the rearticulation of the human, like Ruskin, vast cultural energies were devoted to resisting antihumanism only in the middle third of the 20th century – basically the period from Lang’s Metropolis to Kubrick’s 2001. (I use cinema to establish those boundaries because cinema is the essential art form of this period, and the one most consistently occupied, if often in a subterranean sort of way, with “the question of humanism.” Even Cat People concerns the human and the nonhuman Other. But you could tell a similar story via any of the other arts. I could describe this as the period between Brave New World and Philip K. Dick, or between early-career George Orwell and early-career Joan Didion, or between Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Revolver.)

In the latter third of the 20th century, several forces combined to suppress the influence of humanism, and since then the antihumanists have been largely triumphant. But that is why I devote my attention to the artists and intellectuals of the mid–20th century: They were the last generations to really fight back. I’m speaking generally, of course: we have humanist artists today, though not so many that you’d notice. Today, most people in the West and in other parts of the world as well have won the victory over themselves: They love their antihuman Big Brothers. So on this blog and elsewhere I will keep turning to those figures of the middle of the previous century for lessons in resistance, lessons in courage, lessons in hope.

April 11, 2025

a brief thought on passengers and drivers

Here is Ivan Illich, from Energy and Equity (1974), his book written in the midst of a global energy crisis that heightened everyone’s sense of our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation:  

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.

The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To “gather” for him means to be brought together by vehicles…. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. 

It’s interesting to reflect that you could replace just a few words here and have a good description of our current moment. For instance, “To ‘gather’ for him means to be brought together by vehicles” would make perfect sense today if you substituted “devices” for “vehicles.” In “He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role,” the term “passenger” could be replaced by “user.” A technological regime centered on the automobile has been replaced by one centered on smartphones. This is why teenagers today absolutely must have smartphones but are often indifferent to the possibility of learning to drive. 

But for Matthew Crawford in Why We Drive (2020), to drive an automobile is to assert one’s freedom and responsibility. Crawford’s vision is compelling to many of us in a way it would not have been to Illich, and that is because we live in the Smartphone Era. For those of us who live under technocracy, to contemplate the previously dominant technology always feels like sniffing the air of freedom. 

April 9, 2025

standards

From a while back, Charlie Warzel: 

There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards of traditional outlets. 

I think Warzel’s framing of the issue is telling. Anyone skeptical of contemporary American journalism would instantly flag the phrase “the rigor and standards of traditional outlets”: “Hey Charlie, I think you mean ‘the rigor and standards that traditional outlets claim to uphold but in fact do not.’” 

Similarly, later in the piece, a conversation with the journalist Judith Angwin, Warzel addresses Angwin thus: 

You write that “journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding something when we aren’t. 

But aren’t you? For instance, was there not a concerted effort on the part of many MSM outlets to hide the diminishment of Joe Biden, a diminishment painfully and relentlessly documented in this long WSJ piece? 

Any real self-reckoning by American journalists should begin with the recognition that they do have “rigor and standards” but apply them in wildly inconsistent ways, depending on whether the reporting at issue flatters or challenges the beliefs of the assumed audience and of the newsroom itself. 

And this is true of all of us, isn’t it? Which is why a blog post from eleven years ago still repays our attention: Scott Alexander’s “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor.” 

April 8, 2025

forgiveness

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Pale Flower (1964) is an extraordinary film — and, among other things, a masterclass in directorial tact: Shinoda knows precisely when his camera should move and when it should be still. The shape of every shot — and of every sound, for the sound design here is exceptional — is determined by the needs of the story and characters. I can’t imagine a movie from which you could learn more about how to direct a movie. 

How to describe it? Let’s call it a Yakuza existentialist noir. But the fundamental idea of the story (it’s more than a metaphor) is that of gambling: the playing of games, games with high stakes, games whose demands give you a feeling of being alive. One of those games is murder, by the way. Others are played with hanafuda cards — you see one of those above — and we encounter several such games in the course of the film. I haven’t counted, but I suspect they take up a quarter or more of its running time. 

In the scene above our two protagonists are discussing their addiction to wrongdoing. Each of them confesses to the other. Muraki (the Yakuza hitman) does most of the talking here, and concludes his story of how he killed a man and went to prison for it by saying, “Ask anyone: I’m no good. Even I think so. I’m the scum of the earth. I have nothing in common with ordinary society. But still — I forgive myself.” To which Saeko replies: “I know. No matter what others say, I forgive myself too.” 

And I find myself wondering: What, in their cultural context, does that mean? What is the Japanese word they’re using? What history does it have? What to these characters is forgiveness? Is it identical to, similar to, or wholly different from, the Christian meaning of the word? (It’s very curious that when Muraki and Saeko meet she picks him up — in her expensive sports car — in front of a church. But maybe that means nothing.) Their use of the word brought me up short. 

In his endlessly interesting book Studies in Words, C. S. Lewis talks about how the experienced reader learns to cultivate and to heed “semantic discomfort” — discomfort of the kind I am experiencing. But he also points out that often we don’t experience such discomfort when we ought to. The meaning of a word in its context seems so obvious to us that we glide right past it … and over the falls onto the rocks of Error. So when my mind stumbles on a word as it did at this moment in Pale Flower, my next question for myself always is: How many other important and (to the Western viewer) difficult words in this movie did my mind not stumble on? And I have no way to answer that question. Ignorance is always lamentable but only sometimes remediable. 

Fortunately, there’s such a thing as human life: we recognize in other cultures, and even in the most alien of cultures, experiences that remind us of ourselves and people who essentially are ourselves. Some version of the malady that afflicts Muraki and Seiko is known always and everywhere. But I wish I knew more about the differences, subtle and not so subtle, that shape the distinctively Japanese character of those universal themes. 

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April 7, 2025

two quotations on the effects of phones

Mary Gaitskill:

It is harder than it seems to accurately and evocatively “see” the world through a character’s eyes. It is even harder if your own eyes are so often fixed on a tiny screen that you barely register what is actually happening in front of you.  I have seen people walk into traffic while scrolling on their phones.  I have nearly walked off a sidewalk platform that suddenly came to an end because I was scrolling on my phone.  I know, everyone knows, that traffic accidents have happened because of people screwing around on their phones. 

But there are more subtle effects.  Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, when I took a long walk, either in the city or in the natural world, it was a kind of mediation that happened without my trying.  I became wholly absorbed in what was around me, in textures and shapes, in the human imprint of buildings, sidewalks, backyards, grasses, trees, fungus, worn roads, crushed leaves.  It was a profoundly calming and rejuvenating reminder of the greater world and my own animal connection with it.  When I go for walk now, it is different: even if I only look at my phone once or twice, the experience, while still soothing, is not as deep. My consciousness is kept from full absorption in the physical world by its neurological attunement to the electronic portal in my pocket — or back in my house, if I didn’t even bring the thing with me.  My bodily connection to the environment is thus weakened.  And I cannot believe I am the only one being affected in this way.

Ross Barkan:

I think, watching these children from afar, that almost none of them are going to conceive the next Pet Sounds or Song of Solomon or Mulholland Drive. For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, they’re happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because there’s nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century? Much of the mass culture then, high and middle, was birthed, with little exaggeration, in unremarkable New York City public schools. Here’s one era: Paul Simon (Forest Hills HS ‘59, with Art Garfunkel), Carole King (James Madison HS ‘58), Barbra Streisand (Erasmus Hall HS ‘59), Neil Diamond (Lincoln HS ‘58, and attended Erasmus with Streisand), Barry Manilow (Easten District HS ‘61), David Geffen (New Utrecht HS ‘60), and Tony Visconti (New Utrecht HS ‘60). Gerry Goffin went to the more selective Brooklyn Tech and graduated in 1957. Lou Reed grew up in the nearby Long Island suburb of Freeport and graduated Freeport High in 1959. If you’re looking for literary lions, the city public schools have a few, including Arthur Miller (Lincoln HS ‘32), James Baldwin (attended DeWitt Clinton HS), Cynthia Ozick (Hunter College HS ‘46), and Norman Mailer (Boys High ‘39). This is not an argument for sending your precious offspring to neighborhood New York schools — no school anywhere has magic genius fairy dust to make your child into a generational talent — but it is a reminder that these men and women all had parents who behaved very differently than today’s spiritual technocrats. All of these giants, in their youth, had time to dream — and dream grandly. What kind of time do children have now?

April 4, 2025

handwritten moods

One of things I most enjoy about doing archival research on writers is the discovery of their handwriting. C. S. Lewis wrote beautifully when he wanted to, though sometimes he was rushed and that affected legibility. But the Wade Center has Lewis’s copy of George Herbert’s collected poems, and in the back pages he has very carefully prepared a thematic index to the poems. It’s lovely to look at; perhaps Lewis felt that Herbert deserved his best. (And if you want to see how Lewis’s handwriting changed over the years, see this PDF.) 

Auden’s hand is at best difficult to read, at worst — in his poetic notebooks — absolutely illegible. Edward Mendelson, who knows that hand better than anyone alive, has told me that he thinks Auden sometimes wasn’t trying to be legible, even to himself: he was merely using the action of writing to clarify certain choices of word and phrase and rhythm. 

I’ve looked through hundreds of letters written by Dorothy L. Sayers, and it’s been fascinating to note the ways her handwriting develops. When she was an adolescent schoolgirl at the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she had a somewhat cramped and upright way of writing; almost as soon as she got to Somerville College, Oxford that changed: she adopted a looser, more freely flowing style, one with a certain horizontal energy. 

Most of the surviving letters are to her parents, and she’s often apologizing for delay in answering their letters to her, and emphasizing her busyness. (She almost always addresses them collectively as “Dearest people,” and calls her mother simply “Mother”; her father, however, that dignified parish pastor in the Church of England, is to his only child “Tootles.” It’s interesting that when she writes only to her mother she is almost always more sober and serious than when she writes to the two of them, or to Tootles alone. I find it difficult to avoid the feeling that she is very much Papa’s girl.) 

Perhaps the rush of her life helps to explain the look of her letters to them, but one thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness. Vera Brittain, who knew her at Somerville, referred to her as a “bouncing exuberant female,” and that comes across in her handwriting when she’s happy. When she is going through harder times, through romantic disappointments or vocational uncertainties or just plain poverty, her handwriting is neater, more uniform, more under control. I wouldn’t be surprised if her parents could tell her frame of mind just from looking at a page of one of her letters, before they had read even a word of it. 

Sometimes she signs off simply with a huge sweeping “D.”

As she gets older her handwriting becomes much more consistent, no longer vacillating according to her mood. It is more like the “unhappy” hand of her youth than the “happy” hand, but I don’t think she was less happy as she aged. She just became slightly less exuberant, slightly more settled. Or that’s how I read it anyway. 

These are my interpretations, not the facts. They are based on more than feelings, though: one of those unhappy letters is signed “Yours in disgust, Dorothy” — and then, written below the signature, “What a cross letter!” 

And I can’t help thinking … Almost all of my correspondence — sent and received — has been typed. It is therefore informationally poor, lacking in richness and density, in comparison to the correspondence of the writers I work on. (Though it should be said that letters typed on a typewriter have more character than those printed from a modern printer or having a digital existence only.) I suspect that if I had big folders of letters from friends I’d look through them fairly often; searching Gmail does not promise the same reward. 

April 3, 2025

two quotations from The Economist on AI

Can people be persuaded not to believe disinformation?:

Dr [Thomas] Costello believes chatbots work where humans fail because they offer rational responses instead of letting emotions get the better of them. What’s more, they are able to comb through their extensive training data to offer precise counter-arguments, rather than the generalised ones humans often reach for in debates.

Researchers lift the lid on how reasoning models actually “think”:

When Claude itself is asked to reason, printing out the chain of thought that it takes to answer maths questions, the microscope suggests that the way the model says it reached a conclusion, and what it actually thought, might not always be the same thing. Ask the llm a complex maths question that it does not know how to solve and it will “bullshit” its way to an answer: rather than actually trying, it decides to spit out random numbers and move on. Worse still, ask a leading question — suggesting, for instance, that the answer “might be 4” — and the model still secretly bullshits as part of its answer, but rather than randomly picking numbers, it will specifically insert numbers that ultimately lead it to agree with the question, even if the suggestion is wrong. 

These stories were posted just a few days apart. It’s comical to me how many AI researchers act as though the hallucinations and bullshitting simply don’t exist. Also: LLMs are not rational or irrational or emotional or anything else that human beings are. They are the conduits, thanks to their corpora, of human rationality or irrationality or emotionalism. 

April 1, 2025

assumptions

Sam Kahn:

That is the real existential dread of our age, that the stable value of the book is breaking down and the continuity between eras is dependent largely on whether Apple chooses to keep updating the Cloud or whether posterity is able to play an mp3. For people who are serious writers or creators, that’s really the question at the moment — who are they writing for or trying to transmit to? — since the assumption, a safe assumption for a couple of thousand years, that the people of the future would be readers, is no longer so reliable. 

Is that what Virgil assumed? And Augustine? And Dante? — That “the people of the future would be readers”? If Kahn had said “there would be readers in the future” he’d have been on safer ground. Since they lived in societies in which perhaps one percent of the adult population were sufficiently literate to read a long treatise or poem, none of them expected wide readership: serious literacy had never been common and there was absolutely no reason to think it ever would become so. (One percent is probably a high estimate.)  Milton’s hope, for “fit audience though few,” was the hope of every major writer until the 19th century.

N.B. Through much of the history of writing, “literacy” has been defined primarily as the ability to sign one’s name — something worth remembering when people talk about historical literacy rates. Take a look at this chart and try to figure out how it defines “literacy.” 

Kahn is one of many people who talk about our “post-literate age,” which is kind of funny when you reflect that right now literacy is more widespread than it has been at any point in human history. Just think about how many people in the global South who as recently as fifty years ago would have been illiterate agricultural laborers now read and write every day. And it wasn’t that long ago that many Americans were, generally speaking, only barely literate. During the Second World War, the U.S. armed forces had trouble finding enough recruits who met their basic literacy standards. The history here is illuminating. (Those of us who teach might find it noteworthy that the U. S. Army embarked on a kind of literacy boot camp that got 95% of the illiterate recruits up to speed in two months.) 

No, when people talk about living in a “post-literate society,” what they mean is this: Today a smaller percentage of Americans read books than did so in the two or three decades following the Second World War, when the G. I. Bill made high levels of literacy possible for millions of Americans who previously would have had no access to higher education. This is one of my old themes. I mean, going way back. And more recently too. 

Even in a period of relative decline in serious reading ability — and we do indeed live in such a time — writers have access to a larger audience, proportionally and not just absolutely larger, than any great writer of the distant past would’ve dared to dream of. And that’s something worth remembering. 

P.S. It would be a shame, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t point to something else Kahn says that I want to disagree with. He writes, “One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project.” Assumptions again: Kahn assumes that Johnson’s term as President is the “meat of [Caro’s] project.” But surely anyone who has read the books knows that it isn’t so. What fascinates Caro is that a young man, indeed a boy, from one of the most backward and poverty-stricken parts of America desperately wanted great power, believed he could achieve it, and somehow did achieve it, becoming the most powerful person in the world. How this happened — starting with Johnson’s becoming a mover and shaker in the schools he attended, since that is where he learned how to manipulate people without needing to be liked by them — is the real meat of the story, and his experiences as President make for little more than a coda. If Caro never finishes the final volume I’ll be sad, but I won’t feel that I’ve missed anything truly vital. 

March 31, 2025

Kingsnorth’s Machine

I see that Paul Kingsnorth is publishing in book form his thoughts on The Machine. His writings on this subject have, I think, received more attention than anything else he has written, and yet I have not found them especially interesting or helpful — and I love some of Kingsnorth’s earlier work. 

As I read him, he’s basically restating what I have called the SCT: the Standard Critique of Technology. 

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones. 

“The Machine” is Kingsnorth’s term for what Neil Postman calls “Technopoly,” but I don’t think his actual views are significantly different than those of his predecessors. But I’ll probably read the book and hope to be surprised. 

(It’s noteworthy, by the way, that almost every critic of technopoly, including me, looks for some way to capture the sense that it is an it — some unimaginably massive nonhuman thing with a nonhuman will of its own. There are multiple versions of this insight, or maybe it’s just a feeling, across cultural domains: for instance, when people talk about the core assumptions of the American national security establishment as The Blob, or when Eric Raymond contrasts the two forms of software development as the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Timothy Morton is groping towards a general account of this kind of idea in his concept of Hyperobjects, but his obfuscating writing style makes his account less than helpful.) 

My own view continues to be that we really don’t need more diagnoses of our situation. We know what afflicts us. Caitlin Flanagan: 

The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water. 

This is correct. A fraction of one percent of us will be willing and able to choose something other and better. Those are the people I write for. We live in what, many years ago now, George Steiner called a “post-culture.” I used to call this blog Snakes and Ladders, because it documented the ups and downs of culture. Now I call The Homebound Symphony, after the Traveling Symphony in Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, because I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them. 

I believe we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do. Some people, of course, know what to do: they opt out. And that’s why we don’t hear from them: we remain in the places that they’ve opted out of. But I continue to believe that it’s possible to use the internet healthily, without unplugging altogether. I’m trying to practice that healthy use, and do so right here where my successes and failures can be seen and learned from. 

In any event, we should, I think, be alarmed that our condition was properly and thoroughly diagnosed by a series of important thinkers half-a-century ago — and yet our malady has only progressed. 

March 26, 2025

a correspondence

Here at the Wade Center, I’ve been working through some of Dorothy L. Sayers’s correspondence, for which “voluminous” is not adequate as a description. “Torrential” maybe.

In midlife one of her closest friends was Helen Simpson, who, had she not died in 1940 at age 42, probably of cancer, would surely have remained a major figure in Sayers’s life. There’s an interesting period in the mid-Thirties when Sayers sends to Simpson some letters she has been receiving from a gentleman in Rapallo, Italy — she’s not sure quite how to respond to them.

The gentleman was Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound’s letterhead when he lived in Rapallo

Pound had just read one of Sayers’s detective novels and had concluded that “you are manifestly NOT a complete idiot” (high praise indeed!) and now thinks that she should turn her talents to More Important Things. So he addresses her with exquisite politeness: “Dear Miss Sayers or Lady Peter W. or whoever you now are” — and goes on to suggest that she should think less of murder and more of mass murder, the mass murder inflicted on us by our economic system, and especially the practice of USURY (as he usually capitalizes it in his Cantos). “MONEY … is the root of so much Krrrrime.” And if any one individual is going to be murdered, he thinks it should be the British Prime Minister. (“OR how to kill off all the god Damn Nevils Chamberlains.”) He signs off — he’s writing on 27 December 1934 — “With the seezunz greetinz.”

Sayers politely demurs at his suggestion: “Poor Neville Chamberlain!! Indeed I will not have him murdered. If carefully cherished, he may some day take another sixpence off my income-tax.”

Pound will not be deterred. Sayers writes to Helen Simpson, “A mild and brief reply addressed to Mr. Ezra Pound has now elicited a tremendous epistle. Three sheets long & full of Quaint Devices, & accompanied by a (very badly) printed questionnaire about Volitionist Economics, whatever they are.”

He reads a second Lord Peter novel: “I hav bin readin anuther ov ’em and it WONT DO.” Also: “We are under a secret and damngerous REAL gov’t.” And: “Nobody understands ANY history, without econ/ there is a lot in my cantos/(condensed ).” When Sayers apparently — only one of her letters to him seems to have survived — declines to accept his view of things, he replies, “Thet m’eh de’h ge’l ( as yr/ grandfather wd/ ? have pronounced it ) is because you have not read my estimable writings.” He is unfamiliar with the place in Essex where she lives (“Where is Witham.?”) and hints at a possible meeting: “I spose you get to London nown again?”

I think we may assume that Sayers did not acknowledge this hint. Rather, she says, “I will reserve my wrath for those who commit mayhem upon English spelling and syntax — a subject on which I feel strongly. Would you like something lingering, with boiling oil in it?”

A fascinating and strange non-meeting of the minds! I was at a loss to account for it until I did a quick Google search for “correspondence of Ezra Pound and Dorothy Sayers,” and got:

Mystery solved! And wow, do I need to revise my account of her adolescence.

March 24, 2025

The Box

I wrote: 

In Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold there’s a good bit of concern about something called The Box: 

This Box was one of many operating in various parts of the country. It was installed, under the skeptical noses of Reginald Graves-Upton’s nephew and niece, at Upper Mewling. Mrs. Pinfold, who had been taken to see it, said it looked like a makeshift wireless-set. According to the Bruiser and other devotees The Box exercised diagnostic and therapeutic powers. Some part of a sick man or animal — a hair, a drop of blood preferably — was brought to The Box, whose guardian would then “tune in” to the “life-waves” of the patient, discern the origin of the malady and prescribe treatment.

The Box becomes one of the foci of Pinfold’s paranoia. 

It also plays a significant role in Agatha Christie’s 1961 novel The Pale Horse, and in his book on Christie Robert Barnard says of the novel, “Also makes use of ‘The Box,’ a piece of pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus fashionable in the West Country in the ‘fifties….” But what the hell is this thing? Because it’s simply called “The Box” it’s impossible to search for on Google … have you heard of it? 

I might add that my interest in all this is twofold: 

  1. The Box as an amalgam of Science and Magic (an old theme of mine, borrowed of course from CSL): when three “witches” place a curse on someone in The Pale Horse, they use (a) old rural magic, the sacrifice of a white cockerel, (b) modern spiritualism, and (c) The Box to accomplish their ends. As one of them says, “The old magic and the new. The old knowledge of belief, the new knowledge of science. Together, they will prevail…” 
  2. In both The Pale Horse and Pinfold The Box is presented as something techno-magical, but it turns out to be mere jiggery-pokery, obscuring for a while the ultimate and thoroughly disenchanting explanation: people are being poisoned. (Pinfold accidentally by habitually taking medicines that shouldn’t be used in tandem, and various people in Christie’s novel intentionally by someone who knows how to use thallium.) 

Pinfold is maybe the worst Waugh book I’ve read, but The Pale Horse is one of the best Christies — interesting more as a novel of ideas than as a tale of detection. 

Yours with curiosity, 

Defeated 

And the indefatigably resourceful Adam Roberts replied: 

I believe this is the Dynomizer, the invention of the curious Dr Albert Abrams, who believed the basis of all life was electrons. There were plenty of electrical therapeutic devices around in the 19th and early 20th century (devices of no actual medical benefit) but the Dynomizer is the piece of kit where you bring a piece of hair or a drop of blood, put it in the machine and it diagnoses what’s wrong with you. 

It’s great to have Adam as a friend. I’ll be writing more about The Box in due course. 

March 21, 2025

the sanctuary lamp

This is a nice essay by Henry Oliver on Evelyn Waugh, but I want to call attention, as one does, to something I believe is missing. Oliver describes a scene near the end of Brideshead Revisited in which Charles Ryder is visiting the chapel at Brideshead. Here’s what Waugh writes: 

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame — a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. 

Oliver says that Waugh’s point here is that “what animates modern civilization is the way the lights burn and the bells ring as they have done throughout Christendom in the one true church.” He goes on to say, “There is only one light left burning at the end of this book of shadows: not the lights of Oxford, not the sparkles of diamonds, not the candlelit beauty of Brideshead house, but the lamp in the chapel.” 

What Oliver may not know is that this is a sanctuary lamp: the candle lit next to the tabernacle, that is, the receptacle (usually in a niche in a wall) where the consecrated Host is kept. It is typically, though not always, distinguished from other lights in the church by being placed in a red glass chimney, thus the “small red flame.” 

John Betjeman, in his poem “In Willesden Churchyard,” evokes the same mystery. Walking through that churchyard, he realizes that “the Blessed Sacrament / Not ten yards off in Willesden parish church / Glows with the present immanence of God.”

Now, to be sure, Waugh thought that because Betjeman’s Catholicism was Anglo rather than Roman he was going to Hell — and often told him so. (“Awful about your obduracy in schism and heresy. Hell hell hell. Eternal damnation.”) But that’s not the point here.

The point here is that the light that Waugh invokes at the end of Brideshead is not just any old religious candle — any old light in a church, even in a chapel of the One True Church — but the light that marks the presence of the consecrated Host, the bread transformed into the flesh of Christ, “the present immanence of God.” This is why in many churches people do not pass the tabernacle, when the candle it lit to indicate its contents, without bowing. This, we may infer, is what Charles Ryder does that morning in the Brideshead chapel. 

March 20, 2025

spirits of discouragement

N.B.: Spoilers for Gaudy Night ahead.

As legal obstacles to women’s full participation in British society were gradually removed in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth — starting with the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (with subsequent revisions) and culminating in the Representation of the People Act in 1918 (with subsequent revisions) — certain forms of resistance remained, and primarily took the form of interruptions and discouragements.

So in the opening pages of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf is thinking about her upcoming lectures on “women and fiction” while walking across the lawn of an ancient Cambridge college; her thinking is promising; she is drawing in a little fish of an idea; but then:

However small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

One may consider the Beadle as a kind of personification of Resistance to women’s full freedom to participate in society as they wish.

Another such personification is Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, whose insistance that “Women can’t write, women can’t paint” is often in the mind of Lily Briscoe when she picks up her paintbrush. And in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” we get a voice from the other side of the division between the sexes, the Angel in the House — via Coventry Patmore — who is always telling Woolf to subordinate her own interests and energies to the service of the men in her life:

I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money — shall we say five hundred pounds a year? — so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

These varying personifications of dark forces, these imps of interruption and discouragement, seem less like human beings than … well, than like demons, that is, concentrations of malign power into individual form. The Beadle, for instance, is not a simple human being but rather an apparition: “a man’s figure rose to intercept me” — like a zombie rising from an open grave. It is Charles Tansley’s disembodied voice that whispers to Lily as she paints. The Angel in the House is a “phantom.” These personifications of resistance are not just bad but also eerie, spooky, uncanny.

Which brings us to Sayers’s Gaudy Night. Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, Oxford — an alternate-universe version of Sayers’ own college, Somerville — for a Gaudy, during which she reconnects with some old friends and former teachers. But something goes wrong.

Someone is pursuing an unpleasant campaign of insult, mockery, and threat — the threats being implicit at first, but later increasingly explicit. The overall message is this: Shrewsbury College is comprised of a bunch of dessicated old maids who hate men and (perhaps more to the point) are usurping the social place of men. Only the women who are married or engaged are spared the vitriol of the campaign, which escalates into vandalism and, eventually, attempted murder.

It is only at the novel’s end, of course, that we discover who’s behind the campaign of hate, and even though I noted above that there would be spoilers here, I am reluctant to say more. (Just go read the book, for heaven’s sake! It’s quite fascinating.) In any case, the point I want to emphasize here is that the women of the College come to call the perpetrator the Poltergeist. They don’t mean it literally, they know that it’s all being done by a person, but it’s noteworthy that they fall back on the language of supernatural agency — as though this is one more in a series of Interrupters and Discouragers who personify misogynistic forces. (“Poltergeist” is also a less threatening word than “Demon,” but that’s fitting in that it takes a very long time for the depth of the Poltergeist’s malice to be revealed.) In each case the enmity feels not like something human but rather something precipitated from the ambient hostility to women’s equality.

And I think that’s true in an especially uncanny way in Gaudy Night because the person responsible seems to know some odd things. For instance, the Poltergeist tears some pages out of a novel — this novel — and once we know the identity of the culprit … well, a knowledge of those pages in that book seems highly unlikely in this person. It’s as though the Poltergeist is absorbing and then emitting information from that ambient hostility. It’s a kind of ideological respiration perhaps.

It strikes me that this is a pretty accurate way of describing how feelings, especially hatreds, circulate in society. It was to try to describe that phenomenon that I wrote this essay.

March 18, 2025

the reducing valve and the therapeutic index

Recently I wrote about Aldous Huxley’s blame-the-victim attitude towards people who have bad trips. I want to expand on those thoughts. In The Doors of Perception, after describing one of his first trips, Huxley quotes a 1949 paper by C. D. Broad:

We should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

Huxley’s commentary:

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been bornthe beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

The “reducing valve” is a helpful metaphor. Huxley goes on to say that some people seem by nature to lack this valve, or have an ineffectual one. These are the natural mystics — Blake, for instance, who was quite aware that other people did not perceive what he perceived:

What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty….

But most of us, whose reducing valves are in good working order, need some external power to inhibit the working of that valve, to relax it so that more information from the Universe can stream in. This may be achieved in various ways, but Huxley prefers drugs, which are easy and efficient in comparison to old-fashioned techniques like prayer and fasting.

Huxley’s essential assumption is that almost everyone would benefit from opening their valves (AKA “cleansing the doors of perception”). Yes, some have bad trips, but that’s because they are bad people. For the rest of us, tripping is a reliable path to enlightenment.

Setting aside the question of means — Are mescaline and LSD safe and appropriate ways to open that valve? — I’d like to ask a couple of questions about ends. First of all, how does Huxley know that what he perceives when tripping is a more adequate representation of the whole of reality than what we see when our reducing valve is in good working order? Can we be sure that increased perception is increased perception of the real? It may to the tripper feel real, but how reliable are our feelings in such matters?

This is an especially important question because Huxley wants us to believe that the sense of bliss that he experienced is a genuine encounter with the Real, while the horror that others experience is a projection of their own internal disorders. As I said in my previous post: Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In evaluating these experiences, we face four possibilities:

  • The bliss is real, the horror is false — call this the Huxley Thesis
  • The bliss is false, the horror is real — call this the Lovecraft Thesis
  • The bliss and the horror are equally real
  • The bliss and the horror alike are mere projections of our own inner states

Given the mixture of Good and Bad that we experience in everyday life, it seems to me clear that the third and fourth possibilities are far more likely that either the Huxley Thesis or the Lovecraft Thesis.

And if that is so, then I strongly question the assumption — made not just by Huxley but by our current apostles of Enchantment — that an increased openness to the Ultimate is better than life with a functioning reducing valve. I don’t think everyone is prepared for what they might see when the doors of perception are cleansed. (“You can’t handle the truth!”) This is true whether what’s perceived is radical evil — see The Exorcist — or the glories of Creation — see Job’s abashed response to God’s self-proclamation in the final chapters of his story. “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exodus 33:20).

When evaluating the uses of certain drugs, scientists employ an important criterion: the therapeutic index. Some drugs have a very narrow therapeutic index, that is, the difference between the amount that is therapeutically useful and the amount that is toxic is small and difficult to calculate. Conversely, a drug with a broad therapeutic index can be administered without fear of an overdose.

My belief is that there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy (Hamlet I.5), but few of us are prepared to perceive them without incurring damage: the therapeutic index of any given strategy of re-enchantment is exceptionally narrow. Our reducing valves may well be the mercies of God, and the Christians of old were wise to embed the opening of our minds and hearts within structures of rigorous spiritual discipline. People advocating an easy re-enchantment may well be, like the snake-oil salesmen of old, prescribing poison.

March 17, 2025

a key distinction

Thesis: A cosmos in which “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19) is the opposite of an enchanted cosmos. 

Fantasia 1940 The Sorcerer's Apprentice A sorcerer's apprentice, played by Mickey Mouse, uses magic to free himself from his chores; but once he began his spell on a broom to do his

March 15, 2025

distributed localism

Robin Sloan:

A premonition is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the creatures of the digital night: ghostly bots, cackling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punctuated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, beacons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network.

So, I am planning ahead, contemplating new (old) systems that might be better suited to the media ecology & economy of the 2020s & beyond. 

I couldn’t agree more, and in my own tiny way I want to join Robin in this endeavor. There are three elements to Robin’s plan: 

  1. Traditional book publishing 
  2. Writing on the open web 
  3. Selling and sending via the mail 

Robin’s celebration of the U.S. Postal Service is inspiring! — I especially like how he’s applying to his personal writing what he has learned from selling and shipping olive oil. Though that’s the one part I’m not doing. Maybe I should re-think that, but for now I’m writing books and posting to the open web. 

What Robin says about the “signal towers poking up into the clear air” is a regular theme in Auden’s poetry, especially in his first years in America, as he was striving to build a community of like-minded people. Thus the comment in “September 1, 1939” that, though “Defenceless under the night / Our world in stupor lies,” still, “dotted everywhere, / Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages.” Robin actually quoted that recently, noting that Auden came to disown that poem — but he didn’t disown that idea, which he has many versions of. My favorite is this, from “New Year Letter,” in which he celebrates his time visiting the Long Island house of his friend Elizabeth Mayer: 

CleanShot 2025-03-15 at 12.23.07@2x.

What we’re counting on is a “local understanding” that’s shared across great spaces by internet protocols and the mail. Distributed localism.

(This is of course not true localism, but is a partial compensation for the loss of strong communities; also an aid and comfort to those who have strong interests and convictions that are not shared by many, or any, where they actually live.) 

More about my particular contribution to all this in a future post. 

March 14, 2025

vinyl space

In the summer of 2013, when we were getting ready to move to Texas, I went through our basement storage to figure out what we would keep, what we would sell, and what we would throw away. I lingered a long time over several boxes of LPs — records that I had owned for decades, but that I hadn’t listened to in … well, in at least a decade. After a long mental struggle, I asked my son to gather up the records and sell them to Half Price Books. I didn’t do it myself because I thought I might well chicken out and bring them back home. But the age of vinyl was over, right? We’d be streaming and listening to MPs from here on out, yes?

I try not to think about what we sold that day, because over the past few years I’ve resumed listening to vinyl, and am gradually rebuilding my collection. (So far I’ve managed to keep it small — fewer than 100 discs. So far.) Some blame for this state of affairs must be laid at the feet of my friend Rob Miner, whose record collection and vintage stereo system I used to enjoy when he still lived here in Waco. Damn, this sounds good, I would think.

The online wars between the Vinyl Partisans and the Digital Defenders are endless and not worth rehashing here, or anywhere else. But in essence the Defenders point to the indisputably greater fidelity of digital recordings, while the Partisans speak more vaguely of “warmth” and “presence.” And it’s hard to speak any less vaguely! While many, though not all, music lovers believe that recordings can have distinctive “character,” it’s not clear how to identify the particular sonic features of a given recording — beyond obvious and not-especially-helpful things like dynamic range and audio spectrum.

Pascal said of the Copernican universe, “Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” and while digital recordings do not frighten me, they estrange me: they seem to be coming from a great vacuum, some featureless un-environment, a cold and boring non-place. But when I listen to a well-engineered record, especially one made in the analog era, on vinyl, I feel that I’m sharing a perceptual space, a sensorium, with the musicians. I wish I could describe it better. It’s an experience the opposite of alienating; it’s what the Germans call heimlich. Digital recordings, by contrast, often seem to be unheimlich, uncanny, slightly and uncomfortably weird.

If you don’t feel that way and feel it pretty strongly, then vinyl isn’t for you. It’s kind of a pain in the neck to use — I am not one of those people who enjoys the “ritual” of changing records; I would strongly prefer to be able to listen to a record straight through, as I do when I put on a CD. For me it’s the sound only that appeals. Well, that and the packaging: readily visible cover art! Readable liner notes!

So, yeah, I spend a lot of time wishing that I still had those records I sold in 2013. But to be fair to myself, I think most music-lovers in that year would’ve been surprised to know that in the year 2025 vinyl records would still be made at all — and thus far more surprised that they now outsell CDs. 

March 13, 2025

green tea and mescaline

Here’s yet another post stemming from my reading for my biography-in-progress of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Harriet Vane is not a version of Sayers, though they do have some things in common. Both of them are writers of detective fiction with an interest in certain Victorian novelists who blended what now might be called genre fiction – tales of detection, ghost stories, other supernatural stories – with at least some of the concerns of the social novel. You see this in Dickens, of course, especially in Bleak House, where there are mysteries of identity, shocking revelations, one of the first fictional detectives, and death by spontaneous combustion; but when people talk about this kind of story, often called the sensation novel, the name most closely associated with it is Wilkie Collins, while another is Sheridan Le Fanu. Sayers wrote several chapters of a biography of Wilkie Collins — eventually abandoning it largely because Collins didn’t lead a very interesting life — while Harriet Vane, when she visits Oxford in Gaudy Night, officially does so in order to work on a book about Le Fanu.

I know Collins’s major novels, but I hadn’t until recently read much Le Fanu, and right now I’m immersed in his ghost stories or “weird tales.” (Le Fanu is often associated with the rise of “weird” fiction, as later dominated by H. P. Lovecraft, largely because two collections of his stories published after his death were titled The Watcher and Other Weird Stories [1895], and A Stable for Nightmares; or, Weird Tales [1896].)

A collection of Le Fanu’s stories called In a Glass Darkly links them to one another by presenting them as items from the collected papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician who is interested in the convergence of certain forms of physical illness and encounters with the supernatural. 
He calls his speciality “metaphysical medicine.”

I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope some day to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body — a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”

I’m not sure what he means by “resurrection ‘in power’” (though I think I know what the apostle Paul means when he uses the phrase), but the key point I want to emphasize now is this: When people experience terrifying supernatural visitations, Dr. Hesselius often traces those visitations to what the sufferers eat and drink — for instance, the story “Green Tea” concerns a man whose nightmarish experiences began when he drank too much green tea. But Dr. Hesselius thinks that these experiences, while triggered by the consumption of certain substances, are actual encounters with the supernatural. He does not explain every occult experience thus — some happen because spirits of the dead are seeking vengeance upon those who injured or killed them — but he seems always to look first to see if there is a material catalyst for the person’s affliction. Should this be the case, then he pursues a course of treatment that, by eliminating the catalyst and therapeutically addressing its effects, gradually shrinks and eventually closes the window into the demonic realm. But Dr. Hesselius never doubts that the demonic realm is real.

So you get a story introduced by our unnamed editor thus:

The curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary essay upon the drugs of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius.

This essay he entitles “Mortis Imago,” and he, therein, discusses the Vinum letiferum, the Beatifica, the Somnus Angelorum, the Hypnus Sagarum, the Aqua Thessalliæ, and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, as police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use.

When I read all this I found myself remembering Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and its appendix, Heaven and Hell. Huxley records at great length his glorious experiences under the influence of LSD and mescaline, during which he feels that he has a direct encounter with Ultimate Reality, with the Ground of Being. This encounter poses some problems for him — for instance, ethical problems:

Now I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation — but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action.

But despite such reservations he never questions that what he experiences is (a) real, (b) ultimate, and (c) wonderful.

That said, he cannot help knowing that some people have bad trips — nightmarish trips, trips in which they feel that they have been exposed to something demonic, just like those characters in Le Fanu’s stories. In such matters I’m of Dr. Hesselius’s mind: as I wrote some years ago, “the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic.” But Huxley is deeply reluctant to take that path, and so … well, basically he blames the victims:

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear — in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.

Huxley’s advice to those who would encounter the Ground of Being resembles Aragorn’s advice to those who would enter Lothlorien: that land is “perilous indeed, fair and perilous; but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil with them.” If you experience terror when contemplating the Ultimate Reality, that can only be the manifestation on a cosmic canvas of your own internal demons.

Still, having said that, Huxley continues to worry about bad trips, and returns to the subject in Heaven and Hell, in the last paragraph of which he writes,

There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge’s book Raymond; but there is also a heaven of blissful visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind of appalling visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and some of those who take mescalin; and there is also an experience, beyond time, of union with the divine Ground.

The book he refers to is an account by Lodge of how he and his wife visited a medium and made contact, they believed, with their son, who had been killed in the Great War. Having read the book, I see that it describes several different kinds of “posthumous state,” so I have no idea what Huxley is talking about. Perhaps — this is only a guess — he’s referring to the matter-of-fact ordinariness of Raymond’s reports from the Other Side. Huxley’s point seems to be that it takes all kinds to make an afterlife. 

But I noticed in Raymond something that intrigues me, something that reminds me very much of Huxley’s own views on what Lewis’s Screwtape calls the Miserific Vision. Late in the book Lodge summarizes what several spiritualist writers have said about the world to which the dead go, and one of them, whom he quotes at length, says this:

“Cease to be anxious about the minute questions which are of minor moment. Dwell much on the great, the overwhelming necessity for a clearer revealing of the Supreme; on the blank and cheerless ignorance of God and of us which has crept over the world: on the noble creed we teach, on the bright future we reveal. Cease to be perplexed by thoughts of an imagined Devil. For the honest, pure, and truthful soul there is no Devil nor Prince of Evil such as theology has feigned…. The clouds of sorrow and anguish of soul may gather round [such a man] and his spirit may be saddened with the burden of sin — weighed down with consciousness of surrounding misery and guilt, but no fabled Devil can gain dominion over him, or prevail to drag down his soul to hell. All the sadness of spirit, the acquaintance with grief, the intermingling with guilt, is part of the experience, in virtue of which his soul shall rise hereafter. The guardians are training and fitting it by those means to progress, and jealously protect it from the dominion of the foe.” 

Isn’t it pretty to think so? 

P.S. Adam Roberts writes to remind me that in A Christmas Carol Scrooge first attributes his vision to food he has eaten: 

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” 

But this of course is the reverse of Dr. Hesselius’s view, which is that food and drink can open what Blake (and then Huxley) called “the doors of perception” to a dimension of spiritual reality that is always really there but usually hidden from us. 

There’s a good deal in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy about how food and drink can cause melancholy, while dreams and visions are symptoms of melancholy. Much more to explore here. 

March 11, 2025

on Pygmalion

One way to interpret the story of Pygmalion, it seems to me, is to see it as a tale in which the monster wins — because Henry Higgins is, quite obviously, a monster. The darkness of the story can be felt more strongly in the 1938 film version than in the play, largely (though not wholly) because of the magnificent performance of Wendy Hiller, in her first film role, as Eliza. I’ll consider the key differences between play and film later, but I won’t say anything about My Fair Lady, which is effectively a different thing.

The story is, I guess, still widely known. When Henry Higgins, the great scientist of phonetics, meets a poor flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle in Covent Garden, he bets his new friend Colonel Pickering that in just a few months he can transform her speech so completely that even the snobbiest of snobs won’t be able to tell that she’s not one of them. Thanks to Eliza’s smarts and skills, Higgins wins that bet. (Marginal notation: Eliza is typically called a Cockney, but whether that’s right or not depends on how you define “Cockney”: the strictest definitions confine the term to the East End of London, but Eliza is from Lisson Grove in the City of Westminster. In what follows I will use “Cockney” to mean a style of spoken English shared by many Londoners of the working classes: whether or not Eliza is a Cockney, she speaks Cockney.)

Back to the Monster: Henry Higgins’s behavior in this movie, and in the play, is so bad that you find yourself casting around for a character to notice it. For much of the story the only plausible candidate for Conscience here is Henry Higgins’s mother. Colonel Pickering is certainly kinder to Eliza than Higgins, and this is true throughout the play/film: in the first scene, when an accusing crowd gathers around Eliza, he defends her, and when Higgins is trampling her he asks Higgins to consider the possibility that the girl has feelings. (Higgins considers it and decides that she doesn’t.) But after Eliza triumphs at an elegant ball, charming everyone and dancing with a prince, when they return to Higgins’s flat to celebrate, Pickering ignores Eliza about as completely as Higgins does. It is only Higgins’s mother who suggests, later, that they might have thanked Eliza for all the work she did to win Higgins’s bet for him. But Higgins does not thank her, and he does not apologize for her months of verbal abuse. There’s only one moment when he acknowledges her quickness and resourcefulness, and he does so out of her hearing. It is only Mrs. Higgins who criticizes her son for his bad behavior; Pickering is perhaps a little too afraid of him to do so. But any criticism he receives is mild in comparison to what he deserves — at least until the final minutes.  

Now, about Eliza herself. Wendy Hiller got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and of course she should have won; perhaps her status as a newcomer worked against her. It’s difficult to overstress how great she is here, in an exceptionally challlenging role. At the outset she’s doing broad comedy and doing it fabulously, but then she has to go through several stages of development.

First of course she’s a poor lass who talks pure Cockney, easy enough for a reasonably skilled actress to mimic. But then, as Eliza undergoes her training, Hiller has to overlay a labored R.P. on Cockney vocabulary and diction — which, by the way, leads to the funniest moment in the whole movie, when as she leaves a tea party the besotted toff Freddy (about whom more later) asks her if she’s walking across the park: she replies with her newly-acquired cut-glass diction, “Walk? Not bloody likely! I’m going in a taxi.” Watch the whole scene and on the basis of that alone you’ll be ready to give Wendy Hiller every Oscar statuette ever made.

Eventually Eliza matches her grammar to her new accent; and finally — this is the most astonishing thing about Hiller’s performance — in a moment of great emotional distress she loses her grip on her training and partly regresses to her native speech, wavering between her recent acquirements and her whole personal history. Higgins loves to hear this, because he treats it as proof that her changes are superficial and that she will always remain the “guttersnipe” he likes to say she is. (In the play he also calls her an “impudent slut.”) He wants at one and the same time to celebrate his great achievement and to dismiss it as little more than putting lipstick on a pig.

It’s not just vocally that Hiller excels. Throughout the whole ballroom scene, and especially as she’s dancing with every eye on her, she seems to be in a dream — at one and the same time committing to the role demanded of her but also comprehensively dazed by the coming-true of a poor girl’s fantasy. And afterward, as Higgins rejoices and Pickering (though he has lost the bet) shares his delight, Eliza looks absolutely devastated, and we can see that’s she is not merely exhausted from the demands of her command performance, but also is just beginning to realize how few genuine choices now lie before her.

She has seen a world of elegance, beauty, and plenty, and, should she go back to her old life selling flowers on the streets, or even should she achieve her former ambition of working as a clerk in a flower shop, she won’t be able to forget everything she now knows. Near the end, Higgins’s casual demand that she fetch his slippers and become a kind of servant to him infuriates her, and Freddy’s obsessive puppy-like love for her brings no comfort. It seems clear that she has come to love Henry Higgins, though it’s not clear just what kind of love it is. Would she want to marry him? Or does she simply want to force him to treat her as a human being?

After their big blow-up, in the final scene of the movie she returns to his flat. But why? She doesn’t say. And with his back to the camera, Higgins once more, in a light-hearted tone, tells her to fetch his slippers. The End.

So does the monster win? Will Eliza fetch Henry’s slippers? Or will she walk out on him again as a hopeless case? Does he mean it jokingly, or does he mean it as a final refusal either to apologize or to treat her with courtesy? It’s hard for me to see this as anything but Henry’s reassertion of his contempt for Eliza, and if I could write my own ending for the film I’d have her fetch the slippers, set them on fire, and shove them into his eye-sockets. But that’s just me.

In any case, the filmmakers are leaving room for us to think that Henry is making light of his earlier fight with Eliza in order to create room for reconciliation. This is more than Shaw had done in the 1913 play, which ends with Eliza refusing to be his servant and stomping out of his house and maybe his life, after which Higgins dismissively insists that eventually she’ll do as she’s told. Curtain.

But even that was not sufficient to dissuade audiences who wanted to believe that Higgins and Eliza would eventually marry. Still less would the film’s ending do so. Shippers gonna ship. What shall we call their image of the characters’ future? How about: The Shipping Forecast.

In any event, this kind of response bothered Shaw sufficiently that he ended up writing an epilogue in which he effectively said to the shippers: Not bloody likely.

What is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Shaw actually wrote the outline of a second play, or maybe a novel, in which Freddy and Eliza marry and start a flower shop; in which Freddy’s family is reconciled to the marriage through reading the more hortatory works of H. G. Wells; and in which — this is my favorite part — Colonel Pickering “has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins.” And you know what’s great? She doesn’t do it. I would love to see that play or movie, for sure. 

I feel so strongly about all this largely because of Wendy Hiller’s magnificent performance — and especially that moment of bleak collapse after the ball, when, as Higgins capers about in triumph, she feels that she has lost everything. It’s one of the most memorable moments in film and drama, for me. It’s wondrous what a great actor can do to transfigure a scene without saying a single word, in Cockney or R.P. or anything else. 

March 7, 2025

Cat People

Cat People (1942 film) - Wikipedia

It’s clear that the people who did the marketing for Cat People (1942) didn’t know what happens in the movie — or maybe just didn’t understand it. They made Simone Simon look sultry and dangerous:

https://drnorth.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/cat-people-poster.jpg

But in the movie mainly she looks like this:

Cat People (1942) – FilmFanatic.org

A neatly, modestly dressed young lady who is slightly worried — worried that if she is sexually aroused she will turn into a black panther and kill the man who wants to be intimate with her. (This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”)

All this is usually seen, by nod-nod-wink-wink viewers and critics, as an allegory for the fear of sex. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Three times in the film we see — well, actually we don’t see anything: this is a Val Lewton film, and the guiding principle of Lewton’s horror films is that you’re more afraid of what you imagine than what you directly perceive.

So: three times in the film Irena turns into a panther. (Maybe four, but it would be a total spoiler to get into that question.) The first one happens when she comes to suspect that her husband — whom she will not have sex with or even kiss: their physical relationship seems to max out at sitting next to each other at a restaurant — is growing close to Alice, a woman he works with, sometimes late into the evening. Her suspicions, not incidentally, are justified. Once Irena follows Alice along a dark city street, the women’s heels clicking on the sidewalk … but then the clicking of Irena’s heels stops, after which slight rustling sounds are heard in nearby overhanging bushes. (The sound design here is terrific, and the scene ends with what may well be the very first jump scare in movie history.)

Later, Irena follows Alice into a Y.W.C.A, where Alice regularly swims. Here’s a clip — in which, by the way, we see Jane Randolph’s Alice in a wet swimsuit, in contrast to Irena’s consistently buttoned-up style. (The movie thus sexualizes Alice and desexualizes Irena, which is just what the marketing people couldn’t understand. They obviously figured that Irena was catlike in a sexually predatory sense.) When Alice hears strange sounds around her, she leaps into the pool to get away, is eventually confronted by human-Irena, and when she emerges, discovers that her robe has been torn to shreds by something with claws.

The third transformation is the most interesting one. Irena has agreed to see a psychiatrist, who tells her that her fear is irrational — and then seeks to prove it by seducing her. He kisses her, and then … well, let’s just say that wasn’t his best play. But the key point, it seems to me, is that she is obviously not aroused, nor interested, nor even pleased. See for yourself.

So: while the general context of Irena’s transformations is the realm of sex, she never transforms because she experiences sexual desire, but rather because she experiences jealousy and anger. That is to say, Irena’s problem is not sexual passion but rather passion more generally: unbridled emotion, emotion that we suffer (Latin passio, yielding the English “passive”) rather than control. This I find curious, and I suspect that the Hays Code was responsible for this generalization — a generalization amounting to misdirection. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t dare show Irena being turned on by her husband and having to struggle against it, and aroused by the kiss of her suave psychiatrist. Or were they trying to show a character so deeply sexually repressed that her sexuality could emerge only through other emotions? If the latter, then maybe the Hays Code actually worked in their favor.

One last point, on a related matter. In the Lewton horror films of the Forties, there are several characters like Irena: let’s call this type the Unsuitable Wife, the woman who blocks the male lead from marrying the Normal Woman he loves and is obviously meant for. Oliver can’t marry sexy Alice as long as sexless Irena is in the way. (The locus classicus for this theme is obviously Jane Eyre.)

A different version of the same problem appears in I Walked with a Zombie (1943): poor Paul is clearly attracted to his wife’s nurse, but how to get rid of the wife? She’s a zombie, after all. Can’t have sex, or even companionship, with a zombie, and murdering her would be complicated — as well as immoral, of course. Jessica is not a zombie in the George Romero sense, but nevertheless is locked away in her own wing of a compound, sort of like Ed at the end of Shaun Of The Dead but not as much fun.

I Walked With A Zombie Jane Eyre | We Recycle Movies

And in The Seventh Victim (also 1943 — Lewton’s studio worked fast) poor Gregory is married to a Satanist when the woman he really loves is the Satanist’s cute kid sister. About that … I don’t mean to be judgmental, but if you marry a woman without knowing that she worships the Devil then maybe your engagement wasn’t long enough.

The Seventh Victim (1943) | The Criterion Collection

In each case we’re encouraged to think: Ah, wouldn’t it be great if the Unsuitable Wife died and left the guy free to marry the Normal Woman and get it on with her? And in each case we get what we wish for. Call it the Hollywood version of no-fault divorce.

March 5, 2025

words, words, words

I’ve read several detective novels by Freeman Wills Crofts, and my one most constant thought is: He is an utterly inept writer. His style only occasionally rises to the level of woodenness, and is usually sub-wooden. Like charcoal, maybe: dry and brittle, no longer alive, an ex-style. 

Here’s a typical passage, from Antidote to Venom (1936): 

His thoughts swung round into a familiar channel. If only his old aunt would die and leave him her money! She was well-to do, was Miss Lucy Pentland, not exactly wealthy, but obviously with a comfortable little fortune enough, and she had on more than one occasion told him that he would be her heir. Moreover, she was in poor health. In the nature of things she could not last very much longer. If only she would die!

Surridge pulled himself up, slightly ashamed of himself. He did not of course wish the old lady any harm. Quite the reverse. But really, when people reached a certain age their usefulness was over. And in his opinion she had reached and passed that stage. She could not enjoy her life. If she were to die, what a difference it would make to him!

Next chapter: 

Then there was his aunt’s legacy. He did not know what she was worth, but it must be several thousand: say seven or eight thousand at the most moderate estimate. And at her death he would get most of it — she had told him so. What, he wondered, would his share amount to? After death duties were deducted and one or two small legacies to servants were paid, there should be at least five thousand over. Five thousand! What could he not do with five thousand? Not only would it clear him of debt, but he could get that blessed car for Clarissa as well as several other things she wanted. They could take a really decent holiday; she had friends in California whom she wished to see, and for professional reasons he had always wanted to visit South Africa. In countless ways the friction and strain would be taken from his home life. And all this he would get if only the old lady were to die! Last night she had looked particularly ill; pale like parchment and more feeble and depressed than he ever remembered having seen her. Again he told himself that he didn’t wish her harm, but it was folly not to recognise facts. Her death was the one thing that would set him on his feet.

Later: 

With growing frequency his thoughts turned towards his aunt, Lucy Pentland. If only he could get that money that was coming to him, not at some time in the distant future, but now! Not only would it remove this ghastly financial worry, but it would mean greater safety in every way. With more money he and Nancy could take better precautions.

She could give up that wretched job of hers and go and live in decent surroundings in some place in which he could visit her. A tiny cottage somewhere with a garden and roses on the porch! He grew almost sick with desire as he thought of it. And it might become a possibility — if Lucy Pentland were to die. 

We get it! He wants his aunt to die! Enough already! And there are five or six more passages just like this. You can almost see Crofts bent over his desk, gripping his pen fiercely, muttering to himself Must … make .. motivation … clear. And he does, with one calcified stock phrase after another. 

But of course what Crofts is famous for is the mechanics of plot — and in this novel the means of one death is so arcane and intricate that we need not only a map (of a zoo, as it happens) but also a detailed diagram of the device employed: 

In other news, Fang Apparatus is the name of my new band. 

Speaking of bands, and bear with me as I develop this comparison, but in a way Crofts reminds me of Roger Waters. Waters has said that in Pink Floyd he and Nick Mason were the group’s architects while David Gilmour and Richard Wright were the musicians. Sometimes when he tells this story he complains that Gilmour and Wright looked down on him; other times he insists that the architects are the real bosses because you can always hire musicians — they lie thick on the ground, but an architect is a rara avis. (Waters actually studied architecture before turning to music.) 

Crofts too is an architect, and puts all his best energies into construction. He couldn’t be bothered with the music of language, with wit, with nuances of character; he didn’t see those as essential to success in writing a detective story. Even though Crofts was a religious man, when he brings a religious theme into Antidote to Venom he treats it as quickly and cursorily as possible; he seems embarrassed to have brought it up. 

Me, I’m a music guy, in fiction and actual music alike. If I had to choose between Waters/Mason and Gilmour/Wright, I’m taking the latter pair every time: their contributions to the Floyd seem to me to dwarf those of Waters, who, given his freedom, inevitably sank into dreary pretentiousness and tub-thumping. If he had been a novelist, he’d have written over and over and over, “If only she would die!” 

March 3, 2025

method and madness

I think often of a passage from Patricia Hampl’s gorgeous memoir, The Florist’s Daughter. Scattered through the book are images of her father, short films as it were that emerge from memory. Here’s my favorite one:

He’s in the design room, just off the first greenhouse where all the shiny green plants are kept. He’s holding a knife, the pocketknife every florist has in his pocket at all times, the knife that is never loaned to anyone else.

It must be a Sunday afternoon. The greenhouse is closed, the design room silent. He’s getting something ready, no doubt for a funeral or the early-Monday hospital delivery round. I’m sitting on the stool by the design table, as I always do, just watching.

He emerges from the walk-in cooler with an armload of flowers — tangerine roses and purple lisianthis, streaked cymbidium orchids, brassy gerbera daisies and little white stephanotis, lemon leaf, trailing sprengeri fern, branches of this, stems of that. He tosses the whole business on the big table, and stands in front of what looks like a garbage heap. An empty vase is set in front of him. He appears to ignore it. He just stands there, his pocketknife in his hand, but not moving, and not appearing to be thinking. He doesn’t touch the mess of flowers, doesn’t sort them. He just stares for a long vacant minute. He’s forgotten I’m sitting there.

Then, without warning, he turns into a whirlwind. Without pause, grabbing and cutting, placing and jabbing, he puts all the flowers into the vase, following some inner logic so that — as people always said of his work — it looks as if the flowers had met and agreed to position themselves in the only possible way they should be. He worked faster than anyone else in the shop, without apparent thought or planning. I could distinguish his arrangements — but they weren’t anything as artificial as an “arrangement” — from across the room from the dozens lined up on the delivery table for the truck drivers.

(What a writer Hampl is.) Now, I am no artist — it seems that Hampl’s father was an exceptional artist indeed — but there is something here that reminds me of my own working methods. I often hear about writers who write 500 words a day, come rain or sleet or snow or Breaking News. And that’s admirable! But I have never written that way and never will.

Now, to be sure, I always have at least one and usually two writing projects going on, and I’m working on something almost every day — but the working doesn’t always mean writing words. I can’t write words until the words are ready to be written, and sometimes they might not be ready until I’ve read and re-read books, until I’ve made and then deleted and re-made outlines, until I’ve re-ordered my index cards in half-a-dozen ways, or — this is most common — until I’ve just sat in my chair and thought for a long time about what I need to say. Then I write.

So it’s not uncommon for me to go ten days or even two weeks without writing a single word that ends up in the book or essay I’m working on, and then write 6000 words in a morning. I’ve learned not to force it, I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of readiness — and maybe more important, learned to note and heed the absence of such symptoms. Whenever I have tried to do the 500-words-per-day thing I’ve just ended up with more stuff to delete. My job, as I understand it, is to wait patiently and be ready when the words are ready.

I don’t recommend this method to anyone else. It’s simply the only one I’m capable of following. And I describe it here only because it may be encouraging to some other people who feel guilty about not being able to be perfectly regular in their habits. It’s possible to follow a practice that looks highly inconsistent and irregular and yet, over the long haul, ends up being consistently fruitful. 

P.S. I’m slightly hesitant to post this because I know I will get lots of messages from dudes with writing advice. I’ve published fifteen books and hundreds of essays and articles, and yet there will be guys (mainly guys who have just written some blog posts) who’ll write to tell me what I need to do to be productive. 

February 28, 2025

retirement

Universities love to have productive senior faculty, and when they can they pay such faculty well — but they also don’t really mind when the people near the top of the salary ladder retire. (I say “they,” meaning primarily the people who handle the budgets.)

Here at Baylor there’s been a program in effect for the past few years that gives a gentle nudge to people trying to decide whether it’s time for them to retire. If a person eligible for retirement gives two years’ notice — and does so by signing a binding contract! — then the university

  • provides a nice little cash bonus
  • promises a decent pay increase for each of the faculty member’s last two years
  • exempts the faculty member from service on committees
  • allows the faculty member, in his or her final year, to (a) teach half time for the whole year or (b) teach full time for one semester and take the final term as a farewell sabbatical

I never seriously considered this option — thinking of myself as, if not a young whipper-snapper, then at worst a semi-grizzled veteran — until I learned that the year 2024 marked the end of the program. I could take advantage of it then or say goodbye forever to the cash bonus, the sabbatical, and (above all) the exemption from committees. And in any case I’m not that far from retirement….

So I signed up.

My most recent paycheck contained the lagniappe. Then, just this week, I got an email from Baylor’s Committee on Committes asking me to fill out a form identifying the committees I am serving on, the ones I would be willing to serve on, etc. I clicked the link and the first page gave me a series of options by which I could identify my status. One of them was “I have signed a retirement contract.” I clicked that one and the next screen of the questionnaire bade me a courteous farewell. At that moment I knew I had made the right decision.

When I retire, in December 2026 (though I will be paid through May 2027), I will have been teaching for forty-four years — and I love teaching as much as I ever have. My students are a joy to me, they really are. With a few exceptions, of course, let’s be honest — but few, very few.

But the increasing bureaucratization of the university is the opposite of a joy — it is a misery. The endless and often incomprehensible online forms (many of them obviously designed by trainee or incompetent programmers); the annual online “learnings” (shudder) about Title IX, racism and sexism, travel policies, etc. etc.; the Finance Officers and Accommodation Offices; the annual enrollments in ever-changing health insurance policies … all this has worn me down, and the genuine joy I experience in teaching is being overwhelmed by these characteristic demons of late modernity. I’m ready to quit. 

Or was at the time I made the decision; the prospect of Elon and his merry pranksters blowing up Medicare was not yet on anyone’s bingo card when I had to make the call. If it had been, I very likely would have chickened out. The deed is done, so all I can say is what I often say: Fare forward, voyagers. 

And — this is something I think about a lot — maybe my retirement will mean one more job for a highly-qualified humanist in a terrible job market. Of course, I might not be replaced at all … or I’ll be replaced by a scientist or an engineer or a marketing consultant … but there’s at least a chance that I’ll be replaced by someone who loves literature and ideas. Someone better qualified than I was when I entered the workforce all those years ago, but a kindred spirit who might not otherwise find a tenure-track position. One can but hope.

But after all these decades of teaching, how will I cope without the foundational temporal structure of my life for the past sixty years: the annual round of the blessed School Year? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m hoping that I will finally be fully governed by the rhythms of the church year. At the moment all I’m really thinking about is the books and essays I may now finally have time to write — perhaps that time will compensate for the loss of structure — and the loss of regular human connection, especially with young people who have not yet become jaded.

I have always thought that one of the greatest moments in all of literature, in all of human art, comes at that point in The Tempest when Miranda — who all her life has known only her father, Caliban, and Ariel — sees the party of the Milanese court approaching and cries, “O brave new world, that hath such people in it!” To which Prospero: “‘Tis new to thee.” What makes the moment so absolutely brilliant is that both of them are right. We really need both ways of viewing the human creature. But what will I, a ragged and grumpy old Prospero, deprived of staff and book, do without my Mirandas?

February 26, 2025

dueling letters

Those of you uninterested in Wheaton College or in Christian higher education more generally — which is to say, most of you — should feel free to skip this one. 

UPDATE 2025-02-27: And if you are interested but want a more recent and intimate account than my own, please read this wonderful reflection by a 2024 graduate of Wheaton, Anna Catherine McGraw. 

So the open letter by Wheaton College alumni denouncing the school for capitulation to wokeness, which as I write has 1277 signatories, has been countered by an open letter by Wheaton College alumni denouncing the school for failing to repudiate Project 2025, which has 1653 signatories. 

I therefore declare the lefties the winners of this referendum! 

Just kidding. I do, however, have some thoughts. 

I notice that while the first letter (“For Wheaton,” hereafter FW) denounces Wheaton for allowing “unbiblical” practices to occur on campus, it does not actually cite the Bible. The other letter (“Open Letter,” or OL), by contrast, cites thirty-six passages from Scripture. Hey FW, you seriously need to raise your game in this regard. 

FW is pretty explicit in what it wants, most notably “an audit of every single faculty and staff member’s commitment to the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant” — an interesting idea, since it directly copies Ibram X. Kendi’s old plan for every university to have an “antiracism task force” appointed by university administrators and unaccountable to standard procedures of governance. I wonder how such an audit would work. Would the task force decide in advance what is and is not biblical and seek to dismiss those who disagree? Could those whose views are deemed unbiblical defend themselves by citing relevant scriptures? What happens to people who fail their audit? 

OL is less programmatic, but it says that Project 2025 is “antithetical to Christian charity” and that “Silence in the face of such an anti-Christian vision is complicity.” So presumably (?) this means that Wheaton should denounce Project 2025 rather than be “complicit” in it. But what is “Wheaton” in this scenario? The President? The administrative cabinet? The Board of Trustees? And what to do with faculty or staff who think that Project 2025 is perfectly consistent with Christian orthodoxy?

Five years ago I wrote that there are two political parties in America today: the Manichaeans and the Humanists. It seems to me that FW and OL alike belong to the Manichaean Party; they just represent two mutually-hostile wings thereof. 

More specifically, it seems to me that both sides here — but FW more belligerently, in “tough negotiator” mode — are demanding the same thing of Wheaton: Tell me that God endorses my politics. But I don’t think Wheaton will do that, because it’s foundationally built on the idea that people who affirm its Statement of Faith and Community Covenant will not agree about everything in the political and social and personal and even the theological realm but will be able to argue charitably and constructively on the basis of their shared commitments — which are substantial indeed, but not without controversy.

If people at Wheaton can disagree about when Christians should be baptized, about the proper form of church governance, about predestination and election, about the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, you’re going to tell me that there’s no room to disagree about DEI initiatives and immigration policy? If so, then you’re placing political unanimity above theological conviction, and — I have to consider this possibility — that just may say something about what your actual core commitments are. And if your political commitments are non-negotiable, then maybe — probably — almost certainly — Wheaton isn’t the place for you and you should devote yourself to some other institution. Wheaton is a place where faith seeks understanding; those of you who have already solved all the problems that beset the political realm and don’t want to face disagreement likely would be happier at a more seeker-unfriendly institution. 

If Wheaton ceases to orient itself to controversy and disagreement in the way it historically has, then I don’t know what its raison d’être would be. To settle this mess by taking one side or the other would be to yield a great victory to the Manichaean Party at a great cost to Christian charity. That may be tempting to the people who run Wheaton simply because Manichaeanism is increasingly dominant on our political scene, but, for one thing, I don’t think that it will always be so dominant, and, for another, I don’t think Wheaton’s survival at that price would be worth it. What does it profit a college to achieve political unanimity but lose its soul? 

FINAL WORD ON THIS, 2025-02-27: One of the leading critics of Wheaton from the Right, Eric Teetsel, says: 

“The problem is people who intentionally undermine orthodox Christian teachings as affirmed in Wheaton College’s Statement of Faith, which every faculty member, staff member and student is required to sign … Those are guerrilla warriors for a progressive agenda. They are knowingly and intentionally and willfully undermining the Statement of Faith in their classrooms, and they tend to close the door just before they do it, because they know they’re doing it.” 

My response is: Name names. Name the people who are “intentionally and willfully undermining the Statement of Faith,” and tell us which items in the Statement of Faith they are undermining. To say that you know that such people exist without naming them is the classic McCarthyite tactic: Ol’ Tail Gunner Joe liked to wave around his papers listing the “known Communists” in the U. S. State Department … but wouldn’t actually show anyone the papers. That’s what Teetsel is doing, to the letter. Name names, or else you’re just wantonly imperiling the careers of totally innocent people. You’re not a Christian critic of institutional drift, you’re an irresponsibly malicious gossip. 

February 25, 2025

the author’s views and ours

There’s a very uncomfortable moment in Sayers’s novel Unnatural Death (1927), in a chapter in which Lord Peter receives a field report from his able investigator Miss Climpson. In what follows I’ll add the usual blanks to one word, though Sayers of course does not.

One Miss Timmins, a cook for a local lady, at a tea party that Miss Climpson attends: “You recollect, Mrs. Budge, that I felt obliged to leave after the appearance of that most EXTRAORDINARY person who announced himself as Miss Dawson’s cousin.” Miss Climpson picks up the narration in her usual style:

Naturally, I asked who this might be, not having heard of any other relations! She said that this person, whom she described as a nasty, dirty N*****R(!!!) arrived one morning, dressed up as a CLERGYMAN!!! — and sent her — Miss Timmins — to announce him to Miss Dawson as her COUSIN HALLELUJAH!!! Miss Timmins showed him up, much against her will, she said, into the nice, CLEAN, drawing-room! Miss Dawson, she said, actually came down to see this ‘creature’ instead of sending him about his ‘black business’(!), and as a crowning scandal, asked him to stay to lunch! — ‘with her niece there, too,’ Miss Timmins said, ‘and this horrible blackamoor ROLLING his dreadful eyes at her.’ Miss Timmins said that it ‘regularly turned her stomach’ — that was her phrase, and I trust you will excuse it — I understand that these parts of the body are frequently referred to in polite(!) society nowadays. In fact, it appears she refused to cook the lunch for the poor black man — (after all, even blacks are God’s creatures and we might all be black OURSELVES if He had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!) — and walked straight out of the house!!! So that unfortunately she cannot tell us anything further about this remarkable incident! She is certain, however, that the ’n*****r’ had a visiting-card, with the name ‘Rev. H. Dawson’ upon it, and an address in foreign parts. It does seem strange, does it not, but I believe many of these native preachers are called to do spendid work among their own people, and no doubt a MINISTER is entitled to have a visiting-card, even when black!!!

This passage is sometimes pointed to as evidence that Sayers herself shared and even celebrated its racism. This seems to be profoundly unlikely, given that

(a) the statement is made by an obviously unpleasant character,

(b) whose language and attitudes are explicitly reprobated by Miss Climpson, a character we are strongly encouraged to like and respect,

(c) and then plainly mocked by the hero of all the novels, Lord Peter: “’N*****r,’ to a Miss Timmins, may mean anything from a high-caste Brahmin to Sambo and Rastus at the Coliseum [minstrel-show characters] — it may even, at a pinch, be an Argentine or an Esquimaux.” That is, anyone who isn’t northern European.

And when we meet the Rev. H. Dawson we discover that he is a mixed-race man with dark skin — but not so dark that one cannot see him blush — who is also clean, articulate, gentle, polite, and very poor. It is rather difficult to account for this portrayal if we assume that Sayers shared Miss Timmins’s view of things.

But of course matters are not always that straightforward. Miss Climpson may be a positive character, but she is also an old-fashioned lady clearly presented as a relic of an earlier age. It seems to me obvious that Sayers is gently satirizing Miss C’s enthusiastic gratitude that God “in his infinite kindness” has made her white — shades of Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin — and the bemusement with which she acknowledges that God can make use of Black ministers, “among their own people” of course.

Miss Climpson is, I think, a useful character for exploring such matters. When she cheers on the independent female “PIONEER” of an earlier generation — in a letter discussed in my previous post — we smile and nod, confident that she’s on the side of both Sayers and the angels. But she says other things about women that today’s readers will question. Of the letter I began this post by quoting, Eric Sandberg — author of an outstandingly useful companion to Sayers’s fiction — says, in a passage responding to critics who think that Sayers’s views are indistinguishable from those of Miss Timmins,

Miss Climpson’s own view, that “we might all be black OURSELVES if He [God] had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!” is rather astoundingly backward — and very much in line with her dated views on sexuality — so much so that it should probably be read as a satirical attack on racist thinking rather than an example of it.

To this I would say that if by “backward” Sandberg means “wrong,” then yes, though I don’t see anything “astounding” about it. But what does he mean by “her dated views on sexuality”? Here’s another passage from Unnatural Death that might shed light on the subject, one in which Miss Climpson is thinking about a young woman named Miss Findlater who has grown attached to a somewhat older woman named Mary Whittaker:

As a matter of fact, Miss Climpson had become genuinely interested in the girl. Silly affectation and gush, and a parrot-repetition of the shibboleths of the modern school were symptoms that the experienced spinster well understood. They indicated, she thought, a real unhappiness, a real dissatisfaction with the narrowness of life in a country town. And besides this, Miss Climpson felt sure that Vera Findlater was being “preyed upon,” as she expressed it to herself, by the handsome Mary Whittaker. “It would be a mercy for the girl,” thought Miss Climpson, “if she could form a genuine attachment to a young man. It is natural for a schoolgirl to be schwärmerisch [enthusiastic] — in a young woman of twenty-two it is thoroughly undesirable. That Whittaker woman encourages it — she would, of course. She likes to have someone to admire her and run her errands. And she prefers it to be a stupid person, who will not compete with her. If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.”

Simply within the context of the novel this is a complicated passage. Let us count the ways:

  • The woman that Miss Climpson earlier celebrated as a “PIONEER” — a woman who refused to marry and set herself up as a trainer of and dealer in horses — had formed just this kind of relationship with another woman, though she was a dominant rather than a deferential partner.
  • That woman, Clara Whittaker, was the great-aunt of Mary Whittaker, whose selfishness Miss C deplores.
  • Yet the good country people of the area who knew Clara Whittaker seem to have admired her unreservedly, and had no sense that her relationship with her friend was unhealthy or even especially remarkable.
  • It is never said that that relationship, or the relationship between Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater, is sexual. The distinction between homosexual and homosocial relationships is too often elided; moreover, there are multiple forms of homosociality: for instance, it’s not uncommon to meet women who are sexually attracted to men but prefer the long-term companionship of a woman.
  • Presumably Miss Climpson and the good country people think that lesbianism is sinful and, well, unnatural.
  • Miss Climpson’s disapproval of the Whittaker/Findlater relationship may not be of universal application; that is, she may not reprobate all strong, exclusive homosocial bonds, but ony those in which the power differential is as pronounced as in this case, or (even more specifically) in which the dominant partner is a morally suspect person.
  • That said, Miss C more than once in the novels laments her “woman-ridden life,” and does clearly believe that the ideal permanent relationship is between a man and a woman.

As I say: complicated. Just sorting what Miss Climpson thinks and why she thinks it is difficult, but that difficulty is multiplied greatly if we try to factor in what Sayers thinks about such matters. Even if we agree that Miss Climpson holds “dated views on sexuality,” there is no obvious reason to think that Sayers’s views are substantially different than Miss C’s. After all, the world of the Modern Woman, the Bright Young Things, the Brideshead Generation, is subjected to relentless satire throughout the Wimsey novels. Moreover, Sayers herself was prone in her adolescence to the romantic “pash” for older women — especially one of her teachers at the Godolphin School — but seems to have grown out of that by the time she got to Oxford. And then there’s something noteworthy in the parenthetical continuation of the paragraph I was just quoting:

(Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit — fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, “I’ll ask the wife.” Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born — a perfectly womanly woman.)

All of this up to the final sentence is done within Miss Climpson’s voice-zone (as Bakhtin calls it) — but then comes what looks to me like Sayers’s own commentary. But maybe I’m wrong about that; maybe we’re continuing to see Miss C as Miss C sees herself. The whole business of moving in and out of a character’s voice-zone is very complex and requires great skill to manage: the greatest master of it is Dostoevsky, and Bakhtin coined the term “voice-zone” simply to account for this strange thing that Dostoevsky habitually does. (Note to other literary critics: the employment of the voice-zone is related to but distinct from the employment of “free indirect discourse.” Novelists can use the latter without using the former.)

But if this is direct commentary by Sayers … how does the final sentence relate to the one before it? Saying that Miss C is “a spinster made and not born” is simply to say that she is attracted to men and would have been glad to marry if the right opportunity had arisen, but to claim that on this account she is “a perfectly womanly woman” seems a token of approbation. If so, does this mean that Sayers also shares the belief that “men were intended to be masterful”?

I could spend a lot more time exploring that question, but having gone a good ways down this trail I want to stop and ask: Why are we here? Why do these questions matter?

The situation I’ve outlined here is of a kind that makes a great many people nervous these days — these days in which ideological hyperpartisanship demands that we know what people’s politics (including their sexual politics) are before we know whether we are allowed to like or sympathize with them. Thus Richard Brody’s inability to deal with Perfect Days: the movie never tells us what the movie’s protagonist thinks about politics, or indeed, if he thinks about it at all. How, then, do we know whether we need to denounce him? People today seem to prefer their movies and fiction to come with moral warning labels, like the danger alerts on packs of cigarettes.

But here’s the key thing: Often it’s impossible to be sure how Sayers might evaluate the statements of her characters. Maybe she agrees with a given statement; maybe she disagrees; maybe she’s not certain what she believes; and maybe – this is the possibility almost no one considers – she isn’t thinking about her own beliefs at all, because her purpose in writing is to convey what that particular character would say or believe, not to present her own views. As noted, this could be true even of the “womanly woman” statement.

It never seems to occur to many people that fiction is an unideal vehicle for the direct propositional expression of personal convictions on specific points of public controversy – unless, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle, the work of fiction is explicitly written to address some matter of public controversy. (I would argue that fiction is rarely the ideal vehicle, but those two novels, among few others, make it work.) When a novel has no such plain purpose, then the attempt to discover through hermeneutical calibration the precise distance between a character’s views and those of the author strikes me as a pointless endeavor, and one utterly irreconcilable with the activity we call reading.

Does Sayers agree with Miss Climpson’s views on sexuality, or on race? Does she agree 91% or 73% or 27%? These I think are bad questions, and it would be good for us to break our habit of asking them. They assume that a discernible relationship between author-belief and character-belief exists, that it’s stable, and that we can measure it. Also that it matters. I would deny, or at least seriously question, all of these assumptions.

On such points of public controversy, I think we would do better to reflect on what we believe and why we believe it — which, after all, are not such simple projects. Readers of fiction have better (and more enjoyable) things to do that to spend all their time squinting at their moral calipers.

February 21, 2025

Douthat on belief

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

My difficulty was brought home to me when I was writing the Preface to my forthcoming book on Paradise Lost. That book is one of a series called Lives of the Great Religious Books, which meant that in said Preface I needed to explain and justify my claim that Milton’s poem really is a religious book — which, I argue, it is in some ways, though not in others: its relationship to Christianity is radically different than that of, say, the Book of Common Prayer, the subject of my previous book in the PUP series. In order to do this, I had to take the concept of “religion” seriously. Or semi-seriously.

I began thus:

Many years ago I heard it said — I wish I could remember by whom — that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles. Thus Sir James Frazer, in beginning his great The Golden Bough, wrote that “There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout his work.”

But I had to settle on some kind of definition, so here’s the relevant footnote:

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1912]), p. 46; italics in original. Durkheim is using the term church in a very broad sense, though one may doubt whether it can possibly be broad enough to cover all relevant cases. This definition contains both functional and dogmatic elements, but as Durkheim unfolds his conceptual frame the functional strongly dominates.

After that I went on to argue that Paradise Lost is religious in a dogmatic but not a functional sense. I think my argument is correct, given the premises — but, as I say, the premises are what I’ve come to question.

Basically, I’ve come to believe the various things we call “religions” … well, here’s what I wrote in a recent essay:

I often tell my students that whether Christianity is true or not, it is the most unnatural religion in the world. Even a cursory study of the world’s religions will show how obsessed humans are with finding some way to (a) gain the favor of the gods, or transhuman powers of any kind, and/or (b) avert their wrath. Religious seeking is almost always about these two universal desires: to get help and to avert trouble. But in Christianity it is God who comes to seek and save the lost (Lk 19:10); it is God who reckons with His own wrath, himself making propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn 2:2). The standard — or rather the obsessive — practices of homo religiosus have no place here. In Jesus Christ, the Christian gospel says, God has done it all.

I say: This may be true or it may be false, but it is the Christian account of things, and it is very, very weird — so weird that it is easy, indeed natural, for us to fall back on the standard model of religion and turn our prayers into spells. How often do we think, perhaps in some unacknowledged place deep inside our minds and hearts, that when we come to church and say the appointed words and perform the correct actions, we are somehow getting Management to take our side?

The distinction between spells and prayers is Roger Scruton’s — read the post for the context — and it’s a useful one. I think it is the natural human tendency, the natural religious tendency if you must, to look for spells that can influence or even control the Powers That Be. But what use is a spell if the Name above all names — Jesus Christ — has already redeemed the world?

(I am speaking here of the greatest thing a religion might be expected to do. We also ask smaller things, and in those cases we often fall back on the old spell-habit, not realizing how secondary even the things that most concern us really are in the divine economy. Our inability to keep these matters in their proper perspective is a great theme in the letters of the apostle Paul, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Back to Ross’s book, near the end of which he writes this:

Some people’s encounters with religion in childhood aren’t negative or abusive so much as they are just sterile and empty, making the faith of their ancestors feel like a dead letter when it comes time to start on their own journey. That was how it was for the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. He was raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, a thing that mattered only as a foil for modernity. His own adult spiritual progress grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led him first into a kind of “pick’n’mix spirituality,” and then into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, a nature-worship that made sense as an expression of his love of the natural world, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, by ideas and arguments, and by the kind of stark mystical experiences discussed in an earlier chapter of this book.

In Ross’s account, I think I’m right to say, this is a gradual convergence on the True Religion, and while I do believe that the Christianity Kingsnorth now professes (and professes shrewdly and eloquently) is indeed true, I don’t believe that when he was a Wiccan — saying actual spells! — he was close to that truth than when he was a Buddhist or “spiritual but not religious.” In fact, Buddhism has a better understanding of the uselessness of spells than Wicca. Buddhism, though the very concept of “god” is not intrinsic to it, in its frank acknowledgment of a cosmos wholly beyond our control might be closer to the Christian understanding of the world than any practice committed to the efficacy of spells.

I dunno. I’m still thinking this through. But right now my thoughts are running along these lines:

While I doubt the genus/species premise of Ross’s book, almost everyone else in the world accepts its validity. A point that in intellectual humility I should bear in mind. And because the whole world accepts its validity, maybe Ross is right to structure his book in this way.

But I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

It’s common to call people who move from one religion to another “searchers,” and usually Christians think of that as a good thing. But I doubt that many of the people we call searchers are really searching. We Christians don’t seek, we are found by the One who seeks us. And that may be more of a frightening than a consoling thought. I believe that C. S. Lewis, as God approached him, was feeling the right feelings:

I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.”

People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.

Finally: Near the end of his book Douthat calls Christianity “the strangest story in the world,” a claim I enthusiastically endorse. But I think that if we take that claim with the seriousness it deserves, we might have to abandon the idea that Christianity is one of the things we call “religion.” Religion — if we must use the word — is a human activity that can be described more-or-less as Durkheim describes it. Christianity is something else altogether, I can’t help thinking. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” is not only stranger than we imagine; it’s stranger than we can imagine. 

It occurs to me, belatedly, that some of my earlier posts on enchantment are relevant to the argument I’m making here:— e.g. this one. But I’m wondering whether I’m moving the goalposts somewhat: perhaps I am criticizing Ross for something I’ve done myself. I’ll think about it and revisit the topic later. 

February 19, 2025

activism

I’ve pretty much stopped writing about politics, for reasons explained here, but that doesn’t mean I hold no political views and take no political action. Here’s how I think about political activism. 

Premise: Every government does unjust harm to some persons and groups of persons. (One’s general political philosophy will be largely determined by how much harm one thinks that any government does as a matter of course, and one’s voting patterns will be largely determined by that philosophy, but none of that is relevant to this particular post. What I’m about to say is, I think, universally applicable.) 

From this premise I think some questions should arise: 

  1. In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed? 
  2. Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community? 
  3. What organizations serve and seek to protect those people? 
  4. How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations? 

Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action. Note that this plan will differ according to the political party that happens to be in charge. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” the Prologue to the Letters and Papers from Prison: 

We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not, from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.

February 18, 2025

daffy-down-dilly

Three years ago I published an essay, called “Injured Parties,” in which I explore how attitudes towards defamation and verbal “injury” have changed over time. In light of that I was interested to note, in one of Sayers’s novels, Lord Peter Wimsey’s comment that it is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a “daffy-down-dilly.” Now, literally a daffy-down-dilly, or daffadowndilly, is simply a daffodil. So what is Lord Peter talking about? This thread on Stack Exchange explains. A daffy-down-dilly is a lawyer who works both sides of a case. To accuse someone of being a daffy-down-dilly is to accuse them of criminal professional malpractice, which means that you may be sued for libel. 

When in 1843 a Defamation and Libel Bill was moving through Parliament, one Lord Campbell, in the House of Lords, got deep into the weeds of the relevant distinctions: 

Their Lordships might expect him, as he was perhaps casting reflections on others, to give them some proof of these actionable offences. If it were said of a barrister, that he was “a daffy down dilly,” that is actionable. If he is said “to be a dunce,” — [The Lord Chancellor: Or a dandy.] — or that he has “no more law in him than a jackanapes,” that is actionable. Nay, it was actionable to say that a barrister “has more law in him than the devil,” for he must have less law, and not more than that personage. Now, with regard to words imputing indictable offences, it was an actionable offence to say that Mr. A. had held up his hand to Mr. B., for that was held to be an inducement to commit an assault. In Comyn’s Digest it was held that to say a man had not repaired a road or a bridge, which he ought to repair, was actionable, because the slander imputed to him an act for which he might be fined as a misdemeanor. For such trifling words as these a man might bring his action, and recover damages under the law of slander; but for words of a most serious nature, which might ruin a man’s character, no action could be maintained if they did not ascribe to him conduct inconsistent with the duties of his profession, or impute to him an indictable offence. To call a lawyer a swindler was not actionable. But if a letter containing those words were sent to a single individual, though not shown to another person, an action would lie. If the words were only spoken, it might be proclaimed in the face of the whole county of Middlesex, that a barrister was a swindler, and no action could be brought. If it were said, “a man is a cheat, and I will prove him a cheat; he is a cheat, and stole two bonds from me,” no action would lie, because the bonds were considered only a security, and in that state, as a security, they were a chose in action. So, to say of a man “he is a thief, and stole my trees,” no action would lie, because they were fixtures on the freehold, and on them a man could not commit a larceny. To say a man “stole corn from my field” is not actionable, because the corn was growing or standing, and therefore no action would lie. To say also that a “man stole iron bars out of my window” is not actionable, because the bars are part of the house, and a man cannot commit larceny with a house. So, to state that a “man stole the shutters” is not actionable, for the same reason…. Neither was it actionable to speak most irreverent words of a parson; that was according to a judgment given, which must be well known to his noble and learned Friend on the Woolsack, though the same words, if spoken of a lawyer, would be actionable. It might be said of a parson and it was so held by a judge, that he was a “bon padre and un grand fou.” An action was brought on these words but it appeared by the decision of the court they were not actionable, for the court said in its Norman French, that the man had not said anything against the parson, for a “bon parson might be a d—d fool.”

Some of these distinctions are too subtle for me, I must admit. But I approve of the theology underlying the argument that a lawyer must have less law in him than the Devil. The Devil has nothing but law on his side; the lawyer may not have grace, but at least he may have prudence and equity. 

February 17, 2025

Miss Climpson

One of the more interesting secondary characters in the Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers is Miss Climpson — more fully, Alexandra Katherine Climpson, as she is called when we first meet her in Unnatural Death (1927). By Strong Poison (1930) she is known as Katharine Climpson (note the altered spelling as well as the absence of Alexandra). The change is a mystery I cannot solve, but Sayers — who wrote a whole essay explaining why Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories is usually called John but sometimes James — would probably like to see me try.

Back to Unnatural Death: we meet Miss Climpson when Lord Peter brings his policeman friend Charles Parker to her apartment, slyly encouraging Charles to think that he’s paying a visit to a kept woman of his:

The door was opened by a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward.

Let’s pause for a moment to organize time. The novel’s setting is contemporary: we can be certain of this because it ends with a glimpse of the total solar eclipse of 29 June 1927. We know from other books in the series that Lord Peter was born in 1890, so that makes him 37. The “reign of the late King Edward” was 1901–1910. People who stop updating their style of dress usually do so (in my experience) when they’re around thirty, so while the adjective “middle-aged” is a vague one, I think with this hint about clothing and the presence of the “iron-grey hair” we can safely place Miss Climpson in her mid-fifties. (No younger, I think: in Strong Poison she’s referred to as “elderly.”)

Let us also add — this information will soon be useful — that when this novel was published Sayers herself was 34, and Harriet Vane — her most important female character, whom we will not meet for a while — is 24, and fairly recently graduated from Oxford University.

Now, back to Miss Climpson. After Lord Peter enjoys his joke on Inspector Parker and they depart, Parker wants a proper explanation and gets one:

“Miss Climpson,” said Lord Peter, “is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity. Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers’ money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you….

“She is my ears and tongue,” said Lord Peter, dramatically, “and especially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark. In fact, she is the cat’s whiskers…. People want questions asked. Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a note-book — the sort of man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts. I send a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions — everyone expects it. Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple — many readers will already have her in mind — makes much the same point in A Murder Is Announced (1951):

“We old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

People have often assumed that Miss Climpson is a Marple knock-off, but she isn’t: Unnatural Death appeared in October 1927, and Miss Marple first appeared in December of that year, in a story called “The Tuesday Night Club.” The first Marple novel is The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Neither writer copied the other, I am sure. But I don’t think that the appearance of the two characters at the same time is an accident. The emergence of the Modern Girl in the 1920s (successor to the New Woman) must have set people of Christie’s and Sayers’ generation — Christie was three years older than Sayers — thinking about how dramatically the potential roles for women had changed in their lifetime. They were too old to be Modern Girls, though they had been in some sense New Women, and as such had had opportunities that were unthinkable for women of the generation before them — except in the rare cases of heroic trailblazers like Jane Harrison and Mildred Pope, who simply created opportunities that had previously been nonexistent and thereby changed the world for the generations of women to come after them. 

Moreover, the horrific death-toll of the Great War left several European societies with more marriageable women than men to marry them — thus creating the phenomenon of the “Superfluous Woman,” about whom Vera Brittain — someone I think of as a kind of double or mirror image of Sayers — wrote a moving poem. (Brittain did end up marrying and having children, one of whom was Shirley Williams, a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party.) 

You get the sense that Miss Climpson — who is, generally speaking, of Mildred Pope’s generation — did not have that scholar’s great gifts, including the gift of an almost supernatural determination. Writing about a woman who had been born in the 1850s, around the time of Jane Harrison, Miss Climpson is full of admiration. (I pause here to note that Miss Climpson’s writing style is modeled on that of Queen Victoria, with so many underlinings and other instruments of emphasis that, as Lord Peter says, it looks like musical notation.)

It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker’s great-aunt on the father’s side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a ’character,’ as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very ‘advanced’ and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair SHORT(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady — or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.

Miss Clara refuses to marry and instead lives with her closest friend, perhaps because she is a lesbian — “Lesbianism in Sayers” is a topic for another post — but it’s equally possible, I think, that her romantic feelings simply are not as strong as her desire for independence. When Miss Clara (born in 1850) was a young woman the first Married Women’s Property Act had been passed, but that would not have been enough to protect her from a husband who insisted on domination and control. And though Miss Climpson does not share this strong independent streak, and would herself have wanted to marry — Sayers says of her that she is “a spinster made and not born” — she nevertheless clearly admires the willpower and resourcefulness of Miss Clara. 

It seems likely to me that Sayers in creating Miss Climpson and Christie in creating Miss Marple were, among many other things, thinking about what they might have been had they been born fifteen or twenty years earlier. Sayers in particular might not have been a “pioneer,” but was quick to claim the benefits that her academic pioneers had been able to secure for her. Perhaps, though, I shouldn’t say “secure”: because of the pioneers, Sayers was able to attend Somerville College, but Oxford was yet to grant degrees to Somervillians. She finished her studies in 1915 — with a First of course: she was quite a brilliant scholar, something too often forgotten — but could not receive her degree until five years later, when Oxford finally began recognizing the validity of its female students’ academic work. Harriet Vane, Sayers’s second-most-famous fictional creation, ten years younger than the author, would have finished at Shrewsbury College (a thinly fictionalized version of Somerville) around 1925 and taken her B.A. as a matter of course.

She would not, however, have been eligible to vote, nor would Sayers, though Miss Climpson and Mildred Pope would have had that right. Not until 1928 would all of them have had the franchise.

Had Sayers been the age of Miss Climpson, she almost certainly would not have attended university, would not have become a scholar and writer; had she been the age of Harriet Vane, she would have been faced with the opportunity to become a Modern Girl — something Harriet definitely isn’t, by the way. (Lord Peter’s um-friend Marjorie Phelps, whom we also see in multiple novels, is much closer to that type — which I think is why Lord Peter doesn’t marry her.) Decade by decade the status of women in British society was changing, and changing in multiple ways; the experience had to have been dizzying. We can see Sayers constantly reckoning with it in her fiction, and Christie too, though (I think) in less forthright and dramatic ways. Christie usually keeps the social commentary well in the background, except in her Mary Westmacott novels — Sayers firmly plants it front and center. 

February 14, 2025

here we go again

I’ve had to write this quickly and may be revisiting or expanding it later. Stay tuned.

On my first official day as an employee of Wheaton College, in the summer of 1984, I attended an orientation session for new faculty. We heard from various people who worked for the college in various endeavors; they gave us outlines of what they do and why they do it and how they might be a resource for faculty members. One of them was a man who oversaw a program that sent Wheaton students overseas, primarily to the global South and (in those long-ago days) behind the Iron Curtain, to see how Christians lived there, what they needed, how we could learn from them and how we could help them. It sounded like a wonderful program. During the break after his presentation, we were standing around drinking coffee, and he casually asked me whether I knew whom I would vote for in the upcoming Presidential election. I told him that I supported the reelection of President Reagan. He cocked his head at me and said, “You’re really going to vote for that warmongering racist? I think you should reconsider that decision.”

I was pretty surprised by this because I had assumed that the evangelical Christianity of Wheaton would be accompanied — perhaps not exclusively but dominantly — by political conservatism. It turned out that matters were a little more complicated. Wheaton certainly had far more Republicans (and other kinds of political conservative) than almost any other American college or university campus, but the overall political orientation of the faculty was pretty similar to that of the country as a whole. It wasn’t far from a 50–50 split, and I think a significant variability of political stances has been consistent throughout the modern history of Wheaton. Well, until quite recently.

And it should, shouldn’t it? The question of how the teachings of Jesus and the more general witness of the Bible translates into political belief and action is a notoriously difficult one. Only for the dim-witted or bigoted (on the Left and the Right) is it utterly obvious. The more we know about the history of Christian faith, practice, and teaching the more cautious we will be, I think, about assuming that we can map our Christian beliefs directly onto the political options readily available to us in our time and place. 

But over the past half-century or more we’ve seen a great many people who think that evangelical Christianity should directly correspond to the policies of the Republican party, whatever they happen to be at any given time. (They are quite different now from what they were in the time of Ronald Reagan, which might help to account for a recent imbalance in political preferences among faculty.) So some 30 years ago, as a professor who taught a class in literary theory, I was the subject of the same kind of hit piece that Daniel Davis has just written for First Things about current Wheaton professors, though in my case the piece appeared in World magazine. It was my view that my students, almost all of whom were English and philosophy majors, needed to understand trends in recent thought about literature and interpretation, and needed to be able to assess those ideas from a theologically informed perspective. But this meant reading controversial figures charitably, to try to understand not only what they say but what they are trying to accomplish in saying it, and then to ask ourselves whether, even if in the end we must strongly dissent from their key claims, we might learn something from them.

It was this that my critic found unforgivable: my job, he felt, was to teach students only what I agreed with and thought they should agree with. (With anything I thought wrongheaded, I take it that my job was to denounce it and tell students not to read it.) My failure in this respect made me a betrayer of trust and a Bad Influence.

My reasonably well-informed guess is that my former colleague Keith Johnson – whom I have heard in public conversations making strong defenses of both the uniqueness and the universality of the gospel of Jesus Christ – does the same kind of thing I do. But of course, I certainly wouldn’t be able to know that from this article. Davis writes that Keith Johnson “assigns (and commends) liberation and feminist theology for reading” — but I’d like to know what liberation and feminist theology he assigns, why he assigns it, and if he does indeed commend it, on what grounds. But Davis isn’t going to tell us that because this isn’t a piece meant to inform us of anything; it’s just a smear. I also might ask Davis whether he thinks that people who study theology at Wheaton need to emerge without knowing what liberation and feminist theologians actually say. Is ignorance bliss? Or is it for Davis, perhaps, merely virtue?

Similarly, I don’t know what Davis thinks “critical race theory” is or what it says — I’ve written about this problem at some length — but the phrase, in his usage, isn’t meant to convey any specific content, it’s just meant to scare the children. Ditto the title the piece bears — echoing William F. Buckley’s critique of his alma mater, Yale — which nicely elides the rather significant fact that, whatever their politics might happen to be, everyone employed by Wheaton signs a robust and classically orthodox statement of Christian faith. (But then, perhaps the Christian God isn’t the God Davis feels that Wheaton has betrayed. Hard to say.) 

At this juncture I find myself remembering the many students I advised who participated that program that sent them overseas. I remember one young woman, very conservative theologically, who came to my office on the first day of a new semester, just having returned from six months in Mozambique. She greeted me, sat down — and burst into tears. The abrupt transition from six months among a great many very poor but very joyful Christians to our beautiful, well-appointed, technologically sophisticated, and extremely clean campus was more than she could handle. She would spend the next few months, and probably the next few years, grappling with the implications of an evangelical Christianity that flourished more powerfully in the global South than in the United States, even with almost none of the resources we enjoy.

This kind of experience is a characteristic result not just of that program but more generally of the liberal-arts education on offer at Wheaton, which is always based on the understanding that, if the evangelical movement started in Europe and among white people, it has spread throughout the world and to every “race” and culture, and we in the West neither own it nor control it. The job of liberal education, especially in a Christian context, is never simply to confirm us in what we already know, or believe we know, but to challenge and push us to deeper and wider understanding, and to do so with confidence, because we ground our pursuit of learning in the conviction that “in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

(I use the first-person plural here not because I still teach at Wheaton — I left eleven years ago — but because I learned at Wheaton how to think in this way, thanks to the tutelage of many wise saints, and I hold today to the convictions I developed there.)

The faculty and administration at Wheaton understand all this, and therefore see that the American evangelical movement has not always acknowledged its debts to cultures beyond our own, has not always been willing to learn from Christians whose experiences are very different from ours, and has not always made welcome people from outside a certain and rather narrow cultural context. (Some of the people who have felt unwelcome are Wheaton students and even faculty members, including many who love the place with what often seems like an unrequited love.) It is the picture of evangelical Christianity as a truly global phenomenon that has led Wheaton to try to reckon with the blind spots in its own history, and to make amends to the insulted and the injured when amends are called for.

In trying to make this reckoning, Wheaton has, I believe, made mistakes. For instance, it seems to me that when an alum gets appointed to high office, perhaps especially if you have serious concerns about the tendencies of that government, it’s appropriate for the college to acknowledge that and to promise prayers. Also, I think a few years ago the administration got on board with a DEI regime that may look superficially like a Christian form of reconciliation but in fact is a very different beast, and the college deserves to be criticized for that. But I’d rather a Christian college make mistakes in trying to follow Christ more closely, more faithfully, than to sit back in the smug confidence that it knows everything and has no one outside its own orbit to learn from. 

P.S. The threatened UPDATE, comprised of two points: 

  1. Note that Davis’s prophetic claim that the Glory of the Lord is passed from Wheaton isn’t based on any deviation from the biblical witness or the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Wheaton still proclaims Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, the Bible as the word of God, and so on. But it turns out that the Glory of the Lord doesn’t care about any of that stuff. The Glory of the Lord only cares about whether an organization is or is not woke. I don’t know what the name of this religion is, but it’s certainly not Christianity.
  2. When Wheaton got itself into the social-media crosshairs a few years ago — the story then was not “Wheaton is Woke!” but rather “Wheaton is Racist!” — Wheaton alumna Ruth Graham wrote an outstanding reflection for the New York Times covering the controversy but also drawing on her experiences at Wheaton, and in so doing she made clear distinctions between (a) the actions of the college administration and (b) the beliefs, practices, and attitudes of professors, some of whom had made a big impact on her own life. In the current round of criticism some Wheaton grads are not being so circumspect. When they hurl mud at “Wheaton” they do not care how much of it hits professors who taught them, mentored them, cared for them. They do not care. And that’s pretty sad. 

P.P.S. My friend and former colleague Tim Larsen has made a couple of interventions in this debate: here and here. The second one raises an especially important question: If those who say that Wheaton has become un-Christian through being too woke recommend that students instead go to colleges that require no Christian beliefs at all from their faculty, then what God do those critics worship? 

February 13, 2025

two quotations on survival

Bryan Johnson’s Quest For Immortality | TIME:

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging — like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep — as an “act of violence.”

Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to  “recovery sleepwear.” But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it. 

 

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: 

I had recently come to know an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson who had long since lost his faith but retained his living. By the time I met him his only interest was the search for evidence of “human survival.” On this he read and talked incessantly, and, having a highly critical mind, could never satisfy himself. What was especially shocking was that the ravenous desire for personal immortality co-existed in him with (apparently) a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable. He was not seeking the Beatific Vision and did not even believe in God. He was not hoping for more time in which to purge and improve his own personality. He was not dreaming of reunion with dead friends or lovers; I never heard him speak with affection of anybody. All he wanted was the assurance that something he could call “himself” would, on almost any terms, last longer than his bodily life. 

February 13, 2025

true crime

In a recent post, I offered one reason why the detective story exploded into prominence when it did. But there are others.

Let’s set the stage first. In their witty, sardonic, and often insightful history of the years between the wars, The Long Week-End, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge say that when the Great War ended “Sherlock Holmes stood alone,” that is, there were no other prominent detective series — an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. Sexton Blake stories were being cranked out at a fearsome rate; Austin Freeman was making a name for himself; and Chesterton’s Father Brown was loved by a significant subset of readers. (One could add the shockingly prolific Edgar Wallace to this list, but most of his novels were thrillers of one kind or another rather than tales of detection as such.) But no detective commanded the universal public attention like Holmes, and there was no sign of the Boom that was quickly to come.

A decade later, Graves and Hodge note, popular reading was utterly dominated by the detective story. The addictiveness of the genre was widely noted, never more wittily than in Wodehouse’s 1931 story “Strychnine in the Soup,” which introduces us to such famous novels as Gore By the Gallon, Blood on the Banisters, and Severed Throats. Not only did it seem that everyone was reading detective stories, everyone was writing them. Poets like C. Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake) and academics like J. I. M. Stewart (writing as Michael Innes) got in on the game, and T. S. Eliot regularly reviewed detective stories in the Criterion. When Graves started work on I, Claudius he reflected that the British public loved “reading about murders, so I was careful not to leave out any of the six or seven I could tell about.”

Things moved quickly: Agatha Christie had written The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, but it was not published until 1920, the date usually fixed for the beginning of the Boom. In the same year Freeman Wills Crofts published The Cask; then came A. A. Milne’s The Red House (1922), Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body (written in 1921, published in 1923), and an ever-growing host of others.

How, and why, did this happen? In that recent post I described what I thought was one essential precondition, but the precondition was in place long before the boom occurred. It’s impossible to prove this point, but it seems to me likely that in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history, it was psychologically useful to make violent death ordinary again: to reduce its scope to the comprehensible. Killing could not be denied, but perhaps it could be to some extent controlled, or anyway retributed, through the workings of a generally honest and occasionally competent system of criminal investigation and punishment.

So we have in place a general social precondition for the rising popularity of the genre of detective fiction, and a widely shared psychological need that it fulfilled. But there was, I think, one more factor. If the British public liked reading about murders, as Graves said, that didn’t necessarily mean fictional murders. And I don’t think that the great Golden Age writers of detective fiction got their inspiration primarily from Conan Doyle or Chesterton, but rather from true crime stories they read about in the newspapers.

In her fine book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders writes about how modern police procedures arose in tandem with a series of highly-publicized Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper of course, but also Dr. Pritchard, Henry Wainwright, and, early in the century but famous throughout it, Burke and Hare. It’s hard to overstate how compelling these criminals and their foul deeds continued to be well into the twentieth century: in Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923), there’s a significant mention of the Adolf Beck case, and her third, Unnatural Death (1927), begins with Lord Peter Wimsey offering his opinion on why Pritchard got caught.

And of course these cases continued past the Victorian era: at the time that the Boom began, the most talked-about case for the previous decade had been that of Dr. Crippen. But a new one would come to dominate the news just as the Boom was really getting under way: the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 — the execution of Edith Thompson in January 1923 being perhaps the most controversial event in the history of British murders. And as the genre grew, the murders kept coming: in 1931 the murder of Julia Wallace, in 1934 the Brighton Trunk Murders. The Wallace killing alone has prompted dozens of fictional retellings and even more attempts at guessing the identity of the murderer, and there has never been a more brilliantly written true-crime story than Sayers’s essay on the many puzzles surrounding that murder — it should be much more widely read than it is, but it’s not easy to find.

Indeed, as Martin Edwards has pointed out, Sayers is the Golden Age writer most openly influenced by real-life murder cases — but then, she was always one to show her work, that is, to wear her influences proudly on her sleeve. Many other stories of detection, or crime novels more generally, are strongly based on real cases — one of the most famous, and effective, of these being Ernest Raymond’s revisiting of the Crippen case from the perspective of the murderer(s), We, the Accused (1935).

These famous crimes kept getting re-described by novelists quite closely, or more loosely, because people just couldn’t commit interesting and puzzling murders fast enough to sate the public’s appetite for tales of violence; and that, I think, is the single most important cause of the Boom in tales of detection.

N.B. Just after posting this I realized that I have already done a version of it. Duh. But I’m working through these issues now in more detail. 

February 10, 2025

the integrity of the system

 

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. The latter point might seem more obviously true, but Sayers makes a strong case that we see the essential lineaments of the tale of detection in, for example, the addition to the biblical book of Daniel in which the young prophet-to-be conducts a shrewd examination of the old men who have accused beautiful Susannah of illicit sex, revealing that their testimonies are inconsistent with each other and utterly false. (Daniel does what later became standard police procedure: he interviews the two likely conspirators separately, so neither can know what the other says.) Similarly, about Aesop’s fable in which the fox refuses to enter the lion’s cave to pay respects to the King of the Beasts because he sees many hoof-prints going into the cave but none coming back out, Sayers says: “Sherlock Holmes could not have reasoned more lucidly from the premises.”

People often use the terms “detective” story and “mystery” interchangeably, but Sayers prefers to distinguish the two; and the kind of story she calls a “mystery” is one that fuses horror and detection. This fusion, she claims, begins with Poe, most obviously in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She finds especially appealing stories that begin in an atmosphere of supernatural horror but end with that horror dispelled by the light of reason: e.g. Conan Dolye’s “Adventure of the Specked Band” or Chesterton’s “The Hammer of God.” (N.B.: Full enjoyment of the latter story might be available only to those whose ignorance of the laws of physics equals that of GKC.) She herself wrote no novels that fit this description, though The Nine Tailors verges on it: we are left with a completely material, this-worldly solution to the key mystery, but the possibility remains that there were other forces at work. “Bells are like cats and mirrors,” Lord Peter says, “ — they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.”

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E. M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. The police often make mistakes: they obsess over meaningless clues, overlook essential clues, misinterpret all the clues, grow irrationally stubborn, and arrest the wrong people (Harriet Vane, for instance, in Sayers’s Strong Poison) — but their mistakes are typically honest mistakes and we do not feel that, in Sayers’s words, “the law is arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally administered.” Otherwise we might prefer that a criminal, even a serious criminal, get away with it.

A basic trust in the integrity of the legal system arises, it seems to me, in Great Britain before it arises anywhere else. Again: integrity, not competence. I think George Orwell made a shrewd point when he wrote, in 1941, during the Blitz,

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

There are many powerful critiques to be made of the British political and legal system, and at one time or another Orwell makes most of them, but his own scrupulous honesty prevents him from making the cheapest ones. (The process by which those cheapest critiques could eventually prove to be correct is, of course, the great theme of both Animal Farm and 1984.)

This point leads us back to Sayers, who writes: “The detective-story had to wait for its full development for the establishment of an effective police organisation in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” This is generally true, but American detective fiction does not always fit the bill: the melancholy mood that often dominates Raymond Chandler’s stories — Farewell, My Lovely is perhaps the best example — arises from Philip Marlowe’s determination to be an honest private investigator when the police are commonly, if not universally, corrupt. (And the ones who are honest have to turn a blind eye to their colleagues’ behavior if they want to keep their jobs. In Farewell, My Lovely we see two cops who go along to get along and one who confronts corruption and gets himself fired. Chandler probably thought that the actual proportion was closer to ten-to-one than two-to-one, but you can only introduce so many character in one novel.) This is a theme in Ross Macdonald’s novels as well, and we all know the sentence that best encapsulates the defeated acknowledgement of How Things Are: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers. 

February 7, 2025

happening

The Complete Monterey Pop Festival

A few months ago, when Criterion was running a sale, I got this boxed set. It’s beautifully done, like all of Criterion’s editions, and the films come accompanied with informative essays, images, and videos. 

But the interest here (while pretty intense, for me anyway) is almost purely historical and sociological, because the music … well, it’s largely really bad. Otis Redding is fantastic, and the pop acts — though they often seem out of place in this environment, Simon & Garfunkel especially — tend to sing on-pitch and play with some semblance of rhythm; but the rock acts are almost uniformly inept. Even Jimi Hendrix appeals largely as a showman rather than a musician. The group that sounds the best is probably the Byrds, and they’re more of a pop group than a rock band. 

This shouldn’t have surprised me, because my friend John Wilson, who was living in California in this period and saw almost every famous performer, said that they often weren’t very good. Too many drugs, too much alcohol. Still, because the festival is such a famous one, I was a bit surprised by just how poorly almost everyone played and sang. 

But: I don’t believe many of them were trying very hard, and if they had been, no one would have noticed. This was a classic Happening, an event conjured from vibes, pheromones, and bong hits. You had to be there, as the saying goes, and being there was the whole and the only point. The music was barely relevant: even when you see people swaying and dancing they’re almost never on the beat. They’re dancing to their own inner festival. 

Otis kills, though. 

February 3, 2025

Areopagitica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what happens then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 31, 2025

Orsinia

More than 40 years ago, I read a little volume of stories by Ursula K. Le Guin Orsinian Tales, all of them written in a realist mode – not science fiction or fantasy – but set in a wholly imaginary central European country called Orsinia. I remember enjoying them. They had a certain mood or feeling to them that I liked. But the details didn’t stick in my mind.

Just this past week. I picked up the Library of America volume called The Complete Orsinia, which contains those short stories that I read all those decades ago plus a novel called Malafrena. And I decided it was time to read the whole thing.

It was an interesting experience. I still feel that the stories have a distinctive mood to them, but I don’t think they’re great stories and I don’t think Malafrena is a great novel. This is not Le Guin at her best.

But the final chapter of Malafrena is extremely interesting and is what makes the novel worthwhile. Le Guin often likes to give her primary attention, as a storyteller, not to the obviously crucial events but to what precedes or succeeds those events. So for instance, one of her best short stories is called “The Day Before the Revolution.” The revolution itself goes undescribed: what we hear about is the anticipation of the revolution and all that has been done to prepare for it. And in that final chapter of Malafrena what we have– though much of the novel is the story of an attempted insurrection, attempted but failed – is a kind of melancholy reflection on that failure and its consequences for a couple of the participants in it. So what the novel seems to care the most about – or maybe it’s just what I care the most about – only appears at the end. I’m not sure how things could have been done differently, though; maybe make that last chapter a short story called “The Year After the Insurrection.”

I don’t think Orsinia is Le Guin at her best because I think the stories to some degree, and the novel Malafrena to a considerable degree, are really pastiche. Le Guin started writing Malafrena when she was quite young, and had not, as she herself says, seen much of the world or much of human experience, and so essentially it’s the attempt of a young and very intelligent and artistically sensitive American to write a novel like one by Stendhal or Turgenev. It’s a skillful pastiche, but pastiche all the same. And it doesn’t have the passionate life in it that her later work would have. I think she just had to discover her métier and that was science fiction and fantasy. Those were the genres that released her imaginative powers. If she had stuck with with realistic fiction, I think she would have been a competent writer – she probably would have published novels and stories – but I don’t think she would be anybody that we would be talking about now. She had to find her métier and thank goodness she did.

January 29, 2025

Mank

In David Fincher’s Mank (2020), Herman J. Mankiewicz, laid up with a badly broken leg and confined to a cabin in the Mojave Desert, writes the screenplay for Citizen Kane. His only companions are a German woman who serves as his housekeeper and physical therapist and an an English woman who types up his handwriting. Occasionally John Houseman drops by to wring his hands over Mank’s lack of progress. Orson Welles shows up once.

Mank is a wonderful movie, but this is not at all what happened. The movie’s screenwriter, Jack Fincher – David Fincher’s father – uncritically accepted Pauline Kael’s claim that Mank wrote the whole screenplay and that Welles, in putting his name in the credits as co-writer, stole Mank’s thunder. The Finchers would also have us believe that Mankiewicz was a man of impeccable leftist credentials, whose dislike of William Randolph Hearst was rooted in Hearst’s support (in the 1934 California gubernatorial race) for the Republican Frank Merrian, who won against the Democratic candidate, the novelist and social critic Upton Sinclair. But, again: It wasn’t like that. Mank is a wonderful film, but it’s almost wholly fiction. 

(Kael’s essay on Kane is the single most famous thing she ever wrote, but it is so manifestly and demonstrably wrong about Welles’s role in the screenplay that — as I noted a few years ago — that essay is silently omitted from the Library of America edition of Kael’s writings.) 

As Simon Callow points out in his brilliant biography of Welles, Mank was “without peer as a screenplay doctor,” but “had more difficulty initiating work.” When Welles approached him to work on a screenplay – topic yet to be determined – Mank agreed only on the condition that John Houseman be brought in as his collaborator. Welles, though he had just had an overturned-tables-and-flung-tableware falling-out with Houseman, immediately agreed. The three of them met several times in Hollywood to thrash out the basic framework of the story.

Then, when Mank was sent to Victorville in the Mojave Desert to write the screenplay, Houseman accompanied him. Houseman was no occasional chastising visitor, he was a constant presence, working through possibilities with Mank and only when a direction was established leaving the screenwriter alone to work.

Moreover, Welles was not wholly absent – as in the movie, when he just calls on the phone a couple of times before a dramatic confrontation with Mank when the screenplay is already done – but rather came to Victorville himself on several occasions. When he wasn’t there, drafts were sent to him in Hollywood, to which he responded with praise, criticisms, and suggestions.

No one ever suggests that Houseman should have received a screenwriting crfedit for Citizen Kane, but he probably should have. But in any case, the screenplay was not Mank’s own but the product of collaboration, especially with Welles, with whom Mank constantly struggled for control over the story. In what Callow rightly says is “one of the most pertinent observations about Citizen Kane,” Welles later remarked that one of the key features of the movie is a “certain tension” in the portrayal of Kane: “One of the authors hated Kane and one of them loved him.”

And one more thing: While Mank may have been an impeccable leftist in 1934, by the time he co-wrote Kane he had moved considerably to the right, and towards isolationism. Moreover, as Callow notes, he came to believe, though a Jew himself, that “the Nazis were right about the over-dominance of the Jews” in Germany – even as he paid to sponsor Jewish emigres from Germany to the U.S. The movie tells us about the sponsorship but not about the agreement with the Nazis.

The real Mank was phenomenally gifted, but was a different kind of person, and a different kind of writer, than Fincher’s excellent movie suggests. I doubt that a movie about the real Mank would ever have been made. 

Sources: 

January 28, 2025

persuasion

Recently I responded to a post by the historian Tim Burke, and today I’m going to return to Tim’s writing. This is from a recent post of his: 

I think public and private institutions are going to slow-roll any shifts in their policies and in the process they’re going to have to abandon compliance as the predominant logic of policy-making. That is not just a change for administrations. It’s also a necessary, maybe even overdue, change in how campus progressives and liberals (students, faculty and staff) think about their institutions. The long intertwining of left-liberal goals and regulatory activity (whether governmental regulations or institutional rules) has made most of us unaccustomed to articulating our motivating values in clear and transparent ways and in trying to tie those values to our voluntary practices and our persuasively-articulated expectations for others. We’ve all fallen into the habit of demanding a policy for this and a policy for that, of insisting that we restrain and restrict, that we require and sanction.

But as administrations have rested on compliance most, they will feel the shock of its loss most intensely. The articulation of values has become unfamiliar for some of us, but for many administrators, it has wholly atrophied into oblivion except as a strategy for placating or as a component of crisis communication. 

The passages I’ve highlighted lead nicely into this post I’ve just written for the Hedgehog Review on trying to get Management to take your side — and the alternative, which, meme-maker than I am, I have called persuasion. 

January 26, 2025

doubling

Revolver all four beatles in the studio.

When the Beatles were recording Revolver, engineers at the Abbey Road studio invented a new technique called ADT — Automatic Double Tracking: 

[Ken] Townsend came up with a system using tape delay…. Townsend’s system added a second tape recorder to the regular setup. When mixing a song, its vocal track was routed from the recording head of the multitrack tape, located before the playback head, and fed to the record head of the second tape recorder. An oscillator was used to vary the speed of the second machine, providing variation in delay and pitch depending on the change in the second machine speed. This signal was then routed from the playback head of the second machine to a separate channel on the mixer. This allowed the vocal delayed by a few milliseconds to be combined with the normal vocal, creating the double-tracked effect. 

This made it sound like two almost identical voices were singing. Most of the songs on Revolver used it, and not just on vocals: for instance, the lead guitar on “Taxman” is ADT’d. 

But a very similar effect was used decades earlier … in Citizen Kane. When near the beginning of the movie we hear the dying Kane whisper “Rosebud,” the sound of the voice was produced by doubling Orson Welles’s voice using two different periods of reverberation. Double tracking — just not automatic. 

January 24, 2025

one more round on politics and the university

Re: this 2022 piece from Tim Burke — an outstanding historian and cultural critic whom I’ve been reading for a long time, and both like and respect — I think, first: Is it ever possible to issue warnings about unwelcome right-wing governmental influence without invoking the Nazis? I’d like to see a different historical comparison, just for once. (I think what Christopher Rufo wants is something a little more like the Communist Party’s takeover of Chinese universities.) But Tim has in later posts used other analogies, so I shouldn’t complain.

Anyway, I’m responding to this older post because it seems to me to sum up some ideas, assumptions, and perspectives that I’ve been having to deal with all my career. Tim writes,

This kind of turn can begin anywhere, anytime — like right this moment, here and now — wearing the mask of pragmatism and accommodation: let’s not make waves, let’s not use words or make speeches that draw attention, let’s make friendly connections to state legislators, let’s rename that program, let’s quietly defund that one center. Let’s not grant tenure to that person. Let’s encourage that professor to retire. Let’s look for a leader who is acceptable to interests that really hate the university and its values. Let’s take the money for an independent institute that pushes far-right economic philosophy. Let’s take away some governance from faculty, because they tend to provoke our enemies too much. Let’s compromise. Let’s be realistic.

Change the word “right” in that paragraph to “left” and you have a reasonably accurate account of what happened when leftist academics began their “long march through the institutions” of academe — especially in the humanities and social sciences. (Things are a little more complicated elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll be using “the academy” loosely, to mean primarily the humanities and social sciences and to a varying extent the other disciplines.)

The leftward drift of the academy has been going on for a long time, but it clearly accelerated when the students shaped by the campus activism of the Sixties became professors. Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals is an alarmist screed but the title, at least, has some merit — a fellow professor of English once told me that if the phrase hadn’t been co-opted by Kimball he’d have been glad to own it, and several others around the table nodded agreement. When committed leftists gained a majority in departmental and institutional committees, then they made a point of not granting tenure to that person — the person whose politics might have been slightly to the right of Elizabeth Warren’s — and encouraging the professor to retire who thought that English majors should be required to take a course on Shakespeare, or that maybe the History department should offer some courses in military history. They renamed programs and defunded centers. One of the chief proposals of Ibram X. Kendi was to diminish faculty governance and give the power instead to administration-created “antiracism task forces.” And so on.

When Tim tells professors to ask if “the university president who yesterday argued for more attention to the diverse expressions of religious faith within the classroom argue[s] tomorrow for more attention to the case for carrying guns or the case for restrictions on abortion,” he’s assuming that the American university should be a place in which everyone thinks that the Second Amendment (as interpreted by SCOTUS at least) is a terrible thing and that no stance on abortion is conceivable other than abortion-on-demand. After all, for his whole professional life, and mine, that’s been the case: if you had different views on those topics, you certainly kept them to yourself.

The point of Tim’s post, I think, is to say that the political status quo in the academy is what should be, world without end, and any change to it must be resisted. Thus his conclusion:

That is what we now must do. Watch for those who will come forward with the aim of making us easier to deliver on a platter to some future monstrosity, and block their path whenever they step forward. Start building the foundations for a maze, a moat, a fortress, a barricade, for becoming as hard to seize as possible. Time for the ivory tower to take on new meaning.

But here’s the thing: It seems to me that Tim wants is an academy in which people like me — people who are profoundly and passionately anti-MAGA but not doctrinaire leftists1I continue to be unable to offer a brief description of my politics. Maybe “Christian anarcho-subsidiarist”? — are unemployable. Because that’s exactly what the status quo is and long has been. This is an old topic with me, but: I have had a wonderful career, but I have had it only because in this country there are a handful of religious colleges and universities, which (among other things) are more politically diverse than their secular counterparts. No matter how much I publish or where I publish it, my open religious beliefs and social-conservatism-on-some-issues make me persona non grata at almost every university in the country. If the entire American university system had been what Tim wants it to be, I’d have been forced to find a different career.

So even though the prospect of a MAGA march through the academic institutions fills me with absolute disgust, I also think that maybe, just maybe, if academics with Tim’s politics had been somewhat more tolerant of academics like me, it needn’t have come to this. Tim himself has said some really nice things about my work in the past, but I do wonder, if he and I happened to be in the same discipline, he could support the idea of having me as a colleague. (But of course, even if he could, I’d lose the departmental vote.)

Tim tells us: “Ask that your institution write a mission statement, a values declaration, a promise for the future that no matter what happens, your institution stands for democracy, for freedom, for rights, for openness, for truth.” But I don’t think that the humanities departments in American colleges and universities have recently stood for any of those things: they have instead stood for a distinctively Left interpretation of some of those things. (“Openness” certainly never meant openness to me, or any number of other Christian and/or conservative scholars I could name.) A university whose direction is set by Christopher Rufo certainly won’t be concerned with democracy, freedom, rights, openness, and truth — but then neither would be a university whose direction is set by Ibram X. Kendi. And if the choice were between Rufo and Kendi, then we’d all lose — all academics, and all Americans.

So I’m hoping that won’t be the choice — that, or anything like it. I hope that MAGA attempts to conscript and/or control universities fail utterly. But I also hope that strategies to keep universities ideologically unanimous fail. I’d love to see the clash between these two intolerant visions lead to some kind of compromise, some toleration (however uneasy) of diverse political views. Sometimes bad people wear what Tim calls “the mask of pragmatism and accommodation,” but pragmatism and accommodation are genuine options also, in a politically diverse environment, and typically not evil ones. But sometimes I feel that I’m the only academic who thinks so.

January 22, 2025

Garth Hudson, R.I.P.

Garth Hudson, Dead at 87

When Charlie Watts died in 2021, I wrote, “This feels like a big one” — and it did, it was. But the death yesterday of Garth Hudson is a bigger one for me personally; I’m genuinely grieving. 

Of all the legendary musical groups of the rock era, The Band is the most difficult to assess. They weren’t around for all that long, and they made some indifferent music. But only Bob Dylan rivals them — and doesn’t obviously excel them — as the embodiment of what Greil Marcus called the music of “the old, weird America,” and what Dylan himself called “historical-traditional music.” Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing. 

You have to remember how much the Discourse of the late Sixties was dominated by talk of the “Generation Gap,” how strong the tensions were between the young and the old, to recognize the vital and wonderfully generous thing The Band did when they made an album, Music from Big Pink, that you opened up only to see a photo of the band members with their families: 

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It seems like a small thing … but it wasn’t. It was a powerful statement about the bonds that hold us firm to our past, about the people and places we belong to. And their music made that statement even more powerfully, especially in “the brown album” — the one called simply The Band, which I think is the single finest recording of that era. The Beatles were the best group of that time, and created the greatest body of work, but for albums — well, it’s The Band and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and then everything else trailing well behind. Or so I say. Give a listen and discover for yourself. 

Richard Manuel died in 1986, Rick Danko in 1999, Levon Helm in 2012, Robbie Robertson in 2023 — but as long as Garth remained, that musical world seemed still a living world. Now it recedes into the past. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t linked to it — listening to the music of The Band is enough to remind us of that. But for all those guys to be gone now … it’s tough. 

January 21, 2025

humans

From a handout I’ll give to my class today, though without the accompaniment of the Great Bruce.

Pico della Mirandola, from the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486):

God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought Himself of bringing forth man. Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders. Still, it was not in the nature of the power of the Father to fail in this last creative élan; nor was it in the nature of that supreme Wisdom to hesitate through lack of counsel in so crucial a matter; nor, finally, in the nature of His beneficent love to compel the creature destined to praise the divine generosity in all other things to find it wanting in himself.

From Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), by François Rabelais, Gargantua writes a letter to his son Pantagruel:

And even though Grandgousier, my late father of grateful memory, devoted all his zeal towards having me progress towards every perfection and polite learning, and even though my toil and study did correspond very closely to his desire – indeed surpassed them – nevertheless, as you can well understand, those times were neither so opportune nor convenient for learning as they now are, and I never had an abundance of such tutors as you have. The times were still dark, redolent of the disaster and calamity of the Goths, who had brought all sound learning to destruction; but, by the goodness of God, light and dignity have been restored to literature during my lifetime: and I can see such an improvement that I would hardly be classed nowadays among the first form of little grammar-schoolboys, I who (not wrongly) was reputed the most learned of my century as a young man.

Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored: Greek – without which it is a disgrace that any man should call himself a scholar – Hebrew, Chaldaean, Latin; elegant and accurate books are now in use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration just as artillery, on the contrary, was invented through the prompting of the devil. The whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of very learned teachers and of the most ample libraries, such indeed that I hold that it was not as easy to study in the days of Plato, Cicero nor Papinian as it is now.

Martin Luther, from his commentary on Genesis 3 (1545):

This original state of things shows how horrible the fall of Adam and Eve was, by which we have lost all that most beautifully and gloriously illumined reason, and all that will which was wholly conformed to the Word and will of God. For by the same sin and ruin we have lost also all the original dignity of our bodies, so that now, it is the extreme of baseness to be seen “naked,” whereas originally that nudity was the especial and most beautiful and dignified privilege of the human race, with which they were endowed of God above all the beasts of the creation. And the greatest loss of all these losses is, that not only is the will lost, but there has followed in its place a certain absolute aversion to the will of God. So that man neither wills nor does any one of those things which God wills and commands. Nay, we know not what God is, what grace is, what righteousness is; nor in fact what sin itself is which has caused the loss of all.

These are indeed horrible defects in our fallen nature, to which they, who see not and understand not, are more blind than moles. Universal experience indeed shows us all these calamities; but we never feel the real magnitude of them until we look back to that unintelligible but real state of innocency, in which there existed the perfection of will, the perfection of reason and that glorious dignity of the nakedness of the human body. When we truly contemplate our loss of all these gifts and contrast that privation with the original possession of them, then do we, in some measure, estimate the mighty evil of original sin.

Great causes of gross error therefore are created by those who extenuate this mighty evil of original sin, who speak of our corrupt nature after the manner of philosophers, who would represent human nature as not thus corrupted. For such men maintain that there remain, not only in the nature of man, but in the nature of the devil also, certain natural qualities which are sound and whole. But this is utterly false. What and how little remains in us that is good and whole, we do indeed in some measure see and feel. But what and how much we have lost, they most certainly see not who dispute about certain remnants of good being still left in human nature. For most certainly a good and upright and perfect will, well-pleasing to God, obedient to God, confiding in the Creator, and righteously using all his creatures with thanksgiving, is wholly lost. So that our fallen will makes out of God a devil and dreads the very mention of his name; especially when hard pressed under his judgments. Are these things, I pray you, proofs that human nature is whole and uncorrupted?

January 20, 2025

things made and in-the-making

A while back I commented on a post by Robin Sloan in which he says this:

Sometimes I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent.

I like this, but I want to make a distinction between resting from your labors on a particular project and resting from your labors altogether, through retirement or death.

My attitude toward the works I have completed — at at this point that’s fifteen books and a couple of hundred essays and reviews — is that I have never finished anything to my own satisfaction, I have only been forced to abandon it. That’s why I am psychologically incapable of re-reading anything I’ve written. I may retrieve small chunks of it for one purpose or another, but I’ve never re-read anything of mine longer than a blog post. I learned early in my career that revisiting what I’ve published brings only regrets. So, you know, as the man said: “Fare forward, voyagers.”

Maybe for this reason I am drawn toward the work that is never finished in the sense that it’s never handed over to someone else, never designated as complete. Take Montaigne’s Essays for instance, a page of which, in a modern edition or translation, looks like this: 

Montaigne published the first edition of the Essays in 1580 – that’s the main text here. Then in 1588 he published a second edition with new essays and revisions to the earlier ones: those are marked [b]. He continued up to the end of his life to add new essays and revise the old ones: those most recent changes are marked [c]. Montaigne died at age 59, but if he had lived twenty years longer we might have had further editions of the Essays and, consequently, texts with markings of [d], [e], and [f].

I love this. “Essay” means “trial” or “attempt,” of course, and thus Montaigne’s book by its very nature invites second and third thoughts, second and third trials: iteration that ends only when you die, or when you grow tired of it all and retreat into a life of pure contemplation.

I’m a big fan of contemplation, but I tend to contemplate most effectively when I have a pen in my hand. And a notebook provides endless opportunities to revisit, rethink, fail again, fail better. Though I never re-read my published works, I re-read my notebooks regularly: I consider such revisitations essential to thought, to growth, to intellectual and moral and spiritual maturation.

For me — for my personal wants and needs and satisfactions — my notebooks are the most important writing I do. Then come my essays, and then my books. I think I have written some good books, and they’re made a place for themselves in the world — I’ve sold about 300,000 copies all told, most of those The Narnian and How to Think, which is nothing compared to having a YouTube channel, but not altogether contemptible for a writer of books — but if I had not been in a profession that places a premium on the publication of books, I don’t know that I ever would’ve written a single one. (Maybe a collection or two of essays, though, if I had found any publisher charitable enough to put them out.) It has been good for me to be pushed towards book-writing, but it’s not my natural métier — the essay is. And maybe the notebook is, even more. 

But what about blog posts, like this one? This blog stands at the juncture of the essay and the notebook. Some of these posts are essays, though usually briefer than the ones that get published by other people; others are basically notebook entries shared with the public. What makes a post an essay is completeness: a story told to the end, a train of thought traced to a destination, a pattern of ideas or responses fully woven. Conversely, you can tell that a post is essentially a notebook entry when I say something like “I’ll revisit this idea later” or “Perhaps a topic for a future post.”

In my recent series of posts on the family I was writing on a topic so complex, so nuanced, so difficult that it would have been an impertinence, I think, to issue a finished word. I would dishonor the multiplicity of people’s experiences, the complexity of my own experience, by offering anything like a complete statement. So I put some thoughts out there, related them to one another as best I could, and now I am pausing to reflect. Probably there will be more later. On a blog there can always be more later, and one of the best uses of hyperlinks is to link to your earlier self, even (or especially) when you think your earlier self was wrong about something or left something out.

It’s great to finish (or in my case abandon) something: to tell this story, to make this argument as well as you possibly can, crafting it with all your skill, and sending it out into the world to make its way as best it can. But there’s a place also — and I feel this increasingly strongly as I get older — for the tentative and incomplete, for “I’ll revisit this later,” for “Oh, I forgot this when I wrote that” — for, maybe above all, being corrected by charitable but honest readers and then being able to try again on the basis of what the lawyers call “information and belief.” I am always, and hope I always will be, gathering more information and developing my beliefs. As the man also said, “Old men ought to be explorers.”

January 18, 2025

two quotations on what exists

From a NYT story on a woman with an AI boyfriend:

Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real. “What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

Iris Murdoch:

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

January 16, 2025

you don’t have to be there

Charlie Warzel: 

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.” 

The title of Warzel’s article is “Beyond Doomscrolling,” but it’s really about things you can do, useful apps you can download, in addition to doomscrolling. 

When Musk started dismantling Twitter, I thought it might be an opportunity for people to discover that “irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information” is not in fact “irresistible” — it can be resisted. (Also, you could delete “in moments of disaster” from that sentence: infoconsumption doesn’t go up all that much in times of crisis because so many people are doing it every day — though, perhaps, redescribing every day as a crisis or a disaster to justify their habit.) 

People: you don’t have to “watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem.” Nobody is making you. And it doesn’t do you any good to watch. 

But when Twitter became intolerable people decamped first for Mastodon and then Threads and then Bluesky, or went all-in on Instagram. The Twitter habit, it seems, will long survive Twitter. 

I know I’ve said this many times before, but once more for the late arrivals: 

  • I read news once a week, mainly when the Economist arrives in my mailbox on Monday. If you live in a bigger city than Waco, Texas you’ll get it earlier, but a day or two one way or the other does not matter in the least. 
  • The sites and writers I want to read more regularly I subscribe to in my RSS reader, and that includes a handful of Bluesky and micro.blog accounts. Except in very rare circumstances, I don’t visit bsky.app or micro.blog directly. I don’t have a Twitter account any more, I haven’t had a Facebook account since 2007, and I only visit Instagram once every couple of weeks to see what some friends are up to. (I devoutly wish they were somewhere other than Instagram, but I’m not the boss of them.)
  • Likewise, RSS is how I read the reporters and columnists I especially value. I read Ross Douthat and David Brooks and Ruth Graham, but I never visit the NYT home page. Ditto with the Atlantic and several other periodicals: read the people you know you want to read and ignore the rest. 
  • There aren’t many worthwhile things on the internet that I can’t get via RSS, and for those I rely on email newsletters. 

So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do. 

Now, having established these habits, when I read a piece like Warzel’s I think: Why do people live this way? I’d rather pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And I bet if any of you, dear readers, would ditch the doomscrolling habit for three months you’d never go back — you’d wonder why anyone would ever go back. 

January 15, 2025

priorities

Faculty in my college today got an email announcing a new program “designed to encourage Baylor University faculty to reduce the educational costs for their students by using library content, open educational resources (OER), or other low- or zero-cost materials. In particular, it is intended to encourage instructor experimentation in high-quality low- and no-cost learning materials for their students, especially through the use of OER.” Admirable!

But in the same email we also learned that Baylor has bought a subscription to yet another AI product: “Scopus AI is an intuitive and intelligent search tool powered by generative AI (GenAI) that enhances your understanding and enriches your insights with unprecedented speed and clarity.” And who among us has not wanted their insights to be more clearly and speedily enriched?

But wait, there’s more! Baylor has also purchased a subscription to “Leganto, a resource management tool that enables instructors to add course materials in Canvas for students to access.” The advantage for instructors, we’re told, is that we can “track student engagement with course materials.”

Here’s a suggestion: Maybe if Baylor would choose not to invest in more ed-tech/AI snake oil, and decline to further a student-surveillance regime, we could include textbooks and other “learning materials” in the current tuition cost. My guess is that we could do so and have money left over.

January 13, 2025

cui bono?

In my first post of this series, I called attention to an issue raised by Christopher Lasch: “The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.”

But why do parents so cooperate? Lasch thinks it’s largely a matter of limiting conflict in the home, but I think something more important is at work: parents have internalized the logic of metaphysical capitalism and its implicit contractualism — its view that only what the individual chooses is legitimate for that individual — and are terrified of being tyrannical or even to be perceived as tyrants. Parents have bought into the illusion that if they do not direct and guide their children, then their children will make free individual choices — and then, if things go wrong, at least they won’t be able to blame Mom and Dad. 

The illusion of free choice? Yes, absolutely. Here let me quote someone I’ve cited before on this subject, Christine Emba: 

This story idealized detachment, “liberation” from mutual care, ensuring that relationships never came before career goals. It looked like bringing a capitalist mindset into our interactions, making it normal to use, discard, and objectify other people. And as they often do, our rapacious markets and short-term desires won out.

But:

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns. 

If you look at those stories I’ve cited in earlier posts about people who are cutting off their parents, you might ask: Who is encouraging them to do so? And the answer is: therapists who profit from family alienation. Similarly, when young people experience, or think they are experiencing, what we’re taught to call “gender dysphoria,” who is encouraging them to pursue some major change? Often counselors at their schools, who have pressed for the power to hide such information from parents (though there is pushback against that policy). 

So: Cui bono? As Lasch said, the schools and the “helping professions.” By encouraging young people to sever, or at least weaken, family ties, they create psychological and moral fragility that they step in to remedy, in exchange for money or power or both. And neither group has to deal with the long-term consequences of their interventions. 

But we need a broader view. Counselors and therapists are not independent agents any more than the children themselves are. As Jacob Siegel has written, they are part of a much larger movement, the “whole of society” approach to social change: 

Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them — creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control. 

This is an old idea. It’s not clear that Siegel knows it, but in his essay he’s resurrecting an idea once common among Marxist social theorists: the “ideological state apparatus,” a term coined by Louis Althusser. The state implicitly or explicitly recruits other elements of society, elements that work on the level of ideology rather than physical coercion or law, to accomplish its ends. 

Similarly, as Agustina Paglayan has argued in her disturbing new book Raised To Obey, 

Breaking with the tradition of leaving the upbringing of children entirely to parents, local communities, and churches, central governments in the nineteenth century began to intervene directly in the education of children, establishing rules about educational content, teacher training, and school inspections, and mandating children to attend state-regulated schools. Second, these state-regulated primary education systems expanded in size and eventually reached the entire population. While in the early twentieth century only a handful of countries had universal access to primary education, today this is the norm virtually everywhere. What prompted the expansion of primary education systems, and why did states become involved in regulating them? […] 

Looking at history teaches us that central governments in Western societies took an interest in primary education first and foremost to secure social order within their territory. Fear of internal conflict, crime, anarchy, and the breakdown of social order, coupled with the perception that traditional policy tools such as repression, redistribution, and moral instruction by the Church were increasingly insufficient to prevent violence, led governments to develop a national primary education system. Central governments went to great lengths to place the masses in primary schools under their control out of concern that the “unruly,” “savage”, and “morally flawed” masses posed a grave danger to social order and, with that, to ruling elites’ power. The state would not survive, education reformers argued, unless it successfully transformed these so-called savages into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws. 

This impulse on the part of the state — to “secure social order,” or what people in power choose to designate as “social order” — has not changed, but the number of institutions that it can recruit as its “apparatuses” and their power over children have only increased over time, especially in our age of maximally extensive cybernetic communications systems. (Cybernetic because the mechanisms of coercion become ever more precise via feedback.) 

And the more utopian the dreams of the state, the more desperate it will be to eliminate all alternative sites of influence — beginning with the family. Indeed, the sidelining or destruction of the family is a key feature of all utopian schemes, going all the way back to the fifth book of Plato’s Republic. To utopians and statists — and all utopians are statists, though all statists are not utopians — the family is the first enemy, because the family is by their standards inevitably an anarchic force. 

Cui bono? When the family is weakened and children are cut adrift (morally and intellectually, if not physically) from their parents, the therapists benefit, the pharmaceutical industry benefits, the medical-industrial complex benefits, the social-media companies benefit, the employers benefit — but, in our current system, all of this is to say that the primary beneficiary is the state, especially any state with a competent “whole of society” approach to achieving its ends. 

The family may not be a “haven in a heartless world,” but even beset as it is it can become a site of resistance — and it ought to be, if we have any hope of rearing children who have not had the humanity extracted from them and replaced by the implicit conviction that everything worth having can be bought in the marketplace. 

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