In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror of the meat-packing industry. People were being boiled in vats and sent to larders. Rat waste was mixed with meat. And so on.
As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop enterprise from poisoning us with its food.
To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping disease spread today, including Covid and the catastrophic response.
Not only that, but the story is also the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s food inspection efforts, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of medical drugs, the central plan that governs food production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the legions of bureaucrats who inspect and badger us every step of the way. It is the founding template for why government is involved in our food and health at all.
It’s all premised on the implausible idea that people who make and sell us food have no concern as to whether it makes us sick. It only takes a quick second, though, to realize that this idea just isn’t true. So long as there is a functioning, consumer-driven marketplace, customer focus, which presumably includes not killing you, is the best regulator. Producer reputation has been a huge feature of profitability, too. And hygiene was a huge feature of reputation — long before Yelp.
Sinclair’s book was not intended as a factual account. It was a fantasy rendered as an ideological screed. It did drum up support for regulation, but the real reason for the act’s passage was that the large Chicago meat packers realized that regulation would hurt their smaller competitors more than themselves. Meat inspections imposed costs that cartelized the industry.
That’s why the largest players were the law’s biggest promoters. Such laws almost have more to do with benefiting elites than protecting the public. It was not really about safety, the best scholarship shows, but exclusionary regulation to raise competitors’ costs of doing business.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906”, Brownstone Institute, 2022-06-29.
October 21, 2022
QotD: The real reason for Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle
October 19, 2022
Jonathan Kay reviews 18 Months by Shannon Thrace
At Quillette, a review of a new book on the breakdown of a once-happy marriage when one partner decides that mere transvestism isn’t enough any more and becomes transgendered:
The trans community is diverse, especially when it comes to attitudes toward sex. As writer Angus Fox noted in a seven-part Quillette series, When Sons Become Daughters, some biologically male trans-identified teenagers live a sexless existence; and are drawn to puberty blockers and androgynous aesthetics precisely because they seem to offer safe harbour from male sexual development. In the case of middle-aged men who abruptly adopt a trans identity later in life, on the other hand, it can be the opposite: the presentation is often hyper-sexualized.
(more…)
October 14, 2022
That time that H.G. Wells fell afoul of Muslim sentiments
In the New English Review, Esmerelda Weatherwax recounts an incident from the 1930s where Muslim protestors took to the streets of London in reaction to a recent Hindustani translation of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World:
Screen capture of the 1938 Muslim protest march in London from a British Pathé newsreel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADausiEe4pM
… my husband was at the Museum of London and spotted a very brief mention of this protest in 1938 on a list of 20th century London events. I did some research.
The book they objected to was HG Wells’ A Short History of the World. This was originally published in 1922 but in 1938 an abridged version was tranlated into Hindustani and published in India. His observations about the Prophet Mohammed did not find favour with Indian Muslims (and as you know pre-partition the area called India covered what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh). There were protest meetings in Calcutta and Mumbai (then transliterated as Bombay) and the consignments of the books that WH Smith the booksellers sent to Hyderabad mysteriously never arrived. Investigation showed that the Sind government banned its import. Protests spread to east Africa and were reported in Nairobi and Mombasa.
The paragraphs concerned said “He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception, and quite sincere religious passion”. Wells concludes, not unfavourably, that “when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writing have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration”.
There had been a number of Muslims living in east London for some years, sailors who came through the docks, retired servants, some professional men and in 1934 they formed a charitable association for the promotion of Islam called Jamiat-ul-Muslimin; they met on Fridays at a hall in Commercial Road.
On Friday 12th August 1938 a copy of A Short History of the World was, as apparently reported in the Manchester Guardian the following day “ceremoniously burned”. The main Nazi book burnings were over 5 years previously but I can’t but be reminded of them. I can’t access the Guardian on-line archive for 1938 as I don’t have a subscription, but I have no reason to doubt what they reported.
A few days later Dr Mohammed Buksh of Jamiat-ul-Muslimin attended upon Sir Feroz Khan Noon, the high commissioner for India. Sir Feroz tried to explain that in Britain we could (or could then) freely criticise Christianity, the Royal family and government as a right. He reminded Dr Buksh that Muslims were “a very small minority in England, and it would do them no good to try and be mischievous in this country, no matter how genuine their grievances were”.
October 3, 2022
QotD: The foundation of Rome, as recounted by Vergil and Livy
Aeneas (son of Aphrodite/Venus and a mortal man, Anchises) does appear, by the by, in the Iliad, though he isn’t a particularly notable or impressive hero (naturally Vergil will embroider Aeneas until he is presented as the equal of an Achilles or Odysseus because … well, wouldn’t you?). The Aeneid follows (with the aid of a major flashback) Aeneas as he shepherds his surviving Trojans from Troy to their prophesied new homeland in Italy (with a minor stopover in Carthage) and then covers also the war that breaks out between Aeneas’ Trojans and the local inhabitants (the Latins) when he arrives. Vergil cuts off at the climactic moment of the war (which in turn presents Aeneas as rather morally grey, a feature that is also present, as we’ll see, in Livy’s retelling of Rome’s legends), but Livy provides the denouement. After a period of conflict (Livy presents two different versions of the exact sequence), Aeneas ends up married to Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, king of the Latins (Livy calls them the Aborigines – lit, “the native inhabitants”, Vergil the Latins; in both cases Latinus is their king) and the Trojan exiles and Latinus’ people form a single community at Lavinium, which in turn founds a colony at Alba Longa, both in Latium (the region of Italy in which Rome is, although note we haven’t founded Rome yet).
We then fast forward a few generations. Rhea Silvia, a priestess of Vesta at Alba Longa gives birth to twins, Romulus and Remus by (Livy expresses some doubt) the god Mars. The twins are exposed (for complicated royal-family-drama reasons we needn’t get into) and rescued by either a she-wolf or a woman of ill-repute (Livy isn’t sure which on account of Latin lupa having both meanings and clearly both legends existed, Liv. 1.4) and raised among shepherds in the hills of northern Latium. More politics ensues, Romulus and Remus, having grown to adulthood, right some wrongs in their home city of Alba Longa and set out to found their own city.
At which point Romulus promptly gets into a fight with and murders Remus over who is going to be in charge (this sort of intense moral ambiguity where the venerated legendary founder figures are also quick to violence and deeply flawed is also a feature of the Aeneid and can be read either as a commentary on Augustus or as some lingering Roman discomfort with their own recent history of civil wars running from 88 to 31 BC; we are not the first people in history to have very mixed feelings about how well people in our country’s past lived up to our ideals). Crucially, Romulus forms his new settlement (prior to the fratricide) out of – as Livy has it – “the excess multitudes of the Albans and Latins, to which were added the shepherds” (Liv. 1.6.3). After this, desiring to increase the population of the city, Romulus sets a place of refuge in the city so that “a crowd of people from neighboring places, altogether without distinction, free and slave, fled there eager for new things” (Liv. 1.8.6) and were incorporated into Romulus’ growing city. Livy approves of this, by the by, declaring it the first step towards rising greatness.
Romulus quickly has another problem because all of these new settlers were men, so he concocts a plot to carry off all of the unmarried women of the neighboring people, the Sabines – an Umbrian people (we’ll come back to this, for now we’ll note they are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Latins) – who lived in the hills north of Rome under the guise of a religious ceremony (Liv. 1.9-13). At a festival where the Sabines had been lured to under false pretenses, the Romans abduct and forcibly marry the Sabine women, while using hidden weapons to chase away their families (I should note Livy goes to some length to assure the reader that the captured maidens were subsequently persuaded to marry their Roman captors, rather than forced (Liv. 1.9.14-16), though what choice he imagines the unarmed, captive women to have had is left for the reader to wonder at in vain; in any event, we need not share Livy’s judgement or his effort at patriotic euphemism and may simply note that bride-capture is a form of rape). The Sabines naturally go to war over this but (according to Livy) a peace is mediated by the captured women (according to Livy, unwilling to see their new husbands and old fathers kill each other) and the two communities instead merge on equal terms. In the midst of all of this, Livy does have Romulus set down a set of common customs for his people, which he thinks to have been mostly Etruscan (Liv. 1.8.3), the Etruscans being the people inhabiting Etruria (modern Tuscany) the region directly north of Rome (Rome sits, in essence, on the dividing line between Latium to the South and Etruria to the North).
Now we want to note two things here from this high-speed trip through the first few chapters of Livy. First is the deep ambivalence towards Roman violence here. Livy presents Rome as a city founded on fratricide, conquest, rape and sacrilege. Livy occasionally attempts to soften the impact of these legends (particular with the Sabines), but only so far. This isn’t really the place to unpack of all of that but suffice to say that I think that Livy’s willingness to open his history of Rome – practically an official history of Rome – so darkly speaks to a literary project still attempting to come to grips with the stunning civil violence which had gripped Rome for Livy’s entire adult life and had, as he wrote, only recently ended. And one day we also ought to come back and do a deeper look at how women function in Livy’s legends and histories (Livy’s account becomes much more properly historical as he gets closer to his own time); women, mostly Roman women, suffering (often sexual) violence so that in their sacrifice the Roman state might be enhanced is a repeated motif in Livy (e.g. Lucretia, Verginia).
But more directly to our topic today, I want to note at this point exactly the sort of society Livy is imagining the earliest Rome, under its first king Romulus, in particular that it consists of a lot of different peoples and heritages. We’ll come back to exactly who all of these peoples are (historically speaking) in a moment. But Livy and Vergil first create a Trojan-Latin fusion community, which produces both Romulus and Remus and their initial core of settlers (mixed in with other, apparently purely Latin communities), who then gather up shepherds from all around, and then invite literally anyone from nearby communities to join them (which must include Etruscan communities to the north as well as Umbrians and Falisci of various sorts from the hills) and then finally fuses that community with the Sabines (an Umbrian people).
So we have our very first Romans, as the first Senate is being set up (1.8.7) and the very first spolia opima – the prize for when one commander defeats his opposite number in single combat – being won (1.10.7) and the very first temple being founded in the city (1.10.7). And those very first Romans, as Livy imagines them, are not autochthonous (that is, the original inhabitants of the place they live), nor ethnically homogeneous, but rather a Trojan-Aborigines-Latin-Faliscian-Umbrian-Etruscan-Sabine fusion community. For Livy, diversity – ethnic, linguistic, religious – defines Rome, from its very first days.
But of course this is all legends – important for understanding how the Romans viewed themselves, but necessarily less valuable for understanding the actual conditions in Rome at its earliest. Unfortunately, we lack reliable written sources for this part of the world so early (most of the “regal” period, when Rome was ruled by kings, notionally from 753 – the legendary founding date for the city – to 509, is beyond historical reconstruction).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-11.
October 2, 2022
Robert Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” have nothing on real headlines in 2022
Ed West on what he calls the “triumph of the blank slate” in western culture:
As a depressive conservative who always sneered at the new atheist movement, I’ve enjoyed a certain, almost masochistic smugness about the way the sharp decline in American religious practice has led to a proliferation of wacky beliefs. I told you so, I laugh, as our boat heads for the rocks and certain doom for all of us. And every month I read something else in the media which makes me think, with the best will in the world and a sincere belief in improving our lot, that country’s ruling class is losing its grip on reality.
To take one recent example, an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it “reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years”.
The author stated that “though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential”.
Quoting an academic who claim “that sex differences aren’t really clear at all” the author reported of some studies showing that “the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology”.
On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that “maternal instinct is a myth that men created”. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that “The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.”
Even the most prestigious science magazines increasingly make claims about sex that a decade ago would have seemed wacky. Just recently, Scientific American stated that “Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
If you find any of these beliefs strange, then you might need to “educate” yourself about “the science” because this is the direction of travel now. This kind of stuff is everywhere, growing in popularity in all areas, but all ultimately having the same common inheritance — the blank slate.
Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
With its subtitle “the modern denial of human nature”, Pinker’s worked looked at the various ideas that had emerged out of academia and into wider society: that rape was not about sex, that hunter-gatherer societies were peaceful, that sex differences were learned, all of these beliefs having the common theme that humans are born with infinitely malleable minds and that that life outcomes are entirely shaped by society.
Pinker felt, quite reasonably, that many of these comforting beliefs were on the way out. Of the idea that differences in intelligence were entirely environmental, he wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet this historical curiosity continues to flourish, and 20 years after publication, the blank slate is stronger than ever. More so than in 2002, it’s taboo to discuss the genetic components of human intelligence or the biological factors involved in differing male and female behaviour. The ground has shifted – towards the blank slate.
Pinker is an optimistic Whiggish liberal who has since produced books looking at the decline of violence and making the case that things are getting better — that’s taken a wobble this decade, but I think he’ll be proven right, even if I think the new atheist-aligned cognitive psychologist has a slight blind spot about religion. In the Blank Slate he argued that worthy progressive goals should not rest on untrue scientific assumptions about human nature. When those ideas are proven false, the political argument will crumble too — and yet this hasn’t happened. Instead the taboos just grows stronger.
October 1, 2022
Johann Hari’s unlikely career resurrection
I have to admit that Johann Hari was pretty much just a British media personality I had a vague awareness of, but I hadn’t paid much attention to him (his Wikipedia sockpuppeting came to my attention in 2011, and I quoted from an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2019). As this post by Ben at Ben’s Comedy News outlines, I’d largely missed the rest of his fall and rise:
Nowadays, Johann Hari is known as a pop psychology expert. He does TED talks and writes books with simplistic messages like:
- your smartphone is ruining your attention span! (Stolen Focus)
- you should cure your depression by throwing away your medication and joining a book club! (Lost Connections)
- the war on drugs is bad! (Chasing the Scream)
His books get positive blurbs from distinguished thinkers, such as the comedian and twink admirer Stephen Fry, the listicle entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, the feminist and sex offender’s wife Hillary Clinton, the comedian and fake revolutionary Russell Brand, and the TV doctor Doctor Rangan Chatterjee.
But when you look at how actual experts assess his work, it’s not so positive. The neuroscientist Dean Burnett responded to an extract of Lost Connections in his Guardian column, under the title Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong? Burnett points out that:
despite Hari’s prose suggesting he’s uncovered numerous revelations, pretty much everything he “reveals” is well known already
Hari, in pursuit of an anti-anti-depressant narrative, makes the claim that you can be diagnosed with depression and put on medication immediately after a traumatic event like losing a child, which Burnett (who teaches psychiatry) describes as:
at best a staggering exaggeration, at worst an active fabrication to support a narrative.
But this article isn’t about what Johann Hari has been doing recently. It’s about what Hari was up to before he reinvented himself as some kind of expert, back when he was a journalist who ended up being disgraced.
It’s about how Hari has somehow rounded allegations of serious fabrication down to a record of minor plagiarism. It’s about how in trying to attack his critics, he seems to have inadvertently revealed his penchant for little brother incest fantasies with a troubling racial dimension. It’s about how I tried to fix the record on Wikipedia, and ran into trouble as Wikipedia’s policies collided with the sorry state of British journalism.
Back in 2010, Johann Hari was a star newspaper columnist (if you’re a millennial that means he wrote hot takes that got lots of clicks; if you’re Gen Z, think of him as a viral TikTok star but with words on paper).
In 2011 he was disgraced and kicked out of the profession.
Now if you look at the articles that were written about his comeback, like this New Statesman piece or this Guardian piece you’d conclude that he was disgraced for two things:
plagiarism – specifically, taking quotes from text someone had written in a book or article, and pretending that the person had said it directly to him
abuse of Wikipedia – in particular, using a fake identity to edit the pages of professional rivals with false allegations
I followed the whole Hari affair pretty closely at the time (I didn’t like him because he had been a cheerleader for the Iraq War, so I enjoyed watching his career go down in flames).
When his latest book came out a month ago, I looked at his Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia saves the history of all the different versions of each page, so here is a link to what I saw when I did that.
And here’s part of the summary and the table of contents:
The whole article struck me as weird because it didn’t mention two things I clearly remembered:
- Hari got in trouble, not just for minor plagiarism, but for allegedly making things up completely.
- Even more memorably, the fake identity he used to edit Wikipedia, “David Rose”, was also used to author an incest kink porn story with a hilarious title.
You can see why Hari (and whatever reputation management consultants he has working for him) would want to focus on the “plagiarism” angle. It’s not good to pass off a quote you got from someone’s book as something they told you directly, but it’s not as serious as completely inventing something. I suppose technically it’s plagiarism because you’re pretending you elicited the quote in an interview and you’re not citing the original book; but it’s a lot better than the typical case of plagiarism that involves passing off someone else’s work as your own. Hari’s defence is that he was “cutting corners” because he was under so much pressure due to his meteoric success at young age, etc. etc.
American Empire, question mark
An interview with Niall Ferguson in the Dartmouth Review by Lintaro Donovan revisits Ferguson’s 2005 book Colossus in light of what has happened during the nearly two decades since it was published:
TDR: In your 2005 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you advance the thesis that the United States is an empire in denial and that such denial will be our undoing, both domestically and abroad. Does that thesis still hold in the world of 2022?
NF: I think it has withstood quite well the test of nearly 20 years. If you recall, the analysis was that the United States was trying essentially an imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Iraq and that there were three deficits that were going to make it fail. There was the manpower deficit, because people really did not want to spend that much time in Afghanistan and Iraq – hence the short tours of duty. There was the fiscal deficit, which was already obviously a problem and has only gotten worse. And then there was the attention deficit. The prediction was that the US [BREAK] public would become disillusioned with these endeavors just as it became disillusioned with Vietnam. And if anything, the surprising thing is how long it took to get out of Afghanistan.
I wouldn’t have predicted it would be 2021. I expected it sooner than that. But I think that the overall framing of the US as an empire-in-denial works because it’s so deeply rooted in the way Americans think about themselves and the language that their leaders use. What was odd was that some neo-conservatives back then really were willing to say, “We’re an empire now”.
Of course, it kind of blew them up politically so that they’re now an irrelevant bunch of never-Trumpers. So I feel that book stood up remarkably well to the test of time. I’d stick by it.
TDR: What I’m hearing from your answer is that our denial is sort of endemic to what Americans are and that there were issues that were already present before the invasion of Iraq. Do you think that there’s any personality in American public life today who might be able to get us out of our denial and fix these issues that you’re talking about?
NF: No, because I think, if anything, the kind of aversion to empire has grown on both the left and the right. And so you have different versions of it.
Those wings, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party, are much stronger than they were then. I don’t think we are going to see any revival until the US suffers the kind of attack that it suffered at Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Until there’s a punch landed, what will happen is that the US will try to exercise power through indirect means like sanctions or getting Ukrainians to fight Russians or arming the Taiwanese. And, in that sense, I think we’ve reverted to a Cold War playbook without calling it a cold war.
The problem is that we aren’t as far ahead [of China] economically and technologically as we were relative to the Soviet Union. If you’re doing a cold war with China, you have to reckon with quite a formidable antagonist, but that I think is where we are.
It’s amazing how far there is now a bipartisan consensus that China’s the problem. The continuities from the Trump to Biden Administration are very striking in that respect. I don’t see that changing until something bad happens, whether it’s a showdown over Taiwan that the US actually loses, or the collapse of Ukraine, which I guess is a conceivable if now unlikely scenario, or another terrorist attack, though I think that’s not especially likely these days.
The other thing to watch out for is the Middle East. Basically, as in the Cold War, you’ve got the potential for a crisis to happen. The problem for the US is that it’s quite overstretched. If there’s a crisis in Eastern Europe and a crisis in the Far East, say Taiwan, and one in the Middle East, then the US is going to be completely unable to respond to all of those.
It’s already in the position that it can’t give Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Taiwanese, because they’ve already been given to the Ukrainians and we can’t actually make that many new ones. It feels like we are doing Cold War but with quite a bit more overstretch than was true certainly in the 1980s.
September 29, 2022
Nostradamus
In the latest post at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander considers prophecy “From Nostradamus to Fukuyama”. Here’s the section on Nostradamus (because I don’t have a lot of time for Fukuyama, you’ll have to read the rest at ACX):
“House of Nostradamus in Salon, France. Now a museum.” by photographymontreal is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
.
Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future.
(never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice)
His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate religious authorities (who apparently hated prophecies, but loved prophecies phrased as obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish).
In 1559, he got his big break. During a jousting match, a count killed King Henry II of France with a lance through the visor of his helmet. Years earlier, Nostradamus had written:
The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel deathThe nobleman was a bit younger than the king, supposedly they both had lions on their shield (false), maybe King Henry was wearing a golden helmet (I can’t find evidence for this, but as a consolation prize please accept this picture of his amazing parade armor), and his slow agonizing death over ten days from his wounds was pretty cruel. Seems like a match, sort of. Anyway, for the next five hundred years lots of people were really into Nostradamus and spent goodness knows how many brain cycles trying to interpret his incomprehensible quatrains.
The basic Nostradamic method was:
Write 942 vague and incomprehensible quatrains, out of order and without any dates.
Whenever something happens, say “that sounds a lot like quatrain #143!” or “quatrain #558 predicted that”
Prophet
For example, prophecy 106:
Near the gates and within two cities
There will be two scourges the like of which was never seen,
Famine within plague, people put out by steel,
Crying to the great immortal God for reliefThis is an okay match for the atomic bombs, in the sense that there were two cities where something really bad happened. But read on to prophecy 107:
Amongst several transported to the isles,
One to be born with two teeth in his mouth
They will die of famine the trees stripped,
For them a new King issues a new edict.… and it starts to sound like he’s just kind of saying random stuff and some of it’s sticking by sheer luck.
A few prophecies sound more impressive than this, eg:
The lost thing is discovered, hidden for many centuries.
Pasteur will be celebrated almost as a god-like figure.
This is when the moon completes her great cycle,
but by other rumours he shall be dishonouredThis seems to name Pasteur, who was indeed a celebrated discoverer of things. And Nostradamus scholars note that a historian accused Pasteur of plagiarism in 1995, which is a kind of dishonorable rumor. But the work here is being done by the translator: Pasteur is just French for “pastor”, and an honest translation would have just said “the pastor will be celebrated …”, which is in tune with all his other vague allusions to things happening.
The blood of the just will be demanded of London
Burnt by fire in the year ’66
The ancient Lady will fall from her high place
And many of the same sect will be killed.Seems like a match for the London fire of 1666. But again checking the original French and the commentators, the second line is more properly “burnt by fire in 23 the 6”, which a fanciful translator rounded off to 20 * 3 + 6 = 66 and then assumed was a year. The experts say that this is really a coded reference to 23 Protestants being burned, in groups of six, during Nostradamus’ lifetime (many of his quatrains are references to past or present events, for some reason). This sounds more compatible with the “many of the same sect will be killed” ending.
I had a weird experience writing the end of this first part of the post. When I was a kid, reading through my parents’ old books, I came across an weird almanac from the 70s that had a section on Nostradamus. It listed some of his most famous prophecies, including the ones above, but also (reconstructing from memory and probably getting some things wrong, sorry):
The way of life according to Thomas More
Will give way to another more sweet and seductive
In the land of cold winds that first gave it birth
Without strife, without a war it will fall… and the 70s almanac interpreted this as meaning Soviet communism would fall peacefully. Reading this in 1995 or whenever it was I read it, a few years after Soviet communism did fall peacefully, I was really impressed: this is the only example I know where someone used a Nostradamus quatrain to predict something before it happened.
But I searched for the exact text so I could include the correct version in this essay, and I didn’t find it — this is none of Nostradamus’ 942 prophecies! The almanac authors must have made it up, or unwittingly copied it from someone else who did.
But I remember this very clearly — the almanac was from 1970-something. So how did the faker know Russian communism would collapse?
The moral of the story is: just because Nostradamus wasn’t a real prophet, doesn’t mean nobody else is.
September 20, 2022
Hannah Arendt in postwar Germany
In Quillette, Roger Berkowitz discusses what Hannah Arendt found when talking to Germans after the Second World War, which she characterized as their collective “escape from reality”:
In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”. This “escape from reality”, as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing”.
The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig”. What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion”. The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter”. Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality”.
The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism“), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea. Nazism is an ideology that blames economic disaster, political loss, and the evils of modernity on the Jews — inhuman flotsam who must be exterminated to allow a master race to flourish. Bolshevism, on the other hand, “pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away”. The bourgeoisie are not simply class traitors, they are a dying class, and killing them only supports a law of history. As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience”. The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality”.
Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated”, it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood”. As reality recedes, ideologies organize society to transform their ideas into living reality. If antisemitism as an ideology says that all Jews are beggars without passports, the fact of wealthy and established Jews must be eliminated. If Bolshevism says that the bourgeoisie are corrupt, they must admit their corruption or be killed. The realization of such ideological realities can be accomplished, of course, through terror.
But even before a totalitarian movement takes power and mobilizes the secret police in the machinery of terror, ideological movements can employ propaganda to deny and nullify facts, or change them. The Nazis, she writes, “did not so much believe in the truth of racism as desire to change the world into a race reality”. Similarly, the Bolshevist ideology that classes were dying was not something real, but something that had to be made real. The purges and terror that Stalin unleashed were supposed to “establish a classless society” by exterminating all social groups that might develop into classes. In both instances, the purpose of the ideology was to transform a mere opinion — race consciousness or class consciousness — into the “the lived content of reality”.
The point, as Arendt concludes, is that “ideological consistency reducing everything to one all-dominating factor is always in conflict with the inconsistency of the world, on the one hand, and the unpredictability of human actions, on the other”. What ideology demands is that man — an unpredictable and spontaneous being — cease to exist as such, that all humans be subjected to laws of development that follow ideological truth. That is why the turn from an unreliable reality to coherent fantasy requires an absolute elimination of human spontaneity and freedom.
September 18, 2022
“King Eeyore”
In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte recounts some of the anti-Carolean gossip from the early years of King Charles:
My library of royalist literature is thin, but I did find Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers on the shelf. Published last spring, it chronicles the recent history of the House of Windsor and while it treats the whole cast of characters — Elizabeth, Philip, Margaret, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, William, Kate, Harry, Meghan — much is revealed about the new king.
Charles, writes Brown, the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, was never a happy fellow. She calls him “Prince Eeyore”. He “felt bruised by his childhood and miserable school days, misunderstood by his domineering father, and deprived of an emotional connection with his mother”. Among the “brutalities” he endured in his youth: his schoolmates at Gordonstoun beat him with pillow because he snored.
Although an indifferent student, he attended Cambridge where he read anthropology and archaeology. In 1969, a year before graduating, his mother crowned him Prince of Wales. He spent his early twenties in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, distinguishing himself in the latter service by lowering an anchor without noticing on his chart the presence of a telecommunications cable linking Ireland and Britain. “It was snagged,” writes Brown, “and the two divers send down to dislodge it nearly drowned.” Charles earned a “stern rebuke”.
Having done his military duty, he devoted himself to polo, windsurfing, and test-driving prospective wives. Charles’s royal status made him an obvious catch, writes Brown, who judges that his “Dumbo ears were offset by his excellent tailoring and debonair polo prowess.”
Finding a wife proved difficult, not least because of his affinity for married women. At one point he was sleeping with both Camilla Parker Bowles, wife of Andrew Parker Bowles, and Dale “Kanga” Harper, wife of his buddy, Lord Tyron. “In the mid-seventies,” says Brown, “both married women were on call for the Prince while their husbands looked the other way.”
That’s not exactly true. Both men seemed pleased to lay down their wives for their country, as the joke went at the time. Charles was godfather to Tom Parker Bowles, son of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles, and also to a middle child of the Tyron’s who, naturally, was named Charles.
What Camilla and Kanga had in common were game personalities and maternal instincts that accommodated the Prince’s “sentimentality and tantrums, and needs to be soothed and amused”.
It wasn’t until 1981, at the age of 32, that the Prince of Wales made his choice of a bride. It was famously awful for all concerned. He married twenty-year-old Diana Spencer who bore him an heir, William, in 1982, and a spare, Harry, in 1984. Brown reports that Charles behaved properly in the marriage until the birth of Harry who, to his disappointment, was not a girl. “Oh God,” he said, “it’s a boy … and he’s even got red hair.”
He was back with Camilla in no time. Diana ratted him out to the author Andrew Morton in 1992 and Charles unwittingly confirmed his infidelity the next year in a notorious telephone conversation with Camilla in which he said that he wanted to “live inside your trousers or something”. You know the rest.
September 13, 2022
QotD: J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood and schooling
For a time, the fatherless Tolkien enjoyed a happy childhood, devouring children’s classics and exploring the local countryside. But in 1904 his mother died of diabetes, leaving the 12-year-old an orphan. Now he and his brother went to live with an aunt in Edgbaston, near what is now Birmingham’s Five Ways roundabout. In effect, he had moved from the city’s rural fringes to its industrial heart: when he looked out of the window, he saw not trees and hills, but “almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond”. No wonder that from the moment he put pen to paper, his fiction was dominated by a heartfelt nostalgia.
Nostalgia was in the air anyway in the 1890s and 1900s, part of a wider reaction against industrial, urban, capitalist modernity. As a boy, Tolkien was addicted to the imperial adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, and it’s easy to see The Lord of the Rings as a belated Boy’s Own adventure. An even bigger influence, though, was that Victorian one-man industry, William Morris, inspiration for generations of wallpaper salesmen. Tolkien first read him at King Edward’s, the Birmingham boys’ school that had previously educated Morris’s friend Edward Burne-Jones. And what Tolkien and his friends adored in Morris was the same thing you see in Burne-Jones’s paintings: a fantasy of a lost medieval paradise, a world of chivalry and romance that threw the harsh realities of industrial Britain into stark relief.
It was through Morris that Tolkien first encountered the Icelandic sagas, which the Victorian textile-fancier had adapted into an epic poem in 1876. And while other boys grew out of their obsession with the legends of the North, Tolkien’s fascination only deepened. After going up to Oxford in 1911, he began writing his own version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. When his college, Exeter, awarded him a prize, he spent the money on a pile of Morris books, such as the proto-fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga. And for the rest of his life, Tolkien wrote in a style heavily influenced by Morris, deliberately imitating the vocabulary and rhythms of the medieval epic.
Dominic Sandbrook, “This is Tolkien’s world”, UnHerd.com, 2021-12-10.
September 12, 2022
The Lord of the Rings and Ancient Rome (with Bret Devereaux)
toldinstone
Published 10 Sep 2022In this episode, Dr. Bret Devereaux (the blogger behind “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry”) discusses the relationships between fantasy and ancient history – and why historical accuracy matters, even in fiction.
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September 9, 2022
“Far from fighting against the establishment, the woke are the establishment”
In Spiked, Andrew Doyle discusses the reactions to his announcement that he was writing a book about the ongoing culture wars:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
My new book is about intolerance. I am fascinated by those who prefer only to associate with people who share their own identical worldview, and who interpret the slightest point of political disagreement as evidence of evil. The new religion of group identity and “social justice” has driven once rational people into a state of frenzied bigotry. I want to understand why.
So, back in May, when I announced I was working on a book called The New Puritans, I wasn’t all that surprised to see so many self-proclaimed advocates of “social justice” rush to demonstrate the very phenomenon that I was attempting to explore. Some suggested that they would acquire copies only to burn them. One said that he intended to kick it under the bookshop shelf “so that it could rot in darkness”. Another simply declared that I was “pure scum”. Were any of these people aware that they were proving my point?
Byline Times even claimed that I was waging “a perpetual battle against social justice – fighting against a contrived present world of aggressive ‘woke snowflakes’ in order to return to an imagined past”. This was news to me, given that my book is a defence of progressive and liberal values, and it explicitly criticises those who resort to the “snowflake” slur. I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that my book was an example of someone imagining enemies into existence in order to fight them. It takes some chutzpah to make such a claim of a book you haven’t actually read.
It would seem that the title alone – The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World – was enough to stir the ire of these culture warriors. In a sense, this is unsurprising. One of the key aspects of this ideological movement is that its adherents treat all challenges as a form of heresy that must be quashed. For all that they like to smear their detractors as “bigots”, they forget that the main definition of the word – “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief or opinion” – applies most accurately to themselves.
Why is it, for instance, that JK Rowling can be so routinely monstered as “hateful” and “transphobic” despite having never said anything hateful or transphobic? Only this week, the Harry Potter author found herself in an exasperating Twitter exchange with someone claiming she had been “outwardly hateful of an entire community”. Rowling quite rightly asked for evidence, to which her detractor replied: “I don’t know where you said it, but I bet you do.” For those taking part in the witch-hunt, the total lack of evidence is simply an inconvenience to be brushed aside.
This is why my book draws comparisons between the hysteria of the “woke” movement and the witch hunts of Salem in the late 17th century. In a burst of collective madness that lasted a little over a year (from February 1692 to May 1693), 20 people were executed for witchcraft on the basis of the testimony of local girls. All of the prosecutions were secured on the basis of “spectral evidence” – what today we might call “lived experience”. The girls simply declared that they had seen these innocent people sign the devil’s book, or that they had been “sending out their spirits” to torment people. This was their “truth”, and so it had to be believed.
September 7, 2022
The “self-domestication” hypothesis in human evolution
A review of The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham in the latest edition of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter:
The “self-domestication hypothesis” is the idea that in the ancestral environment, early human communities collectively killed individuals prone to certain forms of aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and monopolizing food and sexual partners.
Over time, our ancestors eliminated humans — typically males — who were exceedingly aggressive toward members of their own group.
If there was a troublemaker, then other less domineering males conspired to organize and commit collective murder against them.
Women too were involved in such decisions involving capital punishment, but men typically carried out the killing.
Humans tamed one another by taking out particularly aggressive individuals. This led us to become relatively peaceful apes.
But if humans are “self-domesticated”, then why are there so many violent people among us today?
The fact is, humans are not nearly as violent as our nearest evolutionary relatives.
Comparing the level of within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees with human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers.
We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder. And tear overly dominant males to shreds.
Many people are familiar with the findings that bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees.
This is true.
Male bonobos are about half as aggressive as male chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.
Bonobos are “peaceful”, relative to chimps. But bonobos are extremely aggressive compared to humans.
The eminent Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores these findings at length in his fascinating 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.
This is a review and discussion of Wrangham’s book.
September 6, 2022
Fixing the American education system (other than burning it to the ground and starting over)
At First Things, M.D. Aeschliman reviews The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System — and How to Fix It by Natalie Wexler:
E.D. Hirsch Jr., distinguished scholar of comparative literature, is the most important advocate for K–12 education reform of the past seventy-five years. Natalie Wexler’s recent book The Knowledge Gap is a helpful examination of Hirsch’s critical analyses and intellectual framework, as well as the elementary school curriculum that he designed — Core Knowledge.
One of Hirsch’s key focal points is the vapid, supposedly “developmentally appropriate” fictions that dominate language arts curricula in elementary schools — mind-numbingly banal stories with single-syllable vocabularies and large pictures. These silly literary fictions and fantasies have helped “dumb down” a hundred years of American students by eliminating or forbidding any substantial reading of expository prose about history and science in the first eight grades. A poignant narrative well worth reading is Harold Henderson’s Let’s Kill Dick and Jane, which details a noble but ultimately losing fight waged by a family firm from 1962 to 1996 against the big textbook publishers.
After a teaching career of fifty years, I agree with Hirsch that the primary problem in American public education is not the high schools, but the poorly organized, ineffective elementary school curricula, including the idiotic books of childish fiction. As Wexler writes, the governing “approach to reading instruction … leaves … many students unprepared to tackle high-school-level work”. Pity the poor high school teachers.
A hundred years ago John Dewey and his lieutenants from Columbia Teachers College, especially William H. Kilpatrick, started dismantling academic “subjects” in favor of “the project method”. They also worked to redefine history as “social studies”, a degenerative development that has continued without cease in our K–12 schools, leading to ludicrous presentism. Dewey and the progressives also attacked traditional language classes — especially phonics but also Latin — opening the way for “naturalistic” literacy instruction that has proved to be ineffective. Yet it should be obvious that students must “learn to read” well early on so as to “read to learn” for high school and college and the rest of their lives. And what they read early on is important.
The “progressive” educational assault on traditional American education had another source, which might be called “soft utopianism”. Twenty-five years ago Hirsch was already writing powerfully — in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them — about this romantic-progressive “soft utopianism” and how it conflicted with what is wisest and best in the thinking, writings, and achievements of the founding fathers and their early republic. Yet he also knew — as himself a repentant progressive “mugged by reality” — that in the nineteenth century the republican educational legacy was already under intellectual assault by Rousseau’s American disciples Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Whitman’s egalitarian naturalism was one of Dewey’s greatest inspirations by the early twentieth century.
The progressives particularly dislike history, and our current “Great Awakening” indicates this. A few years ago, the former superintendent of the school system of one of our most “liberal” states said to me in private conversation that “the progressives hate history and won’t tolerate it in the curriculum”. They hate it because any thinking about history requires ethical assumptions and qualitative judgments: What in the past is worth studying? How do we structure our narratives? How do we fairly evaluate historical personalities and events? Which ones were virtuous and beneficial? These and related questions require some standard of justice and the idea that most individuals — in the past and present — have some degree of free will and some disposition to ethics: the “self-evident truths” of our founding document, and of civilization itself.
