Quotulatiousness

December 27, 2022

Whatever government touches, it makes worse – book publishing as a prime example

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government has always claimed to want to encourage Canadian book publishers and many, many speeches and press conferences and announcements and gestures have been produced over the years (not just by the Liberals, but usually by the Liberals). The actual results of all that political performance? “Meh” at the very best:

Another of my favorite SHuSHs of 2022 was no. 168, “It Started as Polite Talk”, in which my colleague Dan Wells of Biblioasis complained of the dominance of foreign publishers in the Canadian book market. “I don’t think there’s a literate nation in the world whose native industry makes up a small percentage of its overall market”, he said. “This, perhaps, is the real crisis of Canadian publishing.”

The astonishing thing to me is that the stated policy of the federal government for more than half a century has been to foster and protect a Canadian-owned publishing sector to avoid outsourcing our intellectual life to New York and London. Acres of policy written. Billions spent. The results are risible. Here’s a visual representation of Dan’s point. The 113 members of the Association of Canadian Publishers, representing the vast majority of English-language book publishers in Canada, produce $34 million in annual sales against the $1.1 billion of foreign firms:

If you read the self-congratulatory reports from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council, everything is fine: “The Canadian book publishing industry consistently demonstrates a high degree of resilience.”

Does this look resilient to you?

I’ve never been much of a Canadian nationalist and, all things considered, I’d prefer less of a government presence in our arts sector, but government is now so deeply entrenched in book publishing and has made such a hash of the industry that there’s really no way out that doesn’t involve better government policy.

What, exactly, better policy might look like is next year’s project.

QotD: Pedantry

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th century in my possession. In them, the sole mark made by a previous reader is the emphatic underlining, often accompanied in the margin by an explanation mark or some other expression of joyful discovery, of an error, whether of printing or grammar or fact, and of whatever magnitude. The intellectual or moral significance of the error is quite beside the point; it is the fact of error, and of having found it, that is important to the pedant. He is like a predatory animal stalking its prey, pouncing on it when it comes out in the open.

I suppose one is either born pedantic or not, though of course there are different degrees of pedantry. Just as one may be mildly or cripplingly obsessional, so one may be slightly or fulminatingly pedantic. I daresay that one day neuroscientists will put pedants in scanning machines and discover the part of their brains that lights up when they discover an error in a text, and then claim that they have found the pedantry center in the brain.

Theodore Dalrymple, “To Err Is Human, to Detect Divine”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-01-19.

December 24, 2022

The abiding influence of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

So many of our fading-but-still-fondly remembered Christmas traditions seem to come back to Victorian times, and especially those featured in Charles Dickens’ most famous Christmas story (certainly helped by the popularity of the Alistair Sim film adaptation):

Even in our supposedly rationalist secular era, we find one of these thin places or times in the unlikely guise of Christmas and its rich repository of ghost stories. The supernatural was not banished by the developments of modernity but rather it evolved and adapted, moving from enchanted woods to gothic houses to the streets and rooms of Victorian cities. Just as in earlier times, they found their place where it is dark, in the dead of winter, when the nights close in and fireside stories cause the mind to play tricks and shadows to seemingly change their forms.

Among the many writers who have tried their hand at yuletide ghost stories, none loom larger than Charles Dickens who, with A Christmas Carol (subtitled Being a Ghost Story of Christmas), fundamentally influenced the way we perceive and celebrate the festivity. To fully understand how and why Christmas became a thin place and remains so, we have to delve into a scourge at the very heart of Dickens’s story and our society still — loneliness.

Christmas is one of those times when, as a much earlier writer, Dante, put it: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” And what time is happier, or more melancholic when irretrievable, than a childhood Christmas? Victorian writers knew that when we are alone at Christmas, a time that seems intrinsically meant for loved ones congregating (the perpetual renewal of the Nativity scene), our ghosts, borne by memory, absence and regret, would instead arrive.

Dickens knew the power of myth, and how the beautiful lie might reveal the hidden truth. Determined to speak out about the horrors of child labour and poverty he had directly experienced and witnessed, Dickens first toyed with writing a strident but fairly unwieldly political jeremiad until he realised, correctly, that there was a much more seductive approach available, through the Trojan Horse of storytelling. It was all too easy to turn away from a lecture or respond with platitudes and fallacies, but a heart-stirring tale had the ability to get under one’s skin. His characters and settings were constructed not just from satirical observations of the powerful but from encounters Dickens had had with the powerless, during his lengthy night walks around London. He was also deeply inspired, and haunted, by macabre tales that his cockney nursemaid Mary Weller used to delight in telling him as a child — full of Faustian pacts, treacherous innkeepers, poisons “distilled from toads’ eyes and spiders’ knees”, the Black Cat and Captain Murderer. To add to the unease, Weller would claim the horrors were true and she had witnessed them herself or had heard them from relatives who were eyewitnesses. As Dickens later recounted, in The Uncommercial Traveller, she “took a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of introductory overture — by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan”.

A Christmas Carol has this oral tradition feel, albeit delivered in a short, and affordable, novella form. It also rebalances Dickens’s heavy lean towards sentimentality (the pitiable figure of Tiny Tim, for instance) with the resolutely unsentimental tactic of terrifying child readers. This was necessary for reasons of veracity — existence was unsentimental in those days — but also as a myth-making technique. There are few lessons that stay with us longer and deeper than those which strike mortal fear in us and then propose a way out.

At the heart of the story and its extraordinary legacy is loneliness. Rereading A Christmas Carol, its power initially comes from its status as a social tract and a fable. What is crucial, however, is its existential quality. It shows that the system then in place, and perhaps still, not only oppresses and squanders but it also alienates. Dickens takes the traditional Christmas theme of visitation (the announcing angel, the wandering star leading to the Christ child, the shepherds, the Magi) and makes it sinister. Salvation can come only through the painful process of facing the truth (“Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread”). It can only emerge from Scrooge seeing that he has betrayed and marginalised not only his fellow human beings but himself, acknowledging that he belongs to the Malthusian “surplus population” he castigates, that he is alone and bereft (“Will you not speak to me?” he begs the final phantom), and the only precious hope he has left is to be found through gratitude and selfless communion with others.

December 21, 2022

Tom Holland’s Dominion

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West expands on the review he wrote when Holland’s book was first published in 2019:

The Romans are the most “epic” figures in history, to use my young son’s favourite word, exerting a glamour and allure that no civilisation has successfully matched. This magnetism can also appear heightened by what followed, the illiterate bleakness of the early Middle Ages, and the fun-sucking religion that came with it. Many down the years have lamented the switch from the Rome of the Caesars to the Rome of the popes.

The young Tom Holland was one of them. Raised as an Anglican, the historian’s childhood fascination with dinosaurs evolved into one for the equally glamorous ancients. “Although I vaguely continued to believe in God,” he writes: “I found him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. I liked the way that they did not lay down laws, or condemn other deities as demons; I liked their rock-star glamour. As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was more ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of Christianity: that it had ushered in an ‘age of superstition and credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised.”

This, indeed, is a widespread view. Since Gibbon wrote his great work in the late 18th century there has existed the popular idea that the Renaissance, with its return to classical values, and the Enlightenment, which saw the birth of reason over superstition, were a reaction to Christianity, which had in those thousand dark medieval years suppressed science and freedom. 

Yet the truth and paradox, as Holland shows in this truly epic account of how Christianity came to shape the West, is that the western idea of secularism is itself a very Christian one. Liberalism was never a reaction to Christianity, it was a product, perhaps one might heresy; ditto Marxism, socialism and the various progressive creeds of the modern era, right up to the current Great Awokening with its focus on the sanctity of victimhood.

All our assumptions about progress, the rights of the individual, our horror of racism and sexual exploitation, even the acceptance of gay marriage, are the products of Christianity. They are not in themselves universal or “natural”, and to the Romans these ideas of human rights and dignity would have been incomprehensible, laughable even.

Holland made his name with thrilling popular histories set in the ancient world, yet the more he studied antiquity, the more alien it became to him. It wasn’t just that Spartans or Romans killed innocents in large numbers, but that they lacked even the suggestion that the weak might be worth pitying. “That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian,” he writes. 

Cruelties such as the exposure of infants – especially female infants – were almost universally accepted in antiquity, except among one or two small German tribes and, at the other end of the empire, a monotheistic people in the eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps the obscenest horror, however, was the practice of crucifixion, a death so cruel that Roman writers barely touched on the subject. Indeed only “four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross, and then suffer his punishment, have survived from antiquity. Remarkably, they all describe the same execution.”

This is the story of how on that one Friday in Judea the world was changed forever — with a moral revolution like nothing before or since.

December 20, 2022

A true behind-the-scenes look at George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Alexander Adams reports on a new, limited edition of the surviving portion of George Orwell’s manuscript for the novel:

A photo from SP Books’ web page showing the reproduction of Orwell’s manuscript.
SP Books, https://www.spbooks.com/150-1984-9791095457114.html

Published by SP Books, this is Nineteen Eighty-Four as you’ve never seen it before. It reproduces, in colour facsimile, the 197 surviving pages of Orwell’s manuscript, held by the John Hay Library at Brown University, Rhode Island. We see Orwell’s work in fountain pen and ballpoint (complete with ink blots), as well as 14 typewritten sides. We are even given his doodles and pen tests. Readers will remember how Winston also marvels at the beauty of the paper and binding of a blank book he buys from a junk shop.

This edition contains what amounts to 44 per cent of the text of the published novel. It is in a jumbled state, with pages missing and drastic changes made. There are many crossings out and additions. The handwriting can be a little tricky to decipher – Orwell had a habit of using cursive joining lines between words and using abbreviations. Added to that, the script can be somewhat crabbed, especially where Orwell adds text between existing lines. With a little patience, though, the reader can adjust to Orwell’s writing, especially if familiar with the text, and glimpse this most familiar of novels anew.

This version includes an introduction by Orwell scholar DJ Taylor. He tells us that although Orwell usually wrote quickly, he took five years to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four. Taylor details the difficult conditions that explain the novel’s long gestation. The death of Orwell’s first wife in 1945, the effort of raising their young son alone and the toll of tuberculosis all slowed work and drained the author’s energy (tuberculosis would kill him in 1950, only months after the novel’s publication). There are indications that Orwell let the book go to publication even though he thought it was not properly finished.

Looking at this draft, we can see Orwell revising heavily as he wrote. Some revisions are minor, such as Trotsky-figure Goldstein’s description of the workings of the Party and his description of the geopolitics of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Other changes are more significant. Here, in the propaganda film described by Winston at the start of his diary, there is a graphic passage about the lynching of a pregnant black woman. Orwell seems to have cut these lines on grounds of decency. He also reduced the references to race overall, perhaps uncomfortable about the implications of speaking so generally about groups and types. Orwell’s background as a policeman in Burma no doubt made him sensitive to racial issues.

QotD: Myrna Loy

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the first couple of pages of her 1987 memoir Being and Becoming, Myrna Loy gets down to business. Talking about the sex lives of Hollywood stars such as herself, she tells us that “any business involving so many beautiful and high-strung people working together on such intense and intimate terms is bound to breed an easy promiscuity. God knows I’ve fended off my share of amorous men – attractive, desirable men.”

She goes on to provide a short list: John Barrymore (“just because he felt like a little redhead now and then didn’t incline me to join the club …”), Clark Gable (she shoved him off her back porch one night after he made a pass “and, boy, did he punish me for that!”), Spencer Tracy (“he chased me for years, then sulked adorably when I married someone else …”) and Leslie Howard (despite both of them being married he “wanted to whisk me off to the South Seas, and, believe me, that was tempting …”).

“These days you’re made to feel dull and defensive if you weren’t the Whore of Babylon,” Loy writes. “Well, succumbing isn’t the only interesting aspect of a relationship.”

It’s no surprise that a woman who understands this much was such a natural in screwball comedies, where succumbing is usually held at bay until the last shot, the better to draw out the difficulties, obstacles and improbabilities set up like an obstacle course along the way.

Of the over 120 films she made, most of the first half of her career – largely bit parts, vamps and “exotics” – is forgotten, her reputation based on the fourteen she made with William Powell (six of which were Thin Man pictures), along with titles like The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Cheaper by the Dozen.

If she had a type onscreen – and Loy tried hard to avoid becoming a type – she would become Nora Charles, the paragon of wives: supportive but not obsequious, the equal of any spouse, ready with a wisecrack and a bit of fun, and always beautifully turned out. Quite a stretch, she’d admit, for a woman divorced four times, childless and openly dismissive of her domestic skills.

Rick McGinnis, “Do You Take This Woman? Myrna Loy and Third Finger, Left Hand“, Steyn Online, 2022-09-17.

December 18, 2022

Christopher Snowden reviews Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Christopher Snowden praises Doyle’s recent book:

How wrong I was. As Andrew Doyle shows in The New Puritans, it took only a few years for Critical Social Justice to infect the corporate world, government agencies and the media. Most worryingly for a system of thought that favours “lived experience” over objective truth, it became pervasive in higher and lower education.

Doyle had been warning about this for years and kept the receipts. He has a long list of examples of institutional idiocy and persecution to show that there is more to concerns about the “woke brigade” than a right-wing panic over a handful of crazies.

So divorced from reality is Critical Social Justice, that unintentional humour often arises: the CEO of Stonewall accusing lesbians who refuse to date trans women of “sexual racism”; activists becoming uncomfortable with the phrase “trigger warning” because it invokes guns; an American professor of education asserting that “on many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness” (how many levels?).

[…]

Those of us who will never be intimately acquainted with the Frankfurt School owe a debt to Doyle for calmly dissecting the anti-liberal worldview. Doyle himself is a left-wing homosexual who is often portrayed as a Nazi on social media for defending free speech and mocking the “entitled demands and infantile tantrums” of the woke mob.

Borrowing a phrase from Isaiah Berlin, he argues that we are living through a “Counter-Enlightenment” led by “conformists with pretensions of radicalism”. The woke ideology is not a natural extension of left-liberalism, he says, nor of political correctness. It is something far more sinister, regressive and authoritarian. In its Year Zero approach to knowledge and history, it is almost nihilistic.

Academically rigorous but never pretentious, The New Puritans is virtually unimprovable as an analysis of this chilling social phenomenon. It begins and ends with the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, when two vindictive children sent 20 people to their deaths on the basis of nothing more than “spectral evidence” (AKA “lived experience”). The mania ended as quickly as it began when the adults in the room simply stopped believing them.

Doyle believes the current madness will end the same way if we can return to critical thinking and put a stop to ad hominem attacks. Good luck with that. Most of the people he is writing about would sooner burn this book than read it.

QotD: Citation systems and why they were developed

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For this week’s musing I wanted to talk a bit about citation systems. In particular, you all have no doubt noticed that I generally cite modern works by the author’s name, their title and date of publication (e.g. G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road (1972)), but ancient works get these strange almost code-like citations (Xen. Lac. 5.3; Hdt. 7.234.2; Thuc. 5.68; etc.). And you may ask, “What gives? Why two systems?” So let’s talk about that.

The first thing that needs to be noted here is that systems of citation are for the most part a modern invention. Pre-modern authors will, of course, allude to or reference other works (although ancient Greek and Roman writers have a tendency to flex on the reader by omitting the name of the author, often just alluding to a quote of “the poet” where “the poet” is usually, but not always, Homer), but they did not generally have systems of citation as we do.

Instead most modern citation systems in use for modern books go back at most to the 1800s, though these are often standardizations of systems which might go back a bit further still. Still, the Chicago Manual of Style – the standard style guide and citation system for historians working in the United States – was first published only in 1906. Consequently its citation system is built for the facts of how modern publishing works. In particular, we publish books in codices (that is, books with pages) with numbered pages which are typically kept constant in multiple printings (including being kept constant between soft-cover and hardback versions). Consequently if you can give the book, the edition (where necessary), the publisher and a page number, any reader seeing your citation can notionally go get that edition of the book and open to the very page you were looking at and see exactly what you saw.

Of course this breaks down a little with mass-market fiction books that are often printed in multiple editions with inconsistent pagination (thus the endless frustration with trying to cite anything in A Song of Ice and Fire; the fan-made chapter-based citation system for a work without numbered or uniquely named chapters is, I must say, painfully inadequate.) but in a scholarly rather than wiki-context, one can just pick a specific edition, specify it with the facts of publication and use those page numbers.

However the systems for citing ancient works or medieval manuscripts are actually older than consistent page numbers, though they do not reach back into antiquity or even really much into the Middle Ages. As originally published, ancient works couldn’t have static page numbers – had they existed yet, which they didn’t – for a multitude of reasons: for one, being copied by hand, the pagination was likely to always be inconsistent. But for ancient works the broader problem was that while they were written in books (libri) they were not written in books (codices). The book as a physical object – pages, bound together at a spine – is more technically called a codex. After all, that’s not the only way to organize a book. Think of a modern ebook for instance: it is a book, but it isn’t a codex! Well, prior to codex becoming truly common in third and fourth centuries AD, books were typically written on scrolls (the literal meaning of libri, which later came to mean any sort of book), which notably lack pages – it is one continuous scroll of text.

Of course those scrolls do not survive. Rather, ancient works were copied onto codices during Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages and those survive. When we are lucky, several different “families” of manuscripts for a given work survive (this is useful because it means we can compare those manuscripts to detect transcription errors; alas in many cases we have only one manuscript or one clearly related family of manuscripts which all share the same errors, though such errors are generally rare and small).

With the emergence of the printing press, it became possible to print lots of copies of these works, but that combined with the manuscript tradition created its own problems: which manuscript should be the authoritative text and how ought it be divided? On the first point, the response was the slow and painstaking work of creating critical editions that incorporate the different manuscript traditions: a main text on the page meant to represent the scholar’s best guess at the correct original text with notes (called an apparatus criticus) marking where other manuscripts differ. On the second point it became necessary to impose some kind of organizing structure on these works.

The good news is that most longer classical works already had a system of larger divisions: books (libri). A long work would be too long for a single scroll and so would need to be broken into several; its quite clear from an early point that authors were aware of this and took advantage of that system of divisions to divide their works into “books” that had thematic or chronological significance. Where such a standard division didn’t exist, ancient libraries, particularly in Alexandria, had imposed them and the influence of those libraries as the standard sources for originals from which to make subsequent copies made those divisions “canon”. Because those book divisions were thus structurally important, they were preserved through the transition from scrolls to codices (as generally clearly marked chapter breaks), so that the various “books” served as “super-chapters”.

But sub-divisions were clearly necessary – a single librum is pretty long! The earliest system I am aware of for this was the addition of chapter divisions into the Vulgate – the Latin-language version of the Bible – in the 13th century. Versification – breaking the chapters down into verses – in the New Testament followed in the early 16th century (though it seems necessary to note that there were much older systems of text divisions for the Tanakh though these were not always standardized).

The same work of dividing up ancient texts began around the same time as versification for the Bible. One started by preserving the divisions already present – book divisions, but also for poetry line divisions (which could be detected metrically even if they were not actually written out in individual lines). For most poetic works, that was actually sufficient, though for collections of shorter poems it became necessary to put them in a standard order and then number them. For prose works, chapter and section divisions were imposed by modern editors. Because these divisions needed to be understandable to everyone, over time each work developed its standard set of divisions that everyone uses, codified by critical texts like the Oxford Classical Texts or the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (or “Teubners”).

Thus one cited these works not by the page numbers in modern editions, but rather by these early-modern systems of divisions. In particular a citation moves from the larger divisions to the smaller ones, separating each with a period. Thus Hdt. 7.234.2 is Herodotus, Book 7, chapter 234, section 2. In an odd quirk, it is worth noting classical citations are separated by periods, but Biblical citations are separated by colons. Thus John 3:16 but Liv. 3.16. I will note that for readers who cannot access these texts in the original language, these divisions can be a bit frustrating because they are often not reproduced in modern translations for the public (and sometimes don’t translate well, where they may split the meaning of a sentence), but I’d argue that this is just a reason for publishers to be sure to include the citation divisions in their translations.

That leaves the names of authors and their works. The classical corpus is a “closed” corpus – there is a limited number of works and new ones don’t enter very often (occasionally we find something on a papyrus or lost manuscript, but by “occasionally” I mean “about once in a lifetime”) so the full details of an author’s name are rarely necessary. I don’t need to say “Titus Livius of Patavium” because if I say Livy you know I mean Livy. And in citation as in all publishing, there is a desire for maximum brevity, so given a relatively small number of known authors it was perhaps inevitable that we’d end up abbreviating all of their names. Standard abbreviations are helpful here too, because the languages we use today grew up with these author’s names and so many of them have different forms in different languages. For instance, in English we call Titus Livius “Livy” but in French they say Tite-Live, Spanish says Tito Livio (as does Italian) and the Germans say Livius. These days the most common standard abbreviation set used in English are those settled on by the Oxford Classical Dictionary; I am dreadfully inconsistent on here but I try to stick to those. The OCD says “Livy”, by the by, but “Liv.” is also a very common short-form of his name you’ll see in citations, particularly because it abbreviates all of the linguistic variations on his name.

And then there is one final complication: titles. Ancient written works rarely include big obvious titles on the front of them and often were known by informal rather than formal titles. Consequently when standardized titles for these works formed (often being systematized during the printing-press era just like the section divisions) they tended to be in Latin, even when the works were in Greek. Thus most works have common abbreviations for titles too (again the OCD is the standard list) which typically abbreviate their Latin titles, even for works not originally in Latin.

And now you know! And you can use the link above to the OCD to decode classical citations you see.

One final note here: manuscripts. Manuscripts themselves are cited by an entirely different system because providence made every part of paleography to punish paleographers for their sins. A manuscript codex consists of folia – individual leaves of parchment (so two “pages” in modern numbering on either side of the same physical page) – which are numbered. Then each folium is divided into recto and verso – front and back. Thus a manuscript is going to be cited by its catalog entry wherever it is kept (each one will have its own system, they are not standardized) followed by the folium (‘f.’) and either recto (r) or verso (v). Typically the abbreviation “MS” leads the catalog entry to indicate a manuscript. Thus this picture of two men fighting is MS Thott.290.2º f.87r (it’s in Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen):

MS Thott.290.2º f.87r which can also be found on the inexplicably well maintained Wiktenauer; seriously every type of history should have as dedicated an enthusiast community as arms and armor history.

And there you go.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, June 10, 2022”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-10.

December 17, 2022

QotD: The female murderer

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Each volume of Notable British Trials came with a lengthy introduction by its editor, many of whom were distinguished writers — for example, William Roughead, the originator of the true-crime genre and much admired by Henry James; or F. Tennyson Jesse, the poet’s great-niece, a good novelist and author of a wonderful study of murderers, Murder and Its Motives, which remains in use. She wrote with cool irony about the worst crime in the criminal code; she says, for instance, of some women murderers:

    The woman who murders her husband has nearly always ceased to think of him as such, and cannot really believe that he ever stood in that relationship towards her. It is only a tiresome insistence on the part of the law that makes her drastic step necessary. She loves another man who is her husband “in the sight of God”, and it is to her both unreasonable and indecent that the first man should be obstructing her path.

Jesse writes things that I think would nowadays call down upon her all the anathemata of which right-thinking intellectuals are capable. In describing the trial of a Mrs. Carew, who poisoned her husband in order to join her illicit lover, Jesse says:

    Her counsel made a point that did not succeed in weighing the scales in her favour … but which shows him to have been a man of some penetration in the matter of female psychology. He said: “It must be borne in mind that a woman never thinks it wrong for a man to be in love with her”, and when he said that he said something profoundly true. A woman may think it shows a lack of pride, utter shamelessness, complete lack of all decent feeling for another woman to be in love with her husband, but she will always feel convinced that it is a sign of something nice and perspicacious in a man for him to be in love with her.

This was written in 1924. Subsequently, it seems to me, male psychology has — in this regard, anyway — become feminized; what once applied specially to women now applies equally to men.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Quiet Evening’s Reading: Notable British Trials is as complete an inventory of human depravity as has ever been assembled”, City Journal, 2018-06-24.

December 15, 2022

QotD: From The Stepford Wives to The Handmaid’s Tale

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Hey, did you know The Stepford Wives was published 50 years ago today? Salon does:

    Why feminist horror novel The Stepford Wives is still relevant, 50 years on

But before we get to the fisking (I’m running on fumes, y’all; the end of the summer is always the worst time for me), let’s pause for a moment to consider the TV show. You’d think there’d be one, right? Either that, or this is stoyak — The Stepford Wives, coming fall 2022 to Disney Plus. But it doesn’t appear to be. I googled “stepford wives tv show” and got this, which looks trashy enough, but in no way related to the book or movie. There was a remake of the 1970s movie back in 2004, but it bombed.

Odd, no? You’d think that shit would be chick crack — all those Strongk Confidant Wahmens digging into conspiracies and Sticking it to the Man ™. At least, that’s what I thought back in 2004. I thought the casting was dodgy — Kidman was too old (and too glamorous; you really need a pretty-but-not-Hollywood-pretty type) and Matthew Broderick too nebbishy. Nonetheless, I thought the premise would be strong enough to overcome it — oh, you poor, put-upon ladies! But nope.

And then The Handmaid’s Tale happened, as my students would’ve written back in the days, and now I understand why I’m wrong. I should’ve seen it 20 years ago, but better late than never, right? Let’s all have a good laugh at the really obvious thing I missed back in 2004: Strongk, Confidant Wahmens are neither strong nor confident, nor do they want to be either. They want the thinnest veneer of the pretense of the fantasy of those things, delivered to them by a man who comes on like Chad Thundercock, but always somehow has the time to listen to her.

The Handmaid’s Tale, that’s the real chick crack. It’s highbrow bondage porn for the kind of tertiary-educated lady who thinks Fifty Shades of Gray is way too trashy to rent (except, you know, one Girls’ Night with a box of white whine, as a “guilty pleasure”). It gets her all fired up for busting balls at the next partners’ meeting down at the law firm. So empowering!

In The Stepford Wives, book and original movie, the housewives are replaced by robots. The author, Ira Levin, was a guy, and I bet you could tell that just from the one-sentence plot summary. Being replaced by a robot isn’t a “feminist” fear, it’s a male fear. The worry that you’re nothing but a wallet with a criminally underserved dick attached has been pervasive among men since probably the Puritans. It’s a neat trick on Levin’s part, racking up mucho feminist street cred by selling them the #1 male neurosis of the postwar world.

Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.

December 13, 2022

Egypt’s postwar Nazi military advisors

Filed under: Africa, Books, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, James Barr reviews a book on the roles of former Nazi military and political figures in the Egyptian forces, Nazis on the Nile: The German Military Advisers in Egypt 1949-1967 by Vyvyan Kinross:

One of the paradoxes of the early postwar era is that, after Germany’s defeat, the Nazis were vilified at the same time that their expertise was sought after by both Cold War superpowers. Germans played key roles in both sides’ space programmes. Less infamous is the part they also went on to play in the Egyptian rocket programme, one of the subjects in this fascinating and disturbing book.

After suffering a humiliating defeat in the war that followed the establishment of Israel, the Egyptians wanted revenge. As the British had refused to help them — despite maintaining a deeply unpopular and large presence astride the Suez Canal — Egypt’s sybaritic King Farouq turned to his enemy’s enemy instead. In 1949 he commissioned an Afrika Korps general, Artur Schmitt, to review the Egyptian army.

Having checked in to a Cairo hotel under the name “Herr Goldstein”, Schmitt inspected Egyptian units and went on to Syria to survey Israel from the Golan Heights. The Egyptians’ failure to combine tanks, artillery and infantry effectively, he decided, explained their “inability to take advantage of the early stages of fighting to wipe the State of Israel off the map”.

Schmitt’s forthright conclusions were unwelcome, and he did not stay long. But some younger Egyptian army officers shared his views and, after they had overthrown Farouq in 1952, they picked up where the king had left off. Within days they offered Fritz Voss, the former head of the Skoda arms factory in Pilsen, the job of masterminding the retraining of the army and the establishment of a military industrial base that could produce jet aircraft and missiles.

Voss in turn invited old contacts to join him, including Wilhelm Beisner, an SS officer who had been part of Einsatzkommando Egypt, which would have spearheaded the Holocaust in Palestine had Rommel won at El Alamein. The Germans found Egyptian working conditions challenging. “Here one has to act much more slowly than in Prussia,” complained a German instructor who found “Oriental sloppiness” irritating. Of forty tanks lined up for a parade to celebrate the first anniversary of the coup, just twelve made it past the junta’s rostrum.

The author, Vyvyan Kinross, is a consultant by profession. He has advised Arab governments and clearly understands the fundamental problems. “The battle” for the Germans, he writes, “was always to reconcile finance, resourcing and the expertise required to execute a sophisticated manufacturing process with the challenging conditions and logistics that prevailed in a country that was late to industrialise and financially underpowered.”

December 12, 2022

“The reason that Canada’s arts do not resonate with 95% of Canadians is that they are products of socialist realism’

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the parasitic world of official “Canadian culture” with its gatekeepers, subsidies, and luxury beliefs:

When I say society, I don’t mean the upper reaches of the wealthy. While we do have the very rich in Canada, they are rigorous in their hiddenness because we have the worst lefties on the continent and that is saying something. The safe thing for any wealthy family is give $ to socialists, bow and scrape to the harpies at the CBC and hope they don’t notice your bank balance. Anyway, these dreadful people arrived post WW2 with their hideous Frankfurt School ideas and just preyed on the simplest most innocent well-meaning good white people you could ever imagine, and literally ate, ravenous and braying all the while, the country’s potential.

So the scandal took place among them, or rather the world they created, which is basically a clutch of 150,000 grifters located between Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec City, whose only mission is to divest the government of as much public money as possible. This is particularly true of their defensive line which consists of the arts and journalism. Theirs is a world where no stone is left unsubsidized by taxes on the hidden rich, waitresses at truck stops in Kamloops and anyone who dares to make money unapproved by the CBC. They are, as a former editor swore to me, the gatekeepers. That was before her circulation collapsed by 65%., but no doubt she still believes it.

The arts and media in Canada are constructed entirely for the 5%, consumed by those who live the lush subsidized life — or those who want to — whether in government or in semi-independent corporations or businesses who require government help and “seed” money etc. (There are a hundred terms for the grift.)

Books, if you look at their sales, are tragic. There have been a handful of impressive films, despite the literal billions thrown at filmmakers over the past 20 years. Most of them are catastrophically depressing, the books make you want to cut out your heart with a grapefruit spoon. Painters paint, if you subtract all the hectoring from minor artists, from forced inclusion, some of them are very good. We can create good art. But not with our current curators.

The reason that Canada’s arts do not resonate with 95% of Canadians is that they are products of socialist realism. They describe humans and human life as they either believe it to have been (dark and in need of enlightened beings like themselves) or as they feel it must be in the future (filled with people expressing their oppression and being paid for it). It’s basically fantasy, and no one likes it, watches it, reads it.

The rest of Canada is a centre-right country, a gut-it-out-and-build-it-kind of place. I know that is the exact opposite of the propaganda, but Conservatives win a majority of the votes in every election, yet still only amount to 40%. We have five parties, and four of them are leftie — their platforms are all “more money for us” — but the big party, the one that receives about 30% of the vote is so crafty, so embedded in our vast vast bureaucracy that fixing the game is child’s play. Informed by their Frankfurt School gurus, they have been in power 100 years, with brief Conservative interludes.

We take in about half a million immigrants a year, and most of them are from desperate places. Vote harvesting in those neighborhoods is done by leaders in each immigrant community. These men and women are the strongest, most educated and frankly from the ones I’ve met, thuggish, and through them comes all access to government programs, housing and education. Therefore, when they collect your vote, you know for whom your vote is meant. The thing about immigrants though is that they were coming for the old Canada, not the new Commie police state.

But for now? Easy. No one investigates this. Why not? Our media is subsidized. ALL of it.

The British Empire(s)

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Spiked, James Heartfield discusses the changing attitudes toward British imperial history:

Renewed interest in the history of the British Empire has generated a great amount of fascinating research and reflection. Over the past decade or more, there have been many books written about the empire – popular, academic, polemical and picaresque. There has been Akala’s Natives, William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire and Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence, to name just a few.

Today’s approach to the British Empire is invariably critical – often stridently so. It marks a change to the attitude widely held half a century ago, when books on the empire tended to be elegiac farewells, like Paul Scott’s novel, The Jewel in the Crown, or Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica. Today’s critical approach to the empire is certainly a far cry from that which prevailed for a brief moment around the time that Margaret Thatcher was taking back the Falkland Islands. Back then, there was even an attempt at the moral rehabilitation of the empire.

[…]

But there are downsides to the self-excoriating criticism of Britain’s past. Often this approach to history turns into a debilitating exercise in self-loathing, an act of guilt-mongering. Many others have pointed out the limitations of this kind of morbid raking over the coals. But what is just as worrying is that the more we posture over Britain’s colonial past, the less we seem to understand it.

The moralistic framework in which we teach and discuss colonial history reduces our understanding to a single note of complaint. Hence, many historians today now write as if they have to make a case against the empire. This is just kicking at an open door. The empire has very few champions today. And the great British public is certainly not nostalgic for its return, despite some commentators arguing otherwise. Indeed, an ever growing majority think that the empire was a bad thing.

There is another problem with this approach to Britain’s colonial past. It situates readers outside of history. It encourages them to adopt a moralistic rather than historical approach to colonialism. They can do little more than judge the empire as evil. And in doing so, it flattens out the different periods of the colonial project into one long uniform timeline of subjugation. Collapsing distinct periods and stages together leads to a great confusion. For instance, in many accounts, there appears to be little difference between 18th-century British colonialism, which was dominated by slave trading, and the British colonialism of the late 19th century, which was marked by anti-slavery. It is important not to reduce the long history of the empire to a single motivating cause, be it the “English genius” of earlier celebratory accounts or today’s contention that it was all driven by “white supremacy”.

I seek to address these problems in my new book, Britain’s Empires: A History, 1600-2020. There I draw out the differences between the distinctive stages of Britain’s colonial history.

To do this, it is necessary to step back from moral judgement, which foregrounds our attitudes today, in order to try to understand what motivated people back then. That often means looking at a society’s changing social and economic organisation. Britain’s Empires is a history of the empire that holds on to a sense of historical change, and tries to understand the interrelation of its component parts.

The distinct eras of British colonialism are: the Old Colonialism (1600 to 1776); the Empire of Free Trade (1776-1870); the New Colonialism (1870-1945); and the period of decolonisation during the Cold War era (1946-1989). Britain’s Empires ends with an account of the “humanitarian imperialism” of the 1990s up until the present day. This periodisation aims to reflect the objective moments of transition.

December 10, 2022

QotD: The Western Roman Empire – “decline and fall” or “change and continuity”?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So who are our [academic] combatants? To understand this, we have to lay out a bit of the “history of the history” – what is called historiography in technical parlance. Here I am also going to note the rather artificial but importance field distinction here between ancient (Mediterranean) history and medieval European history. As we’ll see, viewing this as the end of the Roman period gives quite a different impression than viewing it as the beginning of a new European Middle Ages. The two fields “connect” in Late Antiquity (the term for this transitional period, broadly the 4th to 8th centuries), but most programs and publications are either ancient or medieval and where scholars hail from can lead to different (not bad, different) perspectives.

With that out of the way, the old view, that of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) and indeed largely the view of the sources themselves, was that the disintegration of the western half of the Roman polity was an unmitigated catastrophe, a view that held largely unchallenged into the last century; Gibbon’s great work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1789) gives this school its name, “decline and fall“. While I am going at points to gesture to Gibbon’s thinking, we’re not going to debate him; he is the “old man” of our title. Gibbon himself largely exists only in historiographical footnotes and intellectual histories; he is not at this point seriously defended nor seriously attacked but discussed as the venerable, but now out of date, origin point for all of this bickering.

The real break with that view came with the work of Peter Brown, initially in his The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and more or less canonically in The Rise of Western Christendom (1st ed. 1996; 2nd ed. 2003, 3rd ed. 2013). The normal way to refer to the Peter Brown school of thought is “change and continuity” (in contrast to the traditional “decline and fall”), though I rather like James O’Donnell’s description of it as the Reformation in late antique studies.

Among medievalists this reformed view, which focuses on continuity of culture and institutions from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, remains essentially the orthodoxy, to the point that, for instance, the very recent (and quite excellent) The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (2021) can present this vision as an uncomplicated fact, describing the “so-called Fall of Rome” and noting that “there was never a moment in the next thousand years in which at least one European or Mediterranean ruler didn’t claim political legitimacy through a credible connection to the empire of the Romans” and that “the idea that Rome ‘fell’ on the other hand, relies upon a conception of homogeneity – of historical stasis … things changed. But things always change” (3-4, 12-3). As we’ll see, I don’t entirely disagree with those statements, but they are absolute to a degree that suggests there is no real challenge to the position. There have been a few cracks in this orthodoxy among medievalists, particularly the work of Robin Flemming (a revision, not a clear break, to be sure), to which we’ll return, but the cracks have been relatively few.

While some ancient historians also bought into this view, purchase there has always been uneven and seems, to me at least, now to be waning further. Instead, a process of what James O’Donnell describes as a “counter-reformation” (which he stoutly resists with his own The Ruin of the Roman Empire; O’Donnell is a declared reformer) is well underway, a response to the “change and continuity” narrative which seeks to update and defend the notion that there really was a fall of Rome and that it really was quite bad actually. This is not, I should note, an effort to revive Gibbon per se; it does not typically accept his understanding of the cause of this decline (and often characterizes exactly what is declining differently). Nevertheless, this position too is sometimes termed the “decline and fall” school. My own sense of the field is that while nearly all ancient historians will feel the need to concede at least some validity to the reformed “change and continuity” vision, that the counter-reformation school is the majority view among ancient historians at this point (in a way that is particularly evident in overview treatments like textbooks or the Cambridge Ancient History (second edition)). We’ll meet many of the core works of this revised “decline and fall” school as we go.

As O’Donnell noted in a 2005 review for the BMCR, the reformed school tends to be strongest in the study of the imperial east rather than the west (something that will make a lot of sense in a moment), and in religious and cultural history; the counter-reformation school is stronger in the west than the east and in military and political history, though as we’ll see, to that list must at this point now be added archaeology along with demographic and economic history, at which point the weight of fields tends to get more than a little lopsided.

Those are our two knights – the “change and continuity” knight and the “decline and fall” knight (and our old man Gibbon, long out of his dueling days). To this we must add the nitwit: a popular vision, held by functionally no modern scholars, which represents the Middle Ages in their entirety as a retreat from a position of progress during the Roman period which was only regained during the “Renaissance” (generally represented as a distinct period from the Middle Ages) which then proceeded into the upward trajectory of the early modern period. Intellectually, this vision traces back to what Renaissance thinkers thought about themselves and their own disdain for “medieval” scholastic thinking (that is, to be clear, the thinking of their older teachers), a late Medieval version of “this ain’t your daddy’s rock and roll!”

But almost every intellectual movement represents itself as a radical break with the past (including, amusingly, many of the scholastics! Let me tell you about Peter Abelard sometime); as historians we do not generally accept such claims uncritically at face value. For a long time, well into the 19th century, the Renaissance’s cultural cachet in Europe (and the cachet of the classical period where it drew its inspiration) shielded that Renaissance claim from critique; that patina now having worn thin, most scholars now reject it, positioning the Renaissance as a continuation (with variations on the theme) of the Middle Ages, a smooth transition rather than a hard break. At the same time, knowledge of developments within the Middle Ages have made the image of one unbroken “Dark Age” untenable and made clear that the “upswing” of the early modern period was already well underway in the later Middle Ages and in turn had its roots stretching even deeper into the period. It is also worth noting here, that the term “Dark Age” has to do with the survival of evidence, not living conditions: the age was not dark because it was grim, it was dark because we cannot see it as clearly.

The popular version of this idea continues, however, to have a lot of sway in the popular conception of the Middle Ages, encouraged by popular culture that mistakes the excesses of the early modern period for “medieval” superstition and exaggerates the poverty of the medieval period (itself essentialized to its worst elements despite being approximately a millennia long), all summed up in this graph:

We are mostly going to just dunk relentlessly on this graph and yet we will not cover even half of the necessary dunking this graph demands. We may begin by noting that in its last century, the Roman Empire was Christian, a point apparently missed here.

While that sort of vision is not seriously debated by scholars, it needs to be addressed here too, in part because I suspect a lot of the energy behind the “change and continuity” position is in fact to counter some of the worst excesses of this thesis, which for simplicity, we’ll just refer to as “The Dung Ages” argument, but also because assessing how bad the fall of the Roman Empire in the West was demands that we consider how long-lasting any negative ramifications were.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.

December 9, 2022

Caesar versus Cato

Filed under: Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Daisy Dunn reviews Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato destroyed the Roman Republic by Josiah Osgood:

If there was one thing the Romans did well — aside from sanitation, irrigation and concrete — it was polemic. Cicero composed fourteen fiery Philippics against Mark Antony in the 40s BC, and Catullus jibed at Julius Caesar so profusely in his poems that he had to issue an apology. Less famous, but equally explosive, was Caesar’s own collection of vitriol. The Anticato survives today only in fragments, but according to an ancient satirist, it was originally so long that it took up two scrolls and almost outweighed the penis of Publius Clodius Pulcher, apparently among the best-endowed politicians in Rome.

Caesar wrote it shortly before he became dictator, with the intention of denigrating the memory of Marcus Porcius Cato, “Cato the Younger”. For years the two men had been locked in furious rivalry. Caesar blasted Cato as cold and miserly. Cato despaired at Caesar’s profligacy and tireless womanising. If Caesar was louche in his barely-belted toga and exotic unguents, Cato was positively austere — a prime hair-shirt candidate — with his bare feet, rustic diet, extreme exercise and strict sexual mores; it was most unusual for a Roman to make his wife the first woman he slept with.

Few would argue with Josiah Osgood, Professor of Classics at Georgetown, when he describes Caesar and Cato as opposites. Even Donald Trump and Joe Biden have more in common than they did. Caesar was the nephew of the wife of Gaius Marius, the populist enemy of Sulla, who as dictator had thousands of Italians proscribed and killed in his bid to restore the authority of the Senate. Cato could count Sulla as an old family friend. Caesar belonged to a well-established Roman family and claimed descent from Venus via her son Aeneas. Cato’s family was Sabine, and his most famous ancestor was a mere mortal in the shape of the plebeian writer and highly conservative statesman Cato the Elder.

The differences between Caesar’s and Cato’s personalities mattered because they reflected the differences in their visions for Rome. Osgood sums these up as “an empire wielding its power for the people” (Caesar) versus “a Senate protecting the people from the all-powerful empire builders” (Cato). It is little wonder they came to blows.

Osgood takes the tense relationship between Cato and Caesar as the central focus of his book. He argues that their feud has been overlooked as a contributing factor to the civil war that erupted in 49 BC and brought the Roman Republic crashing to the ground. Blame for this war has more usually been placed on the collapse of the First Triumvirate — an illegal alliance for power forged between Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus in 60 BC — and the breakdown in relations between Caesar and Pompey in particular. But all wars have long-term and short-term causes. For Osgood, the dispute between Caesar and Cato was significant in at least the medium term.

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