Caldwell’s account is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding how those resentments grew until they finally exploded under Barack Obama. The Tea Party was the first real movement of this sort; the collapse of immigration reform proposals under George W. Bush and then under Obama revealed how powerful these feelings were; Trump managed to wrap them all up into a populist fervor that was distributed geographically enough to give him a win in the Electoral College. Liberals, increasingly ensconced in their own economic and social bubble, were shocked.
Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.
But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.
So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.
I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.
Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?
Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.
November 21, 2024
November 19, 2024
QotD: The Reformation
Your hotter Protestants, your John Calvins and Oliver Cromwells and so on, saw all of this as mere ritual. And to be fair to them, late-medieval Catholicism was very elaborate, and very, very weird — slog through a few chapters of The Stripping of the Altars if you want the details. To the Prods, this was cheating — you can’t just go through the motions and expect to get into Heaven. They made a similar distinction between “natural magic” and the unlawful stuff — the one was undertaken only after deep study and the most rigorous self-purification, while the other “worked” entirely mechanically, because what the sorcerer was really doing was cheating; he was really making a deal with a (or The) devil, to short-circuit the natural processes.
Now, it’s important to realize that the Protestants were not saying anything close to “do your own thing, man”. They were NOT hippies, encouraging everyone to read the Bible and decide for themselves how best to commune with the Big JC. The German peasants thought that’s what Martin Luther was saying back in 1524, but Luther himself was out there urging the authorities to smash the peasants with extreme prejudice. The Protestants were, in fact, extremely concerned about ritual. It just had to be the right ritual, the Biblically sanctioned ritual, and nothing but that — that’s what “Puritanism” (originally an insult) means.
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
November 14, 2024
Early Christianity – from ~1,000 to 40 million believers in the Roman Empire
The latest book review at Astral Codex Ten is Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity:
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
Rodney Stark was a sociologist of religion. He started off studying cults, and got his big break when the first missionaries of the Unification Church (“Moonies”) in the US let him tag along and observe their activities. After a long and successful career in academia, he turned his attention to the greatest cult of all and wrote The Rise Of Christianity. He spends much of it apologizing for not being a classical historian, but it’s fine — he’s obviously done his homework, and he hopes to bring a new, modern-religion-informed perspective to the ancient question.
So: how did early Christianity win?
November 10, 2024
QotD: The low social status of shepherds in the ancient and medieval world
One the one hand, there is a robust literature, beginning in the Greek and Roman literary corpus, which idealizes rustic life, particularly shepherding. Starting with Theocritus’ short pastoral poems (called eidullion, “little poems” from where we get the word idyll as in calling a scene “idyllic”) and running through Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which present the pure rural simplicity of the countryside and pastoralism as a welcome contrast to the often “sordid” and unhealthy environment of the city (remember the way these “gentlemen farmers” tend to think about merchants and markets in cities, after all). This idolization only becomes more intense in Europe with the advent of Christianity and the grand metaphorical significance that shepherding in particular – as distinct from other rural activities – takes on. It would thus be easy to assume just from reading this sort of high literature that shepherds were well thought of, especially in a Christian social context.
But by and large just as the elite love of the idea of rural simplicity did not generally lead to a love of actual farming peasants, so too their love of the idea of pastoral simplicity did not generally lead to an actually high opinion of the folks who did that work, nor did it lead shepherds to any kind of high social status. While the exact social position of shepherds and their relation to the broader society could vary (as we’ll see), they tended to be relatively low-status and poor individuals. The “shepherds out tending their flocks by night” of Luke 2:8 are not important men. Indeed, the “night crew” of shepherds are some of the lowest status and poorest free individuals who could possibly see that religious sign, a point in the text that is missed by many modern readers.
We see a variety of shepherding strategies which impact what kind of shepherds might be out with flocks. Small peasant households might keep a few sheep (along with say, chickens or pigs) to provide for the household’s wool needs. In some cases, a village might pool those sheep together to make a flock which one person would tend (a job which often seems to have gone to either fairly young individuals or else the elderly – that is, someone who might not be as useful in the hard labor on the farm itself, since shepherding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of strength).
Larger operations by dedicated shepherds often involved wage-laborers or enslaved laborers tending flocks of sheep and pastured owned by other, higher status and wealthier individuals. Thus for instance, Diodorus’s description of the Sicilian slave revolts (in 135 and 104 BC; the original Diodorus, book 36, is lost but two summaries survive, those of Photios and Constantine Porphyrogennetos), we’re told that the the flocks belonging to the large estates of Roman magnates in the lowland down by the coast were tended by enslaved shepherds in significant numbers (and treated very poorly; when a Greek source like Diodorus who is entirely comfortable with slavery is nevertheless noting the poor treatment, it must be poor indeed). Likewise, there is a fair bit of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia indicating that the flocks of sheep themselves were often under state or temple control (e.g. W. Sallaberger, “The Value of Wool in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia” or S. Zawadzki, “‘If you have sheep, you have all you need’: Sheep Husbandry and Wool in the Economy of the Neo-Babylonian Ebaddar Temple at Sippar” both in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel, (2014)) and that it was the temple or the king that might sell or dispose of the wool; the shepherds were only laborers (free or unfree is often unclear).
Full time shepherds could – they didn’t always, but could – come under suspicion as effective outsiders to the fully sedentary rural communities they served as well. Diodorus in the aforementioned example is quick to note that banditry in Sicily was rife because the enslaved shepherds were often armed – armed to protect their flocks because banditry was rife; we are left to conclude that Diodorus at least thinks the banditry in question is being perpetrated by the shepherds, evidently sometimes rustling sheep from other enslaved shepherds. A similar disdain for the semi-nomadic herding culture of peoples like the Amorites is sometimes evident in Mesopotamian texts. And of course that the very nature of transhumance meant that shepherds often spent long periods away from home sleeping with their flocks in temporary shelters and generally “roughing it” exposed to weather.
Consequently, while owning large numbers of sheep and pastures for them could be a contributor to high status (and thus merit elite remark, as with Pliny’s long discussion of sheep in book 8 of his Natural History), actually tending sheep was mostly a low-status job and not generally well remunerated (keeping on poor Pliny here, it is notable that in several long sections on sheep he never once mentions shepherds). Shepherds were thus generally towards the bottom of the social pyramid in most pre-modern societies, below the serf or freeholding farmer who might at least be entitled to the continued use of their land.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
November 9, 2024
QotD: George Bernard Shaw
H.L. Mencken, “Shaw as Platitudinarian”, The Smart Set, 1916-08.
October 27, 2024
QotD: Puritans, predestination, and the Ranters
The outpourings of radical thought in the English Civil Wars included sects who came to exactly this conclusion. The Ranters, at least by reputation, advocated a lifestyle of Dionysiac excess. If orgies and boozing, gluttony and blasphemy did not have any material impact on whether you were going to heaven or hell, then why not shag, indulge and curse the Lord as much as you want?
The extent of their membership is disputed and the fear of the Ranters was strong among the Puritans, partly, I suspect, because the logical fallacy of the original tenet is so glaringly obvious. Many of the theological arguments espoused by the men who were labelled Ranters were more textured and complicated than a license to loucheness. But the essential point remains: if you are already damned, your actions and intent are irrelevant.
The Puritan response was a horrified recoil. If God has made you one of the elect, you have a responsibility to Him to behave as if you are elect. A rare few came to believe they were not elect, and tortured themselves with it. If this sounds familiar, you have probably met an apologetic white male ally of the woke.
Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.
October 24, 2024
QotD: From the OG Pontifex Maximus to the Pope
The Protestants might be happy to hear Misanthrope claim this would make you sick, because they’d correctly state that absolutely none of this is in the Bible. The entire liturgical structure of the Catholic Church is pagan, an inherited but corrupted structure from classical antiquity. Thus, a great majority of historic Christianity is syncretic. You might even say haphazardly pagan. The very idea of a high priest who would oversee the spiritual and religious duties is copped by the Pope’s role in Catholicism. The vestments worn by Catholic clergy, the use of incense (especially frankincense, the main herb used by invocations in Hellenism), chants, the sanctification of holy spaces, and the very architecture of Catholic cathedrals are derived from religious practices of pagan Rome. Let’s not get into art. The processions, the veneration of saints (akin to the Roman household gods or Lares), ancestor worship (which Catholics pretend they don’t do), and the hierarchical structure all reflect a continuity from Rome’s Hellenic pagan past. The Catholic Church’s liturgy, with its detailed rituals and sacraments is a direct continuation of the Greco-Roman pagan way of embedding religious practice into every aspect of public and private life. The transformation of its pantheon of gods into a multitude of saints, each with specific roles and domains is indistinguishable from how they interacted with their deities.
Fortissax, “Spiteful Mutant Christians”, Fortissax is Typing, 2024-07-19.
[NR: Glossary links added.]
October 20, 2024
Debunking the “Muslims saved the Graeco-Roman legacy” intellectual urban legend
In my weekly set of recommendations from Substack there was a link to A History of Mankind‘s debunking of what is described as an “intellectual urban legend”:
Islamic scholars at an Abbasid library in Baghdad.
Illustration by Yahyá al-Wasiti from 1237 via Wikimedia Commons.
Among the most popular of those legends, there’s one that can be summarized as “Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten”. This a surprisingly widespread view. I’ve lived in several countries, and heard versions of this legend, often told in very simple terms over somewhat complicated drinks, from well-educated people often working in academia or the financial sector (which makes more sense than it appears — I’ve worked in the financial sector myself, and people there are highly educated as a rule).
I’ve even heard scholars (normally not Medievalists) express this view, and I’ve read views to this effect in multiple occasions. Just Google “did the arabs save graeco-roman books” and look at the top results, if you don’t believe me. Lots of well-educated people believe this, not to speak of history enthusiasts all over the Internet.
However, the truth is that Arab translators had only a modest impact on the transmission of Graeco-Roman texts to modern times. There are various reasons that explain this, but first let me provide some clarity on why Baghdad’s Medieval “House of Wisdom” — oft-cited, correctly, as the center of the Abbasid-era translation movement inasmuch as there was one — is one of history’s most misunderstood institutions.
The House of Wisdom functioned as a state library with a focus on the transcription and storage of manuscripts, and their translation to the court’s main language, Arabic. Based on a similar library patronized by the Sasanian emperors and staffed with some of its personnel from about the 8th century, the House of Wisdom employed Christian Greek speakers – very few Muslims spoke or read Greek fluently in this era and others, particularly Arabs – as well as Muslim and Zoroastrian Arabic or Syriac speakers who worked to translate and disseminate work.
[…]
Just to give a final touch of class to these absurd claims, Abu Sahl added the detail that the Greeks, dunces as they all are, forgot to actually steal many Iranian books, and simply memorized the contents before they torched them, so the actual Greek copies of Iranian greats are, by necessity, inferior versions diluted by the Greeks’ faulty memory.
Some Muslim scholars later came up with a new wrinkle that Byzantines were poor keepers of their own treasures, and their books were eaten by insects, as the bibliographer Al-Nadim (932-995) wrote in a second- or third-hand anecdote about some guy who visited Constantinople and was sad to see some ancient temple filled with neglected books, later widely quoted, and included in his Index of 987. The same Al-Nadim transmits from someone “trustworthy” that the Byzantines burned fifteen loads of books by Archimedes, which never happened.
Abdullah Ibn-abi-Zayd (922–998), a prolific North African writer on Islamic law, came up with a wrinkle for this wrinkle: that the Byzantine emperor gathered books and hid them in a secret building to prevent heresy among potential readers; and when Yahya, a prominent Bamarkid Persian in the Abbasid court, heard of the repository he asked if he could borrow the texts. The emperor agreed on the condition that they were never returned, so that they would never hurt the delicate Christian feelings of his subjects.
Others with less experience of the Christian West, like the Egyptian Arab Ibn Ridwan (988-1061), claimed that ancient sciences were forgotten there, and only survived in the Ummah because of the supreme wisdom and care displayed by Al-Mamun and their successors. Ridwan’s fable showing just how obscurantist and dumb Christians are proved particularly successful, being often retold with the kind of reverence typically reserved for hadiths:
The history of medicine begins with a brief account of the development in antiquity from Asclepius to Galen. After Galen, the community of the Christians emerged from and prevailed over the Greeks. The Christians considered it a fault to study intellectual matters and their kings cast away the care for medicine and failed to take care of its students. So its students ceased to commit themselves to the toilsome study of medicine and found reading Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works too tedious; thus, it fell into disorder and its condition worsened. Then came Oribasius, after the Christian kings’ lack of interest in the instruction [of medicine] was firmly rooted … When none of the kings any longer felt the desire to promote the teaching [of medicine] and the people found Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works on it too tedious and tended to compendia and abridgments, the most prominent Alexandrian physicians, afraid that the art would vanish altogether, asked those kings to retain the teaching [of medicine] in Alexandria and [to allow] only twenty books on medicine to be read, sixteen from Galen’s and four from Hippocrates’ works … The teaching stood on shaky ground until al-Ma’mun ‘Abd-Allah ibn-Harun al-Rashid became caliph, who revived and spread it and favored excellent physicians. But for him, medicine and other disciplines of the ancients would have been effaced and obliterated just as medicine is obliterated now from the lands of the Greeks, which had been most distinguished in this field.
I should also mention that it wasn’t just the Graeco-Romans who the Abbasid-era Muslims ripped off in bulk. The fact that Indian numerals came to be known in Europe as “Arabic” numerals, and chess was widely, and wrongly, believed to be an Arabic invention, gives an idea about the impact that Caliphate scholars had as synthesizers and popularizers of scientific knowledge.
Indeed, when the Iranian Al-Khwarizmi (780-850), head of the House of Wisdom from around 820, published the earliest Arabic text on Indian numerals, he chose a title of disarming honesty: “Addition and subtraction according to the Indian calculation”. Such honesty was rarely imitated by Al-Khwarizmi’s successors.
I think you are probably getting the gist of how the story about the Muslim salvage of Graeco-Roman antiquity came about, and was later embraced by every Atheist writer in the West, so that he or she could have nice laughs at the expense of those barbarian fools who never washed themselves, the Christians.
October 19, 2024
QotD: From blackberry picking to Bible verses
It’s pretty trite by now to point out that Biblical metaphors that would have made perfect sense for an agricultural society are opaque to a modern audience for whom vineyards are about the tasting room and trimming your wick extends the burn time of your favorite scented candle. There’s probably whole books out there exploring the material culture of first century Judaea to provide context to the New Testament.1 But at least pruning is a “known unknown”: John 15:2 jumps out as confusing, and anyone who does a little gardening can figure out the answer. Plenty of things aren’t like that at all. Even today, few people record the mundane details of their daily lives; in the days before social media and widespread literacy it was even more dramatic, so anyone who wants to know how our ancestors cleaned, or slept, or ate has to go poking through the interstices of the historical record in search of the answers — which means they need to recognize that there’s a question there in the first place. When they don’t, we end up with whole swathes of the past we can’t really understand because we’re unfamiliar with the way their inhabitants interacted with the physical world.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. Are they any good? Should I read them? I’ve mentally plotted out a structure for one of my own, where each chapter is themed around the main image of one of the parables — oil, wine, seeds, fish, sheep, cloth, salt — and explores all the practicalities: the wine chapter would cover viticulture techniques but also land ownership (were the vintners usually tenants? what did their workforce look like?), seeds would cover how grain was planted, harvested, milled, and cooked, etc. The only problem is that I don’t actually know anything about any of this.
October 10, 2024
QotD: Why did ancient China lose its early lead in science and technology?
There are all kinds of answers given to this question, from ones based around the concept of “agricultural involution” (which I briefly surveyed in my review of Energy and Civilization), to ones that blame the complexity of the Chinese system of writing and other more outlandish theories. But would you know it, this question is commonly referred to within Sinology as the “Needham puzzle” or the “Needham question”, so what does the man himself think? Needham got the credit for posing the question, not for answering it, but in the final chapter of this book, “Attitudes Towards Time and Change”, he drops some fascinating hints.
A belief common to the great civilizations of the Axial Age was that time itself was somehow unreal. Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the Neo-Platonists all expressed it in very different ways, but all agreed that in some sense the world of mutability and change was an illusion, and that outside of it stood an eternal, absolute reality sufficient in itself, unchanging in its perfection, αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. The Buddhist civilizations include this under the doctrine of maya (illusion), and traditional Hinduism also exhibits time as a dreamlike and incidental quality of the world.
If time is somehow unreal and nothing can ever change, then it’s easy to see the attraction of a cyclic conception of history. And indeed, in the ancient world these cyclic theories predominate. The Babylonians had their Great Year, and Greek thinkers as diverse as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle all speculated about the eternal repetition and recurrence of the ages of the world. In the Mahabharata the great yugas and kalpas, the Days of Brahma, follow one another in an inevitable fourfold cycle of world ages, the profusion of Hindu and Buddhist sects have promulgated a thousand interpretations and variations on this basic pattern. On the other side of the world, the Mayans had their own Great Year, and countless other peoples besides. This cosmology almost feels like a human universal (at least for civilizations at a particular stage of development), and why wouldn’t it be? We open our eyes and all we see are cycles within cycles — the cycle of the day, the cycle of the moon, the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of the generations. As sure as day follows night, why wouldn’t we expect that the universe too, a grand mechanism made by the gods, must eventually return to its starting point.
Various philosophers of science have asserted that this view of history makes scientific progress impossible, because of its fatalism and pessimism. If everything that happens has happened before and will happen again, then why bother trying to change anything? It’ll just get undone in the Kali Yuga anyway. But Needham points out another connection: if time is cyclic, or worse yet somehow unreal, then it makes no sense to stretch it out into an independent coordinate. In this way, the entire metaphysics of cyclical time resists the mathematization of physics. One can imagine the analytic geometry of Descartes being discovered in ancient Alexandria or Tikal or Harappa, but would it have been possible for one of the coordinate axes to represent time? A Descartes was possible, but a Newton or a Bernoulli was inconceivable.
All of this changes with the advent of Christianity, for which the most important fact about the world, the Incarnation, takes place at a particular moment in history, once and for all, κατὰ πάντα καὶ διὰ πάντα. The cosmos is fixed around this central point, and cannot curl back upon itself. Kairos transfigures chronos, and in so doing makes it real, gives it force and meaning. History is not a cycle, but a story of creation, separation, incarnation, and redemption, speeding towards its culmination as assuredly as a stone tracing a parabolic arc through the air. Or as Needham puts it:
[In the Indo-Hellenic world] space predominates over time, for time is cyclical and eternal, so that the temporal world is much less real than the world of timeless forms, and indeed has no ultimate value … The world eras go down to destruction one after the other, and the most appropriate religion is therefore either polytheism, the deification of particular spaces, or pantheism, the deification of all space … For the Judaeo-Christian, on the other hand, time predominates over space, for its movement is directed and meaningful … True being is immanent in becoming, and salvation is for the community in and through history. The world era is fixed upon a central point which gives meaning to the entire process, overcoming any self-destructive trend and creating something new which cannot be frustrated by cycles of time.
Some historians of science have argued that without this linear conception of time introduced by Christianity, we lack the conceptual vocabulary for various things ranging from analytic methods in physics to the idea of causality itself. So is that the answer? Is the solution to the Needham Puzzle that China progressed as far as it could until, weighed down by the fatalism of cyclic history and the impoverished mathematical vocabulary of timeless metaphysics, it ground to a halt?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. This theory sounds great, but it’s totally wrong.
There’s a bad habit among Western historians and philosophers of engaging in a shallow sort of Orientalism that aggregates all of the exotic East into a single entity.1 But when it comes to attitudes towards time, change, and history; the traditional Chinese attitude is much closer to that of Christendom than it is to the Hindu or Buddhist view. Needham does a good job summarizing the basic Chinese outlook, but includes a lot of details I didn’t know, including that the view of civilizations as ascending through distinct historical stages (e.g. the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.) is of Chinese origin! Needham also discusses the veneration, sometimes deification, of great inventors that saturates Chinese folk religion. All in all, the picture is one of China as a progress-obsessed society almost from its earliest moments, and as a society that was steadily progressing right up until it was suddenly and dramatically eclipsed by European science.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.
1. I am infuriated by restaurants that advertise “Asian food”. There’s more culinary diversity inside some regions of China than there is in most of Europe.
October 9, 2024
QotD: The hijacking of the Canadian identity
But before we dismiss this three-year interregnum as a dystopian fever dream, it’s worth asking how our collective Canadian identity could be hijacked — even temporarily — in such a radicalized manner. And the truth is that it isn’t just progressive ideologues who bear responsibility; but also their counterparts on all parts of the political spectrum, few of whom exhibited any inclination to offer pushback while these falsehoods took root in the media. Even many writers at this newspaper, generally held to be a right-leaning outlet, greeted the unmarked-graves claims by heaping shame on their country.
In every other comparably advanced society, there exists a natural tension between conservative nationalists who reverentially sentimentalize their history, and the progressive critics who reflexively denounce it. And it is from out of that tension that something approaching the historical truth emerges. Or, at least something close enough to the historical truth that it provides a stable and coherent basis upon which a society can confidently pin its collectively embraced national identity.
What we learned in 2021 is that this necessary tension doesn’t exist in Canada, because traditionalists can no longer describe their nation’s history in a way that gives voice to their emotionally felt patriotism without attracting claims of racism and neocolonialism. As a result, our marketplace of ideas lacks the checks and balances required to inure us against — oh, gee, I don’t know, let’s take a crazy example — apocalyptic medieval fables in which legions of Indigenous children are thrown into furnaces and shallow graves by cackling nuns and diabolical priests.
So yes, shame on Trudeau for lowering the Canadian flag on federal buildings for half a year to honour victims entombed in non-existent mass graves. But shame on the rest of us for staring at our shoes while this blood libel was being signal-boosted. And now that Trudeau seems on his way out — and, with him, the maudlin, tear-soaked, bent-knee political shtick that accompanied this descent into hysteria — we might turn our attention toward developing a national self-identity sufficiently robust that it doesn’t fall to pieces the next time someone claims to have found genocide’s residue under an old tetherball court.
Jonathan Kay, “Don’t let politicians misinform you. Learn about Canada’s true history for yourself”, National Post, 2024-07-01.
August 20, 2024
QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year
The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.
Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.
As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.
The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.
Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.
1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.
August 6, 2024
QotD: Malicious idiocy
Perhaps we should make it an Olympic event, with male, female, and trans competitions. It would be more fair than the other competitions for running, jumping, lifting weights, &c. No single country would dominate the sport, at least to begin with; some of the smallest nations could excel. Or if they didn’t, malicious idiots could charge the field, accusing judges and timekeepers of racism and hate crimes, adding to the loathely spectacle: Citius! Altius! Fortius!
David Warren, “Off & running”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-11-22.
[NR: This QotD has become much more timely than it was when I scheduled it for today a few months ago.]
August 3, 2024
The Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571
Big Serge looks at the decisive battle between the “Holy League” (Spain, Venice, Genoa, Savoy, Tuscany, the Papal States and the Order of St. John) against the Ottoman navy in the Ionian Sea in 1571:
“The Battle of Lepanto”
Oil painting by Juan Luna, 1887. From the Senate of Spain collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Lepanto is a very famous battle, and one which means different things to different people. To a devout Roman Catholic like Chesterton, Lepanto takes on the romanticized and chivalrous form of a crusade — a war by the Holy League against the marauding Turk. At the time it was fought, to be sure, this was the way many in the Christian faction thought of their fight. Chesterton, for his part, writes that “the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, and called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross”.
For historians, Lepanto is something like a requiem for the Mediterranean. Placed firmly in the early-modern period, fought between the Catholic powers of the inland sea and the Ottomans, then on the crest of their imperial rise, Lepanto marked a climactic ending to the long period of human history where the Mediterranean was the pivot of the western world. The coasts of Italy, Greece, the Levant, and Egypt — which for millennia had been the aquatic stomping grounds of empire — were treated to one more great battle before the Mediterranean world was permanently eclipsed by the rise of the Atlantic powers like the French and English. For those particular devotees of military history, Lepanto is very famous indeed as the last major European battle in which galleys — warships powered primarily by rowers — played the pivotal role.
There is some truth in all of this. The warring navies at Lepanto fought a sort of battle that the Mediterranean had seen many times before — battle lines of rowed warships clashing at close quarters in close proximity to the coast. A Roman, Greek, or Persian admiral may not have understood the swivel guns, arquebusiers, or religious symbols of the fleets, but from a distance they would have found the long lines of vessels frothing the waters with their oars to be intimately familiar. This was the last time that such a grand scene would unfold on the blue waters of the inner sea; afterwards the waters would more and more belong to sailing ships with broadside cannon.
Lepanto was all of these things: a symbolic religious clash, a final reprise of archaic galley combat, and the denouement of the ancient Mediterranean world. Rarely, however, is it fully understood or appreciated in its most innate terms, which is to say as a military engagement which was well planned and well fought by both sides. When Lepanto is discussed for its military qualities, stripped of its religious and historiographic significance, it is often dismissed as a bloody, unimaginative, and primitive affair — a mindless slugfest (the stereotypical “land battle at sea”) using an archaic sort of ship which had been relegated to obsolescence by the rise of sail and cannon.
Here we wish to give Lepanto, and the men who fought it, their proper due. The continued use of galleys well into the 16th century did not reflect some sort of primitiveness among the Mediterranean powers, but was instead an intelligent and sensible response to the particular conditions of war on that sea. While galleys would, of course, be abandoned eventually in favor of sailing ships, at Lepanto they remained potent weapons systems which fit the needs of the combatants. Far from being a mindless orgy of violence, Lepanto was a battle characterized by intelligent battle plans in which both the Turkish and Christian command sought to maximize their own advantages, and it was a close run and well fought affair. Lepanto was indeed a swan song for a very old form of Mediterranean naval combat, but it was a well conceived and well fought one, and Turkish and Christian fleets alike did justice to this venerable and ancient form of battle.
July 29, 2024
“Queering” the Olympics
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris have started, with the traditional “fuck you!” to those the elites most disdain, who in this case are apparently the more than two billion Christians around the globe:
At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill notes that our kakistocratic elites are still not tired of “queering” everything they possibly can, especially if it gets up the noses of those disgusting dirt people in the provinces:
Is anyone else bored of “queering”? Everything’s getting “queered” these days. We’ve had “Queering the Curriculum“. “Queering the Arts“. And my personal favourite: “Queering Palestine“. This entails academics “unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle”. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. “Queering the Pavement” is the only thing they’re interested in.
Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the “queering” of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz. There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.
It really was a naff, dispiriting affair. It was the first opening ceremony to take place, not in a stadium, but in the heart of the hosting city. Boat after boat after boat carried the Games’ athletes along the Seine as 300,000 spectators in soaked plastic macs craned their necks for a glimpse. It seemed to go on forever. It was so bad that even square liberals on X started using the favoured slogan of the right: “STOP THE BOATS”.
The weather didn’t help. The lashing rain hampered the audio, making it hard to hear the ceremony’s star turns, Celine Dion and Lady Gaga (an upside of the downpour, I suppose). What we could hear was just weird. Like when a headless Marie Antoinette sang the opening bars to an ear-splitting heavy-metal ditty. The ceremony organiser, Thomas Jolly, said he wanted his spectacle to be a “celebration of being alive” – here we had a celebration of being dead.
Then there was the “queering”. Just as you can’t switch on the BBC, visit a library or have a quiet pray these days without encountering a drag queen, so you can’t watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics without seeing portly men in moob-hugging outfits voguing and gloating. It was more Eurovision than Olympian. More Ru Paul than Ancient Greece. More “Sashay away” than “Citius, Altius, Fortius“. That’s the original Olympic motto. It means “Faster, higher, stronger”. Because, believe it or not, we were once a species that celebrated the moral beauty of sporting heroism rather than the ability of a middle-aged man to lard himself into a sequined gown.
The part of the ceremony that caused the biggest stink was the camp Last Supper. A bunch of drag acts gathered around a buxom woman adorned in an aureole halo crown in an unmistakable mimicking of da Vinci’s painting of Christ and the apostles at their final meal. Wearing the smug look of all glib performance artists who love nothing more than to piss off “normies” – because they lack the talent for anything else – the drag queens giddily got into their disciple positions and heaped holy adoration on the lady Jesus. You could almost hear their thoughts: “Ooh boy, this is going to piss off old farts – yes!”
