… There was, however, one last check on the power of faction: The bureaucracy.
I know, that seems weird, but unless you’ve really studied this stuff — it’s not taught in most high school or even college classes, for some mysterious reason — you probably don’t know that the civil service used to be entirely patronage-based. Our two most famous literary customs inspectors, for instance (Hawthorne and Melville), got their jobs through political connections, and that’s the way it worked for everyone — every time the other party won an election, most of the bureaucrats got turfed out, to be replaced by loyal party men. Trust me: very few of the names on this list would ring much of a bell even to field specialists, but they were big political cheeses in their day; Postmaster General was a plum federal post that was often handed to loyal Party men as a reward for a lifetime of faithful service. And so on down the line, including your local postmaster.
It took until 1883 to finally kill of this last vestige of federalism, but the Pendleton Act did it. Here again, this isn’t taught in school for some mysterious reason, but the political class took a very different lesson from the Civil War than the hoi polloi. While for the proles the Civil War was presented as a triumph of the common man, the elite understood that it was training, logistics, bureaucratization, professionalism that won the war for the Union. The Republicans made a big show of putting up U.S. Grant as “the Galena Tanner” in their campaign rhetoric but Grant had been a bankrupt tanner, and indeed a conspicuous failure at everything except war … and even there, his record was carefully doctored to present an image of a bumbling amateur suddenly being struck by inspiration, when in fact Grant was a West Pointer with an impressive combat record in the Mexican War. Now is not the time or place to discuss the merits, or not, of various Civil War figures, so just go with me on this: Pretty much all the big name generals on both sides of the war were presented to the public as talented gentleman amateurs, and it was heavily insinuated that the ones they couldn’t so portray — McClellan, and especially Robert E. Lee — lost because they were too hidebound, too “professional”.
The reality is almost the complete opposite — yeah, Stonewall Jackson ended the Mexican War as a mere captain (no mean feat in The Old Army, but whatever), but he had a tremendous combat record, and was so much of a military professional that he actually taught at a military academy. This is not to say there weren’t naive geniuses in the Civil War — see e.g. Nathan Bedford Forrest — but the Civil War, like all wars since the invention of the arquebus, was won by hardcore, long-service, well-trained professionals. A naive genius like Forrest might’ve been a better tactician, mano-a-mano and in a vacuum, than a West Point professional like Custer — then again, maybe not — but wars aren’t fought in vacuums. They’re fought on battlefields, and they’re won by supply weenies and staff pogues.
[…]
They took that experience with them into politics, and so it’s no surprise that the Federal government of the Gilded Age, though tiny by our standards, grew into such a leviathan in so short a time. Again, I’m just going to have to ask you to trust me on this, since for some reason it never gets covered in school, but back in the later 19th century words like “efficiency” really meant something to the political class. All those politician-generals (and politician-colonels and politician-majors and all the rest down at the local level) expected the State to function like the Army — that is to say, as a self-enclosed world where efficiency not only counts, but triumphs. An amateur civil service can’t do that, and so the days of the political sinecure had to end.
Severian, “Real Federalism Has Never Been Tried”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-03.
November 9, 2023
QotD: The end of the “spoils system” and the professionalization of the bureaucracy
October 31, 2023
In the 1920 presidential election, Americans voted overwhelmingly for a return to “normalcy”
Warren G. Harding’s term in office has been treated like a punchline by progressive writers and commentators for a century, but Lawrence W. Reed refutes this easy mockery and points out that the winner of the 1920 election deserves much better:
Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156
Routinely dismissed as a bad chief executive, Harding’s reputation is undergoing a long overdue renovation. The latest contribution in that regard is a new, must-read biography by Ryan S. Walters titled, The Jazz Age President. Read it, and you’ll forever be skeptical of the lazy, biased, conventional historians who worship power and those who wield it.
Warren Harding didn’t just tell audiences what they wanted to hear. He sometimes told them what they did not want to hear. He went to Birmingham, Alabama to condemn racism and Jim Crow laws, for example — a fact I’ve previously pointed out.
Conventional historians praise Presidents for the bills they signed into law but often it requires more courage and conviction to veto them. On that score too, Harding can be judged favorably. He vetoed six bills in the 2-1/2 years he served in the White House. None of the six was overridden. That may not sound like a lot but remember, his party controlled both houses by big majorities; Congress didn’t send him much it thought he wouldn’t sign.
Four bills Harding vetoed concerned minor issues and generated little attention, but one concerned a bonus for veterans of World War I. It stirred up quite a fuss. As the bill worked its way through the House and Senate, Harding gave ample warning that he wouldn’t even consider a bonus that wasn’t paid for. Congress ignored him and sent the bill to his desk. He rejected it, noting as follows:
In legislating for what is called adjusted compensation, Congress fails to provide the revenue from which the bestowal is to be paid. We have been driving in every direction to curtail our expenditures and establish economies without impairing the essentials of governmental activities. It has been a difficult and unpopular task. It is vastly more applauded to expend than to deny.
After the Civil War, Congress paid pensions to veterans of the conflict and their dependents. Sixty years later, in 1923, it sent a bill to Harding to grant pensions to women who married aging Civil War veterans long after the war. It even authorized higher payments to them than what recent widows of veterans in the war with Germany were getting. His veto message included this unassailable objection:
The compensation paid to the widows of World War veterans, those who shared the shock and sorrows of the conflict, amounts to $24 per month. It would be indefensible to insist on that limitation upon actual war widows if we are to pay $50 per month to widows who marry veterans 60 years after the Civil War.
Congress should have known better than to expect Harding to sign such bills. This was the same man who declared at his modest, unembellished inauguration that “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government”. He had expressed a desire to put “our public household in order”. He said he wanted “sanity” in economic policy, combined with “individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for the future”.
If somebody told me all that, I wouldn’t even think of asking him to approve a check for an able-bodied 30-year-old simply because she married an 80-year-old veteran.
This was the same Warren Harding, remember, who gave the country perhaps the best Treasury Secretary in its history, Andrew Mellon. According to historian Burton Folsom, Mellon slashed government expenses and eliminated an average of one Treasury staffer per day for every single day he held the office. Harding, Mellon and Calvin Coolidge (Harding’s successor), together with a friendly Congress, reduced the federal budget and cut the national debt by more than one-third.
October 28, 2023
QotD: Deposing King Charles I
But on the other hand, if they win the ensuing civil war, that must mean that God’s anointed is … Oliver Cromwell, which is a notion none of them, least of all Oliver Cromwell, was prepared to accept. Moreover, that would make the civil war an explicitly religious war, and as the endemic violence of the last century had so clearly shown, there’s simply no way to win a religious war (recall that the ructions leading up to the English Civil War overlapped with the last, nastiest phase of the Thirty Years’ War, and that everyone had a gripe against Charles for getting involved, or not, in the fight for the One True Faith on the Continent).
The solution the English rebels came up with, you’ll recall, was to execute Charles I for treason. Against the country he was king of.
Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.
September 25, 2023
QotD: The economics of American slavery
Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor”. Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
The King Cotton school has been devastated recently in detail by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead of the University of California at Davis and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. They point out, for example, that the influential and leftish economist Thomas Piketty grossly exaggerated the share of slaves in U.S. wealth, yet Edward Baptist uses Piketty’s estimates to put slavery at the center of the country’s economic history. Olmstead and Rhode note, too, from their research on the cotton economy that the price of slaves increased from 1820 to 1860 not because of institutional change (more whippings) or the demand for cotton, but because of an astonishing rise in the productivity of the cotton plant, achieved by selective breeding. Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king.
Slavery was of course appalling, a plain theft of labor. The war to end it was righteous altogether — though had the South been coldly rational, the ending could have been achieved as in the British Empire in 1833 or Brazil in 1888 without 600,000 deaths. But prosperity did not depend on slavery. The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich, observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their riches did not depend on its sinfulness.
Dierdre McCloskey, “Slavery Did Not Make America Rich: Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king”, Reason, 2017-07-19.
September 19, 2023
The end of the Western Roman Empire
Theophilus Chilton updates a review from several years ago with a few minor changes:
British archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkin’s excellent 2005 work The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is a text that is designed to be a corrective for the type of bad academic trends that seem to entrench themselves in even the most innocuous of subjects. In this case, Ward-Perkins, along with fellow Oxfordian Peter Heather in his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, sets out to fix a glaring error which has come to dominate much of the scholarly study of the 4th and 5th centuries in the western Empire for the past few decades.
This error is the view that the western Empire did not actually “fall”. Instead, so say many latter-day historical revisionists, what happened between the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378 AD and the abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the last western Emperor, in 476 was more of an accident, an unintended consequence of a few boisterous but well-meaning neighbors getting a bit out of hand. Challenged is the very notion that the Germanic tribes (who cannot be termed “barbarians” any longer) actually “invaded”. Certainly, these immigrants did not cause harm to the western Empire — for the western empire wasn’t actually “destroyed”, but merely “transitioned” seamlessly into the era we term the Middle Ages. Ward-Perkins cites one American scholar who goes so far as to term the resettlement of Germans onto land that formerly belonged to Italians, Hispanians, Britons, and Gallo-Romans as taking place “in a natural, organic, and generally eirenic manner”. Certainly, it is gauche among many modern academics in this field to maintain that violent barbarian invasions forcibly ended high civilization and reduced the living standards in these regions to those found a thousand years before during the Iron Age.
Ward-Perkins points out the “whys” of this historical revision. Much of it simply has to do with political correctness (which he names as such) — the notion that we cannot really say that one culture is “higher” or “better” than others. Hence, when the one replaces the other, we cannot speculate as to how this replacement made things worse for all involved. In a similar vein, many continental scholars appear to be uncomfortable with the implications that the story of mass barbarian migrations and subsequent destruction and decivilization has in the ongoing discussion about the European Union’s own immigration policy — a discussion in which many of these same academics fall on the left side of the aisle.
Yet, all of this revisionism is bosh and bunkum, as Ward-Perkins so thoroughly points out. He does this by bringing to the table a perspective that many other academics in this field of study don’t have — that of a field archaeologist who is used to digging in the dirt, finding artifacts, drawing logical conclusions from the empirical evidence, and then using that evidence to decide “what really happened”, rather than just literary sources and speculative theories. Indeed, as the author shows, across the period of the Germanic invasions, the standard of living all across Roman western Europe declined, in many cases quite precipitously, from what it had been in the 3rd century. The quality and number of manufactured goods declined. Evidence for the large-scale integrative trade network that bound the western Empire together and with the rest of the Roman world disappears. In its place we find that trade goods travelled much smaller distances to their buyers — evidence for the breakdown of the commercial world of the West. Indeed, the economic activity of the West disappeared to the point that the volume of trade in western Europe would not be matched again until the 17th century. Evidence for the decline of food production suggests that populations fell all across the region. Ward-Perkins’ discussion of the decline in the size of cattle is enlightening evidence that the degeneration of the region was not merely economic. Economic prosperity, the access of the common citizen to a high standard of living with a wide range of creature comforts, disappeared during this period.
The author, however, is not negligent in pointing out the literary and documentary evidence for the horrors of the barbarian invasions that so many contemporary scholars seem to ignore. Indeed, the picture painted by the sum total of these evidences is one of harrowing destruction caused by aggressive, ruthless invaders seeking to help themselves to more than just a piece of the Roman pie. Despite the recent scholarly reconsiderations, the Germans, instead of settling on the land given to them by various Emperors and becoming good Romans, ended up taking more and more until there was nothing left to take. As Ward-Perkins puts it,
Some of the recent literature on the Germanic settlements reads like an account of a tea party at the Roman vicarage. A shy newcomer to the village, who is a useful prospect for the cricket team, is invited in. There is a brief moment of awkwardness, while the host finds an empty chair and pours a fresh cup of tea; but the conversation, and village life, soon flow on. The accommodation that was reached between invaders and invaded in the fifth- and sixth- century West was very much more difficult, and more interesting, than this. The new arrival had not been invited, and he brought with him a large family; they ignored the bread and butter, and headed straight for the cake stand. Invader and invaded did eventually settle down together, and did adjust to each other’s ways — but the process of mutual accommodation was painful for the natives, was to take a very long time, and, as we shall see …left the vicarage in very poor shape. (pp. 82-83)
Professor Bret Devereaux discussed the long fifth century on his blog last year:
… it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroy[ed] from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed […] there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.
It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.
September 11, 2023
How the Russian Army Collapsed
The Great War
Published 9 Sept 2023As 1917 began, the Russian army was larger and better-equipped than ever before. Within weeks, the Tsar and his dynasty were gone, and by the summer, the Russian army was disintegrating before the eyes of its generals — but how exactly did one of the most powerful armies in the world collapse?
(more…)
July 30, 2023
QotD: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan
One last point before we close: As we’ve noted here probably ad nauseam, modern English is far less Latinate than the idiom of Hobbes’s day. Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin himself, and while I’m not going to cite it (not least because I myself don’t read Latin), it’s crucial to note that, for the speakers of Hobbes’s brand of English, “right” is a direction – the opposite of left.
I’m oversimplifying for clarity, because it’s crucial that we get this – when the Barons at Runnymede, Thomas Hobbes, hell, even Thomas Jefferson talked about “rights”, they might’ve used the English word, but they were thinking in Latin. They meant ius – as in, ius gentium (the right of peoples, “international law”), ius civile (“civil law”, originally the laws of the City of Rome itself), etc. Thus, if Hobbes had said “might makes right” – which he actually did say, or damn close, Leviathan, passim – he would’ve meant something like “might makes ius“. Might legitimates, in other words – the actually existing power is legitimate, because it exists.
We Postmoderns, who speak only English, get confused by the many contradictory senses of “right”. The phrase “might makes right” horrifies us (at least, when a Republican is president) because we take it to mean “might makes correct” – that any action of the government at all is legally, ethically, morally ok, simply because the government did it. Even Machiavelli, who truly did believe that might makes ius, would laugh at this – or, I should say, especially Machiavelli, as he explicitly urges his Prince, who by definition has ius, to horribly immoral, unethical, “illegal” (in the “law of nations” sense) behavior.
So let’s clarify: Might legitimates. That doesn’t roll off the tongue like the other phrase, but it avoids a lot of confusion.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
July 9, 2023
Imperial Rome
In UnHerd, Freddie Sayers talks to historian and podcaster Tom Holland about his latest book, Pax:
To his army of ardent followers, Tom Holland has a unique ability to bring antiquity alive. An award-winning British historian, biographer and broadcaster, his thrilling accounts offer more than a mere snapshot of life in Ancient Greece and Rome. In Pax — the third in his encyclopaedic trilogy of best-sellers narrating the rise of the Roman Empire — Holland establishes how peace was finally achieved during the Golden Age, with a forensic recreation of key lives within the civilisation, from emperors to slaves.
This week, Holland came to the UnHerd club to talk about Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Freddie Sayers: Let’s kick off with the very first year in your book.
Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere?
FS: It seemed to me, when I was reading Pax, that there was a recurring theme: a movement between what’s considered decadence, and then a reassertion of either a more manly, martial atmosphere, or a return to how things used to be — to the good old days. With each new emperor in this amazing narrative, it often feels like there’s that same kind of mood, which is: things have gotten a bit soft. We’re going to return to proper Rome.
TH: It’s absolutely a dynamic that runs throughout this period. And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. There’s this anxiety that this wealth is feminising them, that it’s making them weak, it’s making them soft — even as it is felt that the spectacular array of seafood, the gold, the splendid marble with which Rome can be beautified, is what Romans should have, because they are the rulers of the world.
That incredible tension is heightened by class anxieties. There’s no snob like a senatorial snob. They want to distinguish themselves from the masses. But at the same time, there’s the anxiety that if they do this in too Greek a way, in too effeminate a way, then are they really Romans? And so the whole way through this period, the issue of how you can enjoy your wealth, if you are a wealthy Roman, without seeming “unRoman”, is an endearing tension. And of course, there is no figure in the empire who has to wrestle with that tension more significantly than Caesar himself.
FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be.
TH: And, you see, this is the significance of AD 69, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, because the question is, are the cycles of civil war expressive of faults? Of a kind of dry rot in the fabric of the Empire that is terminal? Of the anger of the gods? And whether, therefore, the Romans need to find a way to appease the gods so that the whole Empire doesn’t collapse. This is an anxiety that lingers for several decades. It looks to us like this is the heyday of the Empire. They’re building the Colosseum, they’re building great temples everywhere. But they’re worrying: “Have the gods turned against us?”
And of course, there is a very famous incident, 10 years after the Year of the Four Emperors, which is the explosion of Vesuvius. And this is definitely seen as another warning from the gods, because it coincides with a terrible plague in Rome, and it coincides with the incineration (for the second time in a decade) of the most significant temple in Rome — the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, the most sacred of the seven hills of Rome.
Romans offer sacrifice to the gods or you pay dues to the gods rather in the way that we take out an insurance policy. And if the gods are busy burying famous towns on the Bay of Naples beneath pyroclastic flows, or sending plagues, or burning down temples, then this, to most, is evidence that the Roman people have not been paying their dues. So a lot of what is going on — certainly in the imperial centre — in this period, is an attempt to try and get the Roman Empire back on a stable moral footing.
July 4, 2023
QotD: The (arguments over the) founding of America
No, in its ambitious and often excellent 1619 Project, the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else. Even though those ideals eventually led to the emancipation of slaves and the slow, uneven and incomplete attempt to realize racial equality over the succeeding centuries, they were still “false when they were written”. America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.
Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity. “We may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue”. In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.
Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines! Am I exaggerating? The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully”. Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively. All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel better about themselves.
Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.
July 3, 2023
QotD: The key weakness of the royal cause in the English Civil War
[T]he power of the mighty hath no foundation, but in the opinion and belief of the people.
A king whose knights won’t ride out to battle on his behalf is just a weirdo in funny clothes. Charles I lost for a lot of reasons, but far from the least of them was that his “foundation” was badly cracked. However attached one might be to the notion of monarchy in the abstract, it – monarchy – is always intimately connected to the personality of the monarch … and Charles I was a real piece of work, even by the world-class standards of Renaissance princes. Parliament was outgunned, often outmanned, and suffered from what should’ve been a critical shortage of experienced leadership. But all those massive advantages were offset by the fact that the Royalist forces were fighting for Charles I, personally.
(This is not the place for a long discussion of the course of the English Civil Wars – and I’m not qualified to give you one in any case – but a quick look at the top commanders of the opposing sides will illustrate the point. Prince Rupert was arguably the equal, mano-a-mano, of any Parliamentary general, up to and including Cromwell. But he was still a Prince, and carried on like one (like a young one, to boot) … and even if he weren’t, he was still running the show on behalf of his uncle. Cromwell, on the other hand, inspired fanatic loyalty, not least because he embodied a cause that was much higher than himself).
Severian, “Hobbes (III)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-12.
June 22, 2023
Britain’s 17th century repeats: first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?
Dominic Sandbrook on the parallels between Britain in the 1600s and today:
King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.
A sunny Wednesday in early June 1665, and Samuel Pepys was suffering in the heat. It was “the hottest day that ever I felt in my life”, he confided to his diary, “and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England”.
Pepys spent some of the day strolling with friends in the New Exchange, a shopping arcade on the south side of the Strand, before repairing to Vauxhall’s Spring Gardens, where he “walked an hour or two with great pleasure”. There was something on his mind, though. For as long as he could remember, relations with England’s neighbours had been distinctly fraught, and Lord Sandwich’s fleet was currently engaged in a struggle with the Dutch. London simmered with rumours about the outcome of the battle, but there was no certainty: as Pepys put it, “ill reports run up and down of his being killed, but without ground”.
By evening, “weary with walking and with the mighty heat of the weather”, the diarist had returned to his house in the City. The day had been pleasant enough, but now something else was troubling him. In Drury Lane, he had seen “two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there”. Pepys knew immediately what that meant. Plague — the first sign of the epidemic that would kill an estimated 100,000 people, a quarter of the capital’s population, in the next 18 months. To calm his nerves, he noted: “I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and [chew], which took away the apprehension.”
Reading Pepys’s diary, you sometimes forget that he was born almost four centuries ago. In many respects he was utterly different from us, with assumptions and anxieties we can scarcely understand; and yet often he feels almost thrillingly contemporary, as if you might bump into him in the street tomorrow afternoon. Indeed, you merely have to re-read that diary entry, and you might be looking in a mirror: the stifling heat, the fears of disease, the foreign wars, the fake news.
The past is never just a mirror, of course, and it’s the height of narcissism to cast our predecessors as mere foreshadowings of ourselves. But there are times when, for obvious reasons, a particular historical moment catches the imagination — as is the case today with Pepys’s moment, the mid-17th century.
Just look, for example, at the titles in Britain’s bookshops. For a long time, commercial publishers were terrified of the 17th century. The Stuarts weren’t as sexy as the Tudors, and the age of Oliver Cromwell seemed too dark, too violent, too religious, too complicated for ordinary readers. Why read about perhaps the most significant moment in all our history — the titanic revolutionary conflict of the 1640s and 1650s, when armies surged across the map of our islands, a king was tried and executed, and a farmer from East Anglia tried to turn Britain into a religious commonwealth — when you could read yet another book about Catherine Howard?
And then, as if responding to some subterranean shift in the cultural landscape, something changed. The last few years alone have given us excellent books on Cromwell by Paul Lay and Ronald Hutton, as well as Anna Keay’s dazzling social history of Britain in the 1650s, and Malcolm Gaskill’s haunting account of witchcraft among the settlers who tried to build a new England on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Robert Harris’s most recent blockbuster, Act of Oblivion, follows the hunt for Charles I’s Parliamentarian killers from England to America.
Even politicians are at it. In the Conservative MP Jesse Norman’s new novel The Winding Stair, which charts the bitter feud between Sir Francis Bacon, father of the Scientific Revolution, and Sir Edward Coke, the most influential jurist of the early modern era, we appear to be plunged back into the world of early 17th-century Jacobean England. But right from the first few pages, the parallels are obvious. Among his characters, for example, is James I, a man with “bulging, expressive eyes” and an “awkward gait”, who “dresses finely, yet somehow manages to look ill-kempt”, and always “loves to display his learning with a classical or biblical line”. Even if you didn’t know that Norman had been at Eton with Boris Johnson, worked for him as a junior minister and eventually released a blistering public letter calling for his removal, you’d probably spot the parallel.
June 17, 2023
QotD: Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo
The Right, meanwhile (and again, strictly for convenience), had an equally impossible fantasy, since however it manifested itself — CivNat, BoomerCon, Normie, pick your Internet-speak — it was predicated on the “Left” being physically capable of leaving well enough alone. Alas, “the motherfucker” which the Left feels compelled to burn down includes institutions, infrastructure, the foundations of empirical knowledge, along with the idea of “knowledge” itself — in short, ambient civilization. It’s not that they won’t leave you alone, gang, it’s that they can’t, since whatever is, is wrong.
Will it be a nicely organized civil war, with Ordinances of Secession and neato-looking battle flags and stirring speeches and truly excellent beards on all the general officers? Doubtful. See above. The whole “secession” schmear takes some doing, and we’re living in a world where the mere ability to walk slightly faster than a reanimated corpse is an appealing-enough fantasy to keep a tv series running for over a decade. But people these days absolutely loathe each other, to the point that, when someone finally does pull the trigger — and someone will — the killing won’t stop for a long, long, long time, McDonald’s be damned.
Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.
June 1, 2023
QotD: “The Puritans were the SJWs of their day”
The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …
… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …
Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.
Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.
May 13, 2023
What was the First Modern War?
Real Time History
Published 12 May 2023The question about the first modern war has caused lively debates among historians and YouTube comment sections alike. In this video we take a look at a few candidates and some arguments why they are or aren’t modern wars.
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May 7, 2023
Africa after colonialism
Hannes Wessels on the plight of so many African nations once the various colonial powers were off the scene and they were at least formally independent:
If you have a heart in Africa it’s probably not a good idea to read Martin Meredith’s State of Africa because if you do, it will, in all likelihood, break it. In it, he covers, in gory detail, what has happened on the continent in the postcolonial era, and while it’s riveting, it is also deeply disturbing.
[…] “by the end of the 1980s not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power”?
Or the fact that, in the Congo alone, in 1964, over a million people, virtually all civilians, died in sectarian strife. Nobody knows precisely how many more millions have died in the benighted country since. Or that Mobutu Sese Seko, prior to coming to power, had $6 in his bank account. By 1987 a team of editors and reporters from Fortune magazine disclosed that he was one of the richest men in the world at an estimated $5 billion.
Or the fact that Jean Bedel Bokassa “combined not only extreme greed and personal violence … unsurpassed by any other African leader. His excesses included seventeen wives, a score of mistresses and an official brood of 55 children … [He] also gained a reputation for cannibalism. Political prisoners … were routinely tortured on Bokassa’s orders, their cries clearly audible to nearby residents”. In an effort to compare himself to Napoleon, he declared himself an emperor and spent a large chunk of the national budget on his coronation while his people suffered and starved.
Or the fact that Uganda’s Idi Amin, in a bid to crush political opposition, ordered the gruesome deaths of thousands of alleged opponents at the hands of his “death squads”. “The Chief Justice was dragged away from the High Court never to be seen again. The university’s Vice Chancellor disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of an Anglican Archbishop, still in ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital. One of Amin’s former wives was found with her limbs dismembered in the boot of a car. Amin was widely believed to perform blood rituals over the bodies of his victims.” He was heard on several occasions boasting about his penchant for eating human flesh.
Or the fact that foreign researcher Robert Klintberg reported on oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as being “a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp — the ‘cottage industry Dachau of Africa’.” Under Macias Nguema, more than half of the population was either killed or fled into exile. Finally deposed by his nephew, Obiang was indicted for the murder of 80,000 people. The plunder continued.
Or that in Nigeria, between 1988 and 1993, an official report estimated $12.2 billion was “diverted” from the fiscus. In 1990, the United Nations concluded that Nigeria had one of the worst records for human deprivation of any country in the developing world.
These are only a smattering of an almost endless litany of entirely avoidable man-made catastrophes that have blighted Africa since the imperial exit. One is left wondering if there is any precedent in history for such calamitous misrule that has led to the early, often violent deaths of millions, and delivered unspeakable misery to hundreds of millions more, which is where we are today.
Having read the book, I’m left pondering the fact that Cecil Rhodes, a colonial colossus, looms large in contemporary history as one of the great villains of the last century, better known for his alleged malfeasance than any of the abovementioned leaders. But as far as I know, Rhodes never stole from anyone and never killed anyone, and he certainly didn’t eat anyone. I know he did use his money and military muscle to stop slavery and intertribal slaughter. And I know he plowed most of his fortune into building roads, railways, educational facilities, and other infrastructure needed to transform a wilderness into a developed country. It looks to me like his generosity of spirit is reflected in the Rhodes scholarships he provided for, aimed at nurturing the talents of a select few from across the racial divides in a bid to make the world he was leaving a better place.
