On Friday, I started watching Our Living World, a Netflix nature documentary, but was immediately waylaid by quibbles with the opening monologue.

A recurring rhetorical habit among climate activists is to contrast humanity and nature, especially when commending nature’s endurance of human ravages. They take for granted that mankind is somehow distinct from nature — while at the same time rejecting the traditional theistic understanding of that distinction and insisting that mankind is just another product of evolution. Man is both unnatural and natural, but certainly not supernatural.

Underlying this stark contrast between man and nature and its conflict with the axioms of scientific naturalism is a ferment wrought by centuries of controversy between paganism, Christianity, and the Enlightenment. Rather than listen to Cate Blanchett spout Netflix’s anti-humanism, I decided to close the tab and try to think through the intellectual history of the contradictory assumption that lurks behind so much climate change rhetoric.1

Subscribe now

It’s key that the changing views of man and nature weren’t, in fact, the primary concern: the primary question concerned God, and God’s relation to nature. And given the history of Western thought, that makes sense: both Western pagans and early Christians understood, however vaguely, that human and divine nature go together. How we think about God inevitably affects how we think about humanity, and vice versa.

Western pagans seemed to regard their gods as part of the universe, not least through their role in the cultic cycle: mankind offers sacrifice to please the gods, who in exchange prosper mankind’s short-lived projects. “It is clear,” writes Robert Sokolowski, “that the Olympian gods are understood as particular beings in the world. They are the expression of necessities that men encounter in the world, necessities that men must respect.” (The God of Faith and Reason, p. 12) Sokolowski’s assessment of the gods is a bit unliterary, if you ask me, but C.S. Lewis concurs on the essential point:

even in the creation myths, gods have beginnings. Most of them have fathers and mothers; often we know their birthplaces. There is no question of self-existence or the timeless. Being is imposed on them, as upon us, by preceding causes. They are, like us, creatures or products; though they are luckier than we in being stronger, more beautiful, and exempt from death. (Reflections on the Psalms, p. 95)

While Homer’s concept of Fate occasionally implies the workings of some sort of super-divinity, I think the implications are too obscure to justify considering him a monotheist. And even so, such a super-divinity would still be bound to the world as its governor — not its creator.

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which seems to originate with Judaism, lays the foundation for distinguishing God from the universe, and thus for distinguishing mankind, as well. “To say that God created nature, while it brings God and Nature into relation, also separates them. What makes and what is made must be two, not one. Thus the doctrine of Creation in one sense empties Nature of divinity.” (Reflections on the Psalms, p. 94) In Judaism, we first find something approaching the modern idea of nature as a non-divine spectacle of interdependent organisms. Granted, the attitude toward that spectacle is distinctly unmodern:

It is surely just because the natural objects are no longer taken to be themselves Divine that they can now be magnificent symbols of Divinity. There is little point in comparing a Sun-god with the Sun or Neptune with the great deep; there is much in comparing the Law with the Sun or saying that God’s judgments are an abyss and mystery like the sea. (ibid, p. 95)

Christianity, according to Robert Sokolowski, perfected this distinction between God and the world. “In Christian belief we understand the world as that which might not have been, and correlatively we understand God as capable of existing, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world had not been.” (The God of Faith and Reason, p. 19) As a result of this distinction, though, Christianity drew explicitly a conclusion suspected by Plato and at best implied by the Old Testament, in isolation from the New: that mankind, being tied inextricably to God, must share in God’s separation from the world, His otherness. Mankind, in a word, is himself supernatural, at least in part.

“At least in part” is an important qualifier, given the famous dispute about nature and grace that got Henri de Lubac in trouble. This much at least we may say: the Catechism flatly affirms the supernatural origin of the human desire for happiness. “The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of divine origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it.” (CCC 1718) This position is eminently traditional: we all know St. Augustine’s line that “you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” But given Augustine’s relentless insistence on God’s transcendence throughout the Confessions, we can only conclude that according to Augustine, God created human nature for supernature: “you have made us for yourself”. Theologians can distinguish the natural and the supernatural as much as they want, but in the course of lived reality, they are more synergized than Lagrangian Thomists care to admit.

In the broader Christian context, of course, mankind’s distinction from nature isn’t an opposition — yet. Again, the doctrine of creation is key.

When God does create, there may be ‘more’ but there is no ‘greater’ or ‘better.’ And the world must be understood appropriately, as that which might not have been. The world and everything in it is appreciated as a gift brought about by a generosity that has no parallel in what we experience in the world. The existence of the world now prompts our gratitude, whereas the being of the world prompts our wonder. (The God of Faith and Reason, p. 19)

For this reason, “man’s dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come; it requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation.” (CCC 2415)

When Enlightened figures, provoked by the scandals of the Reformation, abandoned the traditional creedal commitments of Christianity and opted for humanistic deism or atheist rationalism, they retained mankind’s distinction from nature but questioned away belief in divine providence — and thereby removed the limiting principle on man’s dominion over nature. The mechanistic side of the Enlightenment found allies in certain strains of Protestantism, especially those most hostile to the sacramental economy associated with Rome. Nature was for our use and pleasure. While I’m resistant to the impression, widespread among a certain kind of earnest theology student, that the Scientific Revolution necessitated the abusive exploitation of nature, there is an undeniable shift from a sacramental to a utilitarian relation to nature.

Note, however, that I don’t say “enchanted.” The language of enchantment is Romantic language. Romanticism rejects the Enlightenment, but not in favor of authentic Christianity or of authentic paganism: it espouses a misbegotten hybrid of them both. The primary image of nature in Romantic literature is the wilderness, which encloses man and satisfies his appetite for sublimity by overwhelming him with solitude.

Thus, Wordsworth famously laments that

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

And yet he no less famously laments the loss of his childhood affinity with nature:

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
— But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is it fled, the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Or consider Keats’ exquisite “Ode to a Nightingale”:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

While reviving paganism’s respect for the grandeur of nature, Romanticism retains the Christian sense of mankind’s distinction, but apart from the providential context which makes that distinction a badge of supernatural honor rather than an existential burden exiling him from the un-self-conscious pageantry of nature.

Climate rhetoric, to make an end, strikes me as fundamentally Romantic in outlook. Man is somehow an interloper in nature rather than part of it, and his continued existence is somehow at odds with the continuation of life on the planet. When non-human organisms alter the global climate, as cyanobacteria did during the Great Oxidation Event — one of the most dramatic ecological upheavals in our planet’s history, and one of the most destructive, extinguishing countless species of anaerobic organisms while forcing others to seek refuge in oxygen-poor regions deep within the earth — we justly admire their (unwitting) achievement as a testament to the adaptive grandeur of life. Yet when we alter the environment for the sake of our own survival, doing exactly what the cyanobacteria did, climate advocates castigate us for senselessly and selfishly exploiting our glorious environment.

Now, there’s clearly an asymmetry between the transformative power of technology and the slow but steady oxygenation of the atmosphere. Moreover, the fact that we can contemplate the possible consequences of our technologies complicates the analogy with cyanobacteria. Yet our ability to negotiate the intermediate moral space — to recognize our own species’ right to survive as compatible with the rights of our non-human neighbors, and to recognize that surviving, for them and for us, can and often does alter the climate — is inhibited by the Romantic assumptions of the climate debate, assumptions we can’t seem to escape without getting mired in even more controverted philosophical and political disagreements, drifting into Luddism and mystical irrationalism.

All in all, it makes me a bit nostalgic for paganism.

Okay, I don’t mean that. Not entirely. I’m not nostalgic for casual genocide, slavery, idolatry, and proliferation of demonic influence. But the convoluted rhetorical and intellectual morass into which the modern West has wandered, not to mention the actual harm we’re doing to the environment, makes me look with a certain fondness on the pre-Christian attitude toward the cosmos you find in, say, Homer. I’ve been rereading The Iliad to teach in the coming school year, and while I’ll always love the story itself, I’m struck this time by Homer’s fundamental affirmativeness of life as it is.

It’s hard to describe and, as Christopher Nolan discovered, impossible to film,2 but it’s there — it’s the beating heart of the Homeric epics. He knows his gods and heroes are rough around the edges, that they’re violent and rapacious, but he never lets that obscure the fact that they’re also gods and heroes: in Homer, as in life, excellence and depravity, perfection and imperfection, life and death, cohabit without questioning. Rather than lament this state of affairs or question his way around it, Homer takes it as a given and ponders human life as it must be lived in consequence. Achilles takes no comfort in the promise of an afterlife (especially not Homer’s vision of the afterlife); he finds peace in accepting death as his lot. Odysseus doesn’t need to justify his kingship over Ithaca by recourse to divine oracles, like Aeneas; to rule as an excellent, intelligent, chastened man suffices.

This fundamental, uncomplicated affirmation of life suggests the basic pagan understanding of man’s relation to the cosmos. Man, for them, no matter how complex, is still a part of nature. Achilles reaches for immortality, and in the process dehumanizes himself. For pagans other than Plato, to live and to die are inseparable aspects of life. Man is distinct, less by being immortal, but by being inventive. Other organisms survive through instinct and dexterity, man by cleverness. Toolmaking — techne — is therefore no less natural than the tides; human artifice is always comprehended within and governed by nature. There can be no essential opposition between man and machine, for the machine always emerges from and serves the man.

But the pagans also understood hubris. They knew that toolmaking isn’t always innocent, and is never indifferent. They knew that machines meant to be of service could come instead to demand it; that machines which enable us to grasp more than first we could thereby dull our sense of justice — that to grasp for more is the very essence of injustice. The fate of Troy testifies to the power of human invention — and the fate of Icarus to that power’s need for limits. The pagans saw this with clear eyes; we once saw with clearer eyes, but now, after centuries of post-Christian cherry-picking from the “bare, ruin’d” vineyard of scandal-ridden Christendom, we’ve gone blind.

And I doubt we’ll do half as much in spite of our blindness as Homer.

I recently had the privilege of chaperoning a student trip to Italy for Easter, marking my second unexpected trip a l’etranger in the space of a year. It’s taken a long time to process the experience. A quirk of travel is that the more “exotic” your destination, the easier it is to forget yourself and view your surroundings with objectivity — and conversely, the less exotic, the harder it is to forget you’re not at home. For this reason, I found traveling within the West more disorienting than traveling beyond it.

And as I discovered, Rome is uniquely disorienting. “Here is an entity,” writes Goethe,

which has suffered so many drastic changes in the course of two thousand years, yet is still the same soil, the same hill, often even the same column or the same wall, and in its people one still finds traces of their ancient character. Contemplating this, the observer becomes, as it were, a contemporary of the great decrees of destiny, and this makes it difficult for him to follow the evolution of the city, to grasp not only how Modern Rome follows on Ancient, but also how, within both, one epoch follows upon another. (Selected Works, p. 507)

Indeed. I found myself thinking of Goethe often: I enjoyed paging through his Italian Journey before my trip, and enjoy it even more now that I can compare our experiences. It’s strange to share such an intimate bond with a long-dead fellow traveler. Borrowing his title seemed appropriate. He understood the exhaustion of spending even a day in the city:

Wherever you turn your eyes, every kind of vista, near and distant, confronts you — palaces, ruins, gardens, wildernesses, small houses, stables, triumphal arches, columns — all of them often so close together that they could be sketched on a single sheet of paper. One would need a thousand styluses to write with. What can one do here with a single pen? (ibid, p. 508)

Subscribe now

“One epoch follows another”

As it happens, now is an excellent time for getting the feel of classical Rome. Our hotel was down the street from the Colosseum, across the street from the Palatine, and a stone’s throw from the Circus Maximus. But that wasn’t always the case. I recently paged through Montaigne’s 1581 travel diary (composed in part by dictation, hence the third person references) and was surprised. Had we visited the same city?

[Montaigne] said that one saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had stood and the plan of its site; that this knowledge that he had of it was an abstract and contemplative knowledge of which there was nothing perceptible to the senses; that those who had said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much, for the ruins of so awesome a machine would bring more honor and reverence to its memory: this was nothing but its sepulcher. (The Complete Works, p. 1150)

But I had seen the ruins… what was he talking about? Then I remembered: in the centuries following Rome’s decline, most ruins that weren’t plundered to build churches were gradually buried by flood, farming, and sheer neglect. (Some, like the Pantheon, were converted into churches; others were too big to bury, like the Colosseum.) It wasn’t until the 1800s, and especially the decades after Risorgimento, that archaeologists began excavating in earnest for the old city’s remains. Hence the timeliness of Thomas Hardy’s 1887 poem “On the Palatine”:

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,
And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,
We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile
The outer sense, and shape itself as though
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow
Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,
Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:
It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar’s house,
Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

And blended pulsing life with lives long done,
Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

Most of what he saw had been newly, or at least recently, uncovered.

All of which makes Goethe’s enthusiasm for Rome, which he visited in the winter of 1786–87, striking. “Just as the most accurate drawings fail to give an adequate idea of these buildings, so plaster casts, good as some I have seen, can be no substitute for their marble originals.” (Selected Works, ibid, p. 511) Was Montaigne just blind?

No, as it happens. The key is a few lines prior: “St. Peter’s has made me realize that Art, like Nature, can abolish all standards of measurement.” (ibid, p. 511) Poor Montaigne visited after entropy had buried the Rome of the past but before the popes built up the Rome we know and love.

For as I discovered, the credit for Rome’s present glory goes to the late Renaissance and Counter-Reformation popes. Nearly everything splendid about the city, apart from the excavated ruins, was their achievement. This is so obvious that the justice of the Risorgimento claim to the capital, founded on the slim continuity between 19th century Italian city-states and the long-gone Roman Empire, turns out to be baseless poppycock. On each spectacular facade — groups of which circle every piazza like an audience of proud, silent gods watching the circus of human folly — are chiseled, in massive capitals, its date of construction and the name of the relevant benefactor. The names are abbreviated and the dates sprawl in unwieldy Roman numerals, but two words are always clear: PONT·MAX.

The more I read Montaigne’s journal, the more pity I feel. He must have visited at exactly the wrong time, and knew it. On the one hand, he laments that “the churches in Rome are less beautiful than in most of the good towns of Italy, and likewise in Italy and Germany they are ordinarily less beautiful than in France.” (The Complete Works, p. 1161) But he also senses that Rome has quite a future, thanks to Gregory XIII, whom he describes as “a great builder” who “will leave in Rome and elsewhere exceptional honor to his memory”. (ibid, p. 1146) In particular, Gregory was in the throes of transforming Rome into the institutional brain of the Counter-Reformation envisioned by the Council of Trent. To that end, the pope

has built colleges for the Greeks, and for the English, Scots, French, Germans, and Poles, and has endowed each one with more than ten thousand crowns a year in perpetuity, besides the huge expense of the buildings. He has done this to call to the Church the children of those nations, corrupted by evil opinions against the Church; and there the boys are lodged, fed, dressed, instructed, and provided with everything, without one quattrino of their own going into it for anything whatsoever. The troublesome public charges he readily casts off on the shoulders of others and avoids giving himself trouble. (p. 1146)

In 1581, though, these projects were still in their infancy. Many of the great churches had yet to be built or at least completed; not even St. Peter’s was finished. Both the dome and facade were still under construction, with the square and its colonnade coming almost a century later.

But come they did.

Gloria Mundi

I’m used to hearing Catholics praise Rome to the skies. “It’s the beating heart of the Church,” they say. But being both American and a contrarian (they go together, I’m afraid), I was skeptical. I get it now. Rome is a living city whose international denizens are there for more than social media clout: sure, it’s the capital of Italy, but by far the majority of its occupants seem to be priests, religious, or Catholic laypeople. Under the drone of tourism persists a soft but steady hum of organic life — so soft you don’t notice it till you spend time in a city which, like Florence, is now nothing but an ornate skeleton, and realize that all you hear is the chug of the tourist machine.

Rome truly is a wonder to behold. Its grandeur — and, goes the Counter-Reformation argument for adorning churches, the grandeur of God — is so undeniable that famed agnostics, pantheists, monists, and even hostile atheists can’t help being struck. And I’ll say this much in favor of the Counter-Reformation argument: visitors leap from the churches to God in the same breath.

In Italian Hours, for instance, Henry James recounts visiting St. Paul Outside the Walls, my favorite Roman basilica after St. Peter’s.

It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and there are few more striking emblems of later Rome — the Rome foredoomed to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado — a florid advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it’s magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots — a rare thing in Rome. Marble and mosaic, alabaster and malachite, lapis and porphyry, incrust it from pavement to cornice and flash back their polished lights at each other with such a splendor of effect that you seem to stand at the heart of some immense prismatic crystal. (Italian Hours, p. 199; emphases mine)

And in the Gesù, James found a church lugubrious enough to match his prose.

It doesn’t impress the imagination, but richly feeds the curiosity, by which I mean one’s sense of the curious; suggests no legends, but innumerable anecdotes à la Stendhal. There is a vast dome, filled with a florid concave fresco of tumbling foreshortened angels, and all over the ceilings and cornices a wonderful outlay of dusky gildings and mouldings. There are various Bernini saints and seraphs in stucco-sculpture, astride of the tablets and door-tops, backing against their rusty machinery of tapers coppery nimbi and egg-shaped cloudlets. Marble, damask and twinkling chandeliers. The choir perched in a little loft high up in the right transept, like a balcony in a side-scene at the opera, and indulging in surprising roulades and flourishes… Near me sat a handsome, opulent-looking nun — possibly an abbess or prioress of noble lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic baritone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impressions? What a crossfire of influences does Catholicism provide! (ibid, pp. 200-201; emphasis mine)

Goethe was especially intrigued by the pope’s putative status as the Vicar of Christ, and went expecting churches and liturgies befitting that status. The churches didn’t disappoint — but the liturgies did.

The Pope celebrated [All Souls Day] in his private chapel on the Quirinal. … We hurried with the crowd across the spacious courtyard and up an enormous flight of stairs, and into the vestibules opposite the chapel. To think that I was under the same roof as the Vicar of Christ gave me a strange feeling. The office had begun and the Pope and cardinals were already in the church — the Holy Father, a beautiful and venerable figure of a man, the cardinals of various ages and statures. I was suddenly seized by the curious wish that the Head of the Church would open his golden mouth and, in speaking of the transports of joy felt by the souls of the blessed, transport us with joy as well. When I saw him merely moving from one side of the altar to the other and muttering just like any ordinary priest, the original sin of the Protestant stirred in me and I felt no pleasure whatsoever in the sacrifice of the Mass as it is traditionally offered here. Did not Christ, even as a child, interpret the Scriptures in a loud voice? As a young man, He certainly did not teach or work miracles in silence, for, as we know from the Gospels, He liked to speak and He spoke well. What would He say, I thought, if He were to see His representative on earth droning and tottering about? (Selected Works, p. 504; emphases mine)

Rome pushes the sacramental principle — that the work of worship is not mere metaphor or magic, but a network of symbols that communicate grace ex opere operato — to its absolute limit. It’s as if the popes, by proliferating churches, meant the city itself to be a sacramental. The fact that it continues to draw and fascinate pilgrims from all creeds, not only for the pasta and bistecca and cappuccino, but to the churches and galleries hung with art inspired by and for worship, is a testament to the power of their vision.

Concluding Melancholic Postscript

It takes a great deal of strength to be able to live and to forget how far living and being unjust are one. (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, p. 22)

At the same time that I was impressed, I couldn’t help feeling haunted wherever I went.

Granted, my unease was most palpable in the old city, particularly the Colosseum and the Palatine. I realized that everything I saw was built, at least in part, by slaves. That’s especially unsettling for an American. Our conflict over slavery animated the Constitutional debate and nearly shattered the republic in the Civil War, but its legacy is demographic: historians estimate that c. 80–90% of black Americans are descended from former slaves.

The legacy of Greco-Roman slavery is different. Southern chattel slavery was an agrarian institution tied to the plantation life that was abolished with slavery itself, leaving few tangible traces. Greco-Roman slavery, on the other hand, pervaded the entire ancient social structure. It was a given that slaves would farm, mine, and build. Extracting the stone and marble was almost exclusively reserved for slaves; and while assembling buildings demanded skilled labor, unskilled slaves often did the riskiest and least pleasant tasks. Every architectural marvel of the ancient world is tainted by association: the legacy of Greco-Roman slavery is written in stone. But what wonderful stone!

Nor were the popes exempt. Under its pious veneer, their vision for Rome was sheer hubris, and what’s remarkable is how little they tried to disguise it. Sure, they were fighting the Counter-Reformation, when chiseling PONT·MAX into every facade served as a reminder that Christ had chosen a Vicar and given him awful power. But nothing — nothing! — about papal Rome reflects St. Paul’s equally important reminder that the apostles “have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7)

Take Gregory XIII, whom Montaigne praised for casting off the “troublesome public charges” incurred by his projects “on the shoulders of others.” Gregory was entirely typical. Since the Council of Constance, which settled the Great Western Schism, the popes had been keen to beautify Rome, as a visual confirmation of the preeminence the Schism had called into question. To fund that beautification, they made creative use of their authority: in addition to the taxes they levied on the Papal States, the popes collected various taxes and income from Christendom at large, on top of which they sold Church offices, benefices, and indulgences. The result was astonishing wealth, which funded papal projects and fueled their hubris. The glory of the city is an extension, alas, of the corruption for which the Renaissance popes were famous — and which, in the end, helped trigger the Reformation that destroyed their hegemony over Christendom.

Montaigne’s descriptions are revealing of the post-Tridentine vibe of the papal court. Attending Christmas Mass, Montaigne’s secretary notes that

it seemed novel to him, both at this Mass and others, that the Pope and cardinals and other prelates are seated, and, almost through all the Mass, covered, chatting and talking together. These ceremonies seem to be more magnificent than devout. (The Complete Works, p. 1144)

Even more distasteful,

On Maundy Thursday in the morning, the Pope, in full pontificals, takes his stand on the first portico of Saint Peter’s, on the second story, attended by the cardinals, himself holding a torch in his hand. There, on one side, a canon of Saint Peter’s reads aloud a Latin bull by which are excommunicated an infinite variety of people, among others the Huguenots, under that very name, and all the princes who have appropriated some part of the territories of the Church; at which articles the cardinals de’Medici and Caraffa, who were next to the Pope, laughed very hard. (ibid, p. 1168; emphasis mine)

This was the same pope who celebrated the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of c. 10,000 Huguenots by Catholics with a solemn Mass of thanksgiving.

What unsettles me isn’t that civilizations sin — that’s obvious. What disturbs me, rather, is how tied civilizations’ sins are to their achievements. Grandeur has always depended on the brutality of the rich and powerful, and it’s perverse to pretend otherwise, to attribute the achievements of civilization to vague hypostases like “culture” or “the national spirit.” And this is true across the globe. Wrote late Qing essayist Lu Xun in 1925,

What we call our Chinese civilization is actually nothing more than a feast of human flesh prepared for the delectation of the rich, and what we call China is nothing more than the kitchen where these feasts of human flesh are prepared. Those who are unaware of this but still praise the civilization can be forgiven; otherwise, such people should suffer eternal condemnation. (Jottings under Lamplight, p. 149)

But does knowing the tainted mechanisms of a glorious civilization actually erase its glory? For idealists and philistines, perhaps, but the problem for the rest of us is that it doesn’t. I’d argue that it doesn’t even do so for Lu Xun, which accounts for the bitterness of his late essays.

Which brings me back to Henry James, via Lionel Trilling. In The Liberal Imagination, Trilling reflects on James’ mid-career masterpiece The Princess Casamassima, and in particular on the plight of the novel’s hero, Hyacinth Robinson, a would-be revolutionary with an artist’s heart.

Hyacinth has had his experience of the glories of Europe … He understands no less clearly than before “the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past.” But now he recognizes that “the fabric of civilization as we know it” is inextricably bound up with this injustice; the monuments of art and learning and taste have been reared upon coercive power. Yet never before has he had the full vision of what the human spirit can accomplish to make the world “less impracticable and life more tolerable.” (The Liberal Imagination, p. 83)

It’s admirable to realize that, but can individuals or society survive that knowledge? Hyacinth’s discovery sounds far from new to us. Wrote Fernando Pessoa, “Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life.” (The Book of Disquiet, p. 11) Our universities have spent nearly a century wearing away our unconsciousness, cataloging the ways in which Western civilization has exploited the weak and voiceless. What are the consequences? In most, cynical resentment; in many, apologetic resignation, and in a few, mellow serenity. We know too well where resentment leads, but what about the resignation and serenity?

Apologetic resignation tries to have it both ways: somehow to keep inherited culture simmering in private while measuring public life, and especially politics, by the frigid absolutes of postmodernity. But the public freeze will inevitably reach the private simmer. Again, Trilling is apposite, all the more so because he saw this coming in 1950:

all the instincts or necessities of radical democracy are against the superbness and arbitrariness which often mark great spirits. It is sometimes said in the interests of an ideal or abstract completeness that the choice need not be made, that security can be imagined to go with richness and nobility of expression. But we have not seen it in the past and nobody really strives to imagine it in the future. (The Liberal Imagination, p. 84)

Material conservation of the past without spiritual continuity is nothing but cultural life support.

And serenity? There’s something to be said for it, but it’s the serenity of toothless age, of the sage near death who looks back on life and accepts its meaning only because he can no longer change it. Pessoa again: “Could it think, the heart would stop beating.” (The Book of Disquiet, p. 11)

There’s a certain beauty, a certain admirable maturity in this. It’s the beauty of a wisdom that can only come with age. But as Cyril Connolly so shrewdly observed, “the disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously.” (The Unquiet Grave, p. 50) One civilization slips into the twilight of self-knowledge while another spoils for a fight. “There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.” (ibid, p. 50)

…

Yet for all that, I can’t shake off the residual delight of visiting Rome, a delight I attribute in large part to visiting it with my students. Their enthusiasm sustained mine, kept me from indulging overmuch in gloomy speculations. Seeing it through their eyes, and seeing the joy in their eyes, I was put in mind of Zarathustra’s Roundelay, which I’ve quoted before, and which seems a fitting conclusion:

O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
“I was asleep —
From a deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe;
Joy — deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity —
Wants deep, wants deep eternity.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 227-228)

How better to kick off the summer than to spend its first few sunny days brooding about “ideology”?

It was a perfect storm. After years of hearing conservatives fulminate about progressive ideology; months of reading Lionel Trilling, Simon Leys, Jacques Barzun, and other writers retrospectively labeled “anti-ideological”; and several days of reading blustery old Russell Kirk, I was a bit fed up with that curiously vague term, “ideology.”

Subscribe now

That’s enough, Eric

Poor Eric Voegelin was the peak on which my storm burst. I had just taken down (and dusted off) The Eric Voegelin Reader and paged around for something to read as a detox from imbibing too much Kirk. I chose “On Debate and Existence” — and promptly exploded.

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists — whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. (The Eric Voegelin Reader, p. 130)

No sooner had my eyes alighted on “ideologists” than I thundered (aloud, as I recall), “What the hell does ‘ideology’ actually mean?!” As it happens, Voegelin explains it later in the same paragraph, but it didn’t satisfy me.

Rational argument could not prevail because the partner of the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. (ibid, p. 130; emphasis mine)

Already ill-disposed to Voegelin, I found this the icing on the cake — and this was only page one. “Of course you think your particular interpretation corresponds to ‘the matrix of reality,’ while anyone else’s must somehow be a ‘second reality,’” I grumbled. By the end, I had grudgingly to admit that Voegelin made a better case for his position than I had expected.

Still, I wasn’t so sure I bought his understanding of ideology. Voegelin seems to consider it primarily an intellectual error, arising from a reasoned (but unreasonable) rejection of the common experience which makes mutually correcting debate possible. In place of that axiomatic experience (whose object is the “matrix of reality,” which Voegelin elaborates as an existential “structure” using Aristotelian-Thomistic concepts while dubiously avoiding any endorsement of Aristotle or Thomas), ideologues substitute an equally axiomatic Second Reality: economic relations, say, or racial consciousness.

All very abstract and interesting, but hardly adequate to my experience living and conversing with ideologues, or of being tempted to succumb to ideological thinking myself. I say “tempted,” because I think ideology involves an intellectual and a moral failing. This moral dimension is absent from Voegelin’s theory, which renders it incomplete in my eyes.

No sooner had the storm burst, though, than the clouds broke and a ray of sunshine fell. I liked this line of questioning and knew where to turn next. I took down another book that had been gathering dust on my shelf: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

With Arendt, I’m alone but I’m not lonely

According to Arendt, totalitarian movements mobilized “the masses” leftover by the industrial meltdown of historical class divisions. “The masses” in most places experienced that meltdown as catastrophic rather than liberating: the class system had been a source of deep suffering, yes, but it had also provided identity by imposing clear and rigid social distinctions.1

Arendt identified two key effects of this meltdown which totalitarian movements exploited. First, the method of totalitarian terror hastened to destroy any lingering pockets of private life, forcing people into a callous intimacy that lacked real privacy of thought. This made “the masses” all the more dependent for meaning and social validation on the pronouncements of political leadership.

As for the pronouncements themselves, totalitarian movements deployed ideology. Ah, here we go, what does that mean? Arendt’s concept initially sounds as intellectualized as Voegelin’s. Ideologies are “isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.468). In more detail,

an ideology is … the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the “idea” is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. (ibid, p. 469)

In history viewed ideologically, the factual sequence of events becomes a series of logical phases related each to the next as premise to conclusion. Ideology thus weds history with dialectical logic, “and its advantage for ideological explanation is that this dialectical device can explain away factual contradictions as stages of one identical, consistent movement.” (ibid, p. 469)

Initially, therefore, Arendt seems to see ideology as deterministic historicism. The totalitarian uses of ideology reveal its deeper and more disturbing aspect. Ideology purports to be nothing but an application of logic to history. But that logicality, divorced from history and deployed to justify policies for ushering in the future, held a perverse fascination for “the masses.” Indeed, says Arendt, it was their rhetorical ethos of unassailable logic that made Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin such forceful — and similar — leaders:

It is in the nature of ideological politics — and is not simply a betrayal committed for the sake of self-interest or lust for power — that the real content of the ideology … which originally had brought about the “idea”... is devoured by the logic with which the “idea” is carried out. (ibid, p. 472)2

The great totalitarians exploited the basic human fear of deliberately acting contrary to reason by draping every policy proposal in the sublime reasonableness of ideological thinking, and thereby securing the tacit consent of their citizens.

This provides a compelling explanation of why the Nazis and Soviets were able to accomplish so much for so long without widespread popular resistance.3 The idea that everyone but the Nazi leadership or Party execs only complied with their respective regimes out of fear is an attractive way to absolve ordinary Russians and Germans of their share of totalitarian guilt, but it’s too simplistic and doesn’t bear historical scrutiny.4 The real question is: why were so many people susceptible to the seductive power of ideology?

Here Arendt far outperforms Voegelin.

She contrasts three socio-spiritual conditions “which often look alike / Yet differ completely”: isolation, solitude, and loneliness. Isolation is always the target social condition of tyranny:

Political contacts between men are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities for action and power are frustrated. But not all contacts between men are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact. (ibid, p. 474; emphasis mine)

In fact, Arendt points out that meaningful personal and artistic creativity have always depended on voluntary isolation — and flourished in tyrannies and free countries alike.

In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes unbearable. (p. 475)

Indeed, she implies that solitude, a particular form of isolation, is essential for cultivating a mature human personality. But solitude means more than simply being alone.

In solitude … I am ‘by myself,’ together with my self, and therefore two-in-one, whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others. All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought. The problem of solitude is that this two-in-one needs the others in order to become one again: one unchangeable individual whose identity can never be mistaken for that of any other people. (p. 476)

I found this remarkable. Solitude is what makes the private life of family and friendship livable: loved ones simultaneously challenge and affirm your identity. Healthy, meaningful relationships are defined by this dynamic, which demands, but doesn’t deify, individual identity. This explains why political isolation in tyrannies need not affect citizens’ private lives — at least not those with sufficient money and leisure.5

It also helps us understand what loneliness truly means:

What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time. (p. 477)

Here Arendt lands the final blow:

The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose premise is the self-evident. (p. 477)

In the absence of identity-defining class membership, which made possible varying degrees of identity-defining relationships, the mass of men are left with nothing but their inferential organ, on which aspiring totalitarians play with Iago-esque virtuosity. For to appeal to human reasoning (not, importantly, to human reason) is to appeal to “the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions,” an appeal which is especially potent in the industrial age because it “seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others.” (p. 478) Totalitarian tyrants manipulate the masses by offering a desperate way to reaffirm their personhood.

Which is why, I realized, there’s something fundamentally diabolical about the totalitarian temperament. The serpent tempted Adam and Eve by flattering their sense of excellence as God’s created image, enticing them to participate culpably in their fall from grace. Likewise, totalitarians flattered citizens’ identity through enticing them to affirm their personhood by “enduring a belief / Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.” Every citizen is therefore partly responsible for the grief, which is why it’s not just experienced as affliction, but corporate guilt.

For Arendt, ideology involves affirming deterministic historical content less because of the content and more because the underlying process offers an escape from industrial loneliness. She gets at both the intellectual and the moral dimensions of ideological thinking, and speaks as eloquently to us as to her contemporaries.

Eloquence and applicability, though, aren’t the same thing. The more I thought about Arendt’s insightful analysis, the more I realized how dated it is. For in the intervening period, industrial society has undergone another revolution, which has disrupted and redefined the social fabric past recognition: the digital revolution.

Analog Roots, Digital Weeds

As I read Arendt’s analysis of deracinated loneliness, I couldn’t help but think that it might explain some of the initial enthusiasm for the potential of the Internet. That enthusiasm was so widespread and so effusive in the 1990s, even adjusting for the marketing interest of companies like Apple and Microsoft, that Tom Wolfe felt compelled to berate the enthusiasts in his last collection, Hooking Up, published in 2000.

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest is Digibabble. (“Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill”, Hooking Up, p. 76)

Otherwise a keen sharp observer of American life, Wolfe missed the mark here. He somehow failed to see that the “one thing the Internet does” would affect everything everyone does while awake, and even while asleep.6 He’s too dismissive of Marshal McLuhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message.” Technological innovation in the 1830s laid the foundation for the rapid communication networks that enabled the speed and rhetorical unanimity of the 1848 revolutions, to name just one example of how changing “one thing” can change everything. The enthusiasts had precedent for believing that the Internet might be able to heal the deracinated public.

Still, Wolfe had a point. He was wrong to ignore the fact that every new medium disrupts how people relate to the world and each other, but he was right to question the belief that the Internet would do nothing but good for humanity. The law of unintended consequences makes fools of optimists and pessimists alike.

While the Internet hasn’t re-planted the thicket of civil customs which industrialization uprooted, it has introduced an invasive species into the vacant lot. For immersing oneself in the Internet, social media, and so on is not unlike wading into a tangle of roots — or rather, weeds. Roots serve a purpose, they feed and stabilize plants and trees; weeds, by contrast, don’t go down deep, and exist for their own sake. The Internet promised to restore roots, but instead entangled us in weeds.

Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s assume that social media does offer something like rootedness. After all, it does allow people to bond over shared interests, be they never so trivial, which is just what Burkean conservatives celebrate about civil society’s “little platoons.” But that similarity, while real, is material. The real question, in light of Arendt, is whether digital roots can relieve loneliness even half as well as the “analog roots” of old.

Alas, no. Their “digital” aspect militates against their doing so.

Let’s think about those “little platoons.” For Burkean conservatives, an individual life is enriched by participating in many such institutions, to varying degrees: monomaniacal commitment is a turn-off. Moreover, participation is typically in-person: you meet at someone’s house, a bar, a library, a church, or a coffee shop, to discuss poetry, sew, play bridge, or sing doowop for fun. When, where, and how often a group meets are no less integral to its civil flavor than what the group actually does.7

Digital roots form around no less trivial interests, but the medium garbles the communal message. Participation in an online “community” is typically remote. It’s free from the constraints of time and space: it never sleeps, it’s always accessible, always ready to welcome you. Being always accessible, a digital forum absorbs as much free time as you’re willing to sacrifice, allowing it to monopolize your attention in ways that analog forums can’t. That makes it harder to maintain diverse digital roots; and without that diversity, you slip into the offputting monomania which analog roots discourage.

And if that’s how digital roots affect and amplify trivial interests, just think of what they do to more significant issues: religion, politics, culture, and so on. The unique psychological dynamic of digital roots applied to divisive ideas transforms pre-Internet industrial loneliness into the online tribalism we know so well.

So if industrial loneliness was the primary precondition for susceptibility to totalitarian influence, and if industrial loneliness has been so modified by the rise of the Internet, it would follow that Arendt’s diagnostic has only limited applicability to our own time. There are those, like Rod Dreher, who think we’re on the verge of totalitarianism in the West, and they cite Arendt to make their case. To make that case, though, they’d need to revisit both our own circumstances and Arendt’s analysis to see whether digital tribalism is as likely as industrial loneliness to make ideological thinking attractive — if, indeed, she is correct to define totalitarianism as tyranny through terror and ideology.

A Venturesome Postscript

I’d like to venture a word about the totalitarian potential of digital tribalism, though it’s far from my final word.

I think, fueling the tribalism is a different kind of loneliness. Industrial loneliness is an affliction, pure and simple, a consequence of the erosion of classes and with them an ambient sense of order and belonging. The tribal loneliness that predominates in our day is one for which we’re culpable: it is, in part, a choice.

The number of true believers, like the truly stupid, is smaller than we think. By the far the majority of any political tribe is made up of people who are too intelligent to embrace ideologies in full but too busy living and working to make independent judgments about the questions of the day. They are uneasy believers, therefore, but still believers — indeed, the most dangerous kind.

In my experience the bitterest opposition comes neither from [Roman Catholics] nor from any other thoroughgoing believers, and not often from atheists, but from semi-believers of all complexions. There are some enlightened and progressive old gentlemen of this sort whom no courtesy can propitiate and no modesty disarm. (C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, p. 9)

What accounts for this vituperative zeal of the half-convinced? I think it’s because their commitment comes only partly from conviction: no less, I suspect, comes from emotional necessity. Says Simon Leys, reflecting on why so many Western intellectuals overlooked Mao’s crimes:

What people believe is essentially what they wish to believe. They cultivate illusions out of idealism — and also out of cynicism. … They believe out of generosity, and also because it serves their interests. They believe because they are stupid, and also because they are clever. Simply, they believe in order to survive. And because they need to survive, sometimes they could gladly ill whoever has the insensitivity, cruelty, and inhumanity to deny them their life-supporting lies. (Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness, p. 404)

Semi-believers’ hostility to dissent is out of all proportion with the actual threat a critical question poses to any one truth claim. Sincere questions threaten their intellectual security; they expose the unease of their convictions and force them, if only half-consciously, to realize how much their worldview merely tries to dupe intellectual honesty by parading prejudice as informed opinion. Disturb the peace with which their minds rest in judgments of unearned because untested certainty, and you risk exposing them as frauds. And who wants to be exposed as a fraud?

In a word, tribal loneliness is an effect of intellectual laziness. It comes when we forgo the inevitable solitude of thought for the simian path of belonging. It’s an understandable exchange, but no less blameworthy for being understandable. Our time on this earth is precious, and, as Saul Bellow wrote, “there is simply too much to think about.” Fair enough. But we make a fatal mistake if we allow these commonplace burdens of our human condition to justify sloughing off the better burden of our nature: our desire to live in truth. That desire always leads to solitude, and often through solitude to friendship rather than tribalism. But not always: at times it leads to the gas chamber, at times the gulag — even, at times, the Cross. We are impatient creatures who crave easy answers that let us get on with the more enjoyable business of belonging. But

Right has a long and intricate name.
And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

One no longer loves one’s insight enough once one communicates it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche came to mind as I put the finishing touches on this piece. These aren’t especially refined thoughts: I’ve spent the last six weeks overseas (in Italy — impressions to come!), straining to finish out the semester, and staging yet another play (a comedy, as it happens). But I’ve been chewing on these ideas for a bit, and it’s time they saw the light of day — if only for me, like Victor Frankenstein, to gape in horror at what I’ve wrought…

Anyway.

The nature of comedy.

You heard me: the nature of comedy. De comediae natura.

Is there any sequence of words likelier to induce an eye-roll + yawn? I’m mindful of Irving Kristol’s observation:

the surest way of killing a joke is to explain it, and humor has, in self-defense, made an especially comic figure of the man who would earnestly analyze it. (Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of An Idea, “Is Jewish Humor Dead?”, p. 420)

But you know, after three posts (two of them from a series of four) on sociopolitics and one on the liturgy wars, I think Theories of Everything could use a little levity. So if I say something worthwhile about comedy or just make myself ridiculous, I’ll be satisfied.

Subscribe now

The Humorous

The first weird thing about humor: at some level, it’s simply a matter of instinct. That’s why explaining kills a joke: if you don’t already just… see it, then more words won’t open your eyes. In that sense, humor and idiom go hand in hand, even if idiom is a bit more manageable. Someone can sort of explain idioms, and you sort of see them… until you’re fluent, when you can navigate idioms with ease, because they’ve become intuitive. Just as you can’t really explain an idiom or prove that your senses put you in contact with the outside world, so humor seems unanalyzable in principle.

I’d immediately follow this with a comment that having a sense of humor and being funny aren’t the same thing. The latter may result from a nexus of unrelated circumstances, while the former is almost inborn. It’s one thing to make your parents and siblings laugh, another to make your classmates laugh. In both cases you can lean on inside jokes and the patois of familiarity; but to make classmates or colleagues laugh, you can’t only rely on inside jokes. You have to go beyond, usually leaning into the ever faithful combo of acting goofy and enjoying self-mockery… but sometimes relying on an honest-to-God sense of humor. The real test is making complete strangers laugh: you can lean on pop culture and transgressive excess to some extent, but audiences eventually see through comedians who do nothing but swear and gross their way to success. True comedians are funny because they have a sense of humor.

Lingering with the term “sense,” what is it that we actually sense with this “sense”? Let’s get stuffy.

Following Aristotle, a sense in the primary… well, sense, refers to “what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter.” (On the Soul, 424a17) Obviously, then, a “sense of humor” is equivocally called a “sense.” But is it only equivocal? Are the terms as unrelated as the “bat” in baseball and the “bat” that ‘sees’ with echolocation? I don’t think so. The analogy between the senses proper and a “sense of humor” lies in that idea of receptivity. Those with a sense of humor are aware, at least in a passive, receptive way, of ‘the humorous.’ That would explain why jokes and humor can’t really be explained, why you either see the humor or you don’t: some people are more receptive to ‘the humorous’ than others, and a sad select few seemingly unreceptive at all.

But all we’ve done, really, is punt. What is ‘the humorous’?

Aristotle gives us a good starting point, though I’m not so satisfied as I might be.

The ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain. (Poetics, 1149a35-46)

Ugly but painless. There’s insight in the qualification of painlessness, but I’m in doubt about that primary aspect, ugliness. Aristotle’s term, aischron, is charged with moral significance. St. Paul uses the term multiple times, always in a semi-moral context (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:6, 14:35; Ephesians 5:12). It’s opposite is kalon, which also appears throughout the New Testament and Aristotle’s corpus, and which always has a moral connotation. Aristotle specifies kalon as the ultimate motive of virtuous action in his Nicomachean Ethics, while St. Paul commends the law as kalon in itself (Romans 7:16), elsewhere urging the Thessalonians to “test everything; hold fast to what is kalon [good]” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The moral resonance of the term can complicate, I think, our understanding of humor, turning every humorous defect into a moral one. That’s often true, but not universally.

It seems better to say “incongruous.” A sense of humor allows you to detect more or less painless incongruities. In Emma, Miss Bates’ sheer logorrhea — itself out of all proportion to her claims on anyone’s attention — combined with the utter triviality of her subject matter is such an incongruity. Shakespeare’s clowns tackle great ideas in bumbling, vernacular prose and occasionally hit on profound insights (Lear’s Fool), but more often make a mockery not only of themselves, but of the ideas they try to express (Bottom on beauty; Dogberry on duty, etc). And closer to earth, the friends and colleagues who make us laugh are the ones with an eye for the absurd, for incongruities in daily life.

The Comedic

Of course, they have to make us laugh, which takes more than a sense of humor. There are plenty of people who can appreciate jokes but can’t make one to save their life — or at least, I’d love to see them try. At its broadest, therefore, comedy would seem to be the art of making people laugh.

But of course that’s not enough. That’s like saying “medicine is the art of healing”: unimpeachably true, because vague. By what methods do comedians work? How do they make people laugh? And why? Just to entertain?

To stick with my singularly humorless method, let’s turn once again to Aristotle — bearing in mind that his definition is restricted to stage comedies.

As for comedy, it is … an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not only as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly. (1449a31-34)

Not long after this he adds the qualification of the relevant ugliness being painless. For Aristotle, therefore, comedies are plays that imitate callow men and women who aren’t callow enough to be villains, nor monomaniacally depraved enough to be tragic heroes: just B-grade losers and scumbags.

Presumably Aristotle had more to say about how comedy should and shouldn’t imitate such people, but that portion of the treatise is lost. And that’s okay, because unlike tragedy, comedy has taken on a bizarre life of its own: any definition that doesn’t account for stand-up is incomplete, as far as I’m concerned. Let me attempt, therefore, a slightly modified definition of comedy, one applicable to but transcending Aristotle’s.

To do that, please turn a few pages in your Basic Works of Aristotle, to his Rhetoric, in particular to his famous “definition” of that art: “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” (1355b26)1 Granting that rhetoric is probably better defined as the art of exploiting those available means of persuasion, let’s return to the concept of the “humorous”: painless incongruity. There’s more here than meets the eye: not every incongruity is obviously painless, of course, nor is every painless incongruity obviously incongruous.

To make people laugh, comedians — on the page or the stage — have to convince us that what they’re talking about is, in fact, worthy of laughter. A broader definition of comedy, therefore, might be: a species of rhetoric aiming to persuade an audience that something ugly is worth laughter and not recoil. The concrete means of persuasion will vary from medium to medium, but anyone engaged in making people laugh will ultimately be after the same effect.

This would also explain why comedies don’t translate or age as well as tragedies. Ugliness and incongruity are more tied to custom than fear and pity, if you follow Aristotle. And if you choose instead to follow Arthur Miller instead, it’s even more obvious, since for Miller tragedy arises when the boundless aspiration of the human spirit crashes against the limits imposed by our world of three dimensions. Tragedy, in that sense, is “higher,” because it reminds us of our dignity as spiritual beings, even if it only does so by a kind of via negativa. Comedy, by contrast, reminds us that we’re tied to the earth, where painless incongruities are part of the furniture.

The Darkness

But I ain’t done.

If you know stand-up at all, especially contemporary stand-up, you may have an idea where I’m going. Where does dark comedy fit into all of this? The whole point of dark comedy is that we’re not dealing with painless incongruities: the pain, in a way, is the point. Do we have to start all over again?

I’ve heard people wave the problem away with a schema modeled on Dante’s Commedia, originating, so far as I know, with Dr. Jody Bower. Infernal comedy, purgatorial comedy, and paradisal comedy. I’m suspicious of that model, only because Dr. Bower says that infernal comedy isn’t funny — Dante’s Inferno and the grittiest sections of The Lord of the Rings are her examples. She dismisses Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler movies as mere echoes of Aristophanes — awfully tame echoes, at that. But she clearly hasn’t watched enough sitcoms: if anything qualifies as infernal, as characters struggling and often failing to find a reason to live, it’s either Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. But I defy you to tell me these aren’t funny. Infernal comedy can be funny.

Nor am I sure I agree with her characterization of paradisal comedy: “The third kind of comedy is paradisal, in which things are pretty blissful right from the start and stay that way. The wonderful screwball comedies of the 1930s and many Disney movies.” I love a screwball comedy as much as the next joker, but you don’t exactly have to squint to notice that they’re chock full of scum and villainy. Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday are delightful, but they feature, among other things, alcoholics, abusive and philandering husbands, adulteress wives, amoral opportunists, and murder. (The only true 1930s cinematic exceptions that occur to me — and what lovely exceptions — are the films of Ernst Lubitsch.)2

The problem, I think, is taking Dante as the norm for comedy: he called his poem a comedy based on the notion, I think, that the distinctive narrative movement in comedy is upward: unworthy beings receive good when they deserve evil. This is contrasted with the distinctive narrative movement of tragedy, which is downward: worthy beings receive evil when they seem to deserve good. Fine and dandy, but hasn’t comedy moved on? Or rather, given that Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler (or, adjusting for the fact that Dr. Bower was writing in 2012, Adam McKay and Edgar Wright) are such big stars, hasn’t comedy actually stood still while literature has redefined and refined comedy right into the empyrean — and beyond?

So, setting aside the Dante schema, what to make of dark comedy? Do we reject our earlier definition of the humorous?

I don’t think we need to reject it; just revisit it. There are painless incongruities and painful incongruities — and both can be funny, provided the comedian is worth his salt. Perhaps our earlier definition of the humorous was simply based on ordinary experience. But great artists don’t just exploit experience: they transform it. In some ways, and perhaps unique to this art alone, the comedian is the measure of what’s humorous and not the other way around. The greater the comedian, the more they can persuade us that truly awful facts of human life are worth laughing at. That’s been the direction of stand-up for decades: how dark can you get while still getting laughs? But even before our period, you had comedic writers like Chekhov pushing the limits of what’s funny — albeit with mixed results.3 This would seem to imply that, at least as far as difficulty is concerned, dark comedy isn’t some redheaded stepchild: it’s the pinnacle of comedic art.

And that makes me wonder if comedy is actually any lower than tragedy.

Tragedy is the most accurately balanced portrayal of the human being in his struggle for happiness. That is why we revere our tragedies in the highest, because they most truly portray us. (Arthur Miller, Collected Essays, p. 14; emphasis mine)

Oh, do they? We’re physical beings, too, which causes us no little embarrassment, precisely because it offends our vanity. “The belly is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §141)

Tragedy feels higher than comedy, but that’s just our vanity talking: for comedy is no less eloquent about the human condition. We live in a world which constantly defies our efforts to master it by action and by knowledge — so far, comedy and tragedy commence from the same point. But whereas tragedy reminds us that sorrow is an appropriate response to our benighted condition, comedy reminds us that to live always in sorrow — to embrace infinite resignation, Schopenhauerian gloom, or the baneful asceticism of the self-righteous antinatalist vegans — is unbefitting to the human being, who can laugh as well as cry at the seeming absurdities of life.

To return to Kristol, “Jewish humor is the humor of a rebellious rationalism.” (Kristol, Neoconservatism, p. 426) But here I think Jewish humor, which has so thoroughly infused American public life, extends to all humor. For Kristol’s definition is sly: is it a rationalism rebelling against the irrationality of the universe? Or is it rationalism rebelling against itself?

The only answer I can give: yes.

(Wise guy.)

Oh, the Oscars.

There was a time when I quite enjoyed the Oscars — in the good old before-times, when Lady Gaga was still shocking and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still largely a twinkle in Kathleen Kennedy’s voracious eye; when the Arab Spring was in full bloom and John Boehner was a household name; when the only Russians on the coast of the Black Sea were sleazy oligarchs in track suits and little green men in the Crimea on apparently no one’s orders; when ‘fascist’ was a meaningless slur; when The Epoch Times was still a fringe rag on par with the National Enquirer; when “Royals” and “Uptown Funk” and “Shake It Off” were fresh and new, and I almost didn’t even mind Pharell’s “Happy” the first seven times I heard it on the radio driving to work.

Subscribe now

Alas, the Oscars — like so many other things — have gone the way of all flesh. No, not death. That’s the destination of all flesh; the way that precedes it is paunch, prejudice, and a fixation with politics. I’ve recently taken to going to the gym, where they play Fox and CNN side by side, and I’ve been charmed to note that while the news coverage couldn’t be more different, the ads are identical: adult diapers, heart-health drugs, and estate law. And so with the Oscars: a paunchy, prejudice, politicized affair: One Battle After Another (on which, see my review at St. Luke’s Sketchbook) and Sinners are sure to clean up, for no other reason than that they flatter “the Academy’s” political preferences — and its sense that its opinion still somehow means something.

The funny thing is, everything I just wrote, every sentiment I just expressed, was already current in 1948.

Los Angeles denizen Raymond Chandler — twice nominated at the Academy Awards himself for screenwriting — once described his hometown’s signature event in the late 1940s for The Atlantic Weekly. His essay is a doozy — a devastating skewer of the Academy Awards, already a glamorous exercise of Hollywood’s self-adulation.

The essay also contains one of my all-time favorite sentences.

I’m a sucker for a good sentence — who isn’t? But I deem “good” a sentence that is longer than should be allowed, but so rhetorically compelling that it couldn’t be a single word shorter. By that standard, Henry James, Tom Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Lionel Trilling are all in my pantheon of sentencers.1 (Truman Capote is in there, too, despite his style being vastly different and a thousand times crisper than the others mentioned. But a pantheon of sentencers that excludes Capote would be a joke.)

Also in that pantheon, though, is Raymond Chandler — not so much for the sentences that grace his fiction (lovely as they are) as for those that grace his correspondence, which is one of the gems of my personal library. I pick up Chekhov’s letters when I crave his quiet, and quietly sad, companionship, but Chandler’s when I want a little arsenic with my eloquence.

The conclusion of his essay on the Oscars is a case in point, and fully expresses my feeling about today’s ceremony.

If you can pass those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, ‘In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived’; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn’t good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamor queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect these golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel the next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong.

(The Raymond Chandler Papers, p. 73)

We’re finally here, part four. (Here are parts one, two, and three.)

In part three, I addressed the theological incoherence of strong-bond agrarianism, toward which — I argued — Localism tends.

Here, I want to examine why the Catholics in Localism consistently drift in a direction whose theoretical foundations — rooted in philosophical Romanticism — are demonstrably incompatible with their beliefs.

Subscribe now

It’s hard to resist the impression that contemporary Western Christians simply prefer the past to the present. That attitude has defined Catholic conservatism at least since the French Revolution, when Rene-Francois Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre formulated a sociopolitical vision fueled by the romance of “bare, ruin’d” Gothic churches and moldering chateaux more than a yearning for the lively (and ribald) court cities of medieval France or its vibrant (and experimental) liturgical life. Both thrill to autumnal beauty, to the wear on the gold of Christendom — and both see the Church as tenuous link connecting the ever decaying present to the stability of a distant, superior past. And that’s not restricted to French reactionaries. The Culturist recently described J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of history as “a steady fading of the beauty and magic of creation.” That strikes me as uncannily accurate: autumnal melancholy is the prevailing atmospheric emotion in The Lord of the Rings, for all its eucatastrophic triumph. For these thinkers and beyond, tradition — in its cerebral form as lore and its concrete form as ritual, liturgy, and lifestyle — binds us to the bedrock moments of creation and redemption.

I suppose I could leave it there, but it’s not much of an answer. Conservatism, like progressivism, is always at least two-thirds temperament, and the conservative temperament is, well, conservative. But maturity, both moral and intellectual, often demands acting against temperament. To that extent, it’s not enough to chalk up the strong-bond agrarian tendencies latent in Localism merely to “the conservative temperament”. There are conscious, or at least semi-conscious, intellectual commitments at play. What are they?

Aestheticism

Despite contributing to a book that professes — inaccurately — to apply Catholic social teaching, numerous contributors distance themselves from actual policy discussions, preferring to advance what one of them calls the “philosophical mood change” that informs their preferred policies.

• “Can the small, local, and beautiful survive in a world dominated by the big, global, and brash?” (Pearce, “Freedom Is In Our Pockets”, p. 145)

• “A person who loves objects for their intrinsic goodness will not consent to be surrounded by mass-produced baubles and will not wastefully throw out items because they’ve lost sheen. But such a person will happily surround himself with beautiful things, will be inspired by these beautiful things, may even seek to create or obtain additional beautiful things.” (Rennier, “The Localist Mind”, p. 156)

• “The mediocrity of Chili’s and its ilk is both an assault to the palate and an insult to the art of cuisine, which does not demand expense but does demand attention, time, and creativity.” (Richardson, “Taste and See”, p. 175)

• “To ‘dwell poetically’ is to refuse the much-maligned modern tendency to strip the world of its ‘enchantment,’ meaning its intelligible significance, and to view it as a mere pile of dust awaiting formation under the power of the human will. It is also to refuse the equally maligned modern tendency to a merely rationalistic abstraction. Human reason by nature begins on the ground of the particular and rises toward the abstract. It goes amiss when this ‘rise’ becomes a departure from the particular or the reduction of reality to a few abstract, usually quantifiable, aspects.” (Wilson, “The Poetics of Place”, p. 226)

• “We want men to have good jobs making useful, beautiful things.” (Davis, “How to Change the World”, p. 229)

Localism, as espoused in the book, strikes me as little more than politicized right-wing aestheticism. Its economic project is vapid and its reclamation of “Catholic social teaching” oddly selective — ‘oddly,’ that is, until you realize that none of its frustrations or policies are new.

The moral case against pure capitalism has been put forward by the Church, and includes a moderate deployment of top-down regulation (via international vehicles such as, ahem, the European Union) and global trade (via dignity-conscious multilateral agreements, like NAFTRA with a soul). As we saw in part two, the Church’s social doctrine is far from rejecting markets, international cooperation, or industrialization — three things that come under fire in Localism.

But the aesthetic case against capitalism is older and more basic, and its body count higher. It’s not interested in procedural solutions; proceduralism itself stinks of compromise, of collaboration with the news media, political elites, and the intelligentsia—Michael Warren Davis’s three avowed enemies. For aestheticism, on the right or the left, resents the disparity between high culture and low-brow reality.

Walter Benjamin — never the clearest thinker, but always intriguing — identifies a connection between the rising fascism of the 1930s and the decadent philosophy of art for art’s sake:

“Fiat ars — pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. (“The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, p. 195)

“Communism responds by politicizing art.” Indeed, it does — or thinks it does. At the same time that Lenin and Stalin were rallying Gorky’s pen to the defense of forcing art to serve the proletarian revolution, the Frankfurt Marxists were criticizing the bourgeois social order on aesthetic grounds; even their attacks on bourgeois aestheticism are fundamentally still aesthetic.

Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and of art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile. While obstinately seeking to establish aesthetic truth, and trapping themselves in an irresoluble dialectic, they stumble on the real truth, for by making the works of art their own and elevating them to concepts, they limit them all, and so contribute to the destruction of art which is its salvation. Aesthetic tolerance that simply acknowledges works of art in their limitation, without breaking it, leads them only to a false downfall, that of a juxtaposition which denies their claims to indivisible truth. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 80-81)

Yes, indeed, we’re dealing here with someone who knows that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” someone who knows his mission, as a professed Marxist, is help the proletarians slough their chains. Because, of course, factory-shattered proletarians give two figs about art’s “innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance,” and so on.

Come off it.

I defy you to read Adorno and walk away believing that he’s a Marxist in any meaningful sense of the word, at least in a sense Marx himself would recognize. Marx was a dialectical materialist who enjoyed poetry and literature in his spare time, but who castigated academic aesthetics as a bourgeois waste of time. Adorno is too clearly obsessed with truth to be a Gramsci-ite plant in “the institutions,” there to accelerate their contradictions. He was an urbane man of letters, not of action, forced to spend the war years blinded by the neon glare of budding Hollywood beside Max Horkheimer, Thomas Mann, and other equally cultivated exiles from the old world. He quotes Baudelaire and Kierkegaard and Italian operas far more often than he ever quotes Marx, Engels, or any economics — even Hegel shows up more often. He simply hated mass culture and its effect on individuals and society.

We come, therefore, to the typical horseshoe intersection of opposing ideologies. Both localists and Frankfurt Marxists celebrate, or yearn for, “the real,” and lament the alienation of spirit and matter; they simply disagree on what, precisely, “the real” should look like. The Frankfurter demands a “real” in which the untrammeled individual spirit is capable of breathing free and unconditioned, and therefore of identifying with absolute spirit itself; the localist a “real” in which the community is capable of breathing free and unconditioned, and therefore of identifying with absolute spirit.1 But both target the alienation wrought by modernity as the true enemy.

Resenting reality in the name of “the Real”

We need to be clear about what that actually means. Sometimes, you can get the impression that “alienation” means something mystical and metaphysical — that’s what it means, for instance, in Hegel, to the extent that it means anything. But for Marxists and the localists, “alienation” refers to the psychological displacement that followed the erosion of traditional society under the frantic flux of bourgeois money. Spirit, as we know it, isn’t alienated from matter; it’s conditioned by it at every turn. The problem isn’t matter, it’s the kind of matter — and that provokes the aesthetic reaction. The loss of the traditional order has led, it would seem, to our alienation from beautiful matter. The political problem, shorn of philosophical dross, is that the world we experience is an ugly parody of what it was and could be again. That’s why localists and Frankfurst Marxists can sing hymns to the particular, the “small, local, and beautiful,” and castigate all ambient particulars in the same breath.

Adorno, yearning for the particular:

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror. (Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 27-28)

Adorno, in the same breath, against his surroundings:

Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be ‘after’ something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counterclaims. Countless people are making, from the aftermath of the liquidation of professions, their profession. They are the nice folk, the good mixers liked by all, the just, humanely excusing all meanness and scrupulously proscribing any non-standardized impulses as sentimental. … They are capable of everything, even love, yet always faithlessly. They deceive, not by instinct, but on principle, valuing even themselves as a profit begrudged to anyone else. To intellect they are bound both by affinity and hatred: they are a temptation for the thoughtful, but also their worst enemies. For it is they who insidiously attack and despoil the last retreats of resistance, the hours still exempt from the demands of machinery. Their belated individualism poisons what little is left of the individual. (ibid, p. 26)

Michael Warren Davis of Localism, yearning for the particular:

We want big families on a bit of land, at least enough to grow strong and free. We want men to have good jobs making useful, beautiful things. We want women who know true independence from corporate masters, emancipation from wage-slavery. We want our children to grow wise, not merely clever; pious, not merely obedient. Simply put, we want what most Americans took for granted for most of our nation’s history. This isn’t a pipe-dream. It’s not some sort of highfalutin theory. It’s not even a theory. It’s just… normal. (Localism, Davis, “How to Change the World”, pp. 229-230)

Davis, castigating his surroundings:

Political elites … accept billions of dollars a year from multi-national corporations to stamp out potential competitors, especially small businessmen. A mom-and-pop drugstore is a bigger threat to Walgreens than CVS or Rite Aid. Even the intelligentsia (universities, think-tanks, and the like) are in on the scam. They earn their keep by trading in abstract ideologies. They have to make our problems seem more complicated than they really are. They need us to buy into meaningless concepts like Marxism and capitalism for the same reason companies use terms like ‘brand awareness’ and ‘corporate culture.’ But the blame also lies, in no small part, with ourselves. … No supercenter, however super, sells virtue in a can. We—the little guys; you and me—have to make that choice for ourselves. We have to make it every day when we get out of bed in the morning and renew it a thousand times before we lie back down to sleep. This is the only way to change the world—at least for the better. Joseph Stalin and Jeff Bezos harnessed the power of Big Government and Big Business to make the world a worse place to live; Jesus Christ made it better by touching hearts and minds. (ibid, pp. 230-231)2

Lionel Trilling, in The Opposing Self, criticized American Marxism in its various manifestations. But in light of the preceding analysis of localism, I think Trilling’s criticism is no less applicable to it as to Marxism:

Somewhere in our mental constitution is the demand for life as pure spirit. The idea of unconditioned spirit is of course a very old one, but we are probably the first people to think of it as a realizable possibility and to make that possibility part of our secret assumption. It is this that explains the phenomenon of our growing disenchantment with the whole idea of the political life, the feeling that although we are willing, nay eager, to live in society, for we all piously know that man fulfills himself in society, yet we do not willingly consent to live in a particular society of the present, marked as it is bound to be by a particular economic system, by disorderly struggles for influence, by mere approximations and downright failures. (Trilling, “William Dean Howells”, The Opposing Self, pp. 90-91)

When we yield to our contemporary impulse to enlarge all experience, to involve it as soon as possible in history, myth, and the oneness of spirit — an impulse with which, I ought to say, I have considerable sympathy — we are in danger of making experience merely typical, formal, and representative, and thus of losing one term of the dialectic that goes on between spirit and the conditioned, which is, I suppose, what we mean when we speak of man’s tragic fate. We lose, that is to say, the actuality of the conditioned, the literality of matter, the peculiar authenticity and authority of the merely denotative. (p. 93)

The fate of all such wars on “the merely denotative” is failure — but it never stops in failure. Failure poses a crossroads: we can choose life or death, conversion or resentment. The localists, it seems to me, are whistling down the road to resentment — the road of “overlords” and “little guys”, of big and brash vs. small and beautiful, a road where Jeff Bezos is indistinguishable from Joseph Stalin and all is permitted to our friends and nothing to our enemies. It is the road to anti-Christian tribalism, to collaboration with tyrants in the name of freedom and with lechers in the name of decency — to greater goods whose whose logic will assuredly bring us, somewhere else, to grief.

“But anger,” you say, “is the right response to injustice! And surely you don’t think the world we live in is just? Babies are murdered in thousands every day; millions more suffer under the yoke of wage- and actual slavery; young souls are daily enchained by porn and drugs and consequent shame; lies abound at the highest levels of government. To look at that world and not feel anger is a crime against humanity!”

But “the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.” (James 1:20) Anger, wrote C.S. Lewis, is “the anesthetic of the mind, it does men good, it fumes away their grief.’” But ask any recovering opioid addict, and they’ll tell you: there’s no more potent narcotic than a painkiller. Hence, St. Paul echoes St. James warning: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” (Ephesians 4:26) Until we can be angry without sinning, we should be wary of justifying our anger at the world by pointing to the world’s injustice.

As usual, Sir Roger Scruton is apposite, with caveats. Scruton was a defender of beauty and a critic of mass culture, but he was equally sensitive to the dangers of resentment. The only cure for resentment is love — love of a home, because he was too much an English empiricist to commit to anything as metaphysically numinous as a homeland myth.

In Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, Scruton recognizes the spiritual danger of our ambient particulars:

The legitimate protests that are made against the ‘consumer’ culture urge us to distinguish two ways of living. … To respect humanity is to raise the human subject above the world of objects, into a realm of responsible choice. And from that realm, as we learn from the founding myth of our culture, a person may ‘fall’ into the world of mere things, so as to become a thing himself. When all our aims are appetites, then all that we pursue is ephemeral and replaceable. Markets exist precisely for that reason, namely, that the objects of appetite are exchangeable. They can be traded and priced. But the things that really matter to us cannot be traded. … And of course the more abundant the objects of appetite the more they capture our attention, the easier it is to obtain them and the more thickly do they overlay and obscure the realm of intrinsic values. We should look at all those things from the perspective of our own self-knowledge, and recognize that our happiness depends on wanting the right things, not the things that happen to capture our attention or to inspire our lust. (pp. 278-279)

But Scruton immediately resists the temptation to politicize the angry rejection of consumerism: unlike so many of us, he’s an adult about the issue.

Overcoming temptation is a spiritual task. No political system, no economic order, no dictatorship from above could possibly replace the moral discipline that we each must undergo if we are to live in a world of abundance without putting everything that is most dear to us — love, morality, beauty, God himself — on sale. This does not mean that things have not changed for the worse. (pp. 279-280)

He recognizes what most of the localists in the book seem to have forgotten in the midst of their facile economic and illiberal political pronouncements.

But if the problem is abundance, then are we to retreat from it, to a world in which we are once again in need? If the problem is the malleability of appetite, how are we to control it, and by what decrees? The fact is that we know the solution, and it is not a political one. We must change our lives. And to do this we need spiritual authority, the ability to make sacrifices, and the refusal to be degraded into the machines désirantes of Deleuze and Guattari. This changed way of life does not come from politics.” (p. 280)

Not just from mass politics, mind you — it does not come from politics at all. Rejecting our current politics in favor of a thuggish populist alternative substitutes one sham for another.

Our response to injustice should be neither indifference nor resentment, but unglamorous resolve — a resolve that doesn’t interfere with reason, however often reason affirms the overwhelming odds we have resolved to resist. As Aristotle said, “when cities utterly neglect the public care, it would seem appropriate for each individual to contribute to the virtue or his own offspring and friends, or at least to make the choice to do so.” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1180a30-33) Or more basically, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)

If we worship God logike, we should conduct our lives logike, too — and resentment is the enemy of logic. At the end of the day, Localism serves up nothing but the same old politics of resentment, dressed in the parlance of our times. Mature adults and mature Christians need to reject all such politics: we need a politics shorn of resentment, because only such a politics is open to compromise, which is embedded not just in American life, but in prudential reason itself.

Grow up, fellow Christians.

Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word.
- Walter De La Mare, “The Listeners”

Until now, I couldn’t say that with impunity. I promised back in August to conclude my critique of Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching, but all my essays since have been more or less “blah-blah-blah, Heimito von Doderer”. It’s time to keep my word — in two concurrently finished parts, which I’ll be sending out today.

To recap, since it’s been a while:

• in Part One, I culled a working definition of localism/distributism from the essays in the book, and then criticized the contributors’ explicitly economic proposals;

• and in Part Two, I argued that their collective idea of localism/distributism is overwhelmingly and exclusively agrarian, while Catholic Social Teaching is open to globalization and industrial society, making the book’s subtitle a misnomer.

Now in Part Three, I want to look at agrarianism in greater analytical and theological depth.

Subscribe now

Blood, Soil, and American Usage

Less than a month after finishing Part Two, I picked up Virgil’s Aeneid to teach to high school underclassmen. I’d read it nine years before, in college, but I didn’t read it well. I remembered the basics of the plot and key aspects of Virgil’s style, but little else. Rereading it was rich, if ultimately disappointing.

One of the themes that stuck out, especially in Books I-IV, when Aeneas is Dido’s guest at Carthage, was Virgil’s sense of the plight of the conquered. Aeneas and the Trojans are refugees whose homes have been destroyed by self-righteous expansionists;1 the poem recounts their journey to found a new city. But Virgil also seemed to recognize that the conquered easily become conquerors. Midway through, I was sure that Virgil was crafting a tale of Aeneas the tragic hero who would become the villain, like Paul Muad’Dib in Dune. And perhaps he was going for that, but he mutes that insight by the end of the poem: by Book XII, Aeneas is marauding across Italy by divine right, claiming his people’s dubious “birthright” and subjecting the locals to his rule — and Virgil seems to want us to applaud. The constant intervention of the gods in his favor, and Juno’s final concession to Jupiter, gives the whole founding myth a self-righteous stink. By affirming Rome’s self-understanding as the divinely ordained ruler of the world without peppering the climax with actual ambiguities (and not the literary blunders piously celebrated as such), Virgil left me chilled to the bone.

Regardless of the Aeneid’s failure as an epic, it gave me and my students a lot to discuss. One of the things we decided was that there’s a distinction between a home and a homeland. Having a home means you live somewhere, you have a concrete investment in a particular place: you work a farm, you run a business in a town or a city, you have family in the area, and so on. But having a homeland goes beyond concrete ties to the earth and waxes numinous: you don’t just live in your homeland, you belong to it — and it to you.

Outside of class, when I was freer to indulge in more postmodern speculations, I noticed that homelands are creatures of memory because they tend to be the invention of exiles. The conquered refugee gradually fans his warm memories of home into a red-hot longing for a homeland that never really existed.2

And this homeland myth is often closely associated with agrarian ideas. This is especially true of the Russian populist movement that emerged after the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. The intelligentsia fetishized serfs as the incorruptible mystical repository of all things good, pure, and wholesome about the Russian people: if the peasants could only be pulled out from under the thumb of the cruel landowners, they would transform Russia from within. And what made them serfs? Working the land. The magic wrought by the idea of farming on the minds of men who never so much as hoed a field is astounding — and also had purchase beyond Russia. Late 19^th century socialist movements throughout Europe had strong agrarian strains when focused on undermining the mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie class; where they were more pro-industrial, it was usually to undermine aristocratic landownership. To recur to Virgil, meanwhile, he is careful to name-drop numerous forefathers of Rome’s elite families — elite, because landowning. So even here, there is an impression that land and identity go hand in hand.

If the home vs. homeland distinction is real, and if there is an agrarian variant corresponding to each, then I propose to call the agrarian + home combo weak-bond, and the agrarian + homeland combo strong-bond, agrarianism. Weak-bond agrarianism is founded on concrete investment in a place, as mentioned above; strong-bond agrarianism, as I’m thinking of it here, is built on those more numinous, potentially more compelling, ideas: belonging, the prepolitical “we”, birthright, and so on.

To return to our subject, if Localism pushes an exclusively agrarian localism, it is my contention it tends toward strong-bond agrarianism.

It’s not an accident, for example, that Localism includes essays by Joseph Pearce (a noted Euroskeptic) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (now Secretary of State in a would-be populist administration). Some version or other of “strong-bond agrarianism” seems to be synonymous with worldwide right-wing populism. Not only do “conservative” populist parties tend to rely on rural electoral strongholds, their slogans are oddly similar. America is “for” Americans, Germany is “for” Germans, Japan is “for” the Japanese: these are all variations on the strong-bond theme. Nor do the populists simply mean legal, on-paper Americans, as Republican fantasies of abolishing birthright citizenship suggest. They care more about common culture than the fact of a legal birthright — consider Rubio’s recent address in Munich. It’s precisely not culture as an abstract set of ideals, but as a concrete and lived reality, that the populist right across the world sees as the foundation for political order. Such thinking animated last year’s “Heritage Americans” debacle, but it’s at least few months older than that. Eric Schmitt made the same point in his 2025 NatCon address:

If you imposed a carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan wouldn’t magically become America. Because Kazakhstan isn’t filled with Americans. It’s filled with Kazakhstanis! … What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them.3

The populist objection to immigration, in all of the countries mentioned, is that assimilation is a two-way street, and that, therefore, even the integration of well-meaning newcomers will change a country’s culture. Hungary’s foreign minister said it best during the 2015 refugee crisis, at least as reported by Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe: “Immigrants change the character of a country; we do not want the character of our country to change.” Perhaps not every contemporary populist is a strong-bond agrarian, but strong-bond bacilli are swimming in their Scotch-and-sodas.

And that makes sense as a conservative posture in a post-Christian world. Secular pre-Christian conservatism was wedded to the notion of civic and, to some extent, ethnic identity; cosmopolitan humanism, in China as in Rome, was always a minority position among elite intellectuals. It was the public purchase of strong-bond agrarian conservatism that allowed even Rome’s “good” emperors to persecute Christians without provoking popular wrath: the Christians were outsiders who refused to pay the price of civic belonging by sacrificing to the gods. (And Roman conservatism was fairly benign: many other civilizations have worked from something more closely resembling the “blood and soil” myth popularized by the Nazis.) While most of America’s right-wing populists are evangelicals, many other “conservatives” are at best heterodox Christians, as J.D. Vance reported in Hillbilly Elegy; and the would-be populist intelligentsia are openly at odds with Christianity: Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and so on.

So post-Christian strong-bond conservatism is a natural echo of pre-Christian conservatism. The strange thing is when Christians hop on the bandwagon, because Scripture is unambiguous about God’s attitude to “blood and soil” thinking.

The Theology of Land: It’s Complicated

Quite simply, there’s nothing in Scripture to affirm a strong-bond prepolitical tie between peoples and places. The most we get is St. Paul’s Areopagus sermon:

“[God] made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘for we are indeed his offspring.’” (Acts 17:26-28)

St. Paul acknowledges God as the true author of the “boundaries” of the nations, but he goes no further than that — and even that’s to say everything and nothing. Isaiah, too, emphasizes God’s universal authority over time and space, and therefore over the Assyrians and Babylonians threatening Israel and Judah. And indeed, St. Paul concludes with a nod to two cosmopolitan poets, Epimenedes of Crete and Aratus of Soli, the latter a genuine Stoic. The New Testament only amplifies this shifted perspective. St. Paul affirms the Stoic emphasis on the inward man as the decisive feature:

It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. (Romans 2:13-16)

Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. So, if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Then those who are physically uncircumcised but keep the law will condemn you who have the written code and circumcision but break the law. For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. (Romans 2:25-29)

Elsewhere, St. Paul gleefully targets the basic racial and biological distinctions at the root of pagan politics: “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ.” (Galatians 3:28) And the author of Hebrews famously states that “here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14).

As far as the specifically agrarian dimension, the contrast between farmer and shepherd is prominent in the Old Testament, right from the beginning. St. Augustine points out that Abel was a shepherd, because he knew he wasn’t destined to stay in the world; Cain, on the other hand, became a farmer, because he had no hope of salvation. I wouldn’t take Augustine’s comment as normative, but it’s illustrative. Further on in salvation history, in the age of kings, agriculture was closely associated with the cult of Baal, a Canaanite fertility god (cf. Elijah’s conflict with the priests in 1 Kings).

Now, the glaring sed contra to all of this, of course, is the Promised Land. The Israelites are commanded — commanded! — to return to and occupy, by bloodshed, the “land of their fathers.” The Exodus theology of the Promised Land, which is at the core of Israel’s founding story and the normative event in its theology of history, would seem to outweigh any contrary evidence. Doesn’t that make the Old Testament, at least, open to a Blut und Boden interpretation?

As it happens, no. Between The Ten Commandments and Prince of Egypt, the average American knows the Exodus story, but I doubt many non-believing Americans know the core message of Deuteronomy, Moses’s farewell discourse. That’s a pity, because Deuteronomy starkly undermines Blut und Boden politics.

Deuteronomy 4:1, 5:33, 8:1, 11:26-28, and 28 all contain a formula that anticipates the climactic dichotomy at the end of the book:

“I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if you heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land which you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and clinging to him; for that means life to you and length of days, that you may dwell in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” (Deuteronomy 30:15-20; emphasis mine)

Long-term possession of the Promised Land depends on the conduct of the Israelites: will they follow the Ten Commandments and the legal precepts, especially those concerning the treatment of the poor and the stranger, or not? The rest of the historical and prophetic books narrate and criticize Israel’s persistent failure to keep their end of the deal. The gist of the Old Testament, in other words, is that God is faithful, Israel is not, and that only a new covenant will fulfill God’s promises to Abraham — a covenant universal in scope and fundamentally spiritual in content.

Read in this light, the New Testament’s proclamation of ecclesial membership for Jews and Gentiles alike, as of Christ’s spiritual rather than political kingship, are theological refinements of the Old Testament rather than Marcionite ruptures in the continuum of revelation. The whole point of Blut und Boden, by contrast, is that political belonging is restricted and has nothing to do with personal conduct: my right to belong is literally in my blood.

Put more simply, Christians have no business flirting with strong-bond agrarianism. So why do so many have eyes for the coquette?

The fourth (and final!) part should already be in your inbox…

As a Catholic, I can’t overlook or avoid celebrating the (mild) religious revival the Western Church has seen over the last two years. I’ve read plenty of enthusiastic overstatements, but it’s noticeable enough that at least one fairly secular Substacker included it on his list of ten reasons for optimism about America’s future. Most relevant, the Catholic share of the revival has occurred largely, though not exclusively, in Traditional Catholic circles.

I’m not capital-T Traditional Catholic, and I’ve had qualms with Traditionalists in the past, but I don’t share the pessimism I’ve among some critics that the revival’s Traditionalist locus proves that it’s not a truly religious event, only the religious expression of the broad wider sociopolitical drift into illiberalism. And to be sure, there are strains of illiberalism and antisemitism in the new Traditional faithful (not to mention plenty of the old Traditional faithful). Still, charitable circumspection is warranted. The early Christians were uneasy about St. Paul’s conversion, and I’m sure Rome’s underground Christians looked at catechumens from the military and elite with caution, if not downright suspicion.

We can only be so choosy about how people come to the faith: “in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice.” (Philippians 1:18) But at the same time, we can’t afford to indulge or to overlook the imperfect motives that lead some people to faith simply because we’re scared of losing numbers. The revival, as far as it goes, imposes a pastoral responsibility on clergy and laity alike not just to avoid scandalizing newcomers to the Christian life, but to be clear about the nature and rhythm of that life itself.

For most of us, that means clarifying the nature and rhythm of that life for ourselves, since our own motives are almost certainly no less imperfect for being habitual. For that reason, I appreciate essays like Rev. Michael Rennier’s “What does it mean to be Liturgically Traditional?” It answers a real pastoral need.

But there are better answers.

Subscribe now

Rhetorical, not Substantive, Critique

I do not mean to debate the Novus Ordo vs. the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). I find such debates unprofitable at best, and more often scandalously acrimonious. I’m not a regular attendee of the TLM, but I have no quibble with those who are. My critique, rather, concerns a few of Fr. Rennier’s specific words and phrases that I think risk misleading newcomers on the road to Christian maturity.

“Chaos”

It’s odd that Fr. Rennier should highlight the TLM’s “chaos” as a quality worth mentioning. One of the most common motives given by converts in articles about the religious revival, from The Free Press to The New York Times, is the moral and existential chaos that distinguishes our secular from earlier, openly religious ages. Religion, in Jordan Peterson’s words, can be an antidote to chaos: an orderly moral universe, a sense of belonging to a community and to a tradition, a sense of stability.

Indeed, the almost universal longing to escape chaos is one of the reasons that the pessimists I mentioned are skeptical about the revival’s religious credentials. It smacks of the “Christian atheism” of Douglas Murray or Roger Scruton, of the psychologized religiosity you get in Jung and Peterson: religion’s existential necessity suffices to justify belief; it needn’t be premised on the actual existence of God or the immortality of the soul. The language of “escaping chaos” echoes this aesthetic pragmatism. Is it possible, therefore, that Fr. Rennier’s use of “chaos” is meant to splash cold water in the face of those who come to the TLM seeking solace without truth?

Possibly, if he actually meant chaos. But he clearly doesn’t:

The chaos of life carved into the rock is not a decoration upon the otherwise pristine, abstract perfection of the architecture. The perfection of the space is the riot of life. The life is the form.

Chaos, in this context, is nothing but a provocative way of referring to exuberant vitality — which, philosophically, is form incarnate. The “riot of life” is a poetic characterization of the vitality of enacted, living form. That may work as a rhetorical expression amenable to Traditionalists, but it’s rhetorically dissonant with the lived experience of the newcomers to the Church.

More than that, that’s all Fr. Rennier could mean by “chaos.”1 God desires sincere and authentic worship, which doesn’t always respect the banks of aesthetic finesse canalized in the Church’s architectural and musical traditions. And to a certain extent, that’s fine: it’s hard to read the Old Testament and walk away with the impression that God cares more about aesthetics than sincerity of heart. But sincerity is just as capable of becoming an idol as ritual beauty.

Idols arise whenever something other than God becomes our chief concern, but nothing has an exclusive claim to being that “something other”. That’s why both chasubles and self-expression can become idols. Think of St. Paul’s famous words in Romans:

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship [logike latreia]. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2)

Note the etymological proximity between logike, the term here translated as “spiritual”, and “logic.” That’s a clue to what he means. In conjunction with the notion of presenting our bodies as “living sacrifices” and the epistle’s earlier comments on the ultimate futility of the Torah’s ritual prescriptions, St. Paul is delimiting the Christian attitude toward ritual. Our rituals should be duly logike, because their warrant lies not in themselves, but in what they signify: the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Attending prayerfully to that significance, which sacramentally communicates its effect through the mediation of the priest, leads to “the renewal of your mind,” an outcome which implies that we’re otherwise incapable of knowing “what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Just as St. Paul limits the Christian approach to worship, therefore, he also imposes limits on liturgical freedom, which must be no less logike, grounded on the same sacramental significance. Not just anything will do, but only what satisfies a mind renewed by grace. By attending the sacraments with the right interior disposition, we experience the redemption in our hearts, which in turn proposes to our minds and wills what we should do concretely in our moral and intellectual lives. That, and that alone, constitutes logike latreia.

Internal chaos results when ritual predominates — the chaos the prophets repeatedly castigate, noting the discord between honoring God with the lips and abusing Him in the poor. External chaos, on the other hand, results when self-expression predominates — when we treat our cultural preferences as fixed points around which liturgical and theological realities pivot. Refusing to kneel in the Roman rite during the Eucharistic prayer because kneeling is somehow redolent of antiquated political theories; editing hymns and even the creed to omit gendered language, etc.

So, we can only hope that the TLM isn’t chaotic. The new faithful are seeking Christ to escape the psychological chaos of a world hermetically sealed against the breath of God, and the Church demands that we eschew the internal and external chaos that flows from idolatry. Only in the absence of chaos can the vitality which Fr. Rennier means to celebrate flourish — so call the TLM “vital” or “lively.” Words matter, as Pope Leo XIV just reminded us.

“Romantic”

On that subject, here’s another word that Fr. Rennier adopts which he probably shouldn’t. Granted, he might be using the word in its more contemporary sense:

It’s considered naive, overly-emotional, and self-indulgent to be a Romantic but, properly understood, this really isn’t true. Romanticism can be self-indulgent and egotistical, but to me, this isn’t true Romanticism. True Romanticism isn’t emotional immaturity chasing after an idealized lover; it’s the search for the perfect and worthy Beloved.

Which sense of “romantic” is at play here? I’d wager both: the romantic “search for the perfect and worthy Beloved” is part and parcel of the wider romantic notion that the perfection of life consists in the fulfillment of the heart, not the mind. These senses are closely connected, both historically and conceptually.

A common Traditionalist trope is that the Novus Ordo is too “rationalist.” Since the most popular critics of rationalism in Europe were the romantics, who flourished at the tail end of the 18^th century and into the middle of the 19^th, using “romantic” as a catchall for opposition to liturgical rationalism makes some sense. And since “romantic”, in its more recent sense, extends anti-rationalism to the existential sphere, it also makes sense to defend liturgical anti-rationalism as an expression of the soul’s romantic quest for God.

But only if you’re content to think in low resolution.

Lest we forget Pope Leo’s reminder, words have meanings. “Romantic” has always had ties beyond erotic love to a broader worldview properly designated “romantic,” and that worldview has always meant more than anti-rationalism.

The intensity of romantic anti-rationalism far exceeded the Church’s longstanding endorsement of the harmony of faith and reason, dogmatically defined at Vatican I’s Dei Filius. In particular, European nationalism sprang directly, and in many cases predictably, from romantic writers and activists. The Church has repeatedly condemned most forms of nationalism, so-called. Thus, while “romanticism” never came in for direct condemnation, key features of the romantic movement did. It’s instructive to ask why.

Romanticism inspired popular challenges to Napoleon’s authority over conquered German territory, but not to Napoleon’s charismatic advocacy for “the French spirit”. It was precisely the Napoleonic model — the state as voice and effective agent of the prepolitical “people” — that refined and directed romantic political philosophy. Political life is subordinate to a people’s communal life; to be legitimate, a state should express and channel that prepolitical energy. It is precisely this political theology of a prepolitical “we” that the term “romantic” smuggles into other domains, including liturgical discourse.

If all you mean by “romantic” is that there’s room in the TLM for individual emotional fulfillment, fine — but for the love of language, find a better word. Claiming “romantic” without further comment means immersing the liturgy in a whole atmosphere of associated sociopolitical meanings, many of which are toxic to true religion.

“Not Ultramontanist”

Last but not least, Fr. Rennier asserts that being liturgically Traditional doesn’t make one Ultramontanist. That may be factually correct, but only according to a very recent reconfiguration of the facts.

First, to define our terms. “Ultramontanism” refers to a specific attitude of 19^th century Catholics immersed in the revolution-reaction debate which paralleled the question of romanticism. The dithering of bishops and priests in the period of Revolution, specifically in connection with state interference via the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, drove Catholics to seek ecclesial continuity in the pope’s clear and usually anti-Revolutionary pronouncements. Against revolutionary innovations, the pope was the mouthpiece of tradition.

That being so, why one earth should liturgical Traditionalism be labeled “not Ultramontanist?”

Because, as far as I can tell, after more than a century of alignment between hardline commitment to papal pronouncements and a continuous, Tridentine-adjacent Roman rite, the recent popes’ ambivalence has forced the Traditionalist movement to reckon with its historical Ultramontanism. It must now decide just where its priorities lie: in a particular liturgical aesthetic, or in the “traditional” juridical structure of papal supremacy? Fr. Rennier has clearly stated his position — and in the process, introduced some major pastoral ambiguities.

Here are Fr. Rennier’s words:

Catholic Liturgy is the inheritance of generations. As such, it carries magisterial heft and indicates universal truths. The Holy Father can and should regulate liturgy but not in totalitarian fashion. The personal preferences of the clergy are formed by the liturgy, not the other way around. A bishop so formed deserves our obedience and to be given the benefit of the doubt when he intervenes and teaches. Bishops not so formed still deserve our obedience. But of course, the faithful have the right and duty to provide feedback even if the discussion becomes tense. That’s how Father-Child relationships work. Each has duties to the other and both are completely obedient to the liturgy. I’m reminded of the famous story about Pius IX who, when asked to insert the name of St. Joseph into the Roman Canon, replied, “I am only the pope, I cannot do this.” No one owns the sacred liturgy. Even the Holy Father is a servant-guardian.

This is a careful, but historically inaccurate, retrojection of contemporary theological ideas onto the thinking and self-understanding of the pre-20th century Church.

• The claim that the liturgy “carries magisterial heft and indicates universal truth” is misleading. The language is vague, but seems to imply that the liturgy as such has a kind of magisterial authority. This would have been a surprise to the popes: they saw it as their duty to serve the faithful by governing liturgical decisions in accord with deposit of faith — but it was decidedly matter for their government. St. Pius V standardized the liturgy in 1570 by an act of juridical fiat, an act that was echoed by later popes. They saw the liturgy as an expression of magisterial teaching, but not an addition to it. The implicit view of the quasi-magisterial status of the Roman rite is an extremely recent Traditionalist idea, developed in dialectic with equally recent canonical “attacks” on the TLM.

• In conditioning the pope’s authority over the liturgy by the phrase “not in totalitarian fashion,” Fr. Rennier relies openly on an ideologically fraught idiom. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the term “totalitarian” is inextricably linked to the age of communism and rising fascism: usage spikes in the late 1930s and 1940s. The point is, Bl. Pius IX — and, multo magis, St. Pius V — would not have thought of their actions as occupying any place along a spectrum with “totalitarian” at one end. This is anachronistic as history, even if intelligible as a moral intuition.

• Again, the concept of the faithful having a “right and duty” to provide feedback to the shepherds smacks of the idea of popular sovereignty held in suspicion from Mirari Vos to the Syllabus of Errors. Prior to Vatican II, the idea of consulting the faithful at large, rather than experts from Vatican-approved institutions of scholarship and higher education, was unthinkable; it would have been denounced as modernism, liberalism, Gallicanism, conciliarism, or any other number of bugaboo -isms. This, too, relies on a notion that owes far more to Benedict XVI’s post-Vatican II ecclesiology than anything resembling the ecclesial politics of the preconciliar popes.

This paragraph carefully reframes the theology of the pope’s authority vis-a-vis the liturgy in terms entirely sympathetic to the latest version of self-consciously Traditionalist ecclesiology, which downplays the pope’s juridical standing and amplifies his role as servant-guardian.

But earlier popes, especially those responsible for standardizing the Roman Missal in the first place, didn’t see those as opposed. Rather, they saw their juridical supremacy as a tool of servant-guardianship. St. Pius V’s Quo Primum (1570) standardized the Roman Missal and declared that alterations to the Missal by “anyone” would incur God’s wrath and immediate ecclesial anathema… but as far as we know, no canonists got their cassocks in a bunch over Clement VIII’s 1604 revision to the typical edition of the Roman Missal, which corrected texts, adjusted rubrics, and standardized ceremonial inconsistencies. The same dynamic can be observed in the pontificates of Urban VIII, Benedict XIV, Clement XIII, Clement XIV, Pius VII, and Leo XIII. Each saw it as a regular part of his role as pope to govern and, if necessary, modify the liturgy. They exercised this authority as a normal extension of their papal authority.

And here we come to the heart of the matter. The various iterations of the Roman Rite associated with the TLM weren’t normative because they expressed popular piety — the upshot of Fr. Rennier’s paragraph. They were normative because of papal fiat. The popes took it upon themselves, for justifiable pastoral reasons, to standardize liturgical practice, and to perpetuate that standardized practice through post-Trent seminary formation and, eventually, through their unique relationship with the Society of Jesus. That those standardized liturgical practices came to be considered popular is a testament to the success of the papacy’s project — but is irrelevant to the rite’s juridical status. If the TLM became the standard rite of the Roman Church by papal fiat, then by definition its standardization could be altered by papal fiat: that is its undeniable point of contact with Ultramontanism. To redefine the TLM’s historical character and normativity as an organic manifestation of popular piety and unfalsifiable appeals to the sensus fidelium is not to propose a revised interpretation of the facts, but simply to revise the facts.

Please understand me. I am entirely sympathetic to the plight of the Traditionalists. They have discovered what the ressourcement theologians discovered a few generations ago: that there must be limits to papal voluntarism, that the fiat of the papacy must have some sort of procedural check if it is to serve the ultimate good of the Church and not the short-term goals, however well-intentioned, of the invariably flawed men who sit on the cathedra. I once had a conversation with one very Traditional fellow and one outspoken, very non-Traditional fellow. The latter was effusing about Traditionis Custodes, and his reasoning reduced to an endorsement of papal voluntarism I can only describe as absurd. My Traditional friend seemed hesitant to engage, since he assumed he was outnumbered. But miracle of miracles, I found myself defending what I took to be his position: there has to some kind of limiting principle on the pope’s legitimate authority over discipline, much as there is over doctrine. But how to characterize that principle? Conciliarism is out — and likewise, “the synodal way,” conciliarism’s reanimated corpse. These are open and urgent questions in contemporary theology, and they need to be addressed.

But simply to assert that liturgical Traditionalism is “not Ultramontanist” is to close those questions without argument — and conveniently, to close them in favor of Traditionalism. It is closed-minded, and likely to scandalize new believers by suggesting stability where there is debate, which risks recasting what is truly stable as similarly open to the erosion of shifting opinion.

While I tend to avoid listening to interviews with pundits and politicians, you can only avoid so much without earning that epithet of cowards, ‘apolitical.’ So I listen, every now and then — and no matter how often I dip into the scummy Hudson of American political commentary, I never walk away wishing I went for a dip more often.

Subscribe now

What provokes ick and eye-rolls, of course, varies with the kind of interviewee. Politicians tend to exhibit their usual buttery flexibility about comments past and present (with sympathetic interviewers rarely applying so much as a butter knife’s pressure to their interlocutor’s milky doubletalk and hostile interviewers content simply to yell at the humanoid lump of congealed fat).

Pundits, on the other hand, fall back on an even more annoying habit — annoying, because it subtly parrots intellectual virtue. “I’ve always said…” “I’ve been saying this since…” “As I said in my book…” “I think I’ve been very clear about…” and so on. They then proceed to say exactly what they’ve said before, in exactly the same words. They equate verbal with intellectual consistency, and expect to receive the respect properly owed only to the latter.

Now, is there actually a distinction between verbal and intellectual consistency, or is that a Substacker’s excuse for 3,000 words? Fortunately, yes. That distinction, if not in those words, is at the heart of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Newman elevates continuity of content over continuity of form, and identifies an idea’s vitality with its capacity for expression in many different, sometimes seemingly conflicting, forms. From this perspective, adaptability, rather than uniformity, is the proper virtue of a lively mind, giving change a respect it had never before received.

It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savors of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

(St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, p. 40; emphasis mine)

Of course, Newman valorizing change only appears to conflict with the preceding tradition — verbal vs. intellectual consistency, remember? “Irritability” is a biological term for an organism’s ability to detect and respond to environmental stimuli, and it’s an essential feature for survival. A simpler way of saying what Newman says in 250 words is that the richest ideas spring from the liveliest minds, and that intellectual ‘liveliness’ means an irritability like that of organisms. Here, despite all appearances to the contrary,1 Newman concurs with Aristotle, according to whom “the actuality of thought is life” and that “God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.” (Metaphysics XII.7) In another translation, he says that “God is the supreme and everlasting animal.” To think is to live in full, in other words. What Newman adds is that the human mind, being immersed in the physical world, imitates God’s changeless, all-at-once vision of the world through a dynamic of detection, response, and adaptation — that the mind elevates organic mutability in the service of intelligence.

And what Newman says of whole philosophies is true, mutatis mutandis, of every individual mind. During a particularly lively discussion in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, one of the characters says to the other, with whom he has just vigorously disagreed,

“Dmitry Petrovich … please forgive me for being passionate. But you know better than me that physicists love you not only because you are an authority but also because you never use your authority to silence others. The joy of working with you lies in the possibility of escaping from dogmatism into the realm of living, impassioned discussion.”

(Stalingrad, p. 242; emphasis mine)

The intellectual virtue of a pundit, by contrast, is to say the same thing, in the same way, year in, year out. That sounds more like evidence of intellectual death than life. How can they have actually lived through the last 25 years without feeling any need to modify their assessment of the social, political, and intellectual causes of the roiling state of the West?

In the spirit of Newman, I’ve taken to measuring intelligence precisely by how often, and about what, a person changes their mind. There’s something of Rilke to this attitude, too. The teacher who introduced us to the pre-Socratics and to Aristotle’s Physics assigned Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” before we ventured into the dank wilds of Ionian mysticism. The poem ends with the observation that

denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.2

I completed a major intellectual about-face this past year, as a function of teaching history, reading a lot of Substack essays, immersing myself in the literature of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and struggling to produce an honest review of Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching. Indeed, one of the reasons it took me so long to write the first two parts of that review, and why I’m still not done with the third part, is that I was simultaneously struggling to know where I fall on the politico-economic spectrum. I think, though, that I’ve finally settled on a provisional view. So, as a year-in-review exercise in the spirit of Newman’s “to live is to change,” I thought I’d narrate the change to ring in the new year. To many more changes to come!

From Point A: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”

I devoured Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism when it came out in 2022. He brought together numerous strands of thought and interest in a single and readable narrative. What I especially enjoyed was Continetti’s refreshing habit of not just focusing on presidents, as is the custom with most popular political histories, but of bringing in Congressional elections and machinations alongside pop and intellectual culture. My about-face began with Continetti.

“Get the state out of the economy” is — or, well, was — a reliable shibboleth of the American right post-1932. The modern conservative movement in America began as a wholesale rejection of the New Deal, which some at the time saw as a tacit embrace of communism. It was only with the outbreak of the Cold War, Eisenhower’s affirmation of the New Deal, and ideological modulations under Buckley that being conservative meant radical anticommunism uber alles. That was a logical outgrowth from mere hostility to the administrative state, but it was a key rhetorical shift.

Anticommunism — especially after National Review cleansed it of McCarthy’s conspiratorial stench — gave social conservatives like Buckley a common cause with libertarians and, by the late 1960s, “New Deal Democrats” disillusioned by the extremism of the university and hippy van left. Many still dreamed of dismantling the administrative state, but the urgent need to topple communism took pride of place. The compromise they crafted in concert united the libertarians’ hostility to state intervention and commitment to free markets with National Review’s more numinous ideas of ordered liberty and piety for traditional institutions.

The result — whether you call it Reaganomics or fusionism — solidified into conservative orthodoxy by about 1975, led to Reagan’s landslide victories in 1980 and 1984, drove America’s mid-80s boom, and remained the bedrock of Republican politics until 2016. That’s why, when Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” he was castigated as a proto-communist by Republicans everywhere. Nothing good happens when the government rolls up its sleeves and gets involved in economic life, went the typical fulmination.

The reality, of course, was more complicated than that history suggests.

I’d already found myself wondering if the “get the state out of the economy” shibboleth was any more than empty words by the time I graduated college in 2019. I didn’t think conservatives secretly meant the opposite, only that they fell back on it when asked to think critically about the post-2008 economy. Invariably, when pressed, mumblers of the shibboleth insisted that the solution was the same as it had been back in 1981: tax cuts, lower government spending, and deregulation. And yet deregulation, among other things, contributed mightily to the subprime mortgage fiasco that shattered America’s financial institutions in the first place.

Besides, the more I studied the 1950s-1980s — and I studied them in depth, thanks to a summer job transcribing dozens of documentary interviews from the period — the more I realized that the period of American greatness coincided with colossal government spending.

• World War II, and later Cold War, defense spending in California enriched the state and contributed to its cultural dominance in the mid-20th century. ChatGPT estimates that, adjusting for inflation, the federal government spent c. $400-500 billion on defense and aerospace contracts in California between from 1941-1970.

• NASA’s Apollo program, arguably another form of Cold War defense spending, further added to the federal government’s expenditures — and also happened to enrich California, too. Again, according to ChatGPT and adjusting for inflation, the federal government spent c. $180-200 billion dollars on the Moon missions, approximately $60 billion of which went to California-based enterprises.

Now, of course, the spending mechanisms are important. It’s one thing to channel tax revenue to government employees in a bloated executive bureaucracy (the “administrative state”), it’s another to pay this money out in contracts to private enterprises like Lockheed and JPL. The one method incentivizes regulation and administrative bloat, the other stimulates the private sector. Still, golden-age California, the jewel of mid-century American greatness, only existed because the government spent it into existence.

To be fair, there were cracks in the conservative orthodoxy by 2008. The financial crisis intensified the pressure on those cracks; the years that followed, culminating in the 2016 election, signaled a paradigm shift at the level of popular perception. Yet as the 2020 and 2024 election cycles revealed, the specter of Reaganomics continued to haunt Republican presidential candidates: those that weren’t Trump had to pay lip-service to the old fusionism. With Trump’s reelection in 2024, though, I suspect Reagan’s ghost may finally have dissipated. Like everyone, I was primed to revisit my preconceptions of political economy.

To Point B: Waking from My Economic Dogmatism

The stimulus for my overhaul was the controversy about tariffs, “the most beautiful word in the English language.”

I was only dimly aware of the trade war that Trump started with China in 2018, when he slapped tariffs on all kinds of Chinese imports. Unbeknownst to me, Trump has been saying the same thing about China since the 1980s: that tariffs alone could decouple the American and Chinese economies; that tariffs alone could reindustrialize the American heartland; and so on. All I knew was that tariffs were Trump’s “thing,” and that, therefore, the anti-Trump left reviled them as the worst policy since Lebensraum.

The more I researched and discussed the issue with trusted friends, though, the more I concluded they are, in fact, wrongheaded.

Tariffs are fees paid on imports from a foreign country, solely because they come from said country. Importantly, they’re not paid by the foreign exporters, but by the domestic importers. When a government imposes tariffs, it’s usually to discourage domestic companies from doing business with foreign companies. That’s why, despite the fact that they only directly impose a domestic burden, they’re often spoken of as targeting particular countries: in the long run, by discouraging imports from another country, a government can indirectly harm that country’s economic life.

I concluded that tariffs were wrongheaded both from facts and principles.

The notion that tariffs are the best protection for the American economy — especially the agricultural base Trump relied on in 2016 — is hard to square with what actually happened. China’s response to Trump’s initial 20-50% tariffs on tech in 2018 was to jack up its own tariffs on American goods, a large part of which was… agricultural. China relied on American soybeans to support its thriving pork industry — and with Beijing’s 25% tariff on said soybeans, Chinese importers naturally turned elsewhere. What was meant to harm China’s economy in the name of America’s farmers wound up gutting America’s agricultural sector and costing American taxpayers $30 billion in compensatory subsidies.

Moreover, tariffs offend violate the aforementioned conservative orthodoxy. When the state imposes tariffs, it is dictating with whom its citizens may and may not conduct business rather than letting them exercise their economic liberty, which is the precondition for, and the habitual expression of, their political liberty. If America’s consumers want to buy cheaper goods from China rather than from domestic producers, who is the state to say otherwise?

For both reasons, I adopted a universal opposition to tariffs as both economically dysfunctional and philosophically un-American.

But after subscribing to Noahopinion last summer, I found myself gradually questioning the certainty of my conclusion.

Noah Smith, a center-left economist with a critical admiration for Paul Krugman, never wrote in support of tariffs as such. But his various posts on the subject, both during the 2024 campaign and in the bloodsoaked aftermath of April’s “Liberation Day”, helped me see that my wholesale rejection of tariffs was no less dogmatic than Trump’s own unshakable belief in the magic of tariffs. For Noah, tariffs are simply a tool in a government’s economic toolbelt rather than as a weapon (Trump) or as a cipher for political theory (me). Tools serve specific purposes, and need to be used accordingly. If tariffs are a tool, reasoned Noah, then we have to know to what purpose they correspond — and what a purpose-driven tariff policy looks like.

Noah helped me see that tariffs are defensible in a market economy only when designed to protect the government as a unique economic consumer. The government consumes many things like a private citizen, but being responsible for domestic order and national security, it can’t behave like a private citizen in every way. If a private citizen wants to use Chinese hard- and software to store files and share info knowing that China may be snooping on his data, that’s his prerogative. But for the government to rely on the same technology would be a gross dereliction of its duty to protect national security. Targeted tariffs on specific hardware, in conjunction with proactive measures like the 2022 CHIPS act, therefore, can conduce to national security without upending entire industries, as Trump did in 2018 to America’s soybean farmers.

Rethinking tariffs with Noah triggered a broader openness to the center-left perspective on political economy, a perspective I’d hitherto ignored because of my orthodox fusionism. I came across a formulation in an essay by Sam Bowman I discovered through Henry Oliver: “A neoliberal is someone who believes that markets are astonishingly good at creating wealth, but not always good at distributing wealth.” I don’t know that I’d call myself a neoliberal, but I’d certainly agree with that assessment. It’s hard to sell libertarians on the reality of the unjust distribution of wealth, because for most of them, “distributive justice” can’t mean much beyond honoring free contracts. If executives walk home with millions and wage-slaves with their agreed-upon pittance, good luck convincing a libertarian that there’s been any violation of distributive justice.

Of course, it doesn’t do much good to grumble about unequal income: not all labor has equal economic value. (This is an old argument; you can practically smell the hairspray on the side-part of its 1980s provenance.) But the notion of legal equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence has shaped the conviction that America should ensure equal economic opportunity. And that’s an ideal which, pace the William J. Bennetts of the world, we’re far from having achieved: access to economic capital is still too tied to social capital, itself too often tied to generational wealth and status. There is still a powerful aristocracy in this country, all the more powerful for its being, as Tocqueville predicted, founded on industrial achievement instead of noble birth.

I still haven’t read Abundance, but from what I’ve read by Abundance movement enthusiasts (including Noah Smith), and in light of the last two years’ worth of economic ruminating, I think it’s broadly the economic platform I’d like the country to pursue. It’s less wedded to a particular ideology, unlike both progressivism (which is reliably anti-American) and contemporary “conservatism”, making it more amenable to coalition-building and compromise, which the country desperately needs if our republic is to survive intact. The Abundance agenda wants deregulation without the usual libertarian apoplexy about state action (after all, deregulation and zoning reform will both demand enormous action at the state and federal level), promotes openness to local economies without a romanticized fetish for “the local”, is willing to revive antitrust law to thwart the tendency of capitalism to produce wealth and then concentrate it in the hands of a few, and has a realistic grasp of the benefits and costs of global trade. It’s far from Reaganomics, but it’s not state corporatism á la China, either. It’s that rarest of things: a true alternative to both voices in the loudmouthed shouting match of American public life.

I have no illusions that Abundance will heal the country. The more I read, the harder it is to have much hope for politics. If penning these little essays on the philosophy of culture has taught me anything, it’s that politics, like culture, acts according to forces that are reducible to no one person’s or movement’s influence, and therefore nearly impossible to understand, let alone to direct. The relationship between economic and political liberty, while real, isn’t as smooth or one-directional as Milton Friedman would have it; the psychological experience of abundance can lead to ingratitude or to ennui. Buddenbrooks and The Strudlhof Steps showed me that, as did Harry Kessler and Nietzsche and so many other incisive critics of liberal democracy.

And yet we can’t wash our hands of politics, either — let alone of liberal democracy. Lionel Trilling and Isaiah Berlin affirmed that conviction in me this year. The most we can do, as Ralph Abernathy knew, is try: try to understand what drives our world from Gog to Magog and back, and try — without sacrificing ourselves to the dark angel of expediency — to be human with and for each other, in the name of the Triune God Who made us all. Permit me, therefore, a modest hope for 2026, and for the future of our republic that turns 250 a day before I hit 30.

Happy New Year, one and all!

It was a long and eventful year for still being shy of the full 365 days. I was involved in four plays, was chased away from a military installation in Nevada, escaped a flash flood, languished on a 48-hour Amtrak ride from Kansas City to Los Angeles, drank scotch in a Taito City jazz bar and bourbon with a Shanghai bureaucrat in Iwamatocho, climbed a minor mountain in Wyoming (in the snow!) and ate “free”1 lobster tail in Maryland. I also got into pickling, largely through culinarily reading Turgenev’s Sketches from A Hunter’s Album.

I read a lot, but alas, I didn’t make good on many of the promises I made in Kyoto. My reading was more focused than usual: the average year of publication of all the books I read in 2025 (37, if you must know), is 1907, most of them translated from Russian or German. I suppose I’m honing in on the era and the subjects that truly interest me, but at the same time, I hope 2026 rejuvenates my desire to read more widely, not just in space, but in subject matter. Only generalists go to heaven.

Subscribe now

The Father, August Strindberg, 1887.

Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge. Intense. It’s interesting to read intense plays after writing Passion’s End, and wondering what experiences the playwright is pulling from. This has a pretty dark and bleak view of romantic love. Also interesting to read a playwright from this era other than Chekhov — Strindberg and Chekhov are both downers, but Chekhov is considerably more humorous, which makes his tragedy that much more poignant. Strindberg’s unrelenting bleakness inoculates your sensitivity; Chekhov keeps you raw.

Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann, 1901.

Translated by John Woods. Started this back in October 2024, and I’m glad I took my time with it — though the delay began to weigh heavy on my emotions after a while! A marvelous piece of writing: his descriptions of people and places and emotions are all so lush and lucid, a bit like literary deep focus: everything is presented in such crisp detail, I couldn’t plow through it; I needed to take breaks. Deep love for and frustration at all the main characters, but especially Tony and Thomas. So much to think about: the pressures of duty crushing their naturalness and costing them, possibly, their happiness. But all rendered so subtly: lucidity is a key complement to lushness. Never does Mann’s narrative overflow the levy of his cool, crisp style — no bursts of fevered, rampant introspection, a la Dostoevsky or Faulkner. But he is on a par with both. The description of Hanno’s death from typhus makes Turgenev’s depiction of Bazarov’s final illness, which Chekhov praised to the skies, look like a finger painting. Oh, what a tremendous, tremendous book. (There were some definite resonances, very prominent in places, with Flags in the Dust: family honor, the ledger of births and deaths, the ultimate survival of the womenfolk, etc. I wonder if Faulkner read the book, and if he would acknowledge the influence.)

Smoke, Ivan Turgenev, 1867.

Translated by Constance Garnet. Marvelous, with new heights for Turgenev’s capacity to describe complex introspection in a few words, a few carefully crafted metaphors. The social commentary is also extremely funny. Deeply sad, but it ends hopefully, for Litvinov, at least; Irina and Potugin. Sad. Gorgeous. Worth the wait. Late Turgenev is better, I find: Torrents of Spring is also from the same period, and features a similar, and similarly moving, arc of tragedy and redemption.

A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne, 1768.

I bought this a while ago, possibly when I plundered the Santa Paula bookstore when it closed and everything was a bargain. Charmingly written, with something of the authorial presence of Flann O’Brien, though without the absurdist humor — though does Rabelaisian humor qualify as absurdist? Certainly not in the same way that Flann O’Brien does, at the very least. Want to read Tristram Shandy at some point, as a result of this: fun, funny, well-written, light satire.

Confessions of An English Opium-Eater, Thomas de Quincey, 1821.

An astounding book. The prose is magnificent, and the story remarkable: his dreams in particular are wild. I’m convinced the ones related to architecture influenced both Susanna Clarke in Piranesi and Christopher Nolan in Inception. Affecting, gorgeously written, and thought-provoking: a terrific whim-of-the-moment read.

An Armenian Sketchbook, Vasily Grossman, 1965.

Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Beautiful stuff. His stream of consciousness between narrative and metaphorical commentary (his fixation on stones, his extended metaphors on hermits and sunsets and the beauty of women) has a delightful and disarming simplicity to it: he’s not a self-aware writer at all, or at least doesn’t come across that way. A welcome refresher to the hyper-introspection of a lot of the early 20^th century, pre-war literature I love so much. I especially enjoyed the chapter in which he met the Catholicos and the old peasant man. His descriptions, though more dependent on metaphor, remind me of Turgenev’s: they have a simple and direct evocativeness. They’re not labored, heavy, or crafted: they seem effortless. By the end, I felt like I’d spent time in a distinct landscape and gotten to know its yearly cycle of pallor and blush.

Bread in the Wilderness, Thomas Merton, 1953.

My first full encounter with Merton. Beautiful and thought provoking — and oddly contemporary. Surprising in places to recall that it was written in the 1950s. A lot I need to chew on. The role of the Psalms in promoting purity of heart, the central concern — according to Merton, echoing St. John Cassian — of the monastic life.

A Month in The Country, J.L. Carr, 1978.

Brideshead Revisited meets Lilies of the Field, with a touch of B.J. Novak’s Vengeance. I shall say no more.

Mosquitoes, William Faulkner, 1927.

Early Faulkner is excellent, though this certainly lacked the restraint that surprised me in Flags in the Dust. Some of the prolonged scenes are astonishingly well-written — dramatic, cinematic, with some of his finest and wittiest dialogue. The conceit and its execution were both excellent, though it’s certainly a downer. About a group of affected bohemian-types in New Orleans who get stuck on a lake in a boat for a few days, during which bitter hilarity ensues.

Memories, Teffi, 1931.

Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg. The first finished of the (far too many) books I brought with me on my ill-starred roadtrip. Beautiful. Some highlights include Gooskin, the fried eggs business, the hair’s breadth escape from Odessa thanks to V, her eerie discussion of gemstones and her friend M, and the long stretch on the Shilka, with especially the haunting Holy Saturday night when she they hear the churchbells from the shore, and she remembers her little sister. A fascinating transitional period in Russian literature: as with Grossman in An Armenian Sketchbook and now in Stalingrad, events have obliterated the literary charm of mapping the subtleties of psychological topography, but the pre-Revolution tradition of stylistic depth and psychological penetration are still here — the old style has yet to exchange its traditional, psychologically rich subject matter for shallower, more propagandistic fare.

In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki, 1933.

Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. Helped me resonate with the atmosphere and vibes not just of modern Japanese cinema, but of Bashō, Kenkō, and the older tradition. The beauty of shadows and relations rather than of things; the thingness of things muted, reduced to unobtrusive instruments to craft and highlight shadows. Plus, his reflections at the end voiced something I’d noticed about general Japanese mores in their films, about the isolation and exclusion of the elderly in industrialized Japanese society. That makes sense of Ozu’s oeuvre in particular.

Virgin Soil, Ivan Turgenev, 1877.

Translated by Constance Garnet. Not his best, but certainly better than the Penguin Classics note (“his later novels lack the balance and topicality of his earlier works”) implies. Certain sections felt rushed, and the dialogue between his lovers just never quite sticks the landing; but the defects are somehow compensated by the story, which is so different from his earlier fare. Marianna is an especially interesting, unusual character for Turgenev. Nezhdanov, meanwhile, reminds of Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard, but infused with the essence of Turgenev’s previous superfluous men. It’s a combination that doesn’t quite work: he could have done more with him. He hints at Nezhdanov’s complexity, but the hints don’t reveal the nature of that complexity so much as merely make its presence evident. Still, it worked more than A Nest of the Gentry. As always, I loved the side characters: Solomin, Paklin, Sipyagin, Kallomyetsev, Valentina Mihalovna. A melancholic conclusion to his oeuvre.

Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin, 1978.

I finished this during the sleepless night before I left for Japan, but I’d been reading essays from this since I bought it on a trip to Solvang in February. A game-changer in terms of affecting my perspective, not just of Russian history but of life in general. A non-fiction highlight of the year, comparable in intellectual impact to Popper’s Open Society a few years back. Combined with Buddenbrooks, it inspired my two favorite essays. Berlin grounds the major figures of 19th century Russian literature in their wider European context — and does so without the Dostoevsky fetish that prejudices the enthusiasts for Russian literature in contemporary Catholic literary circles. Like Lionel Trilling (see below), Berlin offers a liberal, but deeply humane, assessment of Russia’s imperial writers. He’s also a marvelous stylist in his own right — and immensely well-read. Enriched my experience of Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, and introduced me to Herzen and Belinsky.

The Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, Maurice Leblanc, 1907.

Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. What delightful fluff! Lighthearted, funny, and very French. Arsène Lupin is France’s answer to Sherlock Holmes (who appears, under the preposterous pseudonym of Holmlock Shears, in one of the stories): he is an elegant cat burglar with a Robin Hood heart-of-gold streak and Jeeves-like omniscience. It’s odd, perhaps, that I should read the lion’s share of these tales of a late-19th century French cat burglar in my spare time on trains and “on break” while in Japan, and finished the book in Incheon Airport in Seoul during a 20-hour layover. But that’s our global age, isn’t it?

The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling, 1950.

Picked this up in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the ICLE conference, where it immediately provided an intellectual refuge. A genuinely wise man, grounded in literature, sensitive to the world’s constants and the variables, and a marvelous stylist — a consolation devoutly to be wished. Trilling’s wisdom was certainly hard-won. Jacques Barzun, in an obituary for Trilling, with whom he worked at Columbia University for years, said of his friend that

in the I930s a young American who would be a critic faced, in life and art, the choice between a reactionist aestheticism upholding the autonomy of the work of art and the Marxist interpretation (and employment) of art as a weapon in the Class struggle. Like many others, Lionel was drawn to Marxism by his idealism and generous humanıty; but not tor long. He soon tound unacceptable the apparatus imposed on thought by Marxian teachings and even more repellent the deeds of the practition-ers. He began to develop his own Third Position, a position on the Left as a critic of the Left. Out of it came all the premises and conclusions in politics, art, morals, and psychology that made him from the outset unclassifiable. (A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 134)

If I gush, it’s only because Trilling’s voice is a soft but welcome music amid the atonal white-noise of postmodern, increasingly postliberal life. He’s a true friend in history, in Mencius’s sense. Favorite essays: “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”; “Art and Fortune”; and “The Princess Casamassima”.

The Strudlhof Steps, Heimito Von Doderer, 1951.

Translated by Vincent Kling. An utterly magnificent book. Read from July to October — perfect to finish it in that time, given that it ends in the fall. So different from Buddenbrooks, but still deeply akin to it. Both have a crisp, restrained style, but Doderer’s authorial presence is stamped on every page — an utterly self-aware, vaguely self-reproaching commentator, not unlike Tolstoy’s authorial presence, and yet not quite like him, either. Tolstoy’s satirical contempt waxes during his depiction of society, but it yields to earnest truth-seeking elsewhere; Doderer maintains a cool, mocking detachment that somehow manages never to slip into actual cynicism. Both, too, are masters of metaphor — Doderer to outrageously extended degrees. In that sense, the book was also redolent of Gormenghast. Dear, dear Melzer. I had a harder time with Rene, but Melzer charmed me in the midst of all his emotionally stunted bumbling from woman to woman and job to job, and into something like wisdom. And the gradual, believable transformation of Thea Rokitzer from a self-absorbed ditz to a reserved but open-hearted woman is masterfully executed. As you plow through the very long, seemingly tedious fourth part, you suddenly realize that Doderer has snuck you onto the rollercoaster car of the rising action, which cranks slowly, with a kind of merry mechanical fulfillment, toward a richly eucatastrophic climax involving a severed leg and an invisible Cupid.2

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, 1962.

Started this spring, set aside for some reason, and then finished in Lander, Wyoming, on a hot October Saturday. Bizarre and beautiful. The offhand metaphors are stunning, but Nabokov is just too… I don’t know, you have to wonder whether or not he husbanded his genius to good purposes. Kinbote is perfidious. Returning to the book after the summer hiatus, I was struck by the realization that Kinbote might be modeled after Andre Gide, which helped make his vile character, if not palatable, at least a bit more intelligible. But I’ll admit, the ending left something to be desired: as with many a Gene Wolfe story, these kinds of unreliable narrator, ‘weird’ books are hard to conclude, simply because no conclusion can possibly match the weirdness attained in the narratives.

The Aeneid, Virgil, translated by Robert Fitzgerald.

A reread, as part of teaching high school English. I remember disliking it the first time through, but what credence should be given to the forceful opinions of callow youth? A lot, it turns out. What a deep disappointment — and I can’t even blame immaturity or reading it too fast, the usual pious excuses for not liking a Great Book when you read it at Thomas Aquinas College. All the most interesting human bits are rushed, and its vaunted “ambiguities” don’t strike me as deliberate acts of genius, but as failed executions. Bring up primary and secondary epic all you want, Virgil is a bad epic poet: Milton, much as I may dislike him personally, has a much superior grasp of pacing and dramatic structure, both of which are essential to epics of both kinds. And Dante? I’ve also been re-reading The Divine Comedy, and Dante is even better than Milton at building anticipation across cantos, at all the aspects of narrative and epic art that Virgil lacks. Virgil’s stature is as irritating as Hitchcock’s among contemporary cinephiles: his works paved the way for his betters, but they don’t hold up. It’s hard to tell what Virgil was getting at by the end, but it’s also hard to care — it’s one deus ex machina after another. None of the characters are all that interesting, Aeneas least of all: piety isn’t an epic virtue, and even if it was, Virgil’s gods aren’t worth the effort. Homer’s gods are richer and more mysterious; if they’re not more deserving of piety, it’s at least easier to understand a man being mystified at their sublimity. If Virgil hoped to write a Roman complement to Homer, he proved what every literate Roman already thought: imitations pale. One thing I will say in the poem’s favor, however: the theme in the earlier two thirds of the book of conquerors and conquered, of the inherent violence and lies of homeland rhetoric, immediately provided a lens, fascinating for its antiquity, through which to view contemporary ethno-national violence in Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine. There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. That Virgil seems to let this theme wither at the end is one more reason to dislike the poem: he might have said something profound, but settled on saying something pretty and politically useful.

Happy Thanksgiving! I have the whole week off from school — and that’s what I’m thankful for!1

I think it was Kevin D. Williamson who introduced me to the idea of reading fiction “economically,” that is, paying attention to the socioeconomics implied by the dialogue and events in a book. His go-to example is the first edition of Stephen King’s The Stand, where a character alludes obliquely to a late ’70s spike in butter prices, which King excised from more recent, beefier editions because the spike turned out to be an anomaly and would confuse all but the few readers who remembered or cared. I admire Williamson, so I started applying his “method” to fiction and popular histories, not as a primary interpretive lens but as a kind of infrared afterthought.

Now, some people might bristle at reading Anna Karenina and giving more than a passing glance at Tolstoy’s allusions to the bourgeoisie’s easy access to tobacco or the kinds of wine available at Oblonsky’s club. Who cares? Those details are there to give the impression of realism, but isn’t that about all? Doesn’t Williamson’s “method” resemble the baffling mid-century scholarly habit of reading The Divine Comedy but bypassing Dante’s grand spiritual vision of the cosmos to focus on the political infighting between the Guelphs and Ghibellines?

Not to be “that guy,” but this attitude strikes me as oddly Manichaean. It’s to criticize paying attention to what puts the -carn- in incarnation: food, drink, clothing, etc. To believe in the incarnation is, at some level, to nod to the reality and importance of economics. Put otherwise, reading economically is a specific application of reading incarnationally — precisely the sort of thing encouraged by the Ur-thinkers of the Catholic literary revival, such as John Senior and Rev. William F. Lynch, S.J.

Nor need we defend economic reading solely in terms of theological aesthetics. The novel as we know it evolved from a fascination with the interface of manners and human character.

What I understand by manners, then, is a culture’s hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They are the things that for good or bad draw the people of a culture together and that separate them from the people of another culture. They make the part of a culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it modifies them; it is generated by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason. (Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, pp. 206-207)

Trilling’s attention to manners is especially useful for his understanding of the novel’s obsession with money. For money disrupts the inherited order of manners, and exposes their unjustified, accidental character. But money alone doesn’t achieve that disruption: what money allows you to buy, and who actually has said money, are just as important as the money itself. Characters’ socioeconomic gestalten become an index of their status.

And artistic attention to economics is older than the novel, too. Authors have had economics in mind since time immemorial. The long lists of brazen prizes, armor, and weapons in Homeric games and battles; the multiple chapters in Exodus and Leviticus describing the furnishings of the tabernacle and their echo in 1 Kings’ description of Solomon’s Temple; and the meticulously recorded feasts in the lays and sagas of barbaric Europe: these were all properly significant before they were mangled into symbols by overeager mystics and moralizers. To contemporary audiences, these signified wealth, craftsmanship, and abundance — a show-don’t-tell introduction to the characters and settings of their tales.

I mention all this because I’ve begun to practice a specific application of reading economically: reading culinarily.

Subscribe now

Of Grains…

It’s a commonplace that civilization begins with agriculture, but humans had lived as hunter-gatherers with recognizably human social structures for thousands of years prior to the emergence of the Mesopotamians. Why do historians identify that as the birth of “civilization”?

For a few simple reasons. Agriculture leads to agricultural surpluses, which allow for trade and commerce — with writing coming along soon after as a way to regulate commerce and ensure fair trades. Commerce allows for the accumulation (if not the just distribution) of disposable income, for urbanization, and for the eventual rise of the kind of classes with the leisure to record their thoughts and feelings for posterity to study. By “civilization,” therefore, we don’t necessarily mean “civilized” in the moral sense, but in the sociological sense of being socioeconomically settled and diversified.

Very well, then, civilization begins with agriculture. Agriculture, in turn, begins with grain. And not just any grain: the Mesopotamians built their civilization on einkorn wheat. The Romans and their adjuncts would build subsequent Mediterranean civilization on einkorn’s relative, emmer.

But wheat — einkorn, emmer, and modern variants — is a temperamental grain that demands a consistently favorable climate and careful attention to the health and water saturation of the soil.

The ancients knew how to care for the soil, and were some of the greatest of all innovators, the giants on whose shoulders we stand. But their innovations — mass irrigation via the Nile in Egypt, for instance — had to be proportionate to farmland, which was in turn proportionate to the large populations agricultural made possible by surpluses. Without technological agronomy and a market to refine and channel its machinery toward productive outcomes, the only feasible way to grow large amounts of wheat was with… slaves.2

Rome’s elite families owned most of the slaves in the empire and deployed the vast majority of them on farms outside the city, the surplus from which was the source of elite wealth once traded far and wide. Not all of the slaves were fieldhands, though: many were indentured managers and artisans. But the practice of these complex commercial and productive arts didn’t dignify the slaves, it demeaned the arts. The fundamental distinction between the liberal and servile arts is rooted in this socioeconomic distinction: the liberal arts are those which characterize the free man, whose opposite is the slave. The Latin root, servus, unambiguously means slave; any other more nuanced sense of a servant voluntarily employed, is designated by other words, like minister or famulus.

This is a pretty stark reality. What’s even starker is how utterly conscious of it the ancient elite were. Plato’s noble lie in Republic is premised precisely on this stark reality; it is the first known conscious attempt to whitewash tyranny with ideology. “We’re all different kinds of souls, some gold, some silver, and some iron,” it runs, in a nutshell. “The gold souls are meant to lead, the iron souls to obey.”3

Or take Virgil’s Aeneid, which I just reread to teach to high school underclassmen. Book V features a lengthy section of memorial games held in Anchises’ honor, and the main participants in the games, Virgil is at pains to emphasize, are men whose names were associated with contemporary patricians. Much has been said about Virgil’s relationship to Augustus, but much the same could be said of his relation to the ruling families in Rome. By casting their forefathers as Aeneas’s companions, and presenting Aeneas himself as a pious (and utterly dull) agent of Jupiter’s will, Virgil is justifying the dominion of Rome’s elite as more than an outcome of violence and coercion: rather, it’s fitting. They rule by divine right; to serve them is, in a way, to participate in fulfilling the gods’ will.4

That’s not to say that Virgil is a mere propagandist. Indeed, there’s a lot of scholarly debate about whether or not he was engaged in a subtle subversion of the principate. But regardless of his motive, the means he used either to valorize or to subvert the Roman system are inextricably tied up with the patrician relation to farmland and to slavery. Reading culinarily need not make the Aeneid into a mere proto-Marxist screed, but it does reveal an uncomfortable dimension with which the poem’s heroic interpreters and celebrators must contend.

Now, contrast that with the Anglo-Saxons, the Germanic “barbarians” who settled in England in the waning days of the Western Empire and who were supplanted and suppressed by the Normans after 1066. The earlier barbarians had lived less settled lives, in part because wheat was harder to grow in northerly climates, which suffered from more variable weather and lower temperatures.

Barley, by contrast, is a hardier grain with a heavier flavor and a lower gluten content. The Anglo-Saxons, and their barbarian neighbors in northern Europe, were principally a barley people. They, too, developed an elaborate slave economy for growing barley at scale, but the flavor of the ultimate outcome differed considerably from Roman emmer. The Anglo-Saxons adapted admirably to the grain’s limitations.

Still, emmer remained a status symbol. With population growth in the 7th to 9th centuries, and the rise of the warlords who would become feudal princes, wheat gradually supplanted barley as the dominant grain in Anglo-Saxon territories. It hadn’t become any easier to grow, but the Anglo-Saxon warlords in question had greater access to slaves and agricultural knowledge than their predecessors. The impression given in, say, Ivanhoe of a unified, basically decent Saxon culture oppressed by status-obsessed Normans belies the pre-existent status-obsession that had affected the Saxons in the centuries leading up to the Norman Conquest. Even with Roman rule as a distant memory, likeness to the former Roman overlords conferred status.

The story is similar to the east. Rye, like barley, is a hardier grain than wheat, and had been cultivated in Turkey and the regions surrounding the Black Sea since approximately 6000 B.C. Rye cultivation migrated north, and distinguished the eastern “barbarians” for most of their history. Even after the various conquests and annexations at the hands of warlords and missionaries throughout the early to middle A.D. centuries, rye wasn’t supplanted by other grains. I wonder if, never having been subject to the Romans, the locals were less invested in the status symbol conferred by grain. Rye was only supplanted in the 19th century by wheat and corn, which came with the Western agronomic methods that feature as a background theme in so many of Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s novels.

The suppression of rye by Western wheat would have struck both novelists as significant of Russia’s transition from a standalone civilization to a disciple of Europe — though they probably would have drawn different conclusions to the fact.

…and Acid

But as far as alcohol, the Romans were more diversified. Although they had access to wheat and brewed beer, they preferred wine, deeming beer barbaric.

Roman wine had a manipulable potency, thanks to the dehydration methods they inherited from the Greeks. All those “mixing bowls” in Homer and Virgil are meant for wine-mixing. The dehydrated wine mixture would be poured into the bowl, followed by variable amounts of water — the more water, the weaker the wine.

But the Romans also had more creative ways to deploy their wines. Again following the Greeks, they aged wine into sharp and savory vinegars, the acetic acid in which they used for pickling in the standard sense nowadays. Pickled vegetables were common on Roman tables. The “Mediterranean” diet of olives, cheese, and veggies hasn’t changed much since the principate.

The Anglo-Saxons had a little wheat but, as we saw above, a lot more barley, which they used to brew ale. But though ale, like every drinkable alcohol, ages into vinegar, it’s not nearly as palatable a vinegar as red and white wine vinegars, and much less useful for pickling. It also couldn’t be dehydrated and preserve like wine. Ale that wasn’t drunk was added to pottage, but it couldn’t be preserved past a certain point.

But that didn’t stop the Anglo-Saxons from adapting to the food preservation problem in their own ways. There are other ways to pickle, even if vinegar pickling is the most common. Fermentation using a salt-water brine was an especially common practice — the origin of sauerkraut. But they also smoke-dried meat and fish. They had all kinds of food preserved during winter… but speaking as someone who has actually made and tasted pottage, I can say with some confidence that I understand why the returning Crusaders’ tales of rich flavors and spices awakened the mercantile spirit in so many northern Europeans. We take for granted that we can add pepper, cayenne, cinnamon, and cloves to our food. But prior to the spice trade reaching Europe thanks to the increase in commerce post-Crusades, much that we associate with “traditional” English holiday fare (mulled wine, baking spices, etc.) would have been unimaginable. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for tea and coffee: easy access to both staples represents an already deeply globalized economy by the mid-19th century.

Takeaways

This has been less a literary analysis and more a simple — and inexpert — history lesson. But I think there are some intriguing takeaways which might be worth bearing in mind the next time you pick up a period novel or novella.

For one thing, knowing the basic ingredients in Roman and Anglo-Saxon cooking allows you, if you want, to immerse yourself in something closer to the sensorium of the great authors from those civilizations. I’ve enjoyed baking rye bread and making pickles, the better to appreciate the sensory background of Chekhov and Turgenev; I’ve made pottage, the better to appreciate the sleepy food-coma in which so many Anglo-Saxons probably heard Beowulf for the first time; and so on. It’s a way of visiting literary worlds without necessarily having to travel — except to your local supermarket.

But culinary reading has also helped me appreciate the literature of the “intermediate” regions where civilizations overlapped. Long before there was Russia, there was Kievan Rus, which encompassed modern Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia. Kievan Rus was a bizarre hodgepodge culture arising from three dominant influences: the local Slavic customs (rye, kvass), Viking fare (think Anglo-Saxon fare, along with mead), and Byzantine delicacies (inherited Greco-Roman fare: wine, pickles, etc). All three influences affected status well into the period when modern Russia rose.

Many of the peasants in Russian literature, from Pushkin to Chekhov, would have relied on diets not unlike those of the Slavic underlings in Kievan Rus; the status symbol of the elite, by contrast, has shifted over the centuries. It gradually went from Viking and Byzantine fare to Western food and drink — in particular, French cuisine. With the rampant Francophilia in Tolstoy’s St. Petersburg comes an obsession with French food — Levin’s discomfort during his meeting with Oblonsky in Anna Karenina is an unconscious lack of ease around the fare and customs of fine French dining. Far from merely giving the impression of realism, these details delineate both Oblonsky’s and Levin’s characters: Oblonsky’s moral infantilism and vacuity are expressed in his gormandizing delight in the delicacies of the French table at his club, while Levin’s discomfort is eased only upon his return to the company of the peasants on his estate.

Even “French cuisine” shouldn’t be regarded as a monolithic cultural influence. After picking up Alphonse Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill, I made a Provençal version of beef bourguignons. It’s still based on cooking gobs of beef and veggies in a wine-and-beef-stock, but with the addition of olives and oranges; and it’s served over noodles rather than potatoes. Those may seem like minor changes, but having tasted both the original (northern French) version and its Provençal cousin, I can attest that they’re not. In varying a single dish, you can taste a pronounced regional difference still more pronounced in contrasting lifestyles and assumptions. And yet both depend on a wine-based beef broth, tying them to a common Roman winemaking origin: they’re different enough to clash, but similar enough to be considered variants rather than different species. That’s precisely the conflict Daudet explores throughout his oeuvre: how can French culture embrace both its northern and southern regions without subordinating one to the other?

A more basic takeaway, however, is the philosophical import of culinary reading. While it shouldn’t be the dominant interpretive method, I can attest that it has deeply enriched not just my experience of literature, but my appreciation of human nature as a whole. Yes, having made shchi, I have a better sense of what Turgenev and Chekhov mean by the eye-watering sting of peasant cabbage stew; yes, I have a deeper respect for the countless strong-armed babushki whose names are lost to memory, but who contributed their bit to the arcane knowledge of pickling and fermentation; and yes, having pickled cucumbers, mushrooms, and cod, I have a better sense of what Chekhov savored about the smell of his family kitchen in autumn.

But it goes deeper. If Trilling is right that manners are a particular culture’s unconscious activities, and if Christopher Dawson is correct that a given culture represents a human community’s adaptation to its environment, much as an extant species embodies an earlier species’ adaptation to its environment, then culinary reading, like economic reading, open an avenue for a distinct kind of contemplation proper to natural philosophy. The fascination with living plants and animals is essentially a fascination with nature’s endless ability to adapt to and exploit seemingly adverse circumstances. Likewise, the appreciation, through literature, of the world’s cultures as quasi-organic entities capable of adapting to and repurposing their environment becomes a perfectly justifiable object of the philosophical act. Or to put it more succinctly, one may echo Darwin on this point, with very little analogizing, that:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (On the Origin of Species, p. 490)

For this grandeur, as for everything else, we should all be immensely thankful.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
The Four Quartets, East Coker

I, too, am not ready for thought. The demands of teaching, and of directing the school play, continue to overwhelm me during the week, leaving me too exhausted on Saturday mornings to wake up, caffeinate, and write for three hours — my usual Substack routine. I have, however, continued to read, as I insisted in my last post. Consider this, therefore, another round of gleanings.

Subscribe now

The Finished

I finally finished The Strudlhof Steps, my second gargantuan German novel this year.1 Whereas Buddenbrooks conspired with Turgenev’s Smoke to provoke three of my all-time favorite essays, Doderer’s bizarre masterpiece has left me in a daze. Even if I were ready for thought, I’m not sure I’d know what to say about it.

Doderer’s novel doesn’t fit well into the limits of the category offered by Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, on which I drew so heavily in my critique of Noah Smith’s view of literature. Trilling insists that all of the “golden age” European novels integrate realism with the same myth, the Young Man from The Provinces who gains mysterious entry to high society, conveniently furnishing the author with an outsider’s perspective on the mores under scrutiny.2 The Young Man’s encounter with society makes him question not only society’s claims, but those of his provincial extraction, forcing him into a spiritual crisis which he strives to resolve by falling in love, acts of self-sacrificial heroism, and so on.

There is no corresponding figure in The Strudlhof Steps. Melzer and Stangeler, the characters who most approximate to the protagonists of the book, grow up and remain in distinct social classes, one middle class and the other petty noble. And while their respective character arcs may offer some commentary on the relative virtues and vices of those respective classes, that commentary clearly isn’t the thrust of his purpose — making it an ersatz novel, as far as Trilling’s definition is concerned.

But perhaps that’s not entirely true. The Strudlhof Steps may lack an exact analogue to the Young Man from the Provinces, but it’s still very much about a spiritual journey — several, in fact. But even if it is true, it’s not true in any easygoing way that would comport with Trilling’s take. The objective, leisurely, clinical style3 in which Doderer recounts these journeys makes me wonder whether he didn’t deliberately sever the Young Man myth from its attendant spiritual journey. The Young Man is typically earnest, and naturally inclined to spiritual searching: Trilling adduces Julien Sorel of The Red and The Black, as well as Pierre Bezukhov of War and Peace, as quintessential examples. In Melzer and Stangeler, by contrast, Doderer divides these qualities of earnestness and spiritual searching.

Stangeler is the natural seeker, but he is afflicted by a kind of cold self-consciousness that makes him congenitally incapable of being earnest: his hyper-awareness, both of others and himself, intrudes on his interactions with people, making it almost impossible for him to reach out to others, in the manner of the Young Man. In consequence, he thinks and talks a lot, but there’s a vacuity to his eloquent rambling that reminds me, in places, of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. Worst of all, Stangeler — ever self-aware — is aware of this tragic condition, and doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. Even the peace he makes with his fiancée at the end of the book felt — to me — more like settling than an act of love.

Melzer is a weirder case. He is undoubtedly earnest — he’s the only character in the book whom every other character admires, in one way or another. But his interior life is strangely bifurcated. Like us all, he has a kind of surface interiority, the realm of habit and passive choice, and a subterranean interiority, where his fears and desires roil like molten lava, now and then bubbling up to and affecting the surface. Like us all, he dwells at the surface while remaining aware of the subterranean tectonics in his heart. He is unique, though, in being a human seismograph: Melzer is hypersensitive to the movements of his heart and mind, but he lacks not just the ability to formulate those movements in words, but the self-awareness to realize that formulating them is even something he could or should do with them. He broods without brooding; he is perpetually bemused without realizing it. Things happen to him, but he rarely acts.

Put like this, I think I’m coming to a partial idea of what Doderer might be up to in The Strudlhof Steps. Without spoiling anything — it’s immensely worth reading purely from the standpoint of style, if you have the time — the conclusion of this complicated, borderline plotless story about these two protagonists who between them would add up to the one mythical Young Man of the classic European novels suggests a critical attitude toward that novelistic tradition as a whole. Stangeler’s and Melzer’s respective arcs imply an immediate judgment about the relative value of the Young Man’s defining qualities — his earnestness and his spiritual searching — and a remote judgment about their compatibility in any one person. I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what I mean — I don’t quite know myself. I’m not ready for thought, you’ll recall.

A final word about The Strudlhof Steps. I read a lot of while I was in Japan — it and The Adventures of Arsène Lupin were the only two books I brought with me. Reading about Doderer’s fascinating, self-effacing reflections on the form-driven, punctilious Austrian character, expressed in and by the bizarre figure of Julius Zihal, resonated profoundly in Japan, where punctilious dedication to rituals has somehow survived the spiritual vitality of the rituals themselves. Shinto festivals have 90% turnout, for example, but only about 1-2% of Japanese actually believe in anything remotely resembling Shintoism, with Buddhism faring little better, and Christianity far worse… one of the great, if double-edged, charms of reading is how much the circumstances under which you ingest a book can affect your digesting it. Perhaps that’s an implicit argument for re-reading the classics often, to guarantee that what you love is, in fact, the classic and not the atmosphere in which you encountered it.

Accusers and Old Friends

As usually happens after finishing a big book, I’ve had a hard time settling into anything for the last few weeks. I had almost finished Nabokov’s Pale Fire in the spring, but put it down for some reason in March. I finished that4 in Wyoming a few weekends back — and immediately fell back into the rut of not knowing what to read. I have two books actively in progress (i.e. they sit on coffee tables and countertops, accusing me, by their being anywhere but in my hand, of wasting time) and a few more passively so (i.e. they sit on shelves like old friends whom one can go years without seeing, only to pick up right where you left off).

The Accusers

I picked up Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi shortly after Pale Fire, because it’s been sitting on my shelf for years and I’ve heard so many good things about it from people I trust. I’m a little less than halfway through, but I have to admit, I don’t get it. The ‘crazy inventive’ world of the book which those vocal-fry folks at NPR and The New Yorker praised to the skies is little more than a badly-lit version of the Backrooms, and the contrast between Piranesi’s narration and implied authorial commentary is so glaring that it feels intrusive — and preachy, given the subject matter. It’s as if C.S. Lewis had rewritten (and ruined) House of Leaves. I’ll finish it, but I doubt it’ll top any of my lists.

Far more engaging is Giorgio de Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin, which I read about on a Substack post I haven’t been able to find again. (Given the book, that’s oddly fitting.) It’s a 1977 Italian novel about a journalist trying to make sense of a (fictional) “phenomenon of mass psychosis” that occurred in Turin in 1967. What happened? Hard to say, since I’m only a third into the book. The mass psychosis centered around an institution called the Library, in which citizens can place their diaries for other citizens to read and comment on. Otherwise upright folks confess all kinds of dark, horrific thoughts and desires in their diaries, which attract all kinds of readers. Somehow, out of this exchange of dark thoughts, the patrons of the Library develop collective insomnia; eventually, one night in high summer 1967, numerous insomniacs wind up dying in gruesome ways, with no one remembering who killed them or how. The Substack post mentioned The Twenty Days as a prophecy of what social media would do to the human psyche, and it’s certainly that, but it’s also a magnificent atmosphere piece. A pervasive dread seeps from the hot walls and busy streets of “modern” Turin, and from the interviewees themselves, each vastly different but all haunted by something they can’t talk about directly. It’s perfect reading for foggy October nights.

(Who knows, though? Perhaps when I’m finished with both, I’ll be a Piranesi partisan and totally forget The Twenty Days… though I doubt it.)

The Old Friends

I have too many “old friends” to name them all. Suffice it to say, I can always pick up Sir Isaiah Berlin’s The Proper Study of Mankind and Karl Marx, Simon Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness, Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, and Harry Kessler’s Journey to the Abyss and yield something profitable. But it’s the old friends who will see me through to December, when the curtain falls on the school play and nothing stands between me and a few weeks of leisure but a stack of finals.

(Acknowledgements to The Inscapist for the title of today’s post!)

I’ve had very little time to write, and not that much more to read: this school year feels busier than last year, somehow, despite my being better-versed in the arcane workings of small Catholic schools.

But I have been reading, and I have the gleanings to prove it. I have neither the time nor the energy to string together an original thought this weekend, so I thought I’d string together some unoriginal thoughts from my evening reading sessions.

Subscribe now

John Keats

I went looking for Keats’ comments about Shakespeare’s “negative capability”, his power of lingering with ambiguities without needing to resolve them into a positive insight. I found them, of all places, in a letter to his brothers from late in December 1827. As it happens, his comments are spare, especially given the influence his words have had on the subsequent tradition, although they’re no less thoughtful for being gnomic. But they weren’t the most arresting part of the letter, at least for me: his comments on humor vs. wit were even more striking, for being so immediately and relatably true. I kept his style and capitalization/non-capitalization, as the case may be.

I spent Friday evening with Wells & went the next morning to see Death on the Pale horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s? age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth — Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness — The picture is larger than Christ rejected —I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment — These men say things which make one without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter — They talked of Kean & his low company— Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on wednesday - Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously —I mean Negative Capability, that is when man Is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. (Selected Poems and Letters, pp. 260-261)

Arthur Miller

Autumn seems to be a good time to wrestle with Arthur Miller. I picked up his Collected Essays for another autumn gander, and wasn’t disappointed. I was especially struck by some of his comments in his 1989 reappraisal of two of his earliest plays, The Man Who Had All The Luck and The Golden Years, then being reissued after half a decade of obscurity. You hear so much about “fascism” from people who didn’t live through it, either as victims or as observers from afar, it’s refreshing — if depressing — to hear about it from someone who did, especially when they encountered it at the cusp of adulthood, when we are prone to idealism.

I must say that, at the time, life at best seemed headed for a bloody showdown with Fascism, or at worst a hapless surrender to it, but while there is plenty of worry in these plays, there is no real despair or defeat of the spirit. This will strike some as perhaps a reflection of a callow Leftism, but in truth it was the way most Americans felt even after a very long decade of Depression. By the late thirties and early forties we had, of course, known much social violence and all kinds of vileness, but not yet a Holocaust, not yet the bursting of the banks of evil. I can still recall my incredulity at the daylight bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. As bombings go, it wasn’t a very big one. The big ones were still on the way. But I simply could not believe that a European flying low in an airplane on a sunny day over an undefended town, could, whatever his politics, drop live bombs on women out shopping with their baby carriages, on old men sitting before their doorways, on young lovers strolling across the ancient square! It was hard to sleep for weeks afterwards. It was still possible to be shocked. At least within one’s mind the lines of some sort of order of permissible human behavior still held. (Collected Essays, pp. 184-185)

There was a metaphorical poetry in this in the late thirties when perfectly intelligent, respectable, even heroic folk like the great flier Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne could return from a visit to Nazi Germany and call it “The Wave of the Future.” I recall feeling myself surrounded in those times by a kind of drifting into cultural suicide and a self-blinded acceptance of murder in high places, and this play was written in alarm. A few years later I did believe that had the Japanese not been deluded enough to attack Pearl Harbor there might well have been sufficient isolationist sentiment in the American people to simply let Hitler have his way with a defeated England and Europe. In a word, our passivity seemed in reality a drift toward an unacknowledged arrangement with Fascism. So-perhaps despite appearances-these are two anti-Fascist plays that were written quite close to the abyss. But perhaps more importantly, they were one very young writer’s wrestling with enormous themes. (ibid, pp. 187-188)

Lionel Trilling

I finished The Liberal Imagination earlier this week, a fact attended by the usual bittersweetness with which you close a book that will live with you forever, but which you’ll never be able to read again with the “wild surmise” of discovering another Mencian friend in its pages.

Trilling is a magnificent writer, which no one ever seems to mention when they discuss his importance as a critic. Certainly, he stands head and shoulders above Jacques Barzun, his friend and colleague at Columbia University, whose essays I have also been reading during my evening literary sojourns to “the ancient courts of ancient men” à la Machiavelli, and who strikes me as far the shallower thinker and more workmanlike stylist of the two. (Though maybe one of these days I’ll read From Dawn to Decadence and revise that assessment.)

For all that, though, it was Barzun who furnished the clearest understanding of Trilling’s preoccupations as a thinker and critic.

In the 1930s a young American who would be a critic faced, in life and art, the choice between a reactionist aestheticism upholding the autonomy of the work of art and the Marxist interpretation (and employment) of art as a weapon in the class struggle. Like many others, Lionel was drawn to Marxism by his idealism and generous humanity; but not for long. He soon found unacceptable the apparatus imposed on thought by Marxian teachings and even more repellent the deeds of the practitioners. He began to develop his own Third Position, a position on the Left as a critic of the Left. Out of it came all the premises and conclusions in politics, art, morals, and psychology that made him from the outset unclassifiable. (A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 134)

I read those words between essays in The Liberal Imagination, and they illuminated much. He is very much a man of the left (both politically and aesthetically — the latter leads him to fascinating and, I think, correct critiques of the more or less conservative New Critics in “The Sense of the Past”), but he is never uncritically so. Indeed, the whole thrust of The Liberal Imagination is that the relationship between the eponymous ideas was, at least in 1950, too tenuous to sustain liberal democracy as a living sociopolitical tradition.

Liberalism is all thought and no imagination, whereas conservatism — which, in 1950, still lacked intellectual champions in America — is all feeling and no thought. Neither condition is desirable, but for different reasons. Of the conservative impulse in 1950, Trilling wisely notes that

when we say that a movement is “bankrupt of ideas” we are likely to suppose that it is at the end of its powers. But this is not so, and it is dangerous for us to suppose that it is so, as the experience of Europe in the last quarter-century suggests, for in the modern situation it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology. What is more, it is not conducive to the real strength of liberalism that it should occupy the intellectual field alone. In the course of one of the essays of this book I refer to a remark of John Stuart Mill’s in his famous article on Coleridge-Mill, at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan of liberalism should be, “ ‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies . ..’; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehen-sion, not their strength.” What Mill meant, of course, was that the intellectual pressure which an opponent like Coleridge could exert would force liberals to examine their position for its weaknesses and complacencies.

It is toward remedying liberalism’s weaknesses, especially its lack of lasting expression in and through images, that he dedicates the book. He offers many striking critiques of the postwar liberal consensus, but one struck me above all, the peroration of its final essay, “The Meaning of A Literary Idea”, which I found simultaneously illuminating and irritating, and which I reproduce here in full for your own irritation and illumination.

I know that I will not be wrong if I assume that most of us here are in our social and political beliefs consciously liberal and democratic. And I know that I will not be wrong if I say that most of us, and in the degree of our commitment to literature and our familiarity with it, find that the contemporary authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their literary qualities demand of us a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals. For it is in general true that the modern European literature to which we can have an active, reciprocal relation-ship, which is the right relationship to have, has been written by men who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the tradition of democratic liberalism as we know it. Yeats and Eliot, Proust and Joyce, Lawrence and Gide — these men do not seem to confirm us in the social and political ideals which we hold.

If we now turn and consider the contemporary literature of America, we see that wherever we can describe it as patently liberal and democratic, we must say that it is not of lasting interest. I do not say that the work which is written to conform to the liberal democratic tradition is of no value but only that we do not incline to return to it, we do not establish it in our minds and affections: Very likely we learn from it as citizens; and as citizen-scholars and citizen-critics we understand and explain it. But we do not live in an active reciprocal relation with it. The sense of largeness, of cogency, of the transcendence which largeness and cogency can give, the sense of being reached in our secret and primitive minds — this we virtually never get from the writers of the liberal democratic tradition at the present time.

And since liberal democracy inevitably generates a body of ideas, it must necessarily occur to us to ask why it is that these particular ideas have not infused with force and cogency the literature that embodies them. This question is the most important, the most fully challenging question in culture that at this moment we can ask.

The answer to it cannot of course even be begun here, and I shall be more than content if now it is merely accepted as a legitimate question. But there are one or two things that may be said about the answer, about the direction we must take to reach it in its proper form. We will not find it if we come to facile conclusions about the absence from our culture of the impressive ideas of traditional religion. I have myself referred to the historical fact that religion has been an effective means of transmitting or of generating ideas of a sort which I feel are necessary for the literary qualities we want, and to some this will no doubt mean that I believe religion to be a necessary condition of great literature. I do not believe that; and what is more, I consider it from many points of view an impropriety to try to guarantee literature by religious belief.

Nor will we find our answer if we look for it in the weakness of the liberal democratic ideas in themselves. It is by no means true that the inadequacy of the literature that connects itself with a body of ideas is the sign of the inadequacy of those ideas, although it is no doubt true that some ideas have less affinity with literature than others.

Our answer, I believe, will rather be found in a cultural; fact-in the kind of relationship which we, or the writers who represent us, maintain toward the ideas we claim as ours, and in our habit of conceiving the nature of ideas in general. If we find that it is true of ourselves that we conceive ideas to be pellets of intellection or crystallizations of thought, precise and completed, and defined by their coherence and their procedural recommendations, then we shall have accounted for the kind of prose literature we have. And if we find that we do indeed have this habit, and if we continue in it, we can predict that our literature will continue much as it is. But if we are drawn to revise our habit of conceiving ideas in this way and learn instead to think of ideas as living things, inescapably connected with our wills and desires, as susceptible of growth and development by their very nature, as showing their life by their tendency to change, as being liable, by this very tendency, to deteriorate and become corrupt and to work harm, then we shall stand in a relation to ideas which makes an active literature possible. (The Liberal Imagination, pp. 301-303)

Heimito von Doderer

This has been a year for big German-language novels: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I started sometime last October (how time flies!) and finished, at last, in February; and now Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps, which I started in July and which I hope to finish this week.

I don’t want to go much into Doderer’s background at the moment — I’m sure I’ll write an essay about the book when I finish it. All I’ll say is that the following quotations give you a taste of what this almost 900-page monster of a book is like; there’s a reason I’m taking my time with it.

And I say that with all the affection in the world. I have a high tolerance for artistic self-indulgence, as long as it’s enjoyable. I believe that that distinction is possible, and important. Inception is Christopher Nolan’s most self-indulgent film, but it’s still cool; The Gormenghast Trilogy is almost a thousand pages of self-indulgent dreamscaping, and I don’t care. Some people stop enjoying music or literature as soon as they realize that the artist is producing more for himself than for his audience — and that’s a fine response, I suppose, though I can’t help but feel that such people miss a lot by demanding the author’s full attention and condescension. That’s how self-absorbed children behave, a habit we expect them to break.

Doderer was a strange and flawed man, but he was an artist unlike anyone else I’ve ever read — he writes with a passion for the bizarre that rivals Mervyn Peake, but with a moral intensity like Tolstoy’s and a tone of self-reproach more palpable than Turgenev’s. If you can’t get through these lines because of your contempt for self-indulgence, remember that that’s its own kind of self-indulgence, friend.

The kind of conviviality that sets in quite on its own as a varied and interesting meal progresses and at the same time rises by imperceptible degrees out of the wine now started expanding around the table and warming everyone. Even Melzer. He was seeing through a veil, and that is what enabled him to see in the first place. It is not in confronting the object itself, which fades in stark daylight, that the eye displays its wondrous abilities;, the opulence of light does not unfold until there is refraction. It appeared to him as if the rooms here had unexpectedly grown deeper and that the people in them had accordingly moved off to a distance, in a way somehow akin to what had just happened with the fur-like forest down below on the mountains as they pointed outward and away to a plain which could not be seen. He released himself from his immediate surroundings, as a string being tuned will stretch and raise itself off the fingerboard of the instrument-once i’s no longer touching, it can resonate. A kind of dignity was what now crept over Melzer, along with the remote possibility of his composing himself into some other form so as to face what was coming, whatever that might be. (p. 220)

The steps were standing there for anyone who happened by, for all the self-satisfied run-of-the-mill types and even for the great unwashed, but their design was such as to provide a path spread out to the strides of destiny, which don’t always have to shake the ground with a foot shod in armor but will often come walking, nearly noiseless, on the thinnest of soles, and in Atlas shoes, of with the short, skipping little footsteps of some poor heart exposed, running at a steady, ticking pace on its own two feet, tiny little heart-feet all bare and sore and needing so much care—to such a heart as well will the steps, cascading down in their splendor, offer companionship and escort; and they are always there; and they never grow weary of telling us that each path has a worth and value of its own and is always, in every case, more than just the goal. The masterful architect who designed these stairs isolated one small segment of all the paths we millions follow in so large a city, and in doing so he showed us how much every meter of it is imbued with dignity and design. And when the ramps go sweeping outward, level and banked, and curve as they run along the hillside, negating all utilitarian efficiency of movement and rejecting all our chicken ladders; when one of the flights of steps becomes in itself a device of style, a means of achieving expression on these stages ranked here one above the other, so that a man with his self-worth all forfeited now seems virtually compelled, regardless of how far he may have come down in the world, to come down the steps with that much more refinement of execution, then the architect’s deepest wish for those living in his own time and those coming after him has been fulfilled-to lay out in its component parts and then reunite in some concrete form the treasure beyond price that is in all their pathways all their days, to persevere in this long, tediously detailed palaver, giving cadence to its rhythms, so that it may carry through, a constraining force for skipping little hearts and stomping boots alike, reaching as far down as the platform, where the solitude of summer gathers in so densely around the babbling and the prattling of the fountain, or even all the way down to the urn and to the mask that looks out onto the warm and silent street and is just as inscrutable as a living face, made of stone though it may be. (pp. 308-309)

Taking cognizance of another human being is an act of creation and completion. Out of a sectional councillor or civil service official or other fairly high-ranking bureaucrat earning a decent competence this creative cognizance will fashion the rock-solid fortress of a private lite in splendid order, a person tree of all pressure, as it were, in his own affairs, a firmly established vacuum, an ideal resting place for such backpacks as may from time to time grow too heavy. What’s more, every man also appears more purely to exist than he does. To our own selves, we are always occurring, emerging, forever faltering. But others we see in their static mode, so to speak, ascribing to them far more possession of their selves than they have, more, indeed, than we ourselves have. And yet that’s exactly what we claim from them-that they should at all times function as a solid base on which to lay aside backpacks, if occasion should arise-presuming upon them in a way that is both unthinking and thoughtless, and of course very selfish, too. (314)

Good order is nothing more than the water of life rising up through the arteries, the veins, and the capillaries; when it fills them to the brim they form the most beautiful network of branchings. And when it recedes, then you can bundle them together or smooth them out any way you like but they’ll still be all tangled and snarled, in great disorder. That person is best engaging with life whose apparent command of good order is handled with discretion and can barely be discerned for what it is. (348)

The whole novel reads pretty much like that. And it’s magnificent.

I wish it wasn’t standard to tee up for criticism by singing your target’s praises, because it feels so false. Your attitude toward a writer with whom you disagree will be clear from the way you handle their words with yours. If you handle them with care, therefore, doesn’t that suffice to express your good will?

Still, it’s the standard. So, here goes.

Subscribe now

Noah Smith of Noahpinion is one of my go-to Substackers. He writes clearly and well about economics from a center-left perspective, making him an excellent corrective for the neoliberals and libertarians who are my usual fare. (Straight-up progressive economists, with their quasi- to full-fledged socialism and their three cheers for MMT, have yet to pass muster.) He has, on several occasions, prompted me to change my mind. For instance, Kevin D. Williamson, who also writes clearly and well about economics, led me to believe that the wisest political approach to tariffs (remember when those were the biggest news?) is no approach: they disguise a sales tax on domestic consumers as a punitive tax on foreigners. Noah agreed that Trump’s blanket approach to tariffs wouldn’t (and hasn’t) achieve the decoupling from China he (once) envisioned, but only because of his hamfistedness, not the idea in itself. Noah pointed out that targeted tariffs, such as those on Chinese-produced microchips and computer hardware, have a better history of success, and would contribute to lowering America’s dependence on a geopolitical rival without gouging the wallets of the average American citizen. That seemed like a reasonable middle position between “tariffs bad” and “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

Unfortunately, whenever Noah writes about culture, I realize just how little we have in common. I want to focus on his attitude toward what he calls ‘literary fiction,’ and specifically on why he doesn’t read much of it.

In “A Few Cultural Thoughts”, Noah puts forward a “theory of fiction” as “all some form of exotic travel writing.” In a nutshell, “the appeal of a novel is that it opens your mind up to vistas of experience never imagined in your daily life. Every novel has something exciting in it to make you want to read it, and excitement comes from novelty. Hence the name.”

For Noah, therefore, all novels are defined by the pursuit of novelty through introducing readers to something exotic, “but exactly how novels produce novelty varies depending on the genre.” Some genres exploit exciting and exotic settings, but for most ‘literary fiction,’ “the novelty comes from the characters.” The characteristic genius of the novelist, therefore, lies in being “incredibly skilled at making up fascinating fantasy people.”

But there’s a problem with producing novelty in this way. While it may generate remarkable and entertaining stories, “this skill is extremely dangerous.” Why?

It can give the reader a false impression of what human beings are like. If you read enough literary novels, you can easily start to believe that sex offenders are really like Humbert Humbert, or that whalers were really like Captain Ahab, or that depressed high school kids are really like Holden Caulfield. Except that’s not usually true — those characters, like most of those in literary fiction, were specifically designed to be different from the average, to keep you interested. Literary authors are so good at their craft — so good at producing verisimilitude in their stories — that they can trick readers into believing a distorted version of humanity is the norm.

In the interest of remaining true to the norm and “observing and interacting with and reading about real people,” Noah prefers non- and genre fiction — the former, because it doesn’t part from the facts in the interest of excitement, the latter, because it produces excitement without manipulating human characters, who end up being, in Noah’s words, “more realistic” in consequence.

I disagree with nearly every point in this “theory.”

The first quibble is with the rationale for the term “novel.” The English “novel” comes from the Italian novella, and referred originally to medieval short stories that differed in tone and scope from the epics and romances then common: their novelty lay in the mode of storytelling, not so much in their content.1

But I won’t insist overmuch on that quibble. There are bigger problems, many of which Henry Oliver, of The Common Reader, addresses in his admirable, though regrettably brief, response to Noah’s essay. The following comments are more or less elaborations on Henry’s, with a few noted differences.

Noah writes that “the appeal of a novel is that it opens your mind up to vistas of experience never imagined in your daily life.” But isn’t that a bit… broad? That describes the appeal of all imaginative art, in both prose and poetry, to say nothing of drama and film. We naturally want to escape the humdrum, but even more basically, we naturally seem to want to see how the world, with all its stern fixity, could be otherwise imagined. Artists help us satisfy the urge we all feel “to make of this world enough of another world to again experience for the first time our world.” (Mark Z. Danielewski, Foreword The Poetics of Space, p. xvi) And why? Because “fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, Tree and Leaf, p. 56)

If some version of that is so, then Henry is right to point out that novels — the stated subject of Noah’s “theory of fiction” — are distinct not because they’re “some form of exotic travel writing,” but for specific formal reasons that evade Noah’s attention, but which, it seems to me, make all the difference.

But for that reason, I must fault Henry for failing spectacularly to spell out the novel’s distinct formal qualities beyond admitting that it “is allowed to be freewheeling, realistic, melodramatic, whatever it wants.” That’s hardly unique to the novel. I’m reading Dante’s Inferno right now with my English students, and Dante is nothing if not freewheeling, as well as realistic and melodramatic by turns. Yet no one would describe the Comedy as a novel. The same can be said of Orlando Furioso, Ariosto’s colossal epic poem (it clocks in at c. 38,000 lines of verse; The Iliad, for comparison, is just about 15,000). Yet the difference between it and Don Quixote, in which the figure of Orlando looms like a long shadow, couldn’t be starker.

I bring up Don Quixote here with a purpose, because it touches directly on Lionel Trilling’s far more robust formal concept of the novel:

Cervantes set for the novel the problem of appearance and reality: the shifting and conflict of social classes becomes the field of the problem of knowledge, of how we know and of how reliable our knowledge is, which at that very moment of history is vexing the philosophers and scientists. (The Liberal Imagination, p. 209)

In dealing with the questions of illusion and reality which were raised by the ideas of money and class, the novel characteristically relied on an exhaustive exploitation of manners. (ibid, p. 258)

For that reason, if for no other, I would think that Noah would quite enjoy a lot of so-called ‘literary fiction,’ at least from 19^th century Europe, because so much of it was written quite consciously to record the effects of economic innovation on the lives and manners of individual people.

But novelists were never content simply to record. By raising examining appearance and reality in the social sphere, they exposed a question mark which, it turns out, had always been there, however unremarked: not just what is true, but what is good? If the mores of my time are, in fact, to some extent a consequence of socioeconomics, a constellation of customs half-consciously contrived to legitimate a given distribution of wealth and influence, should I continue to abide by those customs or should I venture in search of a truer way of life? Inevitably, novelists aimed for more than records of Marxist superstructures: “the great novels, far more often than we remember, deal explicitly with developed ideas, and although they vary greatly in the degree of their explicitness they tend to be more explicit rather than less.” (ibid, p. 259)

Another way to put this is to say that ‘form,’ in the case of the novel, doesn’t refer to a specific prescription for “tropes, archetypes, structures, and so on,” but rather to authorial intention: novels are interested in the rift between life as it is and life as it could be. They originally examined that rift in connection with manners and mores, but the same rift divides every man from himself: not to wax Freudian, but we all walk around with a sense of how we actually are, and how we would like to be, and the difference is often pronounced — perhaps even bitter.

If, among ‘literary fiction,’ novels are distinguished by their form, and if the preceding gives a better sense of that form, then Henry’s criticism holds good: Noah is wrong to claim that ‘literary’ novels aim simply to offer novel, psychologically exotic characters. They are, or at least were, novels by being prose analyses of the effects of social illusion through depictions of society and character.

But what to make of Noah’s contention that such psychological exoticism is false to life? I found this the most fascinating — and revealing — part of his “theory.” Let’s consider the allegations of falsity first, and then the contention of exoticism.

Here’s Henry:

Noah writes: ‘Literary authors are so good at their craft — so good at producing verisimilitude in their stories — that they can trick readers into believing a distorted version of humanity is the norm.’ Or, literary authors are good at writing about the weird, distorted parts of humanity.

Again, I’m with Henry, though again, I wish he’d said more.

While he’s not naive that human beings are capable of being weird and distorted, Noah seems utterly untroubled by the implications of the fact. He professes the naive belief that “most” of our problems can be solved by technology, which says a lot about his understanding of our problems. Accordingly, I think he may have a thin idea of “the norm” actually is. “If you read enough literary novels, you can easily start to believe that sex offenders are really like Humbert Humbert, or that whalers were really like Captain Ahab, or that depressed high school kids are really like Holden Caulfield.” These may be extreme cases, but such cases have, in fact, existed — and that they have existed should undermine Noah’s notions of normality. That we, no matter our state of technological development, incline again and again to corruption, perversion, and self-deception is a basic fact of our benighted condition; any view of the world that neglects this fact is fundamentally unserious. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt on social media.

Still, Noah is right to point out that a gulf often exists between literary embodiments of corruption and the corrupt individuals we meet in the mirror and on the street. Novelists exaggerate characters’ moral qualities for the sake of telling a complete and compelling story. But exaggeration and exoticism aren’t the same thing, are they? If they were, then satire would make no sense. As it is, we exaggerate truths to examine them more clearly: in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift veils satirical exaggeration with the farcical exoticism of Gulliver’s, well, travels. Exaggeration can become exoticism, but it needn’t do so, and when it does, the fault lies not with the intention, but with the artist.

Great novels, in particular tragic novels, it seems to me, exaggerate our human capacity for corruption in some way. In the process, they reveal us to ourselves — and the revelations, while sobering, needn’t be depressing. What Arthur Miller said of tragic drama goes for tragic novels, too:

tragedy arises when we are in the presence of a man who has missed accomplishing his joy. But the joy must be there, the promise of the right way of life must be there. Otherwise pathos reigns, and an endless, meaningless, and essentially untrue picture of man is created — man helpless under the falling piano, man wholly lost in a universe which by its very nature is too hostile to be mastered. In a word, tragedy is the most accurately balanced portrayal of the human being in his struggle for happiness. (Collected Essays, p. 14)

Attention to human flaws, to the inclinations which simultaneously drive us to seek and spoil our chances of enjoying happiness, comes in many forms, but it is a defining feature of every great writer. It is just as much the genius of the comedian as of the tragedian: their goal is to excite us, not with exoticism and novelty, but with the stark truth about who we are and what we do.

And you know what? A further indication that the exaggerations of ‘literary fiction’ aren’t untrue to life is that they have been among the most popular writing in history. One reason I keep enclosing ‘literary fiction’ in scare quotes is that the idea implied by the phrase is recent and artificial.

Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Zola, Ibsen, and Shaw, not to mention Mark Twain, all of whom were enormously popular in their own day — Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Zola published their novels serially in magazines — Ibsen and Shaw gloried in their box-office appeal—all would have been highly amused by this attempt to place literature here on this side of the fence and entertainment and popularity over there on the other. (Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up, p. 155)

What accounts for these authors’ popularity? Noah suggests that fiction is popular because it allows us to escape into impossible worlds of the imagination, and that ‘literary fiction’ is popular when it showcases imaginatively endowed or corrupted individuals. But to be honest, that’s thin, and in any case, not what readers themselves report. In his own take on this point, Henry quotes Dominic Cummings’ reaction to Anna Karenina:

When I re-read it aged 46 I was stunned. My own marriage and feelings were there on the page. Some of the arguments and reconciliations between Levin and Kitty almost exactly mirrored those with my own wife! When I looked at my own baby’s fat arm, it ‘looked as if a piece of thread had been tied tightly round the wrist’. So many pages brought tears to my eyes. And in Karenin, an awful shock of recognition. Not only did I recognise him in so many people. But … terrible thought… is it possible that … I too might resemble this awful character in some ways?! Unthinkable surely… Yet…

Or there’s Isaac Babel’s gnomic observation that “if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” (quoted by Richard Pevear, Introduction to War and Peace, p. vii) Or, to do the unthinkable and give some credit to Dostoevsky, there’s his remarkably prescient psychological profile in The Brothers Karamazov and Demons of the kind of men who wound up toppling the czar and murdering millions — extreme cases of human depravity if ever there were any, but all too real. Or there is Simon Leys’ description of his, Baudelaire’s, and Oscar Wilde’s respective reactions to Balzac:

To engage in a complete reading of [Balzac’s] Comédie humaine is akin to climbing onto a raft and attempting the descent of a huge wild river: once you start, you cannot get off, you are powerless to stop, you are carried away into another world — more exciting, more intense, more real than the dull scene you left ashore. Everything is larger than life, everything is loaded with energy. In Balzac’s novels, Baudelaire, observed, even doorkeepers have genius, and Oscar Wilde added: ‘A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent, fiery colored existence. They dominate us and defy skepticism … Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein. He created life, he did not copy it.’ (The Hall of Uselessness, pp. 62-63)

Certainly, Balzac’s characters are an enormous factor in these effusions, but not simply because they’re ‘exotic’: it is rather because he voraciously digested the five-course meal of human experience in 19^th century France and regurgitated it with gusto and panache. It’s precisely not its supposed exoticism, but its mirror-like power of self-revelation, that accounts for great literature’s enduring reputation.

Sad to say, therefore, I reject almost everything about Noah’s “theory of fiction,” and think I have good grounds for doing so.

But really, does it matter? Why spend so much time analyzing an essay on culture by an economist who never claims to be an expert on culture? In part, it’s because I enjoy reading Noah, and don’t want to give him short shrift simply for venturing beyond his wheelhouse: Substack is a safe-space for ultracrepidarians. I hope he’d extend me the same degree of attention, if ever he read anything by me and disagreed. (As I’m almost certain he would.)

But it’s also because I think Noah voices a trend that I’m noticing among more and more people, and not just in connection with literature. My reaction here, therefore, is a kind of testing ground for a fuller and deeper response to this deeper and broader trend — a response which has been coalescing for years, and which 2025 has cemented into a firm, if gray, sediment of insights. And so, I end in typical Theories of Everything fashion: promising a sequel, to follow who knows when.2

Until then, cheers.

Twentieth-century hermits do not live in cells or in caves; they do not live in the wilderness or in a hut in the forest. And so we imagine that there are no hermits left in the modern civilized world. Really, however, there are a great many of them, more than in the days when Christians were being martyred. Their cells are disguised; they are located in modern cities, in communal apartments, on the streets of Moscow and Kiev. And the hermits themselves work as painters and decorators, or in factories and ministries. They were smart jackets, autumn coats, and hats made of Astrakhan fur.

Vassily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, p. 72

Part 3 of What Isn’t To Be Done is in progress, but school is back in session, which makes it harder to finish; the essay is turning into something other than what I expected; and quite simply, I need a break from polemic. So I thought I’d shift gears for a bit and write a movie review — and revisit Japan, if only onscreen.1

Subscribe now

Wim Wenders’ 2023 film Perfect Days is visually lush and outwardly simple. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a soft-spoken janitor for the Tokyo public toilet who fills his free time faithfully working through a routine that includes taking film photographs of sun-dappled trees and reading 20th century novels and criticism. The film shows us several of his days, each punctuated by tastefully abstract evocations of Hirayama’s dreams, blending various images from the preceding day. That accounts for most of the movie. The plot, to the extent that there is one, involves a visit from his niece, who has run away from her high-achieving mother. She spends a few days with Hirayama, living and enjoying his simple life, until her mother arrives to take her home. And that’s about it.

A lot of reviews highlight Hirayama’s apparent serenity and mindfulness, emphasizing his simple enjoyment of life. And the pervasive atmosphere of the first half of the movie is, indeed, serene. About ten minutes in, I immediately thought of that line from Vassily Grossman about modern-day hermits: here was Hirayama, proving Grossman right (minus the Astrakhan hat).

I was especially attuned to the film’s serenity, since I watched it on my phone during a loooooooooooooooooooooong2 layover in Seoul’s Incheon International Airport, where I endured a constant bombardment of loud and colorful ads for everything under the sun, from whiskey to lingerie. I was astonished that a 16.2 square inch screen and some tiny earbuds could seal me so effectively into the movie’s quasi-monastic stillness — which says a lot about the film.

But as the second half unfolded, I realized Perfect Days was more than a celebration of mindfulness. Indeed, the nuances and ambiguity of the second half had already been intimated by Hirayama’s complex facial expressions, which sometimes drifted far from the half-smiling serenity of a wu wei sage. That his face acquired those expressions whenever he was near women further amplified the impression that, though he was silent, he wasn’t still at heart. Hirayama says so little, however, I was hard pressed to make sense of his furrowed brow and his not-quite-frown.

That’s when I started paying closer attention to the music. The soundtrack consists, almost exclusively, of 70s songs played in-scene on cassette in Hirayama’s car. And doing that, I realized I’d been right to suspect that it wasn’t well with his soul. Consider, for instance, these lines from Lou Reed’s “A Perfect Day”, a beautiful, yet somehow eerie and ominous, love song, and obviously the source of the film’s title:

Just a perfect day;
You made me forget myself,
I thought I was someone else,
Someone good.

I dislike the “interpretive key” approach to books and movies, and I don’t think the song “explains” the film, but these lyrics do suggest an emotional thread that unites Hirayama’s mildly pained, ambiguous expressions that surface on his peaceful face like so many subaqueous skeletons.

To my mind, far from being a celebration of the virtues of Zen mindfulness in a distracted, consumerist age, Perfect Days shows mindfulness as anything but submission to the tidal rhythms of existence. As it happens, the hermit analogy is apropos in more ways than one. Hirayama’s way of life is its own kind of opus dei, to use St. Benedict’s term. It’s a delicate horarium all too easily disrupted, to be jealously protected from the bungling intrusion of the world. In the end, Hirayama, like a Desert Father and, indeed, like Travis Henderson in Wenders’ Paris, Texas, struck me as a troubled soul who has gentled himself by withdrawing from the world. He has found peace, but at a steep price.

And unlike Paris, Texas, I wonder about the price.

The dramatic heart of the film is Hirayama’s encounter with his sister when she arrives to pick up his niece. Despite showing clear affection for her, he flatly refuses her hesitant suggestion that he visit their father, now old and living in a nursing home. She insists that he has softened, that “he won’t talk like he used to.” But Hirayama simply shakes his head, unable even to maintain eye contact.3 She doesn’t press the point; she simply hugs him and leaves. When the car is out of sight, he begins sobbing uncontrollably.

The following morning, he resumes his routine.

That was when I stopped admiring his horarium. I know a few apostles of secularized Zen mindfulness who criticize the Christian monastic fuga mundi as an act of Kierkegaardian “infinite resignation.” But if you ask me, Hirayama and his oversensitive ilk aren’t doing much better: life is full of noise, sweat, and raw emotion. To shrink back from every noise and every implicit gesture of intimacy, as he repeatedly does, is just as much an act of fugare as St. Benedict’s withdrawal to the mountains.

Here’s Grossman again:

Is the life of a hermit really a manifestation of courage? Can there be courage in withdrawing from life? What about suicide? This too is a withdrawal from life. A retreat into being a hermit forever. (Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, p. 71)

Their worldly lives do not matter to them; what matters to them are their hours of seclusion, their lives as hermits. All serve their god in secrecy. None aspire to return from the wilderness and tell other people about the illumination that has visited them there. (ibid, p. 73)

There’s a lot that speaks to Perfect Days here. And yet I quibble with Grossman’s comparison, because it omits the one factor that distinguishes classic from contemporary hermits, the one thing that really matters in this case: motive. The Desert Fathers, the first Christian hermits of whom we are aware, were very explicit about why they fled the world: it had ceased openly to threaten those who would follow Christ.

The earliest Christians knew their profession of faith in Jesus Christ posed a direct challenge to the political and cosmic order centered in Rome. The radical demands of being a Christian sifted the committed from the uncertain because they removed any ulterior motive for joining the Church. But as Christianity went gradually from underground radicalism to tolerated eccentricity to imperial religion, would-be Christians had more and more reasons to follow Christ other than the Gospel itself. The first hermits, therefore, went to the desert to challenge their hearts, to regain and retain the clear-eyed purpose of the martyrs. You may think their whole worldview is bonkers, but it has an undeniable positivity at its core: it wasn’t simply a rejection of a loud and brutish world for being brutish and loud, it was a decision to live exclusively for the supreme good without which the world, in all its perfection and imperfection, would cease to exist.

Why do modern hermits flee the world? If Hirayama is any indication, it really is a question of flight. The constellated implications about his past — his awkwardness with women, his tense relationship with his sister, his fractured relationship with his father — suggest an all-too familiar backstory. The fact that his sister arrives in a car driven by a chauffeur and reacts as she does to the news that he’s cleaning toilets suggests an affluent upbringing. I imagine his father was a strong-willed businessman (the kind with which Japanese cinema is rife); I imagine he and Hirayama clashed; I imagined Hirayama rebelling against his expectations in a wild youth full of women and drugs. I can’t imagine the specific precipitating event that led him to abandon it all, and his family, for a life of simplicity and solitude, but I’m almost certain that his rebellion hurt someone he wanted to love. He put it all behind him by an act of escape into obscurity and solitude. He hides in his hermitage the way a bird with a broken wing takes shelter from predators in shade. He seeks a small measure of peace, at the price of his relationships: his father, his sister, the woman who runs his favorite izakaya, and so on. His niece is drawn to him, but in the few moments when he opens up even slightly to her plying questions, it is to drop a few koan-like pearls of wisdom about mindfulness.

Maybe I’m wrong to be so bothered by the irresolution of Hirayama’s fractured relationships, especially with his father. The movie would be drastically different if it ended with an attempted reconciliation; it would harsh its meditative tone and disrupt its pace. But not even an intimation of a slight shift of character, a hint of possible reconciliation? A final admission, instead, during a conversation with a man who has confided a cancer diagnosis, that “nothing really changes”? Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — like Hirayama’s sister, dwelling in an utterly different cinematic world — shows a possibly more fractured father-son relationship, but it brings it to a compelling but plausible resolution. I realize that life isn’t art, and that some griefs and wounds simply don’t heal. But we should be clear that, in that case, life is more tragic than art. Something is broken in Hirayama’s heart, and no number of faithfully executed, “perfect days” of mindful, smiling solitude and aversion to intimacy are going to fix it — I don’t think he’s even trying to fix it. That’s what he’s fleeing. What’s to admire about that?

What I can’t figure out is Wenders’ attitude to Hirayama. The penultimate shot — a long closeup of Hirayama’s face expressing a melange of elation and sorrow while listening to Nina Simone — is as enigmatic as it is gorgeously acted. Does he want us to see Hirayama as a model? As a cautionary tale? As a hero, or as a tragedy? I’m at a loss. The film is a beautiful character study, but like its eponymous song, something eerie and uncertain lurks beneath its surface and leaves you — or, at least, left me — ill-at-ease, despite the trappings of serenity. A fascinating, and no less beautifully crafted, yang to the yin of Wenders’ masterpiece Paris, Texas, and just as intriguing a watch.

Read part one here.

Let’s cut right to the chase: does Localism amount, as the subtitle claims, to “coming home to Catholic social teaching”?

Subscribe now

Recapitulating “Localism”

A little recap may be helpful. At the end of the day, “localism” may refer to one of two related but distinct ideas.

On the one hand, it may refer to a handful of economic policies founded on the axiom that owning and operating the means of production accords more with human dignity than separating ownership and operation into the capital and labor classes — ownership should be “localized” in the network of operators, you might say. Prior to the labor movement in the West, capitalist control of the means of production gave them the upper hand in salary and safety negotiations, frequently immiserating workers. If more workers become owners, the asymmetry between capital and labor would be more fairly distributed. That is, at least in part, one of the implications of the word “distributism”. Let’s call this, unimaginatively, general localism.

On the other hand, “localism” may refer to a worldview which adapts the aforementioned economic policies to agrarian purposes. If general localism sees owning and operating the means of production as more consistent with human dignity than mere operation, agrarian localism sees owning and operating specifically agricultural means of production as the preeminent expression of such dignity. Whereas general localism has no inherent beef with industrial society, provided that it respects workers’ dignity, this view — let’s call it, no less unimaginatively, agrarian localism — identifies industrial society itself as the true enemy of dignity, and prescribes policies accordingly.

With this distinction in mind, to which of these positions do Localism and Catholic social teaching, respectively, correspond? If they both correspond to the same sense, we have the answer to our question.

A Problematic Rebrand

Contributor David Cooney claims that “localists don’t necessarily say we need to return to an agrarian society, but economic independence for communities necessarily includes agricultural independence to the greatest extent possible.” (Localism, p. 26; emphasis mine) That final phrase reads like an intellectual concession to the non-agrarians in the localist tent, but it’s actually a slippery evasion. Determining the possibility of anything is a complex calculus: assuming that you know the relevant facts, you also need to assess costs and benefits — in which values have at least as much influence as facts.

If I had come across Cooney’s essay in isolation, I could have taken his concession seriously. I can’t, however, when it’s embedded in a book whose editorial outlook so clearly devalues industrial, and valorizes agrarian, society.

From the book’s foreword:

It was once normal to live on a farm. Then it was normal to at least be related to someone who lived on a farm. When that stopped being normal, so did everything else. (ibid, Ahlquist, p. x)

From the book’s afterword:

What are we actually saying? That small businesses are better than big businesses. That independent farmers are better than agribusiness. That local government does a better job of providing for the common good than federal and even state governments. We want big families on a bit of land, at least enough to grow strong and free. We want men to have good jobs making useful, beautiful things. We want women who know true independence from corporate masters, emancipation from wage-slavery. We want our children to grow wise, not merely clever; pious, not merely obedient. (ibid, Davis, p. 229)

Of the essays in between, some have tellingly agrarian titles (“How To Get Back to The Land”; “Go Back”). Those that don’t still wax pastoral, sometimes literally:

When multiple families bridge the practical and functional gap, connected in economic dependency included, then we arrive at that noble yet practical ideal of the village, that beautiful yet practical integration in a place of religion, work, and festivity. (ibid, Craig, p. 46)

Become a producer. Build up local economy. Plant a garden. Found a farm. (ibid, Giambrone, p. 107; emphasis mine)

It was one considered our national story that people came to the North American continent in search for land to make a home, but land meant so much more to our ancestors than it generally does to us now. In a world without electric lights, instant communication, and infrastructure, the home rested on a balance of natural life inside and around it. … America’s ancestors knew that the only means of establishing a people is to root them into the land without destroying it, that is, begin a pastoral. (ibid, Reynolds III, p. 159)1

I would call ‘localism,’ then, an attitude: an attitude that recognizes that just as human beings are necessarily rooted in particular times, so we are rooted in particular places. And without this rootedness, we are not complete as human persons; we lack an essential dimension, namely, our natural relations with others. (ibid, Storck, p. 196)

These celebrations of agrarian life lead to some outrageous contentions, like this deliciously preposterous gem of anti-history:

Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste. (ibid, Richardson, p. 175)2

Many are often, in good Chestertonian style, accompanied by cheap appeals to the popular Catholic imagination:

This model of widespread ownership is so removed from the norm of today that it sounds like a fairytale. Hobbiton is a foolish fantasy to those immured in a galactic Star Wars empire. (ibid, Fitzpatrick, p. 83)3

If you ask me, it’s simply impossible to maintain that Localism doesn’t demand the abolition of industrial society. This book isn’t simply expounding general localism, but its grumpy agrarian variant.

Let’s see if the popes agree.

Catholic Social Teaching

Rather than plow through the documents one by one (which is a gargantuan task — papal pronouncement haven’t gotten shorter over the years), I decided to consult the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Church. If anything would give me what I’m looking for, surely that will do.

The core axiom of Catholic social teaching (hence, CST) is the dignity of the human person, the “unmistakable protagonist” of all social life (Compendium, §106). The human person is created in God’s image and destined for communion with God and others; for this reason, persons are ends in themselves, never reducible to means for private gratification or exploitation.4 Human dignity grounds every other principle of CST. The common good is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” (ibid, §164) The principle of subsidiarity states that “it is an injustice and a disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (ibid, §186) Solidarity is a complementary principle that “highlights … the intrinsic social nature of the human person, the equality of all in dignity and rights and the common path of individual peoples towards an ever more committed unity.” (ibid, §192)5

Many of the general implications of these principles suit the ideas expounded in Localism, especially when it comes to the family, where solidarity and subsidiarity intersect.

A society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means. (ibid, §213)

The family, therefore, must be seen as an essential agent of economic life, guided not by the market mentality but by the logic of sharing and solidarity among generations. (ibid, §248)

An element that must be appreciated and safeguarded is that of a family wage, a wage sufficient to maintain a family and allow it to live decently. Such a wage must also allow for savings that will permit the acquisition of property as a guarantee of freedom. (ibid, §250)

Likewise amenable with the book is the Compendium’s vision of the relationship between labor and capital:

Labor has an intrinsic priority over capital. This principle directly concerns the process of production: in this process labor is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instrument or instrumental cause … There must exist between work and capital a relationship of complementarity: the very logic inherent within the process of production shows that the two must mutually permeate one another and that there is an urgent need to create economic systems in which the opposition between capital and labor is overcome. (ibid, §277)

The latter statement amounts to an endorsement of the maxim that “more workers should become owners.”6 Further endorsement can be found in the document’s attention to the communal context of economic life:

All those involved in a business venture must be mindful that the community in which they work represents a good for everyone and not a structure that permits the satisfaction of someone’s merely personal interests. This awareness alone makes it possible to build an economy that is truly at the service of mankind and to create programmes of real cooperation among the different partners in labor. A very important and significant example in this regard is found in the activity of so-called cooperative enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, commercial undertakings featuring hand-made products and family-sized agricultural ventures. The Church's social doctrine has emphasized the contribution that such activities make to enhance the value of work, to the growth of a sense of personal and social responsibility, a democratic life and the human values that are important for the progress of the market and of society. (ibid, §339; emphasis mine)

So far, then, we seem to have an endorsement of what we called general localism, and perhaps a partial endorsement of the metaphysical foundation of agrarian localism (i.e. aspects of human dignity anthropology). Unfortunately, though, the endorsements stop there.

Recall, for instance, Localism’s suspicion of and hostility toward industrial society, whose mechanistic approach to improving man’s material estate has been so prejudicial to the agrarian lifestyle of our ancestors. It was clear that the editors of the book regarded industrial activity as, at best, indifferent to the fulfillment of human dignity, and at worst, actively contrary to it.

Nothing could be further from the spirit of the Compendium, according to which “human activity aimed at enhancing and transforming the universe can and must unleash the perfections which find their origin and model in the uncreated Word.” (ibid, §262) Certainly, this has to be read in context: such activity must be duly attentive to human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. Properly contextualized, of course, this openness to the transformative power of industry stands in stark contrast to the anti-industrial spirit that permeates Localism and haunts it with the neo-romantic language of enchantment. This formulation suggests that the Church emphatically does not equate the fulfillment of human dignity with traditional agrarian life, a subject that comes up fewer than ten times in the entire document. It casts its net wider, and justifies doing so in theologically sounder terms than those of secular romanticism:

By his work and industriousness, man — who has a share in the divine art and wisdom — makes creation, the cosmos already ordered by the Father, more beautiful. (ibid, §266)

Already, therefore, we can say with confidence that, although CST aligns well with general, it is, at best, in tension with agrarian, localism. Further citations stoke those tensions into outright conflict. Recall, for instance, Ahlquist’s quip that “distributism is opposed to centralization, whether it be political or commercial. It is about directness. It is about dignity.” (Localism, p. viii) The Church, on the other hand, has a far more nuanced — and, as you will see, ironically relevant — attitude toward centralization, precisely in the name of dignity:

The action of the State and of other public authorities must be consistent with the principle of subsidiarity and create situations favorable to the free exercise of economic activity. It must also be inspired by the principle of solidarity and establish limits for the autonomy of the parties in order to defend those who are weaker. Solidarity without subsidiarity, in fact, can easily degenerate into a ‘Welfare State,’ while subsidiarity without solidarity runs the risk of encouraging forms of self-centered localism.” (Compendium, §351; emphasis mine)7

And do you remember Joseph Pearce’s attack on globalization and international trade, and his corresponding endorsement of local protectionism? The Church has a very different — but no less resounding — take on just those same issues:

Today more than ever, international trade — if properly oriented — promotes development and can create new employment possibilities and provide useful resources. The Church’s social doctrine has time and again called attention to aberrations in the system of international trade, which often, owing to protectionist policies, discriminates against products coming from poorer countries and hinders the growth of industrial activity in and the transfer of technology to these countries. (ibid, §364; emphasis mine)

In summary, therefore, CST aligns with general localism in its endorsement of workers as owners and its sensitivity to the asymmetry of the antagonism that has historically bedeviled the relation of capital and labor, but its endorsements of industrialization, markets, trade, and international cooperation, caveats notwithstanding, preclude any possible identity with the agrarian localism expounded in the book. In other words, not only does coming home to Catholic social teaching not require our assenting to Localism’s flimsy economics, it actually requires our dissenting from much that these aspiring gentlemen farmers profess and would have us do.

Still, these aspiring gentlemen farmers are my fellow Catholics. I may dissent from their positions and despise the tone with which they demand my assent, but charity — or at least fellow-feeling — compels me to ask why so many of them, often well-read and always well-intentioned, make the same mistake. But that is a question for the… ahem, third part of this review.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a review of Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching. It is, at last, complete. It’s a bit long, though, so I’ve divided it into two parts.

Localism is an anthology of essays by “leading thinkers” on economics and cultural commentary edited by Dale Ahlquist and Michael Warren Davis. Its collective upshot is to rebrand distributism as “localism,” equate it with Catholic social teaching, and contend that it’s the only way forward for serious Catholics to confront the problems of the world.

I aspire to be one such Catholic, and I’m not convinced.

Subscribe now

Adumbrating Localism

What actually is localism?

Despite the assurance on the back cover that readers will learn “what distributism is, and what it is not”, the book is rather short on definitions. Or rather, it included numerous descriptions and nominal definitions without addressing the contradictions between them or demonstrating, even in outline, their ultimate conceptual coherence.1

From what I could cull out of the scattered statements, localism can be defined in a few ways along a spectrum from the strictly economic to the metaphysical.

To begin with economics, Dale Ahlquist writes that distributism

is based on the idea that ‘more workers should become owners’ and that widespread ownership would provide freedom and independence and make for a more just society. It did not pull any punches, claiming that industrial capitalism is responsible for many grave ills in modern society and that socialism is the well-intentioned but wrong-headed solution that only makes matters worse. (Localism, p. viii)

But a strictly economic definition falls short of the deeper integration between economy and community which the localists envision. As David W. Cooney says,

without a good, strong, local economy to support it, the local community is weak and dependent no matter how much neat stuff the average person may own or how nice the cars in the driveways are. … If you are your neighbors’ customer, and they are yours, then you mutually support each other, and money will flow throughout the local economy. The best way to support the local economy is to be the customer of local, independently owned businesses to the greatest extent you can. (ibid, pp. 24-25)

But that still falls short. Distributism isn’t just an economic policy for communitarians. After all, anticorporate, stakeholder socialism is the vibe of every belinened sustainable farmers market up and down the California coast. These co-ops and other initiatives seem marked by a distinctly postmodern communitarianism unburdened by history or organized religion: they’re quasi-intentional communities of men and women who have discovered a desire for authentic self-actualization in the monochrome satiety of postmodern life; farming, husbandry, and so on are how they achieve it. In other words, these are voluntary communities of self-actualizing individuals.

Here, then, distributism distinguishes itself. Despite its theoretical likeness to co-ops and communes, it’s at odds with those italicized ideas. Freedom through limitation, playing that Chestertonian game-on-the-cliff, is the axiom of the localist mind, and chief among those limits are land and family. We are born somewhere we don’t choose, into families we don’t choose. Says Jason Craig,

This life brings men in contact with their local place and its people, and it creates and protects the communal life of man, which is not a superfluous part of his life but a source of it. That which removes man from his home and place, therefore, is something we should resist. (ibid, pp. 52-53)

These two forces conjoin to form a third limiting vector, the sense of history: my family has worked this land for generations, it’s my destiny to do the same, etc. Wallace Stegner — along with Wendell Berry, one of the intellectual godfathers of Localism — says that, “no place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.” (Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p. 202)

This leads naturally to the final component of the localist mind: the religious dimension. This may come in many forms, but at its core, it flows from or at least flows with that sense of history. We don’t just work the land, we belong to it and in it; it is our God-given inheritance, held in trust. Consumerism and socialism alike sever the intimate contact that binds the human heart to “the life of significant soil,” as T.S. Eliot puts it (Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages”, V). Says Ahlquist,

Distributism is opposed to centralization, whether it be political or commercial. It is about directness. It is about dignity. It is about responsibility, which is the flip side of freedom (Localism, p. viii)

Here we have the implicit metaphysical orientation behind localism’s economic policies. Its antitrust impulses, its suspicion of technology and global capitalism, and its desire — to be accomplished with a regulatory cudgel, if need be — to promote small businesses and family farms, are all founded on the conviction not just that human nature was endowed by its Creator with a purpose, but that that purpose can only be realized through prolonged physical contact with the natural world via farming and the personal contact of Sunday worship and workaday commerce alike. Localists defend involuntary affiliations and the transcendent order they express, because without these, they contend, voluntary associations and individual freedom lose their meaning.

Economic Ambiguities

The “leading thinkers” in Localism are, at any rate, thinkers, often sophisticated. But frankly, the book is weakest precisely where it claims to cast fresh light, economics. It’s hard not to walk away with the impression that the contributors hate everything about modern industrial society and believe that only a return to agrarian life can salve our social sores. They say otherwise, of course, but that’s the overwhelming upshot.

I can hear my localist readers (I assume there are a few) protest that I’m straw-manning their ideas, or at least exaggerating their stance vis-à-vis the modern industrial world. Unfortunately, I am not, at least as far as the book is concerned. It is abundantly clear that the editorial vision equates industrial society with a new kind of tyranny.

How does this push toward a globalized hegemony, ushered in by the unholy alliance of big tech, big business, and big government, impact the viability of local businesses and local cultures? Can the small, local, and beautiful survive and prosper in a world dominated by the big, global, and brash? (Joseph Pearce, Localism, 145)2

News corporations have a massive financial incentive to cast every economic, political, or cultural problem as a national problem with a national solution. This in turn gives federal politicians an excuse to collect power in their own hands. These political elites also accept billions of dollars a year from multi-national corporations to stamp out potential competitors, especially small businessmen. A mom-and-pop drugstore is a bigger threat to Walgreens than CVS or Rite Aid. Even the intelligentsia (universities, think-tanks, and the like) are in on the scam. They earn their keep by trading in abstract ideologies. They have to make our problems seem more complicated than they really are. … Joseph Stalin and Jeff Bezos harnessed the power of Big Government and Big Business to make the world a worse place to live. (Michael Warren Davis, ibid, p. 231; emphasis mine)3

Here’s the thing: the world didn’t transition to industrial society by accident, and the transition wasn’t driven exclusively by greed and rapacity. A major motivation was the desire, at least half-conscious, to escape preindustrial tyranny, which was real and no less comprehensive. If the contributors to Localism are going to preach death to industrial tyranny without assuring uncertain readers that they have a plan to avoid simply reverting to preindustrial tyranny, it’s fair to demand an explanation. These are leading thinkers, after all.

A Portrait of the Tyrant as A Preindustrial Man

To stimulate such an explanation, let’s follow Patricia Crone in Preindustrial Societies4 and think away the conditions of our industrial one. Concretely, this means imagining life without global supply chains, mechanized agriculture, and high-speed communications networks. What results?

First and foremost, agricultural output would decline precipitously: traditional subsistence farmers can only consistently feed about 5 people a year. (Cf. Preindustrial Societies, p. 16) And if you must do without mechanized communication (a further perk of being modern), then you’d also have to deal with the fact that the knowledge of agricultural scarcities in this or that region would come too late for a government or church to respond in a timely fashion. As the authors of Superabundance point out, what we call resources aren’t actually resources in the proper sense: they are materials. A resource — in the sense of a material with definite and exploitable uses for this or that problem — comes about from the convergence of materials, knowledge, and time. Agricultural decline and the lack of sophisticated extractive technology would eat away at the materials in question, and the lack of rapid communication would eat away at the time. With fewer materials to exploit in a longer timespan, “preindustrial societies were dominated by scarcity.” (Ibid, p. 15)

An obvious consequence is that the current global population would be totally unsustainable. Forcibly deindustrializing, whether through government regulation or a collective “change of mood” (ibid, p. 28), would mean famine and death for billions — hardly a policy consistent with the pro-life cause to which the authors of Localism are committed.

And besides, how would the survivors spend most of their time?

Scarcity everywhere made for a huge population of vagrants, beggars, robbers, and criminals of other types: no less than 10 percent of the population of seventeenth-century France (estimated at 20 million or less) is believed to have fallen into this category. (Ibid, p. 22)

The authors of Localism rightly abominate the woke attack on masculinity. But if Crone’s characterization is correct, men wouldn’t have it much better in a preindustrial age. Many wouldn’t be working the land, they’d be unemployed vagrants.

Of course, not everyone would wind up in abject, resentful poverty. But if historical precedent is any indication, the landowners would more than likely congregate in cities parasitizing the surplus wealth from the countryside.5 Such cities gave us the gorgeous handiwork in gold, stone, and illumination from so many periods of history popularly dismissed as “dark ages.” It’s not uncommon to hear traditionalist partisans of the Catholic Church retort Voltaire’s familiar mockery of medieval ignorance and incompetence by pointing out contrary examples: Gothic cathedrals, illuminated manuscripts, etc. But I’ve begun to suspect that many such Catholic partisans suffer from what you might call museum myopia. While know-how and expertise certainly existed, they weren’t widely diffused, nor their results — with the exception of the cathedrals — widely accessible. Medieval European artisans — like their analogues in Japan — were more or less in thrall to wealthy urban patrons.

Such people belonged in an altogether different category: highly skilled and extravagantly rewarded (when not extravagantly ill-treated), they supplied exquisite pieces of craftsmanship, exotic luxury goods, and high-powered intellectual, artistic, medical, and financial services to the courts of aristocrats and kings. Such specialists tended to belong to the top. There were not however many of them. (Ibid, p. 23)

If you think the country-city divide is bad now, try living in medieval Europe.

Poor peasants couldn’t simply migrate from farm to farm in search of work, either. The concept of labor as a vendable “product” to be exchanged for money from an employer was virtually nonexistent, as were the markets which channeled different kinds of labor to the needs of different employers. Instead,

scarcity meant that it was impossible to pay for all the labor required; in so far as work was not to be left undone, people thus had to be forced into doing it. The carrot being small, the stick had to be large, or in other words, labor was more commonly forced than hired. (Ibid, p. 31)

The fruit of all that forced labor was rarely channeled into such primitive markets as existed. More often, it was managed by what passed for the state: “a great deal of commodity movement took place by order of, or under the control of, the state, that is it did not amount to a genuine trade at all (as opposed to ‘administered trade’ or ‘redistribution’).” (Ibid, pp. 26-27) The Church, and comparable spiritual organs in non-Christian civilizations, often functioned as one more wealthy aristocratic entity accruing money and prestige through these practices — though it’s worth noting that, at least in Western Europe, Church and state never quite reached the mutual understanding that existed between patriarchs and emperors in Eastern Europe, or between the Confucian scholars and the emperors in China.

In sum, most preindustrial societies saw wealthy landowners in one or two central cities dominate hungry and ignorant masses, who had little legal redress or economic opportunity.

Such surplus as the agricultural sector produced passed into the hands of a ruling elite given to spending every penny it had on consumption, not on investments in trade or manufacture; conversely, those who made money out of trade or manufacture were apt to convert it into membership of the ruling elite. … Moreover, since the agricultural surplus ended up with the ruling elite, sensible businessmen concentrated their efforts on the production and/or provision of extremely expensive items for the very rich, not on everyday goods for sale to the masses: it was only here and there that catering for the masses, or some of them, paid off. (Ibid, p. 39)

Michael Warren Davis wants to do more than lobby for workers-as-owners. He wants openly to reverse the Industrial Revolution, and thinks that doing so will somehow result in “big families on a bit of land, at least enough to grow strong and free,” where “men … have good jobs making useful, beautiful things” and “women … know true independence from corporate masters, emancipation from wage-slavery,” and “children … grow wise, not merely clever; pious, not merely obedient.” (Localism, p. 229) If you ask me, he has lost his reactionary mind.

I’m not saying all this would inevitably result if we heed Localism, only because next to nothing is truly inevitable. But if the sketch above reveals anything, it’s that preindustrial societies were no less prone to centralization and tyranny than industrial society, even if the enabling conditions vary. How do the localists propose to reform our current economy along preindustrial lines without also reviving the conditions of preindustrial tyranny?

I ask this repeatedly in conversation with would-be localists, but many dismiss the implicit premise. If I do get a response, it invariably involves some form of protectionist coercion, whether in the form of federal tariffs and hardcore antitrust litigation to local prohibitions on importing products from beyond a certain distance. Any concern about the likelihood of slipping back into the feudal arrangement of landowner-peasant is greeted with impatience: I’m just a handwringing liberal proceduralist, it wouldn’t necessarily happen that way, and besides, peasants didn’t have it so bad; at least they lived more spiritually alert lives, etc.6 Pardon me, but it did happen that way, and it was that bad. The burden of proof is on the reformers to show that their reforms won’t simply deform what good persists in the industrial age.

At this point, I can’t help but feel further vindicated in my conviction that conservative American Catholicism is aping the Russian revolutionary movement. Numerous figures in mid-19th century Russia were rightly disgusted by the prevailing order, but few gave any thought to practical reforms with mitigated unintended consequences. (Those who did, and who tried politically to enact such reforms, were deported by the czars to Sakhalin and Siberia. If anybody had it coming, it was the Romanovs.) Localism reads not unlike the imprecations of Alexander Herzen: disgusted by the facts and utterly incompetent to change them.

So far, though, I’ve overlooked a key aspect, suggested by the book’s subtitle: “Coming home to Catholic social teaching.” If, in fact, Localism is consistent with Catholic social teaching, then shouldn’t I cease firing broadsides at my well-intentioned peers? Let that be a question for part two. For now, though, as Aristotle says, “it is a pious thing to honor the truth first.” And the truth is, as far as practical economics, Localism punches bantam in a heavyweight ring.

Greetings from Kyoto!

It’s 90 degrees and humid, so it certainly doesn’t feel like autumn. As a teacher, though, I can feel my summer slipping away. Responsibility compels me to think about lesson planning and paper assignments between ramen bowls and shrine visits. That Catholic education conference got me fired up about returning to the classroom, but it won’t be without some wistfulness that I let this wild, peripatetic summer end.

But only some wistfulness.

Subscribe now

Spring is the traditional season of new beginnings, but autumn — thanks to the structure of the American school year — has its own inspiring “freshness deep down things.”

Like The Inscapist, I associate late August and early September with new books. Our books at Thomas Aquinas College were provided gratis thanks to some very generous donors, so every back-to-school weekend involved finding your room, dumping your stuff, and tearing into the box waiting for you on the dorm desk. Out came the Great Books with glassy covers, sharp corners, and spines without crinkle, their wide margins fairly beckoning for scribbled commentary. You stacked them one by one on the desk, watching this semester’s Alp on Alps arise. (You repeated the same ritual in spring, of course, but it’s never the same.)1

The last time I stacked up books on a dorm room desk was almost exactly seven years ago, but the thrill has haunted every autumn since. Although I’m no longer working my way through a fixed curriculum, and I’m cautious about trying to replicate that experience, I find myself gravitating to new books every autumn all the same, the selection reflecting the past year of thought. Here’s this year’s list — the shape of posts to come, as it were.

The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling

I bought this at the conference, mainly as a consolation after a particular round of antimodern sessions. That a single copy of a book by a sophisticated liberal like Trilling was hanging out on the shelves beside abundant copies of screeds by John Senior (see below) proved that subtlety wasn’t dead, just unpopular.

I read a few essays between sessions, and was hooked. Not only can the guy write beautifully, he addresses a tranche of subjects that I kept running into over the last year of Theories of Everything: rejecting illiberalism while engaging in liberal self-critique, clarifying fiction’s social and political implications, and distinguishing it from moralism. It was as if Isaiah Berlin had a chainsmoking kid brother in Manhattan. I plan to finish this as soon as I get back from Japan, and that right soon. I’m particularly curious to see if Trilling’s “sense of the past” resonates at all with Wallace Stegner’s “sense of place.”

The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior

John Senior’s name fell from the lips of almost everyone at the conference like water circulating between so many fountains. I was not among them.

I heard about him seven years ago while researching my thesis at TAC. I didn’t read him at the time, though, because I wasn’t impressed by his ideas as they were expounded to me. No subsequent exposition has caused me to rethink that reaction, by the way. If anything, they’ve reinforced it.

His basic idea is that the modern world is afflicted by a crisis of imagination: we are no longer at home in the imaginative framework that gave life both to the Scriptures and the concepts of philosophy. The only way to resolve the crisis is to restore the imagination through poetry and music; until we do so, philosophy is essentially futile. In addition to the philosophically questionable contentions at play — the implied determinism of the intellect by its environment, the lack of a limiting principle on the priority of forming the imagination — the practical upshot is predictable and banal: reject modernity, embrace tradition. And you know how stupid I think that is.

Still, I like to think I’m capable of changing my mind — the intellectual life is four-fifths subjunction, after all. So in addition to the Trilling, I bought Senior’s Death of Christian Culture, to see if he could do what his proponents couldn’t and convince me that he deserves a place in the canon of tomorrow.2

The Glory of The Lord, Vol. 1, Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Let me be clear: volume one. Someday, perhaps, I’ll hitch up my pants and slog through Balthasar’s fifteen volume “trilogy” (anybody else get Wall-E vibes?) about the beautiful, good, and true, but it is not this day.

The first volume, though, integrates fundamental theology (which examines revelation and how we come to respond in faith without annihilating reason) and aesthetics. My interest in both has been growing, especially given the surge of interest in traditional (“trad”) Catholicism among my hitherto irreligious generational confreres the world over. Many attribute their conversion above all to the beauty of the traditional Mass: that’s fundamental theology and aesthetics right there.

Now, I have a complex relationship with trad Catholicism and a complex history with aesthetics, so I can’t help feeling ambivalent about all this good news. At the same time, it is good news. Dismissing a Catholic renewal simply because it isn’t my preferred flavor of Catholicism seems a bit pharisaical. As Ross Douthat pointed out recently, responding to some leftist journalists who dismissed Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion as a political stunt, no one’s motives for conversion are totally pure. In a way, isn’t that the whole point of Christianity? “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord laid in him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)

People come to the faith for all sorts of reasons; it’s up to the Holy Spirit and the Church, both shepherds and the laity, to help converts clarify and purify those reasons. (As if cradle Catholics didn’t also need to purify and clarify their motives.)

Given the recent history of the Western episcopate, it’s fair, I think, to be ambivalent about our shepherds’ ability to help our new brethren navigate the pitfalls of trad Catholicism. But in the end, that’s not my business. The aesthetics of the Traditional Latin Mass may not be my motive for belief, but I can at least try to understand why it might be someone else’s. I think Balthasar may help — trad ire notwithstanding.

The Square and The Tower, Niall Ferguson; Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson; Breakneck, Dan Wang

We touched on economics at TAC, particularly in senior year, but our exposure was limited to Adam Smith, a little Marx, and some social encyclicals. I left thinking the labor theory of value was the consensus opinion (it’s not) and that Marx remains economically relevant (he doesn’t). I’ve been overhauling my economics knowledge ever since, but it’s a prolonged and extensive process. Economics is a young and developing science with a complex relationship to broader policy issues, and it’s hard to distinguish ideological convictions from data-driven facts.3 Catholicism further complicates the overhaul, because of its still-growing tradition of social teaching.

My latest economic overhaul began when a friend asked me to write about Distributism, which is currently parading as another name for Catholic social teaching. I took him up on the idea and started reading Localism, a recent formulation of Distributism edited by Dale Ahlquist and Michael Warren Davis, last spring.

Actually reviewing it has proven oddly difficult, because the book keeps sending me down different Wikipedia rabbit holes. The review is finally finished and forthcoming, but the long and arduous path to completion has forced me to reconsider a lot of my own socioeconomic principles. I don’t know that I’ve rejected any of them, but I have come to see my adherence to them as insufficiently critical. These several titles represent ways out of the quagmire.

The Square and The Tower examines how communication networks have shaped history and economics — both “secret societies” and the broader “republic of letters.” I’m fascinated by the economic idea of emergent behaviors, which, while not irrational, can’t properly be called rational because they’re not the enacted intentions of a single agent. This is the underlying idea of Smith’s “invisible hand,” which certain libertarians and market absolutists take dogmatically. The Square and The Tower complements the invisible hand by examining what concerted, corporate intentionality has contributed to politics and economics.

Even more heterodox, by libertarian standards, is Abundance. But as a committed centrist and classical liberal who’d rather go down with Cicero and Cato than live under Caesar, red or blue, I need whatever friends I can find. I suspect there’ll be a lot to think about in Abundance, which — as I understand it — calls for government intervention to revive American productivity, currently stagnating under the knuckle-rapping negativity of 70s-style progressivism. Libertarians laugh at the idea, but Noah Smith, one of my favorite Substackers, and no wishful thinking progressive, has been singing the book’s praises for months.

Breakneck is about the rise of modern industrial China over the last few years. I love China and lament not only the dominance of the CCP, but the chauvinism that Americans habitually show toward the country. It’s hard to get a balanced take on our only serious global rival: it’s either the jingoistic claptrap emanating from the White House (which tends to be a lot of empty talk), or it’s quasi-Maoist propaganda. I love America, too, and would be sorry to see us enter our twilight years so soon. I can think of no one better than Dan Wang to assess lucidly the likelihood and likely characteristics of a “Chinese century.”

Novels?

I prefer to let my fiction choices proceed with as little premeditation as possible. I’m currently reading Heimito Von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps, and I hope to get through some more Thomas Mann and Raymond Chandler this year, but who knows? Not I. That’s what makes it fun.

Quite by surprise, and in keeping with the manic episode of Providence which has been the summer of 2025, a friend invited me to join him on a two week trip to Japan.

Subscribe now

To put it more reverently, God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform: had it not been for my car trouble in June, I wouldn’t have gotten my passport. With a month before the beginning of the school year, during which I shall be a functional cenobite, my friend had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I got my first passport stamp before the ink was a month dry — and wound up, entirely by accident, staying in a hostel in the very same city whence Basho embarked on his narrow road to the deep north. Mysterious ways, and wonders indeed!

I greet you, at present, from the first floor National Diet Library, from whose upper floors the Imperial Palace should be hazily visible — though I did enough climbing yesterday in search of older, more majestic Japanese sights (to see Mt. Fuji from the peak of Mt. Takao), that I feel no compulsion whatsoever to confirm that supposition.

I’ve never left the country before, and I expect any essay-worthy insights to come after the raw experience of being à l’étranger slips under the silty pressure of passing days and months and hardens into a gem of memory. Then I’ll polish and scrutinize its depths, and mount it in a necklace of post facto prose. For now, however, I thought I’d share my first impressions, digested from the travel journal I’ve been keeping in my Notes.

I’m aware that these are first impressions of a truly foreign country, after only a few days within its borders. But first impressions, while hardly infallible, have a charm all their own: they’re like the first mark of a pencil on paper, an abrasion that reveals the outward texture of both.

The Poetics of Space

The first and persistent shock of visiting Tokyo is the Japanese use of space. It’s a lot like haiku: squeeze every last ounce of use and significance out of a mere seventeen syllables. Only, if that’s true, then the cities are like epic poems written in haiku.

If you combined Tokyo’s size, height, and density with LA’s smog and general disorder, you’d get the LA of Blade Runner. As it is, Tokyo is shockingly clean for a city of 40 million people. And I haven’t seen any obviously homeless people, either.

Everything is economized, but everything is used. Narrow hallways, narrow stores, no two floorplans the same, stacking stores on top of each other, etc. Watching Kurosawa’s modern Japan films, I was baffled by the sets, where things seem crammed into corners and closets with no discernible pattern, and doorways appear out of nowhere; coming here, I’ve seen that it’s really like that. Wandering through Ginza, a high end fashion district, I noticed a tiny hole in the wall restaurant with a traditional shoji-like sliding door behind a banner covered in calligraphy, at the end of a tiny alley. My friend turned to a guy nearby with a questioning look, and the guy pointed at the banner and said, “Oishi!” (= “Delicious!”) So we went. It opened onto a small dining room, with a small doorway off to the side that led upstairs; at the top, I could just make out a cozy shoe rack, which led me to believe the owners lived upstairs. California sprawls outward, Japan upward.

Getting lost, I saw a bit more of the grungy side of Tokyo (which was by no means all that grungy); grunge here means rust and weeds, not homeless encampments and stray needles.

If you want to lose weight, visit Tokyo. Even with its bewilderingly extensive train and bus network, I’ve walked between 3 and 4 miles every day I’ve been here — and I’m just getting started.

The infrastructure in this city is unthinkable complex. It seems like every train station is a four to five track hub where multiple train companies operate; and yet things are more or less smooth. Markets and convenience stores and restaurants can be found on almost every tiny, one-lane sidestreet. This is a miracle of economic problem-solving. The mind boggles at how delivery trucks manage to keep all these tiny enterprises — unfailingly stocked with food and drink of all kinds — supplied, especially given how unfriendly the city is to cars.

Continuing to be amazed at the Japanese use of space. They’re simultaneously maximalist and minimalist: use all available space, but use it with almost paranoid economy. The jazz bar was a case in point: it was freaking tiny, the bathroom was a postage stamp. There’s so little obvious sense in the distribution of space, and no consideration whatsoever for larger people. Visiting the stacked, windowless malls-in-skyscrapers in Akihabara, with only narrow escalators connecting the floors, I was astonished: somewhere, America’s fire codes were screaming.

General observation: Japanese restaurants are unfailingly tasty (oishi!), but they’re remarkably uncomfortable if you’re not Japanese-sized. Or perhaps the demands of comfort intrude on their ideals of precision and economy. The chairs are narrow and never plush; often, they’re no more than backless stools. And the bathrooms! Much has been said about Japanese hygiene culture, with its house and bathroom slippers, its bidets, and so on. But the same obsession with economizing space prevails here, to maximally uncomfortable effect. Other than those in malls, which are usually spacious and warmly inviting, the bathrooms in local establishments have been narrow and cramped, and the toilet bowls alarmingly shallow. (I’d say use your imagination to see why that’s a problem, but maybe don’t…) Yes, in some places you can do your noisier business under the cover of music right from the bidet, but not even the most melodious toilet song can atone for the sin of such incommodious commodes.

Past and Present

Tokyo — and, I expect, most of the country — is a bizarre mixture of the deep past and the present. That’s true of most cities in the world beyond the United States, I know, but the contrast between the former and current aesthetics seems starker here than in, say, Rome or London, where imposing grandeur has prevailed since olden days. Traditional Japanese aesthetics, if Jun’ichiro Tanizaki is to be believed, prized organizational simplicity, a crepuscular atmosphere, and the patina of age. Western urbanism is anything but those: it's bright, it’s loud, and it’s polished. The combo is striking.

Headed to Jimbocho, Tokyo’s used bookstore district. There’s a whole DISTRICT for it!) It would be cool if I could find Bashō or Chomei or some other classics in Japanese.

Yanagimori Shrine beside the river, near Akihabara. An island of calm, despite the noise of the city. Water drips into fountain pools. Rusted gates open onto beautiful old shrines filled with anime plushie offerings. Tomatoes grow. Water lilies in a pot, with minnows. A cat lounges in the heat. A solitary, sweaty caretaker moves incense and feeds the fish. Volcanic slabs from Mt. Fuji lightly chiseled with kanji. As I leave, I say, “Sore wa utsukushīdesu.” (= “It’s beautiful.”) The caretaker leans in, as if he doesn’t understand — and he probably doesn’t. Japanese is hard to pronounce, especially if you’re reading it off Google Translate. I repeat myself. He understands and smiles, and as I start to leave he says, “Bye.”

Jimbocho cool but disappointing. Why so hard to find an affordable edition of the Japanese classics? Plenty of books about Basho and Soseki, but the only classic readily available in Japanese is The Tale of Genji — which, I’m told, while required reading in Japanese schools, leaves modern school children bored. Hard to blame them: palace intrigue for 1,000 pages is a lot to swallow.

Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station is old and beautiful, Yaesu side new and modern and slick. Marunouchi trackside full of under the subway restaurants; Yaesu all hotels. Marunouchi side opens onto the gardens that surround the Imperial Palace (though the path there passes between two skyscraper arcades of foreign fashion shops and high end French restaurants); Yaesu side opens onto bustling business zone. Tokyo in a nutshell.

Comments from brunch with some Japanese Catholics we met after Mass: “The religion of Japan is being Japanese.” They noted the Japanese resistance to change, even among the vast majority who have no apparent interest in Japan’s traditions. Conservatism by temperament, rather than principle. That aligns well with the materialist indifference bemoaned by Japan’s contemporary alt-right. But refreshingly, traditionalists in Japan seem opposed to using alt-right parties as a political vehicle, unlike their counterparts in the West: Japanese Catholics prefer modern materialism to Shinto paganism. It was in the name of Japanese conservatism, after all, that Catholics were so harshly persecuted in the days leading to the closure of Japan. I suspect that no less of a gulf exists between western paganism and Christianity — it was Roman conservatism, Romanitas, that blamed Rome’s misfortunes on public toleration of the newfangled religious innovation. Still, that contrasts with Ratzinger in Introduction to Christianity: traditional paganism, versus its fashionable postmodern Western variant, was at least infused with a sense of piety for the powers governing the universe, a piety to which the early Christians could appeal. Modern materialism robs traditional paganism of that spirit: it sees only weight and heft and naughty intimations of genitalia in the archaic torso of Apollo that fired the imaginations of a Christian pagan like Rilke. Is Ratzinger overselling traditional Western paganism? Quite possibly. All the same, greenhorn gaijin though I am, I can only wonder: is a culture of overwork, megacities, and tentacle erotica actually better suited to the reception of the Gospel than a society dedicated to Shinto and Buddhism?

Headed to Mt. Takao today, in the hopes of getting some relief from the claustrophobia of Tokyo.

On Mt. Takao. Mountains below, with Tokyo beyond. It’s so peaceful up here, but it’s not quiet. The steady susurrous roar of bugs and eerie, reverberant, screeching waves of some kind of screeching birdsong that sounds like a synth sound effect. Matches the eerie quality of the shrines.

Made it to the peak of Mt. Takao! The ascent passed through one very shady, cool, quiet stretch on the dark side of the mountain which was filled with an atmosphere I can only call haunted.

That’s all for now. For all my hard words about bathrooms and restaurant seats, I’m absolutely loving this place. We plan to spend next week in Kyoto, with visits to Osaka and Nagasaki in the offing. At some point, I plan to try pickled squid. More to follow.

Until then, sayonara.

I spent this past week back in the Midwest (via plane this time) for a conference on Catholic education. It was delightful. I’m still fairly new to teaching, so it was an excellent opportunity to meet other perplexed tyros and some seasoned veterans to guide us.

But the experience wasn’t unmixed. I got very tired of the relentless hostility to everything modern. I didn’t hear many imprecations against “modernity,” in all its abstract glory, but an imprecatory spirit prevailed. I thought I’d jot down a few perks of being modern, to exorcise that spirit — and my irritation with it.

Subscribe now

I don’t want to observe the usual ritual of listing the technological conveniences of modern life; even the imprecators do as much. Equating (dare I say it?) modernity with its utilitarian contributions, in fact, plays right into the anti-modern narrative. They don’t dispute that modern technology is marvelous and has made life easier; they contend, rather, that we have reaped this utilitarian harvest at the cost of culture.

On the contrary, say I, modernity — defined as the period between the 17th/18th centuries and the ideological storm that broke as World War II — has, through technology, reaped a non-trivial cultural harvest which we continue to plunder well into the postmodern twilight. (And twilight is not without its charms, either.)

The Novel

I hear a lot about “the Catholic literary tradition,” which extends from Augustine to Medieval romances (which Augustine would have considered sinfully frivolous), the novels of Dostoevsky (whose fabled Grand Inquisitor is supposed to be a Roman churchman), and the curious 20th century melange of Southern Gothic and dypso-crypto-Catholicism. It’s fine to regard these books under the formal aspect of their authors’ shared Catholicism, but materially, they’re as different as apples and onions. Augustine’s fusion of psalmody, autobiography, and the epic vision is remarkable, but his poetics differ in kind and in theory from Chaucer’s, which differ, in turn, from Dostoevsky’s and so on. And that’s not a moot point: literature isn’t just pretty words on a page. Those words are governed by poetic assumptions, and it’s an inescapable fact that the novel’s poetic assumptions are quintessentially modern.

What’s the difference between a modern novel and a medieval romance? It’s certainly not a matter of depth: the Arthurian romances don’t lack substance. But you know what they do lack? Differentiating details. As with Homer and the other epics, unless we’re told otherwise, we can assume that every knight around the table is preternaturally handsome, brawny, and brave; if we are told otherwise, it’s a clue to the subject and theme of an episode to come: wherever a non-formulaic detail appears, Chekhov’s gun is being cocked.

Contrast that with the broad modern fascination with morally ambiguous details that differentiate characters and places without placing them on a scale of values. True, some authors hint at a character’s role in the story by their name or appearance — Dickens, for instance — but many more strive to evoke physically believable characters. Pierre Bezukhov is tall, fat, and bespectacled, with intelligent, slightly restless eyes. These facts tell us something about his character, but they also serve simply to distinguish him from the many other people described in War & Peace — all of whom Tolstoy strives to render feasible, and none of whom are in the Homeric business of lifting rocks that it would take two men to hoist.

The commitment to feasibility is essential to the novel (which, apparently, is not what W&P is). It evolved as a form over the centuries, but according to Lionel Trilling, it has been concerned with the divergence of appearance and reality since Don Quixote went mad and in the process proved that the world might just be madder.

all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote. Cervantes sets for the novel the problem of appearance and reality: the shifting and conflict of social classes becomes the field of the problem of knowledge, of how we know and of how reliable our knowledge is, which at that very moment of history is vexing the philosophers and scientists. (“Morals, Manners, and The Novel”, The Liberal Imagination, p. 209)

The characteristic work of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to penetrate to the truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all the false appearances. (Ibid, p. 211)

Trilling contends that the breach between appearance and reality was fueled by the emergence of money as a fluid social factor, which in turn laid the foundations for snobbery as “pride in status without pride in function.” (Ibid, p. 209) But it goes deeper, as Trilling hints. The breach had yawned since the early 16th century, when simmering doctrinal and disciplinary tensions finally erupted and shattered the confessional and liturgical unity of Western Christendom. There was also the European discovery of the New World, which implied that every ancient and classical Western authority equating the Mediterranean with the universe, and the lands on and past the Indus as remote appendages, had been wrong. Meanwhile, the speculative and poetic unity of the Medieval universe (so admirably described in The Discarded Image) was under steady corrosion: Copernicus reintroduced heliocentrism, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler backed him up, and then Newton confirmed it. The psychological impact of all this was surely devastating.

If Trilling’s characterization is correct, then the Western novel’s emerging when it did embeds its poetic assumptions in the wider mesh of modern ideas of sentiments.1 And if that’s true, then advocates of “the Catholic literary tradition” have no business dissing modernity: it is, to wax Kantian, the condition for the possibility of much that they hold dear.

If the English novel in its special concern with class does not, as the same writer says, explore the deeper layers of personality, then the French novel in exploring these layers must start and end in class, and the Russian novel, exploring the ultimate possibilities of spirit, does the same-every situation in Dostoevski, no matter how spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles. (Ibid, p. 211)

Cinema

I could’ve led with this one. Cinema is one of the most astonishing artistic innovations in art. Granted, cinema is a product of late modernity, but it came from the convergence of numerous strains throughout the modern period.

Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) to describe his operas, because he aimed to immerse the audience completely in the imaginary world and the lives of his characters. In another sense, opera itself — another modern efflorescence — was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. It marshaled every known artform to its service: poetry, music, acting, dance, costuming, carpentry, painting, and even sculpture.

Throw motion photography into that mix, and you get cinema.

Some of the more self-consistent critics of modernity dislike film precisely because the technological intervention of the camera destroys the organic unity of the performance aspect: the actors no longer sustain a single character over two hours, the music is recorded elsewhere, and the final cut is the product of the least performative contributor of all, the director. These, for instance, are Walter Benjamin’s issues with film, expressed at greater (and obscurer) length in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.2 It’s almost a truism that classically trained English actors prefer the stage to the movie set, for many of those reasons.

But to some extent, who cares what they think? Cinema, as Raymond Chandler says, is “an art that is capable of making all but the very best plays look trivial and contrived, all but the very best novels verbose and imitative”. (Later Novels & Other Writings, p. 993) That art, as Chandler was keen to note, has been practiced almost exclusively for commercial gain, at least in this country, but despite that has given us a growing canon of insightful masterpieces. Ben Hur. Tokyo Story. Ran. Stalker. Of Gods and Men. Le Samourai. The Seventh Seal. Sicario. Magnolia. Don’t you dare suggest that modernity’s legacy is exclusively utilitarian.

Recorded Music

Partisans of modern music tend to regard classical music with skepticism: it’s “ecclesiastical,” said Alma Deutscher’s critics. The vulgar criticism is even more damning: it’s boring. And chant? Forget it. The very definition of “ecclesiastical.”

I can only wonder if modern critics of the stately “ecclesiastical” ethos have ever listened to St. Hildegard Von Bingen’s eerie compositions; if those who think old music boring have ever felt the urge to march to the martial beat of Templar chant.

Of course, a precondition for disabusing modern short-sightedness about old music is that they can listen to it to have their minds changed. And unless you happen to live down the street from a university with an uncommon endowment for medieval studies, that will mean listening to… a recording.

Recording technology makes it possible to experience our great musical tradition without being an aristocrat or a penniless but incurable aesthete. Without it, Andy Dufresne couldn’t have lifted a thousand hearts at Shawshank prison.

I’ve met at least one person who thinks listening to recorded music is almost evil, because it separates the performative and receptive dimensions of the musical act — a kind of aesthetic contraception, if you will. It’s true that there’s nothing like live music, but at the same time… really? We might live in a quieter world without recording, but I have a feeling noise is a human constant. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer lived well before recording, and both complained bitterly that the world was too loud, brusque, and unfeeling. And being able to listen to Beethoven’s 7th on the way to work, or coming home after a long day and soaking in Chopin or Rachmaninov like a warm bath of sound, is a net gain for the human spirit.

And it’s not just music. Remember to thank modernity the next time you listen to a Catholic podcaster live-streaming via the Internet blaming modernity for everything wrong with the world.

(Comparatively) Low-cost Travel

I’m sure we’ve all heard the quote, attributed to Augustine, that “the world is a book, and those who don’t travel read only one page.” If it’s true that travel is integral to cultural maturity, then the comparatively low cost of modern travel has put cultural maturity — historically accessible only to those with sufficient leisure (which almost always meant money) — in reach of the average tax-burdened citizen.

Now, isn’t it possible that modernity has thereby trivialized travel? I don’t think so. The value of travel never lay in its exclusivity. Certainly, you want a journey to transform your soul, and transformation is often an effect of overcoming challenges. But paying to travel was never the most important challenge: confronting a foreign country as foreign is the real summit to be scaled.

Our pre-modern forebears traveled so little, they never got over the “otherness” side of things. They aren’t always as hostile or dismissive as Aristotle, to whose infamous indifference to the “barbaroi” Plutarch testifies, but they’re victims of the tendency to exoticize otherness.

It’s illuminating to compare the travel writing of that earlier period with its modern counterpart. Herodotus famously luxuriates in the fantastic wonders of Egypt and Marco Polo reports the queer habits of the Khans, but both, in the end, leave the reader with an impression that the other is still… other. You return with them to their respective homelands with a spirit of gratitude, not unlike the relief that concludes the surrounding ritual of watching a horror movie: thank God for what’s normal!

Modernity undermines the equation of the familiar with the normal. Modern travel writing celebrates and lingers with otherness: aboard the Beagle, Darwin wrote with equal fascination and respect about the geology and the local cultures of South America; Humboldt’s narratives do the same. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Custine’s Letters from Russia are both, in large part, travelogues. They’re not interested in the fantastic, but the facts — sometimes with devastating consequences. It’s telling that by the time Gulliver returns from his Travels, he doesn’t recognize his countrymen: he has overcome the spell of otherness and realized that what he thought was foreign was, in fact, disturbingly close to home.

If the world is a book, and if those who don’t travel do read only one page, then the reduced cost of travel afforded by modern technology is one of the greatest “literacy” initiatives in history.

Conclusion

I’m under no illusions about the negative cultural consequences of the modern period. But at the same time, honesty compels me to despise the simplistic story I heard session after session, in which we cast ourselves as the benighted few defending our heritage from the wicked industrial clutches of Modernity with a capital M, and even more so the attitude that inspires us to tell that story.

If we care about truth, and if the truth about the past is that it’s thoroughly complicated, then “the refinement of our historical sense chiefly means that we keep it thoroughly complicated.” (Trilling, “The Sense of the Past”, The Liberal Imagination, p. 188) This fundamental principle, whose observance in conducting the life of the mind is identical to the virtue of integrity, is the first to go when ulterior motives supervene. “Violations of historical principle require violations of historical fact.” (Ibid, p. 194) Consequently, if we hear someone violate historical fact, we are compelled to assume either ignorance or mendacity. Since it’s worse to assume the latter without overwhelming evidence, I assume it was the former on constant display behind the podiums this week.