The Homebound Symphony – Stagger onward rejoicing

July 19, 2025

Sayers and Graves

I really appreciated this post by Adam Roberts on his long-term fascination for the work of Robert Graves, especially The White Goddess, which Adam calls “One of my holy books.” I told Adam that I appreciate this post because I have always found Graves not only alien to my sensibility but even alienating — and Adam, justifiably, asked me what I meant by that. So I replied thus (I’ve edited and expanded, and added some links):

Well, primarily it’s that he strikes me as a monomaniac: he’s done a vast amount of reading, but only what supports, or can be turned in such a way as to seem to support, his White/Triple Goddess thesis ever makes its way to the reader. Nothing ever points in the other direction, nothing ever complicates his vision: everything is grist for his endlessly turning mill. Even his famous two-volume edition of the Greek Myths — books I bought fifty years ago and have often enjoyed — grinds his small collection of axes. It feels inhuman to me. And when you couple this with the intensity of his hatreds, he seems a pretty unpleasant character.

By the way, when Sayers was working on her Paradiso translation she read Graves’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, with its notoriously vitriolic introduction: Graves despised Lucan and sought to portray him in every possible negative light, and especially emphasized Lucan’s astronomical ignorance. (E. V. Rieu thought that introduction so hostile that he threatened to cancel the contract unless Graves toned it down, which he did, but only a bit.) I should add that Graves is following A. E. Housman’s lead here: Housman called Lucan a “blundering nincompoop.”

Brief digression: I have long thought that the great classicist Seth Benardete made a brilliant point with exemplary concision: “All the careful exactness of Housman goes along with a pettiness of spirit that at least at times is out of control and expresses a contempt for whatever he does not understand.”

Anyway: Sayers thought it was Graves who was ignorant, and sought to prove it, even enlisting as a temporary research assistant an exceedingly bright undergraduate named Brian Marsden, who later became a very distinguished astronomer at Harvard. He helped her to discover many points on which Graves was wrong and Lucan right. (Decades later he wrote an enjoyable essay about the experience.) Sayers also meticulously went through Lucan’s Latin to show that Graves had deliberately mistranslated him to make him seem more stupid. For instance, in the translation Lucan mentions a lunar eclipse than was followed the very next day by a soar eclipse, and Graves calls attention to the ridiculousness of this in a note. But, Sayers discovered, Lucan didn’t write that it happened the next day; Graves had added that. This appears to have been only one among several, or even many, additions to the Lucan’s text, though I would need to do a lot more work than I’ve done to confirm the point.

Sayers spent most of the last year of her life on Graves’s manifold intellectual wickednesses; it’s the main reason she didn’t finish her translation of Dante. When asked why she was doing it, she answered:

because I can’t bear to see a man treated like that, even if he is two thousand years dead, and because I believe Lucan is substantially talking sense, and I want to get to the bottom of it. I don’t care what it costs or how long it takes. I want justice. I want honest scholarship and accurate translation. The classical scholars won’t take an interest; either they think astronomy is too remote and boring to bother with, or they say, “Oh, Graves! what does he matter?” But he is distributing his sneers to a quarter of a million Penguin readers, and I don’t like it. (End of speech)

“Damn the fellow!” she writes in another letter. “I wouldn’t mind so much his murdering Lucan if he didn’t dance on the body.” I want to be more generous to Graves, more receptive to his ideas, but I don’t think working on Sayers is making that any easier….

She was at least comforted to find some allies. A distinguished professor of classics from St. Andrews University, H. J. Rose, sent her his review of Graves’s The Greek Myths, which he called “a series of tangled narratives, difficult and tedious to read and made none the better by sundry evidences of their author’s defective scholarship.” Sayers replied with gratitude, saying that Rose’s review “filled me with malignant joy.”

July 18, 2025

enemies of the liberal arts

Jennifer Frey, until recently the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa:

An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.

The leadership of the University of Tulsa has for some years now despised its liberal-arts tradition and has intermittently tried to eradicate it. It looks like this time they will succeed.

The key point here — and it’s not the key point at Tulsa only — is that student interest, high enrollments, and donor support mean nothing to trustees and administrators and (often enough) faculty in other programs who have “succeeded” through a completely instrumental approach to education, employment, and indeed life itself. A thriving liberal-arts program is a standing reproach to their frivolity and greed, so they must eliminate it.

So far the administration of Baylor has been thoroughly supportive of our attempts, in the Honors College here, to do the kinds of things that Frey and her colleagues practiced at Tulsa. But what we do is so profoundly counter-cultural, in today’s flailing and failing American academy, that it’s hard not to peek over our shoulders from time to time to see if something is coming for us.

July 16, 2025

viewpoint diversity revisited

Jennifer M. Morton:

Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.

For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater. If you had a tenure-track position, your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to interact with other scholars who share your point of view and to read publications that reinforce what you already believe. Or you might simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits. This would create the sort of ideological echo chamber that proponents of viewpoint diversity have suggested, often with some justification, leads to closed-mindedness among left-leaning professors.

I think this argument is exactly correct: I have often said that if I were offered a job because I represent a certain position I would ask, “What happens if I change my mind?”

But the argument is also a useful strategy for ensuring that the academic humanities remain an ideological monoculture. Morton’s view is: It’s okay if all the professors are progressives as long as they assign some non-progressive books. And if you find that convincing, then turn it around: What if all the professors were rock-ribbed conservatives but told you that that’s fine, since they assign Marx and Fanon?

So, acknowledging the validity of Morton’s warning, I still think that seeking more ideological diversity among faculty is less bad that her plan to keep things just as they are. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, every progressive becomes profoundly conservative once they’re in power.

And while we’re on the subject, I like this from Justin Smith-Ruiu:

One great difference anyhow between the diversity statements of the past years and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era is that the McCarthyites were accommodating enough simply to force you to sign their oath; the DEI offices, by contrast, forced you to write your own, and then to sign it…. It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.

July 15, 2025

the original of Wimsey

Roy ridley 9fb1d2cb 5fce 4f9f 9af4 b930c69b7e6 resize 750. In 1935, when Dorothy L. Sayers was working wit her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne on the play Busman’s Honeymoon, she wrote from Oxford:

I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL. What is the use of anything? … Such waste — why couldn’t he have been an actor?

Though Sayers did not remember it, she had seen this man — whose name was Maurice Roy Ridley — many years before, and had swooned then also. In July 1913, at the end of her first year at Oxford, she reported to her friend Catherine Godfrey about what she saw at the Encaenia:

But the Newdigate [i.e., the winner of the Newdigate Prize] was a darling. His poem was on ‘Oxford’, and he recited it so nicely. He had a very clear, pleasant voice, and spoke as if he meant it. He read from the rostrum close to us, so we saw and heard splendidly. His poem was not frightfully full of genius, and was very academic in tone and form (though it was in blank verse) but there was an appealing sort of youthfulness and pathos and Oxford feeling about it that made it quite charming.… He was very nervous, and he quivered all over all the time he was reciting. Charis and I fell head over heels in love with him on the spot. His name is Maurice Roy Ridley – isn’t it a killing name, like the hero of a six-penny novelette? He has just gone down from Balliol, so I shall see him no more – my loves are always unsatisfactory, as you know….

Surprisingly, this passionate love was altogether forgotten 22 years later.

The news that he was “the perfect Peter Wimsey” reached Ridley, who subsequently acquired all of the Wimsey novels and placed them prominently on a shelf in his Balliol rooms. (Whether he read them is not known.) Vanity was certainly one of Ridley’s most prominent traits — one of his pupils reported that he had a bust of Dante on the mantel over his fireplace and would stand next to it, posing in such a way that the resemblance between him and the great Florentine poet was clear to all observers — and the Wimsey connection gave that vanity more fuel. For instance, he already had a monocle, and began wearing it more regularly.

But Ridley was not content with mere appearance. In 1936 a Balliol student named Pat Moss died in a fire, in peculiar circumstances, and when the police arrived they found Ridley hopping around the scene of death with a magnifying glass. They ordered him to depart. Whether he continued to investigate crimes, or potential crimes, I do not know.

But because Pat Moss was Canadian and naturally friendly with other Canadians at Oxford, one of them who had seen him earlier on the evening before his death — as it happens, a pupil of Ridley’s — was thoroughly questioned. His name? Robertson Davies. (I get this information from Judith Skelton Grant’s biography of Davies, from which I’ve also taken the photos below.) No arrests were ever made, and Moss’s death could have been accidental, but in later years Davies said he thought Moss had gotten involved with gamblers and had been killed by them.

Another of Ridley’s pupils of the era said that he was not a good tutor, but was a great influence, and certainly he would have encouraged Davies — already quite inclined to flamboyance — to make a name for himself at Oxford. This Davies did largely through his participation in OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he served as sometime dramaturg, sometime stage manager, and sometime actor.

Something else Davies learned from Ridley was the usefulness of a monocle:

And a brief P.S.: Many of you will know that Sayers had a son out of wedlock, had him raised by her cousin, and only later told him that she was his mother. When John Anthony, after serving in the military during the Second World War, decided to attend university in 1946, what university did he choose? Oxford. And what was his college? Balliol. And who was his tutor? Why, Roy Ridley, of course.

July 14, 2025

Constantine and Julian

I mentioned in an earlier post how Constantine’s murders of Crispus and Fausta set a kind of pattern — a pattern that would have certain surprising consequences. Here’s Gibbon:

Constantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary honors which he transmitted to his children. The emperor had been twice married. Minervina, the obscure but lawful object of his youthful attachment, had left him only one son, who was called Crispus. By Fausta, the daughter of Maximian, he had three daughters, and three sons known by the kindred names of Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. The unambitious brothers of the great Constantine, Julius Constantius, Dalmatius, and Hannibalianus, were permitted to enjoy the most honorable rank, and the most affluent fortune, that could be consistent with a private station. The youngest of the three lived without a name, and died without posterity. His two elder brothers obtained in marriage the daughters of wealthy senators, and propagated new branches of the Imperial race. Gallus and Julian afterwards became the most illustrious of the children of Julius Constantius, the Patrician. The two sons of Dalmatius, who had been decorated with the vain title of Censor, were named Dalmatius and Hannibalianus. The two sisters of the great Constantine, Anastasia and Eutropia, were bestowed on Optatus and Nepotianus, two senators of noble birth and of consular dignity. His third sister, Constantia, was distinguished by her preëminence of greatness and of misery. She remained the widow of the vanquished Licinius; and it was by her entreaties, that an innocent boy, the offspring of their marriage, preserved, for some time, his life, the title of Caesar, and a precarious hope of the succession. Besides the females, and the allies of the Flavian house, ten or twelve males, to whom the language of modern courts would apply the title of princes of the blood, seemed, according to the order of their birth, to be destined either to inherit or to support the throne of Constantine. But in less than thirty years, this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.

The family tree is pretty complicated — you can take a look at it here. And what makes it more complicated is Constantine’s decision, just before his death in 337, to divide the empire among his three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius, with a few other relatives having a share as well. (The family naming conventions don’t help.) The person most offended by this spread-the-wealth strategy was Constantine II, who fiercely believed in primogeniture and tried to assert it. He was killed in 340 by soldiers under the command of his brother Constans, who immediately took over Constantine’s lands.

So now we had, roughly speaking, Constans the Caesar ruling the Western half of the empire and Constantius the Caesar ruling the Eastern half. By this point Caesar was a title that meant, or was thought by the Constantines to mean, something like “ruler of a large chunk of the Empire but subservient to the One Emperor, the Augustus.” For the Constantines there might not be at any given moment an Augustus, but there should be, and it should be one of them.

Constans lived until 350, when he was killed by a general named Magnentius, who then (a) proclaimed himself the Caesar of the West and (b) tried to conquer the rest of the Empire. But his campaign against Constantius went badly from the beginning, and when his forces were crushed at the Battle of Mons Seleucus in 353, he took his own life.

Now Constantius was sole Emperor, which was what he had wanted all along — and indeed when he first came to power, in 337, he had systematically slaughtered everyone in his family who might make a claim against him, leaving only two young children, the half-brothers Gallus and Julian. Eventually he made both of them Caesars — but when Gallus began taking on airs (i.e., acting like an Augustus) Constantius had him killed … and that’s how we ended up with the situation Gibbon describes: “this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.”

But was Julian content to be a mere Caesar and leave the stature of Augustus to Constantius? Of course not. In 360 he rebelled, and wrote in self-justification, “Six of my cousins — his cousins too! — he killed without mercy, along with my father, who was his own uncle, and another uncle of us both on my father’s side, then later my elder brother. He had them all put to death not even bothering with a trial.” Which was true.

That self-justification came in a letter to the people of Athens — an odd choice of recipient, for Athens was, and had been for centuries, a mere backwater of the Empire. But Julian had received an excellent education in classical thought — even though he had also been raised a Christian — and had a special reverence for Athens’s philosophical and literary history. That a Christian family should give their sons a classical education should not be surprising, for it was common. If you want to know the reasons, try reading Basil of Caesarea’s “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.”

For Julian, the classical education took; the Christian formation did not. Until he became Augustus, on the sudden and unexpected death of Constantius in 361, he maintained the façade of Christian belief, but then he threw it off and announced himself the defender and celebrant of the ancient Roman gods and the enemy of the “Galileans,” as he derisively called Christians. We do not know when he ceased to believe in the Christian religion, or even if he ever believed in it; but almost everyone who has studied the matter believes that his long and close observation of the world-class hypocrisy of the Constantines, who professed a devout faith in the Prince of Peace and yet ruthlessly slaughtered anyone who threatened their grip on power, played a major role in his hatred of the religion.

Julian is fascinating because he’s genuinely determined to see Christianity eradicated in the empire, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a persecutor. So he pronounces a an edict of universal toleration of all religions, and he often writes that he doesn’t want to see the Christians injured in any way. For instance, he writes to one of his provincial governors, “I swear by the gods I do not want the Galileans killed or unjustly beaten or treated badly in any way. What I desire most insistently is to show preference to those who fear the gods.”

But he does three things that are worth noting here. Philip Freeman, from his excellent brief biography of Julian:

Scarcely a month after Julian had taken the throne and made his rejection of Christianity known, the Alexandrians murdered Bishop George, the leader of the Christian church in one of the most important towns in the Roman world. That he was an Arian and not orthodox meant little to the pagan mob. He was a Christian, and that was enough. George had been an important figure in young Julian’s life during his education in Cappadocia, and his excellent library, made freely available to the prince, had given Julian a matchless window into the rich intellectual tradition of Greek philosophy and literature. The new emperor’s response was not one of outrage at the murder of a prominent Roman citizen but only a mild rebuke to the crowd for taking the law into their own hands. In a letter to the Alexandrians he shamelessly pandered to the pagans of the city by casting George as an enemy to the gods who got what was coming to him: “You say that perhaps George deserved to be treated in such a fashion? I’ll grant that and admit that he deserved even worse and more cruel treatment.”

At this moment Julian’s concern is to preserve the pagan books in George’s library, the library he had delighted in as an adolescent, thanks to George’s generosity. Now he writes about the Christian books in the library, “I wish them to be utterly destroyed. But make sure you do so with the greatest care lest any useful works be destroyed by mistake. Have George’s secretary help you. Let him know that if he is faithful in the task he will get his freedom as a reward. But if he is in any way dishonest in sorting things out, he shall be put to torture.”

So that’s one thing: his complicated disingenuousness about his attitude towards Christians.

The second thing, from Freeman again:

His declaration of religious tolerance also included an amnesty and right of return for all orthodox Christian leaders who had been exiled and marginalized under Constantius, who had favored Arian Christians. This was a clever move on Julian’s part. As the pagan historian Ammianus would say disparagingly a few decades later, the Christians were like wild beasts who fought more viciously with each other than they ever did with pagans. Rather than launch a persecution against Christians as a whole, Julian was deliberately fueling a civil war within the church to encourage the orthodox and the Arians to attack and weaken one another, leaving his own hands clean. Most notable of these pardoned orthodox exiles was Athanasius, the former bishop of Alexandria, who had been replaced by an Arian Christian leader in the city. Julian was eager to see what trouble he would stir up when Athanasius arrived back in Egypt.

Clever! First of all, the rival Christians will kill each other. And in so doing, they will discredit the Gospel. (Tertullian, 150 years earlier: “But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred. See, they say about us, how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves would sooner kill.” Julian: 😂) Julian knows that he doesn’t have to persecute Christians: the different Christian factions will persecute each other.

The third point about Julian: his own paganism is complicated. There are two distinct elements to it. One of them is completely ignored by Charles Norris Cochrane in his otherwise excellent treatment of Julian, because Cochrane is a historian of ideas, and he wants to talk about their effect: his focus is on Julian as a neo-Platonic philosophical theologian, and that’s not wholly wrong, as we’ll see in a moment. But what Cochrane ignores Gibbon emphasizes: Julian’s love of blood sacrifice and his belief in divination and magical power. The Emperor actually becomes a haruspex:

On solemn festivals, he regularly visited the temple of the god or goddess to whom the day was peculiarly consecrated, and endeavored to excite the religion of the magistrates and people by the example of his own zeal. Instead of maintaining the lofty state of a monarch, distinguished by the splendor of his purple, and encompassed by the golden shields of his guards, Julian solicited, with respectful eagerness, the meanest offices which contributed to the worship of the gods. Amidst the sacred but licentious crowd of priests, of inferior ministers, and of female dancers, who were dedicated to the service of the temple, it was the business of the emperor to bring the wood, to blow the fire, to handle the knife, to slaughter the victim, and, thrusting his bloody hands into the bowels of the expiring animal, to draw forth the heart or liver, and to read, with the consummate skill of an haruspex, imaginary signs of future events. The wisest of the Pagans censured this extravagant superstition, which affected to despise the restraints of prudence and decency. Under the reign of a prince, who practised the rigid maxims of economy, the expense of religious worship consumed a very large portion of the revenue; a constant supply of the scarcest and most beautiful birds was transported from distant climates, to bleed on the altars of the gods; a hundred oxen were frequently sacrificed by Julian on one and the same day; and it soon became a popular jest, that if he should return with conquest from the Persian war, the breed of horned cattle must infallibly be extinguished.

That’s one side of Julian’s paganism. But in theory, as Cochrane shows, he is effectively a monotheist — someone who sees all of the gods as a manifestation of the One God. For him the ideal way to worship as a pagan is to worship the Sun. “From my childhood an extraordinary longing for the shining rays of the god pierced deep into my soul. From my earliest years my mind was so completely overcome by the light that rules the sky that not only did I desire to gaze at the brightness of the sun, but also whenever I walked on a clear and cloudless night I abandoned all else and gave myself up to the beauty of the heavens.” Soon after he became emperor he wrote a hymn to the Sun that he hoped would be the model for his people’s religion.

He didn’t get the chance to pursue this ideal programmatically — he died in battle in his early thirties — but he very much reminds me of Akhenaten, who wanted to replace the variegated polytheism of Egypt with a highly impersonal cult of the sun. Akhenaten and Julian alike were frustrated that they had so little success in weaning their people from a miscellaneous polytheism.

The other figure Julian reminds me of is, paradoxically enough, Constantine. Constantine was happy for pagans to be confused and rivalrous as long as Christians — on whose strength and integrity he staked his empire — were unified. Julian, his mirror-image, sowed chaos among the Christians while fruitlessly pursuing unity among his fellow pagans. Freeman once more:

Julian also believed the best way to defeat the church was to end division among the pagans, much as his uncle Constantine had tried to banish disunity among Christians. The followers of traditional religions had to work together in the true spirit of worshipping and honoring the gods, not squabbling with each other while the Christians happily looked on. The problem was that, like most crusaders throughout history, Julian was convinced that only his own particular religious beliefs were the right ones. But his austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed. The fact that other pagans could not see the world in the same way he did baffled and frustrated him no end.

The Bible tells us, “Put not your trust in princes.” But maybe what princes need to learn is to put not their trust in the peaceable unity of any religious party.

July 11, 2025

oh the irony

Americans are reading less. Is that poisoning our politics? | Vox:

As America’s test scores fall and its screen time rises, narratives of cultural decline become hard to dismiss outright.

Yet it’s worth remembering the perennial appeal of such pessimism. More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates decried the novel media technology of his day — the written word — in much the same terms that many condemn social media and AI in 2025. Addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the Greek philosopher declared, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.”

Lovely! Here’s an essay about the decline of reading that features either a misreading or non-reading of a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus. Remember, Plato wrote dialogues, and in this one Socrates is on a walk with Phaedrus, having a discussion about the written and spoken word. Thus:

Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

So, no: Socrates does not speak to the inventor of writing: he tells a story in which a divine Egyptian king speaks to the inventor of writing. And this isn’t hard to discover, nor is the passage hard to understand.

Bless me, what do they teach journalists these days? It’s all in Plato — all in Plato!

And if you keep reading the dialogue it gets more curious. Phaedrus says that he agrees with Thamus, but Socrates does not, not exactly. He too has concerns about writing, but they are rather different than Thamus’s. For Sccrates, writing shares a problem with several other modes of expression:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Socrates believes that writing, painting, and declamatory rhetoric all have the same problem: they are non-dialectical. This is also, Socrates shows in other dialogues, the problem with many versions of what people call “philosophy.” Genuine philosophy, Socrates believes, is dialectical, that is, it proceeds when people physically present to one another put one another to the question in a strenuous encounter that elicits anamnesis — recollection (literally unforgetting) of the knowledge that one’s spirit had before being tossed into this world of flux. Nothing else counts as philosophy; nothing else — not painting; not poetry or speeches, whether in spoken or written form — is productive of genuine knowledge. The critique of Socrates is far more unbendingly radical than that of Thamus.

July 11, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 6

Our attempts to understand the character of Constantine are befuddled by two mysteries, the first of which is: Constantine had his (second) wife Fausta and his (eldest) son Crispus executed, and we don’t know why. Some have speculated that he caught the two of them having an affair; Gibbon, more plausibly and with more deference to rumors current at the time, believes that Fausta falsely implicated Crispus in a plot against his father in order to clear the way for her own sons — Crispus being the son of Constantine’s first marriage — to inherit the throne. Gibbon:

The innocence of Crispus was so universally acknowledged, that the modern [by which Gibbon usually means “medieval”] Greeks, who adore the memory of their founder, are reduced to palliate the guilt of a parricide, which the common feelings of human nature forbade them to justify. They pretend, that as soon as the afflicted father discovered the falsehood of the accusation by which his credulity had been so fatally misled, he published to the world his repentance and remorse; that he mourned forty days, during which he abstained from the use of the bath, and all the ordinary comforts of life; and that, for the lasting instruction of posterity, he erected a golden statue of Crispus, with this memorable inscription: To my son, whom I unjustly condemned. A tale so moral and so interesting would deserve to be supported by less exceptionable authority; but if we consult the more ancient and authentic writers, they will inform us, that the repentance of Constantine was manifested only in acts of blood and revenge; and that he atoned for the murder of an innocent son, by the execution, perhaps, of a guilty wife. They ascribe the misfortunes of Crispus to the arts of his step-mother Fausta, whose implacable hatred, or whose disappointed love, renewed in the palace of Constantine the ancient tragedy of Hippolytus and of Phaedra.

Sayers in The Emperor Constantine more-or-less endorses this interpretation, though she differs from Gibbon in another respect: Sayers has Constantine executing Crispus in a blind rage, whereas Gibbon says that his murder was carefully planned well in advance. It was a settled decision, not a moment of wrath. (As we shall see in a future post, this sets a pattern for his family.) Sayers is not excusing him, but I think she does make him a more impetuous and less coldly calculating figure than the real Constantine was — though Sayers’s Constantine does inform Fausta that he will have her executed, but only after she accompanies him as his consort in a grand public ceremony. Which is pretty cold: The imperial show must go on. (And Fausta calmly plays her part.)

The second puzzle about Constantine: Why did he delay his baptism until he was on his death-bed? One possible answer: it was not uncommon in that era for converts to delay baptism until near death, because they believed that if they died immediately after baptism — without the opportunity to commit more sins — that would allow them to go straight to Heaven. Sayers hints that Constantine may have been aware of this: in the scene in which he orders the death of his son Crispus and others he believes to have been conspiring against him — about which more in a moment — he says, “How fortunate that I was never baptised! I can damn myself with a clear conscience.” As though to say: I am not officially a Christian and so do not betray my Lord by this sin — though I can make amends later.

(FYI: You may now choose to read an exemplary tale, taken from an American novel published in 1964, that illustrates in a distinctive way the theological and moral implications of the once-common theology of baptism that I have just described. Or you may simply continue.)

However we might read Constantine’s murderous gratitude that he is unbaptized, something becomes quite clear in the play’s last scene, when the people whom Constantine has had murdered appear before him as spectral images, horrifying him. It is then that, for the first time in his life, he confronts the true depth and extent of his sins:

Sin is more terrible than you think. It is not lying and cruelty and murder — it is a corruption of life at the source. I and mine are so knit together in evil that no one can tell where the guilt begins or ends. And I who called myself God’s emperor — I find now that all my justice is sin and all my mercy bloodshed…..

How can he be forgiven? How can he not pay the price for his wickedness?

It is Helena, his mother — yes, in fact she predeceased him, but shut up about that — who tells him the terrible and wonderful truth:

HELENA: The price is always paid, but not always by the guilty.

CONSTANTINE: By whom, then?

HELENA: By the blood of the innocent.

CONSTANTINE: Oh no!

HELENA: By nothing else, my child. Every man’s innocence belongs to Christ, and Christ’s to him. And innocence alone can pardon without injustice, because it has paid the price.

CONSTANTINE: That is intolerable.

HELENA: It is the hardest thing in the world — to receive salvation at the hand of those we have injured. But if they do not plead for us there is nobody else who can. That is why there is no redemption except in the cross of Christ. For He alone is true God and true Man, wholly innocent and wholly wronged, and we shed His blood every day.

What Constantine must understand, here at the end of his life, as the waters of Holy Baptism are prepared for him, is that the formulation he himself oversaw at Nicaea — that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is also “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father” — is not just a theologically accurate statement, but the only hope of the dying. Constantine must throw himself upon the mercy of the Crucified One — the one whom he himself, in his sins, helped to crucify. As John the apostle put it: “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

And this is where the two helices of the story of this flawed but remarkable play meet and merge. It is when we grasp for ourselves the truth of what was articulated at Nicaea that the dogma indeed becomes the drama.

July 9, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 5

I have said that one helix of The Emperor Constantine is the clarification of Christian doctrine at Nicaea, and the other is the personal theological development of Constantine. When we first see him in the play, he demonstrates a religious sensibility — but one totally subordinated to the needs of the Empire. He asks his mother whether Christ is a “strong god,” because “The Empire needs pulling together — a new focus of faith and energy.” As the Emperor Julian — subject of a future post — will later think, Constantine for a time believes that Sol Invictus is the ideal “focus of faith and energy.” But when he starts winning victories under the sign of the Labarum he starts to suspect that his mother may be right when she says that Christ “is the one true God.”

At one point his Christian servant Togi — accompanied by the bishop Hosius — sees an opportunity to put his master to the test:

CONSTANTINE: Here, Togi, is there a table in this blasted barracks?

[TOGI looks at CONSTANTINE, as if wondering how far he dare go with him. Then —

TOGI: Here you are, Augustus! (He sweeps the offerings from the table dedicated to the Lares.)

CONSTANTINE (leaping to catch them): Here, damn it! what are you doing? That’s sacrilege, you little swine! You’ve offended all the household gods. What the devil’s come over you? By Jupiter I’ll — (He checks the blow in mid-air, and looks from the table to the Chi-Ro and back again, while a ludicrous succession of emotions — rage, alarm, shame, irritation, superstitious awe, schoolboy mischief and defiance chase one another across his face. Then he grins, and the tension is relaxed.) Toleration, I said — not religious intolerance. Is that what happens when we stop persecuting you? Must you persecute others and break down their altars? Does your Christ want all the sky to Himself, and all the offerings too? (He laughs a little uneasily, and looks sideways at Hosius. His tone changes.) By the gods, I believe that’s what you do want.

HOSIUS (steadily) There is only one true God, my son, and He cannot be served with half-measures.

CONSTANTINE So! … Well, that’s logical enough, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. … That’s His strength, of course, He knows the secret of rule. One God… one Emperor. (It is the birth of a new idea; he ponders it.) One. (He goes and stares at the Chi-Ro.) You won our battle for us…. One, true, and mighty…. Give us Your favour and protection — and ten more years of life — (He turns away, discovers that he is clutching an apple in his hand, gazes at it in astonishment and takes a large bite out of it.) All right, Togi. But do remember that, Christ or no Christ, I’m still Pontifex Maximus.

Nope his epithets: “By Jupiter,” “By the gods.” Gradually, though, Constantine becomes more and more committed to the belief that the Christian faith is the One True Faith. But even then he is a kind of theological minimalist: when he learns about the Arian controversies, he says,

CONSTANTINE: It really is heart-breaking — after all I’ve done for them — not to speak of what God has done! For two pins I’d knock their reverend pates together! … All this hair-splitting about texts! Why can’t they agree to differ, like sensible people?

HOSIUS (cautiously): Why indeed, Augustus? Unless the difference of opinion is really so fundamental that —

CONSTANTINE: It isn’t. It’s only some obscure metaphysical point — nothing but sophistry. All anybody wants is faith in God and Christ and the simple Gospel message. These theologians are getting swelled heads, that’s what it is. They feel safe, they enjoy the Imperial favour, they’re exempt from taxation, and instead of looking after the poor and converting the heathen, they start heresy-hunting and playing a sort of intellectual catch-as-catch-can to jockey one another out of benefices. I won’t have it. It’s got to stop.

But, again gradually, he comes to realize that there may be more at stake in these debates than he had suspected. And his experience at the Council — long hours listening to to the Arians and the Athanasians going at each other — ultimately confirms the point. So when the Council is struggling to come up with a formal dogmatic statement, he finally intervenes. (Note: Eusebius of Nicomedia is one of the leading Arians, not to be confused with the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea, who throughout this debate sits on the fence.)

CONSTANTINE: Will you give me leave to speak?

EUSTATHIUS: But of course, sir. Pray do.

CONSTANTINE: There was a phrase mentioned earlier in the proceedings which struck me very forcibly. It was, if I remember it rightly, “of one substance with the Father.”

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: Oh lord!

That Constantine was the person to introduce this word is not Sayers’s invention: when Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a letter about the Council to his own church, he described what the council articulated as “our faith” — in essence what is now called the Nicene Creed — and then added,

When we presented this faith … our emperor, most beloved of God, himself first of all witnessed that this was most orthodox. He agreed that even he himself thought thus, and he ordered all to assent to subscribe to the teachings and to be in harmony with them, although only one word, homoousios, was added, which he himself interpreted, saying that the Son might not be said to be homoousios according to the affections of bodies, … for the immaterial, intellectual, and incorporeal nature is unable to subsist in some corporeal affection, but it is befitting to think of such things in a divine and ineffable manner. And our emperor, most wise and pious, thought philosophically in this manner.

The other Eusebius, of Nicomedia, cries out when he hears the word homoousios because he knows that it is irreconcilable with the views that he and Arius hold. But those who agree with Athanasius are delighted:

HOSIUS: Why, yes, sir — “consubstantial” — quite a familiar term in the West. The Greek, I believe, is “homosoious”. (He pronounces it to rhyme with “joyous”.)

CONSTANTINE (deprecatingly) “Homo-ousios”, I think.

HOSIUS I told you my Greek was bad. Your Majesty is of course quite right.

[The word has taken everybody rather aback — but since it is the Emperor’s suggestion nobody likes to speak first. Murmurs.

CONSTANTINE (insinuatingly): It seems to me a very definite and unambiguous sort of word.

ARIUS (to ARIANS): And I took that man for a simpleton!

CONSTANTINE: As the Apostle says, I speak as a fool — there may be objections to it.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA (to ARIANS): They’ve put him up to it. (Aloud) There is every objection to it.

This is a bold move, but Constantine through his ostentatious humility has invited it — or so Eusebius of Nicomedia hopes. Interestingly, the next person to speak is the other Eusebius, who, as I have said, is fence-sitting. He does not explicitly agree that the term is “objectionable,” but he points out that “It is not scriptural.” Here we might remember that Arius constantly emphasizes that his own views are derived directly from Scripture — and indeed he takes this opportunity to pounce:

ARIUS (with satisfaction): Ah! … Do you think you know better than the Holy Ghost? Which will you have? The Word of God or the word of Constantine?

[Everybody is shocked, except CONSTANTINE.

CONSTANTINE (mildly) Nobody, I hope, would hesitate. But I did not invent the word…. What does Athanasius say?

A shrewd move by the Augustus! He could make the case himself, but why not turn that job over to one who has already shown himself a master of disputation?

ATHANASIUS: Surely it is not a question of substituting our words for those of the Holy Spirit, but only of defining with exactness our understanding of what the Spirit says in symbols and mysteries. And Our Lord Himself set us the example when He interpreted to His disciples the parables which He had taught them.

JAMES: Do not we all do as He did? When I preach to my simple desert folk, I tell them a story, or read them a psalm, and then I say, “this is how we must understand it”.

SEVERAL VOICES: Quite right.

ATHANASIUS: I should … greatly prefer a scriptural word. But our urgent need just now is of a word that nobody can possibly misinterpret — not even Arius.

And if we look at the text of the Nicene Creed that Christians still affirm, we can see how devoted it is to eliminating Arian wiggle-room: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God” — so far Arius would perhaps agree, but then: “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light” — did you hear that about his actually being God? In case you didn’t, let’s say it again: “true God from true God.” Did you hear that about his being begotten? Let’s say that again: “begotten, not made, of one Being [ousios] with the Father….” The repetitions are not accidental.

Yet Athanasius is perhaps too hopeful. A little later the Arians whisper among themselves:

THEOGNIS: We can always say that we understood “homoöusios” in the sense “homoiousios”.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: True — between “of one substance” and “of like substance” there is the difference only of an iota.

This anticipates Gibbon’s famous jibe:

The Greek word, which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians. As it frequently happens, that the sounds and characters which approach the nearest to each other accidentally represent the most opposite ideas, the observation would be itself ridiculous, if it were possible to mark any real and sensible distinction between the doctrine of the Semi-Arians, as they were improperly styled, and that of the Catholics themselves.

But Gibbon is imperceptive here, as Constantine was at first when he derided the controversy as “hair-splitting” and “sophistry.” For, as Athanasius explains, if Christ is not God but only in some sense like God, then he cannot redeem us, and we are still dead in our sins. Or else God the Father (whoever He is) redeems us (by some means or another) and the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are irrelevant to this redemption. In either case nothing remains of Christianity.

Constantine now grasps this point — to some degree. But there is one more stage in his development still to come.

July 7, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 4

In my previous post I referred to the bihelical structure of The Emperor Constantine; today I’m going to discuss one of those helices.

Since the Council of Nicaea was called to deal with the views of Arius and his followers, Sayers rightly gives him a lengthy speech to introduce the debate:

Certainly, I say that the Son is “theos”, that is to say, “divine”, but not that He is “ho Theos”, that is to say, God himself. Our Latin friends who have no definite article in their woolly language may be excused for woolly thinking; but for those who speak Greek there is no excuse. For it is written: “The Lord your God is one God — there is none beside Him: He is God alone.” Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen? The Father alone is eternal, underived Being, that which is — as He Himself said to Moses, “ I AM THAT I AM”. And in His eternity, before all time, He begat the Son, whom St. Paul also calls, “the first-born of every creature” — not a part of Himself, since God cannot be divided, but called forth by Him out of nothing, as the Book of the Proverbs says: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way; when there were no depths, I was brought forth.” And this is His Logos, that is to say, His Wisdom or Word, by whose means He afterward made all things, and without whom, as St. John writes, “nothing was made that has been made”. And this Logos, being in the fullness of time joined to the body of a man, was — in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews — “faithful to Him that made Him” — so that, as it is written of Him in the Acts of the Apostles, “God hath made Jesus both Lord and Christ”.

By the way, throughout this part of the play Sayers is drawing on, and often quoting from, the many surviving records of the Council.

Arius’s views are thoroughly grounded in Scripture, and he does not deny, and does not mean to diminish, the Lordship of Christ — though he is making a distinction between Lord (which Christ, he thinks, is) and God (which Christ, he thinks, is not). And if Christ is not God, then he might be venerated but cannot be worshipped: “Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen?” That woolly language Latin allows a distinction between latria (which we owe to God) and dulia (which we owe to the saints); Arius implicitly makes the same distinction, but between the Father and the Christ. It is not clear that he understands the full implications of his argument.

(N.B.: If I were to go into all the ways that the verses Arius cites might be differently interpreted — for instance, I could point out that it’s not the Son who speaks in Proverbs 8, it’s Wisdom — this would be a book-length post. I’m focusing on the essential points of disagreement. By the way, Sayers typically renders the biblical quotations of all parties in the Authorized Version, so if you want to know where a passage comes from, just copy it and paste it into a search engine.)

Arius continues:

This doctrine I received, and the Bishop of Nicomedia also, from the venerable Lucian our teacher, and from the tradition of the Saints: One God and Father of all, and of Him One Son or Word, sole-begotten before all worlds. But that the Son had no beginning, or that He is equal and co-eternal with the Father, this we deny: for it is the nature of a son to be subsequent to his father, and of that which is derived to be inferior to that from which it derives. This stands to reason, and for this cause the Word when He was made flesh said plainly: “My Father is greater than I.”

That is the truth of Scripture, which every sincere mind must acknowledge.

That last note is an important one: Arius believes himself faithful to the plain teaching of Scripture; and indeed, he finds his view so amply and obviously attested by Scripture that it’s impossible for him to believe that any “sincere mind” could see things otherwise. Therefore he treats his opponents as either mindless — he seems to think all Latin-speakers dim-witted — or insincere: he singles out for particular scorn his own bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, whom he suggests is trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds.

Alexander is rendered speechless by this personal attack, and allows his deacon, a young man named Athanasius, to respond to Arius. Athanasius is so superior to his bishop as a theologian and a debater than one suspects that Alexander would in any circumstances have found a way to be prostrated. Let’s pick up partway through Athanasius’s speech:

… the Son is God out of God, from the very substance and Being of God; therefore the blessed Apostle, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, calls Him: “the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person, upholding all things by the word of His power.” And the Apostle John, in the beginning of his Gospel which lies here open before you, declares very well both the distinct Person of the Son and His equal Godhead with the Father, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

ARIUS: Why, then, does the Apostle call Him “the first-born of every creature“?

Notice that Arius ignored the passages from Hebrews and John’s Gospel that Athanasius has just cited.

ATHANASIUS: Because so He is. For when He became Man, He made Himself as one of the creatures; and therefore He said of himself when He was in the body, “My Father is greater than I”, because He had assumed our nature, being made a little lower than the angels. As it is written, “The first man was of the earth, earthy: the second Man is the Lord from Heaven”. Yet He Himself created the nature that He put on; and this was ordained by Him from eternity when time was not, so that He that is second on earth is first in Heaven. Who also went up thither, the first-born from the dead of all that He had created. Him likewise did John behold in his Apocalypse, in form like unto the Son of Man, and saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty”.

ARIUS: Spoken like a giant, little mannikin. You are so learned in the Scripture you know more about it than Christ Himself, who said to the rich young ruler: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

ATHANASIUS: So he did — and the fool stood gaping. But what if he had answered, like Peter: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God“?

Athanasius’s point is that Jesus did not say, “Why do you call me good, since I am not God?” Arius thinks that’s what Jesus means, but, as Athanasius indicates, Jesus says that he should be called good only if he is God — which he may be. He is pressing his interlocutor to make a decision on that point. But Arius doesn’t get it: he reads as a denial what is in fact a genuine question.

ARIUS: He would have earned a blessing — and perhaps have been commended for knowing better than to confuse the Son with the Father.

For Arius, if you say Jesus is the son of God you are ipso facto saying that he is not God himself. Again, a reasonable enough assumption if you ignore the passages that suggest otherwise. But Athanasius is about to play his trump card:

ATHANASIUS: Was Thomas, then, rebuked when, looking upon the wounds of the Redeemer, he cried: “My Lord and my God!“? Rebuked he was, not for belief, but because he was so slow in believing…. And do not forget to remind your Latin friends, with your customary politeness, that he said, not “theos” but “ho theos mou“ — ” the Lord of me and the God of me” — with the definite article, Arius.

A hit, a palpable hit! That young Alexandrian deacon is pretty skilled in disputation.

He is also following one of the cardinal principles of biblical interpretation: passages that are unclear or ambiguous must be interpreted in light of those that are clear and unambiguous. Arius, by contrast, because he assumes that Christian monotheism is a simple thing, has simply ignored the passages (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3) that in their (terrifying!) straightforwardness complicate what Arius would prefer to keep simple.

And now, by citing the words of Thomas (John 20:28), Athanasius has exploded the distinction that is most essential to Arius’s theology: that between God the Father and Jesus the Lord. Thomas confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, and this, Athanasius reminds us, is indeed the confession of the Church — however distressing that confession might be for the familiar theological categories.

Later in the debate they raise an issue that does not get fully resolved for another 125 years, at the Council of Chalcedon, but the passage points to the incoherence of Arius’s position:

ATHANASIUS: You say that Christ had no human soul?

ARIUS: In Christ, the Logos took the place of the human soul.

ATHANASIUS: Then was He not true man, for man’s nature consists in a fleshly body and a rational soul. There are heretics who deny Christ’s Godhead and others who deny His Manhood — it was left for Arius to deny both at once…. Tell me, how did this compound of half-man and demi-god do the will of the Father? Freely, or of necessity?

ARIUS (hesitating — he sees the trap but cannot avoid it): Freely.

ATHANASIUS: That which is created free to stand is created free to fall. Was the Son, then, made fallible by nature, needing God’s grace to keep Him from sin? If so, the second Adam is no more than the first. Christ is but man or at most an angel — and to worship Him is idolatry.

(The language Sayers gives Athanasius here echoes that of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, Book 3: “I made [Adam] just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”) As noted above, I am not certain that Arius has fully grasped that, if the Son is not God, then the Son cannot be worshipped — it would indeed be idolatry to do so. But Christians do worship the Son along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God. This is why Athanasius says, near the beginning of his first Oration Against the Arians, “Those who consider the Arians Christians are in great error.”

But — you may well be asking — where in all this is Constantine, the Emperor who called this Council? We’ll get to him in the next post.

July 4, 2025

two quotations on giving up and giving in

CleanShot 2025-07-04 at 07.36.26@2x.

Nobody cares, the title says. Nobody.

As I drove and the music played, I felt nothing — but I felt that nothing with increasing acuteness. I was neither moved nor sad nor pensive, just aware of the fact that my body and mind exist in a tenuous zizz somewhere between life, death, and computers. This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?

But looking toward the blushing sky ahead of me, I realized that I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music — perhaps most music now — is not for dancing or even for airports; it’s for the void. I pressed play and gripped the wheel and accelerated back onto the tollway, as the machines lulled me into oblivion.

Second quotation:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

UPDATE, with a third quote: Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong:

For all its awfulness, the Grok debacle is also clarifying. It is a look into the beating heart of a platform that appears to be collapsing under the weight of its worst users. Musk and xAI have designed their chatbot to be a mascot of sorts for X — an anthropomorphic layer that reflects the platform’s ethos. They’ve communicated their values and given it clear instructions. That the machine has read them and responded by turning into a neo-Nazi speaks volumes.

When I read stories like these, I always think: What would it take? Would would Spotify or X have to do for users to say, You know, I don’t need this, I’m out of here? It’s so strange to me how people get psychologically locked into particular platforms, unable even to consider the option of escaping. I want to say: the doors are unlocked. All you have to do is turn the knob and walk through.

July 3, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 3

The Emperor Constantine is not a great play, largely because Sayers, who had done a tremendous amount of reading in preparing to write it, seems to be under some compulsion to share as much of that reading as possible. So we get a lot of backstory and political context hammered into the dialogue in classic “As you know, my Lady” style.

FLAVIUS [Constantinus Chlorus]: Yes. The old man sent me west and kept the boy at court — as a hostage for my loyalty, I suppose. He trusts no one. But when Diocletian retired, I sent to Galerius — who has succeeded him, you know, as Augustus of the East —

HELENA: Yes, yes, I know.

It’s painful, and even more painful when Sayers uses The Common Folk to mediate it:

So old Maximian starts cussin’ and swearin’ and tries to ‘ave the purple off ‘im, see? But the troops only laughs at ‘im, and the old boy runs off to Constantine, ‘owling blue murder. And Constantine treats ‘im very kind, but ‘e don’t give ‘im no power, see? because of upsettin’ Maxentius. Besides, the old boy was past it. But any’ow, Maxentius ‘ad is ‘ands full, because Africa goes and ‘as a rebellion and sets up a new Augustus on its own.

Stop. Please, make it stop. In his columns in the Irish Times Myles na gCopaleen would often introduce the thoughts of The Plain People of Ireland. Sayers seems to have had a similar idea of The Plain People of England and makes frequent use of them — even when she has to disguise them as Romans — from the East End of Rome, no doubt. Fossato di Riva. Or Cappella Bianca. (That was a joke for Londoners.) In general, though, while Sayers knows the shortcomings of the P. P. of E., she has more affection for them than Myles had for the P. P. of I., whom he called an “ignorant self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws.”

But I digress. Back to the play.

There’s another bizarre moment when Sayers is describing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and she gives us this:

OFFICER: We left the city by the Milvian Bridge, and when we got to the fork —

MAJOR DOMO: Where the Cassia turns into the Via Flaminia?

OFFICER: That’s it — we took the Flaminian Way. About a mile out, you come to a narrow defile between the hills and the river —

CRASSUS: I know it. The Red Rocks.

The Turn-by-Turn Navigation Is Definitely Not the Drama. This could not possibly be less relevant to the essential concerns of the play, and, alas, there’s more like it.

But the story has a strong spine, and if you strip away the irrelevancies, you can see its shape. I’m borrowing the “spine” metaphor from Peter Jackson, who said that when he and Fran Walsh and Philippa Bowens were writing The Lord of the Rings they knew they couldn’t tell the whole story, so they had to find a spine, a firm but flexible narrative line which would hold the movie together. The Emperor Constantine has such a spine, though it’s less like a straight rod than a double helix. It looks something like this:

The complex process by which Constantine moves from a vaguely pious religiosity to belief in the defense of what we could now call Nicene orthodoxy — and, ultimately, achieves a complete existential reliance on the Triune God celebrated at Nicaea.
The complex process by which the Catholic Church came to realize that the account given by Arius and his followers of who Christ is could not be tolerated as a viable option — even if the refusal of the Arian position brought, for a time, increased division in an already-divided Church.

And so the Council of Nicaea itself, presided over by Constantine, becomes the point at which the two helices meet.

The (even more complex) sequence of events and achievements by which Constantine became first a Caesar and then, eventually, the sole Emperor of Rome, however intrinsically interesting it might be, has nothing to do with double-helical spine of this story, and it’s a shame that Sayers did not recognize that. If she had recognized it, this might not be a forgotten play. I wish I had the time to make a reduced and clarified version of this play — an Imperial Edit, as it were, by analogy to the Phantom Edit.

More in the next post about this double helix.

July 1, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 2

First post in this series.

In her Preface to The Emperor Constantine, Sayers explains why its subject is important:

The reign of Constantine the Great is a turning-point in the history of Christendom. Those thirty years, from A.D. 306, when he was proclaimed Augustus by the Army of Britain at York, to A.D. 337, when, sole Emperor of the civilized world, he died at Nicomedia in Asia Minor, exchanging the Imperial purple for the white robe of his baptism, saw the emergence of the Christian ecclesia from the status of a persecuted sect to power and responsibility as the State Church of the Roman Empire. More important still, and made possible by that change of status, was the event of A.D. 325: the Council of Nicaea. At that first Great Synod of East and West, the Church declared her mind as to the Nature of Him whom she worshipped. By the insertion of a single word in the baptismal symbol of her faith, she affirmed that That which had been Incarnate at Bethlehem in the reign of Augustus Casar, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and risen from death in the last days of Tiberius, was neither deified man, nor angel, nor demi-god, nor any created being however exalted, but Very God of Very God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father.

The first Christian Emperor was thus, in the economy of Providence, the instrument whereby Christendom was brought face to face with two problems which have not yet found their full resolution: the exterior relations between Church and State; the interior relation between orthodox and heretic within the Church.

We shall return to all this, but at the moment I want to deal with another matter: Why tell this story at the Festival of Colchester?

It turns out that, if certain traditions are to be believed, Constantine has an intimate connection with Colchester, a connection which begins with the simple fact that Camulodunum, as the Romans called it, was the capital of the province of Britannia. More formally it was known as Colonia Claudia Victricensis — colonia, not municipia, which marked it as a kind of extension of the city of Rome itself rather than a mere town in the provinces. The residents of a colonia had the honor of Roman citizenship. (Similarly, Tarsus was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, which is how the apostle Paul, native of that city, gained the Roman citizenship that in a difficult situation he made good use of.)

It is said by some that the name Colchester means “fortress of Coel,” Coel being a king in semi-Romanized Britain. (Probably not the “merry old soul” of song, but who knows for sure?) This is the story that Geoffrey of Monmouth tells about Coel and Constantius, AKA Constantius Chlorus:

At that time Duke of Kaelcolim, that is to say Colchester, started a rebellion against King Asclepiodotus. He killed the King in a pitched battle and took for himself the distinction of the royal crown. When this was made known to them, the Senate rejoiced at the death of a King who had caused trouble to the power of Rome in all that he did. Mindful as they were of the setback which they had suffered when they had lost the kingdom, they sent as legate the Senator Constantius, a wise and courageous man, who had forced Spain to submit to Roman domination and who had laboured more than anyone else to increase the power of the State of Rome.

When Coel, King of the Britons, heard of the coming of Constantius, he was afraid to meet him in battle, for the Roman’s reputation was such that no king could resist him. The moment Constantius landed in the island, Coel sent his envoys to him to sue for peace and to promise submission, on the understanding that he should retain the kingship of Britain and contribute nothing more to Roman sovereignty than the customary tribute. Constantius agreed to this proposal when it reached him. Coel gave him hostages and the two signed a treaty of peace. Just one month later Coel developed a most serious illness which killed him within eight days.

After Coel’s death Constantius himself seized the royal crown and married Coel’s daughter. Her name was Helen and her beauty was greater than that of any other young woman in the kingdom. For that matter, no more lovely girl could be discovered anywhere. Her father had no other child to inherit the throne, and he had therefore done all in his power to give Helen the kind of training which would enable her to rule the country more efficiently after his death. After her marriage with Constantius she had by him a son called Constantine.

And now we know why the Festival of Colchester might well feature a play about Constantine. Indeed, the first scene of Sayers’s play is set in Colchester, with Helena as the point of focus. While modern historians believe that Helena was a native of Bithynia — as did Procopius — Sayers treats that as a mere legend: “It was said by some, both then and now, that she was [Constantius Chlorus’s] concubine, a woman of humble origin — a barmaid, indeed, from Bithynia. But an ancient and respectable tradition affirms, on the other hand, that she was his lawful wife, a princess of Britain.” And if Helena were from Camulodunum, it would be no surprise if she were also a Christian, since in her time Camulodunum not only had churches but sported its own bishop.

Whether historically accurate or not, a belief in her British birth makes for a better story — especially in Colchester. We’ll just set aside the inconvenient fact that in 330, just after her death, her son renamed the Bithynian town Drepanon as Helenopolis. Move along, nothing to see here.

So here, in Sayers’s play, we have Helena, whose husband Constantius Chlorus had divorced her for political reasons, though we are reminded that in the eyes of God they remain married. She lives with her aged, exhausted, and mentally incapacitated father Coel, and in this first scene will see her (former?) husband for the first time in a decade — and her son Constantine, now 21. The surprise of this scene is old King Coel emerging from his slumbers to utter a prophecy:

Coel the son of Coel the son of Coel the heaven-born;
I have harped in the Twelve Houses; I have prophesied among the Dancers;
Coel, father of the Light, who bears the Sun in her bosom.

Three times have I seen the Cross:
Air and fire in Gaul, under the earth in Jerusalem,
Written upon water in the place of the victories.

Three times have I heard the Word:
The word in a dream, and the word in council,
The word of the Word within the courts of the Trinity.

Three Crowns: laurel among the trumpets,
A diadem of stars with fillets of purple,
Thorns and gold for the Bride of the Trinity.

I have seen Constantine in the air as a flying eagle,
I have seen Constantine in the earth as a raging lion,
I have seen Constantine in the water as a swimming fish.

Earth and water and air — but the beginning and the ending is fire,
Light in the first day, fire in the last day, at the coming of the Word,
And Our Lord the Spirit descending in light and in fire.

Then he collapses back into sleep. The prophecy is incomprehensible to all, especially to the young pagan warrior Constantine. But the pattern of the story is now established.

P.S. Just a random note, but the Penguin Classics edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth that I quoted is edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, the husband of Sayers’s great friend, collaborator, biographer, and goddaughter Barbara Reynolds — though he did this several years after Sayers’s death. Small world.

June 27, 2025

Sayers and Constantine: 1

A theme that emerges strongly in Dorothy Sayers’s thought in the late 1930s — and continues to be central to her thought for the rest of her life — is expressed in a phrase that she uses repeatedly: “The dogma is is the drama.” Here is one articulation of that idea:

Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious — others will pass into the Kingdom of Heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him? We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.

It is the dogma that is the drama — not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God Who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realise that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.

What’s especially interesting about this idea, for the biographer of Sayers, is that she seems to have discovered Dogma and Drama at the same time. That is, she started writing and speaking publicly about the Christian faith just as she began a new career as a playwright. Dogma and Drama provided an alternative to a path she had (though she did not admit it for a long time) written her way to the end of, that of the detective novelist.

Now, her first religious play, The Zeal of Thy House, is not fully committed to the dramatization of dogma. The play is more fundamentally concerned with the redemption of William of Sens. It describes how, after an accident that renders him paraplegic, an arrogant artistic dictator who thinks of the cathedral of Canterbury as his own creation becomes a more humble workman, aware both of his need for others to bring his ideas to life and also his subservience to God. That is to say, the play essentially concerns a man coming slowly to see that the human maker is what Tolkien called a sub-creator. (Neither Sayers nor Tolkien knew it, but they had virtually the same theology of work and articulated it very effectively, Sayers primarily in this play and and Tolkien primarily in the story of Fëanor in the Silmarillion and in the essay “On Fairy Stories.” I have sometimes wondered whether Tolkien read The Zeal of Thy House and was influenced by it, though I doubt it. Anyway, if he had, he’d never have admitted it.)

So The Zeal of Thy House doesn’t really test the proposition that “the dogma is the drama,” nor does her series of plays on the Life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King, because there the dramatic interest arises from events: this man’s teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection. There are of course dogmatic implications to this story, and Sayers embraces them … but that’s not the same thing as the dogma itself being the source of dramatic interest.

So did she ever put her idea to a practical test? Yes, she did, a decade after The Man Born to Be King, in a play that she wrote for the Colchester Festival in 1951. This task was a distraction from her chief work at the time, translating Dante, but perhaps a welcome one. Colchester is only fifteen miles from her home in Witham, which made it possible for her to be fully involved with the performance of the play — costumes and staging and rehearsals were her great delight — without demanding too much travel, which as she aged was becoming more difficult for her. She was a gregarious person, and at that time was lonely — her husband Mac Fleming had died in 1950. And perhaps above all, the play gave her a chance to test her great thesis: she decided to write a play called The Emperor Constantine, and to place at the center of her play the debates at the First Council of Nicaea.

And since this year marks the 1700th anniversary of that Council, this might be a good time to talk about Sayers’s play. I’ll be doing that over the next week or two. Or three. Stay tuned! The dogma really is the drama!

June 23, 2025

the health of the state

Mary Harrington:

Decriminalising full term abortion signals a profound moral bankruptcy in England’s leadership class, made all the more grotesque by the thin and (I suspect) bad-faith arguments about compassion to “desperate women” under which this measure has travelled. The same goes for legalising the killing of our old and terminally ill, in a bill that rejected any duty to improve palliative care provision or even give regard to ensuring no one is coerced. This reveals the truth, that the animating desire for these policies of death was never compassion. It was always the political imposition on us all of radical alone-ness: complete liberation for each individual, from the givens of embodiment and our relatedness to one another.

We cannot, in this vision, be fully free until every vestige of human nature and purpose has been scrubbed away by the solvent power of technology and the all-powerful state, leaving only contingent causality and the brute stuff of our flesh.

Randolph Bourne, famously, wrote that “war is the health of the state.” We’re seeing that these days too. The more general truth is: Death is the health of the state. The state magnifies and extends its power through killing — through all the ways of killing. When we empower the state with the idea that it will act to save lives, we are more fundamentally authorizing it to end other lives (and maybe, eventually, the ones it now saves). That’s just how it works.

As I wrote a few years ago,

Proudhon, in the middle of the nineteenth century, asserted that liberty is “not the daughter but the mother of order,” and that “society seeks order in anarchy.” Anarchists do not reject order or rule or governance but insist that in a healthy society these things cannot be imposed from above — from some arche, some authoritative source. Rather they emerge from negotiations between social equals. When complex phenomena arise from simple rules distributed throughout a large population — as can be seen best in social insects and slime molds — modern humans tend to be puzzled. For a long time scientists thought that there had to be intelligent queens in bee colonies giving directions to the other bees, because how else could the behavior within colonies be explained? The idea that the complexity simply emerges from the rigorous application of a handful of simple behavioral rules is hard for us to grasp. Bees and ants demonstrate how anarchy is order. It’s a shame that Proudhon did not know this.

Anarchy is thus the fons et origo of healthy order, and I am increasingly coming to believe that anarchy is the precondition of conservation. Anarchism (in this sense, the sense of order emerging from the voluntary collaborations of social equals) is the true conservatism.

States sometimes do good things, but we can trust the state only to enable killing and to kill. Anything better than killing can reliably be achieved only by civil society, and civil society will thrive only insofar as we practice voluntary collaboration — and it requires practice: voluntary collaboration is something the state has taught us to be bad at.

June 23, 2025

getting through

How to read and why – by James Marriott:

I generally get through one or two books a week in my leisure time. Plus I’m constantly skimming bits of others in the library for work.

The phrase “get through” is a red flag for me. Books are not to be gotten through, they are to be savored and reflected upon, or delighted in. As I have been saying for a very long time, people tend to assume that “being a better reader” primarily means “reading more books,” but this is incorrect.

There are many valid reasons to read, but if you’re about self-improvement in one way or another — an increase in knowledge or insight or, hey, even wisdom — then one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care. If you would be wise, an essential book you know intimately — through slow reading or repeated reading — is of more use to you than a dozen lesser books that you know only casually.

But when you’re reading for fun, don’t worry about “getting more from a book.” Just do whatever you most enjoy. If you finish a fun book and want immediately to start it over, do it. Knock yourself out! But, speaking generally, one of my few firm suggestions for readers would be: Only read a book that’s new to you if you’re not itching to re-read a much-loved one.

June 18, 2025

cheese

I adored Walter Martin’s episode on Cheesy Music and Guilty Pleasures, but my mind organizes these things differently than his mind does. (By the way, if you don’t listen to the Walter Martin Radio Hour you are seriously missing out.) Some of the music he calls cheesy I think of as overly earnest or emotionally indulgent or saccharine — but not necessarily cheesy. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Bernard Williams, I think Walter suffers from a poverty of concepts.

For me, cheesiness is largely a sonic property: it’s a function of how a song is arranged and performed. So I think Walter is totally right to say that Elton’s “Daniel” and Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” are cheesy, because of the flutes + a chorusy electric piano in the former and the pulsing synths in the latter. But U2’s “With or Without You” isn’t cheesy! Good heavens, no. I mean, I think it’s a great song, and I don’t cringe at it one bit, but I get why Walter cringes at it a little: because of its intense earnestness and lyrical excess. But a song with a drum track that great can’t be cheesy.

Walter starts his show with “The Long and Winding Road,” which I think is probably saccharine in any arrangement but only cheesy when Phil Spector adds the strings. The strings on “Let It Be” are also cheesy, but without the strings it’s simply one of the greatest of pop sings.

Cheesiness for me is a function of vocal bad taste or (this is more common) instrumental excess: it’s a matter of gilding the lily, of pouring sugar on the ice cream. Once I listened to a recording of Aaron Copland rehearsing an orchestra for a performance of “Appalachian Spring,” and he told his string players to play dryly, not sweetly, because the music is already sweet enough. If he had let them lean into the vibrato and sweep, he’d have had a cheesy performance of his work.

I think maybe this is one reason why I like demos so much: no added cheese. An overly earnest or emotionally indulgent song can be great if the arrangement is suitably restrained. Dylan’s Blood in the Tracks is in many respects an emotionally excessive record, but the simplicity of the arrangements helps to make it not cringey but overwhelmingly powerful.

Even “Secret Garden” could, I think, be relatively cheese-free with a different arrangement. Springsteen’s love affair with synths in the Nineties was really a self-betrayal. Consider “Streets of Philadelphia,” an extremely earnest synth-heavy song. Listen to that original, and now listen to Waxahatchee’s cover of it: all she has to do is replace the synth with a Hammond organ and everything changes. Katie kills that vocal, also. That song did nothing for me until I heard her perform it.

Another example: Walter is right that “Downtown Train” is a weirdly cheesy song, given that it’s by Tom Waits — but that’s largely because it’s produced and arranged to sound like, I don’t know, maybe a Tom Petty song? Listen to this live version — a totally different beast. In fact, Waits specializes in songs that might well feel cheesy — or at best sentimental and overly earnest — if they were sung by someone with a normal voice in a normal pop arrangement. But when Tom sings “Take It With Me” it’s completely convincing, and deeply affecting. (By the way, the best commentary on Waits that I’ve ever read comes from Thom Yorke — scroll about 60% of the way down this page.)

And sometimes what you expect to be cheesy turns out not to be: see k. d. lang’s early album Shadowland for an example. This is an exercise in pure pastiche, as lang recreates the sound of Patsy Cline, using the Nashville String Machine and the Jordanaires, the whole apparatus. But it’s perfect: the arrangements suit the songs and the vocal performance right down to the ground. Buckle up your seat belt and listen to “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” if you want to know what I mean. Of course, lang is pretty much the finest singer in the world — there are great singers who don’t have great voices, and great voices belonging to people who don’t really know how to sing: lang has the best instrument and the best taste — but the arrangement is perfection. As I say: it ought to be cheesy but isn’t.

And when you’re done with that one, have some “Black Coffee.”

I should make my own playlists — subscribers to Walter’s Substack get playlists associated with his episodes — of songs that I think of as fitting these different categories. If I find time to do that I’ll post links on my micro.blog.

June 17, 2025

the composer as ASS and other exasperations

In May of 1942, as Sayers was writing the eleventh play in the sequence called The Man Born to be King, she shot a quick letter to her producer, Val Gielgud:

As proof that I am doing something, and because it is urgent, I am sending you Mary Magdalen’s song to be set. You remember where it comes — the Soldiers will not let her and her party through to the foot of the Cross unless she sings to them — “Give us one of the old songs, Mary!”

The song is thus the, so to speak, “Tipperary” of the period, and must be treated as such. That is to say, the solo portion is nostalgic and sentimental, and the chorus is nostalgic and noisy; and the whole thing has to be such as one can march to. We want a simple ballad tune, without any pedantry about Lydian modes or Oriental atmosphere….

I want a tune that is both obvious and haunting — the kind that when you first hear it you go away humming and can’t get out of your head! And quite, quite, low-brow.

In September, when the company were rehearsing the play, DLS wrote to a friend,

We had an awful time with rehearsals. Everything seemed to go wrong — it was one of those days. Claudia’s Dream had been done badly (owing to my not being there to explain just what I wanted!) and the ASS who set the song disregarded all my instructions, and not only set it in ¾ time instead of march time, but had the vile impertinence to alter my lines because they wouldn’t fit his tune. I threw my one and only fit of temperament, and we sang the thing in march-time and restored the line, but it wasn’t a good tune anyway!

In another letter she wrote, “I’m still furious with the man who wrote that silly tune.” Who was this “ASS”? His name was … Benjamin Britten. Probably never made much of himself.

It’s fun to write about DLS in part because she is very entertaining when she is outraged by something. Some years after this incident she reluctantly gave an interview to a reporter from the News Chronicle, who then announced to the world that Sayers had declared that there would be no more Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Sayers to the paper’s editor:

Your interviewer appears to have misunderstood me. I did not say that I had given up writing detective stories. I did not say that there would be no more Peter Wimseys. I made no announcement on the subject one way or the other. I only said that for the next few years, I had another job which would take me all my time.

(The “another job” was translating the Divine Comedy.) The editor’s reply merely created further exasperation:

There is no need to wonder how your reporter came to misinterpret me. Your own letter provides the explanation, since it shows you to have fallen into a similar misunderstanding, and for the same reason; namely, that Fleet Street renders a man incapable of taking in the plain meaning of an English sentence. You say you are “glad to hear that there will, in fact, be further Wimsey stories”; how, pray, do you contrive to extract that conclusion from my statement that “I made no announcement upon the subject one way or the other”?

I have not said, and I will not and cannot say, whether I shall write any more detective fiction or not; for the excellent reason that I do not know. Is that sufficiently clear?

Three times your reporter tried to force me into promising that I would write more of this kind of story; three times I refused to commit myself to any such thing. This refusal he interpreted to suit his own fancy; you in your turn have done the same.

June 16, 2025

mind donation

Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad? – The New York Times:

ROOSE And then, of course, there’s the hallucination problem: These systems are not always factual, and they do get things wrong. But I confess that I am not as worried about hallucinations as a lot of people — and, in fact, I think they are basically a skill issue that can be overcome by spending more time with the models. Especially if you use A.I. for work, I think part of your job is developing an intuition about where these tools are useful and not treating them as infallible. If you’re the first lawyer who cites a nonexistent case because of ChatGPT, that’s on ChatGPT. If you’re the 100th, that’s on you.

NEWTON Right. I mentioned that one way I use large language models is for fact-checking. I’ll write a column and put it into an L.L.M., and I’ll ask it to check it for spelling, grammatical and factual errors. Sometimes a chatbot will tell me, “You keep describing ‘President Trump,’ but as of my knowledge cutoff, Joe Biden is the president.” But then it will also find an actual factual error I missed.

But how do you know the “factual error” it found is an actual factual error, not the kind of hallucination that Kevin Roose says he’s not worried about? Newton a little later in the conversation:

How many times as a journalist have I been reading a 200-page court ruling, and I want to know where in this ruling does the judge mention this particular piece of evidence? L.L.M.s are really good at that. They will find the thing, but then you go verify it with your own eyes.

First of all, I’m thinking: Hasn’t command-F already solved that problem? Does Newton not know that trick? Presumably he does, unless he’s reading the entire “200-page court ruling” to “verify with [his] own eyes” what the chatbot told him. So:

Casey Newton’s old workflow: Command-f to search for references in a text to a particular piece of evidence.

Casey Newton’s new AI-enhanced workflow: Ask a chatbot whether a text refers to a particular piece of evidence. Then use command-f to see if what the chatbot told him is actually true.

Now that’s what I call progress!

The NYT puts that conversation on its front page next to this story:

But as almost everyone who has ever used a chatbot knows, the bots’ “ability to read and summarize text” is horribly flawed. Every bot I have used absolutely sucks at summarizing text: they all get some things right and some things catastrophically wrong, in response to almost any prompt. So until the bots get better at this, then machine learning “will change the stories we tell about the past” by making shit up.

“Brain donor” is a cheap insult, but I feel like we’re seeing mind donation in real time here. Does Newton really fact-check the instrument he uses to check his facts? This is the same guy who also notes: “Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, said recently that he believes chatbots now hallucinate less than humans do.” Newton doesn’t say he believes Amodei — “I would like to see the data,” he says, as if there could be genuine “data” on that question — but to treat a salesman’s sales pitch for his own product as a point to be considered on an empirical question is a really bad sign.

I won’t be reading anything Newton writes from this point on — because why would I? He doesn’t even think he has anything to offer — but I bet (a) in the next few months he’ll get really badly burned by trusting chatbot hallucinations and (b) that won’t change the way he uses them. He’s donated his mind and I doubt he’ll ask for it to be returned.

June 14, 2025

Buckley

I’ve just finished Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, which is magisterial. I have many, many thoughts, only a few of which I’ll share here.

Buckley’s greatest virtue and greatest vice was loyalty. Again and again we see him behaving with exceptional generosity to friends and family, even when that generosity was costly to him in dollars, in reputation, or in both. Once he came to think of someone as belonging in some way, in any way, to “us,” then it was almost impossible to dislodge his loyalty to them — even when they had, by any serious measure, betrayed that loyalty. Having settled on anything — a spouse, a friend, a house, a belief, a political stance — he couldn’t face abandoning him or her or it.

Buckley begins his book In Search of Anti-Semitism by frankly acknowledging that his own father was an antisemite, though he doesn’t go into any detail. (Tanenhaus does, though, and it’s not pretty.) But immediately after acknowledging his father’s views, he goes on to say that “the bias never engaged the enthusiastic attention of any of my father’s ten children…, except in the attenuated sense that we felt instinctive loyalty to any of Father’s opinions, whether about Jews or about tariffs or about Pancho Villa.” Okay … but what is that “attenuated sense”? The passage goes on without a break, as though to explain:

Seven or eight children in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young. Suffice it to say that children as old as 15 or 16 who wouldn’t intentionally threaten anyone could, in 1937, do that kind of thing lightheartedly. Thoughtless, yes, but motivated only by the desire to have the fun of scaring adults! It was the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank. None of us gave any thought to Kristallnacht, even when it happened (November 9, 1938 — I was 12, in a boarding school in England), and certainly not to its implications. But then this is a legitimate grievance of the Jew: Kristallnacht was not held up in the critical media as an international event of the first magnitude, comparable to the initial (1948) laws heralding the formal beginning of apartheid or the triggering episodes of the religious wars of the seventeenth century.

The is strangely evasive, except in one respect: Buckley bluntly refuses to distinguish himself from his siblings simply because they burned the cross and he didn’t. Loyalty! If they are to be condemned, then he will share in their condemnation!

But should they be condemned? Should they have known that this was something rather more serious than “a Halloween prank”? Does he expect us to believe that the cross-burning just happened to have been done on a site belonging to Jews and that any other place favored by “adults” would have done just as well? (If not, why does he bring in the “scaring adults” line at all? And why does he include it in a paragraph about the relationship between his father’s antisemitism and the beliefs of his children?)

Does he now, at the time of writing, think it something that should have been seen as a serious offense? Or, rather, that no one could have been expected to take it seriously in 1937 but should have done so after Kristallnacht? Or even that it wouldn’t have been seen as serious in 1938 but on that point Jews have a “legitimate grievance”?

Who can say?

But note that every possibility listed reminds us that Buckley is only seeing this from the perspective of the people who had their “lark,” not the Jews who looked out their hotel window to find a cross burning on the lawn. For them he does not spare a thought. (Something similar occurs in his discussion of Joseph Sobran, a blatant Jew-hater whom Buckley allowed for a long time to write for National Review and dismissed only under significant pressure: when Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, protested Sobran’s writings Buckley replied that “you are strangely insensitive to the point that his essay is much more damaging to me than it is to you.” I’m the real victim here!)

Similarly: he knew what Joe McCarthy was, knew what terrible sins and crimes he committed, and he was too honest to deny those sins and crimes; but out of loyalty he minimized them and said — well, what he always said from the beginning of his career to the end: The other side is worse and therefore hypocritical. “They” are worse than “we.” The people unjustly smeared by McCarthy simply don’t show up on Buckley’s radar at all.

He took the same approach to Southern racists who thought of themselves are preserving Southern traditions — people like his parents, to whom of course he was loyal. (His father was a Texan and his mother from New Orleans, and they split their time between a home in Connecticut and one in South Carolina. Buckley grew up in both worlds.) In 1959 he wrote a column for National Review that astounds me:

In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white — as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status. It is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural advantage of white over Negro; but the statistics are there, and are not easily challenged by those who associate together and call for the Advancement of Colored People. There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities. The problem is not biological, but cultural and educational. The question the white community faces, then, is whether the claims of civilization (and of culture, community, regime) supersede universal suffrage.

He answers Yes: indeed, “the claims of civilization” justify denying black people the vote. That’s not the astonishing part, though: what strikes me is Buckley’s quite explicit denial of the central claim of the Southern segregationists, which is that blacks are intrinsically and necessarily inferior to whites. Nonsense, Buckley says: “There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities.” White culture is superior to black culture because of the “preternatural advantages” granted by “tradition, training, and economic status.” But because it is superior, it should be allowed to rule. Which is no different than saying that a man who steals all my money should be allowed to keep it because he’s richer than I am. The plain old racists have at least the merit of consistency.

Now, in his famous Cambridge debate with James Baldwin in 1965, when a man in the audience shouted that black people in Mississippi should be allowed to vote, Buckley said, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” But then he went on to say “I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are are are voting.” He then went on to suggest an elevation of the standards of voting — presumably by refusing the vote to those unable to pass a civics test — that would dramatically reduce the number of white people allowed to vote but at the same time, given the racial inequities in the Mississippi education system, would certainly reduce by an even greater degree the number of black voters.

In 2004 Buckley told an interviewer: “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” A pundit admitting error is a remarkable thing, seen but a few times a century. That is admirable. But I do wonder how he could ever have believed, even in 1959, that people whose entire lives were built on the conviction of white supremacy would somehow “evolve” into something different? I doubt that he ever did believe it, though he may have wished for it. Primarily what he was doing in that column was being loyal to his parents and to their social world.

All that duly noted, I came away from this biography admiring Buckley for some things, and maybe most of all for his commitment to debate, especially on his TV show Firing Line. The very first episode of that show featured the socialist Michael Harrington, and at the end of it Buckley commended Harrington for making the most eloquent defense of President Johnson’s anti-poverty programs that he had ever heard.

And as Tanenhaus notes, Firing Line became the place to go if you wanted to hear what the radical black activists of the Sixties and Seventies — Huey Newton! Eldridge Cleaver! Roy Innis! — actually thought:

Buckley interviewed these activists, and opened his microphones to them, at a time when their exposure on mainstream television was limited to footage of violent demonstrations. “Amazingly,” writes the media historian Heather Hendershot, “a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism [broadcast] some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power from [its] era outside of the underground press and other alternative sources.”

(Link added.) That’s pretty cool.

I have a great deal to think through after reading this remarkable book. There may be more thoughts later — I feel that I ought to say more about what Buckley got right, because there were a few things. But for now I’m out of time.

June 12, 2025

deskilling and demos

Here’s an architectural drawing by Frank Lloyd Wright:

And here’s one by Frank Gehry:

Now, Gehry’s sketches are quite interesting, I think. My point is not that they’re worse than Wright’s, but that they are radically different and serve a different purpose. Gehry wasn’t going to spend a lot of time working out the details of a building — its structure or its appearance — because that’s what CAD (Computer Assisted Design) software is for. Before CAD came around, Gehry drew like this:

He would’ve had to learn to draw that way when at school. I wonder how much of that skill he retained … or maybe I should say, how long he retained it?

Architects have been debating the importance of drawing for several decades now. There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the business a decade ago when an architecture student said that he had been taught to draw, and acknowledged that “most people” he had asked thought it valuable, but did not seem to think that the skill had any real use. Indeed, he felt that drawing was a time-consuming distraction from what he thought his real job: “generating concepts.”

Me, I’m more interested in those who make art than those who generate concepts. But to each his own.

And I’m not just interested in works of art, I’m interested — passionately interested — in works of art that lead to other works of art. I love architectural drawings like Wright’s. I love the magnificent cartoons by Leonardo and Raphael. I prefer Constable’s sketches to his oil paintings.

And maybe above all I love musical demos.

The Beatles’ Esher demos mean more to me than the White Album. The gorgeous productions of Joni Mitchell’s Asylum albums just might be transcended, but in any case are put in their proper context, by her voice-and-guitar demos — and just listen to “Coyote” when she was still working it out. The best music Paul McCartney did in his post-Beatles career was his brief partnership with Elvis Costello, and their demo of “My Brave Face” is magnificent — far better than the more polished version that was eventually released. Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi” (from Love and Theft) is a fine song, but the earlier, simpler, demo-like version is truly great.

What I’m loving here — of course! — is human effort, human exploration, figuring it out, trial and error, rough edges, things in progress: the rough ground. I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to. But you all know that. Demos and sketches and architectural drawings are cool, is what I’m saying.

June 11, 2025

two quotations on the humanism of leftovers

Leif Weatherby:

Remainder humanism is the term I use for us painting ourselves into a corner theoretically. The operation is just that we say, “machines can do x, but we can do it better or more truly.” This sets up a kind of John-Henry-versus-machine competition that guides the analysis. With ChatGPT’s release, that kind of lazy thinking, which had prevailed since the early days of AI critique, especially as motivated by the influential phenomenological work of Hubert Dreyfus, hit a dead end. If machines can produce smooth, fluent, and chatty language, it causes everyone with a stake in linguistic humanism to freak out. Bender retreats into the position that the essence of language is “speaker’s intent”; Chomsky claims that language is actually cognition, not words (he’s been doing this since 1957; his NYT op-ed from early 2023 uses examples from Syntactic Structures without adjustment).

But the other side are also remainder humanists. These are the boosters, the doomers, as well as the real hype people — and these amount to various brands of “rationalism,” as the internet movement around Eliezer Yudkowsky is unfortunately known. They basically accept the premise that machines are better than humans at everything, but then they ask, “What shall we do with our tiny patch of remaining earth, our little corner where we dominate?” They try to figure out how we can survive an event that is not occurring: the emergence of superintelligence. Their thinking aims to solve a very weak science fiction scenario justified by utterly incorrect mathematics. This is what causes them to devalue current human life, as has been widely commented.

Me, a year ago:

I doubt I will be safe for much longer. I can easily find myself in a position like that of the theologian who worships — this is a famous phrase from one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters — “the God of the gaps,” a deity who only has a place where our knowledge fails, and whose relevance therefore grows less and less as human knowledge increases. If I can only pursue a “pedagogy of the gaps,” assignments that happen to coincide with the current limitations of the chatbots, then what has become of me as a teacher, and of my classroom as a place of learning? At least I can still assign my explications — a pathetic kind of gratitude, that.

No; there’s no refuge there. I must then begin with the confident expectation that chatbots will be able to do any assignment that they are confronted with. What follows from that expectation?

June 10, 2025

nobody learns anything

From a terrific column by Megan McArdle:

Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users — politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.

That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals’ demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.

Moderation suppressed conservative users and stories that hurt the left — most notoriously, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter throttled as “disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Of course, progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.

Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later. All that changed when Musk bought Twitter.

There’s a touching moment in Middlemarch (the first chapter of Book V) when our heroine Dorothea Casaubon pays a visit to a local doctor, Mr. Lydgate, with whom she hopes to do some charitable work. Mr. Lydgate, it turns out, is not home, but his young and beautiful wife Rosamond is there — along with someone Dorothea knows well: Will Ladislaw, a handsome young man with whom Rosamond is playing music.

Now, Dorothea — a married woman who wants to be faithful to her husband, as unhappy as their marriage is — has not yet acknowledged to herself just how attracted she is to Will; but Will, while keeping generally within the bounds of propriety, has made it unmistakably clear that he is deeply attached to Dorothea. So Dorothea is rather discomfited to see Will there with Rosamond in circumstances that look rather … romantic.

As she sets off in search of Mr. Lydgate, she has time to reflect:

Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband’s absence. And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact? But Will was Mr. Casaubon’s relative, and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness. Still there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his own absence. “Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things,” said poor Dorothea to herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.

The slow pace of the horse-drawn carriage gives Dorothea time both to cry and to dry her tears; and the solitude gives her time to think. There may be a general lesson here.

Back in the day, if something happened in politics or culture that made you unhappy, you might or might not have had anyone to talk with about it. Maybe a spouse, or a few friends, or a co-worker or two. After a while, sitting and brooding about the dark turn things have taken, you might eventually have worked your way around to the thought that maybe, just maybe, you had gotten some things wrong. You had trusted those you should not have trusted, believed accounts you should not have believed, wrongly assessed the rules of the game or the way of the world. One of the primary purposes of short-form social media, it seems to me, is to prevent us from getting to that point of self-understanding. Bluesky means never having to say you’re sorry.

I have a Bluesky account, and I’ve posted a few things there, in a desultory fashion. Some people insist that Bluesky is dramatically healthier than Twitter, less corrosive and rage-filled, but … well, to me it seems virtually identical, which would make sense, per Megan’s column: the dominant voices on Bluesky are people who really liked Twitter and want to reconstitute what they think was the best form of it.

Me, I hated, or came to hate, Twitter, and it seems to me that whether on Twitter or Bluesky, there are five major varieties of short-form social-media post:

“Here is some information”
“Look at how funny I am”
“Look at how stupid my enemies are”
“Look at how smart my allies are for pointing out how stupid my enemies are”
“Hello total stranger! You’re an idiot”

Obviously, posts in the first category are useful; posts in the second can be enjoyable when the poster actually is funny; and the remaining three are poisonous.

And one of the poisons readily injected there is the poison of smugness — because you can always find among your allies reassurance that We did everything We could for the righteous cause, that whatever went wrong is not Our fault, that Our enemies were probably even worse than We suspected, and generally speaking everything that has happened just proves that We were right all along. Group solidarity is powerful dope, even when it’s just solidarity among shitposters, and if you get it quickly enough you’ll never have the opportunity to sit and think and realize that perhaps you’ve been mistaken about many things.

June 6, 2025

Swing Street

As I’ve often said, I am a devoted fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, of which there could never be enough. So I thought I would share, below, the first chapter of an otherwise lost Stout novel called Swing Street, set in the Year of Our Lord 1939. Regarding some of the places and characters here: IYKYK.

Anyone treated to one of Fritz Brenner’s dinners wants to savor it for as long as possible, but I had work to do. After coffee — in Nero Wolfe’s house, coffee after dinner is not optional — I trotted upstairs to change clothes. Once I had the old frame suitably draped I trotted back down to the office and ducked in to give my regards to the boss. Wolfe was sitting at his desk with a several maps laid out before him, at which he stared angrily.

“I’m off,” I said. “And for the record, this shirt isn’t purple, it’s mauve.” Wolfe hates the color purple, which I think is pretty rich, considering his fondness for bright yellow shirts and pajamas.

“Pedantry doesn’t suit you, Archie,” he said. “and in any case today is not the day for it.”

I couldn’t disagree with him there. I turned and went out the front door, and standing there on the stoop I decided that I wouldn’t get the roadster after all. It was a good evening for a walk: not fall yet by any means, but the the edge of the heat had been sanded down, and in my lightweight suit I was unlikely to sweat. Not that it mattered, since where I was going if I sweated I’d be just one of the party.

I headed uptown. It was going to be a musical evening.

I’m a Flamingo Club guy myself. The big band dance music suits me fine, especially when I’m gliding around the dance floor with a suitable companion. Lily Rowan, for instance. But other people like other kinds of music, and I was going to be spending the evening with them. I needed to talk to one among their number.

I was headed for Swing Street — 52nd Street, as the maps call it — and one of its many jazz clubs. The problem was, I wasn’t sure which one. It was a jazzman I needed to talk to, or a man involved somehow with the jazz scene, and those guys floated from club to club like fireflies.

It was Friday night, and I knew that Swing Street would be jumping, and that not one person on the whole street would be thinking about the fact that Germany had invaded Poland today. Wolfe was thinking about it, of course; that’s why he had those maps on his desk. He had fought against the Germans in the previous European war; it wasn’t easy to figure who he had been fighting for, but more than once I had heard him say that he wished he had killed more Germans when he had the chance. How many he did kill, and how many would have been enough, I’ve never figured out. Anyway, as he looked at those maps he was thinking about what he personally could do to damage Germans, that I was sure of.

What it all might mean for me, and for other Americans, I couldn’t guess. That didn’t stop me from guessing as I walked. It took me less than half an hour, because I walk fast.

When I got to 52nd Street I heaved a big sigh, because I could see more jazz clubs than I could count. I could be hunting for hours. I stood for a minute outside a place called Dizzy’s Club — I had heard that one of the hot new jazz musicians was named Dizzy. This place looked like it needed a thorough hosing-down, but didn’t they all, more or less?

As I was deciding whether to duck in, a man passed me heading for the door. Tallish fellow with blond hair in a suit so wrinkled and speckled with cigarette ash that I couldn’t stop myself from tsk-tsking, though because I was raised to be polite I did did my tsking quietly. He looked something like a Viking, if Vikings had had librarians. Or maybe he was a poet. The Vikings had a few of those, as I recall.

His hair needed combing and his shoelaces needed tying, and with a cigarette in one hand and a bundle of books and a notebook tucked under his other arm, he was hard-pressed to find a way to open the door. So I opened it for him. He thanked me in a pretty fancy British accent, which he probably wasn’t faking, and went in.

He found a seat in a corner and started spreading out his papers. He looked to be preparing for a lengthy stay, which I was not. The room was very full and very hot and very loud, and there wasn’t a dame in the place, just sailors and guys who dressed like sailors and guys who looked like they would be very interested in sailors. I was definitely not dressed for the environment, though I did get some approving looks I didn’t want, and since there was no live music — the noise came from a jukebox — I quickly decided that this wasn’t the joint for me and backed slowly out the door. I caught a slight grin from the Viking librarian on my way out and tipped my fedora to him.

There’s never a great deal of fresh air on Swing Street, but it smelled like springtime in the Catskills in comparison to the hothouse of Dizzy’s. But I had to keep trying until I found the right club.

The person I wanted wasn’t in the Three Deuces, but I found myself wishing that that had been the place for me because they had a guy playing piano there like nothing I’ve ever heard. He was a hefty guy — not quite Wolfe-sized but not far from it — who appeared to be blind or at least hard of seeing, and he was doing things to those ivories that I can’t even describe. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, or so I would’ve said before I heard it. On the way out I asked one of the waiters and he said the guy was a regular, played there several times a week. His name was Tatum. I made a note of it. Wolfe gives me the occaional off-night and I’m not afraid to use it to try something new. I felt a long way from the Flamingo Club, though, I don’t mind admitting.

A few stops down the street I finally found what I was looking for, though not without geeting a little more musical distraction that I hadn’t been expecting. On stage at a place called the Famous Door a small combo were doing their thing, and I had to listen to for a few minutes before getting back to work. The singer was a fair-skinned colored girl who had a lousy voice — reedy and thin — but you couldn’t not listen to her. She just had a way. I can’t explain it better than that, which I guess means that I can’t explain it. She seemed to have a particular connection with the tenor saxophone player, a big guy in a pork-pie hat, and man, he could play that sax something beautiful. Again I was hearing something that wasn’t my thing, wasn’t my thing at all, but could somehow become my thing if I didn’t watch out. Swing Street was starting to make sense to me.

Behind the bar a tall thin man was whispering in the ear of the bartender, a slight colored guy with alert eyes who seemed to be mixing three or four drinks at once but was also paying close attention to the message. The whisperer looked Italian, which from my perspective was a good thing because the man I was looking for was named Mariano. He had on a suit that cost about five times as much as mine and cut to specifications. He lifted his hand to shield his mouth and his diamond cufflinks came out like the sunrise. As I approached the bar he looked up, saw me coming, and slipped into a back room as smoothly and as quickly as humanly possible, or maybe a little more so.

The colored girl kept singing in that strangely fascinating way as I thought about whether to chase Mister Cufflinks to find out if his name was Mariano. The bartender finished making his drinks, put them on a tray for a waiter, turned to me, gave me a winning smile, and said, “What can I make for you, Mister Goodwin? And whatever you want, it’s on the house. Any friend of Nero Wolfe’s is a friend of ours.”

June 4, 2025

total action

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that the epic as a genre is characterized by what he calls “total action” (318). The total action of a story begins with the initiation of the conflict and ends with its resolution — but the epic poem does not straightforwardly tell this whole story.

For instance, the total action of the Iliad begins with the Judgment of Paris, and it ends … well, it’s a bit difficult to say exactly where it ends. In one view of the matter, it ends when Troy falls; in another, it ends when when the major participants in the story have concluded their part in it. You could argue that the total action of the Iliad is not complete — and certainly the total action of the Odyssey is not complete — until Odysseus has performed penance assigned to him by Athena (building an altar to Poseidon in a place where that god had previously been unknown) and returned to Ithaca — his final homecoming. But in any case, the concept as Frye develops it, suggests that no epic will narrate its total action. It will zero in on something essential, perhaps the pivotal moment in the whole tale. So however you would describe the total action of the Iliad, the poem itself narrates just a few days in the long Trojan War: the days in which Achilles withdraws from the fighting, which leads to the death of Patroclus, which leads to Achilles’s re-entry into the battle, which leads to the death of Hector, which leads to the fall of Troy, since the city has now lost its great champion and the inspiration of its warriors.

The total action of the Aeneid is something vaster. You could argue, if you wanted to see things from Virgil’s point of view, that it extends from the Judgment of Paris ever onward, because the Pax Romana is the culmination of all history. (No, Virgil, no.) But the action of the poem itself begins with Aeneas’s escape from a burning Troy and ends in Italy with his killing of Turnus in battle.

In short: “total action” is a useful concept, and it seems to me that it is not relevant only to epics. Of the other genres of narrative, the one to which the concept of total action is most relevant is, it seems to me, the detective story, and more particularly the murder mystery. The total action of any murder mystery begins when the conflict that leads to the murder begins. When was that first seed planted? Perhaps it was when Aunt Mabel chose to give all of her money to your cousin instead of you; or the first time that Walter flirted with his married neighbor, Isobel. And it ends — well, again, that can be hard to say, but in societies that have the death penalty, the terminus ad quem of the total action is the execution of the convicted criminal. (Matters are less fully resolved when a murderer might eventually be released from prison.)

But however you think about it, murder mysteries, like epics, rarely seek to encompass the total action of the story. Often we do get the the terminus a quo, the initiation of the conflict, typically through backstory: it’s the kind of thing discovered along the way by the investigators, whoever they happen to be. But the terminus ad quem may be anticipated without being narrated. So, for instance, it’s quite common for a a murder mystery to end with the arrest of the murderer. We imagine the conviction and imprisonment and possibly the execution of the criminal as things that will happen as a matter of course. We don’t need to read all the details.

But if W. H. Auden’s view of what the murder mystery is all about — articulated in his famous but very bad 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage” — is correct even in broad outlines, then the novel can’t really stop before the arrest of the criminal. And that’s because in Auden’s view, the murder mystery is fundamentally a consoling revision of the story of Eden. It begins with a healthy (Auden would, wrongly, say “innocent”) community; that community is then profoundly disrupted by a killing; and what must happen in the course of the story is a restoration of the community’s orderly health. And that restoration of order is something that only happens if the criminal is captured, is identified, arrested, and convicted. “The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.”

A small note en passant: In G. K. Chesterton’s stories we only sometimes see the arrest of the criminal Father Brown has identified, but that’s not because Chesterton is uninterested in the restoration of innocence. However, the innocence Father Brown wants to see restored is that in the conscience of the criminal. He doesn’t especially care about whether a criminal goes to jail, but he is passionately concerned to prevent the criminal from going to Hell. Confession and absolution restore a sinner to right relation with God, which is arguably more important that the kinds of restoration that many murder mysteries are concerned with. Arguably. Auden seems to accept the point, because he finds Father Brown to be one of the few wholly successful detectives.

In any case, if the restorative arc Auden describes is necessary to the murder mystery, then something funny is going on in the later mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers — the exception being her final one, Busman’s Honeymoon, which for certain specific reasons, perhaps to be discussed in another post, takes the story all the way to the execution of the criminal. That makes it very different than the other late novels, which I will have to describe in some detail. So if you haven’t read those stories, stop reading this post and go read them instead. They’re very much worth reading, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. I’ll say as little as I can about the details, but

⚠️ SO MANY SPOILERS COMING ⚠️

Consider Have His Carcase (1932), her eighth Lord Peter Wimsey novel and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It’s quite a long novel, the longest that Sayers had written up until that point. It begins with Harriet, holidaying on England’s South Coast, discovering a dead man lying on a large rock at the seaside; we don’t see Lord Peter until the fourth chapter. In the final chapter, Lord Peter — working with Harriet, but he’s the one who stitches together the evidence — discovers who murdered the man, and also how, why, and when they did it. The whole shebang. But he and Harriet are then told by the local police inspector that if he tells the story to the Chief Constable, the Chief Constable may very well not believe it, or, even if he does believe it, may think a conviction sufficiently unlikely that prosecution is not worth seeking. In response, Peter and Harriet give up the whole situation as hopeless and return to London. The End.

So we never learn whether the murderers are convicted. We don’t even learn whether they’re arrested. And what makes that a little more disconcerting is that the circumstances which led them to commit murder are still in place. The story centers on a man who feels that he will be cheated out of his inheritance, and drafts two others to help him kill the man he fears will get the money that’s rightfully his. But by the end of the story it’s strongly hinted that that another person could get the inheritance the murderer wants. So his motive for murder remains: if he’s not arrested and convicted we have no reason to believe that he won’t try again. If what readers want from a story is the restoration of a pre-murder innocence, or even some sense of justice imperfectly done, they’re not getting any of that from this novel.

Things are a little more complicated in The Nine Tailors (1934), because the great revelation in this case is that, while there is a dead man who gives every appearance of having been murdered, in fact he has not been. It is just possible that another man could have been accused of manslaughter in the case, or some other crime less serious than murder; but that man dies and therefore there’s nowhere for the story to go for resolution, at least the kind of resolution that Auden finds necessary. We are left with a feeling that the wheels of Justice have turned, that Nemesis has acted, and that the image or form of Nemesis is the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul; but all such matters are left to the imagination and the meditation of the reader. So we do, in a way, have the thing that Auden asked for, which is a restoration of of the moral order of the community. But it turns out that the moral order of this particular community was never actually disrupted in the way that it is when a member of a community is murdered by another member of the community.

And then in Gaudy Night (1935), once again, there is no murder. What we have at the end is the exposure of the person who is responsible for a good deal of illegal activity: vandalism, destruction of property, and at one point an attempted murder. (Also poison-pen letters, but while destructive of people’e peace of mind those may not be illegal — I’m not sure what British law was at that time.) When exposed, this person, far from regretting the attempted murder, declares that she wishes she could have murdered many people. But once more, Peter and Harriet at the end of a novel turn to their own personal interests, resolve the conflict that has kept them apart from each other. And what happens to the criminal is unknown: we are only told in the last chapter that “the problem is being medically dealt with,” which is frustratingly vague.

It’s frustrating primarily because, again, this person tried to commit murder and is only sorry that she failed. (The person she strangled was not the person she planned to strangle, but is among those she wishes to see dead.) So why is Sayers so reticent, or even evasive, on this key point?

One reason, I think is that the criminal is the mother of two young children, and it’s not at all clear what would become of those children if their mother were arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Saying that “the problem is being medically dealt with” is a way of preventing us from worrying too much about the kids. Sayers has other things she’s like for us to be thinking about, primarily the resolution of the complicated relationship between Peter and Harriet.

All this points to what I think is a serious problem with the construction of the plot. The criminal is obsessively concerned with the upbringing of her children — she thinks and talks constantly about them — but acts in ways that threaten to separate her from those children. She doesn’t think she’s going to be caught — criminals never think they’re going to be caught — but she knows that she could be caught, and if that happens then there’s a very good chance that she’ll never see her children again. She is to some extent irrational, but she’s not that irrational: for instance, she takes great pains to avoid being captured or identified. But she never ceases her campaign of hatred and violence; indeed she regularly escalates that campaign. Sayers never attempts to explain this radical incongruity. As I say, she’s interested in other things.

Sayers in her detective fiction is always interested in things other than the solution of the mystery. She often commented that her goal was to reconnect the tale of detection with the social novel, as she felt some of her 19th-century predecessors (especially Wilkie Colins) had done. In her novels she demonstrates a serious interest in the aftereffects of the Great War on returning soldiers, in the moral disorders of the aesthetic avant-garde, in the plight of the Superfluous Woman, in the sociology of women’s colleges, in the nature of good work, in the social consequences of modern advertising, in campanology and cryptography and cricket. And, of course, she was also interested in whether a highly intelligent and thoroughly independent woman can find happiness in marriage, and, if so, what a successful union might feel like, to both parties. The range of her curiosity is truly remarkable.

Now, those wide interests do not prevent her from working out her plots with great care. Except for The Five Red Herrings she didn’t do puzzle-novels in the vein of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr, but the details could be intricate, and she took pride in following, seriously if not always meticulously, the rules of the Detection Club, of which she was a founding member. It was just that her accountability to her fictional world ended, she thought, when she had provided a satisfactory solution to an appropriately challenging mystery. In writing Have His Carcase Sayers thought it necessary to have Lord Peter figure out whodunnit — who and how and why. But that’s where her responsibilities as a writer of mysteries ended.

It’s interesting, I believe, that this was also Harriet Vane’s view. In Busman’s Honeymoon we’re told that Harriet’s detective novels proceed thus:

Miss Harriet Vane, in those admirable detective novels with which she was accustomed to delight the hearts of murder-fans, usually made a point of finishing off on the top-note. Mr. Robert Templeton, that famous though eccentric sleuth, would unmask his murderer with a flourish of panache in the last chapter and retire promptly from the stage amid a thunder of applause, leaving somebody else to cope with the trivial details of putting the case together.

That very novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, though, carries the story right to the end of the total action: the execution of the murderer — as though to compensate for the abrupt conclusions of the other late novels. But if the community itself is in any way healed, we don’t learn about it. In its different way, this novel is as irresolute as its predecessors.

Sayers did not seem to think that she owed it to the society imagined her her books to provide the kind of restoration of moral order that Auden felt necessary. As her career as a novelist went on, she was less and less concerned to provide comfort and reassurance, and more and more eager to see the incursion of crime into a community as a kind of apocalypse, that is, an unveiling or revelation of the conflicts — social, psychological, moral, spiritual — that we generally do a good job of not seeing. Auden did not think that this was the kind of thing the true detective novel does well, or should even attempt to do, which is probably why he did not like her books. Your mileage, however, may vary. Mine certainly does.

June 2, 2025

peers

With the old institutions of knowledge collapsing all around us — something I write about occasionally, e.g. here — I want to pay brief tribute to one: peer review of academic writing.

When I was working on my biography of Paradise Lost — pub date: tomorrow! — I came to believe that Milton’s view of Eve was more ambivalent than I had previously thought. (You’ll need to read my book for the details.) But, I reasoned, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton was an absolutely unreconstructed misogynist who couldn’t possibly have portrayed Eve, at any stage of the story, in a positive light. So I suppressed my own inclinations and went on with the book.

Then, when PUP sent the finished text out for peer review, I received from one reviewer a pretty scathing report. He or she liked much of the book, but thought that my neglect of a more positive interpretation of Eve was a damning oversight: even if I did not share that view myself I should certainly have acknowledged it as a possibility, since it is well-represented in the critical literature on the poem. This criticism, by the way, while quite severe, was expressed without rancor or insult or snark, and was accompanied by equally thoughtful praise for other elements of my book.

Had I never entertained the idea that Milton commends Eve, this criticism would still have been very useful to me, because I do not know the critical literature on Paradise Lost as well as a Miltonist does. (Remember, my book is not about Paradise Lost itself so much as about its reception history, how people have read it and responded to it — an assignment much better suited to a generalist like me.) But the response was especially welcome to me because it gave me permission to write something I wanted to write but had believed I shouldn’t.

The moral of this story: Honest peer review, even or especially when it’s highly critical, is a real gift to the scholar being reviewed.

June 1, 2025

Ben Sasse:

Higher education’s failures are high-profile case studies in our larger crisis of civil society. In institution after institution, in sector after sector, center-left leaders in recent decades went from understanding that most Americans are in the middle on most debates to making the bizarre misjudgment that the loudest voices on the culture-war left were the constituencies to which they were accountable. The result has been that the center-right plurality of Americans understandably judge normies as under assault, and thus they fearfully drift toward greater tolerance of meat-ax approaches from the right, whose illiberalism seems preferable to the illiberalism of the left. This “choice” between two illiberalisms is tragic because it is false.

Yes, intellectually it is false — but practically it may be the only choice available. What major American university can claim to be liberal in its intellectual orientation, can legitimately claim to prize intellectual diversity and to expose students to a wide range of ideas? Maybe the University of Chicago.

May 29, 2025

the plusses and minuses of Gioiatopia

I don’t think Ted Gioia seriously means everything in this post about ending AI cheating, but let’s go through it as though he does — as though he is seriously outlining the Academic Gioiatopia. He makes five points about the AI-proof experience he had at Oxford:

(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.

A number of my colleagues in the Honors College here at Baylor are doing just this: using good old-fashioned blue books to administer in-class exams. Other colleagues are handing out spiral-bound notebooks — they buy them cheaply at Wal-Mart or Office Depot — and asking students to use them to keep commonplace books. But these are all seminar classes in the humanities, which are a tiny percentage of the overall offerings of a university. What would be the equivalents for Microeconomics, or Sociology 101, or Organic Chem?

(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.

Again, while this makes sense for the humanities and some versions of the social sciences — and is basically the only way to teach musical performance and some of the other arts — it’s hard to see how it translates into many other disciplines. And to implement something like it across the university would be enormously costly.

Ted knows this, sort of: he says, “US colleges could replace their bloated administrative bureaucracies with more teachers. If they did that, there would be plenty of tutors, and every student could receive this individualized attention.” Yes, they could do this, but that would require enormous changes to the way universities function, and you can’t do it just by snapping your fingers. (Though I guess Thanos could get rid of half the deans and deanlets that way. Hmmm….) Many current employees would have to be given notice; administrators would have to be asked to return to the classroom, probably with pay cuts; new searches would have to be initiated, pursued, completed; offices would have to be converted to classrooms.

And of course many disciplines would be required to change everything about how they teach. Think of those Intro to Sociology classes now held in big lecture halls with 200 students, featuring lots of PowerPoint slides, students responding to polls on their laptops, etc. In the academic Gioiatopia, where instead of one 200-student section of SOC 101 we now have 10 20-student sections, there would no longer be any use for those lecture halls … but the department would now need ten seminar rooms. Are those lying around unused? No they are not. So an enormous investment would have to be made in redesigning existing buildings and perhaps building new ones. Oh, and also you now need several more people to teach SOC 101.

Multiply this situation by a factor of 50 or so in each university and you have an idea of what Gioiatopia would require. How many American universities could muster the cash needed to do it — even if they were sure of a significant return on investment?

One more note here: Ted says that “professors in the US would refuse to spend so much time face-to-face with students. They would complain that the Oxford approach is too labor intensive, too demanding on their precious time.” I know many professors who would strongly prefer to spend more face-to-face time with their students — if they could be delivered from the responsibilities of regular publishing. Their time is precious: professors who take their teaching responsibilities seriously, even in the current regime, and also do the amount of scholarship required for tenure and promotion don’t have a lot of time left over. A regime in which teaching was given greater priority and the treadmill of publication slowed or halted altogether would be welcome to a great many academics. But those who have suffered through the current system seem disinclined to reduce the sufferings of the people who succeed them.

(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.

(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.

I’m treating these two together because they depend on the same context: One in which the credential offered by the university is scarce and hence valuable; one in which far more people desire such a credential than can possibly receive it. Indeed, the credential is perceived as so valuable that one would risk failure and no credential at all rather than forego it for something less precious. Of how many universities today can that be said? If, say, Princeton were to implement such a system but the other elite American universities did not, how many prospective students would think a Princeton degree so much more valuable than any alternative that they would take the risk of attending Princeton rather than choose another elite university where, thanks to grade inflation, they could only with difficulty end up with a GPA lower than 3.5?

Now add to that the simple fact that, if once upon a time university places were scarce and prospective students plentiful, we now have precisely the opposite problem: too many universities competing for a shrinking pool of applicants. And no possibility of that ratio altering for the better anytime … well, any time.

Which takes me back to my point above on “return on investment.” No university in need of students would restructure its curricula and pedagogical structures in order to ensure that more people fail. Today’s universities think about little other than recruitment and retention, because they desperately need the money: you’re going to tell them to adopt a system with the express purpose of producing less retention? — and at the same time tell them to find tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to reinvent their infrastructure?

Even the richest universities would find those recommendations nuts, because they know that even their massive endowments could very quickly be depleted by such a strategy (especially when they’re faced with a Presidential administration determined to cut off their access to federal funding).

(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED.

I’m gonna ignore this one because it’s not about preventing AI cheating, but rather about the equally important but distinct matter of one’s university years as a time not just to make social connections but to learn social skills.

One final question, and then its answer: Do students want the kind of experience Gioiatopia would provide? Some would, certainly — but how many? I would guess considerably less than one percent of the pool of applicants. For the overwhelming majority Gioiatopia would be a dystopia. Why?

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly. Their parents want the same thing, and perhaps want it even more intensely because they tend to be making an enormous financial investment in their children’s education.

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world. Many people sneer at universities that build lazy rivers and climbing walls, and devote every spare penny to their athletic programs — I’ve curled my lip at such things a few times over the decades — but the fact remains that such amenities are significant factors in recruitment. Many students like them; they’re part of the [insert university name here] Experience.

Here’s the key thing: what most people call AI but what I call chatbot interfaces to machine-learning corpora (yes, we’ve finally gotten around to that) do a great deal to facilitate the simultaneous pursuit of these two competing goods. Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

The people who run universities understand all this also, even if they have their own regrets; and they’re not going to impede their income stream any further than it’s been impeded already by demographic realities. They will make the necessary accommodations to a chatbot-dependent clientele, because, especially when customers are scarce, the customer is always right. Those departments and programs that push back will be able to to do so only imperfectly, and probably at the cost of declining enrollments. So it goes.

And the kind of learning that Ted Gioia and I prize will still go on. However, it will primarily thrive outside the university system — as it did for many centuries before universities became as large a part of the social order as they are now.

May 27, 2025

here we go again

Nicole Krauss:

In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside cellphones, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

I guess if people keep writing this sort of thing I’ll keep responding with the same questions:

When Krauss says “We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written,” who are “we”?
Presumably she does not mean herself. She seems to be referring, rather, to “an entire culture.” But if our entire culture has “give[n] up on, and cease[d] to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language,” then how do we have novelists like Nicole Krauss?
Krauss says that people have given up on the struggle to “translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share” — but is that true? When I look at the internet I see an astonishing amount of writing, writing done for others to read and share. Is an underproduction of writing really our problem?
If “we have … begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are,” when did “we” have that attachment? When did “we” acquire it?

Let me ride my old hobby-horse once more: The reading and writing of books — and when Krauss says “books” I think she’s primarily referring to novels — has always been a minority pursuit. Until recently Western cultures did not even aspire to universal literacy, and until quite recently no one imagined that universal literacy would extend to the reading and comprehension of novels and poems by all young people. The idea that Western culture as a whole should involve encounters with serious literature is largely a product of World War II and the period following. That’s when we saw the percentage of the population who read novels rise to the highest level in human history. As I wrote last year:

The not wholly tangential question, of course, is what counts as “long-term.” The kind of variation in skills and interests that I have described can happen over a handful of years but also over decades and centuries. One might ask not just how American university students today compare to those of twenty or thirty years ago but also how they compare to students from a century ago. That would have been a much smaller population, for one thing, because before the G.I. Bill of 1944 sent millions of former soldiers to university, many of whom otherwise would never have considered it, a university education was not the passport to white-collar employment and a stable middle-class life that it has since become. As Kotsko’s essay indicates, we now expect what in historical perspective is a shockingly large percentage of our young adults to be able to read and write about complex texts in philosophy, literature, and related disciplines. But perhaps those are, over a truly long period of time, not reasonable expectations. What looks like a disastrous collapse in literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.

What percentage of English people could have read Paradise Lost when it appeared? What percentage of Americans could have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it appeared? We have to know things like this if we’re going to make comparative assertions. But people make comparative assertions all the time without even thinking about such matters.

I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago? Hard to say.

How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to answer.

May 26, 2025

when Auden was wrong

Anyone who has read much of my work knows how important W. H. Auden is to me, how much I love his poetry and revere him as a thinker. But as I am working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers I am reminded of something that I have often thought but never, until now, written: his famous essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” is one of the worst things he ever wrote, and certainly the worst prominent essay he ever published. Let me count just some of the many ways.

One:

Greek tragedy and the detective story have one characteristic in common, in which they both differ from modern tragedy, namely, the characters are not changed in or by their actions: in Greek tragedy because their actions are fated, in the detective story because the decisive event, the murder, has already occurred.

How, exactly, does the occurence of the “decisive event” render it impossible for characters to be changed by their actions? The claim is evidently untrue: I can think of any number of detective novels in which one potentially defensible, or even accidental, killing leads to others, the killer becoming inured to murder or simply desperate.

Two:

The detective story requires … a closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect (cf. the thriller, which requires an open society in which any stranger may be a friend or enemy in disguise).

Obviously, only some detective stories meet this criterion, so he cannot mean what he says. Probably, then, he means that any truly excellent detective story must meet this criterion. But he then goes on to praise Sherlock Holmes as one of three and only three “completely satisfying detectives,” and the Holmes stories rarely meet the criterion announced. Indeed, the bustle and anonymity of London’s “open society” are often essential to the development of Conan Doyle’s plots. Are we to think that Holmes remains an ideal detective but maintains his ideality in stories that do not even meet Auden’s first requirement?

Three:

[The closed society] must appear to be an innocent society in a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis (for it reveals that some member has fallen and is no longer in a state of grace). The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever.

This too is absolute nonsense. In almost every detective story I can think of the society of the book, however peaceable it may appear, proves to be full of sins and crimes, jealousies and resentments, hatreds both rational and irrational. Indeed, if this were not the case then the story would lack multiple suspects: readers would be deprived of the pleasure of making their own guesses and the narrative would grow slack. Moreover, is there any imaginable society, no matter how small, in which the solving of one murder mystery would ensure the permanent retirement of the law? What is Auden even talking about here?

Four:

The characters in a detective story should, therefore, be eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical) — good, that is, either in appearance, later shown to be false, or in reality, first concealed by an appearance of bad.

Well, if they’re good only “in appearance” then they’re not good. They’re not ethical at all, much less “instinctively ethical,” whatever that means. (Is anyone since Adam and Eve, and maybe not even them, ever “instinctively ethical”? Must we not all learn?)

Five:

It is a sound instinct that has made so many detective-story writers choose a college as a setting. The ruling passion of the ideal professor is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake so that he is related to other human beings only indirectly through their common relation to the truth; and those passions, like lust and avarice and envy, which relate individuals directly and may lead to murder are, in his case, ideally excluded. If a murder occurs in a college, therefore, it is a sign that some colleague is not only a bad man but also a bad professor. Further, as the basic premise of academic life is that truth is universal and to be shared with all, the gnosis of a concrete crime and the gnosis of abstract ideas nicely parallel and parody each other.

I have no idea what that last sentence means, but the previous ones are poppycock. There is absolutely no reason why a bad man must also be a bad professor. Indeed, in some university-based mysteries it is precisely the good professor — the one who not only knows his stuff but loves his students — who turns out to be the murderer. It would almost be malpractice on the part of the novelist not to make such a person the killer. And whatever passions are “ideally excluded” from Auden’s imagined college, none of them ever are in real life or in any collegiate mystery I know of. (This goes back to my earlier comment on Auden’s criteria for an ideal closed society.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough. The essay is not wholly without merit — his comment on Raymond Chandler is a shrewd one: “whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” — but its merits are few and small, and its crimes against logic and evidence very great.

A reasonable question at this point is: Why? Why did Auden, who wrote so brilliantly about many things, write so badly here?

My answer is that when he wrote it he was not really thinking about detective stories, but about his own poem-in-progress, The Age of Anxiety — a poem in which our universal anxiety arises from unacknowledged guilt, the murder we cannot allow ourselves to realize that we have committed. (Who is the victim? Perhaps the very one whose loss we grieve: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.”) It is noteworthy that Auden writes this about Rosetta, the only woman in the poem and the character most closely connected to him:

So she returned now to her favorite day-dream in which she indulged whenever she got a little high — which was rather too often — and conjured up, detail by detail, one of those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories, those lovely innocent countrysides inhabited by charming eccentrics with independent means and amusing hobbies to whom, until the sudden intrusion of a horrid corpse onto the tennis court or into the greenhouse, work and law and guilt are just literary words.

“The Guilty Vicarage” was published in the May 1948 issue of Harper’s but had probably been written more than two years earlier: in a letter to T. S. Eliot on 30 January 1946 he said that he had just written a paper on detective fiction that he was going to read at a theological seminary. (I wish I knew which seminary, but I am guessing that it was Union.) At that time he was doing little else aside from his work on The Age of Anxiety — in the more than two years he devoted to it he wrote only one other poem — and my strong suspicion is that he wrote this essay only nominally about detective fiction: its real purpose was to analyze an existential condition that he believed was afflicting the entire Western world, and could be described analogically through a highly stylized picture of the typical Golden Age English murder mystery.

P.S.: Here is my introduction to The Age of Anxiety.

May 23, 2025

Alasdair Macintyre R.I.P.

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre — first After Virtue and then (more defining for me) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? — was one of the most important events of my intellectual life. (I also remember reading Dependent Rational Animals with some students, one of whom commented that she didn’t think that was a good title for a book but would definitely be a great name for a band.)

MacIntyre’s work helped me to understand the ways that Auden’s poetry in the Forties and Fifties anticipated movements later to become important. Auden’s anti-Constantinianism, his theology of the body, his communitarianism, all of them were ahead of the game, and MacIntyre helped me to understand the ways that Auden was both participating in and helping to form a “tradition of moral inquiry.”

In gratitude, I sent a copy of one of my early essays to MacIntyre and received this reply:

This was exceptionally encouraging to me, a response far more generous than I had expected. (I don’t think I expected any response at all.) It gave me confidence that I was thinking along potentially fruitful lines. The memory of it buoyed me when I was deflated, as I often was in those days.

And of course I continued to read and profit from MacIntyre’s work, which seemed as though it would never end. As Christopher Kaczor points out in this fine eulogy — which also describes the philosopher’s role in breaking up the Beatles — now you’ll have to read it, won’t you? — MacIntyre’s publishing career spanned more than seventy years.

Here is a quotation from one of his last pieces, a tracing of his intellectual development:

Two salient thoughts emerge from this narrative. The first concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of living on the margins, intellectually as well as politically, a necessary condition for being able to see things as they are. The two standpoints without which I would have been unable to understand either modern morality or twentieth-century moral philosophy are those of Thomism and of Marxism, and I therefore owe a large and unpayable debt of gratitude to those who sustained and enriched those marginal movements of thought in the inhospitable intellectual climate of capitalist modernity, including Thomists as various as Maritain, Garrigou-Lagrange, De Koninck, and McInerny, and Marxists as various as Lukacs, Goldmann, James, and Kidron. One way to make it highly improbable that you will enjoy outstanding academic success is to enter contemporary debates in moral philosophy as either a Thomist or a Marxist.

A second thought, perhaps in tension with the first, concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of nonetheless learning as much as she or he can from those at the academic center, those who have made definitive contributions to the ongoing debates of academic moral philosophy. For interestingly it is often they who supply the resources that one needs if one is to free oneself from the limitations of their standpoint. If one is to evaluate both the achievements and the defects of twentieth-century academic moral philosophy, it needs to be understood both from within and from a standpoint that is at once external and radically critical. It is such a standpoint that I have tried to define.

In my own extremely small way, I have tried to assume a similar standpoint in relation to my own discipline, and though our fields are different, MacIntyre has been vital to me as an intellectual model. I have quoted him many times over the years, in essays and books, but those quotations do not suggest the greatness of my debt to him.

He was in his way a great wizard, and like Prospero, he has now broken his staff and drowned his book. May light perpetual shine upon him.

P.S. Russell Arben Fox has also written a tribute that goes into more detail about Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

May 22, 2025

Doppelgänger

I very much enjoyed What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade, and wish I had been able to read it before I wrote my own book on the poem. I definitely would’ve stolen some references. I am especially grieved that until reading Reade’s book I did not know about the Mistick Crewe of Comus.

Reading What In Me Is Dark was, for me, slightly disorienting. Not always in an unpleasant way — it was fun to see someone reflect on the many of the same readers of the poem I did, often using the same quotations, but deploy them in service to a different argument. Or a somewhat different argument. My book is about the reception history of Paradise Lost as a religious text and Reade’s is about its reception as a political text, but those categories are slippery, indeed radically unstable, and nowhere more so then in Milton’s great poem.

The fundamental problem can be put, perhaps reductively but I hope usefully, thus:

Paradise Lost is a poem written in defense of the Christian God: “To justify the ways of God to man”;
Satan in Paradise Lost rebels against a sovereign whom he believes to be a tyrant and usurper, and speaks passionately and articulately against that tyranny and in favor of his own cause;
Milton, in addition to being a poet, was a political figure who rebelled against a sovereign whom he believed to be a tyrant and usurper, and spoke passionately and articulately against that tyranny and in favor of his own cause;
Therefore the language that Satan uses in the poem often closely corresponds to the language Milton uses in his political tracts, even though Milton believes that Satan is wrong in every respect.

This state of affairs generates and sustains an instability in the reader’s mind, a sense that almost every statement by almost every character in the poem can be interpreted in two opposing ways. (Note that this does not happen when people read Milton’s political tracts, since is he speaking there in his own voice: it is when he writes speeches for others that the slippage begins.) We try to define the difference between legitimate and illegitimate authority; between the absolute obedience we owe to God — if we know who God is — and the conditional authority we owe to political authorities, who may or may not have been give their place by God. We try to parse these complexities and soon enough find ourselves, like the demons in Paradise Lost inclined towards philosophical and theological disputation, “in wand’ring mazes lost.”

It is noteworthy that, as Reade points out, “the part of the poem most often used by revolutionaries is Satan’s glittering speeches.” That slippage makes it possible for James Redpath, the anti-slavery activist who is the protagonist of one of Reade’s chapters, in writing an editorial for The Weekly Anglo-African, to find “an ingenious solution to the problem of identifying one’s own cause with Satan. Redpath … took Satan’s rhetoric, called it God’s, and put it in the mouths of Union cannons. This allowed him to recruit Milton’s epic poem for the abolitionist struggle.”

One good reason to read What In Me Is Dark is to see the astonishingly wide range of uses to which Paradise Lost has been put, and if I may be so bold I will add that it’s a reason to read my book as well. As I told Phil Christman, the poem is astonishingly generative: people can’t seem to read it without commenting on it, putting it to use. And as Reade’s story demonstrates, outside of its place in the syllabi of English literature classes, it is a book that people have often, as David Copperfield says about his own childhood reading, read “as if for life.” (Kenneth Burke called this “Literature as Equipment for Living.”)

Reade’s last chapter is about teaching Paradise Lost, and other things, to prisoners — that is, to people who aren’t reading for status or approval but for what they can use:

As the semester went on, I poured more and more time into the class, hoping to arrive at some new understanding by the end. When that came, I was exhausted and uncertain what conclusion we had reached. But the students had taught me to see something that I only realised in retrospect. As we looked at the literature of the past, they were respectful but not reverential. They weren’t reading in an abstract, academic way, they were reading in the context of their whole lives, as something that might help to explain why we had ended up where we were, and this was why they couldn’t relinquish the idea that poetry had something to do with the inequalities of the modern world.

Trying to sum up his “new understanding,” Reade says: “To see that is to want to read disobediently. Reading disobediently might, paradoxically, be the best way to honour Milton’s work…. [R]eading disobediently is a way of relating to the past, not as a burden but as a new beginning.”

Maybe. But I think Milton would have a stern response to this, and it would begin with a question: What or whom are you disobeying? Presumably this would not be something to read disobediently:

And the same, Milton would say, is true of God’s prohibition on eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To read that disobediently is to die.

“Read disobediently” cannot be a categorical imperative: context is all. In order to make a sound judgment, we must know who issues the commandment — and who receives it. For Milton, it was an absolute duty to disobey King Charles and an absolute sin to disobey God. You may disagree on those particulars. But constant disobedience is never an option, for any of us. You’re gonna have to serve somebody.

May 15, 2025

two quotations on the brief dream of the human intellect

Neal Stephenson, today:

Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. I first heard that quote twenty years ago from a computer scientist at Stanford who was addressing a room full of colleagues—all highly educated, technically proficient, motivated experts who well understood the import of McLuhan’s warning and who probably thought about it often, as I have done, whenever they subsequently adopted some new labor-saving technology. Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down….

To me this seems like a downside of AI that is easy to understand, easy to measure, with immediate effects, that could be counteracted tomorrow through simple interventions such as requiring students to take examinations in supervised classrooms, writing answers out by hand on blank paper. We know this is possible because it’s how all examinations used to be taken. No new technology is required, nothing stands in the way of implementation other than institutional inertia, and, I’m afraid, the unwillingness of parents to see their children seriously challenged. In the scenario I mentioned before, where humans become part of a stable but competitive ecosystem populated by intelligences of various kinds, one thing we humans must do is become fit competitors ourselves. And when the competition is in the realm of intelligence, that means preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price.

H. G. Wells, from The Time Machine, 1895:

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes — to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

May 14, 2025

yes it is a wonderful world

Since reading Ian Leslie’s John and Paul, I’ve been listening to the Beatles and thinking Beatly thoughts. Whenever I listen to them I always stumble across songs that are unprominent in their catalogue but still terrific — songs that we’d all remember more vividly if they had been recorded by anyone other than the Beatles, whose masterpieces tend to dominate our attention. The one for this week is “Yes It Is,” a little gem by John that features some lovely doo-wopish harmonizing.

The experience of music can be a peculiar thing. Here’s an example:

On a walk I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself, but as the middle-eight was coming … Do any of you do this? Sing or play a song and simultaneously think about and almost hear in your head what’s coming next? I suppose people who read music well and play from written music have this experience all the time, but I am a poor reader of music — I often say that I read music the way I read Greek, reasonably accurately but far too slowly and painstakingly to be good for much — and thus almost never sing or play anything from the page.

Anyway, I was singing “Yes It Is” to myself and realizing that I didn’t remember the middle-eight. But when I’m singing a song and think I don’t know what’s next I usually discover, when the moment arrives, that I do. I figured that the first word and note of the middle-eight would come to me when I needed it. It didn’t — but something else did: the bridge of “What a Wonderful World,” the part that begins “The colors of the rainbow” (right at the 1-minute mark in that video). I somehow found myself at that moment leaving one song and entering another — and then, when the bridge was over, I went right back to the next verse of “Yes It Is.”

The two songs aren’t in the same key — “Yes It Is” is in E, “Wonderful World” in F, but maybe, since the tonic notes are only a half-step apart, that’s close enough for someone with as poor an ear as I have to make a connection. The harmonic sequences are also similar. And probably someone with a better background in music theory than I have could tell me something about cadences that would help to explain it. But in any event it was a funny experience … and now, I suspect, for the rest of my life I’ll be unable to recall the actual middle-eight of “Yes It Is” and will find myself singing “The colors of the rainbow….”

May 13, 2025

John and Paul

Imagine a man who has another man in his life with whom he is deeply intimate and has been for a number of years, a person who understands him as no one else understands him — and he understands the other in the same way and to the same degree. One just looks at the other and knows what he is thinking. Moreover, these two men have a creative partnership, and their intimate friendship feeds creative partnership, and vice versa.

Now, imagine further that these two men are not lovers, but rather friends — and, moreover, friends in a society which has no real vocabulary for describing such intimate friendship, and sees no reason why such intimacy should ever happen, much less be encouraged and nurtured.

Imagine also that these two men are sexual beings, and however intense their friendship is, they still want sex with women, companionship with women, maybe even marriage with women. Imagine further that their pursuit of women, coupled with certain other (largely economic) circumstances, tends to limit the amount of time that they can spend with each other. Each of them also develops a distinctive set of artistic and intellectual interests not usually shared with the other, so that over time the intimacy which has sustained them emotionally, and has sustained their creative partnership, is diminished.

And now, finally, imagine that all of these forces that diminish the friendship eventually become strong enough to bring the partnership to an end. Inevitably, the friendship itself will then be damaged, perhaps beyond repair. It’s a kind of vicious circle in which the circumstances that weaken the partnership weaken the friendship also, which in turn makes the partnership even less plausible. The two men never cease to be connected, but the connection becomes less predictable, and is often interrupted. It never again will be what it once was, and both of them realize it, and oscillate among regret and acceptance and anger. They think: It didn’t have to be this way, it didn’t have to end and It ended and it’s your fault and … many other things.

That’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie. People will read it because they love the music of the Beatles — I read it because I love the music of the Beatles — but it’s really a sobering and moving meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of male friendship in the culture we inhabit. It’s an outstanding book, and an immensely sad one. I’ll keep it on my shelf next to the best book about the band’s music, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head.

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May 9, 2025

news that stays news

Spencer Kornhaber:

What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year; streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. We have podcasts that cater to every niche passion and video games of novelistic sophistication. Technology companies like to say that they’ve democratized the arts, enabling exciting collisions of ideas from unlikely talents. Yet no one seems very happy about the results.

The argument here seems to be that, “logically,” quantity of production should translate to excellence. But what if the ceaseless and overwhelming flow of “content” is an impediment to excellence, not the facilitator of it? See my thoughts from a couple of years back on the virtues of resistance.

But I do wonder whether we spend too much time worrying about whether this moment is one characterized by creativity or stagnation. It is not as though the New is all that matters. One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal — things that happened this very term — it’s all new to them. Thus Ezra Pound:

After talking with Ted Gioia — who is, for what it’s worth, probably right when he argues that our algorithmic media ecosystem is enforcing creative stagnation — Kornhaber is slightly “stung” when he realizes that “The Police broke up before I was born, yet I’ve been humming their songs my whole life.” But why be stung? The Police made some great songs. It’s cool when someone born in 2005 discovers the Beatles, just as it’s cool when they discover Dante or George Eliot.

The proper worry, I think, is this: What if we’re making generations of people who can’t genuinely discover the Beatles or Dante? If they can’t read anything longer than a tweet, if they can’t grok music that doesn’t start with its chorus and last 90 seconds max? If we can form young people in such a way that they’re capable of apprehending the non-algorithmic, non-digital world of art and culture, then the problem of stagnation will eventually resolve itself. But if we can’t … well, then, we can focus on helping those adults who come to doubt the wisdom and good will of their algorithmic overlords. There will be plenty such; never a majority, of course, but plenty. As Larkin says, “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

That’s what this blog is about, in large part, and when I retire from teaching college students it will become my chief mission. Thus good old Wordsworth: “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”

May 8, 2025

sadness

Clay Shirky:

I am an administrator at New York University, responsible for helping faculty adapt to digital tools. Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness. This came from faculty who were, by their account, adopting the strategies my colleagues and I have recommended: emphasizing the connection between effort and learning, responding to AI-generated work by offering a second chance rather than simply grading down, and so on. Those faculty were telling us our recommended strategies were not working as well as we’d hoped, and they were saying it with real distress.

“Sadness” is the correct term — and, as Shirky shows later in his essay, students are feeling it too.

See also Phil Christman’s recent essay, which touches on themes I’ve written about also, for instance here and here.

May 7, 2025

tone

Electric guitar guys spend a lot of time talking about tone: Who’s got the best tone, how does he get that tone, tone is in the hands, man. Tone tone tone, all day and all of the night … and dude, how did Dave Davies get that tone on that song? (He got it on “You Really Got Me” by slicing up the speaker of his amp.)

But I think these conversations tend to miss the most important point, which is that excellence of tone is contextual. What matters is not primarily whether a particular tone sounds cool or not, but rather whether it suits the song. And in that regard it has long seemed to me that the all-time masters of tone-in-context are the Beatles. Their guitars have a remarkable range of tones and they’re always just right. Consider the diversity of

“Ticket to Ride”
“And Your Bird Can Sing”
“Revolution”
“I’ve Got a Feeling” (John’s little riff, used as an intro and then played through the whole song)
“Octopus’s Garden” (I’m serious)

I’m limiting myself to five, but the list could go on. Clapton’s tone on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is great, but it’s basically the same sound he used all the time in those days (before he switched from a Les Paul to a Strat). The Beatles had an uncannily perfect sense of what sound they needed from their instruments for any given song. People rarely say this, it seems to me, but they’re one of the great guitar bands.

More about the Beatles coming — I’m reading this, in the moments between meetings, emails from students, and exam grading.

May 2, 2025

William A. and the future

Let’s think about the story of William A., who graduated from high school in Tennessee with a 3.4 GPA, despite being illiterate. How did this happen?

Apart from his dyslexia itself, William’s most salient “circumstance” for our purposes was that — with proper instruction — he can learn to read. See L.H., 900 F.3d at 795–96. The school has not even tried to prove that finding wrong; yet William graduated from high school without being able to read or even to spell his own name. That was because, per the terms of his IEPs, he relied on a host of accommodations that masked his inability to read. To write a paper, for example — as the ALJ described — William would first dictate his topic into a document using speech-to-text software. He then would paste the written words into an AI software like ChatGPT. Next, the AI software would generate a paper on that topic, which William would paste back into his own document. Finally, William would run that paper through another software program like Grammarly, so that it reflected an appropriate writing style. Not all these workarounds were specifically listed in his IEP, but all were enabled by an accommodation that was: 24 extra hours to complete all assignments, which allowed William to complete his assignments at home, using whatever technology tools he could find.

First of all, we should admire William A.’s ingenuity in finding ways to do his assignments without having been taught to read and write. That said, he must have had some level of literacy to use ChatGPT and Grammarly, unless he enlisted people to help him: perhaps William benefited from work with a dyslexia specialist hired by his parents, something his school deemed unnecessary.

Presumably his parents did not themselves help William do his work, or not much, because they’re the ones who sued the school system for failing to provide the education promised him by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. That act requires schools to make accomodations for disabled students that provides an education equivalent to that received by non-disabled students. William’s parents felt that since he was dyslexic but able to learn to read, the school system had an obligation to teach him to read, through whatever alternative instruction is appropriate for people with dyslexia.

What interests me is the school system’s defense, which is that William A. obviously was given an adequate education: look at his GPA. That is, if he could pass his courses, then he had been given appropriate compensation for his disability. On this account, passing courses in the humanities is what matters, even if the requisite writing is done by ChatGPT and Grammarly, and even if the students cannot himself read or write at all. That is: Literacy is optional to education.

Reading Adam Roberts’s superb 2024 novel Lake of Darkness, set in a pretty-far future, one comes gradually to realize that most of the characters are not just monolingual — a person who knows a second language is considered a prodigy — but also illiterate. A historian specializing in the 20th century “of course” knows the novel Alas in Wonderland — she’s never seen the book’s title, only heard it, like everyone else. (The Alas books, written as we all know by Carol Louis, were published in 1865 and 1871, not the twentieth century, but close enough.) Similarly, people speculate about the first name of the astronaut Armstrong — was it perhaps Nile, in honor of the ancient Egyptians? Also, the writer of Voyage to the Center of the Earth was Julie Verne. Culture has become a game of Telephone: one generation whispers in the ear of the next.

‘Do you do the reading and writing thing? I know a lot of historians master that.’

‘Some do,’ she said, feeling absurdly exposed. ‘Not me. It’s a lot of really fiddly work, is the truth, and I wanted – I wanted to concentrate my mental energies on other things. I mean, I know people who spent many years mastering one antique script only to discover that their primary sources were all written in another. And anyway, after all, anyway, anyway, of course, we can always just get an AI to read texts aloud, any old texts, to read and translate them. I mean –‘ She could feel her gabbling running away from her. Why couldn’t she stop? ‘– I mean, it’s still pretty boring, to be honest, sitting there whilst some AI reads some interminable antique text. Why were they so long, that’s what I want to know? Even at double speed, and even when the AI notices you fidgeting and tries to leaven the experience by doing each different piece in different voices, it’s still –‘

Berd reached out and touched her shoulder with his right hand. His gaze was steady, and as blue as a methane flame. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I understand. It’s hard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes it is.’

‘There are other things to put your time and energy into.’

She grinned. ‘Exactly.’

May 2, 2025

sentences

Arjun Panickserry:

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

J. K. Rowling is the wrong comparison here, since the Harry Potter books were written first for children and then (in later volumes) for young adults. For recent writers, the proper comparisons to Austen, Dickens, and Emerson would be Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion.

The bigger problem is the failure to recognize the developments in the punctuation of English prose over the centuries. Chaucer and Spenser wrote before the current roster of punctuation marks — in addition to periods and commas, we now have colons, semicolons, parentheses, and dashes, which add often subtle variety of meaning, variety of clausal relations, without necessarily affecting comprehensibility — became clearly established. Ancient texts were typically written in scripta continua: not only did they lack punctuation, there were not even any breaks between words. In such a regime of writing, there’s nothing even to correspond to the word “sentence.”

(Indeed, an important subset of the history of written language is the history of punctuation: see e.g. Malcom Parkes’s wonderful, and wonderfully titled, Pause and Effect. Also brilliantly titled, and a fine read: John Lennard’s history of parenthesis in English verse, But I Digress.)

Also, consider this famous passage from Hemingway:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

One could re-punctuate it thus:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early; then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows: there was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails, the deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers — it was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

That would make the sentences longer, but it wouldn’t make them more sophisticated or challenging. It would just make them a bit worse.

April 30, 2025

first notes on consumption

There are two Ways, and a third practice that is not a Way:

Action
Contemplation
Consumption

A practice is a Way if it has a goal, a telos, such as growth in virtue or grace or skill, the love of God, the love of one’s neighbor.

All of the arts depend on a fusion of Contemplation and Action: one prepares oneself, through training and reflection and perhaps even prayer, before acting. (Even in flower arranging contemplation rightly precedes action.)

The most important works of art — the ones most necessary for our flourishing — fuse contemplation and action in order to encourage either contemplation or action. (Cf. Terrence Malick’s comments about seeing certain movies and feeling “strengthened” — ready to be a better person.)

Minor works of art promote neither contemplation nor action, but rather are consumed — consumed completely: nothing is left over, not even a residue. They disappear like cotton candy in the mouth.

The consumption of art is often a good thing, as is art made to be consumed. Everyone needs a period of mental and emotional rest, a hiatus from busyness — and even, sometimes, a hiatus from contemplation and action.

But when one only consumes one is never fortified for a Way. One is never prepared, “strengthened,” for anything.

As tuberculosis consumes the body — that’s why it used to be called “consumption” — so also the soul may be eaten up by unbroken exposure to consumptive media. Eventually and, as Gibbon would say, insensibly one may become indifferent to the need for a Way and even hostile to the very notion.

Art that promotes action or contemplation is not the province of high art alone; popular art is not inevitably (perhaps not even typically) meant only for consumption.

The need to consume is one we share with other living things, all of whom must (by one means or another) consume in order to live. This is not intrisically ignoble!

Evidence: the way that Tom Bombadil and Goldberry in The Lord of the Rings eat — which is, not incidentally, virtually identical to the way that Beorn in The Hobbit eats — is healthy and reverent consumption. They cook almost nothing but rather tend and gather. Tom:

I see yellow cream and honeycomb, and white bread, and butter; milk, cheese, and green herbs and ripe berries gathered.

In Beorn’s house people also eat “butter and honey and clotted cream.”Some of these (herbs, berries, milk) are eaten in their raw state, others (cheese, butter) by the encouraging of natural processes. After all, in the right circumstances cheese makes itself. The use of bread is the outlier, since it has to be assembled from ingredients processed to a degree: grain must be milled into flour, and then baked.

Tom and Goldberry and Beorn gratefully receive; it is the Elves who make, who are the great artists and craftspeople of Middle Earth:

The Elves next unwrapped and gave to each of the Company the clothes they had brought. For each they had provided a hood and cloak, made according to his size, of the light but warm silken stuff that the Galadhrim wove. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars. Each cloak was fastened about the neck with a brooch like a green leaf veined with silver.

’Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.

’I do not know what you mean by that, answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lórien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armour, and they will not turn shaft or blade. But they should serve you well: they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need. And you will find them a great aid in keeping out of the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees. You are indeed high in the favour of the Lady! For she herself and her maidens wove this stuff; and never before have we clad strangers in the garb of our own people.’

And of course Fëanor, the great craftsman and maker of the Silmarils, is perhaps the central figure in The Silmarillion.

Here we might invoke the great passage from The Winter’s Tale IV.4:

PERDITA Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer’s death nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
Which some call nature’s bastards. Of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.

POLIXENES Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?

PERDITA For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.

POLIXENES Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

PERDITA So it is.

This is the art of the Elves in Tolkien’s legendarium.

But even those who but receive, like Tom and Goldberry and Beorn, do so intelligently: they know the times and seasons, they know what beasts or environments produce what edibles, they know how to harvest non-destructively. Tom is only able to save the hobbits from Old Man Willow because he is making his final visit of the autumn to a pool where the water-lilies flower late: had the hobbits arrived in the Old Forest any later they would have found no help, because Tom knows everything in the Forest, knows when to seek this or that, when he can harvest this or that. This is what Goldberry means when she says that Tom does not own anything but is Master.

To consume intelligently and appropriately, to know the scope and bounds of consumption, is possible only to one who has Mastery.

April 28, 2025

Clark’s Enlightenment

This is a mere note about a fascinating book rather than a review or analysis. The book is J.C.D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, which makes a curious but in the end fairly compelling argument. You can get a sense of what Clark is up to from a passage near the end in which he summarizes a series of potential objections to his argument:

First, that ‘the Enlightenment never happened’. On the contrary, this book has shown how ‘the Enlightenment’ was a concept that was widely adopted in the twentieth century in some countries and that persisted for several decades, influencing large numbers of people in the anglophone world and beyond to the point where the existence of an objective phenomenon to which the term appropriately corresponded seemed beyond question.

Second, that ‘the Enlightenment happened but was unimportant’. On the contrary, this book has contended that, once conceptualized, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was highly influential, and it has indicated how the term could be used (although with varying effectiveness) to promote a variety of causes both thematic and national.

Third, that ‘the Enlightenment happened, was important, but was a bad thing’. On the contrary, this book has asserted the historian’s obligation to refrain from normative comment on the phenomena of the past, and has suggested how refraining in this way can better illuminate the normative forces that others have used to shape the development of knowledge, or supposed knowledge, in this field.

For Clark, “the Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an intellectual movement. What happened was the retroactive bestowing by historians of a “badge of normative superiority” on a miscellaneous and heterogenous set of 18th century writers who were in point of fact constantly at odds with each other. (One of Clark’s services to scholarship here is noting points where translators have inserted the word “Enlightenment” into works where it does not in fact appear.) The best way to earn this badge was to be an enemy of religion, and almost any writer or thinker who could be described as such was conscripted into the thought-police force called “Enlightenment.”

Once this badge was pinned onto writerly lapels, there were of course other scholars who, in various polemics against the depredations of “the Enlightenment,” deemed it a badge of shame. But this was to accept the description while inverting its valence.

The most interesting questions Clark poses are these: Can we do without the concept of “Enlightenment”? Certainly not altogether, since it was used by some very famous 18th-century writers. But can it be de-centered? When it is used, can it be used in a way that escapes all these decades of “normative polemics”? Can other concepts with more explanatory power finally emerge? These are powerful questions indeed.

April 25, 2025

the irrelevance of thinking

Mary Harrington:

As I argued here, it would would be more accurate (if less snappy) to describe AI as “powerful modelling and prediction tools based on pattern recognition across very large datasets”. It is, in other words, not a type of cognition in its own right, but – to borrow a term from Marshall McLuhan – one of the “extensions of man”: specifically a means of extending cognition itself.

I don’t think this is correct; what LLMs do is not the extension of cognition but rather the simulation and commodification of the palpable products of cognition.

The people who make LLMs have little discernible interest in cognition itself. Some of them may believe that they’re interested in cognition, but what they’re really focused on is product — that is, output, what gets spat out in words or images or sounds at the conclusion of an episode of thinking.

Seeing those products, they want to simulate them so that they can commodify them: package them and serve them up in exchange for money.

This doesn’t mean that LLMs are evil, or that it’s wrong to sell products for money; only that thinking itself is irrelevant to the whole business.

UPDATE: From a fascinating essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic:

Modern generative AI systems are opaque in a way that fundamentally differs from traditional software. If an ordinary software program does something—for example, a character in a video game says a line of dialogue, or my food delivery app allows me to tip my driver—it does those things because a human specifically programmed them in. Generative AI is not like that at all. When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does—why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate. As my friend and co-founder Chris Olah is fond of saying, generative AI systems are grown more than they are built—their internal mechanisms are “emergent” rather than directly designed. It’s a bit like growing a plant or a bacterial colony: we set the high-level conditions that direct and shape growth, but the exact structure which emerges is unpredictable and difficult to understand or explain. Looking inside these systems, what we see are vast matrices of billions of numbers. These are somehow computing important cognitive tasks, but exactly how they do so isn’t obvious.

UPDATE 2: Essays by Melanie Mitchell of the Sante Fe Institute — one and two — on what LLMS do instead of thinking. The “bag of heuristics” idea is a vivid one.

April 22, 2025

a taxonomy of writers: 2

A couple of years ago I wrote about kinds of thinkers: Explainers, Illuminators, and Provokers. That classification was based on effect, that is, what those thinkers do for me as a reader. But you can also classify thinkers by their purposes. Thus my second tripartite scheme, thinker-writers who are

Diagnostic
Prescriptive
Therapeutic

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? (Diagnosis is commonly etiological.) Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

We don’t have nearly as many Prescriptive writers, but those who exist tend to be really bad at it: obvious and abstract. (“We need to cultivate a society of mutual respect.”) I remember long ago seeing a cartoon: a clown is standing in front of a TV camera, while someone is holding up a cue card that says, “Make a funny joke.” That’s what our current prescriptive writers tend to do.

Therapeutic writers try to help us manage our misery. They may or may not have diagnoses of it, they may or may not have prescriptions for cure, but they know that while we’re in the midst of it we need entertainment, distraction, or consolation — ideally all three. I don’t think we have enough of this kind of thing either; and even when it’s good it’s not especially highly regarded.

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

April 21, 2025

Francis

I am by no means glad that Pope Francis is dead, but I must admit that I am relieved that his papacy is over — or I would be, if I didn’t suspect that even worse is to come.

Pope Francis was consistently and unreasonably generous towards those he deemed his theopolitical allies, regardless of their moral failings; consistently and unreasonably mean-spirited towards those he deemed his theopolitical enemies, regardless of their piety and devotion to the Church; and habitually prone to sowing confusion about what that Church teaches, as well as about its authority to teach it. About people to whom he had decided to be friendly, he asked, “Who am I to judge?” About people whom he was inclined to mistrust, for instance those who prefer the Latin Mass, he was instantaneous and inflexible in his judgments. As Colm Tóibín wrote in a long 2021 essay that mainly focuses on Francis’s pre-papal career in Argentina, “Bergoglio could play the anarchist one moment and the next revert to his role as authoritarian.” The unpredictability and inconsistency were problematic, especially once he became Pope.

However: Francis offered much wise and vital teaching in Laudato Sí — I wish that were more widely discussed in assessments of his legacy. (I wrote about it here.)

There’s a good chance that his successor will be more impartial than Francis was — less Schmittian in his deployment of a Friend/Enemy scheme in dealing with people — and that he will be clearer in his articulation of what Catholicism teaches and why.

I’m less confident, though, thanks to Francis’s work at reshaping the institution in his image, that the next Pope will be as independent of the Zeitgeist as he ought to be. Pio Nono got many individual judgments wrong, but when he (rather indignantly) denied that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself to and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” he was spot on. It is the task of Christ’s Church to preach and teach the Gospel and help the world to come to terms with it. I am of course not Roman Catholic, but any branch of the church that does that particular work earns my gratitude.

My fear is is that Francis has reshaped the imperatives of the Roman communion in ways that make it overly sensitive to the indignation of the bien-pensant and insufficiently sensitive to the unchanging message of the Christian Gospel. My hope is that my fear is unwarranted.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Bruenig:

It was the pope’s efforts to quell growing Western hostility toward migrants that recently put him directly at odds with the Trump administration. After Vice President J. D. Vance had a public spat with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over the rollback of a Biden-era law preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending undocumented migrants in schools and churches, Francis wrote a letter that seemed to chastise Vance directly. “The true ordo amoris,” Francis wrote, citing a Catholic term Vance had invoked to defend the proposition that love of kin and countryman should reign supreme, “is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan.’” That is, he continued, “by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Francis was right about that too, and vitally so. Matthew 12:50 is worth remembering here, as well as Matthew 25:34–40. (The problem with Bruenig’s essay, by the way, is that she doesn’t clearly distinguish between political progressivism and theological “progressivism.”)

Like many other progressive celebrants of Francis, Bruenig speaks of Francis’s “opponents” as though they picked fights with him, when in fact the opposite was often true. Francis was regularly sneering towards and contemptuous of traditionalists who had never said a bad word about him and both prayed for him and encouraged others to pray for him. In Evangelii Gaudium, for instance, he wrote that “In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time.” That many of those traditionalists are not “ostentatious” but rather heartfelt, and that they promote the Latin Mass and highly traditional forms of Catholic spirituality precisely because they believe such practices to meet “the concrete needs of the present time,” are facts that Francis preferred never to acknowledge. He judged, and he judged harshly.

Still, when the man was right he was right, and this commendation by James Butler is powerful, moving, and challenging:

When I was young, the pope always seemed to be dying. John Paul II’s long, public suffering with Parkinson’s made him an emblem for Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. At the time, I thought it sad and cruel. But I came to understand something of that emblematic force as I watched the ailing Francis insist on visiting prisoners, gasping out greetings, being present for his Easter message, speaking against the madness of rearmament and war, squeezing every last opportunity to speak to the world as it continues to erect new prisons and walls, and new oligarchic idols. ‘Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,’ Francis wrote in his last meditations on Good Friday. ‘Theirs is the construction site of Hell.’

April 17, 2025

Moses the roadgiver

As I was drafting my previous post about the changes that the middle of the 20th century brought about, I realized that it was long past time for me to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. So now I have read it, and it is as great as everyone says — or almost everyone anyway. Some of those who have criticized the book write as though it merely denounces everything Robert Moses did, but while the book is indeed fierce in its exposure of Moses’s arrogance, cruelty, and short-sightedness, it’s not a hatchet job.

What Caro shows is a man whose desire to improve life for the residents of his native city was sincere and genuine — as was his belief that he knew better than anyone else in the world what improvements were needed and how they might be implemented. Over time, his compassion and desire to serve the public gradually withered as his arrogance metastasized. After many years in power, Moses lost the ability to distinguish between what he wanted to do and what needed to be done, and became completely unreflective about such questions – a thoughtlessness best manifested in his mantra-like recital of the cliché that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

As Caro points out, even if Moses had wanted to take time to reflect he could not have done so, simply because he had so many obligations, held so many positions, ran so many organizations. Of course, he only carried so many burdens because he sought the power that they made possible, so what you see in The Power Broker is the precise way in which a brilliant and at least initially compassionate man drives himself into a doom-loop of libido dominandi. But even as Caro describes the spiral of this doom-loop, he nevertheless always also shows the great benefits that accrued to many from Moses’s endeavors. He shows you both those who benefited from what Moses built and those whose lives were effectively destroyed by it, and allows you to draw your own conclusions about how much of what Moses did was justified, and how much we would keep if we could.

For instance: Moses built a series of state parks that gave pleasure to countless millions and became models for parks in many other states — and built roads that enabled city-dwellers to get to those parks — but could only do so through an astonishingly complex set of legal and political and administrative maneuvers to appropriate the relevant land from the mega-rich who were hoarding it, from feckless and clueless local administrators who had no clue what to do with it, and, yes, from farmers who made a living from it. Would you wish those parks unmade, and the land still held by plutocrats, or turned into subdivisions? The question has to be asked because no one other than Moses would have or could have achieved what Moses achieved. No one else had the necessary combination of skills, coupled with endless energy and determination.

Some of the best passages in The Power Broker capture both sides of the story at once. For instance:

During the 1930’s, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World. He gouged great gashes across it, gashes that once had contained houses by the hundreds and apartment houses by the score. He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall’s Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. And he made it greener, planting within its borders two and a half million trees, shrubs and vines, bringing a million others back to bloom, reseeding lawns whose area totaled four square miles and creating a full square mile more of new ones. He filled in its marshes and made them parks. He yanked railroad trestles off its avenues, clearing an even dozen from Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue alone as part of a grade-crossing elimination program he considered so minor that he seldom mentioned it.

And:

Part of Moses’ Long Island formula — the vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality — was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it the city would never be able to build parks and roads and bridges — or, for that matter, housing or hospitals, sewers or schools — on the scale its citizens needed. But Moses’ formula could be successful in the city only as the basis of a new, vastly more complicated and subtle and sophisticated formula, one that would turn public works into a far truer reflection of the subtle and complicated human needs they had to serve in the city. A whole new input — a factor of humanity — would have to be added. And Moses would not allow it to be added.

Caro constantly keeps these two visions before our eyes.

The method that Caro develops in The Power Broker is continued and improved — I am tempted to say perfected — in his biography of LBJ. To take but one example: Many readers have been moved by Caro’s admiring and heartwarming portrait of Coke Stevenson, the immensely popular governor of Texas who lost to LBJ in a Senate race in 1948 – or rather, had the election stolen from him by LBJ. There is absolutely no doubt at this point (partly because of Caro’s deep research) that the election was indeed stolen, and that a nasty, dishonest, manipulative, and power-hungry man stole it from an honest and upright public servant. But Caro portrays the character contrast between the two men so in such contrastive terms because he wants us to understand that if Coke Stevenson — who was an honorable man, but also was a garden-variety Southern racist — had won that campaign it almost certainly would have meant the end of LBJ’s political career, which in turn would have meant that the civil-rights legislation that helped to overcome centuries of structurally-embedded racism in this country would not have happened — or would have been delayed perhaps for decades. (It was precisely because powerful Southern Senators profoundly committed to segregation recognized LBJ as one of them that he was able to bring them around to supporting, or at least accepting, massive changes in the segregationist system.)

Both Moses and LBJ were nasty men who did terrible things — but also did great things. And there was no way to get the great things without the terrible things coming along for the ride. Do you accept the deal? That’s the question Caro presses on all his readers, and that’s the key to his greatness as a biographer and historian.

P.S. Denunciation of Robert Moses has often been accompanied by reverence for Jane Jacobs (no relation), but in this outstanding essay Philip Lopate shows why those paired assessments need to be complicated.

April 14, 2025

Orange Man v Harvard (2024)

The Promise of American Higher Education – Harvard University President:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

I certainly hope that Harvard and any other universities that take the same path of resistance win … but: The question is not whether private universities can determine their own identities, but rather whether private universities can determine their own identities while receiving government funds. If Harvard didn’t take federal funding, the Trump administration would have no leverage over it. (Except possibly the threat to end its tax exemptions, which would be unlikely to survive in court.)

Without federal funding, of course, even Harvard would struggle to afford certain vital scientific and medical research, which is why I hope they win. But I also hope that they’re serious when they say that they plan to “broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community.” I very much doubt it, though.

(Take my views on that with a grain of salt, though: as I’ve often said, no matter how much I publish or where I publish it, I am, as a vocal Christian and disposition ally if not programmatically conservative, absolutely unemployable outside the Christian college/university world. So I have a beef.)

The letter from Harvard’s counsel makes two main arguments, both of which will probably be adjudicated in court: that Harvard has already been making the changes to its institutional culture that the Executive Branch is demanding — which is interesting as an acknowledgment that changes need to be implemented — and that the government cannot cut funding without due process. We’ll see whether the courts endorse or reject those claims. I’ll be watching closely.

UPDATE: I like this from the WSJ editorial board:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to “viewpoint diversity.”

The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that “if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously” to ensure the recipient “voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms.”

Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose. President Trump has enough balls in the air without also trying to run Harvard.

And this:

The demands were designed to blow up negotiations, not move the two parties closer to a deal, said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of the Harvard Medical School and member of the Council on Academic Freedom, which has been working toward expanding viewpoint diversity on campus.

“You can’t suddenly turn a switch and things change overnight,” he said. Many in the Trump administration “have said that they don’t think the institutions can be reformed from within, and they need to be burned down and rebuilt from the edges.”

This sounds right — but what does “burned down” mean? Presumably not closed; I guess it means a complete organizational restructuring, with all-new top administrators and a replacement for the Harvard Corporation. Presumably also this new leadership would restructure the academic programs of the university. But perhaps no one in the Trump administration is thinking that far ahead. This may be not a plan but rather just another example of what Steve Bannon calls “flooding the zone with shit.”

If anyone associated with the administration does have a plan, though, it would definitely be Christopher Rufo.

UPDATE 2: This from John O. McGinnis provides some vital long-term context:

Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.

And this from Edward Frame:

Yet for all its courage, Harvard’s response stopped short of making the argument that would best protect the values for which it was fighting. It defended the university’s independence without explaining why that independence deserves protection. It invoked values like “pluralism” and “inquiry,” but it did not fully explain why those values are essential to a liberal democratic society. The letter therefore missed an opportunity to articulate what a university is for — not just to students or donors, but to the country. And this matters, because Trump’s attack against this and other universities is not only about the balance of power between universities and the government. It is, at bottom, about the legitimacy of higher education as a public good.

April 14, 2025

on humanism: the big picture

The word “humanist” has several meanings, but they tend to fall within two broad camps. (There are other, more specialized, meanings, but we won’t deal with them here.)

The first holds that “man is the measure of all things,” and that there is no God, or at least no God to whom we owe worship and obedience. This is the sort of thing preachers denounce when they speak of “secular humanism.”

The second sees humanism as a project – moral, intellectual, artistic – to restore, improve, and perhaps even perfect the human species. To usher us into our true and noble inheritance.

The first camp is not compatible with Christianity, but I would argue that the second camp pursues a project of which Christianity is the proper fulfillment. Christianity is the true humanism because Jesus Christ as man is what humanity ought to be, and by his death and resurrection he makes it possible for that “ought” to become “is.” Augustine: “As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way“ (City of God XI.2).

The decline of Christianity in the West and its replacement as a key motive agent of society by liberalism entailed the exchange of a thick description of the human for an exceptionally thin one. Under liberalism, the human becomes the one who chooses its own way, and the role of society, including the political realm, becomes the facilitation of each human’s choice. This account is thin because it’s so simple, but the simplicity has certain virtues: in the light of liberalism’s one principle it becomes obvious, to many anyway, that the racist and sexist structures of the traditional social order are unjust and must be abandoned or at least seriously reformed. And this has been done, albeit inconsistently and imperfectly.

But as the thinness of liberalism’s anthropology – what Charles Taylor called the “Is That All There Is?” problem (A Secular Age, Chapter 8) – became more evident, alternatives with a thicker (if often also a coarser) account of human life began to emerge. And most of these are antiliberal and therefore antihumanist – because, remember, liberalism is a humanism, if an inadequate one. The various illiberalisms, on the Right and on the Left alike, have no room for the concept of the human.

Pause for what I hope will be a useful analogy: Back when I was devoting a good bit of my energy to cultivating ecumenical endeavors among small-o orthodox Christians, I discovered that there are some Roman Catholics for whom “non-catholic Christian” is a functional concept and some for whom it definitely is not, for whom the distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic is the only one that matters. The former might be willing to pursue ecumenical endeavors; the latter would not see the point. If I had pressed any people in that second group, they probably would have acknowledged that there are non-catholic Christians, but the fact was not relevant to them. It did not function as a concept in their ordering of the world. It cut no ice.

Something similar may be said of the illiberalisms of the Left and Right: they would probably acknowledge the existence of the category of the human, but not its relevance. They order the world by three categories: Us, Allies, and Enemies – that last being populated largely by the Repugnant Cultural Other. Thus in the assaults on liberalism humanism is also eviscerated.

In addition to those of the Right and the Left, there is one other antihumanism at work in the modern era, and that is the antihumanism of Capital: the reduction of men and women to machine, parts, instruments of commerce, either as Tools or as Targets. The great critic of Capital is usually thought to be Marx, but Marx’s response to the rise of a thoroughly dehumanizing industrial capitalism with an equally antihumanist account of the world has divided — so he and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto — between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. There’s no room in this analysis for the human. No, the great humanist critic of Capital is John Ruskin, who in The Stones of Venice and elsewhere denounced Taylorism before Frederick Winslow Taylor was even a gleam in his father’s eye.

Whether the antihumanism of modern Capital is a covert repudiation of liberalism or its natural and inevitable culmination is a question I don’t feel obliged to answer here.

But in any case, as the various illiberalisms and antihumanisms have risen and risen in power, we’ve seen various attempts to restrain and subdue those forces. Three such attempts are:

The reassertion of the liberal version of humanism as a secular alternative to the various illiberalisms and Christianity alike, all of which are seen as “extremist” and “intolerant.” (See Karl Popper, and, quite recently, Alexandre Lefebvre.)
The assertion of the vague colorless construct of “Judeo-Christian values” as the protector and guarantor of liberalism – liberalism’s Daddy, as it were.
The assertion of a robustly Christian anthropology as the only viable alternative to all antihumanisms. (This movement, in the intellectual realm as opposed to the populist realm in which Billy Graham and the larger evangelical movement largely operated, is the subject of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943.)

As the “humanism” tag on this blog suggests, I have thought quite a lot about these matters, and the one Great Conundrum for me continues to be this: Is the renewal of humanism a prerequisite for the renewal of Christianity – or the other way around? That is, does an embrace of humanism make Christianity more plausible, or must one become a Christian – one who believes that all humans are (a) made in the image of God and (b) ”fallen into sin, and become subject to evil and death” (BCP) – before the concept of the human becomes a living and vibrant one?

Beats me.

What I do feel sure of, though, is this: While there are great predecessors to the rearticulation of the human, like Ruskin, vast cultural energies were devoted to resisting antihumanism only in the middle third of the 20th century – basically the period from Lang’s Metropolis to Kubrick’s 2001. (I use cinema to establish those boundaries because cinema is the essential art form of this period, and the one most consistently occupied, if often in a subterranean sort of way, with “the question of humanism.” Even Cat People concerns the human and the nonhuman Other. But you could tell a similar story via any of the other arts. I could describe this as the period between Brave New World and Philip K. Dick, or between early-career George Orwell and early-career Joan Didion, or between Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Revolver.)

In the latter third of the 20th century, several forces combined to suppress the influence of humanism, and since then the antihumanists have been largely triumphant. But that is why I devote my attention to the artists and intellectuals of the mid–20th century: They were the last generations to really fight back. I’m speaking generally, of course: we have humanist artists today, though not so many that you’d notice. Today, most people in the West and in other parts of the world as well have won the victory over themselves: They love their antihuman Big Brothers. So on this blog and elsewhere I will keep turning to those figures of the middle of the previous century for lessons in resistance, lessons in courage, lessons in hope.

April 11, 2025

a brief thought on passengers and drivers

Here is Ivan Illich, from Energy and Equity (1974), his book written in the midst of a global energy crisis that heightened everyone’s sense of our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation:

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.

The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To “gather” for him means to be brought together by vehicles…. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue.

It’s interesting to reflect that you could replace just a few words here and have a good description of our current moment. For instance, “To ‘gather’ for him means to be brought together by vehicles” would make perfect sense today if you substituted “devices” for “vehicles.” In “He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role,” the term “passenger” could be replaced by “user.” A technological regime centered on the automobile has been replaced by one centered on smartphones. This is why teenagers today absolutely must have smartphones but are often indifferent to the possibility of learning to drive.

But for Matthew Crawford in Why We Drive (2020), to drive an automobile is to assert one’s freedom and responsibility. Crawford’s vision is compelling to many of us in a way it would not have been to Illich, and that is because we live in the Smartphone Era. For those of us who live under technocracy, to contemplate the previously dominant technology always feels like sniffing the air of freedom.

April 9, 2025

standards

From a while back, Charlie Warzel:

There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards of traditional outlets.

I think Warzel’s framing of the issue is telling. Anyone skeptical of contemporary American journalism would instantly flag the phrase “the rigor and standards of traditional outlets”: “Hey Charlie, I think you mean ‘the rigor and standards that traditional outlets claim to uphold but in fact do not.’”

Similarly, later in the piece, a conversation with the journalist Judith Angwin, Warzel addresses Angwin thus:

You write that “journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding something when we aren’t.

But aren’t you? For instance, was there not a concerted effort on the part of many MSM outlets to hide the diminishment of Joe Biden, a diminishment painfully and relentlessly documented in this long WSJ piece?

Any real self-reckoning by American journalists should begin with the recognition that they do have “rigor and standards” but apply them in wildly inconsistent ways, depending on whether the reporting at issue flatters or challenges the beliefs of the assumed audience and of the newsroom itself.

And this is true of all of us, isn’t it? Which is why a blog post from eleven years ago still repays our attention: Scott Alexander’s “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor.”