I’m not sure that posting something about this here is altogether appropriate given that it’s not an audiobook, despite being listed on Audible. This is the audio recordings of Fawlty Towers, the award-winning British comedy from the 1970s, made available with introductions from John Cleese and additional narration from Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel on the show. Listening to this made me more appreciative of the level of physical comedy that Fawlty Towers employs: Sachs does in-character narration to “fill in the blanks”, so to speak, but mere audio doesn’t translate all of the humor. Take, for instance, “The Germans”, which is one of the funniest episodes on the show, which has in its first half enough comedy for an entire hour, let alone fifteen minutes. Sachs/Manuel does a fine job providing narration to set up the hysterical scene where The Major confuses Manual practicing his English with a talking moose, but when the concussed and confused Basil is unwittingly antagonizing Germans in the dining room, there’s nothing at all. (“Here! I’ll do the funny walk!!!”) I can appreciate Sachs’ narration being limited to scene intermissions, but it didn’t serve all of the humor. Still, as someone who has watched this show an unhealthy amount of times, these recordings gave me laugh after laugh. I just don’t know that they’d work for someone who doesn’t have the shows in his head.
At the end of last week, I read Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent an interesting little book that chronicles May – June 1776 when the American colonies shifted from “having disputes with the King” to desiring outright independence. The author, William Hogeland, provides the additional interest of focusing on how local Philadelphia politics impacted the shape of the Second Continental Congress’s discourse. Philadelphia had a strong artisan class, one that was active and wanted a larger role in the government: there was a reason Pennsylvania’s state government was the most ‘democratic’ of the states, with a unicameral legislature and barely an executive at all. (John Adams, on reviewing its new constitution, snarkily commented that within a decade Pennsylvanians would be writing to King George and asking for relief from their constitution: sure enough, in 1790 Pennsylvania adopted a new constitution that was bicameral and had a stronger governor.) This book features John Dickinson and Samuel Adams in more elevated roles than they usually get, and was fun reading. I picked it up because it covers the period where the colonies effectively asserted independence long before they formally proclaimed it, by creating state constitutions that made no reference to George III’s authority. The book focuses narrowly on Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, though, instead of looking at the variety of constitutions the new States were creating.
It is impossible to be truly conservative nowadays without being consciously counter-cultural. This book will show you how lots of us are doing it and living it every single day.
Eleven years ago I stumbled onto a book called Crunchy Consby Rod Dreher. I’d begun moving towards ‘localism’ in my later progressive period (circa 2009 – 2011), and had found unexpected insight in online magazines with some localist-oriented writing like Front Porch Republic and The American Conservative, the latter of which Dreher wrote for. Though then still a progressive, the part of me that yearned for cooperation rather than partisanship found the magazine incredibly interesting: TAC writers’ New Urbanist and anti-war writing were nothing like I expected of Republicans. Something about Dreher especially intrigued me, and I sent off for this title. Although my review was mixed at the time, it would be the beginning of a long literary relationship with Dreher. He’s since become an absolute favorite — the only author I’ve ever wanted to meet, and in fact have done several times now. Because so much has changed in the last decade — myself, the world, Dreher himself — I wanted to go back and see what would happen.
The premise of Crunchy Cons (2007) is that there is a growing conservative counterculture, one created by the increasing lack of a difference between the uniparty’s wings, and more importantly the fact that political policy is failing, or simply can’t, address people’s needs for meaning and an authentic life. Instead, both parties, and indeed the general zeitgeist of modernity appear to see humans as purely economic creatures, getting and spending: the economy and material concerns are all they promote. While it’s common to associate the counterculture with 1960s-70s young people who scorned materialism and the ‘burbs and yearned to go back to the land, Dreher writes that there’s a kindred conservative counterculture that is rapidly emerging as creature-comfort goals continue to numb our souls and make it hard for us to breathe. (Okay, the Monkees reference was mine, I’ll admit.) He refers to these fellow travelers as “crunchy cons”, and offers that one thing that unites them — regardless of location, religion, etc — is an emphasis on “living sacramentally”. That phrase is one hard to define, but one I understood almost immediately — living with meaning, perhaps, and living and acting with intention.
What we do matters, Dreher writes, as does how we live. Consider our relationship with food. He devotes an entire chapter on our relationship with the food supply, questioning whether those who consider themselves conservative Christians can countenance a food supply based on horrors like confined animal feeding operations, where thousands of creatures live miserable existences, filled with medications to counterbalance the insanely unhealthy setting. Is this ‘dressing and keeping the garden’? — or is it plundering it? Against this, Dreher offers his and his wife’s experiences with their local organic farm’s CSA, and points out that not only is the food healthier from a nutritional point of view, it’s building relationships and contributing to creation rather than abusing it. Farmers like Joel Salatin and Wendell Berry (who has a heavy presence here) restore Earth through their husbandry, rather than consume it the way industrial agribusiness does. While Dreher believes the free market is still the best economic approach on offer, he’s staunchly against deifying it, or worse still, deifying Efficiency. CAFOs have made chicken cheap, but the price is exacted elsewhere — in the quality of the food, in the destruction of our right relationships with animals and the land, in the predatory ways big-ag treat their suppliers, who are sometimes little better than tenant farmers . Chasing cheapness in other areas has its prices, as factories shutter and the towns and families that depended on them fall apart. We ought to live in such a way that grace is present, that holiness comes down to Earth. On the subject of living gracefully, there’s a strong aesthetic sensibility in this, one that appears not only in the food chapter but throughout: Dreher argues for slowing down and focusing on the good, the true, and the beautiful, rather than thoughtlessly participating in the rat race. He and his wife made the decision to simplify their lives so that they could raise their children without daycare, and later doubled-down by homeschooling them to maintain participation in their lives. For the Drehers, family mattered far more than chasing the Joneses.
This was a fascinating book to return to, originally reading it as I did during a transitional period in my life — and not necessarily a transition I was at ease with. I had to laugh at the amount of overlap between books Rod and I had both read before I picked this up, and books he mentioned that would later have a big impact on me. Wendell Berry, as mentioned, is a heavy presence here, but I hadn’t yet discovered him — and while surely his insight would have of interest to me at the time, I didn’t read Berry until later that year, prompted not by this but by a Art of Manliness booklist recommending Jayber Crow. While reading this, I tried to remember my cast of mind in 2012 – 2013: it was a time of both confidence and confusion, as physically I’d gotten on a health kick and was really enjoying life, but mentally my college worldview had fallen apart and I was reading far and wide looking for answers. Currents of thinking and reading were not taking me to places that my “self” at the time necessarily wanted to go, though: this was back when reading Hayek and Kirk felt positively transgressive. When I read Crunchy Cons the first time, a lot resonated with me — more, I think now, than I was comfortable with at the time, hence the mixed review. In my head, I was still the confident college progressive: realizing my thinking was increasingly at odds with that identity was just as uncomfortable as my secular-humanist college self finding the writings of mystics and monks inexplicably fascinating.
It’s amusing to read that review in retrospect because of the way my thinking and my values have changed over the years: 2012 me was not too far removed from my Pentecostal past and my emotionally charged exit from it, and so was more hostile toward Dreher’s homeschooling his kids for religious-values reasons, among others, then ignoring the fact that his wife’s cohort of homeschooling moms were largely liberal women who wanted to be more involved in their children’s education and life and believed they could do it better than a teacher having to deal with a hundred kids a day. These days I’m far more critical of the public education system — having witnessed it via the library for 13.5 years now. What’s more, I regard a system in which parents are separated from their children for most of the day as profoundly abnormal and unhealthy, just as it is unhealthy for children whose very being wants to bound into the world instead be confined into boxes all day, compelled to stare at screens and work on developing their future emotional-mental disorders. While it’s easy for me to say that this owes in part to my ingesting a Chestertonian or say, Catholic view of the family over the years, I think it has deeper roots than that. I resonated with the Catholic social doctrine when I began studying it around this time (2014, I think) for the same reason I resonated with the Buddhist eight-fold path’s emphasis on “right livelihood”: there’s something in me that recognized the need for an integrated or holistic approach to life that serves the needs of the human person — not only our material needs, but our need to live the good, to have lives shaped by virtue and wisdom in which the various roles we play are not separate, but like the petals of a flower creating a beautiful whole. This emphasis on human flourishing has been one consistency in my thinking from say, 2006 forward.
I rather enjoyed going back to this, and the challenge it and my first review posed to me to reflect on my worldview as it changed. When I began reading it then, Rod and I already had points of agreement: a strong criticism of consumerism, a worldview that rejected materialism, and an interest in slower, simpler living. Areas where we diverged, like Rod’s more observant religion, I’ve actually grown closer to: back then I was a church-goer, yes, but liturgy hadn’t seeped into my soul yet, and I hadn’t yet gotten serious about Christian formation and praxis the way I would in the years to follow. Reading this made me like Rod all the more, simply because of the amount of bookish overlap we have: I’d read books he references, and in the years to come I’d read others he referenced, not because he referenced them but because that was where my currents of thought were taking me. Wendell Berry, for instance, would become a favorite in both nonfiction and fiction. There was additional interest in seeing how Rod’s thinking would develop over the years, with some chains of thought that would lead to The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder. His interview with Catholic and Orthodox crunchies also hinted at storms to come in Rod’s life — his already present anger and grief over the Catholic church’s behavior during the sex abuse scandal, and his attraction to Orthodoxy. While I can’t say “in short” given the length of this review, I can only reiterate how much I enjoyed going back to this, both for my fondness for the author and for the amount of thought it provoked as I read it.
So Many Quotes
Maybe instead we should create a new politics by asking: What’s good? What’s true? What’s beautiful? What’s authentically human?
Too many people who call themselves conservative share the same fundamental conviction of many liberals, namely, that individual fulfillment is the point of life. Conservative, perhaps, in their sexual views, they are, however, libertarian in their economic principles, and believe that the free market should be the guiding light of our lives together. Thus they believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to that merchant or manufacturer. They feel no particular responsibility to be good stewards of communal life or the natural world; if something of real value has been lost because of economic decisions, hey, that’s the free market. Cultivating an appreciation for art, architecture, and the world of beauty used to be considered by a previous generation of conservatives the mark of a civilized person; today, it is often disdained by many mainstream conservatives as an elitist pursuit. A college education is something you get solely as a ticket to a moneymaking career.
There is an older, less-ideological tradition, a sensibility that comes out in people I call crunchy conservatives. We are conservatives by conviction and temperament, and usually vote Republican (though to call us “liberal Republicans” is to fundamentally misunderstand us), but we’re “crunchy”—as in the slang for “earthy”—because we stand alongside a number of lefties who don’t buy in to the consumerist and individualist mainstream of American life.
Mainstream liberalism and conservatism, as the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry said, are “perfectly useless” to combat the forces in contemporary American society that are pulling families and communities apart. Berry says most liberals won’t take a stand against anything that limits sexual autonomy, and most conservatives won’t oppose anything that limits economic freedom.
The liberty we enjoy in America today is certainly worth prizing and defending, but it is insufficient to produce virtue, stability, or happiness. The free market in ideas, commerce, sexuality, and so forth offers various possibilities of how to live, but it tells us nothing of how we should behave to live as well as we ought. Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.
The answer is not to be found in a set of policy prescriptions, but in a considered critique of the assumptions on which mainstream American life is built, and a secession of sorts from the mainstream —all to conserve those things that give our lives real weight and meaning. Every one of us can refuse, at some level, to participate in the system that makes us materially rich but impoverishes us spiritually, morally, and aesthetically. We cannot change society, at least not overnight, but we can change ourselves and our families.
We should ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in, and want our descendants to live in, and ask whether the way we’re living today is likely to get us there. Ideas have consequences, after all, and too many conservatives have unthinkingly accepted the mainstream Republican view that there is nothing wrong with the country that the free market cannot x, at least over time. Unmoored from our philosophical grounding, we allow ourselves to be carried along on the swift currents of consumer culture, and end up in a place where “conservatism,” practically speaking, ends up as general approval of whatever commercial interests want to do.
We have become a society that gives the place of prime honor to material progress, placing the demands of the economy above the considerations of family, of community, of country, and even of religion. Consumerism has become our religion, and it is difficult to identify anything within the contemporary Republican Party that stands against the dogma of the Market Supreme.
Americans naively accept new technologies, thinking only of what these technologies can do, but never, said Postman,what they can undo.
“The number one advice I give to my students is to be a culture creator, not a culture consumer,” Schuchardt continued. “You have to have time to create, and to create, you have to get rid of those things that steal your time. TV is the great time-stealer in American life.”
A society built on consumerism must break down eventually for the same reason socialism did: because even though it is infinitely better than socialism at meeting our physical needs and gratifying our physical desires, consumerism also treats human beings as merely materialists, as ciphers on a spreadsheet. It cannot, over time, serve the deepest needs of the human person for stability, spirituality, and authentic community. We should not be surprised that it has led to social disintegration. What kind of economy should we have, then? I don’t know; I’m a writer, not an economist. I do know this: we can’t build anything good unless we live by the belief that man does not exist to serve the economy, but the economy exists to serve man.
The point is, we learned in this way that food, properly understood, is sacramental; it carries within it the care of the farmers who raised it and the merchant who sold it, the love and devotion of the hands that prepared it, and the happiness of the friends and family who share it.
I started looking into how the government regulates the meat industry. It was shocking to see how agribusiness has gamed the system to keep small meat producers marginalized. Our regulatory system is designed to favor industrialized meat production, with its factory farms, its cattle jacked up with antibiotics and growth hormones, and its chickens raised in cages filled with their own feces. As a conservative, I am angry about this, not only on behalf of the small businesspeople slapped around by the deep-pocketed agribusiness behemoths, but because of how industrialized agriculture has made a traditional agrarian way of life difficult if not impossible.
When I asked Robert what he has in common with liberal counterculturalists, he said that there’s a lot of antiestablishment contrariness in all of us—echoing the quip of Juli Loesch Wiley, a Catholic pro-life pacifist friend who says she went all the way from the left wing to the right wing without ever once trusting the government. (Hah!)
But something struck me, a quote by Saint Francis de Sales, who said that we should treat everything we have as a gift from God, and that we are a gardener caring for the king’s garden. That struck me so much, because what I’m talking about is the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. I don’t see how God could be pleased by the way so many of us eat. And that’s what motivates me. It’s stewardship of the body and of the earth. I just don’t understand why people have a problem with that.
How long do you think we can keep living as we do, destroying country life, rural traditions, and the countryside to produce mountains of processed food that makes us less healthy, and letting lay fallow the sacred trust we’ve been given by our forebears? Care for this trust obliges all of us, but conservatives, because we profess a particular commitment to upholding tradition, are especially responsible for stewardship of the land and its cultural legacy. If we live as if we have no duty to the land and the agrarian traditions of the people who live there, then we ought to be ashamed to call ourselves conservatives. We are no more than market-mad consumers who vote Republican, and whose commitment to conservative ideals ends the moment it costs us something.
If you’re like me, you’ll find as you grow older a strange new respect for the middle-class clichés you spent your smart-ass youth making fun of. Knife. Fork. Crow.
Thought experiment: You are standing at mass in the great Gothic cathedral at Chartres, beneath the vast symphonic complexity of the building’s soaring arches; now you are standing at the same ceremony inside an equally vast modern American suburban megachurch, which looks like an expensively built gymnasium or theater. Theologically, the ceremony has precisely the same meaning. But in which place do you feel closer to God, more aware of the holiness of existence? From which of these churches are you likely to emerge with a glow of exaltation? If a terrorist with a truck bomb forced you to choose which of these structures you’d rather see destroyed, would it make a difference to you? Why?
Notice: “outside of the norm that you see on TV.” The mark of the twenty-first-century nonconformist—the ability to imagine a life outside of the boundaries set for us by media culture.
“The common agonies we call ‘socialization’—playground cruelties, intimidating classroom snickers at mistakes, disabilities, or differences—more often serve to harden than to heighten the child’s sensitivity to other people’s pain. Homeschooled children for the most part don’t have to deal with that, and are more likely to retain their natural compassion.
Technology and wealth have given mankind dominion over nature unparalleled in human history. Everything in the tradition of conservatism— especially in traditional religious thought—warns against misusing that authority. Yet the conservative movement has become so infatuated with the free market and human potential that we lose sight of what Matthew described as our conservative belief “in man as a fundamentally moral and not merely economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” If we lose our ability to see nature with moral vision, we become less human, and more like beasts.
“Conservatives I respect a great deal are always telling us that man is not just an economic being, but a moral actor,” he said. “Well, there are moral costs to efficiency.”
“In America especially, we live beyond our means by consuming the portion of posterity, insatiably devouring minerals and forests and the very soil, lowering the water table, to gratify the appetites of the present tenants of the country,” [Russell] Kirk wrote.
Almost all on the religious right are Christians—and in this broad sense, I am on the religious right—but it’s odd how we limit our political concern to sexual issues. Jesus had as much or more to say about greed as he did about lust. But you will not find most American religious conservatives worrying overmuch about greed.
To see the world sacramentally is to see material things—objects and human actions—as vessels containing or transmitting ideals. To live in a sacramental world is to live in a world pregnant with meaning, a world in which nothing can be taken for granted, and in which no one or no thing is without intrinsic worth. If we live sacramentally, then everything we do and everything we are reflects the things we value.
In short, if one’s religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to nd a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don’t judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.
“I don’t understand why the social-justice people don’t drop their attachment to socialism and embrace the ideal of widely distributed property,” he said. “I don’t understand why patriotic conservatives don’t seem to care that soulless corporations are destroying the old weird America—a phrase coined, I think, by left-wing rock critic Greil Marcus. This is the rich, vital, genuinely diverse, eccentric America that conservatives love, or claim to love.”
A religion in which you can set your own terms amounts to self worship. It has no power to restrain, and little power to inspire or console in times of great suffering. No matter what religion you follow, unless you die to yourself—meaning submit to an authority greater than yourself—it will come to nothing.
American politics has come to resemble the First World War, when powerful armies clashed endlessly and fruitlessly, with neither side gaining much ground, both having forgotten what they were fighting for, remembering only who they were fighting against.
Recently an article at The Free Press which attributed the decline of the public library to the fact that they’ve become homeless shelters has been causing some chatter in some online librarian communities. While looking into it, this book was mentioned and I decided to give it a shot. As an urban librarian, I can testify that homeless patrons have become an everyday part of my working life, including mentally ill and often physically aggressive ‘patrons’ who have precipitated our installing panic buttons at desks throughout the building. Patrons who have witnessed the kind of drama we see on a weekly basis have often whispered, “Y’all need a cop up in here!”. Overdue is a memoir from a librarian who served in a Washington, DC library with such security concerns that female staffers were not advised to go into the stacks by themselves for fear of being accosted. It details a lot of the stress that Oliver and her colleagues endured on a daily basis the fear of being attacked, the anxiety caused by being thrust into social worker and first responder positions with no training or real support from the board, and the psychological drain that spending all day listening to people talk to themselves takes on a person.
As interesting as that element was, her chronic self loathing detracted enormously from it: regardless how stressed she is, Oliver hates herself for not being up to it, and appears to dislike that libraries are not completely re-orienting themselves (i.e. installing public showers) for this new ‘mission’. When the city assigns a police officer to monitor the branch, she feels utterly relieved at his presence, and simultaneously hates herself for feeling relieved that now there’s an armed man standing between her and her frequently-menacing public. (Not surprisingly, she burns out, quits, and is diagnosed with PTSD.) The memoir is only perhaps a third of this book, though, as there’s also an obnoxious history of public libraries that makes men like Benjamin Franklin — who created a lending library for a club he’d also created — out to be villains because their privately-created and self-financed library wasn’t inclusive enough. Her self-loathing and long train of irritating PC writing (capitalizing White, Black, and Brown like these are ethnicities, for instance) made for a generally tiresome read despite the salience that parts of the book had for me. I recognized, for instance, her need to completely retreat from social interactions for a time after work — though whereas I turtle-up for an hour, she confesses to withdrawing completely. It does provoke the question, though — what is the mission of the modern library, and how can American societies better respond to the mental illness crisis in a way that doesn’t simply shove it into the laps of librarians and cops?
Generally, I didn’t mind reshelving, but I tried to never linger in the area. Male coworkers had warned me early on not to—female employees were particularly vulnerable back there. If something was going to go wrong, it was going to go wrong in the Adult Fiction area.
As we approached the second door, he explained that if I’d started the day before, we wouldn’t have met because he’d been in court. A patron named Ms. Lee was suing him for the third time. He quickly explained that Ms. Lee thought she was responsible for creating a secret café on top of the Spy Museum at the behest of the FBI.
[L]ibrarians expect to encounter people from many backgrounds, experiences, and moods. Empathy is an essential part of the work if you want to do it in any meaningful way. Find empathy before anger, fear, or confusion. Find empathy before you lose your cool. Find empathy before you lose your shit. Empathy is a first line of defense in public servant jobs—people are less likely to yell at a calm and patient person.
The actual work of being a public librarian, of showing up to that same building five days a week to perform an unending range of tasks in an environment that was unpredictable, chaotic, and sometimes violent, had warped everything in my life. If someone had told me ten years earlier when I first entered my MLS program that this would be the trajectory of my career, and that I would be diagnosed with complex PTSD in large part because of my work as a librarian, I don’t think I would have believed them.
“I’ve found myself becoming more cynical and jaded as a librarian. I also find it disheartening that so few people outside the library realize just how much library workers put up with. It’s like a dirty secret people are fearful to talk about. We have to put on this happy, cheery facade of ‘everything is fine’ for fear of what? Losing public funding? I can’t even decompress and share the horrors of my experience with nonlibrary people because the attitude is ‘you read books all day, how bad can it be.’”
In a 2009 speech to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, author and literary critic William Deresiewicz cautioned the graduates about their constant exposure to social and news media: “You are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”
WHAT have you finished reading recently? An Audible presentation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
WHAT are you reading now? The Swamp Fox, a history of Francis Marion’s irregular warfare against the Brits during the Revolutionary War.
WHAT are you reading next? Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776, William Hogeland. This is an interesting period because the colonies made themselves legally independent by creating their own State constitutions, well before a formal Declaration was issued by the 2nd Continental Congress.
And now…..favorite quotes from books.
Oh, hey, I could totally cheat! But no, I’m not going to. I will, however, look back at that list to see how many of the items have stuck in my head for 13+ years. (I know one of them has, because searching for the exact quote was how I got that result.) Unfortunately, Top Ten Tuesday did a similar topic back in March with “Things Characters Said”, and a lot of my favorites are on that list. SO, I am going to restrict myself to nonfiction quotes. (We also did “Thoughtful Quotes” back in March, but a few of my very favorites are there so I’m not going to exempt them. Oh, and look, another Top Ten post on quotes! )
Neighborhoods like Georgetown or Beacon Hill are walking neighborhoods. It is not necessary to hop in the car to get an ice cream cone or a bottle of aspirin. You walk to a store — enjoying the felicities of the street as you go — and you are able to see other people along the way. You may even have a conversation with a stranger. This is called meeting people, the quintessential urban pleasure. (Or else it is called a mugging, the quintessential urban calamity.). The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Fall of America’s Man-Made Landscape; James Howard Kunstler)
“I explained — with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport — that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange. Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead.” (A Week at the Airport, Alain de Botton. One reason I like this quote so much is that de Botton is that voice for me.)
Who should ‘run’ America? No one. Or 250 million single individuals. Every man a king, every woman a queen, as the martyr Huey Long once sang. […] As Americans from Emerson to Mencken have known, following leaders is a fool’s game. Only when we restore to Americans their birthright — local self-government in prideful communities that respect the liberties of every dentist and Baptist and socialist and lesbian and hermit and auto parts dealer — will we remember what it means to be an American, first.” (America First, Bill Kauffman)
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people…and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
“I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to is lowest terms.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
If any man feels that the world is too complex and its evil is too big to cope with, let him remember that it is too big to drown in a glass of whiskey. – Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It?
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There’s not one of them which won’t make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn’t. If you leave out justice you’ll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials ‘for the sake of humanity’ and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.” – C.S. Lewis, MereChristianity.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. –C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” – Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Be not unhappy, or discouraged, or dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in acting always by the right principles; but when you have failed, try again, and be content if most of your acts are consistent with man’s nature. Love that to which you return; do not return to philosophy as if she were a schoolmaster, but behave like those who have sore eyes and apply a bit of sponge or an egg, or like another who applied a plaster of a water lotion. For thus you will not fail to obey reason, and will find rest in it. And remember that philosophy requires only the things which your nature requires. – Marcus Aurelius, the Meditations
But when I am in an airport, that most harried image of the eternal tarmac of Hell, crowded without community, noisy without celebration, technologically sophisticated without beauty, and see people engaged in loud conversations not with one another but with a business partner in Chicago or a spouse and children far away, I see not freedom but confinement. And above them all, as if to remind us of our unhappy state, blare the everlasting televisions, telling us What Has Just Happened and What it Means, and preventing us from ever experiencing a moment not of loneliness but of solitude, not of idleness but of peace. It too is a tool of the Anticulture. For culture by its nature is conservative. It remembers, it reveres, it gives thanks, and it cherishes. A farmer tilling the land his father tilled, whistling an air from of old, in the shadow of the church where his people heard the word of God and let it take root in their hearts—that is a man of culture. He might live only fifty years, but he lives them in an expanse of centuries; indeed, under the eye of eternity. How thin and paltry our four score and ten seem by comparison! For we are imprisoned in irreverence. Our preachers are neither the birds nor the old pastor peering over Holy Writ, but the nagging, needling, desire-pricking, noisome voice of the mass educator, or of the headline, or of the television, which could never have won our attention without encouraging in us amnesia, indifference, petulance, and scorn, all destroyers of culture. – Anthony Esolen, from a First Things article I can no longer find. Phooey.)
(I know this is eleven but I couldn’t decide between my CS Lewis quotes. Oh, and here’s a bonus from Jack!)
“[My father] relied wholly on his tongue as an instrument of domestic discipline. And here that fatal bent toward dramatization and rhetoric produced a pathetic yet comic result. When he opened his mouth to reprove us he no doubt intended a short well-chosen appeal to our common sense and conscience. But alas, he had been a public speaker long before he became a father. Words came to him and intoxicated him as they came. What actually happened was that a small boy who had walked on damp grass in his slippers or left the bathroom in a pickle found himself attacked with something like Cicero on Cataline, or Burke on Warren Hastings; simile piled on simile, rhetorical question on rhetorical question, the flash of an orator’s eye and the thundercloud of an orator’s brow, the gestures, the cadences, the pauses. […] While he spoke, he forgot not only the offense, but the capacities of his audience. All the resources of his immense vocabulary were poured forth. I can still remember such words as ‘abominable”, “sophisticated”, and “surreptitious”. You will not get the full flavor unless you know an angry Irishman’s energy in explosive consonants and the rich growl of his r’s.”
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is books with honorifics like Doctor, Mrs, etc. I went back through my booklists all the way to 2018 to find enough titles. First up, though, a tease!
Another times, [Franklin] was playing with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of [chess], he promptly captured it. “Ah,” said the duchess, “we do not take the Kings so.” Replied Franklin in a famous quip: “We do in America.” BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE, Walter Isaacson
(4) Dr. Johnson’s London, Liza Picard. A social history of 18th century London.
(5) The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest Gaines. The story of a woman who was a child when slavery ended, who lived to see the peak of the Civil Rights
(6) No More Mr. NiceGuy, Richard Glover. A self-help men for book advising them to stop living for the expectations/judgements of others, especially those disposed to look down on them to begin with.
(7) The Prince of Frogtown, Rick Bragg. A memoir-biography of Bragg’s troublesome father.
(8) The Awakening of Miss Prim, Natalie Sanmartin Fenollera. A cozy-philosophical novel about a librarian who moves into a village where everyone is interested in a humane life.
(9) Becoming Mrs Lewis, Patti Callahan. A novel about the relationship between Joy Davidman & C.S. Lewis.
(10) Every Man a King, Bill Kauffman. The story of a disgraced pundit who moves back to his Upstate New York hometown and tries to find meaning in his life again.
Ohh, dear reader, this is Kenneth Branagh as you’ve never experienced him. When I saw a seven-volume set of The Chronicles of Narnia on goodreads available for a single credit, with each book narrated by talents like Branagh and Patrick Stewart, I couldn’t resist — nor would I have wanted to had I could. Nevermind the fact that I already have a CD set of Narnia that’s an audiodrama narrated by Paul Scofield, with other vocal casting.
For the uninitiated, The Magician’s Nephew is chronologically first in the Narnia series, though not the first written. The book opens on a pair of kids, Digory and Polly, who become part of an unwitting experiment by Digory’s rascal of an uncle, Andrew. Andrew is an amateur magician, meaning in CS Lewis’ world he’s a reckless dilettante fooling with matters beyond his ken. Digory and Polly are thrown by a advice of Andrew’s creation into The World Between the Worlds, a peaceful wood dotted with pools that they realize can be used to travel to different “Worlds”. On their first attempt at visiting another place, they find a dying place and temptation — temptation that Digory can’t resist, and a choice that leads to the arrival of Jaydis, later known as the White Witch. As the story develops, the children will witness the Creation of Narnia, the order of which mirrors the Creation recorded in Genesis, and then meet Aslan and still more temptation. When I first read this some ten years ago, I liked the story but considered it the least of the Narnia tales. Here, I delighted in it much more, in large part due to the vocal talents of Kenneth Branagth. I’ve long favored Branagth as an actor, watching him in numerous versions of Shakespeare stories — he made a marvelous Iago, and an even better Harry the Prince — but here he shines vocally. The sheer variety of choices and characters he did was impressive, and some of them are absolutely hilarious. One of his critters sounded like of the vultures from The Jungle Book.
This was a wonderful rendition of Magician’s Nephew. I’m currently most of the way through The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, read by Michael York. (All are gathered at the Stone Stable, and Jaydis is about to demand the life of the traitor Edmund.)
“From the halls of MONteZUUUUUUMA, to the shores of Tripoli” — ever wonder where that Tripoli business comes from? While I’d sometimes encountered references to the early United States having issues with pirates in the Med in its early history, it’s not a story I ever looked into. Recently, however, Gordon S. Wood’s Friends Divided mentioned Adams and Jefferson’s initial disagreement with how to handle the problem. What was the Tripoli problem? Four Islamist states along North Africa had developed a nasty habit of sallying forth, seizing ships and enslaving their crews or passengers under the mantra that all non-Muslims were fair game.While these states’ navies were not all that daunting, continental powers like England and France had larger problems that their navies were needed for (problems like France and England), so they simply paid off the looters. American ships had been covered under the Union Jack, but after Independence the Stars and Stripes represented a new target. At first, Jefferson tried to reason with the grand poobahs who controlled the pirates and work out a diplomatic solution, but founded they wanted an absurd amount of money. As other American officers would find out in the course of this history, they were also treacherous. The American government at tried to make a payment, only to be met with humiliation as the George Washington forced to carry tribute and slaves to the bloated royals of Constantinople. Soon the US Navy was dispatched in increasing numbers, and a great victory was won — only to be dashed by some diplomat oblivious to the military scene making a treaty under his own authority. Having seized a city with an exiled royal in tow — planning for some regime change — the Americans were forced to steal away in the middle of the night.
As with other Brian Kilmeade works, this is definitely pop history with a lot of flash: there is substance there, enough to prompt me to more serious reading, but it’s one I’d be careful about recommending except to those who already know to be cautious. Some reviewers on goodreads took issue with the “islamophobia” of Kilmeade’s approach, but Gordon Woods in his far more substantial Friends Divided also noted that Jefferson was prompted to use overwhelming force by the states’ “Islamic fatalism”. Given Islam’s perpetual problem with bloody borders I’m inclined to give Kilmeade the benefit of the doubt, but may follow this up with something like Lambert’s The Barbary Wars, which is more formal.
“You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”
When I first read Gordon S. Wood, his Revolutionary Charactersannoyed me in its short shrift given John Adams. Adams was one of the earliest voices inveighing against Parliament’s abuses of the American colonies, and I was flabbergasted that he was shoved to the back of the book along with a knave like Aaron Burr. In Friends Divided, he gets the attention he merits, alongside his friend and sometimes rival Thomas Jefferson. This is a double character study that explores not simply the rupture in their friendship that saw an eleven-year silence between them, but their differing views as they evolved throughout the men’s multi-decade friendship and political partnership. The book is wonderful in giving a fair notion as to how complex the minds and character were of these two men; he does not try to box and label them up, but draws heavily on their own writing (manuscripts and letters) to allow them to speak for themselves. While I was already familiar with the course of Adams and Jefferson’s friendship via Joseph Ellis, this goes into more detail and proved one of my favorite reads of this year.
Adams and Jefferson, despite their early working relationship and friendship, were two very different men. They hailed from two very different colonies, and from within different classes within those colonies. Adams came from fairly humble stock, that of a yeoman farmer whose hard and humble work had made it possible to send his boy to school – -even if the young John Adams was perfectly content at being a farmer. All Adams could boast of was his ability and desire to work, and in his studies of law and history he would be among the elite of the founding generation’s intellectuals. He was an absolute workhorse as an attorney, building a successful practice for himself before Parliament’s abuses of the colonies drove him into politics. Jefferson, on the other hand, came from more rarefied stock, and he was partially raised by relatives whose blood ran even more blue. Whereas Adams came from a rough & tumble world, Jefferson was manor-born, raised in grace and civility — at least, in the manor, removed as it was from his fields where slaves raised tobacco. Perhaps their disparate backgrounds contributed to their differing casts of mind: Adams was realistic to the point of cynical, believing people were inherently flawed and that progress could only ever be a tentative thing. Jefferson was more of an Enlightenment idealist, believing humanity could flower were institutions like government and organized religion in the way, and seeing America was the perfect place to see the next steps of humanity.
Friends Divided follows the two men’s lives through their becoming friends amid the Revolution, and their service to the early Republic. It was there, when principles met power, that the two began to grow apart. Although Adams and Jefferson had both gone to law school, it was Adams who lived, breathed, and had his very being within the law. It was the law — the English common law — that gave Adams his name and what success he had created for himself in the world, and he took it far more seriously than Jefferson, who was more more fascinated by architecture and making his home — food and servants included — as French as possible. For Adams, law was the thing that made civilization at all possible, and he not only admired the English legal constitution, he despised the actions of those like the French revolutionaries who would burn the world down to try to recreate it a new image. (He had similar views on religion, despite being more of a Unitarian, he regarded religion as fundamental element of society and his appreciation for Christianity grew with the years..) Adams correctly predicted the revolution would end in bloodshed and disaster, and his and Jefferson’s differing attitudes toward their English heritage and the”promise of the French revolution” not only led to arguments but political issues as they both served as President during the French revolution’s aftermath and the rise of l’emperour. This divide between English sympathies and French sympathies was not limited to these two men: there were armed mobs fighting each other in the capital, and a surge of French immigrants made the tension even thicker and more volatile. While Adams thought Jefferson and his compatriots’ wilful bindness as to the revolution’s bloodlust was mad, Jefferson thought Adams’ own attachment to the nation they’d thrown off political ties to — and his working with arch-Federalists like Hamilton who wanted a far more centralized and potent nation-state than either man would be comfortable with — was similarly naive. (Of course, whereas Jefferson was the leader of the “Republicans”, Adams was disliked by the Hamiltonian Federalists as well for being too sympathetic to Jefferson!) Bickering between the two of them would entail a long silence after Adams’ departure from the Federal City.
In the last few chapters, Wood looks at the successful efforts of Dr. Benjamin Rush to reunite the old friends, and this is honestly enjoyable because the reader is allowed to experience the men as men. Adams, fires off letter after letter, gabbing about whatever he’s been reading and thinking, often being facetious and trying to get a rise out of Jefferson. Jefferson, for his part, had far more celebrity status and couldn’t write as much to Adams (having many other people to write to, so much so that he dreaded the arrival of the post), but was responsive. As the larger anniversaries of the Declaration approached, Adams wryly noted that he was suddenly getting more invitations to join societies and the like, as the men of the Second Continental Congress were being pushed into sainthood. Woods notes that while Adams’ view of government was likely more accurate in the long-term , there is a reason that Jefferson’s name lives where Adams’ has only lately been recovered by the efforts of David McCullough. While Adams said things people do need to hear, Jefferson said things that inspired people to be more – and his view of America as a transcendental nation was far more able to cope with the nation the Thirteen United States grew into, with varying ethnicities and religions than Adams’ stricter view that tied it to its English legal heritage.
There is a great deal more in this book than could ever be packed into a simple review as this one. I was much impressed by it, enjoying the narrative as well as the diverse details, the long study of these extraordinary men’s lives. I’ll definitely be reading more Wood.
Quotes and Highlights (I read from both the physical and kindle versions):
But despite all that the two patriot leaders shared and experienced together—and the many things they had in common are impressive—they remained divided in almost every fundamental way: in temperament, in their ideas of government, in their assumptions about human nature, in their notions of society, in their attitude toward religion, in their conception of America, indeed, in every single thing that mattered. Indeed, no two men who claimed to be friends were divided on so many crucial matters as Adams and Jefferson. What follows is the story of that divided friendship.
“How could any Man judge,” wrote Adams in 1761, “unless his Mind had been opened and enlarged by reading.”
Jefferson’s ability to play the violin may have been more important to his courtship than a coat of arms. A story passed down through the family had two rival suitors arriving at Martha Wayles Skelton’s house at the same time. Ushered into the hall, the two men heard from an adjoining room the young widow’s harpsichord and soprano voice blending with Jefferson’s violin and tenor voice in wonderful harmony. After listening for a stanza or two, the two suitors, realizing what they were up against, took their hats and retired, never to return.
Adams tended to be more frank and honest in displaying his feelings. No one in the Congress had any doubts where he stood, and no one did more to move the delegates toward independence. Adams, Jefferson later told Daniel Webster, “was our Colossus on the floor” of the Congress. He was “not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent.” But, said Jefferson, Adams in debate could come out “with a power, both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats.”
Adams, alive and sensitive as he was to the world around him, soaked up as much of Philadelphia as he could. He was especially impressed by the number of different churches in the city, and each Sunday he went to two or three services in order to experience nearly all of them: Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker, German Moravian, and Roman Catholic. He had never been in a Catholic cathedral before, and that experience, as he reported to Abigail, revealed not only his extraordinary sensuousness but also his religious sensibility.
ADAMS’S EXPERIENCE IN EUROPE was different from Jefferson’s. For Jefferson the luxury and sophistication of Europe only made American simplicity and virtue appear dearer, while for Adams Europe represented what America was fast becoming—a society consumed by luxury and vice and fundamentally riven by a struggle between rich and poor, gentlemen and commoners.
“Reasoning has been all lost. Passion, Prejudice, Interest, Necessity has governed, and will govern, and a Century must roll away before any permanent and quiet System will be established.”
Both men enjoyed showing off their wide knowledge of Greek, Latin, and modern literature. Indeed, their letters often exploded with kaleidoscopic displays of learning in classical and Christian texts that are bound to leave a modern reader thoroughly abashed. At age seventy-five, Jefferson offered a long disquisition on the difference between the pronunciation of ancient and modern Greek, followed by a learned discussion of the changes in the pronunciation of American English. For his part Adams once mentioned Archytas, the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher, and followed that up by pointing out that “John Gram a learned and honourable Dane has given a handsome Edition of his Works with a latin translation and an ample Account of his Life and Writings.”
Adams said he considered Jefferson to be as good a Christian as Priestley. But that was not much of a compliment, since Adams later went out of his way to disparage Priestley “as absurd inconsistent, credulous and incomprehensible as Athanasius” and no different from all those other so-called “rational Creatures,” the utopian French philosophes.
It was a good thing for judges to be independent of a king, but it was a gross error to make them independent of “the will of the nation.”
“Public Virtue is no longer to Rule: but Ambition is to govern the Country…..Call it Vanity or what you will,” but Adams believed his and Washington’s administrations were the last expressions of selfless disinterested government. In the future, all the American people could hope for was that they might “be governed by honorable, not criminal, ambition.”
According to Quincy, Adams actually looked forward to his death, when like Cicero he would meet up with all those he had known. “Nothing,” he said, “would tempt me to go back” and relive his life, which was what Jefferson was willing to do. “I agree with my old friend, Dr. Franklin, who used to say on this subject, ‘We are all invited to a great entertainment. Your carriage comes first to the door; but we shall all meet there.’” If Franklin had become his “old friend,” then Adams had indeed mellowed.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Friends Divided, Gordon S. Wood. This book is why I’ve been so review-quiet the last week: it’s a beefy boy.
WHAT are you currently reading? I’m listening to Kenneth Branagh read The Magician’s Nephew, which is first-series wise in The Chronicles of Narnia. That’s more of a casual in-the-car thing, though. I haven’t committed to my next “real” read.
WHAT are you reading next? As I mused last week, I think Friends Divided will start a minor binge. I’ve picked up Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates as well as Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. I’d like to read about members of the founding generation I know comparatively little about, though, especially John’s cousin Samuel Adams, the original Son of Liberty.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews asks for literary worlds we’d like to visit. First and foremost would be Narnia, of course, preferably during the reign of the kid-kings when there’s no drama happening that requires a book being written about it. Then there’s Middle-Earth — the Shire, thank you, not Mordor or any place with monstrous spiders. I would love to visit, too, the innocent world of Bertie Wooster and join him while he legs it over to the Drones club for a few lemon squashes and general evasion of responsibilities. Oh, and can’t forget the little village from The Awakening of Miss Prim, which somehow evaded social disruptions of industrialism and modernity, and where people go around drinking tea and discussing GK Chesterton. Last, Port William, but before World War 2 — where one can still hang around Jayber’s barbershop and listen to what Burley Coulter has been up to this time.
Today’s topic makes me sigh a bit on the inside,because one of my intended themes for 2025 was “The Great Re-Read”, in which I’d re-read a few books that played substantial parts in changing my thinking 10-15 years ago. So far, I’ve re-read two books, only one of which could qualify for that initial premise, and none of the ones I really had in mind. And I’ve BOUGHT COPIES of the books, too, because back in the day I was reading them from university libraries. Ah, well. Oh, here’s a tease first:
In fact, said Adams, almost a half century before Tocqueville made the same penetrating observation, the desire for distinction was even stronger in egalitarian America than elsewhere. Aristocrats, of course, had to keep up their distinctiveness, “or fall into contempt and ridicule.” But in America “the lowest and the middling people,” despite their continual declamations against the rich and the great, were really no different. They were as much addicted to buying superfluities as the aristocracy. Indeed, “a free people,” said Adams, “are the most addicted to luxury of any.” (FRIENDS DIVIDED)
(1) The Meditations, Gregory Hays. I’ve read The Meditations full through twice at least, but with different translators. The Hays is a translation I’ve grown to prefer in recent years despite never going all-in on it. Hays strikes a good balance between the beauty of language and modern meaning — a bit like the RSV treatment for the Bible, I’d say. (I read the RSV bible, but I quote the KJV.)
(2) Crunchy Conservatives, Rod Dreher, a book on counter-culture conservatives, those who grow their own food, homeschool their kids, etc. When I read this I was still in a bit of transition point in my thinking about economics, politics, values, and such: I left the book a very mixed review, but found Dreher interesting enough to continue reading him online, and he’s since become one of my absolute favorite authors, alongside Wendell Berry and Anthony Esolen. He’s literally the only author I’ve ever taken a photo with.
(3) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. It’s funny, but I can never post a review of this book that would do justice to it — not only to it itself, but the amount of times I’ve mentioned it. It shattered my worldview in the first hundred pages.
(4) Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Joseph & Frances Gies. The book that destroyed my Victorian conceit of the medieval period as one of intellectual stagnation and pushing-mud-round.
(5) Techopoly, Neil Postman. One of the two fundamental books in my own tech-skepticism. along with Nicholas Carrs’ The Shallows.
(6) That book series I read as a kid about forest animals who lived on the edge of human farms. The series was both realistic and fantastic; its fantastic element was the notion of birds, frogs, badgers, etc being able to talk — but the book was realistic in that its animals were animals. They weren’t donning robes and fighting with swords against vole-armies threatening their monastery a la Redwall. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the series or any of its titles.
(7) The Plain Reader, various authors. A collection of essays on simple or plain living.
(8) The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, Michael Foley. I read this thirteen years ago at the suggestion of Cyberkitten: the book sits on my bed’s headboard bookcase, I’ve re-read it several times, and still no review.
(9) Weapons of Satire, Mark Twain. On Twain as an anti-imperialist, railing against the Spanish-American war and DC’s subsequent occupation of the Philippines.
(10) Race with the Devil, Joseph Pearce. This was a fascinating story about a man who came of age preaching race-hate, but whose life was changed by grace via literature — specifically, GK Chesterton — and repented and later became a literary biographer and Catholic apologist.
Reading Freely 