The post The Childlike Innocence of the American Protester appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>The pairing of seemingly lawless behavior with an expectation of firm legal restraint has a long tradition in the United States—hence Friedrich Engels’s observation that America had bourgeois radicals, bourgeois conservatives, and bourgeois bourgeoisie. In nineteenth-century St. Louis people went to court twice as often then as they do now (on a per capita basis), and four times as often in a seventeenth-century Virginia county. All this fastidiousness about rights during a period in American life we associate with freedom so great that it borders on anarchy.
European novelists caught the contrast with humor. In The American Senator, the English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–82) sends a visiting US Senator, Elias Gotobed, into the English countryside, where the local hunt rides over a small farmer’s land whether the farmer likes it or not. “Without compensation?” the senator wonders aloud. Only what compensation the lord himself chooses to give, comes the answer, leaving the senator confused and Trollope’s English reader chuckling. For here is a man from a country that boasts of being free and easy, fussing over a day’s sport in the language of a lawsuit. It’s funny the way it’s funny when a wild party-goer pauses mid-dance to straighten a picture frame. (Funnier, still, because the senator is not wrong.)
The senator takes up the farmer’s cause and even pays toward his lawsuit. But over time, as he watches the farmer lie, wheedle, and quietly take the lord’s money, he comes to like the aristocrat better. He simply admits it. In a letter home to a congressman friend, he concedes that the lord, in his kind, is a much better man than the poor man is in his. There is no adult face-saving, no effort to dress the preference up as a principle. He sets it down as plainly as a schoolboy confessing he likes the wrong team, the way a child might say, “I know I’m supposed to be on the little man’s side, but I like the lord better.” Having said so, he still believes the lord was in the wrong.
The Russian novelist Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) touched on the same contrast when recounting his boat trip to America in 1904. On board, his group had a pleasant talk with an American antisemite. The Russian antisemites in the group naturally assumed the man would want to restrict the rights of Jews, as they did. Shocked and angry, the American replied, “It is true that I dislike those people, but it doesn’t follow that I want their rights restricted.” The Russians scratched their heads. Again, the reader laughs, for we expect moral indignation from the virtuous, and here it comes from a man who has just confessed a prejudice. He is a bigot and a defender of principle at once, and has no idea the combination might look odd. His logic is a schoolboy’s: “I don’t like him, but you can’t take away his turn!” His anger at the Russians is that of a child who has caught someone cheating at a game. He isn’t weighing costs and benefits; the rule is simply the rule.
This is why it’s hard not to laugh at the American protester shouting, screaming, and calling for revolution, before suddenly clutching at the American establishment’s founding principle. Marx once said that it is not consciousness that determines life, but rather life that determines consciousness. So it is even among our revolutionaries, who imagine standing outside the stream of American history and re-making the world with new ideas, yet who cannot keep from behaving along the same old lines as their American ancestors, whom they rebel against.
They seem proud of making a small sacrifice, such as missing meals in the college cafeteria or getting scraped on the concrete during a protest, the way children are proud of an illness.
Even funnier when that old groove of thought has a childlike quality to it. It’s funny the way it’s funny when a food-fight participant who throws mashed potatoes at everyone objects angrily when someone sneaks over and sits down in his chair. The American radical protester’s cry, “Don’t touch me!” is pure playground law, like “That’s mine!” The feelings are uncontained; the boundary is held with a child’s rigid certainty.
What joins the senator, the boat passenger, and the American protester is a distinctively American notion of individual sovereignty: a firm boundary exists around each person—their property, their rights, their body—that holds no matter how others feel about them. Other Western peoples subscribe to the same principle, though perhaps not so deeply. A European who professed it while voicing bigoted views might be dimly aware of some inner contradiction. The three Americans described above feel none. They have instead an almost childlike naïveté, joined to a habit of mind so typically American that it might be a factory setting. This is what makes them comical. We laugh at them the way we laugh at Colonel “Bat” Guano in Dr. Strangelove, who, when asked to shoot open a Coca-Cola machine for the coins needed to call the president and stop a nuclear war, does so only after warning that they will have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company—and who sees nothing ridiculous in doing so.
The word childlike may be the operative one. And I do not say this pejoratively. In some ways, such behavior is adorable, even praiseworthy. When early twentieth-century European novelists compared America sitting at the table with the great European powers to an adolescent who has gained a seat after suddenly becoming heir to an enormous fortune, they meant it as a kind of backhanded compliment. The adolescent may not be as well-versed in the ways of the world, but he or she is also not yet jaded. He or she still has the starry-eyed hope and optimism of the young person, along with drive and energy. The adolescent “thinks big”; everything is still possible. The adolescent does not imagine being subject to the law of life, in contrast with the adult who has learned through years of trial and misery that no one is fully master of any situation for any length of time. In contrast, the radical European protesters in the most recent riots seem affected by a different past, with their history of devastating wars and crushing tyrannies. They know the law of the sharks, and they seem to have better insight into the basic forces that remain perennial in the human political field, along with a better grasp on the rules of the larger game of power.
French writer André Maurois (1885-1967), a visiting college professor at an American university, praised this childlike quality in American students. “The [American] faith in the future of humanity rested me after so much European negativism,” he wrote.
It explains some of my own impressions of the more radical college protesters on campuses and in the streets. In some ways they differ little from the vast majority of American college students studying for the purpose of getting a job. Both groups “think big”—the first in forging a new society, the second in forging an illustrious career. In the case of American radicals, many of them cling to political ideas whose names they did not know a few months before. The things they dwelled on before they entered higher education—bikes, balls, and the other possessions of childhood, which once seemed so full of importance—now strike them as foolish and contemptible. A great unused capacity for emotion had been lying in wait for the first cause that seemed to deserve it. Having discovered both new faculties of mind and a cause, they now refuse to take a moderate stance toward anything.
Yet they still enjoy the peculiar, childlike pleasure of interrupting people with shouts, rhymes, or the banging of a drum, the way children gloat over the idea of upsetting the plans of adults. They seem proud of making a small sacrifice, such as missing meals in the college cafeteria or getting scraped on the concrete during a protest, the way children are proud of an illness, knowing that danger makes them doubly important to the rest of the family.
This moral simplicity in Americans—feelings said plainly, rules held absolutely, and little of the grown-up art of compromise, concealment, or expedience—has long been the butt of European jokes. Edward Steiner (1866–1956), an immigrant to America and a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, once escorted a visiting German professor, worldly and cynical, through American colleges. At the end of the journey, the professor said of the Americans: “The most materialistic people on earth in your relationship to each other, [yet] you leap into remarkable idealism in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is true that ‘God takes care of children and fools,’ then God is taking wonderfully good care of you Americans, who seem to me to be both.”
The professor meant it as a put-down. I am less sure it is one. The child who rolls on the pavement screaming against the system, before freezing and crying, “Don’t touch me!” is ridiculous. But the child is also reciting, without knowing it, the oldest promise our system makes. That makes the child a fool but also something better, making the joke at least partly on America’s critics.
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]]>The post Laughing Matters appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>He also regularly made his own life story into a bit of a tall tale, not just in stand-up, but also in interviews and other “serious” formats. The culmination of that practice was his brilliantly fake “memoir,” Based on a True Story. But in countless interviews, when he casually dropped little tidbits about his life, from his education to his drinking habits to whether he was a “deeply closeted gay guy,” one could never quite tell whether what he said was true, an exaggeration, a straightforward joke, or intentional obfuscation. Even many of his own friends and acquaintances weren’t sure of the veracity of his life story. “You can either look at your life as a series of facts,” he told Larry King, “or you could look at it more overarchingly as a truth.”
It’s no coincidence, then, that the new Netflix documentary on his life directed by Judd Apatow is subtitled The Tale of Norm Macdonald. The “tale” is made up entirely of archived footage, and its only narration comes from Norm himself, taken from the audiobook of the above-mentioned memoir or from other interviews. It aims more at that overarching, ineffable truth that Norm described—something you can observe in a life, but can’t quite write down.
And there’s plenty to work with. Norm was extremely intelligent, even though his comedic approach often entailed playing the “dumb guy.” He was also deeply introspective. He suffered from bowel cancer in his twenties and thought often about death, faith, and the human condition in the postmodern world. He was a devoted reader of great literature, especially Tolstoy. And of course, for over his last eight years, he waged his courageous battle [Warning: profanity in the link] with leukemia without telling anyone outside his immediate family and agent. He was a joke maker who was very familiar with the deeper questions of human life.
But like most good comedians, he wasn’t out there to show off his own smarts. His intelligence manifested in his ability to puncture the stupidity around him—usually not by straightforward mocking, but by subversion. If his narrated life story, and quite a few of his most memorable bits, entailed a good deal of extended bull—–ting, it was because he was highly aware of just how much manufactured BS makes up the world around us. The self-importance of Hollywood and celebrity life; therapeutic culture, with its insistence on the “authentic self”; political correctness and wokery: all these were regular targets.
Since he was taking aim at common, popular sentiments, he did not care a whit about how many laughs he got—as long as the joke was good. His SNL collaborator Jim Downey has said in an interview (sadly not included in the documentary) that they were particularly trying to make people laugh at things that they didn’t want to laugh at. Sometimes, the joke was on the audience. And in at least one case, it was on his bosses.
That instance was, of course, when he lost the most mainstream entertainment job he ever had—host of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” When NBC executives told him and Downey to curtail their endless stream of OJ Simpson jokes, they only opened the spigot more fully, likely driven on by the fact that the West Coast president of NBC was close friends with Simpson.
After he was fired, he was unable to find a regular place in Hollywood. His movie, Dirty Work, flopped, his sitcom was quickly canceled, and he never found a regular home on TV or film. Instead, he continued stand-up, was a regular on late-night shows, and became a self-described “internet sensation” on Twitter.
The View may represent the very antithesis of Norm’s disposition toward the world.
This institutional homelessness becomes a main motif of the documentary. Today, to find “the best of Norm Macdonald,” one searches YouTube for radio and podcast appearances, grainy stand-up recordings, and clips from late-night shows, especially Letterman and Conan (where he delivered his iconic “moth joke”). The film pieces its footage together as if a user is browsing the Internet to find it. This format allows Norm to do most of the talking. It also makes it possible to bring up some of the serious themes (death, faith, love) that are manifest in Norm’s life, without ever having a single voice of authority tell you what to think about them—or him. That is fitting, since Norm, skeptical as he was of all the world’s conceits, was also very aware that he did not have all the answers.
It’s no coincidence that not one but two of Norm’s most awkward and infamous performances came on The View, which may represent the very antithesis of Norm’s disposition toward the world. There, the hosts take the topics of the day—unaware or pretending to be unaware of how fleeting and manufactured they usually are—and discuss them with great earnestness. It goes without saying that it’s extremely important to have an opinion about it all. To quote Tolstoy, for such people “to have views is just as indispensable as to have a hat.” Yet the discussion rarely goes past “how I feel about it.” There is no room for doubt either about the importance of the swirling daily narrative, the absolute authority of your own emotional reaction, or the necessity of voicing your opinions.
When Norm, who jokes elsewhere in the film that he “ha[s] no opinions,” appeared on the show just after the 2000 election and was asked about his views on George W. Bush, he put on a masterclass of trolling, wearing a folksy persona and insisting on the conspiracy theory that Bill Clinton had killed Vince Foster and/or others: “We ought to get the murdering out of the White House!” He sticks to the bit of an earnest guy (“We all have our opinions,” he says at one point), just saying what he thought was “common knowledge.” It’s fair to say it short-circuited the brains of the hosts and audience.
It was inevitable that Norm would get in trouble in the woke era. After voicing support for Roseanne Barr and Louis C. K. in the midst of their respective cancelations, he issued an apology, which was itself “offensive” enough to require a further apology. Then (once again on The View) he apologized for the apology in a way that required a third apology. (The details are well worth looking up.) Though the film treats the episode at face value, it’s hard not to wonder whether it’s possible that Norm was committing to an extended, career-threatening, but otherwise perfect bit.
His cancelation woes came about from defending friends that he had known for years. And that is the most poignant theme of the documentary. He was a genuinely loving person operating in an environment that often treats people as disposable.
In a close runner-up for most infamous appearance, Norm participated in The Comedy Central Roast of his friend Bob Saget by reciting unimaginably corny one-liners that he says he found in a 1950s book of jokes to tell at retirement parties. (“She may be a vegetarian, but she’s still full of baloney in my book!”) By the end of the long segment, the baffled audience sits in complete silence, aside from Saget and a couple of other comedians who recognized the performance as one great joke made up of many bad ones.
On the one hand, he was poking fun at the ludicrous pretensions of the “roast” format—that we (well, that celebrities) have progressed so far beyond the need for common decency that we can hurl the most vulgar and degrading insults imaginable at one another all while chuckling over a cocktail. But the film also shares later testimony from Saget and others that reveals a second reason Norm chose that bit: that Saget was his good friend, and he just didn’t like the idea of saying nasty things to a person he cared about.
When one sees through the BS and self-importance that swirls all around us, it’s very easy to become smug and overly impressed with oneself. Other comedians, such as Bill Maher or Ricky Gervais, for instance, poke at many of the same pretentions that Norm did, but Norm never displayed the kind of sneering pride that they often exude. One reason for that, perhaps, was his lifelong contemplation of his own mortality and serious wrestling with religious faith. And wrestling is the right word. He was clearly haunted by a sense of meaninglessness without God. But he also didn’t see faith as something that comes easily, or that can just be tried out like a new hobby. He was certainly nobody’s version of a “Christian comedian”—some of his bits are as raunchy and obscene as one will find anywhere. He often observed that his own Christian faith was shaky and always in contest with doubt. “It seems like faith is the only salvation,” he says at one point, “but I don’t know how to get it.”
Several comments from his final years put one in mind of Ecclesiastes. There was deep anxiety about death; an uneasy recognition that the things of the world are vanity. But also a simple joy for the things he has. “We’re all just lucky,” he says in a characteristically bizarre formulation (and in a very sickly voice) “that we can go outside, eat at Denny’s, and wear a hat.” Apatow’s “tale” gives the audience a brief glimpse at an interesting man’s life and does not try to tell a moral at the end. That’s for the best. If there is something to learn from Norm’s story—equally hilarious, poignant, hopeful, and melancholy—it probably won’t fit into a neat box. Maybe the best one can do is to say that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh.
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]]>The post Facebook as Scapegoat appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>Beyond the journalistic limitations, the impact of our work was highly questionable. The funding for this program, incidentally, came from Facebook, and we had special logins to Facebook’s fact-checking tool, which would aggregate potentially false claims. You’d find one with a certain threshold of likes and shares, contact sources, file the fact-check, and submit it to the system. The fact-check would then appear at the bottom of that post, and some related ones.
But there are billions of posts, in every language and containing untold variations of every false claim under the sun. And a team of journalists, even multiple teams, was a pitiful solution to a vortex of that scale.
I’m thinking about this because I recently watched The Social Reckoning, the sequel to 2010’s The Social Network and a film that purports to show the consequences its leaders faced for the morass of misinformation and rage that exists on its platforms. (Facebook, following the events depicted in the film, rebranded to Meta, under which Facebook and Instagram are managed.) But the problem with the film is that no such reckoning actually happened.
The movie centers on three characters: Facebook employee Frances Haugen, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Much of Zuckerberg’s scenes take place in fabulously corporate environments, including a staged courtroom to prepare him for testimony in front of Congress. Jeremy Strong manages a convincingly stone-faced and robotic Zuck, though his blondness is nowhere near as convincing. But the stars of the show are Mikey Madison, who plays a charmingly awkward Haugen, and Jeremy Allen White, who plays the charmingly old-school Horwitz.
You guessed it—sparks fly! Or rather, that’s what the movie seems to imply throughout. Horwitz appears increasingly soft and caring toward Haugen, whose crisis of conscience over leaking internal Facebook information to Horwitz provides much of the plot of the movie. At the very end, before Haugen testifies to Congress, she and Horwitz share an intimate moment where he holds both of her hands. You’re convinced that, after the credits, they might even go on a date.
This romance, by all indications, did not actually happen in real life. Rather, I assume the filmmakers included this—and Haugen’s various skimpy outfits, worn because the apparently brilliant Haugen thinks that looking like a prostitute to enter Horwitz’s hotel room will help her escape notice—because the underlying issue of Internet safety is so disappointingly unsexy.
I say “disappointingly” on purpose; I know, from both personal experience and the Facebook Files that Horwitz eventually published thanks to Haugen, that online misinformation and rage bait are incredibly corrosive to our public square, both nationally and locally. It would make my small r-republican, journalist heart beat with joy if we, as a nation, realized the toxicity coming through to us on our phones and engaged our elected officials to beat it back. But the fact remains that phrases like “meaningful social interactions” and “engagement” and even “teen mental health,” all of which are used in the film, are not blood-roiling.
I mean, the filmmakers tried. In addition to the sexual tension between Haugen and Horwitz, we’re treated to plenty of shots of Zuckerberg looking satisfyingly evil, and several scenes include anticipatory music. There’s a burner phone and a chance run-in with the head of PR of Facebook, played by that douchey guy who gleefully defrauded immigrants in The Big Short. There’s a near-silent handoff of a flash drive.
There’s also lots of January 6. To be very clear, the storming of the Capitol was a travesty, and all those responsible for it deserve a reckoning of their own. But the Social Reckoning uses January 6 for its own uncertain ends. We mostly view it through Zuck’s perspective, who is watching it unfold through various feeds in a futuristic control room at the Facebook HQ. “Take it down!” many people—including Bill Burr, for some reason—plead with Zuck. But Zuck just sits there.
Also, it’s not clear what they want him to take down. Is it the inflammatory social media posts of Trump, who, despite being the central player in the violence, isn’t actually named? Is it a general exhortation to take down footage of the riot? In the end, Zuck does acquiesce. But it’s weirdly absolving: In the end, the movie seems to say, Zuck did make the right choice.
Later in the movie, the PR douchebag tells Horwitz, unfortunately off the record, that “we’re post-government” around here. It’s quickly elided by other events of the film. But it gets you thinking about the arrogance of such a statement—and perhaps the underwhelmingness of it. The government creeps into nearly every aspect of an American’s existence—those darn roads will get the libertarians every time—and for about 240 years, no other institution came close to its level of power and influence over the American individual. But then came Facebook. And Google, and TikTok, and X, and untold others.
The Internet—especially social media—has a funny tendency to create maybe the greatest paradox of the digital era: antisocial communities.
Government, despite jaw-dropping dysfunction, still exercises the most control over American life. But for how long? I think part of the difficulty in answering that question comes from tradition—we are, despite the current government, not big on change—and from the differing natures of government and Big Tech. Government, thanks to the Bill of Rights and our electoral process, must announce itself. You know that you have to pay taxes, that every so often you are invited to vote, that you must, unfortunately, go to the DMV. There are little reminders of the government’s shadow—and I admit sometimes it is a comforting shadow—wherever we go.
Tech is different. I was in middle school when I joined Facebook and Instagram, and it was as natural as any other cultural trend. It was bright and shiny, and everyone wanted to do it, and it was so easy to do. So we did it. And posting became second nature, reading up on other people’s business became second nature, getting news from those platforms became second nature. For the vast majority of Americans, social media has ushered in a set of cultural practices that we have adopted with ease—and often delight.
But it has a dark side. Reporting by the real-life Horwitz and others has shown that, per an internal report, “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”; that Instagram is harmful to a significant portion of young women; that human traffickers and cartels operate with relative ease on the platform. And then there is the anger, the hatred for the disembodied other.
The film showed that hatred through its January 6 portrayal, and afterward, Haugen testifies to Congress about Facebook’s harms. As she’s exiting the building, she pumps her fist in triumph. January 6, the film seems to say, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Now, Facebook will pay. Now, Mark Zuckerberg will pay. Now, the polis will start to heal.
But unless you’ve been living under perhaps the densest and heaviest rock known to mankind, you know that’s not true. Facebook has paid billions of dollars as the result of lawsuits related to its harms. But as the film admits after the final Congress scene, the company rebranded to Meta following the Haugen testimony, and eventually axed its entire fact-checking program. Today, Facebook continues to be pretty much what it was prior to January 6, albeit with some child-safety measures. And with the advent of short video, I think any changes have probably had limited effects. Instagram and X and TikTok have likewise become more slop factories and discord drivers than anything resembling a frictionless phonebook.
It’s hard to figure out why exactly this movie was made. There certainly seems to be an appetite for tech-founder biopics, as the movie currently crushing The Social Reckoning at the box office indicates. Treatments of Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are also currently in the works. I have to wonder if our desire to see these kinds of films is a kind of sublimated anger—we know something is wrong, we know, somehow, that they’ve caused that wrongness. But we can’t quite say why.
Or maybe we’re looking for something, anything, that will allow us to blame Zuck, Musk, et al—because otherwise you might have a moment of clarity, borne of four hours on Instagram as you eat hot chips, and realize that you’re also the problem.
In the end, the most insightful thing about The Social Reckoning might be the least noticeable. Haugen is, almost without exception, alone whenever she’s in her apartment; even in Puerto Rico, where she’s gone for the warm weather and to escape COVID, she sits at dinner by herself, laptop open. Horwitz does the same: When Haugen is not in his hotel room, he’s alone, watching TV or sifting through documents.
In one of their scenes together, Haugen explains to Horwitz that she loves Facebook, and that she believes in its power to bring people together. Haugen, as played by Madison, is an odd person; she is twitchy and seems to have little understanding of personal space or politeness. You get the sense that, through Facebook, she has hope for a better social life—that she might meet people in a forum where her awkwardness is not an impediment.
Far higher up the food chain, we get the same bit from Zuck. He knows that people don’t like him—and he reads about it every day, his wife reads about it every day, and his children, he adds, will also one day read about why everyone hates their father. He says this with bitterness, but with a bitterness tempered by acceptance. Zuck and Haugen, at least in this movie, are not happy people.
A lot of people today are lonely, and COVID didn’t help. But the Internet did: You could find new hobbies, FaceTime your friends, feel like you were participating in some public square even while you wore your pajamas for the fourth day in a row.
But the Internet—especially social media—has a funny tendency to create maybe the greatest paradox of the digital era: antisocial communities. That is, people bonded not by love but by rage that feels like love, by hatred that feels like deep hobbyism, by poisonous worldviews that, because of the person’s screen time, are not tempered by any other influence. This is how you get people like the friend in a viral video Haugen shows to Horwitz: A blonde woman, four years ago a committed progressive, railing against cops of color, vitriol flying from her lips. And later, that same woman, at the Capitol.
The filmmakers were a little heavy-handed there—I left the theater wondering if I had just, in a way, seen a memorial to Ashli Babbitt. But they did get something right: Something terrible has happened, a great severing in the guise of a great joining, a great cleaving in the guise of, well, the other kind of cleaving. In the end, the wisest person in the film might not be Horwitz or Haugen, but an unnamed woman in front of Haugen in a scene at the grocery store, unmasked and screaming at the store’s COVID requirements. “Sheep! Sheep! Sheep!” she yells. If you’re on social media at all, no matter your politics, you may want to check yourself for any hints of wool.
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]]>The post Patrick Stewart’s Theatrical Imagination appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>Strangely, all three ventures are creations of the ’60s. Stranger still, they make more sense together than might first seem. Granted, sci-fi is lowbrow, and Shakespeare is highbrow, but both are opposed to the literary and artistic culture of modern times, primarily associated with the novel, hence with realism. The “space opera” moniker for early sci-fi also suggests that connection between high and low. They are all attempts to retrieve an ancient tradition that might be associated with the epic or tragic poetry. As storytelling, they trade plausibility for myth and articulate in the element of imagination the highest aspirations or greatest dangers we face as human beings.
Of course, what makes sense at an intellectual level is much more baffling experientially. Stewart was a child in a small Yorkshire town, who fell in love with the theater young and left high school to become an actor, first at the Bristol Old Vic, then in Manchester, and then in Stratford and London during the 1960s. He followed the trodden path for competent actors, adding TV to theater work, mostly for the BBC, from an early appearance on Coronation Street (1967) to roles in John Le Carré series like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982, he was Karla). You can see Stewart in roles of various importance in a large number of productions covering everything then done in England, from Churchill’s People, an adaptation of the History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1975) to I Claudius (1976, as Sejanus), and easily imagine where that career might have led him. But he took another path.
The ‘80s saw a resurgence of fantasy in cinema, in a way a liberation from the ugly naturalism of the previous decade. Stewart gradually found his way in this new cinema. In 1981, he appeared in a small role as King Leondegrance in John Boorman’s fantastic Arthurian legend adaptation, Excalibur, which launched a number of careers. Then in 1984, he had another small role as the swashbuckling and musical arms master Gurney Halleck in David Lynch’s Dune. Then, having made his way to Hollywood and having acquired some experience teaching Shakespeare in California, Stewart was spotted by a producer and cast in The Next Generation in 1987. Finally, that turned out to be the great stage on which he could wow audiences with his Shakespearean qualities of voice and posture, authority and nobility.
Star Trek was itself very theatrical—the bridge of the ship provides the sense of confined space, tension, and surprise required for interior drama—so as soon as Stewart got used to TV, he could bring to the American audience his English charm and the authority of a thespian, modulated by the demands of the strange stories, yet restated by the relationships of the small cast of characters, another theatrical quality, which lends itself over a long period to soap opera, itself an outgrowth of theater. But Stewart’s avuncular manner made the jargon seem more human and the implausible situations more acceptable since they had an effect on his character. The acting, the medium, and the story came together—Stewart’s Picard was a much more receptive captain, aware that he cannot simply take charge, but wait on events and disclosures, rather like the audience.
So long as there is Shakespeare, there is hope for art, and Stewart made his contribution to preserving art in the hope that a future generation will rediscover the plays.
TV is inherently a less serious medium than theater, lacking both public formality and the task of giving an account of civilization through eminent characters and fundamental conflicts. But it makes great use of basic acting qualities like earnestness, which became, through acting school, the new mid-century discipline for TV and movies both. Inasmuch as it’s freely imaginative, however, TV also allows the return of various passions associated with the aristocracy. ”Do or die” situations are common on Star Trek and therefore pride and resolve are needed, however far they are from ordinary American life, which is peaceful and ordered to minimize confrontation through negotiations. Stewart’s remarkable gift was to deal with such possibilities gracefully, to keep the imagination from turning to horror or the sordid. He gave himself to the task fully and eventually even directed five episodes of TNG.
Star Trek’s final frontier is the imagination—this was the deeper connection between theater and TV. Just like Stewart had to say and look at fanciful things with a straight face, he also had to convey by voice and demeanor the transformative power of thought and drama, to transmit it from writers to audience, who, seeing, could imitate. But of course, different audiences learn different lessons. The dramatic intentions and the messages of the writers were one thing. But the major result was quite another, the enthusiasm boys conceived for technology in the ’90s with the approval and encouragement of such a grand old figure of the stage.
The same experiment was much more obvious in Stewart’s next franchise success, 2000’s X-Men, in which he played Professor X, a telepath trying to get America to expand its mind and imagine new possibilities for being human. One such possibility is that traumatized people might be super-powerful in ways ordinary people aren’t; another is that adolescence is not merely hormones, but a time of self-discovery. Mutants are an image of individualism, uniquely themselves, if part of humanity. Hence the idea of a new pedagogy through art and its attraction to actors like Stewart.
Of course, a sense of drama—that is, the touch of grandeur that can always slip into grandiosity—is nothing safe. Patrick Stewart became a celebrity in the era of globalization. The two franchises he’s famous for, Star Trek and X-Men, both offer narratives of progress and globalization that are now as obvious as implausible. The first episode of the first season of The Next Generation, “Encounter at Far Point,” not only introduces a hilarious recurring character, the entity Q, but puts humanity on trial for its violence and atomic warfare. Captain Picard protests: mankind has since achieved progress, that is, after the twenty-first century. Progress is always in the future. X-Men starts with the Nazi death camps and moves to the twenty-first century contemporary situation in which America must decide to treat the mutants nicely, or else Americans are no better than Nazis. Both stories make much of the United Nations.
But it was the other side of his play-acting playfulness that made him beloved, abandoning ideological futurism in favor of an earnest, curious exploration of the treasures of the past. There are many such attempts to bring back to life middlebrow culture. I will only list a few. In 1998, Stewart played Captain Ahab in the TV miniseries adaptation of Moby-Dick produced by Francis Ford Coppola. In 1999, he played Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and he voiced the tyrant porker Napoleon in the live-action adaptation of Animal Farm, both Hallmark productions. As was his 2003 The Lion in Winter, directed by the great Andrei Konchalovsky from the James Goldman play, in which Stewart starred with Glenn Close as Henry II’s exiled wife Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Stewart was embraced even more earnestly by generations of young men who make up the major audience of computer games. Starting with a slew of about a dozen Star Trek games, from the early ‘90s, his voice acting warmed him to tens of millions, both in franchise games like X-Men and in such roles as the Emperor Uriel Septim VII in the high fantasy role-playing game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and Zobek in the Gothic horror Castlevania games (2010).
In old age, Stewart still attended to Shakespeare. He was Claudius in an Emmy-nominated Hamlet in 2009 and Macbeth in a Tony-nominated performance in 2010, then in 2012, he played John of Gaunt in the much-lauded BBC production of the history plays, The Hollow Crown. So long as there is Shakespeare, there is hope for art, and Stewart made his contribution to preserving art in the hope that a future generation will rediscover the plays.
Which brings me to the last topic—Stewart’s rich voice. In 2026, he recorded the complete sonnets of Shakespeare. In 2005, he recorded a Narnia audiobook, C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, and, in 2006, everyone’s favorite Dickens, A Christmas Carol. That warm voice could last as long as digital technology will.
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]]>The post Reflections on a <em>County Election</em> appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>This cacophony is not new to the era of near-constant communication. For evidence, we need not look any further than George Caleb Bingham’s 1852 oil painting The County Election. Bingham’s lively work serves as a reminder during election cycles that though imperfections and annoyances exist in our system of governance, they do not outweigh its beauty.
Perhaps best known for his river scenes, including Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845) and The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), Bingham is equally celebrated for his vivid depictions of nineteenth-century American political life. The Missouri painter’s The County Election is the first in his election series, which also includes Stump Speaking (1853–54) and The Verdict of the People (1854–55), all three of which are appropriately housed in Bingham’s home state in the Saint Louis Art Museum. Taken together, the paintings follow the arc of an election cycle from the campaigning to casting ballots and concluding with the announcing of the results. On this election day, we enter into the moment Bingham depicts in The County Election. Thus, his painting deserves a revisit.
The County Election captures an energetic moment in the public square during an election in a rural town as men gather, discuss, and eventually cast their ballots. Since elections of the time were community events, often lasting around three days, there is much to depict, and Bingham captures the spirit of the moment well. The atmosphere portrayed in his work is spirited as a large group of animated voters congregates to cast their ballots. It is worth noting that though he painted the piece in 1852, Bingham drew inspiration for the piece from the particularly contentious 1846 election, in which Bingham found himself a candidate. While the painter-politician won his race, he was later ousted by an opponent. Bingham’s experience not only as a voter, but as a candidate, adds additional depth to the scene of citizens.
Taken as a whole, the work is a busy snapshot of the day where the viewer can almost hear the discussions from the hordes of people. Yet Bingham’s work, and the painting’s significance, comes into focus with a closer look at the vignettes throughout the piece. Intermingled with good-faith discussion, we find examples of unsavory practices, yet they never outweigh the good.
The painter-politician stands firmly in defense of the liberal intuitions of the American Republic.
One of the most poignant vignettes happens on the stairs as an Irishman, made evident through his ruddy complexion and stereotypical pug nose of the time, swears an oath that he has not voted elsewhere. Though clothed simply, he stands with dignity as the focal point of the painting while he solemnly takes the oath. In this moment, Bingham shows his audience that this newer American understands the weight of responsibility that being a citizen of a republic places on him. Adding to the significance is a bearded man descending the steps hunched over, apparently having just cast his vote. Widely recognizable as an archetype of the time, he is an “Old ‘76” or Revolutionary War veteran—a man, by contrast, who carried that same weight of responsibility for the budding republic. Bingham has positioned men of vastly different backgrounds proximal to one another as active participants in the democratic process, subtly demonstrating that reverence for our creed should serve as the common thread for Americans.
Heritage is not the only instance where Bingham demonstrates a diversity in the electorate. As the voting laws had recently changed in 1850, granting suffrage to all white adult males beyond being limited to those who owned property, the group Bingham portrays is one with obvious socioeconomic diversity. The differences are identifiable largely through articles of clothing. Top hats and cravats adorn members of the upper class in the crowd—one even sits atop the head of a candidate who seeks to impress a last-minute point upon a voter next in the queue to cast his ballot. The voter in question dons a hat suitable for keeping the harsh sun off one’s face in the field and simple farming clothing. Through this exchange, Bingham seems to be suggesting all votes, and thus voters, are equal. Merchants of the middle class also find themselves in the mix, depicted in suits more sensible than those of the upper class, yet also debating the merits of their positions. Despite the socioeconomic differences of those present, there remains a social harmony forged in a common purpose.
The discourse necessary for that common purpose is on full display throughout the painting. In the foreground, a merchant makes his case as two farmers listen tentatively to his argument. Another man in the center of the crowd counts out his points on his hand while his companion listens on. For the viewer, there is a sense that real and productive political dialogue is occurring. As important to the Republic as discourse, so too is a well-informed public. In the right foreground of the painting, a seated man and his companion peer over a newspaper, presumably to gather some final pieces of information before casting their ballots. Bingham gives the viewer the idea that democracy is at work in this scene as the cogs of deliberation turn.
These discussions—or in some cases debates—are in no doubt helped along thanks to the free-flowing alcohol poured freely, accompanied by a cider barrel in the left foreground of the painting. The alcohol is not inherently evil in Bingham’s rendering, as one man sits in the left foreground peaceably watching his glass. The drink does provide Bingham, however, the opportunity to include some nuance to his otherwise idyllic picture. A pink-cheeked man in the center left of the painting holds up another who has evidently been overserved. As the pair wait in line to cast their ballots, the viewer can only surmise the drunken man’s vote will not be made of “free and sound mind.” Swaying the voter was not the only trouble alcohol causes in this scene. The most solemn character is a man slumped over in the right foreground, his head tied with a bandage, having lost an alcohol fueled brawl. Both serve as reminders that despite much goodness in the process, it is still susceptible to discord and abuse. Perhaps something the viewer knows well from the politics of his own day.
Yet despite the potential abuse and strife, the painter-politician stands firmly in defense of the liberal intuitions of the American Republic. A vibrant blue banner hovering just above the Irishman’s head draws the viewer’s eyes to its words emblazoned upon it stating, “The Will of the People the Supreme Law.” With it, the Missourian affirms without ambiguity the principles of our Founding.
George Caleb Bingham’s painting is not only an impressive work of symbolism, but it’s a work that is woven into the fabric of our American heritage, as its warm hues help to elucidate elements of our national character. If we are to learn anything from Bingham’s work during yet another contentious election cycle, it is to strive for the beauty he depicts.
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]]>The post Madison’s Toleration appeared first on Law & Liberty.
]]>In a recent Law and Liberty piece, Aaron Alexander Zubia took aim at the common view that James Madison—and by extension America itself—is a pluralist committed to permitting a diverse array of viewpoints to flourish. Though it seems incredibly unlikely that anyone is entirely opposed to the concept of diversity and differences of opinion in society, Zubia is certainly critical of the concept of pluralism. Especially when taken together with some earlier writings, it seems to be the case that he defines the proper parameters of cultural diversity so narrowly that his writing amounts to a basic defense of the closed society. In short, he seems to assume that widespread pluralism and a society dedicated to virtue are essentially incompatible. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as several American founders well understood, the two concepts go hand in hand.
In his piece, Zubia does a phenomenal job laying out the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and its influence upon “the father of our constitution,” James Madison. It is undeniable that from such august minds as Thomas Reid and John Witherspoon that Madison developed a certain understanding of human nature as the groundswell of all his politics. Perhaps even more importantly, Zubia is correct that for Madison the end of all politics is justice, as he states repeatedly in The Federalist Papers. However, how one achieves the ends of government is just as important as what the government should be aiming towards. Zubia is clear about Madison’s belief in constitutionalism and proceduralism as secondary mechanisms to achieve a just society after Madison’s emphasis on the need for a moral citizenry. However, Madison’s contention that a free republic must consist of a moral people in no way precludes support for a diverse, pluralistic, society in practice. In fact, as Madison stated cleared in Federalist #51, the ability to have a government capable of tending to the rights of its own people there must be a “multiplicity” of religious sects to counterbalance one another. Put simply, Madison is a clear and hard-boiled proponent of the sort of diverse society Zubia rejects.
Instead of Madison, Zubia’s understanding of the world as outlined in the essay—one where the modern choice rests between something like pluralistic relativism on one hand and unified, culturally homogenous, justice on the other—seems to come largely from Richard M. Weaver whom he cites at multiple junctures throughout the essay. For Weaver, the fundamental problem of modernity lay in its lack of a unified vision or dream around which society can be built. Without such a standardized cultural identity, human association is bound to collapse into a chaotic mess. The stunning good luck of the West, in Weaver’s account, is that we inherited a remarkably good and unified vision grounded in the ideas of Athens and Jerusalem. According to Weaver’s version of history, the tragedy of humanity is that over the centuries we have been moving further and further away from this unified vision. Accordingly, any attempt to forge a just society must start with the work of restoring some cohesive order around which the political community can be built.
If humans are beyond redemption, virtue does not exist and moral codes simply establish a stable society, not a just one.
All of this stands in stark contrast to Madison’s account of human history in the Federalist. On first blush, it may seem as though Madison agrees with Weaver. The chief enemy of good government, he states, is faction—when people with differing, self-interested, views of the good come into conflict and turn society into a protracted civil war between their beliefs. However, Madison’s understanding of factional conflict differs from Weaver’s critique of cultural diversity in two important ways. First, though Madison certainly concedes that differences of opinion on moral questions drive factions, the bulk of his analysis is clearly centered upon the sort of class conflict that brought the Roman and later Italian republics to their ignominious end. Second, Madison does not see this as a new development or a particular quirk of the modern era. Rather, he argues that as long as humans are capable of free thinking, they will have disagreements about the best way to organize civilization. In short, Madison sees diversity not as some recent threat to just government but as a persistent fact of human existence. More than this, diversity of thought grows out of a genuine human good—freedom. And as Madison makes abundantly clear, to do away with freedom is in no way a just solution to doing away with the evil of faction.
Thus, Madison’s emphasis on justice is not meant to imply that America cannot or should not be a diverse society. For him, the diversity of America persists as a simple fact—a truism that we cannot do away with even if we wished. The goal then of Madison’s constitutional order is to craft a political system that will bring together the multiplicity of interests that compose a diverse society with the ultimate goal of forging enough political cohesion that it will be possible to create a regime that tends to the basic interests of all the people instead of giving way to factional conflict. Thus only a rather broad shared view of morality is then necessary for a good, just, government to exist. However, it must be admitted that James Madison’s defense of pluralism is somewhat pragmatic. Diversity is a simple fact of life, human rationality often leads to conflicting views, and as a result the best government possible takes into consideration these fundamental axioms of nature. James Madison’s closest friend and political ally, Thomas Jefferson, took these arguments a step further.
In his writings on the importance of religious liberty, Thomas Jefferson offers a trenchant defense of pluralism as more than a simple pragmatic solution to a persistent problem but instead as one of the pre-requisites of a just social order. As Jefferson expressed in his only book Notes on the State of Virginia, freedom of religion is partly a good thing because possessing a variety of religions in a single community is healthy for the individuals who inhabit the community. To put it another way, it is corrupting for one single religion or moral philosophy to dominate an entire people. This is not because Jefferson was some hippy dippy contemporary progressive but because of his conception of human nature. According to Jefferson, the most important aspect of the human soul is conscience—the moral sense that lets us know the difference between right and wrong. However, the human conscience does not come ready made with the right answer to every single moral quandary. Instead, the moral sense requires the same development and training as any other human muscle or skill. For Jefferson, the best way to exercise the moral sense comes from reason and reflection—the sort of reason and reflection that emerges through a frank dialogue with differing viewpoints. Thus a pluralistic society actually makes the cultivation of virtue easier.
It has become typical for liberals in the broad sense of the term to argue that the core of their philosophy is “self-creation.” In some instances, this no doubt means some sort of banal left wing drivel that accounts for bringing into being an entirely new version of ourselves. For Jefferson and others, self-creation has this much deeper meaning rooted in the development of the human conscience—humans have the option, if we live our lives well, to gradually hone our characters, to become progressively better versions of ourselves. As the Roman statesman Cicero put it two thousand some years ago, we can slowly start to reconcile our own individual natures with the greater moral laws of the universe.
Of course, history is littered with cynics who see Jefferson’s brand of moral virtue as hopelessly naïve. To their mind, humans are essentially irredeemable—capable of good only by following strict legal codes designed to hold our irresistible depravity in check. Advocates of this understanding of human nature fail to follow their precepts to a logical conclusion. For if humans are beyond redemption, virtue does not exist and moral codes simply establish a stable society, not a just one.
Fortunately, America is a nation built on a more positive outlook, one full of hope in the possibility, though perhaps not the certainty, of a better tomorrow. This optimism is not merely economic. There is a deep moral element to it—an unflinching belief that we the people are capable of redemption. More than any other nation on earth, Americans trust that a diverse community is not a roadblock to justice, that all humans are capable of moral virtue, and that our deepest calling as a people is, as Robert F. Kennedy once said echoing Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
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]]>We owe this predilection for the gothic, at least in part, to the man who deserves to be remembered as the founder of American literature: Washington Irving. Inspired by the Romantic movement he encountered in his travels abroad, especially the work of Sir Walter Scott, he sought out the features of American histories and landscapes that mark our place in the eternal contract of the “dead, living, and unborn.” Irving’s most enduring success on this front is 1820’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” one of the greatest American ghost stories ever written.
There is a reason “Sleepy Hollow” remains so thoroughly anthologized and adapted over 200 years since its publication. It has both delightful spooks and humor aplenty, but it is also an early expression of American identity. Set in 1790, it is haunted by the bloody legacy of the American Revolution. The Hudson River Valley environs where it takes place were the site of some of the bloodiest battles in the war, including bitter backwoods fighting between Tory and Patriot neighbors divided over the cause. Ichabod Crane’s flight from the Headless Horseman on Halloween night is more than a thrill ride; the story was Irving’s way of exploring how the ghosts of history shape how we see the world around us.
Before Irving, many questioned whether America would ever have a great literature. The funereal Federalist Fisher Ames, for example, held that the infant republic would never achieve the necessary maturity. “Shall we match Joel Barlow against Homer or Hesiod?” he asked in an 1804 essay, “Can Thomas Paine contend against Plato?” Ames believed that democratic decadence would discourage the literary arts and limit the nation’s imagination. He feared that a progressive passion for newness and innovation would lend culture a sense of impermanence.
Irving shared many of the concerns held by conservative critics of American vulgarity, but he did not give himself over to despair. In one essay, “National Nomenclature,” he argued that men of letters should look to the “grand and eternal features of our country” for sources of “sublimity and beauty.” The rivers, mountains, and forests of America possessed a natural majesty that rivaled anything he met in the Old World. Irving further rejected the idea that these lands lacked a past; instead, he saw them as the setting for high drama, including the legends of native tribes, the struggles of European colonists, and, more recently, the glories and horrors of the War for Independence.
This impression of the American sublime contributes greatly to the atmosphere of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The narrator describes the titular valley, home to the descendants of Dutch settlers, so that the reader can almost imagine its peaceful beauty in the day—and the lonely terror of the woods at night. As he puts it, “stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.” Rumors persist that a German wizard bewitched Sleepy Hollow, or that Indian prophets held rituals in the glens in times long ago. “Certain it is,” the narrator reports, “the place still continues under the sway of some witching power.”
Ichabod Crane shows how imaginations can be profoundly shaped by the ghosts that still haunt the republic.
That power is only heightened by the trauma of war. Sleepy Hollow had, according to the narrator, “been the scene of marauding and infested with refugees, cowboys, and all kinds of border chivalry.” It is the location, for example, of the capture and execution of the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold’s more gallant accomplice Major John André in 1780. Many of these episodes were witnessed by locals who still had not succumbed to the “silent artillery of time.” By Ichabod Crane’s fateful ride in 1790, though, just enough “had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit.” History is passing into legend in Sleepy Hollow, where the veil between past and present, here and hereafter, seems thin indeed. “There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region,” we are told, “it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land.”
The most mythic of these legends, of course, is the Headless Horseman. Supposedly the ghost of a Hessian soldier stalking the night in search of a head to replace the one he lost to cannon fire during the war, he “is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.” Even if, as literary historians maintain, Irving got the idea for the Horseman from similar German stories he heard while visiting the Continent, it is easy to see why the gory image of a decapitated rider swinging his saber in the air captured the American imagination. And the superstitions of the people of Sleepy Hollow lend the tale a sense of ambiguity; is the apparition a spiritual reality, or simply the product of over-active imaginations and mischievous pranksters? Irving never quite finally settled the matter for readers, even if the deck seems stacked toward one conclusion.
Ichabod Crane is perhaps uniquely given to being spooked by such an image. A Connecticut Yankee recently appointed schoolmaster, he is more bookish than the Knickerbockers he serves. And yet his most prized volume is not a science textbook, but rather Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, “in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.” Crane also eagerly imbibes the local tales of ghosts and goblins. In short, he is a man of letters altogether given to the superstition and nightmares rising from the land.
As the narrator notes with a dry irony, though, Crane’s downfall is not his active imagination—it is a woman. The beautiful Katerina Van Tassel (and the wealth of her father) becomes the object of all his dearest desires. As the essayist Phillip Lopate recently reflected, Crane’s obvious greed and gluttony lend the tale “a comic irony that percolates through every sentence.” He is not a wholly unsympathetic protagonist—and his rival for the lady’s hand, the hulking Brom Bones, is hardly an attractive alternative—but the reader is not exactly surprised when the courtship fails. In some ways, Crane is a caricature of a certain American vulgarity Irving critiqued: a citizen of the new republic given over too deeply to the materialism engendered by economic prosperity.
Retreating from the Halloween party where his advances were rejected, Crane rides with his borrowed horse Gunpowder into the night and the tale’s climatic chase. As he passes the very tree where Major André was captured by Continentals, he is joined by a “strange midnight companion,” a dark rider. Is it Brom Bones, playing a prank on the hapless schoolteacher? Or is it truly the Headless Horseman? Though the former seems more likely, the actual chase sequence is bone-chilling enough to make it feel as though Crane really encountered the supernatural on that fateful night. At any rate, he is never seen again, and the legend of the Headless Horseman persists. “The bridge” where the encounter came to its possibly grisly end, “became more than ever an object of superstitious awe; and that may be the reason why the road has been altered of late years, so as to approach the church by the border of the millpond.”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is perhaps lighter fare than Great American Novels produced by later figures, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Cormac McCarthy. In a clever postscript Irving appended, one teller of the tale even confesses, “I don’t believe one-half of it myself.” Irving knew that the ghost story is hardly the height of literary ambition, and he did not seek to encompass the whole of the American experience, let alone human life, in a few thousand words. Yet as one of his finest successors in the genre, Russell Kirk once observed, “at its best the uncanny romance touches upon certain profound truths: upon the dark powers that aspire always to possess us, and upon intimations of immortality.” The ghost story offers something more than haunted-house thrill rides; by reminding us of the forces outside our ken, they help us expand the moral imagination.
In writing this story, Washington Irving demonstrated that this nation has sources of inspiration that can achieve exactly that. Whether or not Ichabod Crane genuinely encountered the supernatural, in his character readers encounter a psychology profoundly shaped by the ghosts that still haunt the republic. History and myth alike shape human beings everywhere, and our citizens are by no means exempt. For that very reason, America proved capable of producing a literature rivaling anything Europe has to offer the modern world.
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]]>Soul! soul! for a soul-cake,
Pray, good mistress, for a soul-cake.
One for Peter, two for Paul,
Three for Him who made us all.
Soul! soul! for an apple or two;
If you’ve got no apples, pears will do.
Up with your kettle, and
down with your pan;
Give me a good big one, and I’ll be gone.
G. K. Chesterton, who first drew my attention to Puckle’s work, addressed the subject of ancient funeral rituals in his essay “On Funeral Customs and the Brotherhood of Man.” He insisted that such customs require no further explanation: “To scatter flowers on a grave is simply a way in which an ordinary person can express in gesture things that only a very great poet can express in words.” Such is the simplicity and grandeur of these customs, which may conceal, for the discerning observer, enigmas of ancient wisdom passed down from one generation to the next.
Christian culture had imbued death with a new sense of hope and solemnity. The gradual trivialization of death, like so many other changes associated with the ideas of the Enlightenment, was as unsettling as it was effective. Christianity presented death as a terrible reality, yet one overcome by the hope of eternal salvation. The dead remained part of the community of the living, whether as models of holiness, as testaments to hope, or as reminders that earthly life is merely a brief passage towards eternity.
The culture that emerged in the wake of the Enlightenment displaced this Christian hope, placing earthly life at the centre. It fostered a more trivial view of death, stripped of its eternal implications, and encouraged growing discomfort with the physical presence of the dead. Thus, although the subsequent separation of cemeteries from inhabited areas was driven by clear public health concerns, it also concealed a deeper cultural transformation.
In “The Pornography of Death,” the English sociologist Geoffrey Gorer advanced a bold thesis about what has happened since the nineteenth century: “The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting, as disgusting as the natural processes of birth and copulation were a century ago.” In other words, whereas until the twentieth century our grandparents might have been told that babies were “found under trees” or brought by a stork, today’s children, as the historian Philippe Ariès observed, “are initiated in their early years to the physiology of love; but when they no longer see their grandfather and express astonishment, they are told that he is resting in a beautiful garden among the flowers.” Today, they might also be told that he has “gone on a long journey” or, more absurdly still, that he has “interrupted his life.” “The ugly facts are relentlessly hidden,” Gorer insisted. Whether deliberately or otherwise, what he calls “ugly facts” amounts to pain and everything that causes it, death included. Or, more precisely, death above all.
There is a kind of Halloween that, while keeping alive a beautiful tradition inherited from our ancestors, can help strengthen the bond between the living and the dead.
Until the end of the seventeenth century, the coexistence of the living and the dead was as natural as it was commonplace. Throughout the Middle Ages and much of the early modern period, the dead were generally buried in their own parish, in the adjoining churchyard or in burial grounds within the towns and cities themselves. The Enlightenment ushered in the modern cemetery, whose Greek-derived name evokes a place of sleep, situated away from centres of population. The model was Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, established alongside similar sites beyond the city limits after the closure of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in 1780. Père Lachaise inspired Mount Auburn Cemetery, opened in 1831 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first garden cemetery in the United States, it became the model for similar burial grounds established in more remote, rural settings over the following years.
From both a landscape and a sociological perspective, the dead were no longer integrated into the urban fabric. Death ceased to be an omnipresent reality, one that could naturally and constantly confront the living, and began its rapid drift towards banishment from public life.
The iconography of death throughout the history of art also reflects this shift. During the Middle Ages and the Baroque period, death formed part of a divine order, and Christian culture imbued its representation with faith. Images of death often served as reminders of the transience of the physical body and thus as calls to seek the salvation of the soul. By the eighteenth century, death was increasingly viewed as the mere biological end of the body’s machinery and became more closely associated with science and medicine than with religious belief.
In Europe, the traditional cemetery beside the church gradually fell into disuse, replaced by modern burial grounds located far from inhabited areas. The relocation of cemeteries beyond the city walls was no minor change. The dead ceased to form part of the familiar landscape of the living and came to occupy separate, orderly, silent spaces. Death thus lost some of its terrifying quality, but also much of its transcendent significance, framed by a sanitized, softened conception of death, as though it were merely an inconsequential formality, something that should not intrude on the attention of the living except as a tribute to the lives the dead once lived
This gradual forgetting of the reality of death probably helped Halloween, brought to America by Irish and Scottish immigrants in the nineteenth century, to flourish. For many people, the occasion is the only time of year when they engage directly with the dead, albeit through imagery, customs, games, and legends. But the death contemporary celebrations of Halloween presents is not stern but whimsical, not real but playful, complete with costumes, plastic horrors, make-up, and a fascination with magic, darkness, and the accursed.
Much has been written about Halloween’s origins and the uncertain reasons for its spread, including its arrival in my native Galicia, where I am writing today. This region is known throughout the world for its reverential respect for the dead, and nowhere is a cemetery more at odds with celebration and joy.
The revival of the Celtic tradition of honouring the god of death, supposedly the true origin of the Halloween celebrated today, is a telling sign that our sensibilities have gradually hardened alongside our growing detachment from real suffering and the reality of death. This hardening has also been encouraged by our constant exposure, since the twentieth century, to cinematic depictions of suffering and the relentless barrage of bloody, violent imagery that reaches us today from every direction and in every context.
Here in Galicia, the reality of these Celtic traditions is well understood. Long ago, on this date, the Druids would invoke the god of death and go from door to door seeking sacrifices: virgin women, children, or animals. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus recorded these Celtic customs in the first century BC:
They also observe a custom which is especially astonishing and incredible, in case they are taking thought with respect to matters of great concern; for in such cases they devote to death a human being and plunge a dagger into him in the region above the diaphragm, and when the stricken victim has fallen they read the future from the manner of his fall and from the twitching of his limbs, as well as from the gushing of the blood, having learned to place confidence in an ancient and long-continued practice of observing such matters.
The festival known as Samhain was so gruesome that even the Romans, a people hardly squeamish about blood or entrails, sought to ban it after arriving in the British Isles, with little success. Christianity later attempted to redirect the tradition, and the Irish eventually exported it to the United States, where it acquired a distinctive festive character and, it must be said, became a major business opportunity. Yet from its earliest origins, what has been venerated on Halloween night is darkness, horror, dismembered corpses, tormented souls, and a host of other things our ancestors might not have found remotely amusing.
But there is another kind of Halloween, one devoted to darkness and evil, which often revels in the repulsive.
This transition from death to “happy death” did not happen by chance. It unfolded in the years immediately preceding Halloween’s popularisation. Within a relatively short period, around the 1950s, Victorian mourning customs all but disappeared. Religious services and traditions commemorating the dead declined, while the modern practice of applying make-up to corpses and meticulously embalming them became widespread, with the aim of preserving the body and, in a sense, maintaining the appearance the deceased had in life.
The death children encounter today is not the same death their great-grandparents knew. In some ways, we have lost a measure of respect and solemnity in our attitude towards death. At Halloween, it is increasingly presented as something terrifying yet entertaining, as though it were part of a film. This is partly because post-Christian society tends to conceal actual death while consuming its fictionalized version as entertainment.
Paradoxically, the Christian tradition, inextricably linked to the origins of Halloween, can portray death as something terrible while also laughing at it, because it sees death not as an end but as a continuation towards a better place for those who attain eternal salvation. By contrast, many contemporary Halloween celebrations have moved away from the playful tradition of the living dead and shifted their focus towards darker territory, where horrors and evil are trivialized, and the door is opened to repulsive spectacles, with children as the primary audience.
Furthermore, this overexposure to fictional horror as a substitute for actual death may help explain why these children, as adults, appear more callous or indifferent to the suffering of others. Consider the millions of viewers of all ages who, in 2019, had access to a video of a Halloween performance at a New York pub in which a drag queen staged an abortion, pulling a doll-like infant from a womb, drinking its “blood”, and decapitating it, all to the applause of the audience. It is difficult to imagine that those who cheered and laughed at such a spectacle could feel profound shock when confronted with the bloody, savage scenes that occur in real life.
After all, the tendency in contemporary societies to move cemeteries further away, hide the dead, and banish death and grief, replacing them with a kind of fictionalized or entertaining death, has left us socially immature and somewhat oblivious to our inevitable fate. Pain is inevitable. It bares its teeth mercilessly at anyone who dares to deny its existence and, when it touches us directly, forces us to mature.
There is a kind of Halloween that, while keeping alive a beautiful tradition inherited from our ancestors, can help strengthen the bond between the living and the dead, even if through a festive, recreational lens. But there is another kind of Halloween, one devoted to darkness and evil, which often revels in the repulsive. Rather than bringing us closer to the reality of death, it seeks to draw us into an alliance with evil and a fascination with the macabre that ultimately drains the experience of meaning. And so, once again, amid the exuberance of a celebration so beloved by children, perhaps we should reflect on how concealing the reality of death conceals the reality of life itself.
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]]>But Burnham’s “Manchesterism” is a far cry from the classically liberal Manchester School in economics of Richard Cobden and John Bright, the Ron Pauls of their day, who argued for laissez-faire economics and free trade. Indeed, the Labour leader’s ideology is not liberalism at all, but a repudiation of it. It has been called a “traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos” or “business-friendly socialism”—an oxymoron if I ever saw one.
One aspect of Burnham’s Manchesterism that is truly interesting and contradictory is its professed localism. In a recent speech, Burnham said: “We will bring about the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen. It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down. Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up.”
Is Burnham some sort of English Jeffersonian, then, advocating for the devolution of power to establish a kind of federalism? Not quite. He has used the rhetoric of localism to argue for substantial changes to the structure of the British state, which, perhaps surprisingly, will lead to greater empowerment of the national government. In Americanized terms, we might even conclude that Burnham uses quasi-Jeffersonian rhetoric to argue for a somewhat Hamiltonian blueprint.
Burnham argues that the British state is fundamentally overcentralised—and on this, he is correct. It is especially too large at the national level. His promise is “to bring power to every postcode” in Britain. But a closer look reveals that the goal is not dispersing power into the smallest possible geographical locations, let alone preventing tyranny of the state. Burnham argues that years of a London-centric, Westminster-managed government have broken the link between economic growth and civic welfare and that Northern English communities have been left behind by globalized economic policy. Thus, he wants to rebalance economic growth in every part of the country.
Burnham’s supposed localism, then, is better understood as a sociological rebellion of the “left-behind” regions (akin to the American Rust Belt), especially in the North of England. “Manchesterian” Labourites are simply against the detached financial and political elite of Whitehall in London—not for the countryside against the cities. In fact, Burnham and his Labour Party clearly favour cities and not so much the countryside. Labour does not want agrarianism to thrive in England (one Labour minister even called it a “far-right fantasy”). It is important to understand what Burnham means when he argues for a “place-first” approach, which “needs to become a new operating principle” of government that recognizes “the primacy of place” and that “place is a unifying force.” He believes that people are “united by a desire to see the place where they live move forward, and claims that “if places have more agency, and a sense of forward direction,” then “those places are likely to be more cohesive and less divided.”
At times, Burnham’s view of localism sounds like Sir Roger Scruton’s concept of “oikophilia,” that is, the love of home as a chief political principle. Despite the resemblance, he does not go nearly far enough. Burnham is unconsciously reconfiguring oikophilia, or “place-first,” into a class-based economic transaction and state redistribution based on the left-populist us-versus-them divide that, in his mind, is about protecting the local community from the neglect of Westminster and the City of London bankers. Really his agenda is more concerned with the lack of benefits than real local freedom. This left-populist “place-first” narrative, which the DSA, if they were clever, would learn from Burnham and argue for in the United States, has some emotive traction to it.
Burnham argues that local leaders who “know their communities” are the ones best suited to solving deep-seated regional problems. Yet this left-populist “place-first” is not a true love of home; it is an illusion. It is both an illusion of proximity and an illusion of real community pride, because community pride and local attachment cannot be separated from traditional moral structures, faith, and the nuclear family, which is required to hold it altogether. In effect, Burnham is mistaking the state for society.
Burnham’s plans would build new mini-bureaucracies and create a localised managerial state that lacks genuine community.
Turning from the localist rhetoric to the actual mechanisms, Burnham’s views of actual power align more with the centralizing tendencies of Hamiltonianism. Burnham would agree with Federalist #70 that “energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” especially if this energy was being channeled into making TikTok videos or using the national government mechanisms to orchestrate a coordinated economic strategy. One of the first moves as prime minister was to strengthen the power of his own office by announcing the creation of the Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet (OPMC). This is in socialism’s essence and its very nature, as Ludwig von Mises wrote in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, “it follows from the very conception of the socialistic community that the organ of control must be unitary,” because “socialist community can have only one ultimate organ of control which combines all economic and other governmental functions.” Moreover, Mises argued that the organ can be subdivided and there can be subordinate offices to which definite instructions are transmitted. But the unitary expression of the common will, which is the essential object of the socialization of the means of production and of production, necessarily implies that all offices entrusted with the supervision of different affairs shall be subordinate to one office.
For Burnham, localism is really only a delivery model for his socialism, and his policies will continue the expansion of the British state. Burnham will still use the national government, in Mises’s words, as the “supreme authority to resolve all variations” in his new local government structure and to impose a “common purpose and unify the executive aim.” The people who will guide the new local powers will not be the local bureaucrats or civic institutions or the “little platoons,” as Edmund Burke called them, but the national bureaucrats who set the regulatory framework and the funding allocations. As Burnham said, the national government still needs to fix Britain’s problems through centralised government spending. He also argues that the national government should have control over essential drivers of growth and have a government-backed industrial strategy built around them. The national government will be funding the infrastructure and the reindustrialisation. Burnham’s idea of localism weighs the scales down on the side of socialism; local mayors will not be able to introduce tax cuts due to top-down Whitehall mandates.
Burnham’s ideas about localism are too sterile and too structural. His plans would build new mini-bureaucracies and create a localised managerial state that lacks genuine community. It will not decentralize power down to the individual citizens or community groups, but it will concentrate massive executive authority into a newly created regional state apparatus. Moving the state functions from London to Manchester does not solve the underlying problem of statism.
Russell Kirk held that “a new and better social order” is created “not by cooperating in the grim process of social collectivization, but by infusing new life into the ancient and well-loved institutions.” The American political philosopher Orestes Brownson—one of Kirk’s “conservative minds”—thoroughly agreed. He wrote that there are two aspects to the constitution of the United States: the written and unwritten. With brevity in mind, the written Constitution is the formal document, and the unwritten Constitution is the people’s mores, customs, religion, manners, habits, and inherited traditions that make up the cultural and historical fabric of a people.
Unfortunately, for Burnham, the unwritten constitution cannot be socially engineered with ease. He cannot just draw up a new system of government for Britain and expect it to work. It will only work if Britain’s unwritten constitution, to use Brownson’s words, provides the new governmental system with “vitality and legal force.” This means he should not build his localism policy for new government machinery on a mathematical model, and he will therefore need to reject what Burke called “political geometry,” which very much influenced his Labour predecessor.
Burnham is trying to fix cultural and social issues in England, such as the erosion of the unwritten constitution of England’s regional towns and cities, by creating new governmental machinery. It will not work. No state-controlled bus company, regional development agencies, or artificial mayoralties can generate the shared civic virtues, the local loyalties, and shared moral habits that actually hold a community together.
When it comes to the localist rhetoric and his advocacy for the “left-behind” or for “place-first,” Burnham’s rhetoric may sound good to conservative ears. But his policies will lead to more regional bureaucrats, more compliance officers, and more state planners who use the rhetoric of localism, but it will only expand the power of the administrative state, as socialism always does. This type of political and constitutional engineering, especially of the sort Burnham has in mind, can fail miserably.
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]]>Be that as it may, one of the questions commonly raised was the relation between Islam, Islamism and the disorders in France. Although it was perfectly obvious and undisputed that young men of Muslim background were disproportionately involved in the violence and looting, precise figures will never be known, not least because French law prohibits the gathering of statistics by ethnic group (a prohibition that has its advantages and disadvantages).
My return from Cairo influenced my thoughts on these matters. I cannot describe the poverty that I had encountered there. The pollution, the overcrowding, the chaos, the noise, the dirt, the constant struggle for survival, seemed far worse than when I first visited Cairo, 44 years ago. And yet one could walk through the poor streets with less of a chance of being robbed or mugged than in the streets of London or Paris.
This safety despite great poverty is not a new phenomenon. Forty-four years ago, I visited the City of the Dead, the vast and ancient Cairene cemetery, where many thousands of people lived among the tombs. Far from seeking to rob me, they were hospitable towards me, despite their obvious poverty. This safety from crime was not brought about by an overwhelming police presence: for there was none. The population policed itself, and a thief was given immediate corporal chastisement by the local people; but I do not think, either, that this was the cause for the absence of certain crimes. The fact is that it was not part of their culture, in which Islam played a large part, to commit such crimes.
Therefore, we can dismiss the idea that there is any intrinsic and direct connection between Islam and criminal behaviour that explains the over-representation of Muslims among the looters in France. The story is far more complicated.
In 1976, the supposedly conservative politicians, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac, one president and the other his prime minister, enacted family reunification for Maghrebin workers in factories in France. Until then, these men lived as bachelors, often housed in hostels that were like barracks. The conditions in which they lived were often unpleasant and degrading, and they were expected either to assimilate completely or to return home; but suddenly they had the right to bring in spouses.
Unfortunately, this change, which was motivated by humanitarian sentiment, came at precisely the wrong and inopportune moment. It was at the end of les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty years (more or less) after the war that transformed French society at breakneck speed into a modern and very prosperous, highly industrialised country, which had sucked in large numbers of workers from North Africa.
Whole generations have been taught and come to accept that Western civilization consists of slavery, exploitation, and massacre—and nothing else worth mentioning.
The combination of family reunification and the end of full employment for manual workers in the context of a welfare state spelled the development of a parallel society, much of it in new areas of social housing, and thrown on the cold generosity of that welfare state. It has been downhill, so to speak, ever since; never a year of a balanced budget, and because of state paralysis, immigrants continue to arrive in large numbers irrespective of any economic need for, or capacity to absorb, them. In the minds of the second generation, and even more the third, the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity has become one of repression, inequity, and rejection. Of course, I am speaking in generalities; many immigrants found their place and prospered. But from the point of view of future developments, it was not they who counted or made the greatest impact.
A large proportion of the new immigrants were Muslim (though France is home to the largest number in Europe of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, who do not participate in riots). Islam, unfortunately, seems to be a religion ill-adapted to minority status because it so successfully instils in its adherents the strong conviction that it represents the final and absolute truth, even when those adherents are not themselves highly observant or do not even know much else about their religion. This conviction leads to a certain sense of superiority or disdain of other cultures and religions, but at the same time those who feel it find themselves in a subordinate and socially and economically inferior situation in most practical aspects.
Subordination and social and economic inferiority are rarely pleasant, particularly if there is a coexistent feeling of moral, religious and civilisational superiority. These conditions are therefore thought to be unjust and anomalous, standing as evidence that the society that permits them is malicious, or at the very least evilly disposed towards Muslims. They thus feel no loyalty to the country in which they live, and can become actively hostile towards it, even or especially when they are completely dependent on it.
Deep resentment is the natural accompaniment to all this, and unfortunately there are political entrepreneurs only too willing to take advantage of and magnify it. For electoral purposes, they assiduously propound the idea that, both on economic and racial grounds, French society is profoundly and irredeemably unjust, and will remain so until the present order is overthrown. Thus, far-left militant secularists are able to join with those who detest the official laicity of the state.
The Mephistophelian leaders of the left in France (such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko) do not promote violence in so many words; they call for peaceful, if continual and disruptive, protest, while at the same time saying that they understand why violence breaks out and that it is as inevitable as a geological event. And, as they conceive themselves romantically as heirs to the French Revolution (as well as to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and to the Paris Commune of 1871), they often say that political violence is sometimes justified. A pseudo-syllogism easily develops: Political violence is sometimes justified; we are politically violent; therefore, we are justified.
This is a particular example of what might be called a para-Cartesian psychology that is now quite general in the West, according to which anger and resentment are their own justification. The Cogito of Descartes has become, “I am angry, therefore I am right.” And if I am right, it follows that anything that I do is justified.
Whole generations have been taught and come to accept that Western civilization consists of slavery, exploitation, and massacre—and nothing else worth mentioning. For the younger generation, that civilization is not worth defending against destruction: rather, such destruction is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and they prove their own moral grandeur by tacit and active support of scenes of protest that are known in advance to be highly likely to degenerate into violence. Furthermore, many of the judges in France, thanks to psychology, sociology, and criminology, sympathise with rioters more than with the victims of the rioters’ depredations. One of the judges’ unions—the judges in France are unionised!—issued a statement blaming the police for their “repression of the youth” during the school riots that led up to the big event of October 17, as if the police had suddenly decided to pick on youth in general without any reason.
Having no gratitude towards the country to which their elders emigrated, for reasons about which they are incurious, the young of the parallel society that has grown up feel no obligations towards it. They are also highly receptive to the socialist message that the economic system deprives them of that to which they are entitled, and that wealth in their society is the fruit of exploitation. Property is theft, so when the opportunity arises, theft becomes property, all moral and practical barriers to theft having fallen. The police of Marseille estimate that 30,000 people were involved on October 17 in the looting in that city, a figure that is highly contested; but even if exaggerated by several times, it is hardly to be denied that the looters were not a mere handful of criminals. The looting resembled a popular social movement, often in a carnival atmosphere. To the joys of illicit and costless acquisition and enrichment were added those of supposed vengeance and performing a service to one’s community.
The large-scale riots of 2005 (whose participants may well be the parents, especially fathers, of some of the rioters of October 17) were importantly different from those of 2026. In not a single instance did the riots of 2005 spill into the centre of any major town or city, because the rioters were still afraid of the CRS, the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, the riot police—in whose ranks, incidentally, there are now not a few descendants of North African migrants. But the rioters of October 17 have lost all fear of them, and have descended into the city centres, which is precisely what I predicted might happen when the numbers of rioters were too great for the CRS to be able to control, in which case mere anarchy would be loosed upon the world.
Everyone awaits the elections of 2027 with deep apprehension. Riot could become insurrection, and looting could become killing. A considerable proportion of young French people already think that political violence is justified.
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