James E Hartley

Hidden Revolutionaries: Tristram Shandy and Adam Smith

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations suffers from a familiarity bias in the modern world. It is difficult to get people excited about a book that explains how the division of labor leads to specialization and trade which then creates immense wealth. The shocking nature of the work is hidden from us because we all see this every day and thus think of it as nothing particularly revolutionary.

A good comparison is provided by Isaac Newton’s Principia. In that book Newton demonstrated that the same force that causes apples to fall from trees to the ground can explain planetary movements around the sun. The shocking nature of this is hard to underestimate. As Alexander Pope described it: “Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night./ God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton had turned the entire solar system into a giant machine, following regular laws of behavior. Yet, because everything in it seems so obvious now, few people today are rushing out to read Newton’s work.

In exactly the same way, Smith turned the idea of economic society into a giant machine. It may seem like uncoordinated specialization would lead to total chaos, but there is something akin to an invisible force which induces all the parts to work together into a harmonious whole. Society is not nearly as fractured and disorganized as it first appears.

The reason it is hard for us to see the revolutionary nature of Smith’s insight is that we do not always appreciate how the world looked to people before Adam Smith wrote. In other words, we can all profit from spending some time with Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767.

Read the rest at AdamSmithWorks

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Resting in the Promises of God

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30, ESV)

Spurgeon on Resting in the Promises of God, edited by Jason Allen, is a set of 8 sermons on that theme. This is part of a larger series of books put out by Moody Press which aim to publish bite size samples from the overwhelming large number of sermons preached by Charles Spurgeon in the 19^th century.

The first thing to know about this book is that it is not a theological treatise on rest; it is sermons on the topic. The book thus reads more like a daily devotional than something written by Augustine or Calvin.

The form fits the message; as Spurgeon explains:

“Then, when you are willing to learn, please note what is to be learned. In order to get perfect rest of mind, you have to learn of Jesus not only the doctrines He teaches but a great deal more than that. To go to school to be orthodox is a good enough thing, but the orthodoxy that brings rest is an orthodoxy of the spirit.…To catch the spirit of Jesus is the road to rest. To believe what He teaches me is something, to acknowledge him as my religious leader and as my Lord is much, but to strive to be conformed to His character, not merely in its external developments but in its interior spirit, this is the grammar of rest.”

That concluding phrase, “the grammar of rest,” is a perfect summary of the content of the sermons in this volume. We tend to think of rest as something passive, but the rest Spurgeon describes is quite active. Consider the passage from Matthew 11 at the outset of this review. How does one find rest? By taking up the yoke of Christ. Spurgeon:

“It looks rather strange that after having received rest, the next verse should begin: ‘Take my yoke upon you.’ ‘Ah! I had been set free from laboring, am I to be a laborer again?’ Yes, yes, take my yoke and begin. ‘And my burden is light.’ ‘Burden? Why, I was heavy laden just now, am I to carry another burden?’ Yes. A yoke—actively and a burden—passively, I am to bear both of these. ‘But I found rest by getting rid of my yoke in my burden!’ And you are to find a further rest by wearing a new yoke and bearing a new burden. Your yoke galled, but Christ’s yoke is easy; your burden was heavy, but Christ’s burden is light.”

Similarly, in his sermon on 1 Peter 5:7 (“casting all your care upon Him, for he cares for you,” NKJV), Spurgeon doggedly explains that to be relieved of your cares, you must actively work to cast them away from you. “The care mentioned in the text, even though it be exercised upon legitimate objects, has in itself the nature of sin.”

It is in arguments like this that we can see both the strength and the weakness of the sermon format. So much depends on the implied audience. Spurgeon: “It is an ill thing for Christians to be sad.” If you imagine that being said to someone who is perpetually sad because their every whim is not satisfied, then that is a sound statement. It is indeed an ill thing to forget the blessings of God and focus only on life’s disappointments. But that same message delivered to someone grieving about a death? Even Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died. Was it an ill thing for Jesus to be sad?

Who then is the audience for a book like this? This is not the book for the scholar wanting to think through a theology of rest. It is the book for someone who cannot seem to cast off the anxieties of life, who is constantly worried about the future. If that person has been in a church for a while, there will be no theological innovations here. But, Spurgeon preaches his message with such earnestness and passion, the book may just crack through those anxieties and remind the reader that if you really believe that God has made promises, then it is probably a good idea to rest in the assurance that God will follow through.

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(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

How the Fed’s Hubris Has Contributed to Inflation

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

Milton Friedman’s statement from 1970 should not be controversial; if the amount of money goes up faster than the amount of stuff available to buy, then the inevitable result is higher prices.

Yet, to read recent discussions, one would be excused for thinking there is some great mystery surrounding the reason for inflation. I don’t think I have ever seen such a relatively simple issue clouded in so much confusion. The Federal Reserve, unfortunately, has worsened these misconceptions by misrepresenting the relationship between the money supply and overall economic well-being.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Dreams: Chesterton, Gaiman, and Lewis

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep”

Shakespeare’s Prospero declares that in The Tempest. Figuring out exactly what it means is the task of a lifetime. So, we won’t do that, today.

But, what are dreams?

G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands is a collection of some of his early work. Stories, poems, musings, and doodles, all with that Chestertonian air of paradox embedded within. The book defies summary. Think of it as the flotsam and jetsam of a fertile imagination.

When Chesterton turns to the subject of dreams, in an essay cleverly entitled “Dreams,” we get five pages of reflection which one could spend many hours unpacking.

But, before we get to Chesterton, the biggest shock of this essay has to do with Neil Gaiman. In the substory The Doll’s House of Gaiman’s unbelievably amazing Sandman, none other than Gilbert Chesterton shows up to play a rather important role. Now Chesterton was one of Gaiman’s first loves in the literary realm (along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien). What made Chesterton so important for Gaiman was this:

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

That is a wonderful description of Chesterton. But, it does not explain how he showed up in The Sandman. And suddenly reading The Coloured Lands, I know exactly how that happened.

[Note for those who have read Gaiman: throughout Chesterton’s book, there are assorted drawings, having nothing to do with the story right before or after. Just assorted doodles. The drawing on the facing page to the start of the essay on Dreams is a picture of Cain killing Abel!]

Chesterton begins the essay:

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that “last night he dreamed a dream,” we are quite certain from the perfect and decorative character of the dream that he made it up at breakfast. The dream is so reasonable that it is quite impossible.

Why impossible? After all, we constantly read tales of perfectly comprehensible dreams, inevitably with some obvious moral attached or easily attachable. Chesterton:

Dreams like these are (with occasional exceptions) practically unknown in the lawless kingdoms of the night. A dream is scarcely ever rounded to express faultlessly some faultless ideas.…Dreams have a kind of hellish ingenuity and energy in the pursuit of the inappropriate; the most omniscient and cunning artist never took so much trouble or achieved such success in finding exactly the word that was right or exactly the action that was significant, as this midnight lord of misrule can do in finding exactly the word that is wrong and exactly the action that is meaningless.

That is, if you think about your own dreams, exactly right. They really never make sense unless you iron out all the weird wrinkles. But the weird wrinkles are what makes it a dream. Dreams are weird…and terrifying.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis captures the difference between what we imagine when we think about dreams and what Dreams actually are. Sailing into a pitch black realm, the crew takes on board a man who was screaming for help. Once on board, the rescued man screams out:

“Fly! Fly! About with our ship and fly! Row, row, row for your lives away from this accursed shore…This is the Island where Dreams come True.”
“That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time,” said one of the sailors. “I reckon I’d find I was married to Nancy if we landed here.”
“And I’d find Tom alive again,” said another.
“Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”

When you think about it, Descartes’ question of how you know you are not dreaming right now is really easy to answer. I know I am not dreaming right now because the world in which I am currently existing is perfectly comprehensible. I am typing on a computer in my office and I am not going to find myself in the next second standing on a rural road right after a parade next to an abandoned parking lot realizing my truck was stolen. And I am really certain that I won’t decide that because my truck was stolenI will instantly go to a junk dealer’s storefront to sell the following two items: 1) a baseball from some playoff game involving the Red Sox, signed by the entire team (I’ve never even seen such a baseball) and 2) a Hummel figurine of a little girl holding a flower (the exact one that my mother had). If you can’t see any connection between having your truck stolen and because of that selling two rather odd items to a junk dealer, that is the point. This is the sort of thing that happens in a dream…well not a dream, the last dream I can remember from a few nights ago.

The Lord of Dreams, that midnight lord of misrule, has a very odd sense of what constitutes continuity.

From this starting observation, Chesterton proceeds to consider the relationship of Dreams to Art. As he notes, “at first sight it would seem that the lord of dreams was the eternal opponent of art.” Dreams lack the cohesion necessary to be a work of art. They lack elegance and beauty.

But, Chesterton goes on to argue that first impression is wrong. The incoherence of dreams, that wild and unpredictable nature of them, is telling us something about Life. It is not telling us that Life is wild and unpredictable; we already know that from our hours of being awake. The wildness and unpredictability of the land of dreams is of a different kind than that which we see in the daytime.

So, what are dreams doing? And this is where Chesterton starts giggling with delight off behind the scenes of his essay. This is what Gaiman internalized when he set out to craft the tale of Dream.

There is one unity which we do find in dreams. It binds together all their brutal inconsequence and all their moonstruck anti-climaxes. It makes the unimaginable nocturnal farce which begins with a saint choosing parasols and ends with a policeman shelling peas, as rounded and single a harmony as some poet’s roundel upon a passion flower. This unity is the absolute unity of emotion. If we wish to experience pure and naked feeling we can never experience it so really as in that unreal land. There the passions seem to live an outlawed and abstract existence, unconnected with any facts or persons.

You wake from a dream in a cold sweat terrified like you are never terrified when awake; you awake with a sense of overwhelming peace and happiness; you awake with a terrible feeling of loss; you awake with a massive worry that you forgot to study for the test or you are late. All of these emotions are so strong at that moment of waking that either a) you are relieved to realize the bad emotions were generated by things that are not real, or b) you have that crushing disappointment that the good emotions were based on an unconscious fancy and you want more than anything to return to that dream world.

What is Life? Chesterton notes that is not merely what you read in a newspaper or see under a microscope. “Life dwells alone in our very heart of hearts, life is one and virgin and unconquered, and sometimes in the watches of the night speaks in its own terrible harmony.” That is how Chesterton concludes the essay. What does that mean? I am not entirely sure what it means, but I am pretty sure it is correct.

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Swag and Temptation

“I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do
So the little got more and more”

So Saith Axl Rose in the Guns N’ Roses Anthem “Mr. Brownstone”

(For those of you Dear Readers who know neither Guns N’ Roses nor drug slang, it is a song about heroin addiction.)

If it were not for the intolerance of chronology to have the Order of Time broken, those lines from a 1987 song would have been an excellent epigraph in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel, Swag.

The set-up: Frank Ryan, a car salesman, partners with Ernest Stickley, Jr. (Stick, for short), an itinerant car thief, to embark upon a foolproof spree of armed robbery. Foolproof, I tell you. No danger at all. None.

It’s all laid out in Chapters 2 and 3. An utterly brilliantly constructed pair of chapters in which Frank explains the method to Stick. According to the ever authoritative Library of America, Leonard’s original title for the book was The Frank and Ernest Method, which is both a much better title and, as the publisher obviously noted, a title which would have doomed the book to poor sales. If you were browsing a bookstore in 1976, Swag catches your attention much more than The Frank and Ernest Method. Swag is 1970s cool. Frank and Earnest is something your parents said.

Despite the change in the title, it is the Method that is the key actor in this book. You see, Frank has been studying, really studying, things and he has this foolproof method and all he needs is a partner. Stick is a bit skeptical, naturally enough—if you are sitting in a bar with a car salesman telling you that he has cracked the Code of Crime, you too are skeptical. But, Frank explains: “Statistics show—man, I’m not just saying it, statistics show—armed robbery pays the most for the least amount of risk.”

Well, if statistics show it, how can you be skeptical?

You see most people involved in crime, well they don’t think things through. They get greedy and take unnecessary risks. But Frank, he knows better. “‘I can see how two guys who know what they’re doing and’re businesslike about it’—he paused, grinning a little—‘who’re frank with each other and earnest about their work, can pull down three to five grand a week.’”

Price comparison note: $3-5 grand a week in 1976 is roughly $15,000 to $25,000 in 2022. A week. Do this for a year and you make a million give or take a couple hundred grand. And it’s foolproof. Totally foolproof, I tell you.

All you have to do is follow The Rules! Frank has Ten Rules for success. As you can tell, Frank has been attending a lot of those business seminars on how to be successful in business without really trying. Take those well-established principles of success (based on statistics!) and apply them to armed robbery, and how can you go wrong?

Admit it, you want to know The Rules. You are thinking about rushing out to buy this book just to discover the rules. It’s even easy to buy the book—just click on the picture of the book cover above and it will take you right to the Amazon web page for the book and you can order it and in a day or two, you too will know The Rules!

Or you can just keep reading this here review—though, truth be told, if you do click on that link and buy the book, you will enjoy it; it is a really fun book.

What are Frank’s “ten rules for success and happiness”? The All Caps is in the original, presumably because this is, you know, really important:

1. ALWAYS BE POLITE ON THE JOB. SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU.
2. NEVER SAY MORE THAN NECESSARY.
3. NEVER CALL YOUR PARTNER BY NAME—UNLESS YOU USE A MADE-UP NAME.
4. DRESS WELL. NEVER LOOK SUSPICIOUS OR LIKE A BUM.
5. NEVER USE YOUR OWN CAR. (DETAILS TO COME.)
6. NEVER COUNT THE TAKE IN THE CAR.
7. NEVER FLASH MONEY IN A BAR OR WITH WOMEN.
8. NEVER GO BACK TO AN OLD BAR OR HANGOUT ONCE YOU HAVE MOVED UP.
9. NEVER TELL ANYONE YOUR BUSINESS. NEVER TELL A JUNKIE EVEN YOUR NAME.
10. NEVER ASSOCIATE WITH PEOPLE KNOWN TO BE IN CRIME.

There you have it. Follow those rules and you can’t go wrong.

When you look down that list, it doesn’t seem all that hard. Rules 1 and 4 are about how you look and act. Rules 2 and 3 remove the possibility of revealing information during the crime. Rule 5 also limits the possibility of someone identifying you. Rule 6 means you are focusing on getting away. Rules 7 through 10 just prevent you from getting entangled with someone who will reveal your identify to the police.

There is nothing in that set of rules which seems like it would be terribly hard to follow. This is the genius of the book. The Rules would work. You won’t get caught following those rules. The only thing stopping you from getting that equivalent of a million dollars a year is that you have some strange aversion to pointing a gun at somebody and demanding they give you all the cash in the safe or cash register or wherever it is. Presumably, that is not an easy aversion to overcome…I suppose that should say “Fortunately, that is not an easy aversion for most people to overcome.”

The reason that Swag is such an interesting novel is that by the end of chapter 3, you have seen this foolproof method for crime. Of course it could go wrong if you got really unlucky, but if you are careful, no problem at all. And yet, you, the Reader, have no doubt at all that things are not going to go well for Frank and Stick.

What’s the problem? Suppose you overcome your aversion to armed robbery and you start off following Frank’s rules, but then you realize that if you just bend one of those rules a bit, just a teensy little bit, you could easily increase your income. Say you drop the rule about saying “Please” and “Thank You.” That won’t hurt, will it? And you’ll get a higher income.

Oh, and rule 9 surely doesn’t apply to people you trust. And rule 5 only applies if anyone can see your car. And rule 10 obviously doesn’t apply to people in crime who are cautious and don’t get caught. And Rule….

Swag is a marvelous examination of human nature. Why do people do terrible things? It happens all the time. You see or hear of someone who is really mired in a horrible situation because of what they have done. The drug addict is the classic case. How does one become a heroin addict? It is rare for someone to wake up one fine morning and exclaim, “I think I want to be a junkie.” But, it is easy to imagine someone saying, “I’ll try heroin, just this once. Just a little bit. Nothing too crazy.” And then that little bit become a little bit more and then a little bit more and the end is not pretty.

This pattern of behavior is familiar to everyone. Drug and alcohol abuse, stealing from your employer, bribery or other forms of political corruption, they all start the same way: “Just a little bit.” We condemn such behavior.

We also routinely do the same thing ourselves. We don’t mean to be bad, but every now and then, being a little bit mean to someone, well, that’s OK, right? Sure I should help my neighbor (or my spouse), but just this one time, I’ll pretend I don’t notice my neighbor (or my spouse) could use some help. Just this one little lie, a white lie, honestly, just a little lie. I’ll just cut this small corner at work, just a tiny one. I can put off my work just for a minute to check Twitter, just for a minute. Oh, and Facebook too. And obviously Instagram. And Pinterest. And this nifty game. It’s not like I am deciding to avoid doing the things I should be doing. “I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do. So the little got more and more.”

Why do we do this? It is not hard to think of things you have done in the last week which cause you to wonder why you didn’t have more self-control. Why does temptation work so well? Why can’t Frank and Stick and you and I resist the temptation to just do a little bit more of that thing we know in our reflective moments we really should not be doing.

When we talk about the stamp of original sin which corrupts our very souls, we often instantly imagine the evidence of people who do really terrible things. But, terrible people doing terrible things may not be the best evidence of original sin at all.

Why does temptation seem to only run one way? I am constantly tempted to be a little bit worse than I am. Just a little. But, do I have a corresponding temptation to be a little bit better? I used to be a little bit good and then I got tempted to be a little bit better and then a bit better and then next thing you know I find out I am acting in really virtuous ways and I have no idea how I got here? Hmm. Behaving better than I used to behave seems like work. Behaving worse than I used to behave is really easy.

That is the reason to read a book like Swag. Even if you are not looking for a manual on how to become a more effective armed robber, imagining that you are is a useful exercise. How quickly would you go down the inevitable road that Frank and Stick travel? Could you resist the urge to bend those really easy rules? How often do you bend the really easy rules you make for your own life?

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Christie and Chesterton

Agatha Christie meet G. K. Chesterton.

Imagine a young Agatha Christie. She wants to write Crime Fiction.

But, who should be her role model?

On the one side, she can pattern her work after Arthur Conan Doyle. Hercule Poirot becomes the modern day Sherlock Holmes, using his little gray cells to solve puzzles. (Or as Christie would actually write, his little grey cells.) The clues are all handed to the reader along with an array of red herrings. The reader tries to be as clever as the detective and notice the real clues and uncover the culprit. The novel ends satisfactorily with all the puzzles being resolved and the reader exclaiming either “I knew it!” or “I should have seen it!”

Agatha Christie became world famous following that model. In very many ways she outdoes Doyle in the quality of the stories, even though none of her detectives ever quite become as instantly recognizable as Sherlock Holmes.

But, there is an alternate reality when Christie emulates not Doyle, but G.K. Chesterton. The Father Brown stories also have a detective, in this case an unassuming priest. He roams around and solves mysteries, and the stories are quite nice as mysteries, but there is no doubt at all that Chesterton thinks solving the crime is only a part, and a relatively unimportant part, of the story. Instead, Chesterton constantly draws attention to theological puzzles and mysteries. The stories are merely ways for Chesterton to indulge himself in working out a paradox or an oddity of life and drawing the reader’s attention to larger matters.

What would have happened if Christie had gone that route? You need not wonder. You just need to read The Mysterious Mr. Quin. I started this book having absolutely no idea that it was in a different category than Christie’s usual fare. The first story seems like a conventional Christie style mystery, but it is not really her best. Then the same with the second one. Mr. Quin is indeed mysterious; he just sort of pops into the story, but it seems like it is Mr. Satterthwaite who is doing the actual solving of the mysteries… mysteries that seem less and less like mysteries as they go along.

Eventually it dawned on me. The individual stories weren’t really the mysteries in this book. The real mystery is “Who in the world is this Mr. Quin guy?” (Slaps forehead: Hence the title of the book!) He just sort of pops up, looking oddly like a harlequin (Ah, Mr. Harley Quin!) as the light shining on him seems rather consistently filtered through a stained glass window or some such thing.

How is he always there at just the right moment? Why does he keep crossing Satterthwaite’s path just as there is some crisis in the life of someone Satterthwaite meets? Why does each story seem less and less like a Whodunit?

By two thirds of the way through the book, Mr. Quin stops even seeming like a real character in the stories—he emerges as a sort of deus ex machina, showing up in time to have a brief conversation with Satterthwaite or one of the other characters before he vanishes again.

And then, he really does start showing up magically as if he just climbed an impossible to climb cliff and he departs by heading straight back to the impossible to climb down cliff. Wait, the Reader exclaims. Is Mr. Quin even a human? Is he like some sort of Spirit Being or Guardian Angel? We never find out.

By this point, I had to remind myself this was Christie, not Chesterton. If this was a Chesterton collection, the solution to the mystery is obvious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Dear Reader, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Why shouldn’t Mr. Quin be some sort of non-human spirt wandering the earth doing good? Why do you assume that all mysteries must be solved by tell-tale clues interpreted by clever human agency? Why do you discount the fact that some mysteries are only revealed by knowing the details of the human heart?

This all seems so very unlike an Agatha Christie novel, but her name is right on the cover. She wrote these stories very early in her career, quite literally at the same time when was working out Hercule Poirot. The Mysterious Mr. Quin is the Road Not Taken.

Does this mean that Christie decided to go the more realistic route? Can we say that Hercule Poirot is more realistic than Harley Quin? Only if we deny the existence of ethereal beings.

This Christie-Chesterton mashup has my mind reeling in exactly the same way that Chesterton always jolts one out of lazy patterns of thought.

On the one hand, I have a solid faith in the existence of non-corporeal beings. God exists. Angels and demons exist. Of this I have no doubt.

But, if I am reading a story about angles and demons, I have zero doubt I am reading fiction. I never once paused to wonder if Good Omens was non-fiction. But, that isn’t really all that surprising—everyone thinks Good Omens is fiction.

What about Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? There I still stick with fiction, but suddenly I am a lot less willing to say there is nothing real there at all. Fictional stories about real things. Sure the stories are fiction, but angels and demons are real.

If Hercule Poirot shows up to solve a mystery, I know the story is fiction, but it seems like a plausibly true story. It is realistic. If, on the other hand, Poirot could suddenly call down lightning bolts to slay the murderer, I would think the story was rather unrealistic. If Mr. Quin is just an angel who shows up to help out at a moment of crisis, why do I think that story is unrealistic? Why? Just because to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen an angel roaming the earth, I cannot deny the possibility that they are out there. So, why do I instantly think Mr. Quin is unrealistic? Why am I constantly looking for explanations of how he could both be human and do the things he does?

In other words the real mystery of The Mysterious Mr. Quin is why I find Mr. Quin to be mysterious at all.

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