James E Hartley

Divided We Stand

I would humbly like to submit the following for your consideration as the new National Motto of these United States:

The Nation is Always in Decline

When was the era when people at the time believed that things were amazing? When was the era when everyone believed that things were as good as could be, that there were no issues of great national disagreement, when peace and happiness prevailed throughout the land?

One of the many advantages of reading Old Books is realizing how contemporary they often feel. Here, for example, are some passages describing the Great Divisions in Modern Society. For each of the four passages below, guess the date in which they were written:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

The above was a trick question. All four passages come from the same source. James Madison wrote all of them in 1787 in issue 10 of The Federalist Papers.

Look again at those four passages and ask which one is not something that people have said about contemporary society in the last year. Take the first one, for example, and see how trivially easy it is to apply each of its parts to modern society:

1. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion,
2. concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice;
3. an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions,
4. have, in turn, divided mankind into parties,
5. inflamed them with mutual animosity,
6. and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Rather depressing isn’t it?

The solution? Madison again: “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.”

Look at modern political discourse and there is no doubt which route is the more popular: somehow, some way, everyone seems to want to rid the nation of the causes of faction. We could all get along if only that other side no longer existed or at least if they were just better educated so they would have the right thoughts. Even if we can’t get rid of that other side completely, can’t we just get rid of the most extreme versions?

Madison, once again: “There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” The first of those options is undesirable; the second is impossible.

Madison’s solution was the US Constitution, which we can easily verify has done absolutely nothing to reduce the divisions of society. What the Constitution has done, remarkably well, is keep the nation intact. How? From Federalist 51 (also written by Madison): “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

That idea is absolute genius. If you want to control the effects of the division in the society, make sure that ambitious people will always have the means and opportunity to counteract the ambitions of their opponents.

Division and Strife is a feature, not a bug, of the American political order.

The problem, as one last quotation from Madison makes clear, is human nature: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

So, yes, the divisions in the current world of politics are the worst they have ever been. They are always the worst they have ever been. They always will be the worst they have ever been. Nostalgia is a powerful force making the past seem so much better than it was, but when you read the political documents of those earlier times, it is always quite stunning to realize how contemporary the complaints seem. And, if reading Madison hasn’t convinced you of that, try reading political discussion from 1861.

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Travels with Don Quixote

“And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as in verse.”

That is one of the characters in Don Quixote. Cervantes must have had a merry time writing that description of his own book and embedding it in the book as a description of a perfect book.

If you have never read Don Quixote, this is likely how you would summarize it: Crazy guy (Don Quixote) thinks he is a knight and goes and fights windmills thinking they are giants; he has a sidekick (Sancho Panza) who is not crazy. The book is 940 pages long. And that is why you never read it. Who wants to read a 940 page book about a guy fighting windmills?

The windmill episode, by the way, takes place on pages 58-60 (in the excellent Edith Grossman translation (the one in the picture (and Amazon link) above). That leaves another 937 pages.

Written in the early 17th century, Don Quixote is a contender for the first novel ever written. The debate is not about an earlier book, but whether this is actually a “novel.” It has so many interweaving stories within stories, it was published in two parts written ten years apart, and it, to put it mildly, wanders all over the place—the debate is whether it retains enough cohesion to be called a novel. The problem with the debate is that if it is not a novel, it is not clear what it is. (Well, other than a masterpiece; it is definitely a masterpiece.)

Have you ever had the pleasure of starting a jaunt on a mountain road and wandering aimlessly wherever the path takes you, picking branches of the trail at random, not really heading anywhere in particular, but admiring the scenery? That is how you should read Don Quixote. Forget what little you know or think you know about the book, and just set off. Embrace every lengthy short story within the larger story. Be thrilled when you keep arriving back at the same Inn, which for no obvious reasons turns out of be a cosmic magnet for curious characters. Simultaneously laugh at Don Quixote and be indignant when the characters in the novel mock him. Be delighted. It is easy to be delighted with this book one you lose the expectation of a linear narrative.

But, as Cervantes notes in the quotation reprinted above, delight is only one of Cervantes’ aims. He also wants to teach. What is the lesson?

We begin see the shape of the lesson by looking at Don Quixote. After a lifetime of being obsessed with stories of knights errant, Don Quixote decides that he will become one, dons his armor, picks a fair maiden he has never seen to be the lady for whom he is doing valiant deeds, hires Sancho Panza to be his page, and then sets off to do Great Things. He meets people on the road who are villains and he defeats them in battles, rescues people from cruel captors, joins massive battels between warring armies, fights giants, and visits castles. Well, at least that is how Don Quixote would describe his story. The narrator tells tales of Don Quixote attacking random travelers, fighting windmills, and visiting inns. Don Quixote’s world is a lot more exciting than the narrator’s (and your) world.

Eventually Don Quixote starts meeting a cast of characters all of whom have lengthy back stories or tell tales of themselves, some true, some invented. Before long, the reader is lost in this maze of stories. You can pause, if you would like, and untangle the web to try to recall which stories are true and which are fictions told by the characters to deceive Don Quixote even further, or you can just enjoy the journey.

Throughout the story, the question of Don Quixote’s madness keeps arising. On the one hand, dressing up in armor and roaming the countryside looking for villains and magical beasts to vanquish is a rather odd thing to do in the year 1600. Knight errantry died out long ago. On the other hand, when Don Quixote speaks, a remarkable thing slowly dawns on the people he meets (and the Reader):

Those who listened to him were overwhelmed again with pity at seeing that a man who apparently was intelligent and rational in all other matters could lose these faculties completely when it was a question of his accursed and bedeviled chivalry….But, as has been said so often in the course of this great history, he spoke nonsense only with regard to chivalry, and in other conversations he demonstrated a clear and confident understanding…

Is Don Quixote mad? Here we have someone who can speak calmly and rationally about every subject you bring up, but is convinced he is a knight errant. Does his delusion about that one thing render him insane?

Before you answer: what do you call someone who dresses up in armor and roams the countryside looking for wrongs to be righted? Isn’t that the very definition of a knight errant? When Don Quixote sets off on his journeys, doesn’t he, in fact, become a knight errant? Is he wrong about himself? Or is he simply wrong in thinking that windmills are giants?

Before you answer that: Suppose an educated person decides that there are great evils in the world and quits a steady, well-paying job in order to go out and right those wrongs. Is that mad? Are missionaries and social works and teachers all afflicted with madness when they believe they are making the world a better place?

Before you answer that: when I put on shoes and go into a classroom and tell 18-22 year olds about supply and demand curves thinking that by doing so I will help rid the world of those Demons called Ignorance and Sloppy Thinking, am I merely dressing up in a professional garb and tilting at windmills?

Don Quixote, c’est moi.

Am I excused because I know my own delusions? So, does Don Quixote:

“It seems to me,” said Sancho, “that knights who did these things were provoked and had a reason to do senseless things and penances; but what reason does you grace have for going crazy?” […]
“Therein lies the virtue,” responded Don Quixote, “and the excellence of my enterprise, for a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason. The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?”

One of the things that most fascinated me in reading the book was the constant undercurrent suggesting that Don Quixote was not deluded at all. What if he was choosing to embrace his delusion because it made for a better life than the one he was leading? If so, then how is he any different than everyone who has ever taken up an impossible task simply because the effort to do the Herculean is far better than rotting away in a cubicle or a back room somewhere?

Maybe, just maybe, there are more Don Quixotes in our midst than we care to admit. Maybe, just maybe, you are a Don Quixote too. Maybe the Don Quixotes of the world are indeed the real heroes because at least they are not standing off to the side mocking or ignoring those who are out to slay giants.

Is it better to spend our life slaying giants even if the giants are windmills or to simply trudge along the path of life occasionally briefly noticing the windmills by the side of the road? When the real giants show up, which type of person is going to be more ready for the challenge of facing them?

That is why you should read Don Quixote.

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The Glories of Being Enchanted

“He was only a little taller than Lucy herself and he carried over his head an umbrella, white with snow. From the waist upwards he was like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s (the hair on them was glossy black) and instead of feet he had goat’s hoofs. He also had a tail, but Lucy did not notice this at first because it was neatly caught up over the arm that held the umbrella so as to keep it from trailing in the snow. He had a red woollen muffler round his neck and his skin was rather reddish too. He had a strange, but pleasant little face, with a short pointed beard and curly hair, and out of the hair there stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead. One of his hands, as I have said, held the umbrella: in the other arm he carried several brown-paper parcels. What with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a Faun. And when he saw Lucy he gave such a start of surprise that he dropped all his parcels.
‘Goodness gracious me!’ exclaimed the Faun.”

That, as you probably know, is from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. In a later essay (“It All Began With a Picture…”), Lewis claims that this image, which he first had at the age of 16, was the genesis of Narnia. (In the same essay he also says you should not always believe authors when they tell you how they wrote their books, so…)

Is that passage Enchanting?

Alan Jacobs wrote an engaging biography of Lewis: The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. It’s the first full biography of Lewis I have ever read, so I have no ability to evaluate it on a comparative basis, but I can happily recommend it to anyone who, like me, would like to while away some hours delving into how the mind of Lewis was developed. (Obviously, if you want to actually delve into the mind of Lewis, you are better off reading Lewis’ own books.)

There are a ton of fascinating anecdotes in the book. I’ll give just one before moving along to the subject on which I want to ruminate for a bit. When Clive Staples Lewis was four years old, he announced to his family that from then on he would only answer to the name “Jacksie.” Later in life, that shortened to Jack, but he did indeed never use Clive again. He also never stopped being as headstrong as that four year old demanding his parents call him by his new name. That episode explains a lot about the adult Lewis.

The adult Lewis was a remarkably prolific author. Even setting aside all his essays, the books alone demonstrate an incredible variety. Both fiction and non-fiction. The fiction category has both adult and children’s novels. The non-fiction has popular Christian apologetics and scholarly treatises. He was, in the mid-20^th century, one of the most well-known English academics in the world. He made the cover of TIME.

So, facing this enormous variety of works, how does a biographer make sense of it all? What unifies all these books and essays? Jacobs explains:

And here I would like to suggest something that is the keynote of this book: my belief that Lewis’s mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted and that it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life—his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story, whether written by an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, by Beatrix Potter, or by himself. What is “secretly present in what he said about anything” is an openness to delight, to the sense that there’s more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything. For someone with eyes to see and the courage to explore, even an old wardrobe full of musty coats could be the doorway into another world.

A willingness to be enchanted. That is a curious phrase. What does it mean?

Look out the window. (Really—this the Reader Participation Portion of this rumination.) What do you see? Now: imagine that the object you see is actually endowed with sentience and wonder. That bird speaks English, or maybe Bulgarian. The tree is possessed by a dryad. The breeze is being caused by a sleeping giant just beyond your line of sight. The man in the suit is a magician. The woman in green is a traveler from another world.

And now take whatever image you just conjured and imagine it is true. Really true. Imagine what it would be like to live in a world like that, where the bird really does speak Bulgarian to the woman from Neptune about how to slay the stone giant without alerting the magician who is the giant’s servant. Is your picture enchanting? Do you feel under the spell of this world? Is there something amazing about imagining that when you next leave your house, you will actually encounter a faun carrying an umbrella?

If you are the normal product of a 21^st century education system, you think such imaginative exercises are just foolishness. Obviously there is no dryad in that tree and no dwarfs digging ditches. Kids fantasize about things like that, but then eventually they put aside the childish idea that maybe such things are real. That is, after all, the whole purpose of school, to rid you of such childish nonsense and learn real things. Sure, if you want to pretend you are a kid, you can read fantasy stories or science fiction, but don’t go pretending such things are real.

Lewis had zero patience with education of that sort. The first part of The Abolition of Man is a rant about textbook writers who want to disenchant children. Why is disenchantment our universal educational goal? Why not go through life pleasantly pausing every now and then simply to be enchanted?

Take The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. We know Lewis wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Into which category falls this tale about Narnia? Fiction, obviously. But, what if it isn’t? What if Narnia is real? What happens if you read the novel and the whole time you suspend all your disbelief and imagine that this book as every bit as accurate at Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What if Hogwarts really exists?

Yes, I know you are thinking it is a really silly exercise to spend some time imagining that Narnia is real, that Lucy really did meet a Faun in the snowy woods. But why is it silly? What is the harm that will be done by spending some time being thoroughly enchanted by that image of Lucy and the Faun, imagining it really happened while German and English men were killing each other in the French countryside? Are you really better off if you only think about the deaths on the battlefields of France, but not those between the armies of High King Peter and the White Witch?

What if being enchanted is the key to understanding the world? What if the deliberate quashing of enchantment has meant that people spend their lives looking down, imagining that it is only what they can see that is real? What if enchantment is the only way to realize the true nature of this world, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies? What if there is “more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye”?

It is about to start raining here. (Really, it is—major thunderstorm about to roll through.) The sky is getting darker as I write this. At one level, I know this is the result of weather fronts and cloud formations and all sorts of other meteorological mumbo-jumbo that I vaguely learned about in school.

But, what if? What if I spend some time during this storm thinking of the Wild Wizard in the Holyoke Range who is working with the God of Rain to summon up a storm to protect the people hiding in the castles at Mount Holyoke from a fire breathing dragon who is heading our way? Every drop of rain now seems like a gift from above. The harder it rains, the safer I feel. That booming sound is the anger of the dragon who is being thwarted as I write.

In which world am I going to spend a more enjoyable half-hour; the one the Weather Channel talks about or the one with that wild wizard named Doctor Jimbopulous?

Cultivating enchantment is not the same thing as losing touch with reality. I know there is not a dragon breathing mustard fire bearing down upon me right now. But what if Lewis is right that being enchanted is a good thing? As Jacobs notes: Lewis, at some point in his life realized that “feeding his imagination” could be done “under the guise of rigorous, analytical, academic study—but he would still be reading the kinds of books that had always brought him delight.” Is that delight something to be lightly tossed aside as your knowledge of the world increases?

Be enchanted today. Just for five minutes imagine this is a world in which wild things really do happened and it is all amazing and anything, literally anything, could happen when you walk out of the door. Who knows, when you return from your enchanted world, you might just realize something new about how amazing the real world actually is.

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Villette (and Jane Eyre)

“Bronte’s finest novel.”
Virginia Woolfe

“It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.”
George Eliot

The book? Villette by Charlotte Bronte.

As longtime readers of this here space know, I have long had a deep loathing of Jane Eyre. (More about that anon.) And so saying that Villette is a superior novel is potentially damning with faint praise. So, let us start with a declarative: Villette is good, really good, well worth reading.

Our heroine (and narrator), Lucy Stowe, is a young English woman who finds herself working in a boarding school in the French town of Villette. Love interests? Of course there are (this is a Bronte novel). A strapping young doctor and a jaded French instructor. Ah, but there is also the beautiful young rival, a vain lass lacking any hint of seriousness, and another beautiful rival, lacking any depth of any sort. Toss in an unscrupulous suitor for the first rival, the father of the latter rival, an oddly terrifying matron of the school, and an enigmatic priest. You can now write a story very much like Villette.

In other words, there is nothing about this plot that makes the story in any way significantly different than every other romantic bildungsroman. You’ve read this story a zillion times already. The only questions the reader has throughout the book are a) which love interest will win out in the end? and b) will they live happily ever after?

It is the nature of our heroine that makes the story compelling. Early on, she describes herself:

I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains. Fate would not so be pacified; nor would Providence sanction this shrinking sloth and cowardly indolence.

Lucy Snowe does not see herself, nor does she want to be, the protagonist in this story. Note the title of the book; Villette is the town in which the story takes place; it would be hard to think of a title for the novel which would signify less attachment to the narrator. Eliot (T.S., not George) could have been writing a character description of Lucy when he wrote:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous

Secondary characters like that abound in literature. When secondary characters are the narrator, they are usually detached observers of the actions of others. But, in Villette, Lucy tries to fade into the background while narrating the story of her life in which she is the central character of every interesting episode. It is a curiously effective narrative style.

An observer at heart, Lucy notices much of what is going on around her, but only whenever it does not touch on her personally. Perpetually oblivious to how others see her, we have a heroine who is trying to avoid grand gestures or scenes while patiently seeking out and enduring a myriad of small privations and pains, caught up is a grand romantic novel with romantic intrigues all around, occasionally touching herself. It is the narration, not the plot, which makes this novel so compelling. It has the aura of a detective story without a crime; the reader is constantly trying to be one step ahead of the seemingly clueless narrator in figuring out what is really going on.

There are frequent payoffs in brilliantly crafted descriptions. Here, for example, is how the woman who runs the school is described:

Never was the distinction between charity and mercy better exemplified than in her. While devoid of sympathy, she had a sufficiency of rational benevolence: she would give in the readiest manner to people she had never seen—rather, however, to classes than to individuals. “Pour les pauvres,” she opened her purse freely—against the poor man, as a rule, she kept it closed. In philanthropic schemes for the benefit of society at large she took a cheerful part; no private sorrow touched her: no force or mass of suffering concentrated in one heart had power to pierce hers. Not the agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, could have wrung from her eyes one tear.

Brilliant. I know a lot of people just like that. (This is, in fact, also a great summary of the thesis in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals. In crisp biographies of intellectual titans in the past couple hundred years, Johnson mercilessly shows how an intellectual having a very public deep concern for mankind does not correspond with treating real people in their lives with even a modicum of decency. Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre, and on and on. “Biography as Character Assassination” could be the subtitle of Intellectuals. It is a brilliant book, and wonderfully fun reading.)

While the novel is well worth reading, Villette is not a perfect story. I enjoyed the first two-thirds much more than the last third, which seemed like a jarring shift in tone. In retrospect, the nature of the last third could be interpreted as a change in Lucy herself—she is the narrator after all, so maybe the change in tone is due to the maturation of the narrator. But as it is, it struck me as quite inelegant.

There is also a truly annoying subplot about a ghost haunting the school (mostly in the attic!), which plays no real role in the story and the grand reveal is simply lame. If you are going to have a mysterious ghost in a novel like this, at least have it do something interesting and have the explanation be a lot less painful.

But, none of the above was the most stunning part of reading Villette. The biggest shock for me personally while reading this novel: I realized I have been wrong all along about Jane Eyre.

Somewhere in the middle of reading Villette, the scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly understood Jane Eyre. Mind, the shock of this realization was huge—I have read Jane Eyre at least three times, and here, reading a completely different novel, I finally understood Jane.

Jane Eyre is simply a slightly more adventurous version of Lucy Stowe. It explains so much about Jane and suddenly the constant descriptions of and obsession with the minor privations and pains which she endures, the weird fascination with Rochester, sticking with Rochester even after she discovers he is keeping his wife locked in an attic, the unwillingness to actually just move on with her life, and on and on—all of that is simply a slight variation on Lucy Stowe.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not eagerly anticipating rereading Jane Eyre. But, for the first time since I first read it, I can understand why everyone else seems to adore the book so very much. Jane is the wallflower who is trying to move to center stage.

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Is Liberty a Means or an End?

Liberty is not the default state for a society. Looking at 16th century Italy in The Prince and the early years of the Roman Republic in Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli amply demonstrates liberty was indeed a very tenuous thing. Regardless of whether authority in a country is nominally lodged in a prince or the people, liberty is always at risk.

How, then, can a society achieve liberty? Having achieved it, how can liberty be preserved? Enter Machiavelli, who explains that since liberty does not arise and maintain itself, it needs the help of an enlightened ruler. He offers his counsel, like the friend who cares enough about you to tell you what you really do not want to hear. To enable a society to live in freedom requires someone willing to do hard, and often unpleasant, work.

How unpleasant in the work of establishing and maintaining liberty? You should not get into this business if you want to keep your hands clean. “This will always be known by those who read of ancient things: that after a change of state, either from republic to tyranny or from tyranny to republic, a memorable execution against the enemies of present conditions is necessary.” A memorable execution is necessary?

This essay is part of a symposium on “Machiavelli: Friend or Foe to Liberty?” Read the rest of this essay, the three essays by my fellow symposium participants, and the responses from all four of us at the Online Library of Liberty.

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Diseased Politics and Politicized Disease

“Why do you assume you have the right to decide for someone else? Don’t you agree it’s a terrifying right, one that rarely leads to good? You should be careful. No one’s entitled to it, not even doctors.”
“But doctors are entitled to that right—doctors above all,” exclaimed Dontsova with deep conviction. By now she was really angry. “Without that right there’d be no such thing as medicine!”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that in Cancer Ward, first published in 1968. On the surface, the novel is a slice of life story set in a hospital. The semi-autobiographical central character, Oleg, is surrounded by an array of other patients undergoing treatments, mostly ineffective, for a terrifying disease. The nurses and doctors are overwhelmed, managing their frustrations with a mix of bravado and despair. The only true victor in the novel is cancer.

But the book is also a metaphor for society. Solzhenitsyn designed the metaphor to capture what was happening in the Soviet Union. But the book can also help us examine American society in the Age of COVID. Solzhenitsyn helps us understand the answer to a question that has surely crossed many minds since 2020: how did a biological disease turn into a political battle?

Read the rest at Public Discourse

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