Austin Hall Library

Juries: A Microcosm of Modern Society

One need look no further for a microcosm of modern society than the the jury room of the local courthouse. While juries are normally made up of a mixture of fine people, the collective psychology of the modern jury is frightening. Frightening, that is, for what it discloses about the mindset of society in general.

Sentimentality is the dominant characteristic of juries these days. As the constitutive parts of the word imply, sentimentality is the subjugation of the "mental" to the "sentient." It is an attempt to found a philosophy, outlook, or decision on feeling. Of course, all human beings have sentiments. Sentiments, if subject to the reason, are good. Sentimentality is, however, the subjecting of reason to desire or feelings.

Sentimentalism is sentimentality raised to the level of a first principle and, in the context of law, it is a very serious weakness that challenges justice itself. The sentimentalist doesn't simply subject reason to feeling; he unwittingly denies the difference. Whatever he feels or desires, appears transparently right to him. When the collective psychology of a jury is sentimentality, the rule of law is overturned.  Examples of this appear in the news every day.

A person who commits a crime has indulged his will against his reason. A jury that indulges its feelings against its reason converts a court of law into a hospital, a school, a social agency, or some other such place. Ultimately, such a jury denies the free will of man. It treats man more as a pet and less as a human being responsible for the choices he makes.

But, where did sentimentality as a dominant characteristic in modern society originate? It is hard to  say--not because the precursors are so hard to find, but because there are so many. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries immediately come to mind, as well as late-eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism. Like most ideas, there were likely many related causes converging into a concept. If one is interested in reading about one aspect and possible precursor to modern sentimentalism, Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion: With Special Reference to XVII and XVIII Centuries is a great place to start. The connection may not be immediately apparent, but if one sticks with this insightful and solid book, the contours of incipient late-twentieth century sentimentalism may be made out. Go to Amazon and read the Excerpt from Enthusiasm posted there. It should be read slowly and thoughtfully. Then buy the book and take your time reading it. It is a good start to understanding at least one aspect of modern sentimentalism.

Top Ten Historical Novels

My tastes in historical fiction are not very refined. I didn't read any fiction until 1991 (other than what I occasionally read when I was much younger), and the genre remains a small part of my reading to this day. But, I have come to believe that one can't do better on a rainy day, or on a long flight, than spending one's time with a gripping historical novel--the genre that combines historical facts with fiction.

This post introduces my top ten list of historical novels in alphabetical order. As I said, it is not a refined list, but, for the most part, the books are great reads.

While I fell in love with the American West as a young boy by reading Louis L'Amour paperbacks, I  was forever captivated when I read James A. Michener's Centennial, about a fictitious Colorado town by that name (there is an actual Colorado town by that name where the author lived for a year doing research for the book). Michener makes the northern plains Indians, fur trappers, pioneer settlers, soldiers, ranchers, and dry land and irrigation farmers come alive in this epic of the American West. It was this book, in significant part, that spurred me to eventually make my home in the West and to embrace everything about that great region.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, is based on the experiences of two historic French Catholic priests (a bishop--archbishop in real life--and his vicar) sent to the American Southwest in 1851. It is quite literally a beautiful book--with stunning descriptions of the southwestern frontier. It is also a deeply moving book about humanity and faith.

I have on more than one occasion written of my affection for Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire. It is a page-turner about the 5th century B.C. Battle of Thermopylae that is not for the faint of heart. It contains graphic violence in the context of war and is a mesmerizing and well-researched account of the Spartan worldview. This book appeals to me on a mysterious level and reminds me, each time I read the battle narratives, of Geroge C. Scott's quote, in the movie Patton, referring to the sacking of Carthage: ". . . The soldiers lay naked in the sun, two thousand years ago; and I was here."

Robert Graves' historically detailed I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 chronicles the period in Roman history immediately following the fall of the Republic and near the beginning of the rule of the Caesars. It is a highly readable first person narrative about a very important period in history, written by an accomplished historian. This is not only a really good novel, it is very good history.

I include Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey as one historical novel. They are actually two books (poems) that tell stories older than the written word. The Iliad is the story of the ten-year long Trojan War, which climaxes with the destruction of the City of Troy by the Greeks. The Odyssey is the story of the adventures of the Greek Odysseus (also known as Ulysses) during his long journey home from the war. Strictly speaking, these books are not historical novels. The belong to the genre of epic. An epic is a long poem that tells a story involving gods, heroes and heroic exploits. But, I include them because they share some characteristics with historical fiction and they were profoundly influential classics in Western literature, not to mention that The Iliad is one of the best war stories of all time.

From this post, one might get the idea that I am obsessed with tales of war, and that thought even occurs to me as I write my next recommendation: The Killer Angels. Written by Michael Shaara, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg through the eyes of Confederate Generals Lee, Longstreet, and Armistead and Federal General Buford, Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, and others. I have read much of the historical literature on the War Between the States and The Killer Angels is the most gripping treatment of the valor and sacrifice of that war I have ever read.

Then there is the episodically brilliant saga of the American West, Lonesome Dove. Actually, I read this book only relatively recently, after seeing the television miniseries by the same name--several times. The book is a story of the quest of two aging former Texas Rangers to lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to the Territory of Montana, and the character development in Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winner is unexcelled. This Western has everything: larger than life cowboys, deep masculine friendships, a cattle drive, lots of bravado, outlaws, vast prairies, Indians, river crossings, a lynching, gunfights, gamblers, authentic western lore, and cleverly written dialogue by an author who actually understands Westerners, particularly Texans. Only such an author would have known to include in the story the novel's oft-repeated refrain, "Things would've been a lot better if we'd stayed in Texas."

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a brilliant and complex mystery novel about a monk and his young assistant (the narrator) dispatched to a monastery to investigate heresy. Soon after their arrival, however, their focus shifts to a series of mysterious murders, and the reason behind the deaths. Set in a 14th century Italian Abbey, this is a masterpiece of the thinking person's novel. It has a spellbinding plot, plenty of historical facts, and interesting philosophical and theological questions. If you like books, the description of the Abbey's library alone is worth the read.

Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth powerfully chronicles the experiences of a prior, his master builder, and their community as they struggle simply to live and to build a cathedral during the tumultuous 12th century. It is hard to explain the impact this beautifully haunting novel had on me when I first read it. Rich character development and attention to detail are characteristics of this historical novel of the Middle Ages and, even though it contains gratuitous sex and a couple of other things that detract from the story, it likely rates up there with the best historical novels ever written.

Finally, there is James A. Michener's absorbing work of genius, Texas. Covering the whole panoramic  history of the great State of Texas, this extremely well-researched novel helps one understand why Texas is the way it is, and its people are the way they are. The book is certainly not accurate in all its history and it takes some patience and perseverance in the early pages, but it is well worth the effort. God bless Texas!

Before Your Embrace Universal Healthcare

On the way to my office recently I heard an NPR report on the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama regarding universal healthcare. Admittedly, the cost of healthcare for the average person these days is almost beyond belief. But, before one embraces the idea that government provided universal healthcare is a good answer to the problem, one should read Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass. I have previously posted about Dalrymple and his insightful book (here), but I mention it again for a different reason.

Dalrymple is a British physician who served the poor in hospitals and prisons in England for forty years. The case histories and his experiences with England's welfare state are shockingly enlightening. In short, socialized medicine misses the main point of the plight of the underclass--cultural and spiritual impoverishment. In fact, universal healthcare, while intended for good, may very well exacerbate the problem of the underclass. According to Dalrymple, a physician with vast first-hand experience in this area, it is not the absence of full medical coverage that most significantly harms the underclass. It is the moral relativism and tolerance of the progressive elites that ultimately foster self-destructive pathologies in the very people they intend to help.

Books and Guns

Molon Labe! (Μολὼν λαβέ, pronounced "mo-lone lah-veh") is the Greek expression of defiance uttered by King Leonidas of the Spartans when presented with the Persians' ultimatum to give up their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae. It means "Come [and] take [them]!" The picture on the left is of the words inscribed in marble on a monument at Thermopylae. For the best historical novel written on the Battle of Thermopylae, by the way, pick up Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. I was swept away in Pressfield's breathtaking description of the battle and the heroism of the Spartans.

I thought of Leonidas' defiant statement when I came upon the following Dutch proverb yesterday: "Arms and books need to be looked at every day." The Dutch have changed but the wisdom of that proverb has not. In addition to a fine library, one ought to have a few well chosen guns and know how to use them. If you need to be deprogrammed and persuaded, try John R. Lott, Jr.'s somewhat dry but irrefutable More Guns Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. I heard Lott give a defense of his book in Washington, D.C. in the late 90s and went right out and bought the book. If you don't need persuading, you should nonetheless add to your library Boston's Gun Bible. The Amazon editorial review calls it "a no holds barred consumer guide to firearms, accessories, and shooting." It is likely the best all-around reference book for firearms owners.

While neither violence nor arms should ever be glorified, there is probably no subject under the sun that has spawned greater nonsense written about it than gun ownership--with, of course, the notable exception of Southern history and culture.

The Era of Relativism

I am seldom surprised these days at the ideas expressed by people. But, during a very recent cross-examination of a witness in court, I was momentarily taken aback by the young female witness who asserted that the rightness and wrongness of her actions depended solely upon the circumstances. Moreover, she was quick to add that she was the sole interpreter and judge of her curcumstances.

I was mildly surprised at this not because of the witness' brazen relativism. I have encountered that under oath before. Rather, I was surprised by the fact that the witness in this case was not a sophisticated, college educated, quasi-intellectual, but a highly unsophisticated and extraordinarily simple high school graduate from the rural south. She had much more in common with the Beverly Hillbillies than she did with some university philosophy professor extolling the virtues of free thought.

It dawned on me that the only thing this simple woman has in common with the American intellectual elite, where moral, philosophical, and cultural relativism is now commonplace, is that she also is the product of our national educational system. An educational system that, more than any other nation, has chosen to look upon its schools at all levels as a means of shaping the mind and personality and not merely imparting information. And the predominant shape of American education these days is relativism.

A good practical and popular lay treatment of relativism may be found in Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl.

Provocative Reading

I am well into Clyde N. Wilson's Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture, and I can already highly recommend it to anyone interested in a view of Southern culture undisturbed by political correctness.

Dr. Wilson, a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, has produced a series of essays, as well as book reviews, that are grouped by content and span approximately twenty-five years. The essays and reviews are an excellent counterbalance to the distorted ideas of Southern culture that pass for factual history these days and, for the most part, the writing is insightful and provocative.

Along with Wilson's book, I am delving into Mark G. Malvasi's The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, which does precisely as its subtitle suggests. It explores, compares, and contrasts the thought of these three influential figures in the Southern Agrarian Movement.

And while I am at it, I highly recommend Michael Andrew Grissom's Southern by the Grace of God for a delightful insight to all things Southern, and, particularly, a good look into the Southern psyche. Along the same line is Lewis Grizzard's, less researched, but more humorous, book by the same title.

The Politics of Modernism

One cannot help noticing the current political fascination with "change." According to one major news network, the perceived ability to "bring needed change" continues to be the number one attribute sought in a candidate and mentioned by voters in exit polls. Experience is mentioned as a distant second and empathy is listed third. One major candidate even adopted the campaign slogan "Ready for Change, Ready to Lead."

At one level, this is a fascinating phenomenon--fascinating because the word change is used like a direct object, with no reference as to what specific change is needed in what. At another level, it is a deeply disturbing phenomenon. It reminds me of the thought of Ezra Pound, one of the major figures in the Modernist movement. Pound, in Make It New, explains that the meaning of all his work, particularly The Cantos of Ezra Pound, is "new-ism".

Admittedly, I find Pound virtually incomprehensible for the most part, and I lament the fact that the customarily  insightful T.S. Eliot is reported to have referred to Pound as a great poet. Nonetheless, he has made a recent but significant impact on Western culture. Pound promoted the Confucian doctrine of "process" and even said it would save the world, by which, as John Senior says, "he means destroy the West." In his writing, Pound essentially repudiates ideas and is thus left with nothing observable but a process.

People who conceive of existence in this way--as a process rather than being--always attach themselves to the current, the novel, the au courant. The pursuit of change as an end in itself in the political realm is simply a warmed over version of Modernist philosophy. The lust for the new derives from a loathing of the customary, the traditional, the norm.

Modern politicians may not express their ideas in this way, and may not even know the philosophical roots of their own political inclinations. Most politicians, after all, are not deeply thoughtful people. Nevertheless, the hazy expressions championed by politicians and parroted during exit polling must come from somewhere. They come from ideas, and are often caught rather than explicitly taught.

Modern Commercial Education

Despite protestations to the contrary, modern education is not an improvement over the education of the past. There is more of it for more people, but integrity demands an admission that its quality has been watered down.

I had occasion this weekend to recall Wendell Berry's essay, "The Joys of Sales Resistance," in which he expresses his customary clear thinking on the subject of "the new commercial education" that "is fun for everybody." For those familiar with modern education and the presuppositions that have come to support it, although somewhat humorous, a number of Berry's comments hit very close to home. He wrote, "all you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:"

• Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.
• Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.
• The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.
• The place where education is to be used is called "your career."
• Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.
• The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But, if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.
• Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.
• The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their "field" or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as "professionalism."
• The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.
• The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.
• The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.
• A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.
• Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs. Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.
• The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.
• A good school is a big school.
• Disarm the children before you let them in.

A Microcosm of Recent Centuries

I am enjoying John Senior's The Death of Christian Culture, which opens with a story that reminded me of a recent trip to Rome. At left is a picture of Michelangelo's sculpture of the Pieta', which I took in St. Peter's Basilica last October. The statue stands in the first chapel on the right as one enters the Basilica and, as I recall, is the only work to which Michelangelo ever attached his name. If one enlarges and looks closely at this picture, it is obvious that there is a glare from glass that separates the viewer from the statue. That was not always the case (see clearer picture at right below).

David Allen White opens the Introduction of Senior's provocative book with this paragraph:

On May 21, 1972, Lazzlo Toth, an Australian geologist of Hungarian birth attacked Michelangelo's the Pieta' in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. As he raced at the statue with a hammer in his raised arm he proclaimed, "I am Jesus Christ--risen from the dead." When he had finished his assault on the marble, he had broken off the Virgin's arm at the elbow, taken a large piece off one of her eyelids and shattered her nose. No charges were ever brought against him, for, as horrified as the world claimed to be, the authorities were convinced only a madman would commit such an act. He spent two years in an Italian psychiatric hospital and then was released and deported to Melbourne, Australia, where he is believed to reside to this day.

White goes on insightfully to say:

This single act contains within it all of the madness of recent centuries--a belief by man that he has become God, an assertion of the primacy of the individual will, a burning anger at the glories of the past and the beautiful art that embodies them, an attempt to remove the Blessed Virgin and Mother from her central place in God's plan for man's redemption, a lack of respect for the sacred sanctuary, and an assumption of innocence toward all the destroyers.

As Senior makes clear:

It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity."

For the Contrarion-Minded

Following up on my last post, I have another short list titled Five Books That Will Change the Way You Live. Slightly edgy in spots, these books are occasionally difficult to read--not because they are complex in structure, or present complex ideas (they aren't and don't). It is because some of the ideas presented will make one squirm a bit with the impression that they are correct and that to embrace those ideas will not be easy.

The list is as follows:

1. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
2. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays by Wendell Berry
3. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry
4. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher
5. Happy Are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom by Thomas Dubay