Peter Sean Bradley

Protagoras by Plato

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I am reading this for the Online Great Books program. I am really grateful that this was among the assigned reading. I read a fair bit of Plato around 15 years ago, but I missed this dialogue, but it was everything I enjoyed about the dialogues I read, particularly the Gorgias. The main attraction for me was the character of Socrates; he's sharp, clever, sarcastic, and subtle. Watching him get digs into his adversaries, or in setting the bait and working the chump to keep him on the line, is a great pleasure.

The Protagoras starts with Socrates being rousted by his friend Hippocrates who is eager to listen to the sophist teacher Protagoras who is visiting another friend named Callias. Hippocrates is thinking about becoming Protagoras's student, which leads Socrates to ask, what precisely does Protagoras purport to teach?

The two get to Callias's house, which is a hotspot of intellectual activity. Protagoras is walking back and forth with a crowd trailing him. Hippias is on a bench teaching. Prodicus has a group clustered around him. Still, when Socrates asks his question of Protagoras, it's like a group of schoolboys watching a fight after school; they push the benches together and sit down watch the donneybrook.

The dialogue follows the issue of whether virtue is knowledge and whether it can be taught. The discussion is well worth following, but if you miss the entertainment value of Socrates controlling the discussion, you are missing the element that has kept Plato's dialogues alive through the ages. For example, after Protagoras insists on giving a long speech, Socrates pleads that he has a short attention span and cannot be expected to remember what he needs to remember if Protoagoras gives such long speeches. Later, when Protagoras is given the chance to frame questions, Protagoras celebrates that he has scored on Socrates by showing that a poem is not a great work as Socrates had claimed because it seems to contain a contradiction. Socrates, then gives a flawless ten-page deconstruction of the poem, quoting from it by memory, pointing out the nuance of dialects, and brilliantly explaining its key points, all from memory without notes.

Then, he asks Protagoras if they can cut the nonsense and get back to philosophy.

This is a fun read and informative.

The Void Protocol (The ICE Sequence Book 3) by F. Paul Wilson

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This is book three in F. Paul Wilson's “The ICE Sequence.” “ICE” stands for “intrusive cosmic entities” according to Rick Hayden. Rick is convinced that “cosmic entities” are playing mind games with humanity, or only with him, by revealing unexplainable phenomena that upset scientific laws. In past volumes, this has involved miraculous panacea and a newly discovered set of primates that have the human gene for creativity but no junk DNA.

In this book, the mystery involves a number of people with odd but seemingly trivial abilities. One person can teleport, another can make small things disappear, and others are telekinetic. Needless to say, their abilities are unexplained, although there is another storyline about a mysterious substance from a mysterious source called “melise,” an anagram of “slime.”

Before you can say “Lovecraft knew,” Rick is throwing punches to protect these strange youngsters from mobsters and covert government operatives. The storylines converge and Rich and his on/off girlfriend Laura Fanning are in the presence of an anomaly that begs explanation, but which threatens Rick, Laura and maybe the entire human race.

This is a fast-paced story with a lot of action. It almost seems that Wilson had an eye on this story for a movie treatment in that his descriptions almost frame movie shots.

The Rick and Laura dynamic is cliched but enjoyable nonetheless. Let's call it dependable. Who doesn't like romance?

This book is being treated as the last installment of the ICE Sequence, but there is no logical reason for it to be the end. I think I would enjoy another couple of installments.

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta

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I came to this book after watching a couple of episodes of the HBO series. As is my wont, I was looking for some insight into the backstory and explanation for the television series. It is always interesting to see how television writers mutate the book's storylines for incomprehensible reasons.

The book starts three years after the “Sudden Disappearance,” when some small but unspecified number of people in the world's population disappeared from existence in a split second. The disappearances seem to have been entirely random, with some clusters in families, and other families unaffected. The Sudden Disappearance (“SD”) resembles the Rapture invented in the late 19th century by a small Protestant sect which has become a late-arising, outsized doctrine among certain Evangelical sects.

So, naturally, the book is mostly focused on the “religious” implications of the SD, ignoring the fact that most Christian churches, including Catholicism, do not have a doctrine of the Rapture. The author insists on treating the SD as a kind of challenge to mainline Christianity in a kind of wooden, 21st-century atheist way. Thus, we get a picture of people losing faith in Christianity, while taking up oddball cults and fads.

We are explicitly told through a minor, minor character - Rev. Jameson, who gets a bigger role in the television show and is turned into the brother of Norah Durst - that many of the people taken in the SD were sinners. So, we know it was not the Rapture UNLESS God is really a Calvinist, in which case, the Presbyterians should be increasing their market share.

The author's conventional bias against religion is unfortunate. The real challenge of an SD would be to the scientific worldview. The SD is outside the scope of science as we can possibly conceive it. Worse still, if it is a scientific phenomenon, when is it going to happen again? How would the SD affect science? Would people still have “faith” in science? What answers would science propose? Would people start believing in occult power or dark Lovecraftian entities?

We don't know because the book is not really interested in the SD except as a plot device to shake up the ant colony. No one speculates about what happened. We hear nothing about a scientific explanation or what the government is saying or doing.

What we get are several storylines that focus on average people living their average lives. Thus, we have Kevin, a successful businessman turned mayor of Mapleton. His wife, Laurie, has abandoned the family to join the Guilty Remnants (the “GR”), a cult that does not want people to forget the SD. His daughter Jill has allowed her grades to drop since Laurie abandoned the family and she has gotten into questionable sexual activities. His son, Tom, has joined the mission of the Holy Wayne, the proponent of the Holy Hug. Wayne is a typical religious scam artist/cultist with a taste for minor Asian girls. Tom has his doubts about Wayne but is shepherding Holy Wayne's pregnant fourth wife around America as a result of Wayne being arrested on the usual fare for which religious shysters generally get arrested. Then there is Norah Durst, who lost her entire family in the SD and has never recovered.

The book relates how these lives, situated in their own context, play out over the course of the fourth year after the SD.

This book makes no effort to solve the mystery of the SD. For the most part, although there are constant call-backs to the SD, such that it is a fact in the lives of most people, it is simply a fact like 9/11 or the Civil War: People disappeared and their families, friends, and associates have to deal with the sadness or inconvenience of losing a child or a teammate on a softball team.

The book really doesn't go anyplace, until the last pages. For example, Kevin has lost Laurie. Will she come back? Will he get involved with Norah? The answer is, initially, no and, then, maybe in the last lines of the book after an incredibly improbable set of events connects Holy Wayne to his 4th wife to Tom to Norah at the last minute to provide the one moment of light in a generally somber story.

Likewise, at the last minute, we learn how evil the GR really is, which we probably could have guessed from their nihilistic, prevent-anyone-from-enjoying-themselves ministry.

I approached this in the vein of a science fiction story because of the science fiction/paranormal premise. I wanted to see some speculation about the effects of a crypto-rapture on society. The only place where there was some imagination about that subject in the book involved the various new religious movements that were mentioned. Thus, the Holy Wayne cult was a typical cult with a charismatic leader. People were shown as being drawn to Wayne because they were depressed after the SD with its unexplained losses of friends and family members. Anyone who lived through the gut-punch of 9/11 knows that feeling (and, yet, there was not a rise in cult religion.) The Barefoot People were another variation. They were imagined as basically 1960s hippies looking for hedonism in what seemed to be an increasingly nihilistic culture.

The GR was really the author's best offering in terms of imagination and speculation. They were weird with their vow of silence and chain-smoking. None of it was explained, but Perotta generated a sense of nihilism in his scenes with them, but he didn't offer an explanation about what attracted any particular person to them. Typically, cults generate a sense of belonging, and we see some of that in the approach of Ms. Maffey to Jill, but we are also told that the GR actively opposes cult members from getting familiar with each other (except when they do, the GR moves to death cult mode.) Sociologically, the GR makes no sense, but there is an interesting story to be told about the nihilistic group that controls the GR and what their agenda is.

Honestly, I think that there was a much more interesting story to be told concerning Laurie's life after the last pages of the book.

In sum, this is a character-driven story. It is not plot-driven. If you want a plot and answers, this is not your story. If you want to read about characters, then it might be. For myself, I think that it was just beginning to find its footing when it ended.

The Shadow of Alpha (The Parric Trilogy 1) by Charles L. Grant

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Back in the 1970s, I read a short story in Analog by Charles L. Grant called “Seven is a Birdsong.” It has stuck with me, but I recall it as a confusing and impenetrable read, involving a post-apocalyptic setting, someone named “Parric,” murderous androids, and some kind of historic plague. For a story, I didn't particularly care for, it has stuck with me to the extent that I've been looking for a copy ever since.

I think that what I liked was the mood of the story and the questions it left me about what appeared to be a fleshed-out world that was only hinted at.

This book, “The Shadow of Alpha,” inspires a similar frustration in its confusing and pedestrian writing mixed in with notes that leave me questioning.

One of the frustrating things about this book is its undefined date. This book was written in 1976, which is consistent with my memory of the Analog short story, but it mentions 2020 as a date in the past. There appear to have been six wars (or world wars.) America is now part of “Noram” with a continental government. There are starships, forcefields, and androids. Mention is made of the Japanese Empire. On the other hand, the mores seem to be the 1950s and there are mentions of things like communits and diagunits like it was written in the 1950s. The whole mix is odd.

The main character is Frank Parric, who has been moved from his position as an insurance clerk to a community where he is teaching androids to act like humans so that they can become consumers. Apparently, the birth rate has been declining and people need human-like, human-acting consumers to pass as humans in order to avoid economic catastrophe.

Just as a female character is introduced, war breaks out between the Japanese Empire and the Eastern Panasian Union, which involves releasing biological weapons that get out of hand and contaminate the world...shades of 2020! All this happens offstage.

Parric and his new associates are safe with the androids since they have a forcefield, which apparently is not used around governmental installations because the Contigov apparently collapses over the weekend. Also, the forcefield does not stop viruses from infecting the androids, who become homicidal. Rural people go feral over the weekend and set up independent enclaves. Parric and his friends decide to go on a road trip to another android community that is no better off than his own.

This was all rather pedestrian and not particularly convincing since (a) it happened too quickly and (b) the collapse of civilization is offstage.

So, what is the “Alpha” mentioned in the title? Alpha is the rather uninspired name for a starship that was launched a few years before the events of the book. Parric periodically announces his resolve that when the Alpha returns from its adventures, it will be greeted by an intact civilization.

By the end of the book, Parric is in love and they make it back to “Central,” which can manufacture androids. So, I'm speculating that later installments of the book will involve the descendants of Parric working through problems in a human/android civilization.

I've got a nearly 50 year investment in this, so I will read the next book, but if I had read it back in 1976, I would probably have considered it a fairly lackluster by-the-numbers scifi book.

The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 by Richard Price

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The 7th century AD was a kind of fulcrum of history. After contending with Persia for nearly a thousand years, Persia finally scored its biggest victory since Cyrus the great and conquered Rome's possessions from Mesopotamia to Egypt. This great victory was overturned within twenty years by Heraclius, who really deserves the title of “the Great.” Then, after Rome had returned the status quo ante, Islam emerged out of nowhere to finally end the interminable Persian-Roman conflict by ending Persia and conquering the Roman Middle East finally.

And, yet, this period is largely a black hole in our historical consciousness.

The intellectual history of the period is equally interesting. The Christian world was divided on the issue of Monoergism and Monothelitism. It is safe to say that most Christians have zero knowledge about these concepts today. “Monothelitism” is the doctrine that Jesus Christ had only one will, presumably the divine will. “Monoenergism” was the doctrine that Christ had only one action or operation, i.e., when Christ did something he was acting in his divine capacity.

My understanding had been that these were opposed to the Chalcedonian doctrine of two natures in Christ, i.e., that Christ had both a human and divine nature. This “monophysitism” became orthodox Christianity, but not all Christians had accepted monophysitism. Some adhered to “monophysitism,” which held that Christ only had a divine nature. My understanding what that monophysitism presupposed Monoenergism and Monothelitism, i.e., one nature meant one will and one action from that will. Likewise, two natures meant two will and two operations.

The author/translator Richard Price has written an in-depth discussion of the history of the 7th century prior to the Lateran Synod of 649 AD and these issues. Price takes on the historical/political implications of Rome's successful war with Persia and loss to Islam and its connections with Christian theology.

The conventional explanation, as I understand it, is that Monotheletism and Monenergism were efforts by the Roman emperors to find a formula that would allow a reunion with the Monophysites. This was important because the division had weakened Imperial defenses when the Persians had attacked. Although it seems that some reunions occurred because of these initiatives, Price does not view the Monothelite controversy as being primarily about rapprochement with Monophysites. He thinks it was mostly a dispute between Chalcedonian (Diaphysite) Christians, particularly through a series of texts approved by either the emperor or the Patriarch of Constantinople. The texts include the Psephos (633/634), the Ekthesis (636), and the Typos (648). The gist of these texts was to forbid discussion of either one or two operations in Christ, albeit, in passing, the Ekthesis mentioned “one will.” (So, interestingly, Monoenergism was the issue prior to Monothelitism.)

Price also views conflict as arising from Imperial losses to the Muslims. Heraclius outreach to the Monophysites in a “unionist” initiative had met with success while he was winning against the Persians. When Heraclius began losing to Islam, the question was “why?” One conclusion is that the Christian Roman Empire had offended God through heresy, specifically, the heresies of Monothelitism and monergism. Price places the blame for this concern on Sophronius, Bishop of Jerusalem, and his disciple Maximus, who would be known to history as Maximus the Confessor.

Price argues that the dispute over these doctrines was mostly based on a confusion of terms or perspectives. Monotheletes did not deny that Christ had a human will and Catholics acknowledged that the two wills were formally united into a single will. Price has a fascinating discussion of the situation of Pope Honorius. Honorius is a favorite of anti-Catholics for arguments against papal infallibility, but the situation of Honorius is far from clear. Maximus the Confessor denied that Honorius had ever espoused Monothelitism. It appears that Honorius may have been affirming either that Christ had a single human will - which is a live issue in that some perspectives asserted that emotions were a kind of will - or that the human and divine wills were coordinated in the person of Christ, which is an orthodox doctrine.

In reading Price, it sometimes seems that the two sides were disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, which is not uncommon in the history of the church.

It is clear, though, that the papacy went from an accommodationist position under Honorius to a rigorist position under Pope Martin, the pope of the Lateran Synod, and his immediate predecessors, which Price lays at the feet of Maximus and his fellow monks. Martin's immediate predecessor had called the Synod for the purpose of repudiating the heresies of Monothelitism and Monoenergism.

The first part of this book contains approximately 100 pages where Price covers virtually every issue related to the Lateran Synod. The rest of the book consists of Price's translation of the texts of the speeches, votes, and decisions of the Synod. Price argues, consistent with other experts, that these articles were written prior to the Synod as a kind of script that the bishops followed.

The whole text makes for interesting reading if you have an interest in getting into deep historical and theological weeds. It also helps to have some background in the issues. I've just finished reading Part III of the Summa Theologica concerning Christ's wills and actions, which comes right out of this debate. This text certainly helped my understanding of that text and vice versa.

After the Synod, Pope Martin was arrested by the emperor and sent into exile where he died. Maximus was also arrested and eventually had his tongue cut out and his right arm amputated. What's interesting is that Price attests that the Pope's primacy was essentially conceded by the rest of orthodox Christianity, which is itself surprising since we normally think that Catholic claims to such primacy are the result of the later “Dark Ages.” In that vein, it is noteworthy that Martin was the first pope not approved of by the emperor and the Lateran Synod was not called with Imperial sanction. It appears that by the seventh century, Rome was beginning to separate from the Imperial system.

The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury: Volume 2 by Anselm

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It is incredible to think that after the span of nearly a thousand years we have this comprehensive collection of letters to and from anyone, much less the first genius to come out of the so-called Dark Ages. Who thought of preserving these writings? How were they preserved from rot, fires, chance, and neglect over the last millennia?

I went into these letters thinking that I would get gems of theological insights. That expectation was not borne out by experience. There were perhaps two or three letters that I could classify as treating theological topics. Generally, though, these were occasional letters written for a variety of reasons. Anselm's correspondents included his family, fellow monks, and bishops, popes, and the kings of England.

The totality of this book is greater than any of its parts. The letters are often mundane and quotidian. Anselm writes letters to monks and nuns who have broken their vows by leaving their convents and monasteries. He urges them to return to their vows for the sake of their immortal souls.

Read the entire book and Anselm grows on you. The first letters involve Anselm's promotion to the office of Archbishop of Canterbury. He protests that he will not take the office unless he is released from his position as Abbot of Bec by his religious brothers. He also argues that he cannot refuse the offer because God has given it to him, although he wishes that he could. I thought that Anselm was putting this out as stock humility, but the rest of the book makes it clear that he meant it.

Somehow we miss this point, but Anselm, the postulator of the ontological proof and author of Cur Deus Homo, lived in the middle of a political pressure cooker. Anselm lived at the time of the Investiture Controversy. The controversy did not involve just the Holy Roman Empire, but the monarchy of England also insisted on its prerogative to name and invest the bishops of their kingdom. As a loyal Catholic, Anselm sided with the church and constantly exhorted the king to keep his hands off the office of the church. As a result of his loyalty to his the church, Anselm was banished three times from his office in England.

So, what we get is a window into the lived experience of the period, as well as something of the private life of the people involved.

If you are interested in history, there is nothing better.

The Devil's Sanctuary by Marie Hermanson

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Psychologists say that there are psychopaths everywhere. Next door? You boss? Maybe you married one?

Daniel and Max are twins. They were separated when they were young by their parents' divorce. They then grew up very differently from each other.

After a long absence, Max arranges for Daniel to leave his humdrum daily grind and visit him at a swank resort/rehab facility. When he arrives Max spins a story about his need to leave the fcility for a short while to arrange finances. Daniel agrees.

Things unwind for Daniel after that. The hospital is, in fact, more of a prison set up to research psychopaths. The residential population of the resort are composed of psychopathic personalities. Daniel desperately attempts to disclose the truth, but try as he might no one believes him because he is believed to be Max and Max is a habitual liar.

I found this to be a captivating page-turner. I enjoyed this book. It's not a great book. The first half of the book takes a bit too long to get into the story. Then, when the plot picks up speed, the pay-offs are just a bit too quick in coming, and, then, they come in by way of monologues. Honestly, I enjoyed having my suspicions confirmed, but it was just a bit too easy.

I came to this book by way of the “Sanctuary” (2020) mini-series on Hulu. The series is gender-swapped; Daniel and Max are now Siri and Helena. This change actually improves the story. A colony of psychopaths is incredibly dangerous, even more so for women, I'd imagine. The sense of tension is heightened in the TV series I think I will be scoring the show better than the book.

Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution by H. Robert Baker

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Having read a few books on the cases involved in the fraught issue of slave law, I have been surprised to discover that this approach allows for a fascinating and insightful view of social history. The legal history approach requires that attention be paid to the facts, which in turn requires an analysis of social circumstances while acknowledging the limitations of actions available to the actors under the law at the time.

In this case, the issue was whether Pennsylvania could constitutionally enact a law that required out-of-state slave-catchers to comply with Pennsylvania state law before kidnapping an alleged slave to return that slave to slavery in a slave state. The legal issue was framed by an ambiguity in the Constitution's “fugitive slave clause” that failed to specify who would enforce fugitive slave rights.

The Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV section 2) provides: “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall, in consequences of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour may be due, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” Baker describes this as a guarantee that the Somerset principle would not apply among the states. (p. 29.) I think this is wrong: the Somerset holding applied to slaves voluntarily taken to England - not escaping to England. The Somerset holding remained a stare decisis in a number of cases until Dred Scott.

The ambiguity in the clause was that it did not specify to whom the claim would be made. There was virtually no federal enforcement mechanism until the 1830s and, so, one view was that the claim would be made to state courts under state laws, which could guarantee rights to those accused of having escaped to the free state, including the right to a jury trial or striking the testimony of the alleged master.

What is interesting in the light of the current belief that “America is a racist country” was the lengths that Northern free states went to protect Black citizens. Northern states universally passed laws forbidding the kidnapping of Black citizens without compliance with state claim laws. Further, the laws were written in such a way as to stack the decks in favor of the alleged slave, such as by requiring jury trials, which made enforcement of rights under the clause expensive and put the issue into the venue of Northern citizens who were not inclined to return Blacks to slavery. The 1830s saw Northern states enacting Personal LIberty Laws to protect Blacks from kidnapping by slave-hunters.

The particular facts of the case are illustrative of the issues. Margarett Morgan was born a slave in Maryland. She moved to Pennsylvania, allegedly after being freed her master. When her master passed away, his widow decided to reclaim Margarett. By this time Margarett had married a free Black citizen of Pennsylvania, Jerry Morgan, and had a child. In 1832, Margaret and Jerry moved to Pennsylvania. In 1837, Edward Prigg came into Pennsylvania and kidnapped Margaret back to Maryland after a desultory effort to comply with Pennsylvania law that would have given Margaret the right to a trial in Pennsylvania before a judge or jury hostile to slavery. Jerry Morgan persuaded the local sheriff to bring criminal charges against Prigg for kidnapping in violation of Pennsylvania's Personal Liberty Law.

The issue teed up for decision was whether could be held criminally responsible for kidnapping Margaret Morgan in violation of Pennsylvania's Personal Liberty Law.

Baker's book nicely goes through the legal precedents that existed prior to the 1842 decision in Prigg. The precedent could be fairly said to lean against Prigg. However, the United States Supreme Court found in Prigg's favor and struck down Pennsylvania's law. The majority opinion by Justice Story was a “nationalist” in the sense of elevating federal law over state law. Since the Congress had enacted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1790, it had spoken authoritatively and comprehensively on the subject. (This principal is applied today under the doctrine of federal preemption.) Since the Fugitive Slave Act provided a national right, federal law overrode contrary state law, leaving state's no role on the subject (outside of police power issues.) Baker writes that Justice Story “braided Lord Mansfield's Sommerset v. Stewart into his opinion.” Mansfield had held that slavery was not a natural right but required a positive law to create rights in slave. Story seems to accept the proposition that the Fugitive Slave Law provided such a basis. Later, in Dred Scott, the seeds planted by Story would bear fruit.

Chief Justice Taney went further in a concurrence that foreshadowed Dred Scott by arguing that the individual states had a positive duty to enact laws that assisted slaveowners in recovering fugitive slaves.

Justice John McLean wrote a dissent arguing that a “slave was a sensible and human being” who could be protected by the state, even if the master might have a superior claim to the slave's labor than the slave himself. McLean understood that Story's legal theory denied that free blacks had legal rights, although Story simply assumed that conclusion.

Here's a factoid that surprised me, and shows how complex history is. Baker discusses the significance of Jerry Morgan staying in slave Maryland for some time to be with his wife. Then, he notes:
“But it may have been a safer decision than we know. Hartford County, Maryland had a sizable and growing free black population. The number of free blacks living there doubled between 1790 and 1800, and nearly doubled again between 1800 and 1810. The percentage of blacks who were free also rose steadily during this period, rising from 18 percent in 1790 to 33 percent in 1810 to 41 percent in 1830. And the trend continued. By 1860, more than 67 percent of Hartford County's black population was free. In the legal borderlands, freedom and slavery coexisted.” (p. 103.)

The idea that over half of the black population in a Southern state would be free surprises me. My surprise speaks more to my own ignorance and the popular presentation that all blacks prior to 1865 were slaves. Clearly, there were free black populations throughout America, but we hear so little about them.

After 1837, Margaret Morgan and her child disappear from history into slavery. Jerry Morgan's life was even more tragic. In traveling to legal proceedings, he failed to have papers and was detained as a fugitive slave. In attempting to escape this legal predicament, he jumped ship and drowned.

The Prigg decision was one of many decisions understood by the North as indicating that the South had unbridled control over the nation. Worse still, Northern states were prevented from protecting their own citizens. In 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Law that was viewed as more intrusive than the prior law.

We can see how the travesty of Dred Scott was built legal brick by legal brick. When I look back on the concrete, personal reality of this bit of history, I find it horrifying. My thoughts go to Jerry Morgan and how he lost everything in a life that was hard enough to begin with and had turned into a horror story.

I wanted to say “our ancestors were barbaric,” but the truth is that these kinds of atrocities are still occurring.

This book was written in 1899 and describes the various non-judicial murders of African-Americans accused of crimes that occurred in Georgia over a six-week period. The descriptions of the atrocities disgusted me with my shared humanity with the mobs who committed these evil acts, but they also raise questions.

The most atrocious of the murders involved a public burning of Sam Hose, who had killed his white employer. There was a dispute about a payment of wages, which may have resulted in the white employer threatening Hose with a gun and Hose flinging an axe at the employer, killing him. Eventually, a claim that Hose had assaulted the employer's wife entered the narrative. The local newspaper began to “predict” - or egg on - the burning of Hose when he was cancelled. Sure enough when Hose was captured, a mob burned him at “the stake,” actually a sapling, after torturing him by cutting off his ears. A newspaper article describes the scene:

“The stake bent under the strains of the Negro in his agony and his sufferings cannot be described, although he uttered not a sound. After his ears had been cut off he was asked about the crime, and then it was he made a full confession. At one juncture, before the flames had begun to get in their work well, the fastenings that held him to the stake broke and he fell forward partially out of the fire.
He writhed in agony and his sufferings can be imagined when it is said that several blood vessels burst during the contortions of his body. When he fell from the stake he was kicked back and the flames renewed. Then it was that the flames consumed his body and in a few minutes only a few bones and a small part of the body was all that was left of Sam Hose.”

The post-atrocity behavior of the crowd was equally disgusting:

“One of the most sickening sights of the day was the eagerness with which the people grabbed after souvenirs, and they almost fought over the ashes of the dead criminal. Large pieces of his flesh were carried away, and persons were seen walking through the streets carrying bones in their hands.
When all the larger bones, together with the flesh, had been carried away by the early comers, others scraped in the ashes, and for a great length of time a crowd was about the place scraping in the ashes. Not even the stake to which the Negro was tied to when burned was left, but it was promptly chopped down and carried away as the largest souvenir of the burning.”

This description puts me in mind of scenes from the French Revolution or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

What possessed these people to act this way? We can say “racism,” but this behavior transcends racism, as was the case with the French Revolution and medieval attacks on heretics. Even today, we see this kind of barbarity directed against suspected witches in Africa and even against people who are owed debts.

The people of the time knew this was barbaric. In “As Easy as ABC,” Rudyard Kipling's steampunk science fiction polemic against democracy and mobs, the characters mention the statue of the “N* in Flames” which is unveiled once a year while the people sing “McDonough's Hymn.” I didn't understand the reference before reading this book from 1899, but Kipling was condemning mob mentality and the barbaric practice of burning African-Americans.

Doing a quick scan of the history, I was surprised to find how often “lynching” involved burning. Given the current obsession with nooses, I hadn't realized that burning occurred in a substantial number of lynchings. The Kipling reference suggests that it was burning that was associated with lynching at the beginning of the 20th century.

So, why burning?

Another feature was how often lynchings occurred when the person had been apprehended and was in police custody. The first lynching was a mass murder of seven African Americans in jail. In another, the mob had been persuaded to turn over an innocent man to the police for trial, but then hung him anyway.

I know that similar things happened to whites. The last lynching in California was of two whites who were in jail. The mob had to break into the jail to lynch them.

Again, why? Did people not trust the justice system?

Finally, the narrative doesn't fit a Manichean narrative where all whites are racist. Consider the case of Lige Strickland, who had allegedly been implicated by Hose, but was innocent. The author relates:

“Sunday night, about 8:30 o'clock, about fifteen men went to the plantation of Major Thomas and took Lige Strickland from the little cabin in the woods that he called home, leaving his wife and five children to wail and weep over the fate they knew was in store for the Negro. Their cries aroused Major Thomas, and that sturdy old gentleman of the antebellum type followed the lynchers in his buggy, accompanied by his son, W. M. Thomas, determined to save, if possible, the life of his plantation darky.”

The narrative continues:

“The Negro's life might have been ended then but for the arrival of Major Thomas, who leaped from his buggy and asked for a hearing. He asked the crowd to give the Negro a chance for his life here on the streets of Palmetto, and Major Thomas said he would speak in his defense. A short conference resulted in acquiescence to this, and Major Thomas spoke in, substance as follows:
“Gentlemen, this Negro is innocent. Hose said Lige had promised to give him $20 to kill Cranford, and I believe Lige has not had $20 since he has been on my place. This is a law-abiding Negro you are about to hang. He has never done any of you any harm, and now I want you to promise me that you will turn him over either to the bailiff of this town or to someone who is entitled to receipt for him, in order that he may be given a hearing on his case. I do not ask that you liberate him. Hold him and if the courts adjudge him guilty, hang; him.”

Several of the cases involve people pleading for the lives of the accused.

So, what was going on? Racism is too simple an answer; there was something deeper going on that needs to be ferreted out.

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I enjoy watching a few channels on Youtube where the presenter recreates and tries recipes from history. Since we can't travel in time, this seems to be about as close as can get to experience the past.

One of the shows involved the presenter making home-made garum, a fish sauce loved by Romans in the same way that Americans love ketchup. His approach involved leaving rotting fish in a jar for a few weeks, but he pointed out that you can order garum online.

So, I did.

Now, what to do with it?

So, I got this book.

This book contains recipes from ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and ancient Babylon, and from the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I haven't tried any of the recipes, but some of them look like things that I could cook and might enjoy.

This is as close to a call-back to the best works of Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven. We have a fantastic, novel setting inside of an air-filled “fullerene” balloon that has a 5,000 mile diameter. This balloon constitutes the “planet” of Virga. There is no gravity inside Virga and very little “ground.” The people of Virga live in a weightless environment where they can fly for thousands of miles. They live in settlements that produce gravity by centrifugal effects. All light in Virga is created by artificial “suns” that illuminate only scant territories of this enormous domain.

In the best tradition of Larry Niven, this is a lot to take in.

Clustered around individual “suns” are nations. Hayden Griffin belongs to the nation of Aerie which was conquered by the nomadic nation of Slipstream. His parents are part of the Aerie resistance with plans to light up a new sun and declare independence. Things go wrong and Hayden is left with a mission of vengeance.

Flash forward 15 years and Hayden is infiltrating into Slipstream society. Suddenly, he is called out to travel with his enemy to the outer darkness in search of a device that will allow Slipstream to fight its enemies.

We get the Cook's tour of Virga. We see the vast cloud banks, the pirates, and the outer darkness. We get a glimpse of Virga's history and society. Sword fights and battles between airships.

It's all good fun and quite exciting.

Suffragette Fascists by Simon Webb

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We live in Manichean times. History is the battlefront of the culture wars. History is being erased, at least insofar as that history does not denigrate Western civilization. Statues celebrating the great scientists, authors, and leaders of the past are unceremoniously burned down. On the other hand, the history of the oppressive oppressing class is “protected.” Suggest that there is nuance or blemishes in the history of the heroes of the new elites is treated as a kind of treason, eliciting cries of “racism” or “sexism.”

Simon Webb has committed a kind of lese majeste with this book. Webb argues with evidence, wit, and insight that the suffragette movement was a type of proto-fascist movement whose leaders eventually became actual fascists.

Webb starts out with some context. By the early 20th century, while women were not enfranchised to vote in parliamentary elections, this was the case with a lot of men - around 40% - as well. (On the other hand, both men and women could vote in non-parliamentary elections.) Nonetheless, the path to women's enfranchisement was well-advanced, with a lot of political support from both parties for the proposition. This had largely been accomplished by the “suffragists,” a movement that included both men and women.

In the face of inevitability, Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). The WSPU became the “suffragettes.” While Pankhurst was advocating for “votes for women,” she did not mean “all women.” Pankhurst and her organization were upper-class elitists who wanted “equal votes” for women limited to upper-class voters, not “universal voting” for everyone.

The suffragettes began a campaign of terror, starting fires, lacing mail with acid, and other acts of violence. The suffragettes hurt other people and/or acted in ways that exposed people - usually, lower-class people - to risk of death or injury. Webb writes:

//Anybody looking at the Wikipedia article on the WSPU on 19 May 2019 would have read the following statement about the arson attacks on houses carried out by the suffragettes: ‘Included in the many militant acts performed were the night-time arson of unoccupied houses.' What is really meant in this context by ‘unoccupied' is not that nobody was present in the houses which they torched, but rather that the important owners were not there that night. Other people often were, but since they were only working-class people such as servants and caretakers, they did not really count. Like the postal workers, it was not especially important if such individuals were caught in the crossfire.//

And:

//Fortunately, the smell of smoke woke one of them and they were able to escape, but it was a close thing. They could easily have died that night. This was a classic example of the callous attitude of the WSPU. Here were five women, none of them with the Parliamentary vote, who were nearly burned alive as a by-product of a terrorist attack. Those carrying out the arson either did not bother to check, or perhaps did not care, that domestic staff were sleeping in the house.//

And:

//The women of the WSPU also set fire to many churches, business premises and even private houses. The reason for these attacks was a little different from their motives in burning letters, but the victims were the same; working-class men and women.//

This behavior resembles recent Antifa efforts to set police stations on fire after blocking the fire escapes. Another bit of resemblance to Antifa is the shared constituency of young, wealthy, bored individuals looking for something new and exciting. Webb offers this example:

//The act which made Richardson famous and for which she is remembered today took place on 10 March 1914 and resulted in her acquiring the nickname of ‘Slasher' Richardson.
In 1906 the National Gallery had acquired a masterpiece of the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez. It had for many years been in private hands in a Yorkshire house called Rokeby Hall. The subject of the painting is the goddess Venus, depicted naked. Although it is today known as the ‘Rokeby Venus', the actual title of the painting is ‘The Toilet of Venus', a name which, because of the changing meaning of the word ‘toilet' over the decades, might cause the odd snigger today. On that March morning, Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery with a meat cleaver hidden under her clothes. After loitering for two hours, she plucked up her courage, pulled out the chopper and began hacking away furiously at the painting. She was subsequently sent to prison for six months for this act.
The statement which Mary Richardson released after her senseless attack on a painting is revealing. She said;
I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.//

The casual use of violence is also typical of Fascists (and other anti-bourgeoisie movements.) Webb also notes that the WSPU was based on a cult of personality around Emmeline Pankhurst. Suffragettes followed Pankhurst's orders and idolized her as the “leader.” Pankhurst eliminated any democratic structure within her movement and went so far as to drive out anyone who threatened her control.

Feminists will probably object to learning about the elitism of the suffragettes, but the fact is that it was an upper-class movement that received substantial financing from upper-class Britons. Webb discusses the suffragettes' interest in color-coordinated outfits and movement jewelry. The cost of these items was well beyond the means of working-class men and women.

The suffragettes lost interest in winning the vote for a limited number of women with the advent of World War i. At that time, they became boosters of the English empire. They subsequently transformed into anti-communists. and, ultimately, many of them became partisans of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

The suffragettes fit the description of Eric Hoffer's True Believer: people looking for a cause larger than themselves. Such people can flit from movement to movement, always looking for the high of belonging. Many of the suffragettes moved from the WSPU to anti-communism to religion to fascism and back and forth. Webb explains their motivation:

//Many suffragettes had revelled in the fact that their activities and political beliefs were unacceptable to many people. They enjoyed the feeling that they were rebels, people breaking though society's usual boundaries. This is quite understandable for Edwardian women; it was a liberating experience for them. Instead of sitting quietly at home, embroidering handkerchiefs, entertaining neighbours to tea or running a household, they were smashing windows, fighting the police or racing round in motor cars and planting bombs or setting buildings on fire. It is very likely that the young women who gravitated to the BUF were motivated by identical feelings. The fascists were viewed askance by most people and joining them was in itself an act of rebellion against ordinary life. There was fighting, trouble with the police and on top of that the belief that all these exciting activities were justified, because members of the group were following an important new idea which would revolutionize the society in which they lived. They were able to transgress against societal norms in the name of idealism. It is easy to see how the young woman who, had she been in her twenties before the First World War, rather than the second, might have hung out with the suffragettes, would now, on the eve of the Second World War, instead be joining the fascists. Sometimes, the two movements showed almost eerie similarities.//

Webb is a good writer. There are redundancies in the book, where Webb recapitulates a point he made previously. On the other hand, Webb has a historian's gift of understanding and explaining the context, events, and motivations of the time.

Euripides I: Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, Hippolytus

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I read this as part of the Online Great Books program. I found the five plays in this text to be quite accessible and quite interesting. The book has a glossary of names that is useful for keeping track of persons, places, and relationships.

What was fundamentally interesting to me was the fleshing out of Greek mythology. I know some of these myths up to the point where we assume “and they all lived happily ever after.” Apparently, Greeks did not put much stock in happy endings and loved putting their protagonists into no win situations.

Take “Medea,” for example. We knew that Medea fell in love with Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts) and saved his bacon on numerous occasions. She cuts her ties with her family and homeland with extreme prejudice. She marries Jason and they have two sons.

So, does she get her happy ending? Not after Jason decides to marry the King's daughter and cut her and their sons off from his support. She naturally, but, perhaps, disproportionately, plots revenge against the king and Jason's new wife. When Jason proposes to take his sons to live with him because he loves them, Medea extends her revenge to include them, from which we get the term “Medean” for mothers who kill their children.

In Hippolytus, Aphrodite decides to get revenge on Theseus's son, Hippolytus, who favors Artemis, by stirring up passion in Theseus's wife, Hippolytus's step-mother, for Hippolytus. When her passion is rejected by Hyppolytus, in order to save herself from a disgrace that might result in her children being disinherited by Theseus, she kills herself in a way that frames Hippolytus. An enraged Theseus uses one of his three curses from his father, Poseidon, on his innocent son. After Hippolytus is killed, then and only then does Artemis share the truth with Theseus.

In Alcestis, King Admetus has been blessed by Appollo with the boon of putting off his death if, and only if, someone else is willing to take his place. Naturally, no one is willing to do this, except his wife, Alcestis, who recognizes that a dead King will mean that her children will be at risk.

Alcestis actually has what may pass for a happy ending in Greek theater as Heracles intervenes to manhandle Death into coughing up Alcestis for a happy if mysterious re-union with her louse of a husband. (She may not speak for three days....three days after her return from death!)

Finally, the Children of Heracles has a lot of drama and its own questionable happy ending. After Heracles is taken to heaven, his children are left defenseless against King Eurystheus, who fears that they will seek revenge against him for his tormenting their father. The children and their guardian, Iolaus, seek refuge in Athens. Athenians being good and noble, and where the plays were staged, agree, but the wrinkle is that a virgin sacrifice is required, which one daughter of Heracles nobly agrees to provide. There is a battle. Eurystheus is captured, and despite an agreement to spare him, Heracles's wife is delighted to obtain revenge against Eurystheus, proving that his insight about the wisdom of ending the line of Heracles was accurate all along.

There was a whole bunch here for ancient Greeks to chew over on long Greek nights. I can imagine them turning over and over the issues of fate, destiny, conflicting duties for which there is no answer, and the machinations of the gods who always seem to be somewhere behind these conundra.

The bad news is that it will end in 500 million years.

The Medea Hypothesis by Peter Ward

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This book is about refuting the Gaia Hypothesis (the “GH”) which is a thesis that undoubtedly deserves refutation. The most scientific form of the GH is that the biosphere is a complex system with innumerable feedback systems such that it is able to offset and adjust itself to correct environmental perturbations. The most extreme form of the GH is that the biosphere is itself a living organism that deliberately adjusts environmental conditions to encourage and promote life.

Ward confronts the GH with the Medea Hypothesis (the “MH”), which argues the contrary: Mother Nature will kill us all in the end. The MH is named after the female lead in Euripedes play “Medea.” Medea was famous for the lengths she went to get revenge on her husband Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts - this the “and they lived happily ever after” part of Greek myths) who dumped Medea in favor of a marriage with the King's daughter. Medea arranges to kill Jason's new wife, the king, and, for good measure, her infant sons with Jason. Hence, Medea refers to mothers who kill their children.

This book is an extended walk through a lot of heavy, speculative science. Ward makes some strong points to refute the GH, such as “what about all those extinctions caused by the evolution of organisms that polluted their environment with toxic oxygen?” He cursorily examines the great extinctions, including the entirely hypothetical massacre of every organism that didn't have our kind of DNA, to show that the smoking gun was probably held by some evolutionary change. He also points to statistical modeling which suggests that the biomass of Earth has been declining since the Golden Age when unicellular bacteria ruled the Earth two billion years ago.

This is all surprising, “gosh-wow deep time” stuff, which I enjoy, but I feel like I got shorted. I thought I would be getting more information on these past extinctions than I actually got.

Ward turns to the future. This section is also fascinating in a “gosh-wow” science kind of way. Apparently, life on Earth is heading for its self-made apocalypse in the next 500 million years. Notwithstanding the CO2 problem of the current age, the long-term trend has been and will continue to be, the depletion of CO2 from the atmosphere. Right now, CO2 is a trace gas, but a billion years ago it was as much as 30% of the atmosphere. In the future, plants will take it out of the air below the threshold to keep plant life alive. That factor along with weathering of rock will make CO2 almost entirely absent, at which point, plants die taking with them everything else.

In short, all is doomed. Mother Nature will killl us all.

Ward ends the book with an opposite crisis, anmely global warming and the parade of horribles that we can expect in the next 300 years. This image of planet-changing catastrophe fits well in his Medea Hypothesis. His advice ultimately is that while it might be nice if humans could retreat to a pre-civilized state, ultimately it will be only human ingenuity that can save the world, so let's get the boffins to and do their engineering thing.

In broad outline, this is the kind of “gosh-wow” thought provoking science text that I enjoy. I'm convinced by his argument. There were nuggets of information that I will cherish and share. However, in practical experience, I found the book a bit of s slog and its global warming ending was more than a bit preachy.

On the other hand, the MH is a challenge to romantic ecological mystics. Ward writes:

“The main message of the environmental movement is that if we “return to nature,” or turn the world back to its state before humanity evolved—in other words, stop pirating the Earth's natural processes and resources for our short-term benefit and instead try to return to something resembling our relationship to the planet before we “took control” of nature—the Earth will eventually clean up our mess and save us from ourselves.”

But the MH says otherwise.

Likewise, concerning another romantic ecological mystical movement, namely “Deep Ecology,” Ward writes:

“Deep Ecology believes that all organisms are equal: Human beings have no greater value than any other creature, for we are just ordinary citizens in the biotic community, with no more rights than amoebae or bacteria.
This certainly sounds reasonable. But the paradigm shift described at the start of this chapter deals exactly with this point and turns it on its head: we are not ordinary citizens. We are the only hope to keep Earth life alive.”

Well, no...it didn't sound “reasonable” to me, but I was already ahead of Ward on his conclusion. I'm not a fan in any way of people who casually discuss regulating human population as if it wouldn't involve well-ordered genocide.

Nonetheless, Ward's attack on romantic environmental mysticism is useful. Couple this argument with the historical insights from “Apocalypse Never” by Michael Shellenberger, who demonstrates how human ingenuity has solved ecological problems, lose the human-hating bits and this book wouldn't have annoyed me in the end.

Conspiracies (Repairman Jack 3) by F. Paul Wilson

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Before this book, I read one of F. Paul Wilson's “Young Jack” novels and a collection of his Secret History of the World short stories. I found the occultic, supernatural hints intriguing. So I decided to give the Repairman Jack stories a shot.

This is an enjoyable read. It launches into the story almost immediately and then sets a fast pace throughout the story. The story introduces us to “Repairman Jack,” who makes a living “fixing” things for people. In this book, Jack has a client whose sister is the victim of domestic violence and another client whose wife has disappeared. The two stories are unrelated, but provide energy to the story as Jack flips from one to the other.

The vanished wife plot is the main story of this book. The wife was a member of a group that believes in every conspiracy known to man. Jack has already had a run-in with the supernatural before this story opens, but in this story, he learns more about the supernatural world hiding just around the corner from this one. Thus, the reader gets acquainted with the “Adversary,” “the Twins,” the “Otherness,” and the cluster of strange births in 1968.

The story is a fun read in the action-adventure genre. The character of Jack is not developed. We know nothing about his background or his abilities. He doesn't seem particularly competent, except with respect to passing as ordinary and knowing about guns. For all his attempts to be a man of mystery, Jack is a nerd with a love of kitsch. I don't get the sense that he has a background as a “spook” or in the military. Nonetheless, this story seems to offer a taste of a tantalizing, mysterious world.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Immaculate Conception of Mary by Angelo George

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My Aquinas group has moved into the Virgin Birth section of Part III of the Summa Theologica. I decided I needed some quick crib notes on Aquinas's theory of the Immaculate Conception.

Briefly, Aquinas posited a theory of ensoulment under which the developing matter of the embryonic - if one can use that term without anachronism - was formed for up to six months before “ensoulment.” Aquinas posited that during that time period, Mary could not have been subject to sin and, therefore, could not have been cleansed from original sin. Aquinas strongly posits that there could be no saving from original sin prior to the imposition of original sin, even if the time interval was a split second. The author distinguishes this view from that of the Blessed Duns Scotus who posited that Christ's salvation could have been found in preserving Mary from sin, rather than redeeming her after sin.

Aquinas affirmed that even with this delay, the Mary was sanctified in the womb, which is a far cry from the position of Protestants who try to enlist Aquinas as an advocate against the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This initial sanctification has been referred to as a “first sanctification” or “prepurification.”

The second sanctification - or sanctification proper - according to Aquinas occurred at the Annunciation when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary. According to Aquinas, prior to this second sanctification, Mary had received the stain of original sin, namely, the “fomes of sin,” which is “nothing but the sinful inclination towards sensual impulses.” However, Mary did not actually suffer this impulse because the fomes was fettered and she was provided abundant grace so as to avoid both mortal and venial.

This is all interesting stuff from a historical standpoint. It also represents a biblical/traditional interpretation that does not go the route of the Immaculate Conception, which eliminates the nuances of two sanctifications and fettered fomes of sin by holding that Mary was totally preserved from original sin prior to her life.

This book is quick and to the point and well worth getting for an overview of the subject.

Homeric Moments by Eva Brann

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I read this book after reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as part of the Online Great Books program. I think it worked better that way than trying the other way. By reading the primary texts first, I had a background that added to my appreciation of the observations made by Professor Brann. While reading this book first might have given me insights into the text, I think I might have found this book far too dry and acadmic. In addition, reading this book after the primary texts was an excellent review of those texts.

Brann's style is to skip around addressing different topics where she has insights after teaching Homer for years. All of the insights are well-worth considering. In some ways, reading this book is like having a conversation with an old friend about a subject she loves. Professor Brann clearly loves this material and finds it to be a vastly rewarding subject to consider.

This book is filled with tidbits. For example:

//Helen and Clytemnestra are indeed sisters, married to the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon. They are the daughters of Tyndareus, who is, in turn, brother to Icarius, Penelope's father.//

Clytemnestra was the wife of Agamemnon. She was infamous for killing her husband on his return from Troy. Given that she figures prominently in the Orestiad, the connection of Helen, Penelope and Clytemnestra adds a dimension I did not pick up from reading Homer or the play.

Another insight answers a question about the Odyssey that came up during the OGB discussion of the book, namely, what did Telemachus get out of his journey to see Menelaus?

//Moreover, she had taken one look and asked her husband, “Do we know who among men these claim to be who have come to our house?” And she points to him: “that man,” he is the one who looks like Odysseus' young son. It may be the first time in his prolonged boyhood that he has been called a man, and by such a personage! I think that perhaps Helen is never more beautiful than when she gives this boy the recognition that makes him Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, a young man.//

Again, these insights work better after the reader has interacted with Homer's texts and tried to unravel them for himself.

The Politics of Envy by Anne Hendershott

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We are living in a nasty moment. After a year of riots against a “White Supremacy” - resulting in blocks of burned buildings and murdered citizens - so intangible that the words “microaggression” and “white privilege” have been invented in the absence of actual white supremacists, we've had the cultural/financial/political elite gain control of the federal government, erect barb wire around the capitol, stigmatize the opposition as “insurrectionists,” and, now, boycott the State of Georgia for requiring some form of identification for voting.

What's going on.

Perhaps, Anne Hendershott offers the best explanation – envy.

This is an erudite and encyclopedic discussion of the topic of envy. Hendershott starts with the traditional understanding of envy: it was the devil's envy that death entered the world (Wisdom 2:24) and envy was classed as one of the seven deadly sins. Envy got updated in modernity:

“Marxism, the pernicious theory that still motivates many within academia and beyond, is based entirely on envy. The Marxist promise of “fairness” to the proletariat was a promise of a utopian world in which all conditions that produce envy will disappear. The Marxist assures us that an egalitarian world would remove all targets of envy so that the envious will have nothing to envy. But, as the following pages will demonstrate, envy creates its own targets, regardless of how equal people may appear to be. In the aftermath of the revolutions to overthrow capitalist systems — whether in Cuba or Nicaragua or Venezuela — the spoils are never evenly divided. In the final days of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, when the Sandinistas marched into Managua, the first thing the revolutionary leaders did was to grab for themselves the luxurious homes left behind by the Somoza regime.”

“Even in a socialist system, there will always be something to envy. History has shown that envy increases in communist countries because the stakes become so small that even the slightest advantages are envied.” Hendershott points out (quoting Hedrick Smith) that in the closing days of the Soviet Union “corrosive animosity” had turned “rancid under the miseries of daily life.”

Hendershott offers the classic distinction between envy and jealousy. Envy is “hostility or a negative feeling toward someone who has an advantage or something that one does not have and cannot seem to acquire. Jealousy, on the other hand, typically involves an attempt to protect a valued relationship (especially marriage) from a perceived threat (especially adultery). In some ways, jealousy can be a useful emotion — it is the desire to hold on to a loved one — especially when one feels the relationship may be threatened by outside forces.” “Envy is the pleasure, the malicious joy that is felt when the object of one's envy falls, fails, or suffers.” “In On Rhetoric, Aristotle described envy as “the pain caused by the good fortune of others.”

In the second chapter, Hendershott surveys classic literature for the “narratives of envy.” This is worth reading by anyone who seeks wisdom.

The third chapter discusses envy as involving being “other-directed.” The envious are always concerned about what another person has and which they think they are being deprived of by those others. In this chapter, she introduces the topic of the “Incels” (the “involuntarily celibate.) Incels are misogynistic, but their animosity is directed at the “Chads,” those men who obtain the sex that they feel deprived. (Women are not much better off in their jealousy toward other women and their assessment that “most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.”) Envy in this case has costs:

“And, as Girard would have predicted, reducing the number of unmarried men reduces the envy-driven competition for female partners and thus reduces the incidence of rape, murder, assault, robbery, and fraud in societies that value pair-bonding enough to encourage it.119 In some ways, the Incels are correct in their assertion that the Chads are capturing the highest-status women — leaving little for the rest. But, as the following chapters will point out, in a chaotic society like ours, most women are not the winners in this competition either.”

In chapter four, Hendershott discusses the horrific “crimes of envy,” such as where a nanny killed two of her minor charges because of her envy for the parents' wealth. Malicious vandalism is another phenomenon associated with envy. Finally, anti-Asian racism – blamed since March 2021 on “white supremacists” – is actually a product of black envy:

“Similar patterns of envious rage and frustration were evident in the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, when Korean-owned businesses were targeted for vandalism and destruction through arson.126 More than 1,700 Korean businesses were destroyed because the African American community opposed the widespread Korean ownership and control of real estate across South Central Los Angeles. African American and Latino rioters believed that they did not have the same entrepreneurial opportunities. A Korean business owner who was interviewed on the local television news decried the fact that no fire trucks were coming to Koreatown to put out the fires: “This is no longer about Rodney King. . . . This is about the system against us.” It was an envy-inspired insurrection against Korean-owned businesses.”

Chapter 5 concerns envy and antisemitism. Working its way through Hendershott's book is the thought of Rene Girard, who wrote about “mimetic desire” and “scapegoating.” Initially, I thought that this was psychobabble, but as she made her case, I became more convinced that they were on to something. She explains:

“René Girard has argued that the major driver of all conflict and violence is mimetic desire — desire that is aroused by the craving of another. For Girard, all envy is mimetic. In his work on Girard's theory of mimetic desire and scapegoating, Gil Bailie, the founder and president of the Cornerstone Forum and a former student and longtime friend of Girard, appears to understand the relationship between mimetic desire and violence better than anyone.”

“The very existence of human culture “requires” that the constant threat of violent conflict arising from the mimetic nature of desire or envy be somehow counterbalanced. Unfortunately, throughout history, people have drawn upon what Girard has called the surrogate-victim mechanism — or the scapegoat — in order to make human culture possible or to achieve social order. To do that, people encourage a form of mimetic contagion in which participants become vulnerable to mimetic suggestion and begin to make accusatory gestures toward rivals.”

What we are seeing today in many forms, and most recently, President Biden's call to boycott the State of Georgia because it passed voter ID laws (and Major League Baseball doing exactly that) is not only political opportunism and authoritarianism but, more important, given its unhinged from truth dimension, a kind of scapegoatism to make leftists feel “clean.”

Consider this passage:

“In 1908, University of Berlin historian Dietrich Schafer wrote a scathing evaluation aimed at preventing Georg Simmel, one of the founders of modern sociology, from being given an academic chair at the University of Heidelberg. The son of Jewish converts, Georg Simmel, whose work is still widely read and respected by sociologists and political philosophers today, was described by Schaefer as “an Israelite through and through, in his external appearance, his demeanor, and the character of his intellect.” Envious and resentful descriptions of Simmel's talents were woven throughout Schafer's evaluation of the popular lecturer, who was accused of possessing a “pseudointellectual manner” that is “greatly valued by certain circles of listeners in Berlin.””

Reconsider that passage in light of the recent firing of 47-year newsroom veteran science writer Donald McNeil Jr., because the New York Times' management, under public pressure from more than 150 employees, decided that when it comes to speaking certain radioactive words, not only does intent not matter, any utterance is potentially a one-strike offense. How much of that outrage comes from people who thought that the salary and prestige of this older white guy could better be divided up among them?

In chapter six – Envy as the Path to Power – Hendershott comes close to the insight of Steven D. Smith's recent “Pagans and Christians in the City” where modern politics was explained as a fight between those with a transcendent religion, i.e., conservative Christians, and those with an immanent religion, i.e., secularists. Building on Christian libertarian Doug Bandow, Hendershott writes:

“Bandow was prescient about the growth of government and the envy that has driven it. He would not be surprised that the secular atheist ideology that has grown over the past two decades distorts our understanding of reality. Those distortions work to hide the true goal of politics under atheism, which is, of course, power. Once God is banished, we become creatures not of God but of society politics, and we then have the choice either to rule or to be ruled. The stakes can be no higher because, for the secular atheist, man is the highest thing, and so power among men is the highest good. That is why everything is now political and why people lose their minds over elections. Bandow understands that there will always be a significant portion of the population who will vote for the candidate who promises to take away the most wealth — and sometimes the very freedom — from the greatest number of “undeserving” people. But the 2016 election of President Donald Trump disproved the theory that promoting the envy of the rich helps to win elections. Rejecting progressive promises to destroy the rich and the powerful, voters awarded President Trump with the presidency because he reassured them that America can again be the “envy” of others if we are willing to change course. President Trump knows that most of us do not envy the rich — we admire them. We may even want to emulate them. President Trump understands that for most of us, our dreams are not to hurt those who have more than we do. We just want to have good jobs that pay us enough to support our families and make us feel secure.
This is not to say that President Trump does not acknowledge that we often want to blame others when we experience hardship. And, although his message in the 2016 election was subtle, there were undercurrents of an appeal to envy in Trump's promises of “greatness” for Americans. Conservatives can, of course, be envious. As Helmut Schoeck writes, “Envy is politically neutral. It can be equally mobilized against a socialist government that has been in power since living memory, as against a conservative or liberal one.”194 The decisive difference is that the nonsocialist politician will always direct the voter's envy or indignation and resentment against certain excesses, the extravagant spending, the way of life, the nepotism of individual politicians. The conservative candidate will not pretend — as the socialist-leaning candidates do — that once he is in power, his aim will be a society in which everyone is equal and that there will be nothing to envy. Trump never promised an egalitarian society. Rather, he promised greatness — a society that others would envy — and this is what helped him win the presidency.”

You can see this difference in our age when the Woke One Party State aims at ending “white supremacy” root and branch.

The Never Trump movement and Trump Derangement Syndrome was clearly related to envy in the sense that the formerly “in-group” found itself out of power:

“The “Never Trump” movement that emerged within the Republican Party during the 2016 presidential primaries and continued through the early years of the Trump presidency relied on these concerns about within-group status among those who oppose Trump. Even though President Trump may have significantly improved the economic position of most Americans, some within the Never Trump crowd have continued to deny that he deserved any respect and certainly not their vote in 2020. To support the president openly would bring an unwelcome decline in within-group status for high-profile Never Trumpers such as Bill Kristol, the founder and editor of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, who has enjoyed high status because of his frequent media appearances on progressive cable television news sites where he continues his attacks on President Trump.”

In chapter seven, Hendershott discusses the papacy of Pope Francis I.

In chapter eight, begins her discussion of envy in Academe with, “Several years ago, American writer Gore Vidal, a public intellectual known for his piercing prose and clever witticisms, famously said: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

In this chapter, Hendershott provides a valuable discussion of “mobbing.” “When the resentment becomes strong enough, and other faculty members with similar resentments are enlisted, there is danger of an organized “mobbing” action to be taken against an individual on campus — usually a high-status and highly productive individual — in order to destroy the perceived threat to the faculty.”
“People caught up in the scapegoating movement, Girard believed, are “too naïve to cover the traces of their crimes.”295 Scapegoaters are “imprisoned in the illusion of persecution.”296 Girard believes that the social eliminative impulse, or what Westhues calls “the lust to wipe another person out,” is categorically similar to the impulse for food and sex because it can consume a person to the point of obsession, spreading like a virus through a group, becoming the driving force behind collective energy. Much of that impulse emerges from envy. In his book Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors, Westhues writes that the most basic clue that a mobbing action is occurring is that the eliminators' focus is on the targeted person, rather than on the allegedly offensive act: “The guilty person is so much a part of his offense that one is indistinguishable from the other. His offense seems to be a fantastic essence or ontological attribute.”297 When an individual is being mobbed, there is an attempt to break that individual's bond with everyone else by humiliating him or her. “

The Sparrow by Doria Maria Russell and the Problem of Suffering

One of the reasons to read science fiction - apart from not getting any dates in High School - is that it is a genre that allows the author to explore the great issues of the human condition in a fairly direct manner. By confronting their characters with some nonhuman civilization, science fiction authors can often talk about what makes us human, and what it means to be human. It has been this way since Gulliver's Travels.

Based on an off-hand quote about Jesuits in science fiction, Orrin Judd [who obviously knows his s.f.] recommended the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning book The Sparrow by Doria Maria Russell. The Sparrow appears to be a “first contact”story, which pits different cultures against each other. In this case, the cultures are a group largely composed of Catholic Jesuits who travel to Alpha Centauri lured by the SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] reception of songs from that source. The story is set twenty and sixty years into the future, as it brackets, with due concern for time dilation caused by travel at close to the speed of light, the parties' experience on the extraterrestrial planet of Rakhat.

Apart from one character, every other character is either a Catholic or a lapsed Catholic. The main character is Father Emilio Sandoz who as a gifted linguist is a logical selection for an expedition to an extraterrestrial planet. Sandoz himself returns maimed by the alien and an emotional wreck because of his stint in an alien brothel, the death of his exploration comrades, and his seemingly pointless murder of an alien child. The circumstances behind Sandoz' conduct are not cleared up until the last twenty pages.

Normally, in books of this kind, the focus is on the alien culture. The culture, its worldview and limitations are developed in the context of the clash of cultures. C. J. Cherryh - is a master of this form, particularly the Faded Sun Trilogy.. Russell, though, doesn't appear very interested in the culture of her aliens. The reader does learn some tantalizingly interesting facts - there are two sentient species on the planet, one a predator species, the other its traditional prey - but the implications of these details are not developed, and they seem to be tossed out for shock value.

Russell is a gifted writer. Her characters were interesting and largely sympathetic. She also seemed sympathetic to the Jesuits. But the intent of her book was unclear until the end. I had thought it was about first contact. It wasn't. In fact, the book was about the meaning of meaningless suffering. This is clear at two places. The first is when a party member simply dies. The agnostic doctor asks why God gets the credit for good things that happen, but not the blame for the end.

The second place is the end of the book when we learn that Sandoz' spiritual collapse - he clearly blames God for treating him as a cosmic joke - is due to the fact that all of his friends on the exploration team are dead, he has been brutalized, and he has killed an innocent, and to his way of thinking there was no meaning for any of it. The author interview at the end makes it clear that Russell's intent was to communicate that message. Russell herself is a convert from Catholicism to Judaism and she explains that in selecting Judaism one knows two things: first, being Jewish can get you killed, and, second, God won't rescue you. She also describes Sandoz' experience as a kind of holocaust. One may therefore assume that she views suffering as a meaningless experience, explained in some way by a story told by one of her Jesuit characters about a Jewish story that in order to make creation God had to remove himself from that part of the universe, so something other than himself could exist. Sandoz felt abandoned by God on Rakhat because he was.

It is here that I have my criticism of the Sparrow. Russell's avowed intent was to write a Black Robe among the stars. The Jesuits who suffered in the New World didn't share Sandoz' view. They felt that their sufferings had some meaning. There has been some discussion among various blogs about the problem of suffering. As John DaFiesole at Disputations points out the Catholic tradition ascribes evil to an absence of goodness, or an attraction to that which is not good, and that God may be the author of suffering that is intended to punish. The New Gasparian notes the tradition of suffering as causing growth by learning not to be attached to the temporal. Heart, Mind & Strength - Blog Admin Panel emphasizes the disciplinary function of suffering; suffering is like a leg brace. These answers all seem to be in line with the traditional understanding of the significance of suffering set forth in Salvifici Doloris aka The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering. In Savifici Doloris, Pope John Paul II acknowledges suffering as a mystery with dimensions in justice, growth, love and charity. On that last, he writes:

The parable of the Good Samaritan belongs to the Gospel of suffering. For it indicates what the relationship of each of us must be towards our suffering neighbor. We are not allowed to “pass by on the other side” indifferently; we must “stop” beside him. Everyone who stops beside the suffering of another person, whatever form it may take, is a Good Samaritan. This stopping does not mean curiosity but availability.


Religion is important because we are all going to suffer. Even if we never suffer material or psychological deprivation, we suffer when we contemplate our finite existence in this world. Religion offers a meaning for that existence, and thereby lessens that suffering. Father Sandoz' had a deep tradition to understand his suffering. He could have viewed his suffering as punishment for the sin of pride - heading out four light years, then landing on an alien planet without reconnoitering at the very least implicates the sin of pride, if not stupidity. He could have viewed his suffering as a form of love and sacrifice. He could have looked at it as charity in bringing Christ to an alien planet. However he viewed the experience, viewing himself as abandoned was not part of that tradition. Even if Sandoz reached a point of nihilistic desperation, it seems that he should have known something about this rich understanding of the meaning of suffering.

And that's the criticism. If Russell wanted to write a book where the main character was a Jesuit, it just seems reasonable for her to acknowledge the philosophy which that group shares. It seems that she was as uninterested in developing the Jesuit culture as she was in developing the Rhakat culture.

The Ministry of Fear - Graham Greene

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It's the middle of the Blitz and Arthur Rowe is at loose ends. There are hints that he is for some reason beyond the pale of polite society, at least in his own mind. He sees a “fete” and decides to participate. In a scene that has overtones of “Nazi spy ring” written all over it, he is awarded a cake. It's a cake that everybody seems to want.

Before you can say “Bob's your uncle,” Rowe is in the middle of a mystery where he is being shuttled to and fro by apparently unrelated people. He is framed for a murder and is on the lam from the police, when...

And suddenly we cut to an amnesiac in a hospital. There's a woman who seems interested in him, and odd things happening.

As a reader, I could see how this story would work as a movie. In fact, “Ministry of Fear” was produced as a movie in 1943. The book was written in 1942. The movie is now part of the Criterion Collection, which speaks to its value in some dimension.

From my perspective, I enjoyed the story as it moved from set to set, but the conceit of a conspiracy so well-run as to arrange for the things that they run poor Arthur Rowe through seemed far beyond credulity unless you were in an environment where your country was in a death struggle with a totalitarian power who could have agents anywhere.

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After the election and re-election of the first African-American president, Americans might have thought that they were in a period of reconciliation. The acquisition of the top spot in American politics could be thought of as proof positive that America in the 21st century has essentially moved beyond its racist past and made good on the promise of equality.

Alas, that was not to be. America's political elites have far too much invested in identity politics and racist grievances. President Obama's acquisition of the presidency was in no small part due to fostering America's guilt about its treatment of blacks and the monolithic black vote. Democrats. The cultural bloc that control the Democrat coalition was obviously not going to give up the power of race-baiting. However, with the absence of actual racism, the cultural elite have had to play up racist hysteria to disguise the absence of real racism.

And, thus, we come to a Ministry of Truth effort to rewrite history.

Peter Wood's “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project” is an effort by the president of the National Association of Scholars (“NAS”) to respond to the pseudo-academic malpractice that is being foisted on Americans by the New York Times and the Woke activists who represent the elite bloc of the Democrat Party. The particular vehicle used by these institutions is the self-proclaimed “1619 Project” which seeks to teach school children that America's true founding date was not 1776, but 1619 when the first slaves were brought to America, thus tainting all of American history with the the agenda of preserving slavery as the raison d'etre for all Americans at all times (or as many Americans for as much time as they can safely tar with the broadest brush they can find.)

Peter Woods does an able job of demonstrating the academic malpractice involved and, more importantly, the political agenda that informs the gross academic malpractice. The 1619 project is scholarship only to the extent that cherry-picking talking points from minority opinions and then spinning the points to the desired goal is scholarship. Woods documents how shoddy the “scholarship” was behind this re-invention of history. Woods writes:

“The lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who makes some of the most audacious claims, cites no sources at all: the project as presented in the magazine contains no footnotes, bibliography, or other scholarly footholds.”

In essence, what you have is the “scholarship” found on Facebook or Twitter where assertions are stated and accepted based on how they fit the Woke cultural zeitgeist.

More importantly, Woods reveals the attacks on American historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who in the Woke scheme of things was a bitter racist who supported slavery. Thus, the 1619 Project ignores Lincoln's clear statements of his belief in the equality of the races and the foundation of the Civil War in the issue of slavery. Woods states:

“IN HER LEAD ESSAY for the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones calls out Abraham Lincoln as a racist. Her evidence for this charge is an August 14, 1862, White House meeting between Lincoln and five black leaders in which Lincoln “informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.” Lincoln said, as Hannah-Jones quotes him: “Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”1 He seems to call for treating whites and blacks in dramatically different ways, to the disadvantage of blacks. Lincoln did not propose deporting any European Americans back to the continent of their ancestral origins. The phrase “ours suffer from your presence” certainly sounds both insulting and racist.
But there is more to the story. The questions that hang over a lot of studies of Lincoln is whether he always meant what he said, or whether he sometimes said things out of political calculation. In this chapter I explain why Hannah-Jones's account of that White House meeting is wrong, and more broadly, why Lincoln was not a racist. But we will have to give fair-minded hearings to both sides – something that Hannah-Jones herself declined to do. I will not say that her view is eyewash from beginning to end. There are historians who basically basically agree with her. But the weight of evidence is against them – and her.”

Woods sets forth his arguments about why Lincoln's conversation - with a reporter present - was for public consumption by those who may have resisted emancipation. As such, Lincoln's ploy ranks up with that of President Obama who was against gay-marriage until it was made a constitutional right by the Supreme Court.

Woods' argument turns on paying attention to details and asking questions - what about that reporter? - something that 1619 Project will not do with its Manechian projection of the good and the bad sides of the issue. This Manechian projection is something that I find with a lot of Woke history; Woke ideology is two-dimensional and simplistic, denying the interesting complexity of real people and real events.

Another example is found in the 1619 Project's efforts to make Lincoln into a white supremacist:

“The complications here are that Lincoln was a public orator known for his ardent opposition to the expansion of slavery and his belief that blacks had the same fundamental rights as whites. He was frequently in a position of threading the needle: How could he advance his principles while trying to win the support of audiences who did not necessarily support, even if they did not vehemently oppose, his agenda? The lines that Hannah-Jones quotes are masterpieces of subversive rhetoric. They sound on first hearing as though Lincoln is expressing his opposition to black equality. But look again. He asks a rhetorical question and provides an equivocal answer. His “feelings” will not “admit” political and social equality, but as Lincoln's defenders often point out, Lincoln didn't take political and social equality off the table. He just took those topics out of the debate he was in at the moment.”

Likewise, the 1619 Project relies on discredited Woke race-mongers for its support:

“Although Hannah-Jones did not cite sources in her article, in this case her source was easily identified. Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been publishing a multivolume “survey of Lincoln's political life” and writing occasional pieces on Lincoln in the Washington Monthly. Blumenthal took notice of Hannah-Jones's debt to Lerone Bennett Jr., an editor at Ebony magazine who once wrote an article called “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” and who followed up with a book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2000). Hannah-Jones “recapitulates Lerone Bennett's projection of Lincoln as an inveterate racist and committed white supremacist, and the Emancipation Proclamation as a sham.”9
In a review written for none other than the New York Times, the great Civil War historian and Lincoln biographer James M. McPherson immediately buried Bennett's wild accusations in the graveyard of incompetent and malicious books, describing it as “a tendentious work of scholarship, marred by selective evidence taken out of context, suppressive of contrary evidence, heedless of the cultural and political climate that constrained Lincoln's options and oblivious to Lincoln's capacity for growth.”10 Yet Bennett's incompetently researched tome was apparently a goldmine for Hannah-Jones.”

Woods also points out that the basic assumption of the 1619 Project is tendentious. The Africans imported may not have been slaves; in fact it appears that at least one subsequently obtained his freedom, maried, and purchased slaves:

//How much less onerous is evident in the subsequent careers of some of those who endured servitude along the shores of the Chesapeake. An especially well-attested case was an individual known as Antonio, who may have been among those individuals sold by Captain Jope in 1619, though he doesn't enter the historical record until two years later when he was set to work on the Bennett family plantation.7 He was eventually freed, renamed himself Anthony Johnson, got married, raised children, became a plantation owner himself, and acquired African slaves of his own. He successfully sued one of his white neighbors in a Virginia court.8 Plainly, Virginian “slavery” was not a total institution then, nor would it ever become so in the antebellum South.”

History is surprisingly complicated. This is not the only story of Africans social mobility in the New World.

Woods prefers 1620 as the founding date of American history since that was the year that the Pilgrims arrived. What Woods finds significant about the Pilgrims is that it exemplified the self-organization and enterprise that has more to say about America than slavery.

Woods does not deny either that slavery played a significant role in American history or that there have been times when American schools have downplayed the role of slavery in American history. However, that criticism can not be laid at the feet of history education after approximately 1970.

Woods also does a nice job of debunking the King Cotton narrative which was a Southern Slaver's trope picked up by Woke activists. On this point, I really invite everyone to read “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States” by Frederick Law Olmstead. Olmstead wrote this book in the 1840s and it categorizes his observations about the detrimental effects that slavery had on Southern society.

Woods ends his book with a section on “what is to be done?” His advice is to learn and share history. I often do that but I have found that any good thing I say about American history will receive Woke responses reminding that “America was not perfect” and “what about” this or that event. It is fascinating that Americans have been trained to instintively respond to positive statements about America with automatic “Debbie Downerism.” Woods points out that this tendency has migrated to conservatives. He points to the example of an article published in National Review that kind of/sort of took the 1619 Project to task but refuses to defend any counter-narrative. Woods points out:

“It is hard to imagine that someone who thinks like that will play any constructive role in resisting the corruption of our schools in the direction of the 1619 project's slavery-is-the-foundation-of-everything-in-this-vile-white-supremacist-society curriculum. As for 1620, he scoffs, “Like English colonists elsewhere, the Pilgrims and their descendants then stripped Native populations of their land through dubious property transactions and episodic wars.”

I don't think this is an accident. If these people don't hate America, then their emotional state is one which takes pleasure in a masochistic contempt for America. Since this seems counter-intuitive, I took some reassurance in Woods' observation:

“The 1619 Project is, arguably, part of a larger effort to destroy America by people who find our nation unbearably bad. The project treats the founding principles of our nation as an illusion – a contemptible illusion. In their place is a single idea: that America was founded on racist exploitation. The form of this racist exploitation has shifted from time to time, from chattel slavery to free-market mechanisms, but its character has not changed at all. There is no American history as such, but only an eternal present consisting of white supremacy and black suffering. The 1619 Project thus consists of an effort to destroy America by teaching children that America never really existed, except as a lie told by white people in an effort to control black people. It eradicates American history and American values in one sweep.”

And what effect does this have on African-Americans?

“Insisting on mere accuracy is unlikely to sway people whose sensibility has been formed along these lines. How then is the 1619 Project to be defeated? One possible answer is the work of Robert Woodson and the Woodson Center, based in Washington, DC. Woodson is a humanitarian, a community-development advocate, and a civil-rights activist known for his efforts to stem youth violence. He is the editor of two books, Youth Crime and Urban Policy: A View from the Inner City (1981) and On the Road to Economic Freedom: An Agenda for Black Progress (1987), and the author of The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today's Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods (1998). He was also among the first national figures to criticize the Times' initiative.
Ten days after the magazine presented the 1619 Project, Woodson published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the project would hurt blacks by encouraging a sense of victimhood. He immediately discerned the core theme of the project: “Whites have always been and continue to be the beneficiaries of both slavery and its attendant institutional racism – and blacks the perpetual victims.” He anticipated the positive media coverage and the eagerness of “left-leaning politicians” to associate themselves with it. And he recognized the importance of the educational angle: “Most dangerous of all, the Pulitzer Center has packaged the Times' project as a curriculum for students of all ages that will be disseminated throughout the country.” He also called on leaders within the black community to voice criticisms of the 1619 Project, lest the idea sink in further that “blacks are born inherently damaged by an all-prevailing racism and that their future prospects are determined by the whims of whites.”4

A final takeaway from Woods:

“There is an answer to the question, “Was America founded as a slavocracy?” – an answer in actual, documented history that does not depend on surmises or interpretative leaps. And the answer is, No, it was not founded as a slavocracy. It wasn't founded as a slavocracy in Virginia in 1619, or at Plymouth in 1620, or in Philadelphia in 1776. We can perhaps conjure other dates from history that have some lesser claim to be “founding” events, but there is no plausible case for an American founding that makes “slavocracy” the beginning of the story or the main charter for what followed.”

This is an incisive, well-written book that should be read.

The Nothing Man by Jim Thompson

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You can see from “The Nothing Man” how Jim Thompson earned the sobriquet of “the dimestore Dostoevsky.” This is a short, quick, engaging read about someone who is in self-imposed exile on the fringe of society. The main character, Clinton Brown, is the essence of “untrustworthy narrator” as runs a permanent 2.0 BAC as he associates with lowlife cops and the better class of Pacific City, where he is a reporter working for the Courier.

Brown is handsome, young, and witty (when he chooses.) He is also bitter, vile, and coarse. He is estranged from his wife, who has turned into a slut in the absence of his attentions, attentions he is not capable of providing inasmuch as, in his words, he was “emasculated but not castrated” in an engagement with the enemy “during the war.”

This is not much of a spoiler since the reader gets told this on the first page of the book, albeit through circumlocutions. I found myself strangely reluctant to understand what Brown was talking about, and I wondered about following the story of a man who had been “disfigured” in this way. In point of fact, the “disfigurement” comes up on almost every page and is presumably the thing that provides the motivation for the story.

Brown's concern that the nature of his disfigurement might become known plagues him. And, yet, he often hints about it so broadly that someone would have to be very dense not to pick up on the references. Everyone seems to know that he is getting a substantial military pension, but has no obvious disfigurement. Everyone also knows that his boss was also his military commander during “the war” (I'm assuming World War II, but it might have been Korea), and has been willing to take Brown's bitter insults for years. So, it may be the case that Brown's worry about social emasculation is totally in his mind rather than a feature of reality.

In any event, his fear of exposure leads him to commit murder, and, then, murder again to cover up the first murder. Brown does all this with the detachment of a sociopath, which does not ring entirely true with his disgust for the corruption of the Chief of Detectives or with his concern that no one be framed for his crime.

Is Brown a sociopath? Thompson has written about sociopaths, for example, Nick Corey in “Pop. 1280,” who was out and out nuts by the end of the story. I think I saw some of the same character arcs with Clinton Brown that I saw with Nick Corey (although Corey was truly evil and, yet, strangely appealing and funny.)

This book is very well written for a book with such gritty and disturbing content. Thompson can turn out some pretty sentences in the midst of horrifying images. Sometimes, the sentences suggest that Thompson is just having fun with language and characters. for example:

“I loved her, Colonel,” I said. “Her image is permanently graven on my heart. I could have gone for her in a large way—if, unfortunately, I had not lacked certain essential equipment.”

And:

“I drove out to the Fort, leisurely, wondering how, if I ever found the opportunity, I should polish Kay off. The most appropriate way, I felt, would be to hit her with a father. She always called Dave “father” and I think that any wife under sixty who does that should be hit with one.”

And I found this paragraph interesting as a kind of literary/historical bit of self-awareness of life at the bottom:

“You asked for it,” he said stubbornly. “I'm telling you. You claim I'm always layin' into the colored folks—blaming everything that happens on them. Well, maybe I do, kind of, but I got a damned good reason to. Not one out of a hundred can get a decent job, a job where he can get as much as you do, say, or even half as much. They don't make no dough, but they got to keep laying it on the line. They get stuck every time they turn around. Their rents cost 'em plenty, because there's just one section of town they can live in. If they don't want to walk two–three miles to a store in a white neighborhood—where they'll probably get a good hard snooting—they have to buy from the little joints in their own section, places where there ain't much of a selection and the prices are high. It takes every nickel they can get just to keep goin', just to live like a bunch of animals. They're always about half sore, an' it don't take much to make 'em more than half. They make trouble; they start playin' rough. And all me and my boys can do is play a little rougher. Flatten 'em out or get 'em sent up for a stretch. We can't get to the bottom of the trouble, try to fix it so there won't be any more. All we can do is... All right,” Stukey sighed, “go on and laugh at me. But just the same, I'm giving it to you straight.”

I liked this book. I don't think that it was as good as “Pop. 1280,” and I can see that it has lightweight elements, such as the motivation for the murder and the infatuation of the female characters for Brown, and I might be inclined to knock off half a star for those infelicities. On the other hand, I would certainly rate it as one of the better noir crime stories I've read, which enough poking into gritty truth and the warped human soul.

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My Aquinas group has been diving into the third part of the Summa Theologica for the last several months, after spending over a decade on getting to that point by reading the Summa chapter by chapter. The third part involves St. Thomas Aquinas's analysis of the Incarnation.

I have been enlightened by nuance and depth of the Incarnation. I have come to appreciate its centrality to Christianity. This may seem obvious, and I would not have denied knowing it on an intellectual level, but learning about the balance of doctrines designed to preserve both the Logos's role as divine and true humanity of the Incarnation. What I think I came to appreciate was the way in which the Incarnation represents respect for human dignity. Human nature plays a role in salvation; salvation is not effected separate, apart or on humanity, but through and with human nature.

This book unpacks the issues that arise from the effort to find a balance. The author, Michael Gorman, takes the reader methodically through the pertinent concepts. Since the doctrine is that the Incarnation consists of two natures in a single person, this means tackling the concepts of “person” and “nature,” which leads to dealing with the arcana of “supposits” and “substances.” These are tricky concepts that have a tendency to slide around in my mind and require my constant attention to pin down.

I want to say that persons, supposits and substances are those things that “subsist,” that endure to provide continuity throughout and despite changes in the matter of a thing. Your cells are constantly splitting and dying; you may lose an arm or have a heart transplant. What continues to exist during and despite these changes? You do, i.,e the person “you.” A nature is the thing that defines one kind of thing from a different kind of thing.

In the Incarnation, the “thing” that existed at all times was a divine person, namely the Logos. The Logos assumed a human nature in addition to His divine nature without changing the Logos into something different. The joining of divine and human natures was at the level of the peson, not at the level of the nature, which is why there was a “hypostatic union,” since “hypostasis” means “person.”

So far, so easy, but things get difficult when we start asking questions like “if God is simple, then how can He be a compound of human and divine natures?”, what does it mean to say that God does not suffer, how can Christ not be a human person, etc.

Gorman offers explanations for these questions, but some are not particularly satisfying, though no fault of Gorman, since he is simply giving his best take on the positions of the Angelic Doctor. For example, my personal bete noir has been “simplicity,” namely, how can God in his divine nature be such that His essence is his powers and He is pure act, and still have one person of the Trinity be a composite being of human nature and divine nature.

The answer, according to Gorman, involves some fine hair splitting about what it means to be “simple.” Gorman is very useful in warning that one should never “over-read” Aquinas:

“The text to focus on is ST I, q. 3. Aquinas does not ask, in a generic and undifferentiated way, “Is God simple?” and then answer “Yes.” Instead, he develops a specific notion of divine simplicity that consists in the negation of certain specific kinds of composition. This is important, because if we assume that Aquinas holds that God is simple in just any sense we ourselves can imagine, then we will be likely to jump too quickly to the conclusion that he is contradicting himself when he says that Christ is composite.”

From there we pay attention to what Aquinas says:

“Of course, Aquinas's claim that Christ is composite might contravene his understanding of divine simplicity, but that would have to be demonstrated in light of what Aquinas actually means by divine simplicity, which is, to repeat, not just anything we might imagine to be implied by the word “simplicity,” but the specific negations that Aquinas argues for.2
In article 1, Aquinas says that God lacks corporeal parts, in article 2 that he lacks composition of ​form and matter, in article 3 that he lacks composition of nature and supposit, in article 4 that he lacks composition of essence and existence, in article 5 that he lacks composition of genus and difference, and in article 6 that he has no accidents. Article 7 provides additional reasons for thinking that God is simple without adding anything to the notion of simplicity embedded in the denials contained in the preceding six articles (unless perhaps the mention there of ​act-potency ​composition gives us something that is not implicit in the previous articles, in which case we should add it to the list). Article 8, finally, says that God does not enter into composition with anything, but that is not relevant to the present inquiry: Asking whether God is a component of anything is different from what we are asking about here, namely, whether God has any components.
Divine simplicity, understood in this way, does not exclude substantial composition. The point is fairly easy to see with regard to articles 1–2 and 4–6, because Christ's being composed of two natures is not an instance of any of the modes of composition that those articles rule out. The union of divinity and humanity in Christ is not a union of corporeal parts, of form and matter, of essence and existence, of genus and species, or of anything with an accident (or of ​act and potency).

And:

“To make that denial is not to take any stand at all on whether a divine person can have a second substantial nature – an issue that is far from Aquinas's mind at this point. As long as Christ's human nature does not arise from his divinity – which, of course, it does not – that human nature's being united in person to the Word is not excluded by the denial that article 3 is making. ​
So in ST I, q. 3, while Aquinas does indicate a number of ways in which a divine person cannot be composite, he does not deny substantial composition. Based on his way of understanding divine simplicity, therefore, there is no opposition between divine simplicity and having substantial composition. If this sounds odd to us, that will be because we are unwittingly imposing our own understanding of simplicity on Aquinas. If we keep our eye on precisely what he means by divine simplicity, we will see that for him, divine simplicity is consistent with a divine person's having two natures.”

That was a surprisingly underwhelming answer to a conundrum I've been pondering since I first started reading Aquinas 20 years ago.

Actually, it's not bad to get that answer because it does free up the mind to consider what it means for something to be simple but have two natures.

Another one involves the question of Christ's human personhood, which Christ does not have. The history of Christianity has been tortured by the “One or Two” question, namely, how many natures does Christ have, how many wills, how many energies, how many of anything, for which the answer is always “two.” This rule ends at the level of “person” as in how many “persons” in Jesus? Then the answer is “one.”

But how can this be? Natures are sorted out to things - one to a customer - and “rational natures” are awarded to “persons.” Natures don't just float free unattached to persons. If Jesus had a true human nature, what did he lack to make that nature a human person?

Gorman's answer is that the question is not what was lacking, but what was extra, in the case of the Incarnation, the extra thing being a “divine person,” which, so to speak, took up the slot for “human person.”

Obviously, I found this to be a useful, engaging book. However, I have to recognize that I've been reading Aquinas for a few decades and had recently gone over the Incarnation. From that perspective, this book was right on the money, but I would have to wonder how lost I would be without that background. I think Gorman is about as accessible to a beginning Thomist as you might find, but be prepared for a lot of concepts to come your way.

Legal Eagle by E.C. Tubb

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This story was written in 1955 by the author of the Dumarest saga. The story has quick culture-building associated with “Golden Age” stories. In this case, the culture is one, which decides lawsuits through trial by combat. A scrappy Earth company is bullied by the rules of this legal system, but finds a loophole.

This is a quick, fun read.

Aeschylus II: The Oresteia by Aeschylus

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I read the Orestes trilogy for the Online Great Books program The program had just had us read Homer's Odyssey, so the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and their boy Orestes fit seamlessly into one of the grooves found in that book.

I really recommend that any thinking person read the Oresteia. It actually makes for an interesting and gripping read. The story progresses through Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon on his return from victory over Troy, to Orestes taking vengeance on his mother for the murder of his father, to, finally, the trial before Athena as to whether Oreste's will be handed over to the Furies because of his kin-slaying.

The story is told in the form of prose poetry in a play. The reader has to acquaint himself with the forms of the Strophe, Antistrophe and the like, but that's not difficult. This test has a nice glossary that clues the reader into references to gods, myth figures and location, which is helpful for staying on track.

Coming from the Odyssey to this trilogy, I was impressed by what I think I saw in moral development. My sense from Homer is that Bronze Age Greeks were fairly hit or miss on the treatment of strangers and the universality of justice. Homer's world was largely a divine command world and the protection of strangers seems to have rested in the possibility that the stranger you were mishandling might be a god in disguise.

By the time we get Aeschylus, it seems that there may be some norms of justice with the Furies assigned to give teeth to those norms. However, these norms seem to be fairly conditional. Thus, Orestes slaying of his mother gets the attention of the Furies because that involved blood kin, but Clytemnestra's slaying of her husband is outside of their jurisdiction because they are not blood relations.

The gods do take an interest in Agamemnon's vengeance, but that was because he was fairly important. Further, while the gods do provide a way out for Orestes' dilemma, one doesn't get the sense that the Greeks were too concerned with universal forms of justice.

It's worth reading and pondering.