On Robert Burns' Day

I learned from a DNA test that I have Scots ancestry, almost certainly on my mother's side of the family, the Bond side. Many Scots celebrate the poet Robert Burns on the anniversary of his birth — January 25.

Madeleine Kearns, herself a Scot, wrote about several of Burns' poems a few years ago. I looked up a few of them online. First from "Address To The Unco Guid," the first and last verses (full poem here):

O YE wha are sae guid yoursel', Sae pious and sae holy, Ye've nought to do but mark and tell    Your neibours' fauts and folly! Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill, Supplied wi' store o' water; The heaped happer's ebbing still, An' still the clap plays clatter.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us; He knows each chord, its various tone, Each spring, its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted.

Kearns also quotes from "To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church":

O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us An foolish notion: What airs in dress an gait wad lea'es us, An ev'n devotion!

Much more at this site.

Robert Burns’s Antidote for Our Self-Righteous Times

Norman Vincent Peale

The incoming President's favorite pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952, but still in print). Today Jake Meador writes about "The Perils of Positive Thinking":

[F]or Peale the Christian message isn’t a message about the nature of reality, the reasons that mankind suffers and does evil, or the way that we might be saved from those things by something that exists outside of ourselves. It is not a story of God taking on flesh and entering the world as a rescuer, and the renewer of all things. Rather, Christianity—and really it’s just Christian words for Peale—is a technique for people in advanced industrial societies to achieve their dreams. It represents a kind of baptism of egocentrism for the wealthy and the powerful. Indeed, virtually every personal anecdote Peale shares involves well-to-do people. You will find many business owners, civic leaders, and men about town in The Power of Positive Thinking. What you won’t find are janitors or plumbers.

When Peale cites Scripture, it is invariably out of context and applied in ways that would have been quite shocking to the original authors. The point of one of Peale’s favorite texts—if God is for us, who can be against us?—is not that...people should pursue their personal kingdoms with confidence and positivity because God is on their side. It is, if anything, almost the opposite: The quite extensive witness of Scripture is that the sorts of people Peale constantly cites in his book are precisely the people least likely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless they repent of the very avarice and self-centered ambition that Peale’s work encourages.

The results of this confusion on Peale’s part in which he seeks to use Christian language to advance wealthy Western individualist goals are sometimes hilarious. In one passage, he explains that one can harness “prayer power” to achieve one’s goals, but only if one understands the rules and formulas required to pray “scientifically.” ....

According to the wisdom of Scripture and mother church, prayer is a way of laying our fears and concerns before God. But it is not a self-help technique or a kind of celestial snack machine we visit whenever we are hungry. Prayer is a way through which human creatures enjoy communion with their creator and through which they are renewed and restored to what they were made to be. .... Often prayers seem to go unanswered, not due to using the improper technique but, as the Scriptures tell us, because God’s ways are inscrutable to us, and the work of prayer is not so much to yield the results we want, but to align our fallen and imperfect will with God’s will so that we might be caught up in closer relationship with him.

All of this complexity, which one must speak Christian to understand, falls away in Peale’s work. It is almost as if he doesn’t even recognize such complexity as being part of the human experience, let alone the Christian experience. Prayer is simply a technique one practices in order to improve one’s daily material life, to help one’s mood, or, quite crassly, to grow one’s bank account. .... (more)

Jake Meador, "The Perils of Positive Thinking," The Dispatch, Jan. 19, 2025.

A personal library

Robert Caro is the author of "titanic biographies of Robert Moses (which took seven years) and Lyndon B. Johnson (a multivolume project that began in 1976 and is still ongoing)." The Washington Post has just published an article about his very extensive personal library. I particularly enjoyed this:

.... Lower [in his bookcase] in much easier reach, sit the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester, about the ascent of a British Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The young Caro loved the series so much that, whenever the public library got the latest installment, he would plop down on the building’s metal steps and start reading right there. As a gift, his wife, Ina, who has worked as his researcher on all his books, had Caro’s set rebound in blue, with anchors and naval insignia on the spines.

“I had them all my life,” he said. “It means a lot to have the very pages — because I read these books so many times that I sort of know where the words are on the page. And I’m ashamed to tell you how often I reread them.”

“Oh dear,” he said, his eyes falling on a different stamp, on the top edge of one volume: the faded words “East Meadow Public Library.” “Well, that’s quite true, I was not always good at returning these books. This is going to look really bad! It’s too late.” ....

“Sometimes you look at these bookshelves,” Caro said, “and I have all these memories, all wrapped up in them.” .... (more)

The book cover illustrated above is of one of the Hornblower books in my library.

Sophia Nguyen, "A peek inside Robert Caro’s home library, hidden shelves and all," The Washington Post, Jan 17, 2025.

David Lynch’s only Disney movie

Among the notable deaths reported today is that of filmmaker David Lynch. I've watched several of his films and TV series. Enjoyed some of them but I haven't revisited any except this: 

The Straight Story (1999)

It’s David Lynch’s only Disney movie, which is delicately illustrated with scenery that looks like it’s been pulled out of the pages of National Geographic. The story concerns an aging man who travels across the heartland on a dilapidated lawn mower, hoping to reunite with his brother (played by Harry Dean Stanton). It’s not only Lynch’s most romantic film, it’s also the only one where his strange interpretation of Americana becomes almost Rockwellian. There is nothing Lynchian about Alvin Straight, who’s a swisher-smoking wiseman who shares his thoughts over crackling campfires and warm meals—each time his eyes filling up with tears. Though it’s based on an unusual story that made headlines in 1994, Lynch’s interpretation of Straight’s story is elegiac. This is a film about an aging outlaw taking his last ride towards the sunset.

Not really about an "outlaw" at all, but a decent old guy played by Richard Farnsworth who wants to see his brother at least one more time. It was filmed in Iowa and Wisconsin where the real events happened.

Art Tavana, "Nineteen of the Loneliest Films Ever Made," Quillette, April 19, 2020.

Against stupidity we are defenseless

A comment I read today led me to look for a Bonhoeffer essay apparently included in Letters and Papers from Prison. My immediate inclination was to apply the insights to the left but, of course, they can apply to just about any group.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. ....

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. .... (more)

I found the essay at: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "On stupidity," North State Journal, Jan 15, 2025.

Alone against a warship

I've seen the film and own a DVD of Sailor Of The King, a pretty good film based on a book by C.S. Forester, Brown on Resolution, that just entered the public domain. It was one of the first Forester books dealing with nautical subjects. The text is available at Standard Books with this description:

Albert Brown was fated to enlist in the British Navy, his destiny set by his unusual birth and upbringing. While on operations in the Pacific during the First World War, his ship is sunk—but he survives, and is taken on board the German cruiser that sank them. It too has suffered damage, and heads to the Galapagos Islands to effect repairs. In this unlikely and hostile setting, Brown, alone, pits himself against the German ship and its crew, seeking to delay its progress while British naval reinforcements make their way to the region.

C.S. Forester became famous for his Horatio Hornblower series, but Brown on Resolution is among the first of his works of nautical fiction. In it, he weaves together the gritty social themes of his earlier work with meticulous accounts of naval adventure.

The book is set during World War I but the film moves the story to World War II.

Integral to humanity

From a review of Alister McGrath's Why We Believe:

His latest book, Why We Believe, provides McGrath with another opportunity to defend belief in the face of those who deride it as at best irrational and weird and at worst, dangerous. It coincides with the 1,700th anniversary of the Christian Nicene Creed, first adopted by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and still used today as a profession of faith by those with official positions in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Churches.

But as McGrath rightly says of a creed – a word taken from the Latin credo, “I believe” – it might be a description of what a Christian believes, but it’s a limited statement. To truly understand belief, he argues, we need to see it lived. As he reminds his readers, CS Lewis, one of the 20th century’s most high-profile atheists-turned-Christians, as well as the creator of Narnia, understood that “the Christian narrative is primary; Christian creeds are secondary… creeds cannot convey either [Christianity’s] imaginative appeal or its subjective impact.”

McGrath’s basic premise is that belief, rather than being outmoded and unscientific superstition, is integral to being human. In a rewriting of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, he argues that homo sapiens needs to make sense of life, not merely survive it. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson would put it, we are meaning-seeking creatures. Beliefs, whether humanist, or Christian, or that of another religion, shape the way we understand and experience the world.

The most interesting issue about faith and its understanding of human nature, after all, is how it keeps bubbling up, not only in people’s everyday lives but in public discourse. While humanists, as McGrath points out, believe in the inherent goodness of people, a Christian such as Miss Marple understands the simultaneous capacity for its opposite. Only this autumn, forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead reached for Christian theology in her Reith Lectures to help explain evil. It was, she argued, an absence of good, and its antidote to evil was therefore to practise goodness – in other words, the development of virtue that theologians and philosophers from Aquinas onwards have been advocating.

McGrath uses this book to take on Dawkins et al once more: he complains that the New Atheists “degraded and rationalised faith”, and treated it as though it were “simply a form of data”. But he also gives an account of belief’s many facets, from the search for a big picture to the difference it makes to navigating a difficult world. He perceptively comments on how suffering, once seen as a connection between Christians and Christ, is now often perceived as a problem by Christian thinkers drawn into trying to rationalise pain. .... (more)

Catherine Pepinster, "Atheists, you don’t even understand what ‘belief’ is," The Telegraph, Jan. 9, 2025.

Creepy crawlies

About the only time I make up my bed is immediately after I launder the linens. That's because I am lazy and almost nobody (other than me) enters my bedroom. But now I have a new justification:

Tiny dust mites, only the largest of which are visible to the naked eye, exist in their hundreds of thousands – if not their millions – between your sheets. They might hide out in your mattress after a night spent eating the dead skin on your face, pillows and sheets, or linger on your duvet throughout the day.

These arachnids (yes, they have eight legs, like spiders) thrive in moist, damp places, and hoover up the dead skin left behind as your cells renew themselves throughout the night.

“Apparently the typical bed contains somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000,000 dust mites,” says Dr Sermed Mezher, a British GP....

...[D]ust mites don’t bite, and they are relatively harmless. But they do proliferate quickly, die off fast and create a lot of debris from their droppings. Those with an allergy to the tiny creatures can see their health derailed by this build-up: dry eyes, sneezing, coughing, wheezing and fatigue are all telltale signs that you might be allergic to dust mites. ....

While you can’t eradicate mites totally from your bedroom, it is possible to reduce their presence significantly by airing out your bed, washing your sheets regularly, and making sure that your room is kept at a reasonable temperature. ....

Between washes, against conventional advice, it’s best to leave your bed unmade throughout the day .... Mites thrive in warm, damp environments, so by airing out your bed you’re “allowing your mattress and sheets to respond to the temperature of the room more quickly,” (emphasis added)

Lauren Shirreff, "The creepy crawlies living in my bed – and how I got rid of them," The Telegraph, Dec. 7, 2024.

In the public domain

Every January 1^st more works go out of copyright and enter the public domain. This year, in the United States, the songs, books, and films, are those published in 1929. Standard Books selects twenty of the "best," books available on their site including, for instance, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and others, including several by authors I always enjoy:

• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
• The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie
• The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan
• The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey
• Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester

Each of the above is linked to a page where it can be downloaded or read online. All but one are mysteries. The non-mystery is the C.S. Forester, a WWI naval thriller. The Buchan is a Richard Hannay I haven't yet read but will soon.

"A slayer of Communists"

John Podhoretz is not particularly fond of Bob Dylan but liked A Complete Unknown because of a theme Podhoretz isn't sure the director understood. Who knew that electrified guitars were anti-Communist? From the review of the film:

The hidden story of A Complete Unknown is that Bob Dylan is a slayer of Communists—maybe not because they’re Communists, but I’ll take what I can get.

His rebellion against the elders in the folk movement of the 1960s was a rebellion in part against the static conformity and dreary humorlessness of the far-left politics that had dominated that corner of the music world for a quarter-century.

That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if co-writer and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against "Masters of War"—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown. ....

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.

It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)

The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic "Which Side Are You On?" nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the "side" in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.

A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.

John Podhoretz, "REVIEW: ‘A Complete Unknown’," The Washington Free Beacon, Jan. 3, 2025.