Conviction or compliance?

I was a public school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. Many (most?) of the students in my high school classes had political and social opinions that differed from mine. If I created the kind of classroom atmosphere described below, it was certainly not my intention, and it would have definitely contradicted my teaching philosophy. This article from The Hill discusses what many college students believe they need to do to succeed.

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. ....

Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience.

But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation. .... (more)

Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, "Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed," The Hill, Aug. 13, 2025.

"The sage on the stage"

My teaching style was primarily the lecture. There was pressure, especially in the '70s, to avoid lectures in favor of students sitting in a circle and sharing what little they knew. However, it always seemed to me that, having formally studied a subject in college and graduate school, I was qualified to share it, translating it into understandable terms for my students. It was incumbent on me to make the lectures interesting and to respond to questions. But what was the point of requiring teachers to have advanced education if it wasn't intended to be used? Consequently, I liked "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage":

.... Relegating the teacher to a secondary (or even tertiary) supporting role as a “guide on the side” implicitly devalues what it is that sets him apart from his students: his education, knowledge, and professional experience. We reduce him to a mere repository of information. This may have initially been a bug in the system, but, in any case, it is now a feature. The transformation of the teacher’s role from “sage” to “guide” and the corollary “flip” of the classroom have been aided by obsessions with “power,” biases against “privilege,” and efforts to dismantle “systemic” and “institutional” structures of “oppression”—all of which are represented by the “sage on the stage.” ....

Contrary to widespread characterizations, the sage on the stage does far more than merely transmit information to a necessarily passive audience. The lecture, writes Amanda Fulford and Áine Mahon, “should … be seen as a special form of human encounter.” And it is a human encounter that allows for the kind of “guidance” that the flipped classroom may or may not actually provide in practice.

This is particularly true when the lecture is delivered live. Students not only are able to think critically about the material that is being presented, but they may also be able to ask questions about it and receive answers in real time. They may even be able to engage in dialogue with the lecturer. ....

A good lecture isn’t the regurgitation of information gleaned from sources that could be provided directly to students to be read on their own. It is the product of the kind of active learning that teachers seek to promote—a synthesis of information, critical analysis, and informed interpretation on a specific subject, carefully prepared within a particular context for a target audience for specific purposes. In this, it serves as a real-world example of “active learning.” In a piece titled “In Defense of Lecturing,” professor Mary Burgan notes that lecturers serve as “models of knowledgeable adults grappling with first principles in order to open their students’ understanding. […] The phenomenon of a grown-up person capable of talking enthusiastically and sequentially can show students how they themselves might someday be able to think things through.” Lectures thus provide students with the opportunity to see that “the passionate display of erudition [is] valuable in itself—regardless of the rewards of approval or popularity.” Those students “rarely … have the chance to observe intellectual mastery and excitement in their daily world. When they find it on a campus, it validates the life—the liveliness—of the mind.” ....

None of this means that direct instruction is always the best approach—that there is no room at all for facilitated “active learning” in an occasionally “flipped” classroom. In practice, almost every sage occasionally leaves the stage to guide from the side. As Peter Stanton argues, “the ideal teacher should be able to act as both a sage on the stage and a guide on the side, and they should carefully evaluate when it’s most valuable to use each approach.”

What I do mean, however, is that the guide on the side is no substitute for a sage on the stage. Students do, in fact, need a sage—for his education, knowledge, experience, and expertise. And if students are to receive the full benefit of these things, the sage needs his stage—even if he may occasionally leave it to guide from the side. (more)

David C. Phillips, "Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage," Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 8, 2025.

Building bridges

I taught middle school and (mostly) high school social studies and history for thirty-six years. During that time, the curriculum evolved in positive ways. And in ways that were absurd and destructive. This sounds like a pretty good corrective for the bad while retaining the good. From FAIR:

The American Experience Curriculum offers what every educator, parent, and student desperately needs now: a balanced, rigorous approach that explores America’s rich cultural heritage while emphasizing our shared humanity and founding principles.

What makes FAIR’s curriculum revolutionary? It achieves what others haven’t:

• Applies pluralism concepts to help students navigate competing goods vs. simple right/wrong thinking
• Develops civil discourse skills that students need for civic engagement
• Teaches character strengths that transcend cultural boundaries
• Combines constitutional foundations with the experiences of diverse ethnic groups
• Addresses complex perspectives on racial and ethnic identity
• Meets Ethnic Studies standards without the polarization
• Brings students together instead of dividing them

.... While other curricula choose sides, the American Experience chooses students. We’ve created academically rigorous content that builds bridges instead of walls and teaches America’s complex story with honesty and hope. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s leaders, and they deserve a curriculum worthy of that responsibility. (more)

"FAIR News: The Solution America’s Classrooms Have Been Waiting For," June 20, 2025.

Pointless suffering

"Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes" is a review of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein. Excerpts from the considerably longer review:

The ninth of November, 1799—the 18th of Brumaire in the calendar of the French Revolution—is often remembered as the day the Revolution ended. Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Italy and scourge of Egypt, engineered the dissolution of the executive committee of the French Republic. The following day he entered the lower house of the French Assembly with a military escort. The deputies, recognizing a coup, cried “down with the dictator” and roughly manhandled the great general until he retreated. But troops soon cleared the chamber. Napoleon was made first consul and granted expansive powers. A new constitution followed, animated—according to one of its authors, the powerful Abbé Sieyès—by the principle that “power must come from above and confidence from below.” Remarked Sieyès of this new order: “Gentlemen, we now have a master.” ....

For the ancient Greeks, and for millennia thereafter, political turmoil was “revolutionary” in that it was a perennial pathology of cyclical history, bringing only pointless suffering. ....

To the ancients, Mr. Edelstein writes, “the state in revolution was a perversion of the state, a social hell in which the trappings of society remained in place only to mask the unbridled violence and greed…that really governed human affairs.” Revolutions were calamitous “mutations” to no purpose, adding only tragedy to the affairs of men. ....

The French philosophes, Mr. Edelstein argues, were the first to exchange “a vision of revolution as devastation for one of revolution as improvement.” Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet and others developed a perfectionist faith in accumulative human improvement. They introduced the belief that history progressed and that the “iron law of inequality,” as Mr. Edelstein puts it, could be overcome. Tradition and custom were recast as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Social classes would melt away beneath a future sun.

Crucially, these progressive philosophes also developed a confidence in the capacity of the central state to act as the engine of reform. ....

The Revolution to Come cleaves the much-celebrated “age of democratic revolutions” into two. The French Revolution embodied the new confidence in historical progress and enthusiasm for unchecked power. Its guiding spirit, Mr. Edelstein insists, was Voltaire, the enthusiast for enlightened despots, rather than the radically democratic Rousseau. Napoleon, perhaps even Lenin, emerge as the heirs of Frederick the Great: authoritarian, but no less revolutionary for that.

The American Revolution was of a different quality. It emerged from the British tradition of mixed constitutionalism and what Mr. Edelstein calls “radical conservatism.” “Rather than transforming their world,” he writes, Americans “wished above all to preserve the state.” For Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, pure democracy and revolution remained threats. The American constitution thus sought to manage class conflict and balance governmental powers, both federally and within the central government. ....

...The Revolution to Come is still harder on the “modern” revolutionaries of the French dispensation. In his best chapters, Mr. Edelstein unfolds the despotism and pitiless violence that stains this tradition. Advocating historical progress was one thing; securing popular consensus on the nature of progress was something else entirely.

In place after place, disagreement over the question of what progress meant inevitably spawned factions, strife, conspiracies, and atrocities. The drive to centralize power disabled any constitutional mechanisms that might have tamed this factionalism. The contest to control the single central power—through which the future would be defined—became increasingly ferocious. Purges targeted traditional counterrevolutionaries, but even more, false friends: the quisling moderates who might undermine the cause from within. The only solution was radical, reforming despotism. .... (more)

Jeffrey Collins, "The Revolution to Come Review: Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes," The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.

Presentism

Patrick Kurp on "presentism," beginning with a quotation from Robert Conquest:

“History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it unrolls. And only if one is without historical feeling at all can one think of the intellectual fads and fashions of one’s own time as a ‘habitation everlasting.’ We may feel that at last, unlike all previous generations, we have found certitude. They thought so too.”

I heard it expressed by commencement speakers and others in more casual conversation that ours is an unprecedented age of uncertainty and worry. “We have never seen anything like what we’re experiencing now,” said an articulate and highly educated woman. I wanted to remind her of, say, April 1861 in the U.S. and September 1939 everywhere. The phenomenon of presentism is like a disease that causes blindness. We attribute a sort of proud uniqueness to ourselves and our era, an understanding fostered by narcissism and historical ignorance.

The speaker quoted at the top is Robert Conquest in “History, Humanity, and Truth,” the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities delivered at Stanford University. .... (more)

Patrick Kurp, "Fanaticisms and Factiousnesses Too," Anecdotal Evidence, May 12, 2025.

Oswald did it.

My last post reminded me of this, posted eight years ago, the last time Trump had documents released related to JFK's assassination :

I taught high school history and social studies classes for thirty-five years. For almost all of those years, I taught required 9^th grade US history classes. Eventually, I got pretty good at it. Each quarter one of the units involved the production of an essay that propounded a thesis, supported the thesis with evidence properly footnoted, and a conclusion flowing from the argument. Since these were 9^th graders I supplied packets of primary and secondary sources for them to use although they were free to find other materials. Of the topics I gave them the most popular by far was the assassination of JFK. Since I used that subject year after year I became very familiar with the various conspiracy theories and the evidence (or, rather, the lack thereof) supporting them. There is really no reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the only shooter that day in Dallas. All of the alternate theories were answered long ago and it requires a genuine unwillingness to consider the evidence to believe otherwise. Peter Jennings' ABC documentary (2003) effectively dealt with all of the questions regarding a second gunman or an alternate assassin firing from somewhere other than the Schoolbook Depository. A thorough debunking of the various conspiracy theories can be found in Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993). If your understanding of the issues is based on Oliver Stone's movie, look further. Like most of his films, JFK is pretty good as a movie and pretty terrible as history.

The President has decided to release the remaining documents relating to the investigation of the assassination. As of last night, he has ordered that all those remaining should be released holding back only the names and addresses of people still living. I predict that nothing new of importance will be revealed. Was Oswald himself part of a conspiracy? People who know the most about him are doubtful that he could have worked in concert with anyone. From today's London Times:

Farris Rookstool, a former FBI analyst who spent nine years reading 500,000 pages of documents in the bureau’s Kennedy collection, said the notion that Russia controlled Oswald was seductive but flawed.

“I did the interviews with the KGB, the first FBI-authorised face-to-face meetings, and I can tell you they thought Oswald was just as crazy as we did. I don’t think they were trying to wash their hands of being involved with him but they were just being very candid. Oleg Nechiporenko [a KGB officer who also met Oswald in Mexico City] said they called him ‘the Tornado’ because he was spiralling out of control.

“If you strip Oswald down and look at him as just a human, he had antisocial personality disorders, he had a childlike understanding of world history and he didn’t take orders very well.

“When he was in Russia they did a two-year electronic surveillance on him and they finally realised the guy was an idiot. They thought this guy is obviously not an American double agent or false flag or a dangle. When they folded their operation over there they gave him 72 hours to leave the country.”

There are still people who believe Stanton had Lincoln assassinated or that Spain blew up the Maine in Havana harbor and there will always be people who think a professional assassin might have chosen an exposed position behind the wall of a public parking lot and fired over the heads of people lining a parade route.

"Epic levels...of ignorance"

Gerard Baker on conspiracy mongers:

Sheer dumbness is part of the problem. Our culture is dominated by people with epic levels of historical, economic and scientific ignorance. Mr. Rogan is unimaginably successful and doesn’t need my critical approval, so he won’t mind when I say I doubt he has read a book of real history in his life or can see the difference between the charlatans he promotes and actual historians of the Third Reich such as Richard Evans or Ian Kershaw. Nor would he or his followers understand the difference between the historiography required of a genuine authority and the kind of drivel produced by a dilettante opportunist.

The larger problem is the steady undermining of truth itself. So much contemporary ideology rests on eradicated standards of objective reality, so people can believe all kinds of impossible things. The abandonment of academic truth is partially to blame. The tendentious and dishonest nonsense that holds sway at most of our top universities and the intolerance with which its adherents exclude dissent have undermined faith in academic truth and debased the currency of scholarship so that anyone with access to a social media account can propagate his own “learning.”

The collapse of trust in almost all our sources of information—media, government, experts of all sorts—has allowed epistemic malignancy to flourish. Fifty years ago Nazi apologetics were malicious ahistorical fantasy, a thin veil for ancient bigotry, whose propagandists were rightly ostracized from serious political company. Today they’re just another interesting lie that will get you a fat paycheck on YouTube. (more)

Gerard Baker, "Antisemitism Rears Its Head on the Right, Too," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2025.

A love of reading

Lamenting the decline in reading for pleasure by the young, this Telegraph column explains why "Reading is vital for our children":

One of the greatest gifts my grandad ever gave me was a love of reading. From an early age he handed me book after book. Beatrix Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Treasure Island – I couldn’t get enough.

But my favourite was the Chronicles of Narnia. I stumbled through the back of the wardrobe with Lucy Pevensie, into the world of Aslan the lion, Maugrim the wolf, Mr Tumnus and the White Witch. I was hooked from the first page.

Books hold a special power to light up children’s imaginations. Generations have flown off to Neverland and leapt down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. They’ve run through the hundred-acre wood and snuck into the secret garden. From tea with tigers, to picnics with hungry caterpillars – the magic of children’s books can cast a spell on us all. ....

Reading is vital for a child’s language and cognitive development. And it brings a raft of emotional and social benefits. Reading carries children into different worlds and transports them into the minds of others. They can experience different perspectives, helping them to build empathy and connect with people unlike them. All told, these benefits bode well for a child’s future – from employability to earnings. ....

The books we read as children become part of who we are as adults. From the days I spent in the land of Narnia I learned about friendship, loyalty, forgiveness – and the dangers of accepting Turkish Delight from strangers. But it was the magic of children’s stories that gave me a lifelong love of reading. My grandad understood the value of that. He understood that reading could set me on the path to success. And now it’s our duty to make sure the next generation of young readers don’t miss out on that wonderful gift. (more)

Bridget Phillipson, "Reading is vital for our children," The Telegraph, Dec. 20,2024.

Intellectual humility

The author of The Certainty Trap describes the problem:

...[T]he easiest way to recognize it is by how we feel when we’re in it. We know we’re in this trap when we demonize, dismiss, or otherwise view with contempt people who disagree—especially on heated issues. ...

Avoiding the trap means understanding that, when we judge as hateful or ignorant someone who sees the world differently, it’s because certainty has paved the way for us to do so.

To see how this can work, consider the claim that biology and gender are entirely distinct. Certainty on this point clears the path for the conclusion that saying “a trans-woman isn’t a woman” is transphobic. Similarly, certainty that inequality is caused by systemic racism, past and present, paves the way for the conclusion that questioning the role of systemic racism is itself racist. And certainty that, for instance, immigration is good for the economy makes possible the judgment that anyone who favors immigration restrictions is xenophobic.

To be sure, people holding any of the positions just mentioned may well be transphobic, racist, or xenophobic. For that matter, so might people who hold none of the opinions listed here. The problem is that certainty means other possible explanations are dismissed. ....

The Certainty Trap is made up of three fallacies.

The first is the Settled Question Fallacy. It refers to the way we treat our knowledge about the world as final, rather than provisional. It also describes our tendency to treat our preferred policy or decision as though it has no downsides, or at least none worth taking seriously.

The second is the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge. This is the assumption that, if we all had the same information, we’d agree on issues like abortion, Black Lives Matter, and immigration.

Finally, there’s the Fallacy of Known Intent. As the name implies, it means we’ve made an assumption about the other person’s motives. Avoiding each of these is required for avoiding the problem of certainty. ... (more)

Ilana Redstone, "Beware the Certainty Trap," Martin Center, Dec. 11, 2024.

"No new thing under the sun"

From Anecdotal Evidence yesterday:

“The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists more amusing than optimists and failures more attractive than successes. I do not say that my preferences are based upon universal principles or that everyone should share them; in any case I should not want to live in a world of mental clones of myself, even if it were possible. I merely describe my own preferences as they happen to be.”

What Theodore Dalrymple describes is neither an ironclad law of existence, a wallow in sentimentality nor an affliction of the elderly. It’s common sense, a recognition of reality. The future is fiction. It is the home turf of utopians and other schemers, whose visions have the solidity of steam; that is, hot air. The past is where we come from. It made us. As a corollary to Ecclesiastes 1:9, C.H. Sisson writes in his essay “Natural History”: “It is an absurdity to try to be original. You might as well try to be beautiful or intelligent.

Patrick Kurp, "More Interesting to Me Than the Future," Anecdotal Evidence, July 29, 2014.

Enjoying Shakespeare

Most of my knowledge of Shakespeare comes, not from studying the plays in English classes, but from attending annual student productions at the college where my parents taught and I eventually attended. Milton College had a tradition of annual Shakespeare plays dating back to the 19^th century. I've seen yearbook pictures of WWI casts that were entirely female since most of the guys were serving in the military. My brother and I from a very young age were taken to whatever was being performed that year. In preparation, Dad would read us a summary of the plot from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. I was reminded of that today:

First published in 1807, it contains retellings of 20 of Shakespeare’s best-known plays. The Lamb siblings weren’t trying to dumb down the language or stories, they were simply hoping to give newcomers a more understandable introduction to these plays. Often, it’s easy to get stuck on the unfamiliar language and trip on the allusions, and these mishaps can make us lose the whole thread of the plot. Many characters, some major and many minor, zip on and off stage, adding to the confusion. Tales from Shakespeare, however, aims to fix some of that by giving the plots in as straightforward a manner as possible and including enough of the Bard’s language to give a thrilling glimpse to eager readers. ....

Whether you’re a long-time lover of Shakespeare’s works or you couldn’t name a single one of his plays; whether you’re a Stratfordian or an Oxfordian; and if you never could figure out whether Hamlet was crazy or not, Tales from Shakespeare is a wonderful addition to any library. Read it aloud to your children or dip in and out for your own pleasure — this delightful introduction to some of the greatest stories, prose, and poetry in the English language is a treat.

Sarah Schutte, "Shakespeare for the Young," National Review, June 23, 2024.

Warts and all

I majored in history and then taught it for over three decades. Late in my career, I taught a 9^th grade TAG elective with two colleagues, one from the Science department, and the other an English teacher. We chose the 19^th century as a time frame because of significant events that occurred in each of our fields, as well as the kinds of subject matter that might interest bright and motivated students in that age group. One of my most helpful discoveries was the work of Gertrude Himmelfarb. Her work as a historian focused on that century. And her work was fascinating. A search for her name on this site will find many references. National Affairs has published an essay on "The Historian's Craft" about Himmelfarb's approach to the discipline:

...Himmelfarb looked to the past and what it had to say about liberal society as someone (to borrow philosopher William James's phrase) "twice-born": someone who appreciated the profound and terrible role contingency played in history; who had no illusions about the purported inevitability of progress; who, as she put it herself, experienced "life as a tragic mystery, acutely aware of the potentiality for evil and of the heroic effort required to overcome it." ....

Himmelfarb had as little use for misty-eyed nostalgia as she did for an unbounded confidence in the moral arc of history. She revered the liberal tradition, particularly the sensible, practical, and virtue-oriented one born out of the British and American enlightenments, and the multi-generational British and American societies that cultivated and transmitted this tradition. Morals and moral sense mattered, in her telling, because they made the pursuit of freedom — of a kind of progress — possible. ....

"I suffer from the professional deformation of the historian," Himmelfarb confessed at the end of The New History and the Old. "Philosophers can see the eternal verities that transcend history. Political scientists can see the abstract processes that underlie history. Historians can only see history itself, the 'epiphenomena' of history, it might be said pejoratively — the messy, unpredictable, contradictory, transitory, yet ineluctable facts of history."

Even if history is only visible through a glass darkly and mired in mess and contradiction, Himmelfarb knew that wrestling with its ineluctable facts was an essential part of recovering a tradition worth preserving. Unfortunately, our capacity to meaningfully reckon with historical facts (moral or otherwise) has been jeopardized by those who treat history as a litany of abuses by the empowered against the disempowered, while others sanitize it beyond recognition by cleaving ideas from their historical context. If we are to return history to its rightful place in our civic discourse, it will depend in part on emulating the example Himmelfarb set by treating history as a beloved spouse — warts and all.

Nicole Penn, "The Historian's Craft," National Affairs, Spring, 2024.

It wasn't inevitable

I've always been interested in World War II, largely because it was so fraught and victory was so important. So I read all I could about it and found particularly interesting the events leading to its outbreak and the lessons that should have been learned. When I taught 9^th grade US History, I spent an entire unit on the rise of the dictators in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USSR leading to World War II and the subsequent much longer Cold War. So I found this recent book of interest and have ordered it. Takeover is about how Hitler gained power, and was reviewed in Commentary:

Adolf Hitler’s capture and destruction of the fragile Weimar Republic is a cautionary tale without rival. To tell the story in his new book, Takeover, the historian Timothy Ryback has narrowed the action to the six months leading up to Hitler’s elevation to national leadership. He relies heavily on newspaper reports, diaries, and memoirs to recount in vivid detail how the infighting between cocky, short-sighted members of the Prussian establishment eventually opened the door to the Nazi leader. But also ever-present in Ryback’s account is the role of chance—unplanned encounters, missed opportunities, hidden resentments. Conditions were ripe for this political catastrophe, but it wasn’t inevitable. ....

The specter of Weimar haunts us still. We can marvel from a distance at how small decisions—made in the moment, in response to immediate circumstances—cascaded into disaster. We can point out that peril awaits a leadership class willing to align itself with political extremists, seeking to counter forces which it perceives to be more unsavory. The lessons to be gleaned from this are eternal. (more, a pretty good summary of the events.)

Clare McHugh, "'Hitler’s Unnecessary Rise' Review of Takeover by Timothy Ryback," Commentary, June, 2024.

The way he said it

K. Alan Snyder is working on a paper describing Dorothy L. Sayers's arguments for sound education. Sayer's most well-known paper on the subject is “The Lost Tools of Learning,” which has been part of the inspiration of the classical school movement. Dr. Snyder, doing research at the Wade Center, has discovered an unpublished Sayers lecture about one of those "lost" tools, rhetoric. Sayers on Churchill's effective use of rhetoric:

The cornerstone for this address was the example of Winston Churchill, a leader that Sayers believed had rejuvenated the impact of effective rhetoric. She comments, “At the beginning of the last war, an extraordinary wave of excitement & vivification ran through the nation when Mr. Churchill began to speak on the wireless.”

Sayers adds, “It was not so much what he said—though that was heartening & good—as the way he said it, which was electrical. Events (which were agitating enough) helped of course to put us into the mood to be moved; but at first events were so depressing that if they had been talked about in the old way we should probably have sunk into a lethargy of discouragement.”

Throughout the war, Sayers notes, “that resonant voice trumpeted its way through bad times & good.” Even people who weren’t fans of Churchill or his politics were stirred by the rhetoric of his famous speeches in those dire times. They “drank in great lifesaving draughts of stimulating language with body in it. That marked, I believe, the first steps in the Revival of Rhetoric.”

Dr. K. Alan Snyder, "Dorothy L. Sayers & the Revival of Rhetoric," Pondering Principles, May 17, 2024.

Reparations

Most historians agree that the reparations required of Germany after World War I had unfortunate consequences. Are those lessons relevant to the consideration of reparations in general?

.... Reparations caused endless, dangerous resentment, and damaged the prospects of genuine reconciliation. They arguably harmed both those paying them and those receiving them. They caused severe trade distortions and added to financial instability. They imposed burdens on people not responsible for the damage being repaired. Worst of all, the political outcomes were disastrous.

One might think that such a discouraging and well-known historical example as the Treaty of Versailles would cause those blithely proposing billions or trillions in reparations for long-distant wrongs to exercise some caution, especially as today’s circumstances make the case for reparations vastly less strong than it was in 1920. Precisely what damage today is to be repaired? Who are the victims now? Who alive in the 2020s is responsible for events in the 1720s? How can the monetary cost of remote harms be reasonably calculated? Would resentment be caused by the imposition of reparations? How damaging might that be to present society and to the relationship between payers and receivers? Could resources be better used to relieve urgent 21st-century needs, rather than to pay the distant heirs of long-dead victims? ....

Robert Tombs, "Has the C of E got its reparations bill all wrong?" The Spectator, April 27, 2024.

Art, architecture, music, and philosophy

I watched Civilization when it first aired on PBS. I watched it in B&W because I did not yet have a color TV. I was enthralled. I am getting a Blu-ray version right now fearing that the series in its original form may not always be available. From The Spectator:

'What is Civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t definite it in abstract terms – yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.’ So suggested Kenneth Clark, looking towards Notre Dame at the start of Civilisation, his magisterial televisual guide through Western art, architecture, and philosophy. .... Now, more than fifty years since its creation, the BBC has decided its viewers need protecting from this ‘personal view’.

It suggests the programme does not necessarily accord with Auntie’s current ‘standards and attitudes’, and further undermines it by placing alongside it a new segment by Mary Beard lamenting the ‘posh’ Clark’s Euro-centrism.

The former can be begrudgingly accepted, since it has previously been applied to other programmes from the BBC archives, including an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. But the latter sticks in the craw. ....

Reading the Victorian critic [John Ruskin] had convinced Clark that art should be accessible to everyone. Civilisation was the embodiment of his life’s work. It never talks down to its viewers. Clark contentedly left minutes devoid of commentary, allowing those watching to bask in the magnificence of whichever cathedral or piece of music he had chosen. You are free to enjoy the beauty without interruption.

...Clark wholeheartedly believed in individual genius and Christianity’s role as ‘the chief creative force in western civilisation’. Neither is in vogue today. Looking at the monstrosities that litter our cities and galleries, one can’t help but find Clark’s traditionalism appealing. ....

At the end of the series, Clark maintains that it is ‘a lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation’. A national broadcaster that feels challenged enough by a fifty-year old programme not to let it air without some form of warning or lecture cannot be said to be that. But as Civilisation proves, great art endures, even as fashions shift – and idle posturing can never substitute for good taste.

William Atkinson, "Why is the BBC censuring Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’?," The Spectator, April 25, 2024.

A word that means something

The time came, quite a few years ago, when the foreign language department in my high school decided to call themselves the "world" languages department. I stopped by their office to tell my colleagues there that the only "world language" I could think of was Esperanto. They did not seem amused. Today, Kevin Williamson made a similar point:

It is remarkable to me that so many professional writers will go to such lengths to avoid the perfectly respectable word “foreign.” E.g., Jim Newell writing in Slate about the proposal to rename Dulles Airport for Donald Trump, who never flies commercial.

In a way, it could be a perfect passing of the torch. The current namesake, John Foster Dulles, worked to overthrow international governments; his would-be successor, the domestic one.

That’s a good line—clever.

But there are no “international governments” that can be overthrown—there are “foreign governments” that can. International things are things that are between nations, that involve more than one nation: international agreements, international travel, international trade, etc.

The government of Germany isn’t international (not in this century, anyway!)—it’s just German, and foreign. Germans are foreign to Americans, and Americans are foreign to the Germans. ....

Yes, people sometimes spit foreign as invective. But it is a word that means something, and what it means is not international. Like alien and illegal alien, we need a term for the thing we are talking about, and it is better if that term is a word or words that actually say what they are meant to mean.

Kevin D. Williamson, "There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid," The Dispatch, April 8, 2024.

Blowhards

The teaching of history in our schools and colleges isn't what it was, but these guys are all old enough to have learned stuff if they were paying attention. Jonah Goldberg:

... [S]tupidity and ignorance are closely related concepts, but they’re not the same thing. Smart people can be ignorant and stupid people can be informed. Indeed, one of the cool things about knowledge is that it can make not very bright people seem very smart. ....  Meanwhile, really smart people can seem stupid if they have no good facts to work with. We tend to look with scorn at thinkers of the past because we know they were wrong. Hah hah, they used leeches! They thought the sun revolved around the earth!

The thing is, the people who came up with these incorrect theories were probably very, very, smart. They just didn’t have access to a lot of information and data. It’s not like you came up with heliocentrism. ....

There’s a lot of wisdom to George Santayana’s aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But I’d like to offer a different observation. We are condemned to hear a lot of stupid nonsense from people who don’t know—or don’t remember—jack squat about the past.

What got me thinking about this was an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on CNN Monday night. ....

And Goldberg then explains how RFK Jr. displays remarkable ignorance about history. But he's not the only Presidential candidate who does. There are a couple more.

[Donald Trump] knows nothing about American history, so every (allegedly) unfair thing that happens to him has “never happened before.” Indeed, RFK Jr. is essentially cribbing Trump’s material. After Biden’s State of the Union Address, Trump posted on Truth Social: “HE WEAPONIZED GOVERNMENT AGAINST HIS OPPONENT – DIDN’T TALK ABOUT THAT, NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!” In 2016, Trump insisted that “African American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.”

“Ever, ever, ever” is pretty definitive. It’s also nonsense.

Trump insists that no president has been treated as unfairly as him, including Lincoln (he also probably didn’t know Lincoln was a Republican—whenever he learns something new, he likes to say “a lot of people don’t know that …”). But even leaving out the whole assassination thing—which is a pretty big thing to leave out—Lincoln was treated pretty shabbily by the press. Trump didn’t know where some of his favorite terms came from, including “America First,” and “Silent Majority.” He claims to have invented “Make America Great Again,” but when it was pointed out to him that Ronald Reagan used it, he plausibly responded that he didn’t know that. Besides, Reagan “didn’t trademark it.” ....

Joe Biden is a little different. It’s not so much that he doesn’t know anything about history, it’s just that the history he invokes is frequently wrong. He wasn’t arrested in South Africa trying to visit Nelson Mandela. He didn’t have a historic conversation with Golda Meir, nor was he a “liaison” with Egyptians. Many of the seemingly historic tales of his personal life never happened.

More to the point, Biden makes up history about stuff he’s not personally involved in. And—also very important—he was doing this long before anyone accused him of being senile (though that’s increased the frequency). In 2008, he told Katie Couric, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.” But FDR didn’t go on TV then —television was introduced to the American public at the World’s Fair in 1939—and FDR wasn’t even president when the stock market crashed in 1929. He makes up stuff about the Second Amendment, Jim Crow, and more—all the time.

What this says about Biden versus Trump and Kennedy is open to debate. I do think having no idea there was a past is different than being wrong about the past, but the differences are obscure and psychological. Where all three old men overlap is that they’re blowhards. Biden’s style seeks the authority of the past in a different way, but it’s still wild exaggeration and bluster. When he touted Barack Obama’s successful effort to kill Osama bin Laden—which he opposed at the time—he said, “You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan.” Okay, Joe.

But there’s another commonality. They all work from the assumption that the rest of us are too ignorant to know better—or care. .... (more)

Jonah Goldberg, "A Gerontocracy of Blowhards," The Weekly Standard, April 3, 2024.

A moral imperative

On slavery, and the campaign against it:

...[T]he country that led the world in the rebellion against this barbarism – and played a bigger role than perhaps anyone else in its eradication – was the United Kingdom.

Britain did not invent slavery. Slaves were kept in Egypt since at least the Old Kingdom period and in China from at least the 7^th century AD, followed by Japan and Korea. It was part of the Islamic world from its beginnings in the 7^th century. Native tribes in North America practised slavery, as did the Aztecs and Incas farther south. African traders supplied slaves to the Roman empire and to the Arab world. Scottish clan chiefs sold their men to traders.

Barbary pirates from north Africa practised the trade too, seizing around a million white Europeans – including some from Cornish villages – between the 16^th and 18^th centuries. It was in fear of such pirates that the song ‘Rule Britannia’ was written: hence the line that ‘Britons never ever ever shall be slaves’. Even slaves who escaped their masters in the Caribbean went on to take their own slaves. The most concerted campaign against all this was started by Christian groups in London in the 1770s who eventually recruited William Wilberforce to their campaign, and parliament went on to outlaw the slave trade in 1807. British sea power was then deployed to stamp it out.

The largely successful British effort to eradicate the transatlantic slave trade did not grow out of any kind of self-interest. It was driven by moral imperative and at considerable cost to Britain and the Empire. At its peak, Britain’s battle against the slave trade involved 36 naval ships and cost some 2,000 British lives. In 1845, the Aberdeen Act expanded the Navy’s mission to intercept Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves.

Much is made about how Britain profited from the slave trade, but we tend not to hear about the extraordinary cost of fighting it. In a 1999 paper US historians Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape estimated that, taking into account the loss of business and trade, suppression of the slave trade cost Britain 1.8 per cent of GDP between 1808 and 1867. It was, they said, the most expensive piece of moral action in modern history. .... (more)

The portrait is of Wilberforce.

"How Britain smashed the slave trade," The Spectator, April 6, 2024.

Holocaust

I watched The World at War as it was being broadcast on PBS in the 1970s and later purchased the DVDs. I used several episodes in my US History classes when teaching the Second World War. The toughest one for students to watch—and for me to watch again and again—was titled "Genocide." It first screened fifty years ago and was one of the first films to document the Holocaust. From History Today:

First broadcast on 27 March 1974, "Genocide" is credited with introducing the Holocaust (a term still not yet in common use) to the British public. It helped to inculcate an awareness of the Nazi "Final Solution" as a crime directed against a specific group. The episode was screened over four years before the US-produced television miniseries Holocaust, often cited as the televisual milestone promoting Holocaust awareness on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Genocide" provides an account of the Nazi persecution of Jews and the Holocaust that is succinct and accessible, yet not oversimplified. This is even more remarkable given that it preceded much of the foundational scholarship on the subject. It included themes such as the influence of racial science and eugenics on Nazi ideology, the rise of the SS, the role of the Einsatzgruppen ("special task forces" – mobile killing squads) in perpetrating what became known as the "Holocaust by bullets" in the eastern occupied territories, and the "Aktion Reinhard" death camps – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. ....

"Genocide" was directed by British filmmaker Michael Darlow. The World at War’s producer, Jeremy Isaacs, had initially wanted to direct "Genocide" but, given that members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, decided against it, fearing that he would be too "emotionally involved". ....

"Genocide" succeeded in its aim to educate a British public still largely ignorant about the nature of the Holocaust. It would also be unfair to judge "Genocide" by the standards of present-day Holocaust scholarship and memorial culture. In some respects, it was a product of its time, but in many, it was far ahead. The episode’s most significant achievement was to clearly explain who the Nazis targeted and why, and how this persecution developed from exclusion, to expulsion, to extermination. However, "Genocide" also inadvertently encouraged a degree of understanding, perhaps even sympathy, for those who perpetrated the Holocaust. These men were allowed to position themselves as mere "cogs" who had been placed in an impossible situation by a brutal, totalitarian regime; a regime in which the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was conceived, masterminded, ordered, and approved of by a tiny coterie of the most senior Nazis.

This episode of The World at War can be seen on YouTube but, as you can see, only on YouTube as it is age-restricted:

Joseph Cronin, "Holocaust at 50," History Today, March 3, 2024.