Neither static nor stagnant.

I finished R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, from which I've already posted a few excerpts on this blog. The book is deliberately restricted to Latin Christendom between 972 and 1204, which means it's about the rise of only one part of medieval civilization. (I'll have to read books on Germany and the Slavic countries some other time.)

But there's still plenty of good material on some of the most interesting events and phenomena of European history. For example, there's Prester John, legendary Christian king of a distant empire, about whom legends began circulating in the twelfth century. There's a recounting of the sad, strange Fourth Crusade, where crusaders trying to get to Jerusalem ended up conquering Constantinople, which was at the time the greatest city in Christendom.

The main part book is structured on a set of organizational transformations: the thickening of hierarchies in both secular and religious organizations, and the new intellectual rigor that helped make these shifts possible. There are also some compelling discussions on medieval ideals, the most stirring of which were the descriptions of the feudal conception of liberty (worth studying as a contrast to our modern ideas) and of the admiration of Rome as a spiritual capitol (which faded as the papacy assumed a more active political role).

This book would not make a good first dip into medieval history: it assumes a basic knowledge of major events (the council of Clermont, the Battle of Hastings) and personalities (Gregory VII, Bernard of Clairvaux) of the period. There are many fascinating details about the historian's work: for example, one source for comparing styles of monastic poetry is a scroll that a monk carried across Europe to collect eulogies on. I really don't know how it's regarded in the field these days, and would be curious to find out. The book is well-sourced and doesn't seem to be pushing any conspicuously modern ideologies. The Making of the Middle Ages portrays early medieval society as dynamic and imaginative: an age with its share of troubles, to be sure, but neither a static time awaiting technology nor a stagnant era awaiting enlightenment.

Vita voluntaria.

Quite possibly what freedom looks like in a non-voluntarist society:

When Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, wrote to dissuade a canon, living according to the Rule of St. Augustine, from becoming a hermit, he raised the objection that the life of a hermit was a vita voluntaria. By this he did not mean that it was a life voluntarily adopted, but that every detail of the life was at the will of the individual: the life governed by a well-established rule was higher, and essentially freer.

[...]

Freedom could only be defined by reference to the law, by which those who were free were governed. Freedom was not a status like serfdom; it was a quality which was attached to the status of all who were not serfs. This quality was the quality of rational order. The mere freeman, with no further qualification, was a man who stood on a zero line: it was not easy to decide on which side he stood, and he could easily be pushed across the line into unfreedom. It was only when the quality of freedom was articulated by being attached to the status of knight, burgess or baron that it could be observed, analysed and measured.

-R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. New York: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (107-8)

Byzantine policies.

Liudprand was the Bishop of Cremona from 961 to 972. He made a journey to Byzantium in 968 and tried to bring back some of Byzantium's fine purple silk, but his silk was confiscated by customs officials. Here is the letter he sent to Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor in Germany:

So, you see, they judge all Italians, Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Swabians--in fact all other nations--unworthy to go about clothed in this way. Is it not indecent and insulting that these soft, effeminate, long-sleeved, bejewelled and begowned liars, eunuchs and idlers should go about in purple, while our heroes, strong men trained to war, full of faith and charity, servants of God, filled with all virtues, may not! If this is not an insult, what is?

- Liudprand of Cremona, quoted in R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (33-34)

R.W. Southern's gloss on the passage: "Of course, anyone might write like this after a brush with customs officers."

Corporations.

I had an idea for something like this history of the corporation when I was an undergraduate. I wanted to start with early corporate forms and trace their evolution to the present day. At the time, though, I didn't know where to start, and nothing ever came of it. So I'm inclined to swipe some books from this guy's reading list and give it a half-hearted go now. In particular, the one about the East India Company looks fascinating.

Not having gotten into the history yet, I can't do much about the body of the essay except express curiosity. But the section on framing modernity is problematic:

The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces ... Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible: it can be reduced to a few basic rules and principles...

Maybe it's particularly modern to put race, art, and religion all under the same label, and it'll take a little more work to convince me that "culture" in this setting doesn't just mean "forces I can't easily analyze." If Christianity is true -- as whole cultures have believed it to be -- then God's interaction with mankind would presumably deserve a top-tier category of its own. It's hard to imagine the Greek philosophers accepting this particular ranking of politics, war, and business, and they weren't unobservant. And what about science and scholarship? This fourfold division is cute, but I don't find it all that useful.

But even though I find the overall framing a little silly, he's got a nice description of the way that the corporation form shifted its goal from spatial domination to ownership of time, and an interesting suggestion about the diminishing returns in this practice.

Pet names.

George Washington had many dogs at Mount Vernon. Names included:

• Madame Moose
• Gunner
• Pilot
• Tipsy
• Old Harry
• Chloe
• Pompey
• Frish

Mark Twain, on the other hand, liked cats. Names included:

• Abner
• Apollonaris
• Motley
• Fraulein
• Famine
• Cleveland
• Buffalo Bill
• Sour Mash (!)

I'm slightly curious about this next thing, but probably won't track it down:

“Toward the end of the author's [i.e., Twain's] life, his cats were photographed and the images were subsequently published as ‘Mark Twain's Cats’ in the Pictorial Review.”

-Katherine C. Grier. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. (38, Gen. Washington's dog names can be found on page 26)

For more historical pet names, see “Dog People v. Cat People” in John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise. I must warn you that Hodgman's lists are made up.

"The scales begin to fall."

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a pair of posts about why he rejects the idea of the Civil War as tragedy. In short, he can't accept the moral equivalence (or near-equivalence) between North and South on which the brother-against-brother view relies:

It's really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

J.L. Wall, writing at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, agrees (as do I) that the Civil War is not properly understood a tragedy of avoidable violence. However, he does describe a different sort of tragedy, and he does so with eloquence:

By the end of Gettysburg, as I have mentioned, exhilaration has given way to frustration, disgust, and tragedy. Rather than a misguided quest for glory, Jeb Stuart’s meandering during the first days of that battle are depicted as a lost child’s desperate search for his father. The scales begin to fall and the South’s “great” men are revealed to be self-serving (Bragg; the Hills; Hood; Stuart; etc.), blindered (Lee), or brutalizers of questionable sanity (Forrest; Quantrill).

[...]

For all the narrator’s fascination with Lee’s and Jackson’s underdog role in the first volume, by the end of the second, the South has condemned itself, militarily and morally.

It's stuff like this that keeps a fellow sticking around on the internet. The tragic arc of the Confederacy: a cultural rot so deep as to be inextirpable, slowly revealed to people that saw themselves as good. Chilling.

Curse of Ham.

So this is worth knowing. One of the purported Biblical justifications for slavery was the "Curse of Ham;" the idea was that all black Africans were living under an ancient curse which made it all right for white people to own them. According to a short review Mark Noll posted today at Books & Culture, the "Curse of Ham" was first specifically linked to Africa in a book published in 1498; before that, biblical commentators had only treated the passage as an explanation of serfdom as a general condition, not specifically tied to race.

Here's the upshot:

You do not have to look far today to find continuing efforts to apply the "curse of Ham" to Africans and use it as vindication for slavery. None of it is true. It has been made up out of whole cloth. It is a depressing tale from first to last.

The NYT visits the Levine Museum.

There’s a piece in today’s New York Times on Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South. I spent an afternoon at the museum last month and I think the article is spot-on. I should also take this opportunity to recommend Tom Hanchett’s book Sorting Out the New South City, which is a wonderful supplement to a museum visit. (Link via Lew Powell.)

George H. White's final speech.

I've been reading up on local history: one book on politics in North Carolina and another on residential patterns in Charlotte. The decade that really grabs me is the 1890s, when a Republican-Populist coalition, representing small farmers, mill workers, and African-Americans actually managed to beat the Democrats, who represented the state's large farmers and businessmen. By broadening voting laws, the coalition made it possible for a good number of African-Americans to be elected as officials. At the high tide of this movement — 1896 — George H. White won a congressional election and became the only African-American in the House of Representatives. He won reelection in 1898.

But 1898 was also the year that the Democrats orchestrated a massive white supremacy campaign and recaptured the machinery of North Carolina politics. Determined to hamstring the opposing party, they followed the rest of the south in deliberately disenfranchising black voters by means of a the poll tax and the literacy test. Representative White realized he couldn't win after this law passed and declined to run for reelection in 1900.

I found his final speech to Congress in UNC's Documenting the American South online collection. It's a remarkable and moving speech. The most quoted section is the closing:

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people--rising people, full of potential force.

Mr. Chairman, in the trial of Lord Bacon, when the court disturbed the counsel for the defendant, Sir Walter Raleigh raised himself up to his full height and, addressing the court, said:

“Sir, I am pleading for the life of a human being.”

The only apology that I have to make for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.

Bill Kauffman is on to Charlotte's trickery.

Bill Kauffman recently traveled through my hometown's airport and saw some kind of ad campaign for “Charlotte, USA.” In The American Conservative, he muses on why they left out the “NC”:

“So N.C. is gone, ostensibly because Charlotte is no mere city but is instead a 16-county two-state blob that absorbs all the little communities within devouring distance, chewing them up into one masticated bolus flavorless enough to be swallowed by savvy global investors put off by states with directional adjectives in their names.”

He calls for impromptu citizen repair of these posters; if I were in Charlotte now, I'd be tempted to take him up on it.

But, yes, this is an ongoing problem with Charlotte, whose lurching efforts to become a World Class City provided the backdrop to my childhood. He's kind of got it pegged: Charlotte's explosive growth during my lifetime — at least 275,000 people since 1990, if the census is to be believed, which is approaching a 70 percent increase over a period of 17 years — has a lot to do with people who came for Charlotte, USA, rather than Charlotte, NC. It's Charlotte, USA gets the yuppies and the corporations. It's banks, not basketball or barbecue, though I should admit now that Charlotte wasn't particularly known for its barbecue, and, in my opinion, the Davidson / UNCC rivalry isn't much compared to what we've got going on in the Triangle. Anyway, banks: could it be a coincidence that Charlotte's business leader, Hugh McColl, changed his bank's name from North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) to NationsBank, and later Bank of America?

Much of the city feels soulless to me, although there's a strange comfort in that our efforts to become World Class are paying off in the form of a NASCAR hall of fame right next to the convention center. I suppose that this keeps Charlotte somehow tied to the North Carolina tradition of running moonshine — Wilkes County, Junior Johnson, and all that. (The apparently complicated issues of localism and corporatism in the world of NASCAR I will leave to the side, not being a racing fan myself.) Another bit of history that we try to keep in mind is that James K. Polk was born in Mecklenburg County — but do we really want to celebrate that? I'm going to have to think on how to find history in Charlotte, NC.

Chapel Hill, on the other hand, drips history, as old university towns tend to do. Might I again remind you that UNC was the first public university in the nation to open its doors?

Why I like Wirkman Netizen.

Wirkman Netizen has posted his top and bottom five presidents, with Andrew Jackson on both lists. There's more there, but I love that he concluded with this:

“Let me conclude by stating just how radical I will go in talking about American politics. Before the Civil War, I would have been a Garrisonian, advocating the secession of the Northern States. ‘No union with slaveholders!’ The South was filled with evil scum, and a slave rebellion, spurred on by northern instigators and open borders all along the north, would have led the south finally to wise up and phase out slavery before the 20th century dawned. I’m pretty sure of that. If only the North would have loved liberty more than The Union.

“But isn’t that the usual problem, people loving government more than freedom?”

I'll have to accept the “evil scum” remark because it's true.

I need to do some more reading about pre-Civil War intellectual movements to decide what I would have been attracted to. Where would someone with my temperament have landed in the late 1840s and early 1850s? It's hard for me to say. I think I would have subscribed to Brownson's Quarterly Review (assuming that I was not a dirt-poor farmer in western Virginia), although perhaps that would not have been appropriate for a Presbyterian of the time.

Churchill and Roosevelt

Isaiah Berlin, in 1949, comparing Churchill and Roosevelt:

Mr. Roosevelt, as a public personality, was a spontaneous, optimistic, pleasure-loving ruler who dismayed his assistants by the gay and apparently heedless abandon with which he seemed to delight in pursuing two or more totally incompatible policies, and astonished them even more by the swiftness and ease with which he managed to throw off the cares of office during the darkest and most dangerous moments. Mr. Churchill too loves pleasure, and he too lacks neither gaiety nor a capacity for exuberant self-expression, together with the habit of blithely cutting Gordian knots in a manner which often upset his experts; but he is not a frivolous man. His nature possesses a dimension of depth—and a corresponding sense of tragic possibilities, which Mr. Roosevelt's lighthearted genius instinctively passed by.

Mr. Roosevelt played the game of politics with virtuosity, and both his successes and his failures were carried off in splendid style; his performance seemed to flow with effortless skill. Mr. Churchill is acquainted with darkness as well as light. Like all inhabitants and even transient visitors of inner worlds, he gives evidence of seasons of agonized brooding and slow recovery. Mr. Roosevelt might have spoken of sweat and blood, but when Mr. Churchill offered his people tears, he spoke a word which might have been uttered by Lincoln or Mazzini or Cromwell but not Mr. Roosevelt, greathearted, generous, and perceptive as he was.

The whole article is worth reading, even though David Bentley Hart has called Berlin, if memory serves, “that most fraudulent of twentieth-century intellectuals.” I think Hart's gripe has mainly to do with Berlin's book on Johann Hamann.

The point is that Churchill should always be remembered as one of the great democratic leaders of history, despite his air of imperialism and aristocracy. For Churchill managed to sweep his people up in a grand story, to provide a focal point for a sense of purpose, but, most importantly, to remain in the service of democracy: ultimately, to elevate the people of the nation rather than to crush them into a collective. In this sense, the comparison with Lincoln is especially apt.

Political pessimism was here before me; it will be here when I'm gone.

“The Constitution is a dead letter, except so far as it serves to prescribe the modes of election, the role of the majority, the distribution and tenure of offices, and the union and separation of the functions of government. Since 1828, it has been becoming in practice, and is now, substantially, a pure democracy, with no effective constitution but the will of the majority for the time being. Whether the change has been for the better or the worse, we need not stop to inquire. The change was inevitable, because men are more willing to advance themselves by flattering the people and perverting the Constitution, than they are by self-denial to serve their country. The change has been effected, and there is no return to the original theory of government. Any man who should plant himself on the Constitution, and attempt to arrest the democratic tendency,—no matter what his character, ability, virtues, services,—would be crushed and ground to powder. Your Calhouns must give way to your Polks and Van Burens, your Websters for your Harrisons and Tylers. No man, who is not prepared to play the demagogue, to stoop to flatter the people, and, in one direction or another, to exaggerate the democratic tendency, can receive the nomination for an important office, or have influence in public affairs. The reign of great men, of distinguished statesmen and firm patriots, is over, and that of the demagogues has begun. Your most important offices are hereafter to be filled by third and fourth-rate men,—men too insignificant to excite strong opposition, and too flexible in their principles not to be willing to take any direction the caprices of the mob—or the interests of the wire-pullers of the mob—may demand. Evil or no evil, such is the fact, and we must conform to it.”

-Orestes Brownson, “Catholicity Necessary to Sustain Popular Liberty” (1845). Essays and Reviews Chiefly on Theology, Politics, and Socialism. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1852. (368-9)

Did you make it through all that? Good. The essay goes on to argue that although Protestantism might set a free government in place, only Catholicism can sustain it. The people manage the government, but only a truly authoritative religion can manage the people. Brownson, in this essay, never imagines the storm that will break two decades later, nor does he consider the possibility of a strong civil religion. Lincoln must have taken him by surprise.

It's interesting to see the famous names of Polk, Van Buren, Harrison, and Tyler disparaged in favor of Webster and Calhoun. Of course, the Speaker of the House was the most important figure in the government throughout much of the 19th century, especially under Henry Clay. But which of our buffoonish politicians will history choose to lift to the status of a featureless name in a list? In two hundred years, will the name “George W. Bush” be infamous, vindicated, or merely recited by bored schoolchildren? Brownson doesn't explain why Polk &co. are demagogues, but I certainly don't have the information at hand. (It is time, I suppose, that I read more U.S. History...)

By the way, did you see the date on that book? As best I could tell, it was part of the 1852 printing. I'm so happy that books predating the Civil War are in circulation in the UNC libraries. It's part of the magic of libraries.

Orestes Brownson: American Chesterton?

Orestes Brownson was quoted several times in Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent, always as a Jacksonian Democrat firebrand. And that he was—for a time. His intellectual journey had taken him from Presbyterianism to Universalism to Transcendentalism, but then he made a sudden turn to Roman Catholicism and repudiated the trajectory of much of his earlier thinking. He wrote voluminously throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. I hadn't previously heard of any American Catholic intellectuals in the nineteenth century, but it seems that he's well-remembered in certain Catholic circles, and, I suppose, among scholars of the Transcendentalist movement Brownson abandoned. Brownson laid out his political philosophy in his book The American Republic, through which I would love to browse someday.

At any rate, I did manage to thumb through a 1855 anthology of his Brownson's work, and stumbled upon his essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Evidently Brownson took Kant very seriously, and worried a great deal about the implications of Kantian reasoning. Here's an excerpt (and this is where today's post ties back to yesterday's):

Kant himself believed, many have since believed, that his Critic [sic] is a refutation of Hume; we regard it as the most masterful defense of Hume that man may be expected to produce. . . . The Critic of Pure Reason [sic], we all know, is confessedly atheistic; it leaves no space for faith in God, and Kant was obliged to write his Critic of the Practical Reason in order to restore the faith it had overthrown.

-Orestes Brownson. “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.” The Brownson Reader, ed. Alvan Ryan. New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1955.

I don't have much more to say about Kant, but my question is this: do you detect a hint of that Chestertonian art of witty reversal in this passage? Is that just something that happens to people who spend time trying to explain scholastic philosophy to ordinary people? Unfortunately, I don't recall whether this particular passage was written before or after Brownson swam the Tiber...

The Birth of the Consumer Republic

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, sees the birth of the consumer-oriented political culture in the the writings of Walter Weyl and, more generally, in a strand of Progressivism that didn't quite match up with Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.

In the republican tradition of political economy that informed nineteenth-century American debate, producer identities mattered because the world of work was seen as the arena in which, for better or for worse, the character of citizens was formed. Consumptions, when it figured at all in republican political economy, was a thing to be moderated, disciplined, or restrained for the sake of higher ends. An excess of consumption, or luxury, was often seen as a form of corruption, a measure of the loss of civic virtue. From Jefferson's agrarian republicanism to Lincoln's celebration of free labor to Brandeis' call for industrial democracy, the emphasis on producer identities reflected the attempt to form in citizens the qualities of character necessary to self-government.

A politics based on consumer identities, by contrast, changes the question. Instead of asking how to elevate or improve or restrain people's preferences, it asks how best - most fully, fairly, or efficiently - to satisfy them. The shift to consumer-based reform in the twentieth century was thus a shift away from the formative ambition of the republican tradition, away from the political economy of citizenship. Although they did not view their movement in quite this way, the Progressives who urged Americans to identify with their roles as consumers rather than producers helped turn American politics toward a political economy of growth and distributive justice whose full expression lay decades in the future.

I don't really know what to say about this, which is, I suppose, a terrible fault for a blogger.

In this book, I am stumbling on to these old arguments, stacked up and dusty in cobwebbed corners, and the nostalgic impulse to try to bring them down, to make use of them, nearly overwhelms me at times. Some might truly be warped and broken from disuse, but it can be hard to distinguish that which was unjustly forgotten from that which was put away for good reason.

I'm still in this book's headspace; I'll try to sort out its arguments when I finally get through it.