Category Archives: Journalism

A New Theory of Western Civilization

Posted on by

In the October 2020 edition of The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz reviews Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous:

Around 597 A.D., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. That meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. Augustine wasn’t sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother?

He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers’ widows. He was lax about second and third cousins; only the children of aunts and uncles were off-limits. By the 11th century, however, you couldn’t get engaged until you’d counted back seven generations, lest you marry a sixth cousin. The taboo against consanguineous family had expanded to include “spiritual kin,” who were, mostly, godparents. (It went without saying that you had to marry a Christian.) Pope Gregory and Augustine’s letters document a moment in a prolonged process—begun in the fourth century—in which the Church clamped down, and intermittently loosened up, on who could marry whom. Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed.

You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriageability would be relegated to a footnote—a very interesting footnote, to be sure—but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of-everything book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Consider this the latest addition to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe. Big History asks Big Questions and offers quasi-monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks. Cooperation. What explains differences and inequalities among civilizations? Diamond asks. Environment, which is to say, geography, climate, flora and fauna. Henrich also wants to explain variation among societies, in particular to account for the Western, prosperous kind.

WEIRD is an acronym for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.” Read the whole thing, or the book itself.

Medieval Studies in the New York Times!

Posted on by

And on the front page no less. The article, which arrives on the eve of the annual Kalamazoo conference, has been getting a lot of attention from my medievalist colleagues on Facebook and Twitter. A lot of people have taken issue with Richard Utz’s assertion that “People don’t become medievalists because they want to be political… Most are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.” Thus do we now have (of course!) the Twitter hashtag #notamonk, and the repeated assertion that nothing is apolitical, that if you ignore the problem, then you’re part of the problem. They are also upset about opinions they disagree with getting such a prominent “platform.”

But I don’t want to live in a world where everything is political – and definitely not one where a political position is a compulsory badge of membership in an institution. And as a general principle of journalism, I believe that all sides deserve a fair hearing. It used to be that adults understood this intuitively.

As for “platforms,” it’s curious to note how putative outsiders are so finely attuned to questions of status (that is, they complain about the “prestige economy,” but they don’t actually object to its existence, just that their current slice isn’t as big as they’d like). The New York Times can publish whatever it wants, and demanding creative control over the product on account of its “prestige” is somewhat like making a public issue about Harvard’s admissions policies. No one has a right to attend Harvard, and no one has a right to constant validation from daddy either.

So I’m happy to note that Milo Yiannopoulos’s 16000-word  essay “Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters for America” has been published as an ebook. It’s available at Arkhaven Comics and Amazon (for now!). I like that it features an introduction by Mark Bauerlein. Excerpt:

To any objective observer of higher education over the last thirty or so years it is now clear that the multiculturalist project announced in pleasing, benign term of “diversity” and “opening up the canon” and “recovering lost voices” was no such thing. Multiculturalists spoke warmly of honoring the Other and welcoming historically-disadvantaged groups, but now that the diversiphiles have changed the curriculum for good and altered hiring practices – for instance, by adding to job interviews litmus-test questions such as, “How will you enhance diversity at our school after we hire you?” – they aren’t happy and they aren’t satisfied.

Read the whole thing.

Antebellum Newspapers

Posted on by

From Georgia Public Broadcasting (hat tip: Jeff Bishop), news of something interesting:

Georgia Newspapers From Before The Civil War, Now Online

By 

Georgia newspapers spanning the years from the end of the colonial period to the start of the Civil War have been made publicly available via the internet.

The Digital Library of Georgia and the Georgia Newspaper Project digitized almost 54,000 pages of newspapers published before 1861 with the help of a grant from the R.J. Taylor Foundation. The papers range from the Royal Georgia Gazette, first published in 1779; the full run of the Cherokee Phoenix, the voice of the Cherokee Nation prior to Indian Removal; to some early African American papers.

Not to mention the Cherokee Advance, the Cartersville Express, and the Cassville Standard, other papers from around these parts. Check it out.

A Good One

Posted on by

An amusing comment by John Nolte on the Daily Wire:

USA Today’s Brian Truitt describes himself as a “shameless geek,” but oddly enough omits the fact that he is also just as shamelessly ignorant when it comes to the signaling of his own virtue. In his review of Dunkirk, director Christopher Nolan’s big-budget look (opening this weekend) at an actual historical event that took place in the early days of World War II, Truitt offers potential ticket-buyers the following trigger warning:

The trio of timelines can be jarring as you figure out how they all fit, and the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.

Where in the world do these people come from?

Did Truitt do any homework about the background of this movie? He does appear to know that Nolan’s latest is based on a true story, which I guess is a start, but he probably learned that from the trailer. The real question, though, is just how clueless about history, about the biggest world event of the 20th century are you when you find it “jarring” that Wesley Snipes doesn’t show up to save the day or that Sandra Bullock is not driving a tank that will explode if it goes under 50 miles per hour?

Complaining about the lack of women and minority actors in a movie about Dunkirk is like complaining about the lack of Sinatra music in Straight Outta Compton or wondering why cancer failed to get equal time in Philadelphia or hectoring Hollywood over the omission of realistic sex scenes in the Toy Story trilogy.

And we cannot only blame Truitt, who is probably a victim of public schools. How did his trigger warning, one so feeble-minded it ranks as a non sequitur, make it past the USA Today editors? Are they all half-wits or does someone personally dislike Truitt so much they have stopped protecting him from himself?

Sorry if the following is inconvenient to your McCarthyistic desire to bully filmmakers into thinking and believing a certain way, but the settled science tells us the following: Trapped at Dunkirk were young, white males. Saving those young, white males were other white males. Trying to kill those young, white males were other white males.

UPDATE: From News Thump:

‘Not enough Americans’ in Dunkirk movie, says Hollywood

Hollywood’s top military historians are up in arms over the lack of Americans in the new film ‘Dunkirk’.

The film, which features some bunch of Limeys nobody has ever heard of, has been singled out for lacking realism and credibility by not showing Americans as the heroes.

American reviewers described feeling ‘robbed’ after the film failed to show any of their countrymen in a heroic, leading role, leading to accusations of ‘Britwashing’ the Second World War to make it look like anyone other than the USA was involved.

UPDATE: Apparently there were some colonial Indian troops at Dunkirk, although they numbered about 1800 men, about half a percent of the 338,000 troops who were evacuated.