Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.

Himmelfarb on Butterfield

In “Does History Talk Sense?” an essay on philosopher Michael Oakeshott in The New History and the Old, Gertrude Himmelfarb pauses to compare Oakeshott to Herbert Butterfield and his classic of historiography The Whig Interpretation of History:

Published in 1931, . . . Butterfield’s little book has long been the most influential critique of the practical, present-minded, progressive, judgmental mode of history; indeed, its title is the accepted, shorthand description of that mode. Although Butterfield himself took the Whig historians as the classic exemplars of the Whig interpretation or “Whig fallacy,” the concept is now understood generically to apply to any present-minded or future-minded reading of the past. The fallacy, as he describes it, has two sources: the distortions that come from the processes of selection, abridgment, generalization, and interpretation that are inevitable in the writing of history; and the natural tendency to read the past in terms of the present—to select, abridge, generalize, and interpret in accord with the knowledge of hindsight and the predisposition of the historian.

That’s just about the best one-sentence summary of the main points of Butterfield’s book. Himmelfarb follows up with a couple of important caveats:

In both respects the fallacy pertains to the writing of history, not to the past itself. And while Butterfield adjures the historian to be wary of that fallacy and to avoid it as far as possible, he does not take it as vitiating the independence and integrity of the past. The evidence of the past, the historical record, is inadequate and inaccurate, and the historian’s use of it inevitably aggravates these flaws. Yet the past itself is real and objective, and it is this past that the historian tries to discover and reconstruct. If the ideal always eludes him, it never ceases to inspire him.

“The evidence of the past . . . is inadequate and inaccurate, and the historian’s use of it inevitably aggravates these flaws. Yet the past itself is real and objective, and it is this past that the historian tries to discover and reconstruct.”

“History” in the sense of historical records—documents, inscriptions, and the stuff we find in the dirt—is flawed, partial, and incomplete but, unlike the postmodernist, who takes imperfection as permission to regard all sources and reconstructions of the past as equally invalid fictions, Butterfield avoids the gravitational pull of this hermeneutic black hole by pointing out that even with all its flaws, history is reflective of real things that actually happened.

That they must be pieced together by scholars with their own limitations and that their work and our knowledge will inevitably be flawed in no way changes that. If anything, it increases the responsibility of the student of history. The past has its own “independence and integrity.” We do not construct it but attempt to seek, find, and recover it. Modern and postmodern theories—call them legion, for they are many—are in this way too puritanical. Failing to find perfection, they take the easy way out by writing off all of it.

A good summary by Himmelfarb an important part of The Whig Interpretation of History, a book I’ve seen badly misunderstood by those who—like this high-profile evangelical preacher and educator—grasp the first half of Butterfield’s insight but not the second. About time to reread it—and more of Himmelfarb’s essays.

(Oakeshott, Himmelfarb, Butterfield—what a great bunch of names!)

Scare quotes and Poe

Last night I finished a major new biography of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s by an important Poe scholar—a name I recognized as the editor of my Penguin Classics edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—and published by a university press. It’s excellent—comprehensive, insightful (I had never noticed Poe’s use of chiasmus before), well-researched, and fair. I’m not going to name the book or the author because I don’t want what follows to be construed as an attack on either.

What I want to criticize and wonder about is also not characteristic of the rest of the book, which is what made me notice it in the first place. Think of it as an editorial or rhetorical tic.

Poe might have been born in Boston but he grew up in Virginia, considered himself a Virginian, and nursed recognizably Southern resentments toward northerners, especially New Englanders. He also died sixteen years before the passage of the 13th Amendment, just as the sectional debate was reopened by victory in the Mexican War, leading to failed compromises, mudslinging, vigilantism, and war. Slavery was a fact of life.

The author approaches these topics within the context of Poe’s life with laudable charity and nuance. He takes pains to defend Poe from glib accusations of racism, especially in misinterpretations and misrepresentations of his work—while acknowledging that Poe was still a man of his time.

And yet the book’s own context as the product of a 21st century university press shows through. There is the predictable gesture of capitalizing “black” and the clumsy circumlocution of “enslaved people,” which I complained about back in the spring. Odder, though, are the two passages following, both of which concern Poe’s lifelong best friend John Mackenzie:

Clearly the hard work of the farm was done by enslaved labor. According to tax records, John H. Mackenzie “owned” eleven slaves at this time.

and

John and Louisa’s abundance—in the house, on the 193 acres, even in John’s tobacco warehouses and stables in the city—was made possible by the African Americans whom John “owned”: in 1849, six of them over twelve years old, and another six over sixteen years old.

There’s not really a factual problem here—though I will note that small-scale slaveowners like this very often did do a lot of hard labor and that pointing out the role of slaves in the economy is a truism. My real question: why the scare quotes?

Putting scare quotes around owned suggests some kind of falsehood in the word, that slaveowning was some kind of socially constructed fiction, but John H Mackenzie’s ownership of these slaves as property was an actual and legal fact. That’s the whole problem. Those uncomfortable with slavery—which included far more people for far longer than the abolitionist movement that Poe hated—were uncomfortable with it precisely between of the tension created by treating people as property. Handwaving this tension, “They weren’t really ‘owned’ by someone else,” is insulting. As with the dubious “enslaved people,” treating harsh reality this way undermines one’s own disapproval.

This is a tiny thing in a 700-page book, but a noticeable part of an repeated posture of disapproval that the author does not display elsewhere. Three times the reader is treated to a mention of the Mackenzie’s mantlepiece picture of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea with a heavily ironic gloss that someday it would be the slaveowners who would be drowning. The author seems desperate in these passages to let you know he thinks slavery is bad and that it is good that it was abolished. A stunning opinion.

The final odd note comes in the conclusion. Concerning John Mackenzie’s brother Tom, a doctor who championed Poe’s reputation, we read:

Although Tom Mackenzie would have been on the right side of Poe, he was on the wrong side of history.

He served as a surgeon in the Confederate army, you see. “The wrong side of history” is a cringeworthy cliche, and stupid because history doesn’t have sides. This is also an odd thing to throw in at the end of a book about Poe, who famously and vocally denounced the myth of progress.

My own stance on historical writing is that it should be descriptive most of the time—as this book generally is. Opinion and moralizing may have a place occasionally, sure, but not for opinions that are universally approved. In twelve years of teaching college students—who are typically less guarded and studiedly correct in their opinions than professors emeriti—I’ve never had a student even suggest that slavery was okay. Condemning slavery and celebrating slaveowners’ downfall feels performative. Forcefully declaiming obvious, widely shared opinion is not argument, but liturgy. Here the author wants us to know he can recite the creeds of the liberal consensus, too.

Well, perhaps it’s the author. My suspicion, based on the inelegant way these passages fit with the rest of this careful, balanced book, is that these originated as editorial demands. Poe, himself a sometime editor in a time of political polarization, probably would have understood, but not approved.

Intelligence in 1066

Harold Godwinson listens to a messenger in the Bayeux Tapestry

This morning on my commute I listened to the latest Rest is History Club bonus episodes. Among the questions Holland and Sandbrook fielded was one about the intelligence networks available during the Norman Conquest. Could William have known what Harold was doing before he sailed from Normandy?

Such questions are ultimately, per Holland, “unanswerable,” though it is not quite true that, as Sandbrook says, there is “no evidence.” The following passage from Wace’s Roman de Rou, which I cited and expanded upon in my master’s thesis, comes immediately to mind. From Glyn Burgess’s translation:

One of the knights in the area [of Pevensey] heard the noise and the shouting coming from the peasants and villeins, who saw the great fleet arrive. He was well aware that the Normans were coming with the intention of taking possession of the land. He took up position behind a mound so that no one could see him; he stood there watching how the great fleet arrived. He saw the archers emerging from the ships and afterwards the knights disembarking. He saw the carpenters, their axes, the large numbers of men, the knights, the building material thrown down from the ships, the construction and fortification of the castle and the ditch built all around it, the shields and the weapons brought forth. Everything he saw caused him great anguish. He girded on his sword and took his lance, saying he would go to King Harold and give him this news. Then he set out, sleeping late and rising early. He travelled extensively night and day in search of Harold, his lord, and found him beyond the Humber, where he had dined in a town. Harold was acting with great arrogance. He had been beyond the Humber and defeated his brother Tostig; things had gone very well for him. . . . Harold was returning joyfully and behaving with great arrogance, when a messenger gave him news of the sort which made him think differently. Suddenly the knight who had come from Hastings arrived.

‘The Normans have arrived’, he said, ‘and established themselves in Hastings. They intend to take the land from you, unless you can defend it. They have already built a castle with brattices and a ditch.’

Later, in a passage I’d forgotten about until rereading it this morning, Duke William benefits from similar intelligence:

In the land there was a baron, but I do not know his name, who had loved the duke greatly and become one of his close advisers; he would never have wanted things to go wrong for William, if he could manage it. He sent him word privately that he had come with insufficient forces; he had few men, he believed, to accomplish what he had undertaken. There were too many people in England and it was very difficult to conquer. In true faith he advised him, and in sincere love sent him word, that he should withdraw from the country and go back to his land before Harold arrived; he was afraid that things would go badly wrong for him.

Wace is a late, poetic source and is problematic for reasons both obvious (his portrait of Harold as a hubristic usurper) and subtle (using post-Conquest feudal terms like “baron” and “knight” and “villein” in an Anglo-Saxon context), but here he presents a plausible picture of what is now called HUMINT or human intelligence. It jibes with many, many other stories from the world before signals intelligence and aerial and satellite surveillance, a world of eyewitnesses desperately offering actionable information to their side’s leadership—something they can only do as quickly as the fastest horse can carry them—not to mention a world of rumor, uncertainty, and, in the case of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon lord who feeds information to William, secret betrayal.

Further, it jibes with the Bayeux Tapestry, which several times shows messengers bringing word to Harold, William, and others and the recipients listening intently, and other sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the Chronicle writes, over and over in every extant version, that Harold “was informed” or “came to know” of some new development, we should probably picture something like what Wace describes.

The evidence is extremely limited and raises as many questions as it answers, but it gives us enough for reasonable inferences. It also—and this is why I remembered the story so many years later—offers a rare glimpse of the men involved in these campaigns at the ground level. Who can read Wace’s account of that anonymous thegn, alerted by the people fleeing in terror and watching from behind a hill as the invasion proceeds unopposed, and not feel his “great anguish”?

You can read the whole passage of Wace in an older translation at Project Gutenberg here.

Gibbon vs geographic determinism

I’m reading a good, thoughtful, thought-provoking book about the factors behind the emergence of the secular, industrialized modern West, but its early chapter on geography bugs me. The author leans hard into geographic determinism, the historiographical theory that human cultures are largely at the mercy of the environments in which they arise—an odd position for an intellectual history to take, but stranger books have been written.

The author introduces this theme through an anecdote from Captain Cook’s voyages. Having landed on Easter Island and taken in the colossal wreck of the civilization that had once flourished there, Mahine, a Polynesian accompanying Cook, commented, “Good people, bad land.” The author takes this at face value, but Mahine’s observation is rubbished by the very thing he’s responding to: the land was good enough to support a large, sophisticated society. It must be some other factor that led to its collapse.

The author signals that he’s focusing on geography as an explanatory factor in order to avoid racial determinism—or suggesting even a little bit that some cultures are more successful than others, an observation commonly confused with racism—but using race to explain everything and using geography to explain everything is not even a false dichotomy. There are other options.

Whenever I run across geographic determinism in my reading, a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall always springs to mind. Here we have, to paraphrase Mahine, good land and bad people. From Vol I, Ch X:

The Goths were now in possession of the Ukraine, a country of considerable extent and uncommon fertility, intersected with navigable rivers, which, from either side, discharge themselves into the Borysthenes; and interspersed with large and lofty forests of oaks. The plenty of game and fish, the innumerable bee-hives deposited in the hollow of old trees, and in the cavities of rocks, and forming, even in that rude age, a valuable branch of commerce, the size of the cattle, the temperature of the air, the aptness of the soil for every species of grain, and the luxuriancy of the vegetation, all displayed the liberality of Nature, and tempted the industry of man. But the Goths withstood all these temptations, and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty, and of rapine.

I first read this in grad school at the same time I was reading books that were part of the then-current wave of geographic determinism, books like Michael Cook’s Brief History of the Human Race or the massively popular Guns, Germs, and Steel, by anthropologist Jared Diamond. Gibbon’s pervasive emphasis on culture was refreshing. Plunk any society you care to come up with into an environment rich with natural resources, but it takes more than the mere presence of those resources for that society to use them.

Conversely, a society with poor land but a spirit of ingenuity can make much out of little. Witness Icelandic society, which has sustained itself for a thousand years despite almost immediate deforestation during the Viking Age and a lack of much else that their forebears from Scandinavia depended on. Nature and human cultures exist in a constant push-and-pull. Geographic determinism makes it all nature, pushing, all the time.

Culture matters. Contra Mahine, what went wrong on Easter Island wasn’t the land, but the use of the land. That’s a cultural problem, just like the Goths’ neglect of their land. The environment imposes barriers and places sometimes hard limits on societies, but whether the people living in a given place creatively adapt to the land, reshape it to their liking, or simply accept it and eke out a living within the limitations imposed by nature is a much more complex question. Their priorities—dutifully serving their gods, seeking honor through war, maintaining their inherited order, raking in cash—are the determining variable, not the environment.

Despite all my disagreements with and misgivings about Gibbon, this is one of the things that keeps his work engaging and readable 250 years later. Likewise the ancients he drew upon. Read Tacitus’s Germania for more on the cultures of Germanic peoples, not all of which, contrary to a common interpretation of his work, is laudatory.

To his credit, the author of the book I’m currently reading acknowledges late in the chapter that culture does matter, but the long meditation along pure geographic determinist lines makes this feel like a feeble gesture toward the immense complexity of man’s relationship with his world.

I swear we are not making this up

Anglo-Saxon infantry vs Norman cavalry at Hastings in the Bayeux tapestry

The Rest is History, after a short series on the reigns of Æthelred, Cnut, and Edward the Confessor and a side trip through the life of Harald Hardrada, released a four-part series on 1066 this week. I finished the third episode, on the Battle of Hastings, on my commute this morning. The series is very good, so naturally I’m going to gripe a little about historiography.

The less-well remembered battle of the three in England during the fall of 1066 is Fulford Gate outside York. Here, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, with Tostig Godwinson—a deposed and exiled eorl and brother of the King of England—landed with his fleet and fought with the fyrd of Mercia and Northumbria under Eorls Edwin and Morcar. Our sources on Fulford Gate are pretty thin, and include the much later and heavily embellished King Harald’s Saga of Snorri Sturluson.

Sandbrook introduces the battle by noting that “the saga’s descriptions of this battle are exceedingly confusing, and historians who claim they know what happened are obviously talking balderdash.” Fair enough. Snorri is a colorful but late and problematic source. Sandbrook goes on:

What seems to have happened is this. Basically, at first, Harald Hardrada’s men are going slightly uphill through all this mud, the Saxons are throwing spears and firing arrows at them, bodies pile up, people are stumbling in the ditch and whatnot. The right hand side, the right wing of Hardrada’s force where Tostig’s mercenaries are, they start to waver we’re told. Now it may be—is that because everyone hates Tostig? Or is this the saga just trying to buttress Harald Hardrada’s reputation dissing Tostig? Who can say.

Sandbrook, who is not typically given to deconstructing sources at this level, excludes an important alternative: Maybe this is simply what happened?

Later, Sandbrook and Holland suggest that Snorri’s account of Harald Hardrada’s death at Stamford Bridge, having been shot in the throat with an arrow, may have been “modeled on” Harold Godwinson’s supposed death at Hastings a month later (as they also suggest stories of bad omens being wittily spun by Harald and William the Conqueror were “modeled on” Caesar in Suetonius). I’d suggest deaths by arrow wound are more easily explicable in unusually large all-day battles like Stamford Bridge and Hastings. As The Battle of Maldon reminds us, “bows were busy.”

Much more sensible is a point Holland makes in the Hastings episode about two very early Norman sources: William of Poitiers’s Gesta Guillelmi and the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a Latin verse epic attributed to Guy of Amiens and written probably within a year of the battle. After Sandbrook jokes that a few of the Carmen’s laudatory details about William the Conqueror sound like heroic formulae of the kind Snorri used of Harald Hardrada, Holland avers:

I think it’s unlikely that they would just make up details that everyone would have been able to scoff at. The details may be slightly spiced up. I think that probably the details we’re getting from the Carmen and from William of Poitiers in the main are fairly accurate because there are so many people who’d be reading them that they would know if they weren’t.

Sharp, and broadly applicable. In their postmodern focus on ancient and medieval sources as instruments of control over narratives, modern historians often lose sight of the fact that sources don’t appear in a vacuum, that their authors had contemporaries who could contest self-serving accounts and outright fabrication.

As I’ve written here before, I think ancient and medieval sources simply recorded what happened more often than we, hairsplitters and tweet-parsers, are inclined to believe. Cf. my notes on the modern habit of pooh-poohing anything interesting in a source, on whether the term “propaganda” is really appropriate in the ancient and medieval worlds, and on Tolkien’s observation that an event need not be fake because it feels literary.

Again, a very good series. The greatest praise I can give it is to say that Holland, in narrating King Harold’s death at Hastings—the mystery of which was the subject of my undergraduate thesis—convinced me that some version of the story in the Carmen, with Harold hacked down by Norman cavalry and possibly William the Conqueror himself, is more likely true than the arrow in the eye mentioned in later sources. And on that bombshell…

The Mooch takes Dealey Plaza

This week on The Rest is History Club bonus episodes Dominic Sandbrook hosted Anthony Scaramucci, whom you might—might—remember as Donald Trump’s White House communications director for a week and a half in 2017. They talk through presidential history and their picks for the best of the lot. Despite my disagreeing with a lot of their choices it’s a generally fun conversation and Scaramucci is a smooth talker with a certain oily New York charm, like an ingratiating mid-tier Corleone enforcer who desperately wants you to know how many Douglas Brinkley books he’s read.

In the course of discussing JFK, Sandbrook teased that Scaramucci disagrees with the conclusions Sandbrook and Tom Holland laid out in their excellent series on Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. After a bit of puffing insinuation—“Remember I was in the White House, so I’m not really at liberty to talk about it,” as if the staffer who holds press conferences is going through highly classified FBI files in his off hours—Scaramucci says:

“But I would just ask you to look at the Zapruder film very closely—look at those three or four frames—and you tell me where the shot came from. Okay? Take a look. And if you believe the ‘magic bullet’ theory—”

Okay. The shot came from behind. Take a look at the Zapruder film however closely you want, but that’s not going to transform what you see in frame 313 into anything other than an exit wound.

Most of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, for me, founder upon a few immovable physical facts:

1. The first shot to strike Kennedy passed through him into Governor Connally. You can see both men react to the shot simultaneously in the Zapruder film.

2. No “magic” is necessary to explain the effects of that shot, as bullets do not move in straight lines, especially when passing through solid objects like human bodies. Read even a little bit about combat medicine and this should be obvious.

3. Regardless of which direction Kennedy’s head moves, the shocking head wound visible in the Zapruder film is an exit wound, meaning, again, that the bullet struck Kennedy from behind.

4. Shooting from behind was easier than the shot from the grassy knoll that Scaramucci and so many others either suggest or insist upon. A shooter on the grassy knoll would have to traverse left-to-right to hit a target moving across his line of fire. For a shooter above and behind Kennedy—in, say, the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository—his target would be sitting almost motionless in his sights as the presidential limo moved down and away from him.

Argue all you like about Oswald, the Mafia, the Cubans, the CIA, or whatever, but no theory that contradicts these facts is credible.

I come down, like Sandbrook and Holland, firmly in the camp that it was Oswald acting alone in a politically motivated crime of opportunity, but I am willing to entertain some alternative that fits within the physical limits imposed by 1-4 above. For a detailed example worked out in fiction, see Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novel The Third Bullet. Hunter, who actually knows something about guns, ballistics, and marksmanship, posits a second shooter in the building across the street from the Texas School Book Depository firing along almost the same axis as Oswald, who is still in his historical position and still fires at Kennedy. I can’t remember who or what is behind this convoluted backup plan in Hunter’s story, but it works within the known facts.

I don’t believe it, but this is far more likely than whatever it is Scaramucci wants impressionable listeners to think he knows.

Which is it?

One of the peculiar annoyances of medieval history is the license even good historians seem to give themselves to make sweeping generalizations, only to qualify them to the point of contradiction later.

Here’s Tore Skeie in his otherwise excellent book The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, in the middle of a discussion of the remarriage of Æthelred Unræd’s widow Emma of Normandy to his conqueror, Cnut the Great:

But despite her status and central position in this drama, it is more difficult to obtain a clear picture of Emma than of the men around her, for the simple reason that she was a woman. The men who recorded the course of history—mostly monks—almost never mentioned women other than when they were married off or acted on behalf of their husbands or sons. The kings’ wives, sisters, mothers and daughters—all of them remain almost invisible to us, even though they were often deeply involved in everything that went on and could be accomplished and independent political players in their own right.

And in the next paragraph we read:

Emma of Normandy (c. 1984-1052) in her Encomium receiving the manuscript from its authors

One of the most important sources from this period is the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a tribute to Emma and the people around her written at her request later in life, probably by a Flemish monk.

Typical! Nasty old patriarchy-loving sexist monks ignoring a powerful woman, erasing her from history... Right up until they write a dedicated biography of her at her command.

The truth is that it is “difficult to obtain a clear picture” of anyone for most of history, men and women, high and low. Even the more heavily documented men in this story seldom reveal much of a personality or motives behind what they do or the particular courses they take, and even the most important of them simply disappear from the record for years at a time. In his short biography of Cnut for the Penguin Monarchs series, Ryan Lavelle records the king’s death thus:

Cnut died in Shaftesbury in November 1035 at about forty years of age. We don’t know why he died there or what he was doing at the time.

That’s two short sentences, but go back over them and really consider just how much they indicate we cannot know about the most powerful man in northern Europe at the time of his death. Even his age is approximate. The rest of the book is full of such passages beginning with “maybe,” “probably,” “possibly,” and “we don’t know.” The “invisibility” of people in historical sources, especially the Early Middle Ages, has more to do with the purpose and built-in limitations of the sources than sexism.

The generalization in that first paragraph from The Wolf Age does not so much inform the reader about medieval culture and historiography than affirm a dearly held modern prejudice. And this prejudice, much like that passage’s imaginary chauvinist monks, renders the close-following contradiction invisible to the right-thinking modern person.

For two other examples of modern preconceptions blinding the historian and the reader to medieval minds, see here—an example coincidentally also involving Cnut—and here. Like the imputations of sexism in the example above, these faults—cynicism and a reductive “seeing through”—warp our perception of the past. For a better approach, Tolkien is always a good place to start, as here.

On the fine art of insinuation

Eric Idle and Terry Jones in Monty Python's "Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge" (1969)

Earlier this week, in my notes on a recent historical controversy, I mentioned some of the “dark insinuations” that were one part of the furor. That particular aspect of the controversy wasn’t the point of my post, but I did want to revisit it in general terms—especially since I was working on a post on the same topic last year, a post I eventually abandoned.

Since facts and sound historical interpretation prove dangerously prone to turn back on them, conspiracists rely heavily upon insinuation—the “you know what I mean,” “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” implications of whatever factual information they do put forward. This approach allows them to present information in what seems to be a purely factual way, but with a tone that implies the conclusion they want you to reach. It’s a technique used in what David Hackett Fischer called “the furtive fallacy” in historical research.

The fine art of insinuation crossed my mind again just before the interview that prompted my previous post when I watched a recent short video on the Cash-Landrum incident, a genuinely weird and interesting—and genuinely unexplained—UFO sighting in Texas in 1980. Briefly, during a late night drive on a remote East Texas highway, two ladies and a child spotted a glowing, white-hot, fire-spewing object that hovered in their path for some time before drifting away, apparently escorted by US Army helicopters. The ladies subsequently developed severe illnesses related to radiation poisoning.

It’s a decent enough video, so please do watch it, but the YouTuber behind it provides a few textbook examples of insinuation. After describing the ladies’ attempts to get compensation from the military and the government following the incident, the narrator relates the first formal third-party research into the incident this way:

[Aerospace engineer and MUFON co-founder John] Schuessler agreed to investigate the case and was taken by Betty and Vickie to the site where they claimed it had happened. When they arrived, they found a large circular burn mark on the road where the UFO has supposedly been levitating, cementing more credibility to their claims. However, several weeks later, when Schuessler returned to the spot, the road had been dug up and replaced, with witnesses claiming that unmarked trucks came by and took the burnt tarmac away.

This is already a UFO story, and now we have unmarked trucks destroying evidence! The story autopopulates in your mind, doesn’t it? But this part of the story, as presented for maximum insinuation, is vague—which points toward the best tool for combating the use of insinuation: specific questions. For instance:

• What’s so unusual about a damaged road being repaired?

• Did Texas DOT vehicles have uniform paint schemes or other markings in 1980?

• Who were the witnesses who saw these unmarked trucks?

And, granting for a moment the conclusion that the narrator is trying to imply:

• If some powerful agency was trying to cover up what had happened, why did it take “several weeks”? And why did they allow witnesses to watch them?

Insinuation relies on context, especially our preconceptions and prejudices, to do its work. It’s a mode of storytelling that invites the listener to complete the story for you by automatically filling in details. Questioning the vague prompts and implications that start this process can bring the discussion back down to earth and the basic level of fact and source. And, perhaps more importantly in this kind of discussion, specific questions can force people to say what they mean rather than letting them get away with insinuations or implication.

A 44-year old UFO sighting offers a pretty harmless test case for interrogating this technique, but pressing for clearly stated details might have proven more helpful to everyone—as well as more revealing—during that interview last week.

The Cash-Landrum incident was memorably dramatized in a 1991 episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” which you can watch here. It’s worth noting that the ladies involved always assumed the UFO was purely terrestrial and that they were the victims of some kind of government or military test gone wrong.

Notes on the Churchill kerfuffle

V for Victory? Or accidentally signaling the best response to his critics?

Speaking of The Bridge on the River Kwai, in a revealing moment early in the film the antagonist, Col Saito, speaking to his British counterpart about prisoners who had been shot in an escape attempt, shows pride in his enemy’s behavior: “For a brief moment between escape and death… they were soldiers again.”

Well, last week, for a brief moment between TikTok and college football, people cared about history again.

Background and backlash

Briefly, last week podcaster Darryl Cooper of Martyr Made appeared in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter. Carlson feted Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian” in America, fulsome hyperbole that did Cooper no favors once the discussion started and Cooper ventured his unconventional opinions about World War II. These resulted in immediate controversy.

While early reporting on the interview floated a number of possible points of outrage, including wobbly suggestions of Holocaust denial and—more accurately and damningly—Cooper’s dark insinuations about the Zionists who had financial connections to Winston Churchill, the controversy eventually settled around Cooper’s examination of Churchill’s decision-making and leadership, and not least his description of Churchill as a “psychopath” and “the chief villain” of the war. Churchill’s crimes? Having needlessly antagonized Hitler before the war, bullheadedly refused peace offers during the war, and pushed for things like the strategic bombing of German cities. Cooper even repeats the meme-level cheap shot that Churchill was “a drunk.” (He wasn’t.)

Journalistic outrage-baiting ensued, all conducted in the breathless tone with which I assume Puritans reported the discovery of witches. I found it pretty rich that the same media that justified and celebrated anti-Churchill protests and vandalism in 2020 used a podcaster’s profanation of the same man for clicks. Well, it worked. I couldn’t escape this story as it unfolded.

I don’t intend to wade into the details. Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, to whom I have referred many times here on the blog, handled those with aplomb in a blistering essay for the Washington Free Beacon. Read that, then follow it up with Roberts’s appearance on the School of War podcast in an episode that dropped just last night. The past week has produced many more apologias for Churchill and critiques of Cooper, but Roberts has done the work and is worth listening to on any subject he’s researched.

For his part, Cooper posted a characteristically discursive response on his Substack, which you can read here.

Hyperreality and post-literate history

What I found interesting and, at first, a little baffling about the controversy from the beginning was the… prosaicness of some of Cooper’s views. Churchill as warmonger, Churchill as manipulator of America, Churchill as the real instigator of the bloodiest war in history, even Churchill as drunk—these are all pretty pedestrian contrarian takes. Pat Buchanan published a book laying out many of these arguments sixteen years ago, and he was drawing on a current of anti-Churchill interpretation that was already decades old. (Roberts does a good job explaining some of the historiography of this controversy on School of War.)

The fact that such perspectives are and ought to be old news to anyone who has studied Churchill or the Second World War even a little bit suggests that most people—journalists, media personalities, podcasters, and the general public—simply haven’t.

For most people, Churchill is a recognizable character with no depth in a simplistic good-and-evil tale rather than a complex real person living through uncertain and dangerous times. This reduction of the man to the icon means that an attack of Cooper’s kind will generate either outrage at the profanation of a sacred image (when, again, we should have heard all this before) or the frisson of the conspiracy theorist discovering forbidden (false) knowledge. Beyond Cooper’s bad history, the fact that this interview generated the controversy that it did is revealing.

It’s this broader context that I’m most interested in, and two essays in particular offer a lot of food for thought in response.

First, writing at Compact, Matthew Walther sees the Carlson-Cooper interview and the resulting controversy as symptoms of a “post-literate history,” there being an “epistemic gulf between the current consensus . . . of practicing historians on any given subject and the attitudes of the ordinary person of general education.” The appetite of the public for charismatic purveyors of dark, hidden truths—usually old, debunked ideas that can still be used to surprise the ignorant—is part of the problem, but historians and educators generally share the blame. Take a few minutes and read the whole essay.

Second, Sebastian Milbank, one of my favorite writers at The Critic, published an essay this morning that only glances across the Cooper controversy as an example of our present absorption into “hyperreality,” an imaginary world shaped by social media that, through information overload and partisan polarization, turns real people and things into symbols and erodes discernment, judgement, and wisdom. Simplification, detachment from reality, the reduction of knowledge and rival truth claims to mere content, and the “openness to everything” of online hyperreality create an environment in which false views appear more inviting, and not only for the ignorant or wicked:

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge will be able to spot the huge gaps in Cooper’s argument here. But what is more interesting is how he came to embrace such a grotesque viewpoint. Cooper isn’t stupid, or wicked, or even ill-informed in a conventional sense. Instead, we could say that he is “overinformed”. He is the product of hyperreality, supersaturated with information to the point that his analytical faculties and sense of reality breaks down. One gets a sense of this in the interview alone, where he describes reading, not systematically, but omnivorously, consuming over eighty books for his podcast on Israel/Palestine, and not being able to recall all the titles.

Milbank’s essay is longer and richer than the discussion surrounding Cooper—and Milbank includes a favorite passage about madness from Chesterton—so be sure to read the whole thing. For an even more dramatic parallel case, including another pertinent Chesterton quotation, see Jonathon Van Maren’s essay on Candace Owens at the European Conservative here.

Caveats and crankery

Churchill lived a long time and involved himself in a lot of things, not always successfully. Far from the “correct” view being the flawless and burnished bronze lion of British defiance in the face of tyranny, Churchill is open to legitimate lines of critique that historians still debate. Irish and Australian critics, for dramatically different reasons, sometimes take a more negative view of Churchill, and he is the object of an entire subfield of anti-imperialist Indian criticism. But all of this is despite the role he played in World War II, and all of these grievances and arguments are subject to evaluation according to the evidence.

Which is the first place Cooper fails. And when Cooper asserts that the reactions to his interview are evidence that he’s correct, he fails even more seriously by falling into a trap I’ve written about here before: crankery.

Cooper is not, as Carlson tried to puff him, an historian. I’ve tried to avoid pointing this out but others, like Niall Ferguson, have been much less polite about it. Cooper is, however, as Walther and Milbank’s essays suggest, a gifted autodidact. But the problem for autodidacts in any field is that their enthusiasm is not a substitute for the basic intellectual formation that formal, guided study by those that have already mastered the subject provides. There is a moral dimension to this as well—enthusiasm and omnivorous reading are no substitutes for sound historical judgement or simple human wisdom.

And so the autodidact blunders into plausible but false theories that, owing to gaps they aren’t even aware of, become their entire frame of reference. “Everything becomes reduced down to a single question or thesis,” as Milbank puts it. Their world view is complete, but too small, according to Chesterton. And if, when questioned on their interpretation, they double down, attack their questioners, or begin to distort their evidence, they risk becoming a crank. Once they begin referring to “them” and an undefined “establishment” with knowing contempt, they’re already there.

This is, more than anything, a good example of why education in history and the humanities more broadly still matters.

Recommended reading

Churchill’s memory lives among those very few men—like Lincoln and Napoleon—who inspire a continuous flow of books. The following are those that I most often recommend:

• Churchill, by Sir John Keegan—An excellent and approachable short biography from a great military historian.

• The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler, by John Lukacs—A good look at a specific episode of Churchill’s life, from his appointment as Prime Minister in May 1940 into the summer, with Hitler’s activities at the same time told in quite revealing parallel.

• Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings—An excellent study of Churchill’s time as Prime Minister, with a lot of attention devoted to his frustrating relationship with the United States. A good antidote to at least one of Cooper’s claims.

• Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts—The big one, a massive and deeply researched comprehensive biography by an expert who, as I said above, has done the work. It shows.

• Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II, by Michael Burleigh—If you’re interested in the moral and ethical questions raised by the war, this is a more serious and better researched consideration of them than you’ll get from the Carlson interview.

I’d recommend any one of these for a more detailed and nuanced grasp of a great man than any podcast or social media interview can possibly provide.