I’m writing this at the airport! I’m on the way to Portland to visit some friends. Yes, I’m finally going to the promised land of millennials. There’s plenty of good material this week! And next week there will be more and probably some Portland pics. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou
Von Mises, Human Action
Rodgers, Mencken
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: A Simple Desultory Mithra Pic
REVIEWS
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error” (1975) (translated from the French by Barbara Bray) - It's been a while since I read this! Or wrote a review. I’ve been busy! More are down the pike.
Nobody makes a meal out of a good source like the Annales historians. The Annales School was mostly composed of French historians who minutely examined medieval and early modern European history, delving into archival sources to produce minutely detailed pictures of how people lived their lives, and deriving other things, like “mentalités,” roughly meaning “points of view,” from there. They were hot shit for a while- this one, “Montaillou,” was from the third generation of Annales School guys, and got write ups in the mainstream press both in France and elsewhere. But nowadays they’re somewhat out of favor. “No one wants to read them,” the dude in charge of our dissertation seminar, a taciturn Irish professor of nineteenth century America, once told us, “because their books lack arguments.”
I remember at the time arguing with Professor Kenny (I was the only one who’d argue back with him- I knew he didn’t mind) that history doesn’t have to have some big argument to be worthwhile. I’m of two minds about that now. I don’t think history HAS to be tendentious… but maybe it SHOULD. “Montaillou” is a good work of history, but probably could have been improved by a clearer argument. Maybe the argument simply was “this is history, like it or not,” and every argument it made in the historiography — I got the impression there was more than one — Le Roy Ladurie left implicit. Maybe that was always the Annales argument- “this is so clearly how you do history that we won’t even argue with others over how else to do it” (“typically French,” one is tempted to say).
Getting ahead of myself! Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie had a peach of a source- the records of a long-term Inquisition put on by the Catholic Church in the little Occitan village of Montaillou in the south of France, near the turn of the fourteenth century. Montaillou needed inquisiting because it was in the heart of Cathar country. The Cathars were dualists, perhaps influenced by Gnosticism, who held that the material world was evil, and nothing was more evil than the Church. They were big stuff in the south of France in the 1200s, even making some moves prefiguring Protestantism (they were popular with the proto-bourgeoisie, tradesmen and artisans). But then the Pope and the French king (the latter looking to extend his power more firmly to the south) mounted the bloody Albigensian crusade (that’s where the phrase “let god sort them out” comes from). Popular Catharism continued to linger for a while after, and inquisitors chased them around.
More than Catharism, what Le Roy Ladurie uses the inquisitorial record for is gleaning details of life in this little village. The head inquisitor was a deeply scrupulous fellow who questioned damned near everyone in the village at some point, and who kept detailed records. Since heresy could be anywhere, he got a lot of details of everyday life in his questioning.
And so, Le Roy Ladurie takes us into the life of Montaillou. He writes it as centered around the “domus,” roughly, the household, which meant family, servants, and boarders. Everyone was looking to boost the wealth and prestige of their domus, often at the expense of others, and you can be sure ratting people out as Cathars — and virtually every domus had a Cathar or two, some were all Cathar — was a winning strategy in this game. The people were materially poor in ways hard to understand today, but it wasn’t exactly Monty Python peasants lying in mud ditches, either. Really, it was more capital poverty (building a good house was very hard) and lack of insurance against disaster, like sickness or famine.
One way out of the domus situation was to go become a shepherd. Much of the Languedoc was unsettled at the time, and men tended flocks across transhumance paths that wandered all the way to Spain. The shepherds were naturally more independent than the domus-dwellers, a source of news, ideas, and outside products and money. As you’d probably expect, a lot of them were Cathars or otherwise unorthodox, and could get away with it more, being relatively footloose (great, now I’m imagining a “Footloose” remake where instead of dancing, it’s Catharism).
I’m no medievalist and so can’t say how “accurate” Le Roy Ladurie’s picture of Montaillou is. It more or less passes what sniff tests I have. It was an interesting read, but damn me for a plodding Anglo if the professor wasn’t right, and it would have been better with more of an argument (I’d also like more Cathar deets, but I know they’re hard to suss out, given the secrecy and lies swirling around them). I’d say it’s still worth reading, and I get why maybe French academics, especially ones with great sources, might want to avoid the superheated ideological atmosphere surrounding most arguments then going in their country, but still. ****
Ludwig von Mises, “Human Action: A Treatise on Economics” (1949) - Part of me thought, as I read this, “ok, this is the real shit” — not as in “this has a bearing on reality” (quite the opposite), but, “this is the mack daddy, this is the guy the libertarians are all trying and failing to be.” Von Mises came out of Dolfuss’s clerical fascist Vienna post-Anschluss (he worked for Dolfuss, but as a Jew, by blood if not by conviction, Nazism was a bridge too far). He had the haughtiness of European high culture, the world-building faustian self-belief and system-building ambitions of the great age of secular lawgivers that ran from Rousseau’s time to Freud’s. I had a vision of him as the pit bull of libertarianism, with people like Rothbard and Nozick as so many yapping terriers making noise from behind him.
Well, yes and no. He certainly had more going for him than either libertarian philosopher, or any of the others who came in his wake. But it wasn’t necessarily brains or even originality that he had. It was the sort of Yiddishism an assimilé Viennese Jew smiling and nodding for the likes of Dolfuss would avoid like botulism: chutzpah. And really, that’s a charitable reading. We associate chutzpah with underdogs. That’s never what he was, never how he’d even want to be seen (if this offends libertarians the way some of my reviews offend fascists, I’m sure they’ll try to get across the idea he was an underdog in the face of liberal statism blah blah etc etc fuck off).
But that’s basically what he had. He had… maybe “the face” is the right term… to just declare vast bodies of knowledge and many perspectives taken by numerous thoughtful people just verboten to human consideration. “Human Action” is about how anything other than the most intentionally naive positivism is flatly wrong, useless, and morally suspect. He calls this “praxeology,” “the study of human action.” Intent doesn’t matter, he smugly declares, not just as a consequentialist — that would make some sense — but out of a smug assumption of something like perfect, or at least sufficient, knowledge. In one of the great whoppers of supposedly educated writing — the sort of thing the worst positive thinker or evangelist you could imagine would probably demur from saying so baldly — declares that human action, it’s success and failure, actually creates happiness or sadness! You’re happy if you achieve your aims. The end!!
Quite apart from whatever else it is, von Mises and his followers (for those playing the home game, of the two lesser libertarians I mentioned, Rothbard really was a hype man for von Mises and believed in this praxeology shit, where Nozick had some other dumb philosophical basis) basically see this stuff as taking irony and tragedy out of the box of life. Things work rationally. Not being able to see things rationally is the closest thing to a tragedy you’ll ever get- not for those who so see things, but because those people keep rational people from thriving (there’s reasons von Mises warmly praised Ayn Rand before some stupid quarrel split them up). That’s it. Any intellectual construct that acknowledges that sometimes, the best laid plans don’t work out and maybe collective action differs in some important way from individual action — everything from Marxism to the most anodyne progressive liberalism to, von Mises hastily adds, burnishing his antifascist credentials for the big jump to America, racism — is intellectually bankrupt and oppressive to even be around. There’s a reason anarchocapitalism is, at best, a hop or two from mass slaughters ala Parkland- there are the main characters (you, and people you think about) and everyone else is a malignant sheep whose lives aren’t really lives.
What’s left of the European tradition — what von Mises supposedly brings to the table — if you take tragedy and irony out of it? If everything is a just-so story where the heroes just need to realize their heroism/rationality? Well, not much. Just the face, like I said, more or less, the chutzpah, the ability to get over with those rubes who want pedigreed ideas but not the existential bummers that often come with them (i.e. Americans with money), to write nearly nine hundred pages of this garbage and not get laughed off as a crank. *
Marion Rodgers, “Mencken: the American Iconoclast” (2005) - “Send a maniac to catch a maniac,” as the phrase went in one of my favorite childhood movies, “Demolition Man” (which I think still holds up quite well). The writer to “catch” Henry Louis Mencken in biography form, by that standard, would have to be a prose wizard and critical to the point of scabrousness. Alas, in this biography, the task is taken up by a journeyman writer whose attitude towards her subject is mostly one of hero worship.
Do people still think much about Mencken? An article recently said Matt Taibbi thinks of himself as a Mencken figure, which is a complicated claim I’m just going to leave alone. I thought about him well before I read much of him because his name was ubiquitous if you read much about American culture from a period roughly between 1920 and 1945 or so. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every American writer who came of age in that period wrote in Mencken’s shadow. From his perch at The American Mercury and The Smart Set, Mencken propelled American literary modernism into the spotlight through his criticism and curation. He was one of the most famous men in America during the Jazz Age, and young intellectuals the country over aped his hard-drinking, cigar-chomping style. He was also a working journalist and was famous for reporting on presidential campaigns and on the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” His linguistic work, “The American Language,” is highly respected.
It’s hard to explain much about Mencken’s career without going into detail about his politics, which is a problem because a lot of the contexts of what mattered to him were different back then. In fact, you could argue that as his context converged more with one we could recognize, the more he kicked against it, and the further he fell from his twenties heights.
H.L. Mencken is at one and the same time a very contemporary figure, and one not necessarily easy to place given contemporary ideas about writing and politics. He was, in many respects, the original talented edgelord, laying the pattern for media iconoclasts from his day to the time of Parker and Stone. He was the guy who always one step ahead in terms of wit, who didn’t care when you did (and sometimes, just to show you up, cared when you didn’t, or didn’t expect him to), the “equal opportunity asshole,” the guy you couldn’t help laughing at or otherwise enjoying his work. Many of the same hot button issues Mencken leaned on are similarly deployed by edgy types today, from the hypocrisy of religion to the fecklessness of politicians to the importance of free speech.
That last might give us an entry point into the ways in which Mencken eludes us. Rodgers depicts Mencken as a man whose first and last priority was always free speech. She opens with a scene of him baiting a Boston blue nose into having him arrested for selling a copy of the American Mercury, which the Watch and Ward Society had had banned (this was the time when “banned in Boston” was a known phrase), getting the case dismissed, and stopping by Harvard for rousing applause. Mencken was, in fact, critical in opening both cultural and legal doors that allowed literary modernism to flourish in the United States. But it’s worth noting that the sensibilities offended were usually those around the use of working-class language like “damn,” allusion to the existence of sex workers, or depictions of such lascivious acts as kissing.
The point being, if you showed Mencken an episode of South Park without context, I think it quite likely he would agree with his Boston antagonist that it was filth and should be banned post-haste. This is a guy who broke up with a movie starlet at least in part because she made jokes about Johan Strauss’s waltzes. In this way, he’s both utterly unlike the “free speech purists” (outside of some chan-bound fantasists no one believes in literally free speech but you know what I mean), and strangely parallel. They get weirdly easily offended, too, a lot of the time. A lot of the time, what they’re about is more the promulgation of quality, as understood by themselves and as done over the objections of busybodies, rabble, and losers, than they are about anyone else’s freedom.
Mencken’s contemporary quality and his distance from our time come together in his reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mencken hated FDR since he came
onto national political scene in 1920, seeing him as a silver-tongued mountebank (a favorite Mencken insult, “mountebank”). When FDR became President and started implementing the New Deal, Mencken grew increasingly angry, and grandiose, paranoid, in his anger. FDR spelled an end to American liberties, with his throwing money at the poors and his management of the press. On the one hand, this was, more or less, ideologically consistent for Mencken- he was always an elitist and always despised the poor. On the other, FDR was actually known as a relative fiscal conservative going into his term of office (Rodgers neglects to mention this), but Mencken still hated him and had for over a decade.
I think it’s actually easy to see why Mencken hated FDR so much, so consistently, for so long, even as FDR was key to ending the Prohibition law Mencken hated so. FDR beat Mencken. FDR beat Mencken at his own game, communicating in American English via mass media, and shifted the cultural ground under Mencken’s feet. Mencken couldn’t adjust to post-1929-crash reality, and FDR steered many aspects of that reality. FDR even beat Mencken at ridicule, owning him in speeches, and all Mencken could do was fume and fulminate, getting less and less funny with each column inch he took up screaming after the president. Whatever abrogations of due process FDR undertook in his time, he didn’t need secret police to beat his most determined opponent in the press- just his own wit and popular goodwill. That must have gutted Mencken, to the extent he understood it. It revealed a deeper weakness- Mencken always did best against weak opposition. He was a front-runner, great at turning his nose up at the “boobs” but unable to do much against anyone who could match wits with him or see something he couldn’t.
From there, it was downhill for Mencken. He was materially secure, more or less, but increasingly culturally irrelevant, somewhere between an honored relic and a cautionary tale. Among other issues, he was part of a whole generation of people whose justifiable skepticism regarding American intervention in World War One led to some horrifying judgment calls as its sequel came around. Mencken, ever the Germanophile and mindful of how exaggerated (some) anti-German propaganda in the Great War was, systematically downplayed the dangers of fascism and of Hitler in particular. Whenever there was a choice between sympathizing with inconvenienced Germans and with existentially endangered Jews, he always chose the former, and didn’t shy away from stereotype and crude language in so doing- why would the guy who called his critical collection “Prejudices”? By the time he died in the fifties, it made sense that a scabrously racist gang of paleocons had taken his name for one of their societies.
Well! I guess I should talk about Rodgers’ book rather than giving you this report on the guy, huh? Most of what I’ve written here I knew before I listened to this biography. Of course, I learned a fair amount in listening… but a lot of that was minutiae. This wound up raising questions for me that I found more diverting than the book as it wore on. How do you generate good questions in a biographical project? It’s so easy to fall into the trap of taking a side in some notional Egyptian afterlife courtroom, waiting to see if the alligator eats the subject’s heart. This leads biographers to array their investigations around the established controversies — in this case, “how much of a racist, antisemitic prick was Mencken, all told?” mostly — and neglect more interesting approaches.
The upshot of this is that as Rodgers went on into the period of Mencken’s life defined by public controversies, especially ones where he both loses and looks bad by contemporary lights, the more analytical energy she spends trying to justify him. This sucks, because not only are some of her calls pretty bad, but when she lets the thing breathe a little it isn’t half bad. You can see this in the early parts of the biography, where Mencken’s boyhood Baltimore comes to life, and the Edwardian (they often say “Victorian” but that’s basically wrong) context in which Mencken grew up and which shaped so many of his ideas comes across clearly. Among other things, the German-American milieu of Mencken’s youth (I forget whether Mencken’s parents or grandparents were the immigrants) comes in loud and clear, the combination of respectability and skepticism and the quiet certainty that they were, in fact, superior in terms of culture to American-Americans.
Basically, think of this book as having three stages (it has like seven “parts” but ignore that). Mencken’s youth is the best part, basically up until the end of World War One. Along with fun descriptive bits, it seemed to be setting up a clash between Mencken’s Edwardian, vaguely-German-American-nationalist idea of what an advanced man should be like, and the realities of modernity as revealed by the war. We get a little bit about this in the second part, Mencken’s salad days in the twenties. We see some of how the literary critical sausage gets made, Mencken’s negotiation with the “tribal twenties” — despite believing black people to be essentially inferior to whites, he published many more black writers than any other white editor, respecting talent where he found it — but we also start getting a lot of “hot goss” about Mencken’s love life. It was intermittently interesting — and Rodgers seems more indignant at the way the bachelor playboy Mencken dealt with some of his women than how he borderline denied the Holocaust — but not a good sign, how much it dominated the book. Then you get the end, with Rodgers scraping the bottom of the evidentiary barrel to make her man look good in his decline. By this time, analysis of anything interesting has gone out the window in favor of lawyering up- admitting what she has to admit, but giving “context” to excuse him.
The context I’d be interested in is that of historical change, and not just “a lot of people didn’t believe atrocity stories from Nazi Germany that people now know are true.” A real historical contextual understanding of someone like Mencken wouldn’t be a defense, or a takedown. He’s interesting enough, and important enough to American letters, to contextualize for its own sake. I wonder where Rodgers is at these days- I think she teaches somewhere, used to contribute to Reason, and you can see this as an addition to an aughts-era libertarian canon of saints. What it all would have meant, to her or to anyone, after libertarianism took its big fall against Trump, is a question you can’t glean an answer to from this book, alas. Will anyone with a critical acuity anywhere near matching Mencken’s — and despite some holes in his abilities, when he was good, he was phenomenal — ever take on the project of bringing him and his times truly to life, or will it all be fans and/or detractors from here on out, until people finally forget him? ***
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: A Simple Desultory Mithra Pic
It’s not really “desultory” but who am I to deny the Simon and Garfunkel nod