I downloaded John Ross Browne’s book on his travels in Russia and Scandinavia, The Land of Thor, because it was an old account of those regions that I’d never heard of (such accounts can be invaluable for the historical writer), and because I could get it free as a Kindle e-book. Now that I know better, I recommend going to The Guttenberg Project instead, and downloading the illustrated version, as the author’s drawings are half the point.

John Ross Browne was born in Ireland, but raised in the United States. He eventually became a proud—nay, arrogant—citizen of the state of California. He was a frequent contributor of both stories and illustrations to Harper’s Weekly Magazine. For a period of his life around the Civil War he moved to Germany and took the opportunity to travel extensively, sending reports to Harper’s and compiling them into books when he was finished. The Land of Thor is one of those. Continue reading The Land of Thor, by J. R. Browne →

Despite my tremendous and unfeigned admiration for, and enjoyment of, the writings of G. K. Chesterton, I’ve raised some people’s ire in the past by giving my opinion that, on the basis of my own reading of his work, I consider him an antisemite within a reasonable definition of the term. Perhaps I need to clarify that I don’t mean—as many people would—to suggest that he was a Nazi, or sympathetic to Nazism. His antisemitism was of an older and arguably more benign sort—the antisemitism of the Christian peasant who truly believes that the Jews are hoarding all the gold in the realm, and using it to manipulate the rulers.

That Chesterton was not by any stretch of the imagination a Nazi can be demonstrated by a single reading of Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State.

In Chesterton’s time, those pre-World War II years that seem comparatively gracious to us today, Eugenics was a massively popular movement. Some of the most eminent social reformers in the world, people of unquestioned philanthropy and integrity, thought it self-evident that the government ought to be given the power to “improve” the race through selective breeding and the sterilization of “inferiors.”

To all of this Chesterton, out of his “medieval” mindset, cried “Infamy!” To deny a basic right like marriage and procreation to any human soul, simply because someone in authority judges him unfit, was to him a denial of basic human dignity—dignity which, he believed, sprang from the image of God, not from some biologist’s checklist of desirable traits.

Further, Chesterton was deeply concerned that such a program would place in the hands of the state a power that would destroy liberty—power that no human being deserves or is capable of exercising innocently.

The first half of the book contains a wealth of quotations just as apt for our own time as for Chesterton’s:

Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.

A remarkable element of this book is that Chesterton warns in particular that Germany is likely to be the source of great Eugenic evil.

I liked the second half of the book less than the first, because I’m a reactionary capitalist and less poetic-minded than Chesterton. Chesterton hated Socialism, but he hated Capitalism (I think) more, and in the second section he traces all the evils of Eugenics back to the Capitalists and their presumed plan to organize society in such a way as to produce a more efficient source of labor. I don’t know if that’s true. It certainly is no longer the case, for today’s great Eugenists (Chesterton’s name for them) are overwhelmingly Socialists and Leftists.

But the first half made it all worthwhile. I highly recommend Eugenics and Other Evils.

It is probably the measure of Whittaker Chambers’ success that he’s largely forgotten today, except in conservative circles. If his enemies had found a way to satisfactorily discredit him, he’d be included in the Rogues’ Gallery of Red Scare Crazies, like Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the members of the John Birch Society. But in fact his witness has stood the test of time (especially since Soviet intelligence files were made available to the public). So he has been ignored, made a non-person in the Stalinist tradition.

The title of his autobiography, Witness, has a double meaning. Its obvious reference is to his testimony, as a former Communist, before the House Committee On Un-American Activities in 1948. In that testimony he named several people he knew to be Communists, or Communist collaborators, in high government positions. In particular he named Alger Hiss, a state department official who had played a major role in the establishment of the U.N. When Hiss sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced documentary proof that Hiss had lied about their association. In the end Hiss went to prison for five years, for perjury (his espionage activities fell outside the statute of limitations).

But the second meaning of the name Witness is Chamber’s confession of his Christian faith, a faith he adopted about the same time he left Communism (he became a Quaker). Those who know Christian history will immediately think of the ancient Greek word for “witness,” which is martyr. Although he does not mention that connection, Chambers makes it plain that when he went to the government to inform on his former comrades, he expected that the Communists would try to kill him, and that the government would very likely indict him for his espionage activities. He expected his life to be ruined, but he felt that was the duty he had to perform, the ministry to which God had called him.

He was not a perfect witness. His memory was sometimes inexact when testifying about events more than a decade in the past. He held back, at first (to the point of perjuring himself), the fact of his and his friends’ spy work for the Soviets. At one point the pressure became so great that he attempted suicide.

But he persevered by grace, a dumpy, not very photogenic celebrity, the butt of many jokes and the target of endless slanders. He came through at last, a little the worse for wear, to return to his beloved farm and family.

Witness is a moving book. It’s a long book, and the later parts featuring long transcripts from the Senate hearings sometimes make heavy reading. But he was a fine writer with a sensitive spirit, and the impression the reader comes away with is, most of all, what a great lover he was—of nature, of his family, of his country, and of his God.

Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age.

Highly recommended.

First of all the disclaimer: I got my copy of Proud To Be Right: Voices Of the Next Conservative Generation from our friend Rachel Motte of Evangelical Outpost, one of the book’s contributors.

Proud To Be Right is an anthology of essays by various young conservative writers, all edited by Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online. At 247 pages, I found it an easy read, and I zipped through it in a couple days. It’s difficult to make a summary statement about the contents, though, because a very wide range of views is showcased here. You’ve got Bible conservatives on one end, and atheist libertarians on the other. You’ve got supporters of the War On Terror, and an isolationist. You’ve got a stay at home mother and a gay marriage advocate. My primary reaction, as an obsolescent Baby Boomer, is that if these young conservatives ever win the political war and kill big government liberalism forever, they will immediately split into factions, and the new political divisions will be as sharp as the old.

There are some excellent essays here. I was impressed with “A Noncomforming Reconstruction” by Justin Katz, a poetic meditation on the preservation of culture, using the restoration of an old house as a metaphor. Rachel Motte’s “Liberals Are Dumb: And Other Shared Texts” is an extremely thoughtful warning to think beyond bumper stickers and slogans; to treat people and arguments with respect: “My generation’s forebears were fortunate in that their elders were willing to tell them when they were ignorant—but for our entire lives, our elders have been too busy trying to emulate us to even realize how poorly they taught us.” (This essay may really be the most valuable of the collection, and I don’t say it just because Rachel’s a friend. The kind of snarky thinking she decries is precisely what’s wrong with some of the other essays in this book.) “Immersion Experience” by Caitrin Nicol is another good essay, a defense of homeschooled kids combined with an appreciation of her liberal friends. I also enjoyed “Ducking the Coffins: How I Became an Edu-Con” by Ashley Thorne, a memoir of her experience as a student at King’s College, a classical curriculum college in Manhattan.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were a couple essays I actively disliked. Pride of place, needless to say, goes to “The Consistency of Gay Conservatives” by James Kirchick. This is a remarkably dysphoric piece, entirely lacking in humor, self-questioning, or charity. His thesis is that many gays have decided that the Republican Party is a more useful vehicle to get them to their goal than the Democratic Party, so they claim this territory in the name of the queens. We’re here, we’re cheerless, get used to it. He makes no attempt to soft-peddle his contempt for the knuckle-draggers in flyover country who refuse to get with the program.

“The Leptogonians: Growing Up Conservative in a Disrupted Decade” by James Poulos, is almost unreadable, at least for someone not current with hipster culture. I suspect it may be a brilliant and tightly-knit rhetorical tour-de-force, but I have no way of telling.

“The Smoker’s Code” by Helen Rittelmeyer performed the almost impossible task of nearly destroying my long-standing sympathy for smokers in a tobacco-hating culture. Its argument seems to be that we should concentrate more on finding ways to look cool than on constructing reasoned and convincing arguments.

The rest of the essays fall somewhere in between. My overall take-away is that the term “conservative” doesn’t seem to have much positive meaning anymore. The only thing these writers have in common as a group is their rejection of big government. Our country could change into something almost unrecognizable, and it would still be considered a conservative victory by the standards of many of these writers.

I wonder what Jonah Goldberg actually thought about this collection (I discount what he says in his introduction, of course). The book is educational. I’m not sure it offers great hope for the future of conservatism.

The name Eirik Bloodaxe conjures an obvious image of a great Viking warrior. This use of Eirik’s name to personify Vikings in general can be clearly seen from the way that the Jorvik Viking Centre, which mostly deals with the peaceful activities of the great Viking settlement at York, for many years sold a range of “Erik Bloodaxe” products showing a bearded Viking warrior (pp. 8-9).

Eirik (or Erik) Bloodaxe is one of the most famous Vikings of all time, right up there with Erik the Red, but that fact is due, alas, more to the evocative nickname he enjoyed than his actual achievement or the historical record. In point of fact, we don’t know a lot about this man. Was the Eirik Bloodaxe who ruled Norway and was driven out by Haakon the Good the same Eirik who showed up a few years later as king of York in England? Most historians think it likely, but there’s some dispute. Did he rule York once, twice, or even three times? The record is confusing and contradictory. Did he die in England or in Spain? Is he buried in Norway? Opinions differ.

This short volume (133 pages, including notes), Eirik Bloodaxe by Gareth Williams, Curator of Early Medieval Coinage at the British Museum, is the first attempt ever to write a biography of this shadowy figure, remembered as simultaneously a ruthless warrior and a hen-pecked husband. As a serious work of scholarship, it cannot give a complete or definitive story, but it’s valuable in compiling what we are able to know about the man, as well as discussing the many lacunae and contradictions in the record. In describing Eirik’s world and the forces that shaped him, it also provides valuable information to the reader on the story of Eirik’s father, Harald Finehair of Norway, and his achievement.

The book is handsome to look at, featuring excellent illustrations, many in color. The prose is clean and the editing (generally) good. As a specialized work on a relatively minor historical figure, it may not appeal to the general reader, but the serious Viking enthusiast will want to have it on his bookshelf.