🌲 Familiarity with the Western Canon is Surprisingly Reassuring
It's amazing how much modern conservative rhetoric sounds like Augustus and Chesterton.
Last week, I wrote an article touching on the value of curating a personal canon of works about things that matter to us. But I didn’t talk much about the importance of cultivating an understanding of the broader cultural canon we’re immersed in. I mentioned Anne of Green Gables and then moved on, because it was a digression and I had a different point to make.
But ‘the Western canon’ has been on my mind a lot these last few weeks. A lot of my friends enjoy the classics, Standard Ebooks makes them more accessible than ever1, and I’ve always sort of regretted finishing my Philosophy degree without touching much on guys like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.
Most days, I can sort of gloss over spots of ignorance. I’ve always taken pride in having more off-the-wall knowledge of Phoenicia than Rome, in knowing more about obscure African kingdoms than the Napoleonic wars. But candidly, a lot of my historical ignorance is based in cowardice; scholarship surrounding Rome and France and Medieval Europe is so big it’s hard to encompass, and I’m never going to know the most about Cicero, so why bother to learn?
The answer is ‘to gain context.’
In SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard taught me that Cicero was a central figure in the late Roman Republic, not so much for his political maneuvers as the wealth of writings he left behind, which offer a remarkably detailed look into how fundamentally similar — and weirdly alien — his life was. Cicero was a “new money” guy, active in politics but not from one of the old families. He was staggeringly wealthy, so rather than put up with inns and hostels, he owned a series of farms and villas along major travel routes so he could sleep somewhere comfortable on trips — rather like a modern-day businessman with a private jet and a series of vacation homes.
Knowing that “novi homines like the Cicero brothers ... are always the sons of equites who made their fortunes in business but who afforded their children the best educations from an early age and raised them to be aristocrats, not businessmen” was a phenomenon that happened not just in Jane Austen novels but also the Roman Republic helps put once-new money like the Rockefellers and Kennedys into perspective.
For me at least, knowing that the current era is not uniquely terrible, knowing that my ancestors (cultural or otherwise) dealt with the same sorts of sociopolitical battles as we’re seeing splayed across social media, is remarkably reassuring. The Luddites had it hard, and so did the guys who figured out stirrups second, but there is a peace that comes from knowing that Cicero also conspired and gossipped with his friends, that Chesterton also lamented a lack of conservative values, and that the ancient Greeks also hassled each other about how long their hair was and how much money their wives were spending on clothes.
In What’s Wrong With The World, Chesterton had this incredibly relevant passage that I think will stick with me:
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen—which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great-grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson.
I find it remarkable that this was written in 1910 — before my grandmother was born. Either everything old is new again, or the trends he noticed over a hundred years ago have continued on steadily through world wars and technological revolution. David Perell, the guy who teaches huge chunks of modern-day nonfiction writers how to write, recently posted:
The design of the Internet has us only consuming content that was created in the past 24 hours. We’re like little hamsters on the wheel, scrolling and scrolling to keep up with an endlessly unfolding feed of content that moves faster than we can. It’s a tragedy, I think. It didn’t need to be this way. The Internet could’ve led us to the greatest ideas of all time. The ones they’ve shaped history and stood the test of time. But instead, it traps us in a Never Ending Now.
David is absolutely correct that it didn’t need to be this way — I’m currently reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a delightful pre-WWII travelogue that was recommended by my friend
, who I never would have met if not for the internet.In it, Rebecca West offers an incisive and often cutting summation of what life was like in Yugoslavia and the surrounding environs. She writes beautifully, often hilariously, about all sorts of places and events I know almost nothing about — but knowledgeable people I know say she’s right on the money.
I just wish I had more context for passages like this:
Nothing can make this situation smell quite like the rose. If Dickens had known the facts he might have felt about Dubrovnik as he felt about Mr Chadband; and if Chesterton had attended to them he might have loathed it as much as he loathed cocoa.
I’ve certainly heard of Chesterton and Dickens, but I’m not familiar enough with what they’ve written to really get this reference. I hated A Tale of Two Cities, but Chesterton’s Father Brown and What’s Wrong With The World are both still great a hundred years later.
There’s a lot of discourse about how ‘the kids these days’ are brain rotted and functionally illiterate, but I remember stumbling my way through Shakespeare and Dante as a high schooler, and it was hard to understand why Shakespeare was so great until I finally saw the local Renaissance Faire parody troupe do Antony & Cleopatra in the style of a sitcom about the Jersey mob. All the words were straight from Shakespeare’s script, but the costumes and accents were updated in a way that made the cultural milieu accessible to me.
I couldn’t understand Dante’s Inferno until I read Niven’s science fiction pastiche — itself thirty years culturally out of date by the time I got my hands on it. And even then, there are all sorts of things I don’t ‘get’ because I don’t know enough about Italian politics and Renaissance religion. Even with the help of an annotated copy, it’s rough going.
But in some ways, it’s hard to understand Niven’s Inferno without reading Dante. To understand Heinlein without familiarity with H.L. Mencken, Kipling, and Mark Twain… in the same way it can be hard to figure out what Scott Alexander is talking about if you don’t keep up with
, , and .Yet there’s more to it than that. Context is not just about understanding nerdy philosophical arguments and literary frills. It’s also key to things like worldview, politics, and mood.
Most of us know that The Lion King riffs off of Hamlet, and that the Percy Jackson books riff off Greek mythology, but if you don’t know that Caesar Augustus worried about the Roman divorce and fertility rate, or that atheism is as old as belief in gods, modern-day alarmist rhetoric can feel new — and terrifying.
Scary headlines get clicks, and there’s very little money to be made in pushing people to read old, difficult texts like Chesterton or Cicero’s letters. But there’s a lot of value to be had from winding your way back through the history of the Western canon, tracing the schools of thought and the arguments the old philosophers were having — which, except in terms of speed and scale, are not so very different from the discourse that happens these days on social media platforms like Substack.
If you’re interested in learning more about the canonical literary tradition (and, of course, history) of pirates, come read “A General History of the Pirates” with me and some friends. The ebook is free from Standard Ebooks. I spun up a little pop-up newsletter to facilitate, inspired by the inestimable Craig Mod saying they are the greatest newsletter format. I’ll post small exercises every weekday to help direct the flow of conversation, and we’ll have plenty of side quests and nerdy note-sharing opportunities.
Please also spread the word to other folks who might be interested. The ‘seminar’ will run from June 9 to August 22, aka summer break for the school my kids attend.
Project Gutenberg is also great, but Standard Ebooks creates beautifully formatted versions of popular classics. I find the classics much easier to deal with when there’s clean typography.
It's too bad that Tale of Two Cities is so many people's first (and thus often only) exposure to Dickens. I love Dickens and wordy 19th-century fiction generally, and have been fairly interested in the French Revolution and I still find Tale of Two Cities rather hard going. Dickens greatest strengths are his ability to make a virtue of verbosity and how closely observed and rich his characters and settings are. Tale of Two Cities did not play to the latter strength at all, which makes the lengthiness less of a gift.
Right on. A major complaint I have about modern culture is how far away it has gotten from the 4000-some years of normative literature that largely defines how to be human successfully and graciously and with integrity. We seem to have turned our backs on all that. The end result of our doing so currently squats in the Oval Office. Back in the 1970s I called it "The Death of a Liberal Arts Education" — it was noticeable then and has only gotten worse since. *Much* worse since 2000. I sometimes wonder if the new millennium blew our fuses — the *real* Y2K problem.