Dear Friends,
I want to thank you for reading this newsletter each week. And thanks to those of you who send me your thoughts and notes of encouragement. I am very grateful for you. And a big welcome to my new subscribers! I hope that The Square Inch remains worth reading for you.
The “Not-So-Dark” Ages
The late Michael Crichton had a formula. Like John Grisham has a formula, and M. Night Shyamalan has a formula (unfairly derided, in his case). Crichton wrote novels that blended scientific fact and fiction so seamlessly that the reader couldn’t help but suspend disbelief. Wait! Could this really happen? Could someone clone dinosaurs from mosquitoes encased in amber (Jurassic Park)? Could someone genetically engineer a half-boy, half-monkey (Next)? How about create an intelligent—and malicious—swarm of biotech particles using nanotechnology (Prey)?
Adding to the plausibility, Crichton would often include real footnotes to academic books and articles—his best example of this was State of Fear, a “novel” about climate change hysteria. I put quotes around “novel” because that book is actually just a legitimately compelling scientific argument against climate hysteria.
On top of all the scientific jargon and footnotes, Crichton knew how to nest all of that into a page-turning thriller. Yes, his characters are pretty shallow and the plot devices predictable, but I read these things for fun and amusement and I think they’re charming.
Last year at a book sale I picked up a Crichton book (for a buck!) that I’d never heard of: Timeline, published in the year 2000. From the start, it appears to be his novel about quantum theory—which deals with the mysterious study of how sub-atomic particles behave and interact—and, of course, that means his villainous scientist has invented time travel. Well, actually, not really time travel, but travel to and from other universes in the “multiverse” (one theory of quantum physics).
Imagine my delight to discover that the book isn’t really about quantum physics at all. It’s about Crichton’s sudden love of the Middle Ages. All the Richard-Feynman-quoting quantum theory stuff is just a quick and tidy vehicle to get us to mid-14th century France, so that Crichton could take us on a tour of what the time and place was really like. Not the dark, drab, humorless world of the popular imagination; rather, a bright, colorful, exciting time of human progress and innovation. Oh, violent and brutal, yes; but nevertheless a time of remarkable sophistication.
He painstakingly describes the world: the clothing, technology, weaponry, economics, politics, and so on. Per his custom, he includes a bibliography at the end of the book to substantiate his “scholarship,” such as it is, and you have to hand it to the guy: he does his homework.
It’s a very fun and entertaining tale, the dramatic climax has wildly implausible twists and turns, and it has a sentimentally satisfying conclusion.
It’s really the Acknowledgments at the end that caught my attention. Crichton made a very big name for himself as a contrarian—pushing back on “established” scientific consensus and its often unearned trust, whether it be cloning, climate science, nanotechnology, gene therapy, and so forth. Timeline is remarkable in that he turns his contrarianism to the humanities. Particularly, the discipline of history. He writes:
Our understanding of the medieval period has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Although one occasionally still hears a self-important scientist speak of the Dark Ages, modern views have long since overthrown such simplicities. An age that was once thought to be static, brutal, and benighted is now understood as dynamic and swiftly changing: an age where knowledge was sought and valued; where great universities were born, and learning fostered; where technology was enthusiastically advanced; where social relations were in flux; where trade was international; where the general level of violence was often less deadly than it is today. As for the old reputation of medieval times as a dark time of parochialism, religious prejudice and mass slaughter, the record of the twentieth century must lead any thoughtful observer to conclude that we are in no way superior.
In fact, the conception of a brutal medieval period was an invention of the Renaissance, whose proponents were at pains to emphasize a new spirit, even at the expense of the facts. If a benighted medieval world has proven a durable misconception, it may be because it confirms a cherished contemporary belief—that our species always moves forward to ever better and more enlightened ways of life. This belief is utter fantasy, but it dies hard. It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.
This is extremely refreshing, especially coming from someone who was actually very enthusiastic about scientific disciplines. Much modern science assumes the Renaissance/Enlightenment narrative of a “Dark Ages,” followed by the “light” of human reason. He is right to doubt this narrative and go back to the sources, and is certainly right to question what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”: that the present is better than the past simply because it is the present and therefore more “progressed.”
But there is more to the “Dark Ages” narrative than just chronological snobbery. It is theological at root. The narrators of the “Dark Ages” were declaring their independence of God, revelation, and the church. Those were felt realities that dominated the life of the Middle Ages, and the theory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment was that humanity must now “outgrow” such superstitious notions.
And this is where Crichton is weak. Aside from a mostly caricatured monastery, his novel cannot quite reach the intellectual and spiritual climate of the age. It is not mere coincidence that the vibrant age he describes is also the age of, say, Anselm and Aquinas and Bonaventure. The universities came from somewhere, and they were founded and fueled by incredibly brilliant theologians. Scientific and economic innovations grew out of Christian intellectual and practical soil—the world is orderly, predictable, rational, and purposeful, and human beings have a calling to cultivate and understand it. So also the development of moral concepts like individual human freedom and dignity. For a really good introduction to these themes, see Rodney Stark’s Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, or Tom Holland’s more recent Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
But if you want to simply dip your toe into the idea that maybe we’ve been lied to and the Dark Ages weren’t actually that dark, you could do worse than read a page-turning thriller from a guy who has the formula down.
Miscellany
I figured out why I’d never heard of Timeline. Somebody made an awful movie out of it. A 11% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes! Nothing like a bad movie to dampen enthusiasm for a book.
GameStop was all the rage this week, as online denizens of a Reddit board squeezed the price of the company’s stock higher and higher, just to stick it to the hedge funds that had bet on the stock going down (“shorting”). Of course, the hedges are correct as an objective matter: the company isn’t healthy and will soon be obsolete—people don’t go to stores to buy games; they download them. Never mind. It’s David versus Goliath, and everyone wants to root for the little guy, no matter the little guy’s cynicism. Bottom line? The market will sort it out, as it always does. And a few people will make a great deal of money, and the vast majority of fevered people who jumped on this bandwagon will be left holding the IOUs. For myself, I’m always alarmed—and so should you be—when rooting for the “little guy” involves Marxist tropes about fat cat Wall Street villains and innocent Main Street victims (as if there’s no greed animating the latter group). Anyway, here’s David Bahnsen explaining it all to Ben Shapiro.
When the French working class complained about not having any bread, Marie Antoinette is apocryphally reported to have said, “Let them eat cake!” When blue collar pipeline workers complain about losing their jobs by the stroke of the President’s pen, John Kerry, Special Envoy For Climate, says—not apocryphally: Let them make solar panels!
John Kerry is asked what his message would be to oil and gas workers who "see an end to their livelihoods": "What President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices... That they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels."As an aside, an “envoy” is someone who delivers a message for someone. I’m not sure what this new job is supposed to mean: Is he our ambassador to the climate (whatever that might mean), or an ambassador from the climate to American companies and workers? I think it means the latter, and that raises the question how the “climate” delivers its messages and demands to its “envoy”? Is John Kerry reading bird entrails?
Do you remember when Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) conveniently and suddenly decreed that the phrase “sexual preference” is offensive to the LGBT community, in order to tar and feather Judge Amy Coney Barrett? That wasn’t surprising. The more amazing thing was that on that very same day the Merriam-Webster online dictionary changed its definition of the term to fit her new one.
It’s not much of a story, but Salon recently decided to accuse Senator Tom Cotton of inflating his military service by calling himself a “Ranger.” The controversy? He had completed Ranger school and thus received his Ranger tab, but didn’t technically serve in a Ranger Battalion. This is quite ridiculous. People who finish the grueling months of Ranger school are often referred to as Rangers (it says so right on their shoulders) even though they move on to roles other than an actual Ranger unit.
Case in point: in 2015 when two females completed Ranger school, Newsweek was only too proud to refer to them as new “U.S. Army Rangers,” even though neither ever served as Rangers. Guess what? Wanting to join in on Salon’s hit job on Senator Cotton, Newsweek secretly went back and re-wrote their story. Now that’s a story.
Major League Baseball lost one of his brightest lights: Henry Aaron, the Home Run King. There’s an essay I’d love to link, but it is behind a paywall. So I’ll settle for Joe Posnanski’s explanation of why Henry Aaron was not the “Home Run” King. To call him a “King” is to demote him. He was certainly one of the five best players to ever play the game and, more importantly, he exhibited incredible and inspirational personal courage in the face of horrific racism. A man of immense dignity, who’s contribution both to our national pastime and our national character should forever be remembered. RIP.
There’s nothing quite like a full moonlit skating party on a frozen pond to warm the heart. I was proud of my fire-making skills. My skating? Ugh. Get me some ibuprofen. Go do something adventurous!