20 November, 2019

A Note on "Historical Nihilism"


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"We should continuously upgrade our understanding of Marxism and maintain steadfast pursuit of the great ideal and goal.... We should earnestly study, understand and believe these theories, and put them to good use. We should not be conceived or impetuous when we have won success and not waver or give up in times of adversity. We should stand fast and hold onto the great ideas that promote the progress of human society and the realization of human ideals."
—Xi Jinping (July 2016) 
In the summer of 2013 Xi Jinping delivered a speech on the National Conference of Development Work. Included in the official version of his speech is the following paragraph:
How strong and invincible people can be if they have lofty aspirations! During China's revolution, development, and reform, innumerable Party members laid down their lives for the cause of the Party and the people. What supported them was the moral strength gained from the utmost importance they attached to their revolutionary ideals.[1]
This focus on aspirations and ideals pervades Xi's speeches; it is something of an obsession with him. He is deeply concerned that 21st century Chinese simply do not have have fortitude and sense of self sacrifice needed to make China great. This worries him greatly.

What interests me in this paragraph, however, is the second sentence:  During China's revolution, development, and reform, innumerable Party members laid down their lives for the cause of the Party and the people. Xi is saying something very interesting here. The history of the Communist Party of China is a history of glorious martyrdom—both during the revolution that brought the Party to power and after it.

Xi commonly divides the history of his Party into three sections. He does it in this speech I have just quoted. He would do so again a few years later, in a speech commemorating the Long March:
The victory of the Long March proved that Party leadership is a fundamental guarantee ensuring that the cause of the Party and the people will succeed. Mao Zedong once said, "Who brought the Long March to victory? The Communist Party. Without the Communist Party, a long march of this kind would have been inconceivable. The Communist Party of China, its leadership, and its cadres and its members fear no difficulties or hardships." Party leadership has guaranteed the success of China's revolution, socialist construction, and reform." [2]
Revolution. Socialist construction (or socialist development). Reform. This is the standard periodization of the Communist Party of China. We live in the reform era. "Reform and Opening Up" is the official name, and it has been going on since Deng Xiaoping decided to liberalize China's SOEs and transform China into a "socialist market economy."  Revolution refers to the period from the Party's founding through the Party's seizure of power in Nanjing and the retreat of the KMT across the Taiwan Strait. The Mao years make up the middle period. In this time the formula of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" had not yet been found. China just had socialism—or at least, attempts to "construct" and "develop" it.

The Party mythology is full of heroes who died valiantly for the cause of the Chinese people in the Party's early days. Chinese television is full of dramatizations of Communists fighting against the Japanese; less televised, but still celebrated, are those who died fighting the nationalists. These are the glorious dead of "revolution."

Who are the dead of development and reform?

I do not know the exact number of Communist Party members who died after the revolution ended. I do know the number must be massive. Remember that the Cultural Revolution began as an attack upon the Party. It ended as a civil war among China's youth, both sides claiming the mantle of Marxist revolutionaries. A great deal of 'red' blood was spilt in the reign of Mao Zedong.

Xi Jinping is well aware of this. Xi was himself a target of the revolution. His sister died in it; he, his parents, and his other siblings were exiled, imprisoned, or tortured because of it. Through war and will, Xi's father had climbed the Communist hierarchy.  He knew the grand and bloody heights of Zhongnanhai. He brought his family to perch there with him. Though young, Xi would have personally known many of the country's most prominent Communist leaders when the tumult began. He would have attended school with their children. He would have watched as these 'heroes' were killed off by zealous Red Guards. He would have seen them thrown from their heights one by one until he was thrown down himself.

How does Chairman Xi make sense of these things? I often ponder this question. Xi Jinping is a man who watched the Communist Party cannibalize itself. He watched this up close. He suffered tremendous grief and pain because of it. And yet from the age of 17 forward he devoted his life to it. He has done more than defend Party: he has personally moved to punish historians and researchers who chronicle its past—a past he lived through. Those historians who research the atrocities of the Mao years are accused of "engaging in historical nihilism."

Much has been written on historical nihilism. But what does it mean? I do not think the pairing of those two words together was accidental.[4] The Party is accusing these historians of stripping history of its meaning. But what meaning? What meaning is being lost?

Xi Jinping has beliefs about meaning. He often articulates them. In his mind the Communist Party and its cause are suffused with it. He dreams of progress. "The system of Chinese socialism represents a fundamental institutional guarantee for progress," he says. This 'progress' is not for China only. The "Communist Party of China and the Chinese people," he declares, "are more than confident that we can offer a Chinese solution to human society, " a solution for those peoples who want "to explore a better social system." The Party's path is an advance in "human civilization."[3] These are the great ideals that China's martyrs and heroes died for.

We might ask: does that include the heroes and martyrs who died after the revolution ended?

 Xi Jinping will never say this explicitly. He cannot. But this is more or less how he talks about the Mao years: a time of both pain and glory, of socialist "construction" and "development," the necessary stepping stone of toil, tests, and tears that made the current regime possible. The wonder that is modern China, he implies, was built from the blood of those countless dead. Their deaths were terrible. Vicious. But they were not meaningless. They were the building blocks of progress.

The problem with the historical nihilists now can be seen in a different frame. Yes, by telling the truth about the Party's past the historians might make the Party's hold on the people of China's present less sure. I doubt it not. But I suspect there is something more personal involved here, something more deeply felt. The Party leadership remembers the bloodshed. They do not want the suffering of their fathers and their mothers to be stripped of its meaning. To have been for nothing. Far better if they suffered for something. Far better if it had been for the cause of national greatness and human progress. Then all of it might have been worth it.

Thus the 'nihilism' of the historians. I suspect that what most troubles Xi Jinping most of all is not that the historians write tales of faction, massacre, terror, famine, starvation, torture and destruction—but that in so writing, they suggest a reality China's leaders do not wish to face: it was all for nothing. 


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If you found this post on China's political ideology useful, you might also find the posts "Xi Jinping Explains His Political Philosophy," China Does Not Want Your Rules Based Order," and "Reflections on China's Stalinist Heritage, Parts I and II" of interest. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar's Stage, you can join the Scholar's Stage mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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[1] Quoted in Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol I (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2014), p 463.

[2] Xi Jinping, Governance, vol II, p. 37

[3] Ibid, 53, 37.

[4] I should note here that the phrase itself is not a Xi era invention. It has had a renaissance under his rule, however. This is partly because of how much Xi himself likes the term.

08 November, 2019

Historians, Fear Not the Psychologists



This week Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich had their big piece on WEIRD psychology and the Catholic Church published in Science. [1] Long term readers will remember that I wrote about this piece in the American Conservative when the pre-print was published last year, and then wrote a critique of the Schulz-Henrich research program as a whole on this blog shortly after.[2] I still feel like that critique is one of the better things I have written here; in a different world I would be a grad student trying to turn that critique into its own set of research papers.

My critique withstanding, I see the "Origins of WIERD Psychology" as a landmark paper in the fields of economics, psychology, anthropology, and history. It deserves that status precisely because it is one of the few attempts to use data and theory from all four fields in one place. This is how social science should be done—and increasingly, I believe, how it will be done. I was very happy to see a version of it published in Science. 

Not everybody was so happy. The paper was met with outcry on twitter. "This is a pile of hot-trash" declared one; "[none] of the authors even bothered to read a history book or talk to a historian" inveighed another. "It’s also almost unbelievably ethnocentric — what it says about Europe is wrong," we read, "and what it implies about the world beyond Europe is equally wrong." Discussion of the piece has been a crazed tumult of the contrived ("I am just very very tired. SIGHS IN ALL CAPS), the snarky ("Historians of the family are a whole field. With books. And classes that you can take. And experts and everything"), the crusaders ("its time for a heavyweight institutional response"), and the righteously enraged ("holy shit am I angry").

Most of the outcry came from historians or those who would fancy themselves such. Strip away the emotional bombast and we are left with one essential critique: Schulz and company did not do their proper research. Their historical knowledge is too thin to support their claims. If they had read more books on the history of medieval Europe then of course they would recognize that the chasm between the letter of Catholic marriage laws and the reality was too large to support their thesis.

This notion that Schulz and company do not take history seriously is silly. The Science paper splits the references up between the main paper and the supplements (which none of the critics seem to have read!). Instead of bouncing between those two documents, I am going to refer to the pre-print instead, which keeps everything in one neat 174 page mega-paper. At the bottom of the pre-print we find 242 sources. By my informal count, 43 of these were written by historians. I might I have misjudged one or two of these. But I am talking about books with titles like Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany, The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy 850-1150, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe and From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. To these sources are another 20 or so works by historical economists ("Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period,"  Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons From Medieval Trade, etc), and a slightly smaller number by anthropologists of a historical or comparative bent (The Evolution Of Human Societies: From Foraging Group To Agrarian State, Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social System, etc.). Rounding us out are a few "big think" titles by people like Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Michael Mann.  The remaining 140~ sources are devoted to research in cross cultural psychology,  development economics, demography, and evolutionary anthropology.

Sweeping big history books celebrated in the discipline (think the style of William McNiell) will deal with topics like these peripherally, and do so in three or four pages citing six or seven sources. Most article-length treatments in historical journals have less than 40 sources. Schulz et. al. have met that standard. Their study includes regional surveys of medieval society in every part of Europe, a dozen Europe-wide surveys of the history of European marriage, sex, and law, and even a few primary sources. No, they have not dived into the archives for this project; none of them began their career with a 300 page dissertation on marriage records in a single Welsh parish. But historians do not demand that standard even from other historians who set out to write trans-regional surveys. Their bibliography is as good as you would expect to find in any work of comparative history—which in a way, this is.

More importantly, those finer grained historical arguments already exist. The underlying thesis of the paper (Western individualism—"WEIRDness"—was an outgrowth of changes in the medieval family) was developed by a medievalist!  That theory was set forth by historian Michael Mitterauer in various journal articles a decade and a half ago.[3] Mitterauer expanded on these ideas his 2010 book Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path? To Mitterauer's work we could add books by anthropologists Emmanuel Todd and Alan MacFarlane, neither of whom were strangers to archives; their books also argued that family structure was key to understanding the individualist orientations of Western Europeans.[4]

Thus none of the underlying ideas here are novel. Schulz and company are not advancing some bold new thesis: they are testing an old one. The worst they have done is take an already existing theory in the field and asked, "How could we test this with statistical methods and experimental data? Does the Mitterauer-Todd-MacFarlane thesis predict actual cross cultural psychological variation today? If so, how would we know?" Their solution to this problem is clever and worth reading in full (including the supplements!).

That is all Schultz et. al. have done. They have tested and refined an existing thesis with new methods (and show how their findings accord with theories in economics and psychology). But why then, all this outcry?  Why the histrionics?

I have a charitable hypothesis for the historians' behavior and a less charitable one.

The charitable hypothesis is that many historians are reacting this way because of the paper's venue. This has been published in Science. Like most work in Science it stuffs all the caveats and sourcing into the supplements; the smaller summary brims with all the confidence of numbers and empirical fact. Mitterauer's theory was bold but contested. His work has thirty contenders in the "great divergence" literature. Among medievalists, his take on medieval family life has not attained general consensus. But here we see it proclaimed as SCIENCE. Perish the day one stray and contested medievalist theory becomes enshrined as scientific fact!

This reaction is understandable. We live in an age when 16 year old girls wield phrases like "unite behind the science" as a rhetorical bludgeon. In our world, "the science" has immense cultural authority. However, being published in Science is not the same thing as being a part of "the science." Tally up the number of studies in a newly emerging field (say, historical population genetics) that were published in Science only to have their interpretations of the data overturned a few years later. There are a lot!

The same is true for the work of our authors. Take the career of a prolific social scientist like Joseph Henrich (who is one of the co-authors of this paper). Lay out his publications out in one place, and you will see titles like Science, Nature, Behavioral and Brain Science, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. But if you are familiar with the topics he researches you quickly realize that almost everything he has ever published has been at the center of some scholarly tussle. How universal are psychological experiments first tested on American university students? Can Darwinian models of change and inheritance be used to understand learned culture? When did  organized religion emerge, and has it had "pro-social" effects on the societies that adopted it? After two decades of fighting, Henrich has more or less won the battle on the first topic. But the other two topics are still very much live debates. And where do the people who disagree with Henrich and his fellows publish their critiques? They are published in.... Science, Nature, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and so forth. Using statistics and being published in Science is not the same thing as being enshrined as part of THE SCIENCE. The advance of science is a story of model building, empirical challenge, debate, more data brought to bear on the question, and yet more model building until a consensus has been arrived at. We are in the beginning stages of this process: If other studies martial evidence or put together models that puts the Mitterauer thesis to doubt then this one will eventually fade away.

So there is no need for the upset. Unless the upset is about something else—which it might be. My less charitable hypothesis goes like this: When Mitterauer or another historian advances a historical thesis it is simply "one more contribution" to an argument. When a coalition of psychologists, economists, and evolutionary anthropologists advance a historical argument it is a threat.

It is jokingly said that too many proud physicists parachute out of their own discipline into others, convinced that all who research lesser subjects have lesser brains. I understand hostility towards the economist or evolutionary psychologist version of the same problem. Many of the social scientists who do this know nothing about the history they reduce to an equation. They deserve all of the hostility and ridicule that they get. It is frustrating to watch arrogant scholars try to colonize a field they have no knowledge of, especially when you have spent decades mastering its intricacies.

Yet historians who expect their field to remain un-colonized are blind. One of the most remarkable academic developments of the last twenty years is the slow blurring of what were once much tighter academic distinctions. I regularly see scholarly debates that draw in participants and ideas from the worlds of micro-economics, ethnology, neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, sociology, genetics, computational social science, and psychology.  On a different scale I also see work that mixes freely from epidemiology, archeology, historical linguistics, climate science, biological anthropology, and population genetics, and network science. These fields have all 'colonized' each other. "Multi disciplinary" is often a gimmick. These emerging fields have achieved much more than that. [6] 

The work of historians is and will remain an important part of these debates. I do not know if the same thing can be said for the historians themselves. The essential problem was stated well by the pseudo-anonymous economic history blogger Pseudo-erasmus a few years back:
Cultural-social historians are ill-equipped for the age of “Big Data” that Guldi drones on about, but not because they are intellectually incapable. They can get trained in quantitative techniques and actually understand the various interdisciplinary debates that are mostly impenetrable to them right now. But such training would actually change who they are. It’s the historians’ hermeneutical and subjectivist instincts that alienate them from the big empirical debates amongst economists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, etc. So the problem with historians is less any microhistorical preference, than an epistemological bias against positivism.[7]
Schultz and company are threatening because they use methods impenetrable to most historians and embody a positivist attitude uncongenial to these historians' broader beliefs. To receive Schultz et. al's work as a legitimate entry in the debate—as historians regularly do with the work of colleagues that they disagree with—would mean conceding that the methods psychologists and economists use to understand the world may be just as  useful for understanding medieval times as a trip to the archives. It would be mean recognizing the  importance of statistical literacy, and more terrifying still, accepting that the "subjectivist instincts" which rule so much of the history profession may be inadequate for answering the kind of questions social scientists may ask of them.

But the truth is that an economist and a psychologist do have methods that may be useful for understanding the medieval world. Medievalists should welcome the contributions of social scientists with the same warmness that Schulz and company embraced the research of historians. A past generation of empirical psychologists and economists would not have read 40 tomes on Medieval European society to inform their research. But they have—and created a worthy advance in the literature by doing so. They are not afraid of allowing historians into their debates. There is no reason for the historians to fear the reverse.

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This post discusses both history and behavioral science. If you liked it for the history, you might be interested in some of the popular things I have written on that topic: "History is Written by the Losers," "Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program," "Making Sense of Chinese History," or "A Study Guide For Understanding Human Society." On the other hand, I have also written about psychology: see "Public Opinion in Authoritarian States," "Taking Cross Cultural Psychology Seriously," "So Why Did They Publish Them?", and "Tradition is Smarter Than You Are." To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar's Stage, you can join the Scholar's Stage mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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[1] Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henric, "The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation,"Science, Vol. 366, Issue 6466 (2019).

[2] Tanner Greer, “How the Catholic Church Created Our Liberal World,The American Conservative (17 December 2018); "Taking Cross Cultural Psychology Seriously," The Scholar's Stage (21 Dec 2018).


[3] Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of its Special Path, trans. Gerald Chapple (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).


[4]Emmnauel Todd, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems (Blackwell Publishers, 1989); Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family Property and Social Transition (Hobeken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).


[6] To make this more concrete: think of the research programs of Joseph Henrich, Walter Scheidal, Peter Turchin, and Ara Norenzayan. There are many more scholars I could add to this list, but I this is sufficient for the argument.  

[7] Pseudoerasmus, "La Long Duree Puree," Pseudoerasmus (11 November 2014)

04 November, 2019

Shakespeare : Just What Kind of Writer Was He?

Othello and Desdemona in Venice
by Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856)


Earlier this week I suggested that major authors of world literature could be divided into three categories. Each of the categories is an attitude towards fictional and dramatic narrative. I labeled the three approaches as that of the artificer, the reporter, and the fabulist. In that piece I left unsaid where I think Shakespeare fit into this schema. The short answer: he is an artificer, with a touch of the fabulist thrown in.

That last sentence—and the rest of this post—will make no sense if you have not read that earlier piece. Please do that now. Once you have done that we can continue on to the long answer.

Shakespeare is often hailed a master of "psychological realism." The seed of this claim was planted by Samuel Johnson a few centuries ago. He famously wrote:
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.

...This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

...It will not easily be imagined how much Shakespeare excells in accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every stage but that of Shakespeare. The theatre, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topicks which will never rise in the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation, and common occurrences. [1]
Did Shakespeare have an unusually brilliant grasp on human nature? I think so. But I do not think he was especially invested in having his poetry mirror all that he found in "manners and life." I doubt he ever met a Hamlet or an Othello, a Lear or a Brutus, a Falstaff or a Cleopatra in the flesh. The souls of Shakespeare's most tragic creations are greater than flesh can bear. Antony was a man, says Cleopatra, whose:
legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show'd his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp'd from his pocket.[2]
Matched to Antony was this same Cleopatra, of whom it was said:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies: for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.[3]
How many men and women have you met that deserve such descriptions?

"Shakespeare has no heroes," Johnson maintains, "His scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion."[4] But how rare is the reader who would have braved Lear's storm! How hard is it to find a daughter with the grace of Cordelia, an underling with the loyalty of Kent! These characters are incredible—though I will concede, never inhuman. Shakespeare takes pains to ensure that both the audience and his characters themselves are painfully aware of their mortal frailties. They never rise above the human.  But the protagonists of Shakespeare's histories, tragedies, and romances exist at humanity's outward edge.[5] They are the titans of human life, personalties of untold force, definers of their age.

I suspect this is why Shakespeare was drawn to them. In the majesties of myth and history Shakespeare had his chance to plumb the depths of human depravity and climb the heights of human grandeur. In terms of our schema, this an argument for thinking of Shakespeare as an artificer, not—as Johnson and many of Shakespeare's readers like to view him—as a reporter. Shakespeare was interested in the outer-bounds of human nature. He selected stories for his plays that let him push against these boundaries.

This is less obvious for the comedies than the tragedies. The comedies are more grounded in every-day personalities; they devote their thought experiments to extremes in situation, not extremes in character. Shakespeare was fascinated by the logic of the outer-bound. How far can you push a principle before it falls apart? How far can a virtue be stretched before it redounds on itself? Several of the comedies (Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Comedy of Errors) ask this question of the law, devising situations where impartial application of legal writ leads to obvious (if hilarious) injustice. He poses the same sort of what-ifs about revenge and honor (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet), self-interest or ambition (King John, Richard III, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth), intellect (Love's Labor Lost, Hamlet), and erotic passion (Two Gentleman of Verona, A Midsummer's Night Dream, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra).  He devises plots whose happenings pit a man's private moral code against his public face (Love's Labor Lost, Measure for Measure, King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus)and his appearance against his identity (I will only note here that a full twenty five of Shakespeare's plays use disguise as a central plot device). Several plays go so far as to question whether human language (and art created from it) can capture any underlying reality at all (this is a theme across Shakespeare, but it is especially strong in Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest).

Now it is possible for writers in the reporter corner of the schema to tackle these same themes, but they will rarely rely on extraordinary devices like gender-bending disguise, ghostly apparitions, hidden forest sanctuaries, or fiercely unforgiving legal regimes to so. In this Shakespeare is more Dostoevsky than Balzac. Dostoevsky centers each of his novels on a murder because he believed that such an extreme act brought out the excesses of human nature. Shakespeare is not so reliant on one plot device, but his fascination with the outer edge is the same. Shakespeare was a playwright of depths and peaks. His plays are not sketches of social interaction or studies in the characters of his own life, but enthralling experiments in the psychology that might bring a person to those depths and peaks of human experience.

On this point Johnson was more perceptive:
 Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life.... Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed. [6]
This is likely the best defense that can be mounted against claims that Shakespeare's plays are not properly realistic. One of the most convincing of these critiques came in the 1912 with Edward Stoll's "Criminals in Shakespeare and Science."[7] Stoll's piece was in part a reaction to the new field of criminology, which had sent researchers off to the prisons of France and England to interview murderers and criminals of like viciousness to understand their psychology. They discovered that most of them slept soundly at night. They were not haunted by specters of blood. None had been troubled by daggers floating in the air.  They had murdered and got over it—many were proud of it. Those were real murderers. What grounds then do we have to take seriously the guilt of Macbeth and his wife?

The only convincing answer to this question that I have yet found is this: Shakespeare is the wrong place to look to understand the commonplace criminal. Shakespeare did not intend to describe the median motivations, fears, and dreams of the Elizabethan criminal population. Othello was not writ to portray the psychology of the average wife beater. The average wife beater was only of peripheral interest to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was interested in the titans: Othello is the story of a titan in free fall. How does a titan go from holding up the sky to diving downwards through hell? How could a man as genuinely good as Othello kill a newlywed wife as innocent and virtuous as Desdemona?

Shakespeare's tragedies, romances, and histories worked backwards from questions like these. They could not do otherwise: all were retellings of stories already popular with his audience. Shakespeare's audience already knew that Cressida would betray Troilus, Richard II would lose his crown, Brutus would kill Caesar, Timeon would become a misanthrope, and the Prince of Tyre would lose both daughter and wife only to find them again.  Shakespeare did not invent new tales, but instead found stories that allowed him to open up the aspects of human life he was most interested in exploring.

Yet Shakespeare was not all artifice and thought experiment. Daggers floating in the air and addled kings wandering across the British wilds might be explained through logic of artifice; horses madly eating each other's flesh and hurricanes haunting royalty over the heath can not. Those belong to the world of the fabulist. Happenings like these are allegorical or aesthetic; they are designed to establish specific moods or provide comment on the nature of the action we see before us. Those who champion Shakespeare for the psychological realism of his characters underestimate how deeply the personalities of these characters are shaped by these same allegorical and aesthetic concerns.

I would take the argument one step further: It is through shedding realism these plays gain their power. It is no accident that three of Shakespeare's most thoroughly fantastic plays (Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest) are regarded as three of his best. The image of Mad Lear raging against the cyclone is one of the most powerful expressions of the human condition in world literature—and this because, not in spite of, its disregard for the "real."

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If you liked this post you might also enjoy, "Shakespeare in American Politics" "On Adding Phrases to the Language,"  "Fiction and the Strategist,"   or  "On the Tolkeinic Hero." To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar's Stage, you can join the Scholar's Stage mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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[1] Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," in Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1904), or. pub 1765, accessed here https://www.bartleby.com/39/30.html

[2] Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene II.

[3] Ibid., Act II, Scene II. Somebody is going to try and argue with me in the comments that these quotations exist for rhetorical effect or as windows into the psychology of the speakers. The first a product of Cleopatra's infatuation and unbounded imagination, the second to set off the declaration that Cleopatra is herself a normal mortal who "pants" like the rest of the human race. Both arguments are correct but insufficient. We all know I could hunt down similar excessive descriptions of Macbeth, Goneril, Brutus etc; please don't try and waste my time by requiring me to actually do it!

[4] Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare."

[5] For more on this theme, see A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed (London: MacMillan and Co., 1919), ch. 1.

[6] Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare."

[7]  Elmer Edgar Stoll, "Criminals in Shakespeare and in Science," Modern Philology 10, no. 1 (1912): 55-80. 

This essay is open-access. I recommend reading it in full—it is a good example of what literary criticism could be today if journals forced their writers to stop using dreadful words like "potentialities," "differentiations," "homologous," and so forth.

02 November, 2019

On the Three Basic Types of Literature

This piece began as a continuation of a post I wrote some months ago, "A Study Guide For Human Society, Part I." That post laid out my thoughts on the best way to organize one's history reading. I promised my Patreon subscribers that I would continue the series with a post laying out my personal philosophy for reading literature and behavioral science. That post will be published in a few days. Yet this Part II was growing large and unwieldy; I have decided to trim it down by removing some of its material and making this material its own mini-essay. Consider what follows a footnote to the "Study Guide" series of posts.
Let me propose a schema. I believe all works of narrative or dramatic fiction can be placed into one of three categories. These categories are not a discrete ternary. They are better thought of as a sliding scale, or perhaps something like one of those "political compass" graphs that float around the internet, albeit one with three sides instead of four. Each of the three sides represents a different approach an author might take to characterization, plot, and reality. 

When I say "reality" I mean the world that you and I live in. Fictional narratives are always a mix of the real and the imaginary. In a fantasy or a science fiction novel the breaks with reality are obvious. Our reality is not populated with tiny hobbits or killer robots. Discerning readers will usually only "suspend disbelief" and accept the presence of these beings in a story if other aspects of the story's presentation matches our understanding of how reality works. Other authors might depart from reality purely for aesthetic reasons. Elizabethan playwrights did not have their characters speak poetry on the stage to replicate the way people speak "in real life." They did it because Elizabethan audiences valued verbal artistry and poetic imagery as goods in themselves. But these performances were never just dazzling celebrations of the spoken word (though they certainly were that). The poetry of an Elizabethan soliloquy served narrative ends; the best were superb snippets of characterization, set pieces of human psychology.

The dividing line that separates the good narrative literature from the great lies here. Readers can tolerate terrible plot holes if they believe in the characterization of the fictional men and women who jump through them. An enduring novelist, playwright, or screen writer was first a curious psychologist. These story tellers care about human behavior—what humans do, why they do it, and what might lead them to do something differently.

But a story-weaver can explore why humans do what they do from several angles. Those who prefer the first corner of our compass might be called devisers, artificers, or thought experimenters. The imagination of these men and women is stirred by questions of "what if?" and "how could?". Utopian and dystopian literature is dominated by this impulse; here the what-ifs are asked not about individual people but entire societies. Replace 'societal' with 'technological' and you have described "hard" science fiction. But you find artificers in almost all literary genres. In most of these the what-ifs and how-coulds are psychological. What if there was a normal, bookish guy who got it in his head that he must live above the rest of the human race? Thus Crime and Punishment. How could an honest and unjealous man be convinced to murder his newlywed? Thus Othello. Story telling in this mode is at its base a gigantic, engrossing thought experiment. Of necessity, novels of ideas almost always take this form, and characters in these stories are often meant to embody specific philosophies of life or ways of living. In the hands of less able authors, these characters never rise above rude caricature. But if artificers can yoke their explorations to a character that acts and thinks with the complexity and intensity of a breathing human being—well, then they will have written something that will be remembered.

A second strand in this corner are those writers who embed their experiment not in the characters, but in the situations their characters face. Often these situations are exceptional or extraordinary—think of the biographies of Joseph Conrad's Jim or Kurtz or the strange happenings at Charlotte Brontë's Thornfield Hall—but not absurd or impossible. Conrad had no more personal experience with ruling 'native' kingdoms than Brontë had with mad-wives: those scenarios were put into the plot not because they were common, but because they were strange. Strangeness allows the artificer to explore certain ideas and themes that more conventional plotting would not allow. These are thought experiments for the sake of gripping narrative.

In the opposite corner from the artificers are a group of authors that I might label chroniclers, reporters, or perhaps witnesses. If the artificer builds social worlds out of an imagined scenario, the witness builds her imagined scenarios out of a social world. The witness rarely sketches characters that are 'larger than life': her characters—and their world—simply are life. Or at least life as the witness sees it. The witness concerns herself not with what-if but what is. She is seized with a desire to capture the world as it really is. Oft her characters are pastiches of individuals she has known. Most 'novels of manners' are told from this angle; an honest roman à clef can come from no other. But the work need not be limited to the actual social world of the author: many of the most famed novels of this type, say Eliot's Middlemarch, are works of historical fiction. The setting is less important than a determination to put into story form what human life is really like. The human society so chronicled can be ancient or modern, at war or at peace. That does not matter so much as a commitment to rendering the normal foibles and fancies that set humans apart from each other in whatever setting they are placed. 

One might say that the distinction I drive at here is the difference between Breaking Bad on the one hand and The Wire on the other.  I crown Dostoevsky king of the first style, Austen queen of the second. Of similar focus to Dostoevsky, though differing greatly in style, setting, or theme, we might throw in authors as diverse as Miguel Cervantes, John Milton, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Henrik Ibsen, Joseph Conrad, William Golding, Aldous Huxley, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin. Toward the other side of the sliding scale we might safely put Ben Johnson, Honore Balzac, George Eliot, Erich Maria Remarque, Vasily Grossman, Chinua Achebe, Tom Wolfe, and near every autobiographical novel you have ever read. Some writers swerve between two poles: the Tolstoy of Sevastopol Sketches was a chronicler; the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Ilych an artificer. Cao Xueqin wants to artifice (and with some characters and set-pieces succeeds in his aim) but is fundamentally too in love with the world of his memories to stop himself from reporting on it. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables has a foot in both worlds; I am convinced that Monsieur Thénardier is included in the novel because Hugo thought it would be dishonest to center his story on the saintly criminality of Jean Valjean (a story all artifice) without tempering his tale with more typical criminal thuggery.

The triangle is completed by a third corner. These story tellers believe that central truths of human existence cannot be related through straight forward descriptions of reality. We might call these writers myth-makers, imagineers, or fabulists. Some writers are attracted to fabulism because they believe it is the task of literature to capture the emotional experience that attends human life. Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" is a particularly on-the-nose expression of this philosophy. Joseph Heller's and Franz Kafka's most famous stories are another example of the type; the byzantine bureaucracies that haunt the protagonists of Catch-22 and "The Trial" do not actually exist, but the sense of helplessness and alienation experienced by all whose fates turn on declarations of government machines that these tales invoke is real enough. The countless experiments in unreliable narration, absurdist plot lines, surrealist prose description, or spare minimalism that have marked the last century of high literature all fall in this bucket. The connecting thread here is that they reject realism as insufficient for capturing subjective human experience.

A much older model of fabulism is the construction of actual fables. The elaborate allegories of Spencer's Faery Queen count here; so too do the symbolics of Melville's Moby Dick, and the mythic story-beats of books like Cormac Mcarthey's Blood Meridian. These stories intentionally replace realistic settings and characters with highly stylized creations. Their characters are archetypes; in these stories plotting often takes back seat to aesthetics. I do not know why mythic imagery is so effective at messing with our emotions. But it is. Mythic fabulists give no fealty to psychological realism: the men and women of their stories stride on to the scene like colossi, larger than anything that could fit into an actual human frame. Whether archetype or allegory, it works: their image is impressed upon us. Scenes of their triumph and suffering are seared into our conscious,  all desire for realism defeated.

The magical realists are an obvious example of this sort of thing in modern literature. Fantasy is another especially tempting vehicle for the mythic fabulist (J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings certainly belongs in this corner). But the mere presence of magical tropes does not a myth make: I would classify J.K. Rowling, for example, among the reporters of children's literature, not among its fabulists (much less its devisers!). The world and premise of Potter is fantastical, but the series' appeal is not really found in the fantastic. The real pleasures of reading Rowling come from the grand social web her characters inhabit. Petty squabbles and soppy friendships are the soul of the Potter series. Their setting is almost secondary—you can imagine Harry, Hermione, Ron and company transported to some other place or time and still delivering a riveting adventure.

I originally devised this schema to make sense of my feelings about Shakespeare. But my thoughts on how to evaluate him according to this framework are long, and this footnote to another series of posts is long already. My judgement of how to fit Shakespeare in must be published as its own post.

 [EDIT 6/11/19: That post has now been published. Read it here.]

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If this posts on literature are your thing, consider reading my earlier posts "On Adding Phrases to the Language," "A Non-Western Canon: What Would a List of Humanity's Greatest Writers Look Like?", "Fiction and the Strategist,"   or  "On the Tolkeinic Hero." To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar's Stage, you can join the Scholar's Stage mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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30 October, 2019

Travels and Meet Ups: Nov-Dec 2019

I will be traveling a bit over the next few months. I have decided to set up a few public meet-ups on these travels; anybody who reads the Scholar's Stage is invited. These are the dates and locations:

Taipei, Taiwan — 9 November (Saturday), 6:00 PM-9:00 PM(ish)

San Fransisco, California —18 December (Wednesday), 5:30 PM-10:00 PM(ish)

Salt Lake City, Utah — 21 December (Saturday), 1:00 PM-4:00 PM

 You do not need to be anybody "special" to attend. When traveling I usually prioritize meetings with individuals that can serve as sources in my reporting. Upon reflection, I feel like this is rather miserly. The events listed above are intended for me to have a chance to meet and thank the normal people who read, share and support this blog.

If you would like to attend, please contact me via private message on Patreon (if you are a patron) or through my Scholar's Stage e-mail, which is listed in the side-bar. I will tell you the location of the venue after you have contacted me. Attendees in Taiwan will learn the location quite soon. Those in the other two cities must wait a bit longer—the venue will not be decided until I have a firmer idea of the head count. The times are intended to be flexible; nobody is obligated to stay for the entire event, and some will arrive late to it.

My time in San Fransisco and Salt Lake City will be very limited, and I likely will not have much time to meet people outside of these meetings. If you are in southern Utah or northern Arizona there is a small—but not impossible—chance I could meet you in the week following Christmas. Send details to me privately and I will see if I can make it work.

On twitter I mentioned the possibility of a similar series of meet-ups along the Acela Corridor (the locations will probably be DC, Philadelphia, and New York). That will not happen until 2020; details for those meet-ups will not be announced until after the New Year. Please reserve requests to attend those until after their dates have been set.

25 October, 2019

A Non-Western Canon: What Would a List of Humanity's 100 Greatest Writers Look Like?


Harold Bloom is dead. His death has prompted one final, staggered brawl between the exhausted ranks who have spent away their strength with three decades of culture warring. My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. With the concept of a 'canon' or a 'classic' I have no argument. It seems obvious to me that some works are better than others and more obvious still that if a book is still being read several centuries after it was written it is likely one of those better works–or barring that, a work whose intellectual or artistic legacy makes it a necessary piece of the larger puzzle. The trouble with Bloom was not his elephant love for the canon, but his inability to articulate anything but this passion (and disgust with those who sought to defile it). The truth is that Bloom adds nothing to the great works he champions. This weakness is seen most clearly in his many volumes on Shakespeare; in less exaggerated form it mars the judgments Bloom throws around in The Western Canon or Genius

Bloom declares where he should argue, emotes where he should analyze, and effuses where he should unveil. Bloom deplored young Hal to the center of his bones; his love for Falstaff soaked through his soul down into his toes. You'll discover this within a minute of reading any of Bloom's criticism of the Bard. Upon Falstaff  he bestows the title "the grandest personality in all of Shakespeare."[1] But peer at his pages long enough and you quickly realize the truth: Bloom asserts this title; he does not argue for it, much less prove it. He rarely bothered trying to prove anything. Instead he stacks his pages with one overwrought judgement after another–and the best of these judgements are usually not even his, but some quote lifted from Hazlitt, Johnson, or some other ancient critic.

Bloom read all of the ancient critics. Bloom's erudition was his genius. He was staggeringly, smashingly, outlandishly well read. What could be read, he did read. Harold Bloom, champion avatar of librarians everywhere! This was the source of his cultural authority. He can declare that Moliere is one of the three—and three only!—playwrights of the last six hundred years that deserve canonization because he has read them all, damn't. He should know; you should trust him.

But if Bloom's prodigious reading was his rest and his strength, it was also, I suspect, key to his failures. He analyzes great works of art not through the eyes of a poet or a novelist or a playwright—that is, through the lens of their actual creators—but through the lens of reading. The original theoretical technique of his earlier days (the theory which made him a literary name) was exactly this: categorize authors by their reading habits, build fancy lineages of who read who through whom, and argue that great literature can be reduced to great minds trying to negotiate a space in the shadow of their own favorites. This is all great fun. Sometimes these classification games are even insightful. But peruse his books and you are left with the sense that Bloom cannot really do much else. He can put works into lists and lineages and into buckets of mutual influence. But ask him to bridge these works to the world of living men and women and you will be met with silence. Bloom strikes me as a man who experienced life entirely through the written word. The tangible world outside of literary images lies beyond him. [2] This is a shame; there is nothing essentially wrong with the ideals of folks like Bloom, who would fill those god-shaped holes in our souls with the great books of the ages. But that means demonstrating how a great work confronts the same problems that trouble real people in the dust-stained realms beyond the ivory towers. This task is an inescapable part of that project. Bloom was not capable of that; I doubt he saw the need for even trying.

 Like Walt Whitman (who makes Bloom's canon short list), his greatest virtue was his bounding enthusiasm for what he loved. He cried to the skies "How awe-inspiring! How wonderstruck am I!" Enthusiasm is infectious; for many fans the wonder stuck. Yet no matter how wonder-filled, his prose was never wonderful. He writes no turn of phrase for your copy book. His actual ideas are either too zany ("Shakespeare invented the human") or too banal ("Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's star creations") to take seriously.  Bloom dealt in tautologies. In so many superlatives, he would have you believe that Iago bedazzles because he is the most captivating villain of Western literature, or that Jane Austen is a classic because her novels are immortal. Tautologies all—and tautologies that ultimately come down to Bloom's personal taste. He really likes some things, he really doesn’t like others, and he has read so much that you are supposed to trust him when he divides one from the other. I find this personally difficult: I set out this year to read every play of Shakespeare’s—I finished Lear four nights ago—and I am finding that the more I read the less I trust Bloom's judgements. Harold Bloom was a man that read much, effused more, but discerned little.

(As an aside, this Goodreads review of Bloom's ouvre tracks my feelings pretty well).

But the common criticism of Bloom has nothing to do with any of that. Bloom is disliked because his canon is parochial, Western, and white. Were it offered in good faith, this would be fair criticism. Only a fraction of humanity's greatest works were written by Europeans and Americans between 1500 and 1900 AD. Humanity is larger than one continent; our experience broader than those four centuries. Sadly, this idea is rarely argued in good faith. Bloom's critics want to destroy all notions of canon, not expand it. But what if we did want to expand it? What if we were to include the great classics of Indic, Sinic, and Islamicate civilization in our list of great books? What would a truly global canon look like?

I advance this notion as a thought experiment. Perhaps it is a bit of a parlor game, but it is not without precedent. Advocates of 'great books' and 'the Western canon' often speak in terms of a civilization-spanning "great conversation," with philosophers, theologians, poets, and novelists sharing in one dialogue that stretches across the ages. But this conversation was mostly constructed post-hoc in the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th. If there was a literary canon before that moment, it consisted mostly of poetry, and all of that poetry was in English. This canon included both long epics like Spencer's Fairy Queen and lyric poems, many of which are little remembered today and never included in great books syllabi. Yes, education in those days was rooted in the "classics," but a classical education in Latin and Greek was nothing like an education in literature or philosophy today. In most centuries preceding the invention of the Western canon the focus of classical studies was composition, rhetoric and grammar; a man educated in the classics spent equal time on Horace, Quintilian, and Terence as they did on Virgil (and more than they spent on Homer). Reading Sophocles was a philological exercise.

In those days, Dante's Inferno (which is universally acknowledged as a central work of the Canon today) was not part of the English-language "conversation." How could it have been? It was not translated into English until the 19th century, and with the exception of a brief moment in the Renaissance when Italian was one of the proper languages of the literary "Renaissance man," Italian was not a focus of upper-class education in the English speaking world. Under the influence of the classical model of education, which did not distinguish literature from language, most American universities that did teach Dante only taught him in Italian to students of that language. Foreign literature in English translation was vulgar. Those translations were to be read in the drawing room, not the school house.

The great books style of education changed this. Americans had never trucked with the classical education model as happily as the English aristocrats did; when the model began to disappear from American life in the late 1800s they began searching for something more democratic. The greatest classics of world literature and philosophy, taught and read in the English vernacular, did the job. But what should be included? So began the job of sorting which titles made the lists and which did not. Dante was in; Spencer was out. A new canon was born. [3]

If Dante, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Kant, Nietzche, and Marx could be canonized in the early 20th century (and a dozen works of English literature thrown out to make room for them), there is no reason we could not do something similar today, adding in other truly great works that only recently entered the Western stream but have been tempering souls for millennia in the currents of other cultures. I divide these currents of culture into four broad categories (though there are overlaps and intersections in the 'conversations' between them): the Western tradition, which my readers will be most familiar with; the East Asian tradition, which began in ancient China but which also properly includes the literature of Vietnam, Korea, and Japan; the Indic tradition, which begins with the Sanskrit and Pali classics of Ancient India and continues through to modern South Asia, Tibet, and Southeast Asia; and the Islamicate tradition, which was written in classical Arabic, Persian, or their successor languages in Central Asia and the Near East.

The list that follows is tentative. It is a thought experiment, an exploration. I have not read every author listed. Selections which I have not yet read are included on the strength of their reputation and the size of their later influence. Readers will notice that my list differs from Bloom's in some key ways. He includes only literature, giving no space to theologians, philosophers, or political theorists. He also restricts his choices to 'modern' world of literature written in vernacular tongues. In contrast, I include the ancients along with the moderns, the philosophers alongside the poets. When I reduce all of Western thought to 30 authors it is truly all of Western thought I am reducing.

Well, not quite. My lists—especially the Western one—are idiosyncratic. That is inevitable: any list like this will reflect the concerns and tastes of it compiler. As I see it, there are three broad reasons a work might end up on a list of "great books." The first is that the work is a vehicle for immense beauty or stunning insight. This is necessarily subjective. My decision to include the Icelandic Sagas instead of the Nibelungenlied was made on these grounds. Both show the West's Germanic heritage; both provide a picture of less-than-heaven-centered Medieval minds at work. But at the end of my day, the emotional journey Njal's Saga and its kin took me on was filled with terrible meaning. The Nibelungenlied I just found terribly interesting.

The second reason an author may be included is that the ideas or the imagery associated with his or her work has been so influential that these writings (or misinterpretations of it) changed everything that came after. To understand the 'after' you must first understand the before. Regardless of whether you agree with their ideas found in Plato's dialogues, the Upanisads, or the Analects, each of these collections must be included in our list of global classics on these grounds. There is nothing subjective about this judgement, though the apparent importance of this sort of thinker may wane as we move further away from him or her in time. It is for this reason I never seriously considered adding Hegel or Freud to the list, though they often appear on many other lists of this type. These thinkers were wrong. Their ideas were appallingly ill thought out. Everybody admits this; few living readers find anything redeeming in their philosophy. When they are studied today it is usually because of the influence they had on their contemporaries. But that influence has ended. We are barely a century away from Freud and already he is obsolete; I cannot imagine he will be anything more than a historical footnote in two more centuries time. In contrast, no matter how much I detest him (and detest him I do), Plato will certainly still be debated two centuries hence. He must stay.

The third reason to include an author is because his or her work is the most brilliant or the most distinctive expression of a certain stand point or ethos. These perspectives simply must be grappled with. I do not believe as Dante, Machiavelli, Rosseau or Nietzche did. I do believe that every thoughtful person must spend time wrestling against the ethos each embodies. I would believe this even if their ideas had waned in influence (as Dante's arguably have). It is rare to find someone who thinks highly of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism, but it is a poor ethicist who has not tussled with them all (in this case, through the works of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill).

These are the positive arguments for including a thinker on the list. To this I add a negative argument, the central reason for which I exclude names from it. This reason will strike some readers as strange, even unforgivable. But I am unapologetic: I refuse to give any space to authors whose central contribution was in metaphysics. I view the entire field as a series of unanswerable pseudo-questions; its debates are of no more interest to the business of human life than hair-splitting arguments in alchemy and astrology. Religious faith may force certain metaphysical commitments upon you: those commitments, and their implications for the wider world of human action, are worth studying. On the opposite side, empiricism, mathematics, and the natural science have revealed many wonderful things to us about the workings of our universe. These things deserve to be studied deeply (though I do not think 'great works' is the ideal way to do so). In between the range of science and revelation lies a vast wasteland of metaphysical "sophistry and illusion." With Hume I cry: "Commit it then to the flames!"[4]

Thus Leibniz and Descartes have no place on my list. I am interested first and foremost in the realms of decision, action, and meaning. Ethicists, who ask "what should man do?" and "what should man value?" deserve their place in the pantheon. So do political theorists, who ask those same questions of human communities. Epistemologists ("how do we know what we know?") are at their strongest when they are at their most practical. The less metaphysics are involved in any of their theories, the better. This is especially true in a project like this, which gladly crashes millennia length traditions into each other to see what will emerge. One reason I find Warring States philosophy so compelling is relative ease with which their ethical and political programs can be decoupled from the metaphysical fancies of ancient China. This is harder with Western and Islamic ethical theory, and harder still with the classics of ancient India. The ethics and epistemology of the ancient Indians is trussed to their metaphysics; these metaphysical commitments become a stumbling block for those who do not share them.

That is the logic of the lists. They were fun to create. However, here I must admit blemish. My acquaintance with each of the great traditions is not equal. The poets and thinkers in the East Asian bucket are the ones I know best. I have read every one of the authors there listed save three. I do not have quite as strong a record on the Western list, but a pretty strong one nonetheless. It is with the Islamicate and Indic traditions I turn weakling. I have explicitly left several spots in both groups blank. The two empty slots early in the Islamicate tradition list is intended for the hadith and the most important names from the world of fiqh. I suspect two spots may not be enough for these things, and cannot pretend to be familiar enough with them to know who the most important names in hadith compilation and Islamic jurisprudence are or how many spots they might need. The empty slots at the end of that list are intended for the last five centuries of Islamicate literature and thought. Works in Urdu and Turkish have just as strong a claim in these centuries as works in Arabic or Persian, though again, I must admit I am not familiar enough with the intellectual or literary course of these centuries to  discern the awesome works of this era from those merely prominent.

A similar concern convinced me to leave open the last few slots on the Indic tradition list. These spots could be given to the ancient Tamil poems, none of which I have read. They also, perhaps, could go to the titans of India's 'vernacular' literature (of which, again, I must admit ignorance).

Yet I am troubled with deeper concerns about the Indic list. I might state them as thus:

 In classical India, human pursuit was said to be divided into four grand categories: moksha, artha, kama, and dharma. The first eleven titles of the Indic list are divided more or less equally between the four pursuits, with kama getting the short end of stick. This balance was not hard to achieve. With the exception of a few of the Upanisads, I have read, either in abridgment or in whole, every one of the authors/texts included (and between the Indian Sourcebook in Philosophy and the Clay Sanskrit Library I have been exposed to many other writers of "classical" India that I judge to have not made the cut). But as we move closer to the second millennium of the common era my knowledge thins. This era—the period from 700-1400 AD—marks the advent of Advaita Vedanta and Vaishnavism, the ascendance of bhakti practices, the death of Buddhist devotion, and the armed introduction of Islam to the subcontinent. Sadly, my knowledge of these events is absurdly superficial. I have not yet read any of the texts I listed for this era, nor even read about most of them except in the most cursory fashion. There is a high probability I have missed someone important or included someone who, for all their merits, does not deserve the honor. In fact, I feel like this must be the case, for the diversity of classical India disappears in these selections. If the first half of the list divides itself among moksha, artha, kama and dharma; the second half (as far as I understand thinkers I know by reputation only) is devoted entirely to moksha. Did Indians stop thinking about power, justice, beauty, and human love in the  Middle Ages? Was there no thought but for release and religious devotion? I cannot believe it. This imbalance probably reflects my ignorance more than it does the tradition I am drawing from.

I encourage readers more knowledgable of these two traditions than myself to provide their own suggestions or lists in the comments.

Below is the list. I chose names, not books, but with each name I have linked to a book you could find in a book store or library if you wished to read through the canon yourself.

A GLOBAL CANON

THE WESTERN CANON

1. THE HOLY BIBLE
2. HOMER
3. SOPHOCLES
4. THUCYDIDES
5. PLATO
6. ARISTOTLE
7. VIRGIL
8. OVID
9. EPICTETUS
10. AUGUSTINE
11. ICELANDIC SAGAS
12. THOMAS AQUINAS
13. DANTE ALIGHIERI
14. NICOLO MACHIAVELLI
15. MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
16. MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE
17. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
18. JOHN MILTON
19. DAVID HUME
20. JEAN-JACQUES ROSSSEAU
21. IMMANUEL KANT
22. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
23. HONORE DE BALZAC
24. KARL MARX
25. LEO TOLSTOY
26. JOHN STUART MILL
27. GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS)
28. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
29. FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
30. MARCEL PROUST

THE EAST ASIAN CANON

1. CONFUCIUS
2. MOZI
3. DAO DE JING
4. MENCIUS (+GREAT LEARNING and DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN)
5. ZHUANGZI
6. XUNZI
7. HAN FEI
8. SIMA QIAN
9. TAO QIAN
10. PLATFORM SUTRA (+HEART SUTRA and DIAMOND SUTRA)
11. LI BAI
12. DU FU
13. MURASAKI SHIKUBU
14. THE HEIKE MONOGATARI
15. YOSHIDA KENKO
16. ZHUXI
17. SU SHI (SU DONGPO)
18. HONEN/SHINRAN/NICHIREN DEBATES
19. SHI NAI'AN
20. WANG YANGMING
21. WU CHENG'EN
22. CAO XUEQIN
23. NGUYEN DU
24. LU XUN
25. NATSUME SOSEKI

THE INDIC CANON

1. THE UPANISADS
2. ASHVAGHOSHA
3. PALI CANON (e.g., selected discourses from the SUTTA PITAKA)
4. MAHABHARATA
5. THE NYAYA SUTRAS
6. THE YOGA SUTRAS
7. RAMAYANA
8. LAWS OF MANU (MANUSMRITI)
9. KAUTILYA
10. THE LOTUS SUTRA 
11. KALIDASA
12. NAGARJUNA
13. SANTIDEVA
14. JAYANTA BHATTA
15. GAUDAPADA
16. THE BHAGAVATA PURANA
17. ADI SHANKARA
18. RAMANUJA
19. JAYADEVA
20. THE YOGA-VASISTHA
21. [----]
22. [----]
23. [----]
24. [----]
25. MAHATMA GANDHI


THE ISLAMICATE CANON

1. THE QURAN
2. IBN ISHAQ
3. [----]
4. [----]
5. JARIR AL-TABARI
6. AL FARABI
7. FERDOWSI
8. AL GHAZALI
9. IBN RUSHD
10. RUMI
11. NIZAMI GANJAVI
12. IBN TUFAIL
13. SAADI
14. ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS
15. HAFEZ
16. IBN KHALDUN
17. BABUR
18. [----]
19. [----]
20. [----] [5]


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If you would like to read more about philosophers and historians I especially cherish, consider reading this piece on Ibn Khaldun, this one on Sima Qian, this one on Thucydides, or my 2014 post on Quantum Libraries.  To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar's Stage, you can join the Scholar's Stage mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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[1] Harold Bloom, Falstaff: Give Me Life (New York: Scribner, 2017), 50.

[2] Relevant here is Truman G. Madsen's critique of Bloom's claim (made in claim in American Religion) that Mormons had abandoned the ethos and impulse of Joseph Smith for corporate respectability: "With a clipboard and a gifted interview style, Bloom might have consulted a fair sample of recent converts to the LDS Church. If he did not impose his paradoxical indifference to self-awareness, he could glimpse what is stirring and moving in their lives [instead of speculating based off of Church PR reports]. Truman Madsen, "Four LDS Views of Harold Bloom: A Roundtable," BYU Studies 35, iss 1 (1995), 188. 

[3] Some helpful texts here include David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 25-98; Marianne Montgomery, Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 (Ashgate: Burlington, VT: 2012), 6-15; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Caroline Winterer, Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 152-179; William Scott Rule, "Seventy Years of Changing Great Books at St. John's College," Dissertation, Georgia State University (2009), 1-123.

[4] David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Section IV, Part I.

[5] For the curious, I made a count of which languages are represented in these works. The Bible is divided between classical Hebrew and ancient Greek; Gandhi between Gujarati and English. I considered dividing Milton between Latin and English (which he would have approved of), but decided against it. Milton's works in Latin have left only a threadbare memory. 

19 - Classical Sanskrit
18 - Classical Chinese
6.5 - Ancient Greek
 9 - Arabic
5.5 - English
 5- Persian
 5 - French
 4 - Classical Japanese
 4 - Latin
 3 - German
 2 - Russian
 2 - Italian
 1 - Old Norse
 1 - Chagatai
 1 - Vietnamese
 1 - Modern Mandarin Chinese
 1 - Modern Japanese
 .5 - Gujarati
 .5 - Classical Hebrew