There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because they ‘give a false picture of life’—in other words, deceive their readers.

I trust that what has already been said about egoistic castle-building [i.e. the reader lives vicariously as the hero of the story] forearms us against this error. Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content. To be sure, the show of such realism which deceives the mere castle-builder would not deceive a literary reader. If he is to be deceived, a much subtler and closer resemblance to real life will be required. But without some degree of realism in content—a degree proportional to the reader’s intelligence—no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth. The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. the real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’. For some at least of such comments must be false. To be sure, no novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 67-8

The last part makes it clear that he does think some literature is dangerous; but it’s dangerous in ways different from how many people imagine.

Jewett had an odd fascination with her initials; she would carve them on random items, including the window pane of her room, which you can see in the photograph. Jewett’s house is interesting as a representative of Georgian architecture, especially its colorful wallpaper and the hand-carved wood of its central, slightly sagging, staircase. Inside, overlooking downtown South Berwick, we were told plausibly that not much of the view had changed in the last 150 years.

Nearby is the Nubble Lighthouse. Although termed a “savage rock” by one mariner in 1602, it took almost three hundred years (and at least one local wreck) before the United States constructed a lighthouse on Nubble Island, literally a stone’s throw from the mainland. Though only slightly removed in space, the picturesque lighthouse seems to be in a different age from the masses of people teeming along the opposing shoreline or sipping lemonade and grilling among the hundreds of RVs lined up just down the road. It fascinates me how something built as a matter of life and death is now one of the most popular postcard images. (Turning the profound into the mundane is common in New England: the Revolutionary Battle Road is now a bike trail; “Patriot” is as likely to be the name of a dry cleaners as anything else).

A few weeks ago I finished David McCullough’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography. I started the book mainly because I enjoyed McCullough’s history of the Brooklyn Bridge, and when I find an author I like I try to read his other books.

Even though I think some of Truman’s policies as President were misguided, and I despise some of his campaign tactics (I have in mind the egregious populist speeches during his presidential campaign), I still find myself liking him as a person.

For one thing, he genuinely cared about people. Truman’s whistle-stop campaign trips, which his staff found exhausting, never seemed to tire him because he so much loved being able to talk to people face-to-face. Truman was pioneering in pushing rights for minorities even when it was politically dangerous to do so (Strom Thurmond almost split apart the Democratic Party over race issues, running against Truman in 1948).

The 1948 campaign brought out another trait of Truman I admire: an imperturbable sense of optimism. Almost everyone including his own staff thought he would lose the 1948 election (you’ve probably seen that famous picture of Truman holding aloft the Chicago Tribune headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”). But Truman was convinced he would win, and he even had fairly accurate predications about how the electoral votes would go. More generally, he was optimistic about the democratic process even though he knew well how treacherous people can be. In other words, his knowledge of mankind’s sin nature didn’t make him a cynic; I wish I knew his formula.

Truman’s honesty and integrity are what great men of his time, such as Winston Churchill and George Marshall, admired about him. Unlike his predecessor, FDR, who would tell people whatever he thought that person should hear, Truman prided himself on his “straight-talk.” Often he did what he thought was right, though enormously unpopular. For example, Truman fired Douglas MacArthur when the rest of the country worshiped the man.

McCullough doesn’t try to hide Truman’s blemishes. Truman had a bad temper; usually he would vent by writing a long letter to the offending party and never sending it (something I’ve tried a couple of times now with email and with success). But in a famous incident he actually mailed a letter to a man who had unfavorably reviewed the professional singing of Truman’s daughter, a letter in which Truman threatened to beat up the reviewer. At first Truman’s daughter was certain that her father would not use such language.

I wish McCullough had better accounted for Truman’s campaign demagoguery. Uncharacteristically, he made personal attacks and played loose with the facts. Was it just an at-any-costs attempt to get votes? Or was he overly caught up in the spirit of competition?

I’d also like to better understand the cronyism of his early political career. Truman’s rise to the Senate occurred largely in thanks to Missouri Democratic machine boss Tom Pendergast, and all his life Truman had the idea that party loyalty should be rewarded with appointments. I wonder if that way of thinking was less objectionable during his time than ours.

I get the sense that McCullough thinks one’s religious beliefs are mostly incidental, as we get few glimpses of Truman’s. In his early married life he was an Episcopalian, but in Washington as President he attended a Baptist church. Was there any particular reason for the switch? Was religion important to Truman’s ethical thinking, or was it just a social event? McCullough doesn’t tell us.

Finally, I enjoyed reading about Truman’s friendship with Dean Acheson. The men were quite different with regards to education and personality, but they had a warm relationship even years after Truman was in office.

Many circumstances beyond Truman’s career brought him to the presidency: Pendergast’s anointing, the 1944 political landscape, and FDR’s death. But he was a Horatio Alger kind of president: mostly self-educated, from the Heartland, plain-spoken, and a man of integrity. It’s hard to imagine that any time soon his successors will be like him.

The press also applauded Hanks when he was asked if he had been under any pressure by the Greek Orthodox community, of which he and his wife Rita Wilson are members. “No, absolutely not,” he replied. “My heritage and that of my wife communicates that our sins have been taken away, not our brains.

“I view this film as I would any number of films,” he continued, “as a great opportunity to discuss and to perhaps clarify one’s own feelings about their place in the universe and the cosmos and the mind of God. This was just one of a great many pieces of fiction that could spur, I think, a better understanding of that for the individual.

I’m not sure how a mystery thriller is supposed to be “a great opportunity to discuss and to perhaps clarify one’s own feelings about their place in the universe and the cosmos and the mind of God,” but then again I’m among the half-dozen people that haven’t read the book or seen the movie.

What I have observed is a disproportionate amount of skepticism directed at orthodox Christianity, something Joseph Loconte addressed in today’s OpinionJournal (HT: SharperIron). I think he’s right: let’s spread the skepticism around.

[C. S.] Lewis, I suspect, would also point out that theories about massive coverups presented in fanciful works such as “The Da Vinci Code” ignore an elephant-sized fact: There are any number of people and events in the Bible that are frankly embarrassing to believers. Recall, for example, that the family tree of the Messiah includes a prostitute (Rahab), a king who commits adultery and murder (David) and another king who leads his nation headlong into religious idolatry (Manasseh). Yet the earliest Christians failed to excise these characters from their story.

The first “conspiracy theory” about Jesus, in fact, actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew. After the crucifixion, religious leaders ask Pontius Pilate to post a guard at the tomb of Jesus because they suspect his disciples “may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead.” Why keep a story about a possible conspiracy lodged at the heart of your sacred text if you’re determined to cover up a deception about the credibility of that text?

Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation. “I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds,” Lewis explained. “I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.”

Sounds like good advice to moviegoers this week–for the skeptics as well as the faithful.

After hearing an interesting NPR interview with Christine Rosen, author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, I thought her book would describe why she left “fundamentalism.” Other books do that: Leaving the Fold is a collection of testimonies of former “fundamentalists” who end up everywhere from milquetoast Christianity to bizarre spiritualistic cults. What Leaving the Fold lacks and what I hoped to find in My Fundamentalist Education is a tempered view of fundamentalism that recognizes good among the bad. In that regard Rosen’s book seemed promising: to NPR she said that fundamentalism had encouraged her interest in reading and her curiosity about the world.

But Rosen’s book was disappointing. Not because she presents a lop-sided attack against fundamentalism–the opposite is the case; her childhood experience seems mostly positive, if quirky–but because she has almost no analysis at all. At the close of the last chapter, her parents are about to transfer the twelve-year-old to another, non-fundamentalist Christian school, and then we learn in the epilogue that today she no longer considers herself religious. That’s quite a change from the little girl who once memorized numerous Bible verses and wanted to save the souls of all her friends and family. What happened? Rosen doesn’t tell us.

Instead, we get over two hundred pages about life at Keswick Christian School in St. Petersburg, mixed with stories about visits every other weekend to “Biomom,” her term for her divorced mother. As someone who’s had a fundamentalist education, I think her portrayal of school sounds about right, and she makes an important distinction among evangelicals in general and fundamentalists and charismatics in particular (though without elaborating on the distinctions). Some descriptions seem exaggerated, such as her exceptional reverence for Jews (though I agree one is not likely to find antisemitism among evangelicals) and her classmates’ nightmares about the End Times. I credit most of those exaggerations to the perspective of a pre-teen.

Part-way through the book, the descriptions start to get tedious. I kept thinking: Rosen, we get it. You studied the Bible–a lot–and everyone at Keswick was at least a little weird; now draw some conclusions. For example, in a chapter titled “Here Comes the Son,” Rosen talks about fundamentalist eschatology, the study of the End Times. Rosen is a historian by training, so one might expect her to compare the theology of movies like A Thief in the Night, shown to her school, to the similar, recent best-selling Left Behind series. Or she might say something about Christian eschatology throughout history. She doesn’t. Also, Rosen notes the tension between the creationism Keswick taught and the theory of evolution, which she first learned about in a secular science camp. Why did the latter win out in her mind? We’re left wondering.

From clues scattered throughout the book, readers can speculate about the forces that brought about her conversion away from fundamentalism. For one thing, her father, step-mother and grandparents, seemingly not religious themselves, did not support her fundamentalist views. So perhaps they influenced her thinking. Also, Rosen hints that fundamentalists just aren’t very smart: reading a story about a fundamentalist trying to evangelize a doctor, the young Rosen thinks the doctor comes off looking intelligent and his would-be proselytizer, boorish. At another point her school librarian is befuddled at the mention of evolution. Maybe Rosen wants us to see her change as a matter of steadily increasing enlightenment.

Wall Street Journal reviewer Alan Crawford has another idea: class pride.

Twelve years old then but in her early 30s today, Ms. Rosen is a vivid writer with an enviable memory for the revealing detail. But what she remembers about her Keswick years suggests that her biggest objection to fundamentalism and fundamentalists was less moral and theological than aesthetic.

Keswick mothers, she writes, “were women with home permanents, not salon coiffures, and they wore vinyl mock-croc pumps and polyester-blend dresses from Sears.” Teachers, both male and female, were also partial to polyester. The female musicians who performed at the school smelled of Aqua Net, and the missionaries who came to share their stories invariably had “out-of-date clothes” and “badly cut hair.”

The pews in the school chapel were “upholstered in an unfortunate pea-green color,” and the Good News Bible Club that she joined met “in a musty, decaying house painted in a disturbing lime green color.” The “old, disheveled lady” who hosted the club “served stale cookies and tepid Juicy Juice.” This woman also “had the sort of girlish crush on Jesus that only a disappointed spinster who’d spent too many years leading children’s Bible studies could nourish.” She read to the children with her Bible balanced on her knees and her “thick socks rolling down her legs.”

Sometimes these unattractive and unsophisticated people could also be downright embarrassing. The local Jehovah’s Witness missionary had a “strange smell,” for example, and one of Keswick’s Bible teachers was a legless Vietnam veteran “whose biblical knowledge was impeccable, but his nonscriptural musings were infected with malapropisms.” He said “reprehend” when he meant “comprehend.”

Such descriptions may well be accurate, and they also betray the extent to which social class can influence religious beliefs–one’s own and one’s attitudes toward those of others. Only on the penultimate page of “My Fundamentalist Education” does Ms. Rosen acknowledge that her Keswick experience “gave me a profound respect for my fellow human beings”–not evident from her descriptions of them–and afforded her serious academic benefits. The peculiar rigor of the school’s approach, for example, “taught me the value of reading, the usefulness of memorization, and the importance of speaking and writing clearly.”

These are, of course, precisely the qualities that many public schools are struggling to inculcate in their students, all too often with little success. Had Ms. Rosen explored how Keswick managed to accomplish this considerable feat, and what it felt like to be a child learning to love the written word in this eccentric environment, she might have made a greater contribution to the literature of American education. She might also have offered a way for people on one side of the so-called culture war to better understand those on the other. As it is, “My Fundamentalist Education may be regarded, because of its unkind tone, as another salvo in that struggle, which is probably not what the author intended.

I think Crawford is about right: Rosen seems interested more in the trappings of fundamentalism than in being one herself. When she describes her religious experiences, it usually strikes me that she’s missing the point. For example, when she “hustled [herself] to the front of the chapel to join the many other ‘just-in-case’ supplicants at the altar” (p. 126), it was because she imagined that otherwise she’d suffer the fate of Patty, the decapitated protagonist of A Thief in the Night. The adventurous life of missionaries allured her, and she wanted to save friends and family from Hell, but as far as I know nowhere does young Rosen claim to have had faith in Christ herself. Even her repeated bathtub “baptisms” seem to have everything to do with Biomom’s superstitions. Other remarks are uncharacteristic of fundamentalists. For instance, she writes that “the only inclination to vice I could identify in myself was a longing for my own at-home video-game arcade” (p. 124). Part of being a fundamentalist involves expecting Christ to save you from your sins; that’s tough to do if you don’t think you are a sinner.

By excluding her analysis and leaving us to guess why she left fundamentalism (or whether she actually was a fundamentalist), Rosen left out much of what could have been the most interesting part of the book.

What, I ask, were her first impressions of him? “Oh, I loved him. Loved him, of course I did. I was in the kitchen helping Mrs Moore with the hen food when I first met him. I turned round and knew this was something momentous. Jack was naturally very gregarious, he liked exchanging ideas. He enjoyed the pub, and walking.

“I had read the Screwtape Letters and, being a good little Catholic at that time, his famous book Christian Behaviour, but I didn’t know then that Jack Lewis was CS Lewis. I had no idea. Two weeks later I saw his books on the shelf, then I made the connection. I realised that this man I was staying with was my literary hero.

“I didn’t know where to put myself. I couldn’t look at him or speak to him for about a week because I knew from reading his books that he understood human nature horribly well and I just thought, ‘He will know all my faults, all my nasty little foibles’. I felt completely exposed. I got over it, of course.”

Curiously, C.S. Lewis wasn’t Freud’s only connection with the famous. Through C.S. Lewis she met J.R.R. Tolkien and Alexander Fleming, “about the time he was developing penicillin.” Her son married Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, and her husband is the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

Some classical music is enjoyable.
Some concertos are not enjoyable.
Therefore, some concertos are not classical music.

This is an invalid syllogism, so it can’t be “sound,” because a “sound” syllogism is one that is valid and has true premises. But that didn’t stop numerous students who went on to evaluate the truth of the premises.

Here’s what surprised me: quite a few concluded that this was an unsound syllogism, because the first premise is false. In other words, they believe that no classical music is enjoyable, and they said so directly in their explanations.

They’ve never enjoyed a piece of classical music? That’s like saying you’ve never been in love or never laughed. It reminded me of a passage from a book that influenced me when I was a freshman in college, written about college students twenty years ago: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.

The power of music in the soul—described to Jessica marvelously by Lorenzo in the Merchant of Venice—has been recovered after a long period of desuetude. And it is rock music alone that has effected this restoration. Classical music is dead among the young. This assertion will, I know, be hotly disputed by many who, unwilling to admit tidal changes, can point to the proliferation on campuses of classes in classical music appreciation and practice, as well as performance groups of all kinds. Their presence is undeniable, but they involve not more than 5 to 10 percent of the students. Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they like it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America. Many, or even most, of the young people of that generation also swung with Benny Goodman, but with an element of self-consciousness—to be hip, to prove they weren’t snobs, to show solidarity with the democratic ideal of a pop culture out of which would grow a new high culture. So there remained a class distinction between high and low, although private taste was beginning to create doubts about whether one really like the high very much. But all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music. This is a constant surprise to me. And one of the strange aspects of my relations with good students I come to know well is that I frequently introduce them to Mozart. This is a pleasure for me, inasmuch as it is always pleasant to give people gifts that please them. It is interesting to see whether and in what ways their studies are complemented by such music. But this is something utterly new to me as a teacher; formerly my students usually knew much more classical music than I did.

The Closing of the American Mind page 69

Steven Vincent authored In the Red Zone almost a year before he was murdered in Basra, Iraq. When I read about his death, I knew I had to read the book. A freelance journalist (actually a former art critic), he wrote articles from Iraq that were published in the National Review and The New York Times, among other periodicals. Unlike other journalists, he wasn’t whisked between safe zones in armored convoys. Instead, he rode unarmed with Iraqis, staying in their hotels and getting to know them first-hand. Though the book draws conclusions, it’s much more of a personal reflection than a political commentary. But those personal reflections and experiences revealed to me just how complicated and fascinating Iraq is.

Except for the Kurdish-controlled parts of northern Iraq where U.S. support is strong, everywhere Vincent went Iraqis told him they were thankful Saddam was gone but they hated U.S. troops and wanted them to leave. As Vincent explains it, the Iraqis are a proud people who are ashamed that they didn’t overthrow Saddam themselves and are even more ashamed about what the presence of the troops says about them: they can’t rule themselves.

The problem with Iraqi self-rule is that Iraq is a fractured country. I was already somewhat familiar with the major fractures: the independent, secular Kurds, the minority Sunni Muslims (largely former Baath party members), and the majority Shia Muslims, once oppressed by Saddam. But the fractures run even deeper. Families form enclaves, withdrawing so much into themselves that something like half of Iraqi marriages are between first or second cousins. This isolation reduces the sense of community; while many Iraqis keep the interior of their homes spotless, they allow garbage to pile in the streets, thinking nothing of constant littering.

That fractured condition allows radical religious leaders (or thugs hiding behind a religious name) to vie for ascendancy. Once they gain power these groups usually demand the rule of Islamic law, which oppresses women, stifles journalism, and offers draconian punishments (such as death for conversion from Islam). Yet Vincent was ambivalent towards Islam. He often dressed as an Islamic Iraqi, once even saying the words that made him technically a Muslim (Vincent calls himself a lapsed Presbyterian) in order to gain the trust of his translator at that time. He visited a prominent Shia festival in order to learn more about the popular Shia version of Islam. But that Shia festival also showed him one dark side of Islam.

The Shia, long persecuted by Saddam, have little love for the Sunni Wahabbi Islamists associated with Al Qaeda. Because the Wahabbi think the Shia are guilty of blasphemy, they often make the Shia victims of their attacks. Indeed, while Vincent visited the town of Karbala for the Shia festival of Ashura, the Wahabbi attacked again. However, it seems to be the festival itself, not the attack, that most impressed Vincent.

Ashura shocked him. Expecting to see a celebration along the lines of Easter, he instead realized that it was a glorification of death and suffering. Many Shia cut themselves to commemorate the slaughter of the Battle of Karbala.

Something else felt immobile, too: the spirit of the whole festival.

All this devotion doesn’t lead anywhere, I realized. It seemed circular, repetitious. For all its religiosity, Ashura lacked symbols that lift the spiritual imagination beyond the Battle of Karbala. What it needed, I thought heretically, was an image of resurrection: Hussain rising, Christ-like, from the ashes of his failure and defeat.

. . .

At the same time, though, I began to wonder if the Christian motifs in Shia iconography weren’t exactly what they seemed: a desire to emulate Christianity and–in a case of flagrant shirk [blasphemy]–deify Hussain and Ali, transform them into Christ-like incarnations of God. Ashura could use such a myth. Lacking a sense of transcendence, the festival offered the Shia no catharsis, no symbolic redemption. And so, like trauma victims, the pilgrims obsessively repeated scenes of the Karbala massacre, reliving the agonies, the suffering, their religiosity growing increasingly overwrought.

In the Red Zone pages 110-111

Vincent thought the antidote to religious extremism in Iraq would be a secure democracy, but he was under no illusions about how difficult achieving democracy in Iraq will be. However, he met a number of remarkable Iraqis, who in their fearlessness in the face of true danger and their love for democratic ideals, gave him hope for the country’s future.

Sadly, one of Vincent’s revelations about the difficulty of achieving political freedom in Iraq seems almost prescient about his own fate. Having just finished a lecture to Iraqi journalists about the relationship between freedom of the press and democracy, he felt as though “something hadn’t clicked.”

Leaving the meeting room, a tall, serious reporter from al-Ahkbaar newspaper stopped me. In English, he thanked me for my talk, then added, “but you underestimate the problems we face here. You talk about freedom, but Iraqi journalists still are not free. If we go too deep into some stories, we will anger certain people–and they will kill us.”

The reporter’s words startled me, and I realized at once my mistake. Swaggering a bit in my role as an American journalist, I’d forgotten that there are dangerous forces throughout Iraq who do not want the media to investigate their activities. . . . How glib my comments about “being true to truth” must have seemed! How naive my emphasis on “proof” and “fairness”–particularly to journalists who could lose their lives in pursuing those ideals! Too late, I remembered something Yussef told me: “In Iraq, freedom of the press is a freedom that must be carefully applied.”

I apologized to the young man for my oversight and thanked him for reminding me of how fortunate I am to be an American journalist. Taking constitutional protections for granted, I had stressed to the Iraqis the necessity of press freedom to democracy without noting the opposite: that without democracy, without the almost instinctive commitment of millions of Americans to principles of a free and responsible citizenry, true journalism (and many other occupations) would be impossible.

In the Red Zone pages 158-159

We visited New York recently and on the advice of JRC walked the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk. The experience inspired me to pick up David McCullough’s book The Great Bridge. McCullough, who won a Pulitzer for his biography of Truman and whose book about the Adams was a best-seller, knows how to tell a story.

The book’s heroes are John and Washington Roebling, the father and son who oversaw the design and construction of the bridge. When John died from lockjaw after a job injury, Washington took his position of Chief Engineer and saw the bridge to completion. But mostly from a distance; he ruined his health working in the caissons during the first stages of the construction.

While the bridge’s towers attract attention today (as they did at its completion in 1883, when at 280 feet they dominated the New York skyline), I think the most dramatic part of the bridge’s construction was hidden from view, in the giant caissons beneath them.

Imagine flipping a cake pan upside-down and pushing it underwater. It could hold a pocket of air inside of it, so that if you held it against a river bed, inside the cake pan the dirt would be “dry.” Enlarge that cake pan so that it’s the size of four tennis courts, and make it out of wood plated with metal, and you have the Brooklyn Bridge caissons. Men inside the caisson dug away at the river bed, and as they sunk lower into the earth beneath the river the towers rose on its back.

The problem is that the deeper one goes underwater, the greater the water pressure. And the only thing keeping the water out of the caisson was the air inside; the air also was chiefly responsible for keeping the caisson itself from being crushed by the tons of masonry above it. So Roebling increased the air pressure the lower the men dug, producing some interesting effects. The men could shovel debris underneath a shaft leading to the surface, and the air would blast rocks and sand up and out of the caisson, like a giant vacuum cleaner. Fire was a greater risk, so that after battling for hours one bit of flame that worked itself deep into the planks of the caisson, Roebling gave up and had the structure flooded with water. While in the caissons, workmen’s voices became higher-pitched, and they couldn’t compress their lungs enough to blow out a candle. And some, after returning to the surface, began experiencing excruciating pains they called “Grecian bends” or “caisson disease”–what today we usually term “decompression sickness.”

The technology necessary to produce caisson disease on a large scale hadn’t existed until recently before Roebling built the Brooklyn Bridge, so little was known about its causes and its treatments. Shortly before and during the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction, caisson disease caused the deaths of a number of men working on the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi. Roebling had even visited the caissons for the Eads Bridge to compare them to his plans, but Eads was equally in the dark about decompression sickness.

From the hindsight of history, it’s almost painful to watch Andrew H. Smith, the physician for the construction workers, try to figure out how to treat the malady. He was correct that symptoms worsened the longer one spent in compressed air, so he had the men take shorter shifts. He suspected that it was important how long one took to decompress, but his prescribed time of a few minutes was insufficient (it needed to be about 20 minutes), and the men, impatient to head to the pubs and leave behind the disagreeable caisson work, probably didn’t even heed that amount of time.

When Roebling decided to halt the descent of the New York caisson at seventy-eight feet even though it hadn’t yet reached bedrock, his decision was influenced in part by his concern that caisson disease not kill numerous workers. And he had already begun to suffer from terrible bouts of the bends himself.

Already [physician Andrew H.] Smith had recorded more cases of the bends than Jaminet had in St. Louis. And whereas Eads had not suffered a single fatality until his first caisson was down ninety-four feet and the pressure was at forty-four pounds, Roebling, for some unknown reason, had already lost two men. So at this rate the New York caisson might take even more lives than the thirteen the St. Louis foundations had cost by the time they were in place.

The Great Bridge pages 315-16

The rest of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge makes for fascinating reading as well. Roebling, his health broken by caisson sickness, supervised the construction from afar (and only crossed the bridge himself after it had already been open for a while), while dealing with the machinations of various politicians. But the bridge opened to almost unimaginable fanfare: after a day filled with speeches and parties (the President was Guest of Honor), a non-stop fireworks show lasted for an hour.

In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”

The Great Bridge page 542

I’ve been reading the Gulag Archipelago on and off for a while. Solzhenitsyn wittily lances the Soviet insanities while recognizing that the problem is not mainly with a particular government but with the human condition.

I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had gotten into an NKVD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have matured just in time for Beria.

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 168

But whereas one can’t lay all the blame at the feet of social institutions, neither is an unjust society simply the fault of the individuals it comprises. A particular culture can encourage or discourage various virtues and vices. The problem with the Soviet culture, Solzhenitsyn seems to suggest, is that it deliberately unmoored itself from any cultural tradition. The result was that when it came time to make legal rulings or set public policy, those in charge acted on what was most expedient for them at the moment. Solzhenitsyn quotes from a 1919 trial transcript:

Accuser: “This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I demand that the case be turned over to a people’s court.”

Presiding Judge: “Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are! We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary conscience!”

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 304

Note how the judge glosses arbitrariness and expediency as a “revolutionary conscience.” The October Revolution overthrew not just those in power but centuries of Russian legal tradition, tradition which had ended the death penalty and restricted torture. “Revolutionary conscience” allowed the Soviets to sneak them back in.

The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.

With Communist greetings,
Lenin

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 353

Solzhenitsyn comments:

With the exception of a very limited number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes, whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 355

I’m not sure that’s exactly right. Take the American Revolution. Although the United States overthrew the British rule, it did not abandon the authority of British legal precedent, some of which is cited still today. Moreover, to justify their actions many of the the American revolutionaries appealed to what they saw as over-arching principles in natural law, law which theoretically included the British as well as the Americans. So while the Americans revolted and seized power, they didn’t try to create legal principles from whole cloth, as did Lenin. And I don’t think the United States is exceptional in that regard. The Soviet Union invited the kind of injustice Solzhenitsyn describes, not simply because its founders overthrew the government but because they overthrew moral and legal authority as well. By trusting in “revolutionary conscience,” they allowed the sinful human heart alone to cut the public line between good and evil, with terrible consequences.