Hanson Hate Redux

Any reader of a Victor Davis Hanson book is confronted with two facts which the mind struggles to assimilate: (i) he managed to get this published, and (ii) people are actually reading it. One of the blurbs on the back of his most recent book, The End of Everything, describes it as ‘stupendous.’ Latinist readers know that this adjective comes from the verb stupere, which can mean ‘to marvel at’ but also ‘to be benumbed,’ and insofar as this second definition is applied, I could not agree more. The book wore me down into such a stupor that, before the end of the book, I found myself praying (secular prayers) for the end of everything.

The title is singularly infelicitous, because the book hardly deals in the kind of apocalyptic universal eschatology promised either by the title or the cover art. Instead, Hanson explores the destruction or sacking of four cities: Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan. Conservatives are fascinated by the decline of civilizations, a subject which provides an excellent foothold for intellectual judo maneuvers that allow them to argue that progressive impulses bring about the sorts of changes which undermine the virtuous elements of once glorious cultures. The ancients themselves excelled at this sort of thing: every time Nestor opens his mouth, there’s a good chance that he will fault his contemporaries for their suffering by noting their manifest inferiority to their predecessors.

Hanson begins, inauspiciously enough, by framing his conclusion as a rebuff to a preposterous straw man:

“Its conclusions warn that the modern world, America included, is hardly immune from repeating these tragedies of the past.”

Out there on his farm, Hanson may be touching too much grass. The most cursory glance at the psychic cacophony of the internet would suggest that no one believes that any place in the world, least of all America, is immune from tragedy. Contemporary discourse, regardless of one’s politics, is entirely invested in the idea of civilizational collapse. Geopolitical conflict, domestic disorder, climate change, the loss of cultural values mistily glanced through roseate lenses – does anyone today go to bed easily with the smug reassurance of imagined future stability?

For my own part, I have relied for the past several years on a panoply of somniferous consumables, though I now think that I have wasted thousands of dollars on sleep aids which could probably be replaced by a regular dose of Hanson’s soporific writing. Let’s stop touting the study of classical languages as the royal road to excellent prose. At least we know that Hanson isn’t a killer. (Nabokov: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”)  Observe:

“As the first-century historian Diodorus put it, most in Greece on news of the revolt were sincerely worried about the Thebans. But their sympathy was not the same as their succor.”

I wonder how proud he felt of the apparent rhetorical balance of the alliteration in the second sentence. But the phrase “most in Greece on news of the revolt” is singularly inelegant. Luckily, Hanson didn’t need to activate too many new neural pathways during the drafting phase, leaning instead on well-worn cliches:

“In fact, the timid allies advanced all sorts of flimsy excuses why discretion was the better part of valor, claiming that a century and a half earlier the Thebans had helped the Persian invaders and thus were unworthy of the sacrifice of their brethren.” [Italics added.]

Sometimes the cliche takes the form of unexamined nonsense expressions:

“…quite in contrast to the one-dimensional hoplite phalanxes of old.”

“…the Thebans, like all Greek armies, remained a one-dimensional militia.”

As Kingsley Amis noted, the standard journalese description of characters as “one-dimensional” reflects muddled thinking. Only a point in abstraction is properly one-dimensional, but somehow “two-dimensional” has never really caught on as a suitable replacement. Sed hae sunt nugae.

Consider this paradox:

“The Thebans were within a single day completely defeated. Their army was routed and erased from history.”

It’s one thing for a group to be “swept into the dustbin of History,” as Trotsky had it, but one might well wonder how an army erased from history finds itself discussed in what is billed as a work of…history. There is much in antiquity which has been entirely effaced from history, but it all takes the form of Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” Anything erased from history is ipso facto not discussed – it’s gone.

Speaking of expressions featuring facto, brace yourself for pedantry: Hanson has a singularly irritating tendency to use the phrase post facto throughout the book, which makes agrammatical nonsense of the phrase ex post facto and seems rather unbecoming of a man who wrote such an impassioned polemic about the value of rigorous training in classical languages. Not that Hanson is afraid of a nice bit of pedantry himself. There is a four-page stretch featuring the use of the rather finicky ultimata where most writers would happily settle for the Anglicized ultimatums.

You might think that Hanson was a millennial blogger in light of his fondness for the adverb apparently. A lot of statements get qualified thus in this book, as in this ghastly little performance:

“That sum was the equivalent of paying more than seven thousand of his soldiers together a year’s worth of wages, apparently a far preferable proposition than providing sustenance for thousands of the helpless in the occupied city.”

What to make of this? “Apparently a far preferable proposition than…”? Have you ever observed the way in which people speak with fawning reverence about Ivy League education? Did you know that Hanson went to Stanford?

If it appears (apparently) that I am belaboring Hanson’s faults as a stylist instead of discussing the content of the book, it’s because there isn’t much there. We have potted histories of four cities, linked only by the fact that they were sacked or extirpated and serve as a synecdoche for broader civilizational collapse. No one with a passing familiarity with any of these narratives will find anything novel or surprising in their treatment here, as this contains no real original scholarship. By itself, this is not a damning criticism. But the theme which binds the tetralogy of destruction together is weak, uninteresting, and not particularly well-managed.

I made two great sacrifices to write this post: I added a few extra cents of pocket lining to America’s most famous raisin farming reactionary and sank some irrecoverable hours into reading it. At some point in the past, Hanson set himself about the task of becoming a classical scholar, but found his real metier in Fox News punditry. He may have once done illuminating work on the phalanx, but even his historical work now savors of Rupert Murdoch’s tailpipe. It turns out that the mind, too, can dry up just like those raisins.