An embarrassment of riches here, at least to those of us trying to characterize them in fresh words.
The only real comments I had on the two VRT part 6 episodes were:
• You didn't mention how FUNNY the episodes of "March"'s diary, right after VRT takes over, are. All of a sudden we get lines like "Without the boy I don’t know what I’d do. He has done everything, most of the work, for the entire trip." — effusive appreciation after a diaryfull of a very limited amount of it. Which, once you know that VRT is suddenly writing, is really funny.
• I may be reaching here, but does anyone else hear an echo of Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in the scene of the boy's death? Like that famous fall, there is a fundamental uncertainty about who went over. And somehow that manner of death just reminds me of Holmes.
Going into episode 67, I was going to suggest that, as an experiment, you try reversing the theme & puzzle episodes next time (for Peace, I suppose, in a year's time). The argument is that, hopefully, the answers to the puzzles would enrich our understanding of the events of the story, which would enrich our understanding of the theme. It just seems to make more conceptual sense. Of course you made this recommendation difficult to make by putting out such a splendid theme episode — my favorite yet, perhaps.
I loved all your talk of freedom & slavery, especially the stuff about the ancient context; as an Americanist, I tend to think of it totally in an American context. (I loved the Latin lesson about famulus in particular. Am I correct in understanding that it would not be the term for a plantation slave, just for a household slave?) I also liked the link you made between flourishing & freedom; I had heard similar ideas, but never that term before; it fits beautifully. (One critique of the libertarian idea — and at least some versions of the anarchist idea, if not all of them — is that it sets up a sort of freedom that inhibits rather than enables flourishing.)
Anyway, I did natter on about this before, and I won't repeat myself, except to say again that Constant's views on slavery are all familiar from American slavery defenders (including the idea that freedom is the freedom to enslave, a very familiar idea to our slaveholding founding fathers!), and that his notion that Government health care is akin to slavery is one deep in (quite recent as of 1972) conservative thought, so that I am not entirely sure that Wolfe is holding that notion up to spite, as you both, and I, do, and as everyone should. (I hope he is; and he may well be — he put it in the mouth of a slavery apologist, after all. But I'm not quite sure.)
But on the multiple, complex and contradictory ideas of freedom, let me strongly recommend the work of the historian David Hackett Fischer, in particular the opening chapter or two of his book Liberty and Freedom (the whole book is good, but the best bit is summarized in the beginning). He talks about liberty (libertas) as arising from a Roman notion of freedom, and freedom (freiheit) as arising from a Germanic one, and about how they are, basically, opposite ideas, which worked their way (in altered form) into American culture. (His section on the Civil War is called "Liberty vs. Freedom"). In his earlier book, Albion's Seed, he talks about four of the founding cultures of the US (Massachusetts puritans, Virginian cavaliers, Pennsylvania Quakers, and backcountry folk), and for each defines their notion of freedom — four very different ideas. Anyway, it's interesting stuff, and it pertains directly to the sort of thing you were talking about — freedom as being independent (as Jefferson would have it, in an idea derived from the Roman world), versus being part of a free society (as the Massachusetts puritans would have it, in a German idea). Check it out.
Also he makes (in Albion's Seed), the following superb point, which I never tire of quoting: "The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be."
There's a lot of wonderful stuff to say about the contradictory ideas of freedom in an American context — I used to teach a whole unit on this in an American studies class — but I will stop there.
A few other notes:
• In talking about humans v animals, you talk about the idea that what makes us human is our knowledge of good and evil. But you don't cite the most famous (and relevant to Wolfe) source of that idea: the story of the garden of Eden! What makes humanity (alone among animals) fall is that we eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil — which is to say that it is that which makes us human.
• You spoke about VRT's choice between independence (staying among the free people, if he found them, or at least staying in the back of beyond) and going in search of his mother. You didn't quite make the final connection (perhaps thinking it too obvious!), that a need for a mother is about as pure a symbol of human dependence as you can get.
• You mention, casually, that nowadays we believe all human beings have rights, and point out, correctly, that this is a fairly recent belief. At a time when the government of this country is putting undocumented people into concentration camps — including one of the very same camps that was used previously to intern Japanese Americans during WW2 — that assurance that we have, in fact, moved once and for all over that barrier is unwarranted (as I am sure you actually know).
• Also in the "you probably know this but you said otherwise" category: you mention Emerson & Thoreau, and in particular you allude to Emerson's essay "Self Reliance" (I think your point about evil genius is a combination of his use of genius in that essay and the passage ""But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.""). But you say they are post-civil war figures. Thoreau didn't even survive the war; Emerson did, but the contributions are referring to are antebellum ("Self Reliance" was published in 1841).
Hey, I'm almost caught up! I'll see if I can catch up by the time your episode with Marc Aramini airs.
I thought of the Reichenbach Falls as well. "• You didn't mention how FUNNY the episodes of "March"'s diary, right after VRT takes over, are. All of a sudden we get lines like "Without the boy I don’t know what I’d do. He has done everything, most of the work, for the entire trip." — effusive appreciation after a diaryfull of a very limited amount of it. Which, once you know that VRT is suddenly writing, is really funny." I thought that was funny as well. I was trained in and did a fair amount of casework in forensic linguistic profiling, and you consistently see that as a feature in texts and narratives written as false "poison pen" letters directed against the actual author, in an attempt to gain sympathy for them as a victim and/or to redirect suspicions of guilt away from them. It's controversial, but it's been noted as a feature in the "ransom note" that the Ramsey family urged the police to look for in their home after the JonBenet Ramsey killing. A supposed "foreign" group of conspirators is blaming her father in the letter for the purported kidnapping, but keep talking about what a really smart man he is and what a great and successful businessman.
Glenn: Yeah, I saw right after I posted that that you'd switched the puzzles/themes eps for the full book! Silly of me not to notice before.
You mentioned that your wife works on Islamic slavery in the episode (and that you used to work on ancient slavery). I hope I wasn't sounding condescending or anything! I just think that an Americanist's perspective (even if I am not, myself, focused on the topic of slavery) might be useful.
Wolfe's intellectual milieu. Ok, I am going to recommend a bunch of books, and recommend you read two of them. (Yes, I know that two is more than one. Ask an academic, even a lapsed academic, and that's what you get. :) ) The revival of the conservative movement in the 1950s produced a very rich literature. I think the best book was Russel Kirk's The Conservative Mind — that's the one I assigned in my U. S. Intellectual History Since 1865 class. My only hesitation in recommending it is that what Buckley did was put together "fusionism", a merger of three intellectual streams — anti-Communist, free-market libertarians, and social conservatives — and Kirk is not balanced between them the way that Buckley was; while supporting all three, he leans towards group three. So a more balanced overview is historian George H. Nash's (sympathetic) book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. That's an after-the-fact overview, and isn't as rich a book on its own as Kirk is, but might serve your purposes better. A third temptation would be to recommend one of Buckley's books — probably God and Man at Yale, which made his name and captures the spirit of the movement he was forming. One advantage of Buckley is that it's a lot shorter — Nash and Kirk are both doorstopers. (When I assigned Kirk I had them skip a lot of the material on England, and focus on the US stuff, although do read the stuff on Burke; he's foundational.)
Anyway, pick one of those — probably either Kirk or Nash, possibly Buckley. But all of those are books written from the right. And I also think (here I show my bias as a leftist) it's important to get a sense of the other side of the argument. In this vein I would strongly recommend Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind — written, as the title suggests, with Kirk in particular in mind — as a really smart, balanced, fair, but ultimately very critical overview of the same field. There were two editions; the first was subtitled Conservatism from Burke to Sarah Palin, and the second Conservatism From Burke to Donald Trump. I strongly recommend the second edition; it's not just a retitling; it's a very substantial rewrite, and the second version really conveys the argument much more clearly. Also, Robin is (like the Buckley, unlike the Nash & Kirk) refreshingly short, and if you are really pressed for time, you can just read the introduction & maybe the chapter on Burke and get a good sense of his argument.
That's two books. I guess if you really wanted to do one, I'd say to read either Kirk or Nash. But I will still suggest two!
This all is the intellectual mileu, of course. There's a huge literature on the socical & political milieu of mid-twentieth century conservatism too — it was a neglected field as recently as twenty to twenty-five years ago, but it's been a very hot topic since roughly 2001 (go figure). But I will spare you a list of titles for now...
Brilliant observations, as always! And we've already taken your suggestion about reversing the order of the wrap-up episodes, as you'll see! But, seriously, we've gone into each of these two-part wrap-up episodes thinking we'd outlined a single episode (only to discover what fools we are), and so we'd done it up in the order that we thought would be helpful. Sometimes we think the themes help solve the puzzles, sometimes the opposite.
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but my wife works on slavery in early Islam. Some of our first dates mostly were excited conversations about Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian terms for different types of slaves. I assure you, it would make a great romcom. Anyway, famulus would refer to a household slave, which doesn't mean a slave who wasn't involved in agricultural labor but means a slave who spends a lot of time with his owner. So it's more expansive than "house slave" in the American sense, but an American "house slave" would be a famulus. This was also the term used for the slaves who more or less comprised the bureaucracy of the Roman state during the first and second centuries.
Thank you for pointing out that maybe not everyone is on board with the idea of basic human rights. I'd like to think this is a problem of individual empathy rather than a problem of our intellectual culture, but perhaps that's too optimistic.
I'm nearly done with my current Chesterton book and will be looking for something else to read to help me with Wolfe's intellectual milieu. You've mentioned a lot of books (especially relating to V.R.T.) that would be really helpful, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?