The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, July 11, 2025

Notably: Harry Elmer Barnes is a problematic historian. As brilliant as he was in his younger years (he was born in 1889, died in 1968), age did not agree with him: he became a repulsive holocaust denier (if you can forgive the redundance, which grammarly, that latest of stupefying language tyrants, would have me change to redundancy; well, I refuse). But I have been reading his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, the first volume of which he published in 1937, before he soured (the last was published in 1965, post-sour: I’ll report on it in time). So far, through the pre-history of the Magdalenian wonders, the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, my own Phoenician ancestry, and now the early beginnings of Greece’s Cambrian explosion of intellect, he’s been what would anachronistically be called “woke” today. Take this wonderful insights as an example. We always conventionally refer to writing as an untrammeled good. Barnes reminds us: “Its great contributions, of course, have been accompanied by certain evils. Although it has enabled us to transmit culture from age to age, it has at the same time kept alive outworn notions and antiquated beliefs whose retarding influences might otherwise never have reached succeeding generations.” Who could possibly dispute that? The same applies to books, newspapers, social media, any media: quality is the exception, passability the rule, disproportionate infamy the often dominant exception. Along the same lines, I found this little excerpt heartening, ion light of our current dark ages. He was writing one of his little sum-ups of Greek civilization, as in the Greece of Pericles 2500 years ago, and underscoring the importance of secularism. Are you listening, Chief Justice Roberts? “Accepting this highly secular view of life, the Greek was in a position to speculate freely about human problems and social issues. He was able to discover what the ‘good life’ was really like. Such a humanistic outlook was an absolutely new thing in the world, and has remained, through ages of darkness, turmoil, tyranny, and defeat, a perpetual inspiration. It is the morning star lighting up the course of Europe’s subsequent chequered intellectual history.” It’s not quite the rhythm of the Psalms. But same idea. And yes, before romaticizing the Greeks too much, let ujs agree with Hendrick van Loon, and “let us not tumble into the very common error of depicting ancient Hellas as some sort of terrestrial paradise. Nor was the average Greek a paragon of all the virtues a noble hero, moving with Homeric dignity across the stage of history, spending his days in battling for freedom and democracy and burning his little midnight oil lamp, discussing some of the finer points of Plato’s most recent philosophical disquisitions with half a dozen assorted friends. There undoubtedly were a few men of such caliber during the age of Pericles, but they were the exceptions, as they always have been and always will be.” The exception. Always. Even today. Especially today. So what are we getting so incensed about Maga? It’s always been the norm. Always. Its steroidal era doesn’t make it exceptional. Just more putrid. 

When he rises in the morning and clothes his body in textile garments, when he sits down to the breakfast table spread with spotless linen, set with vessels of glazed pottery and with drinking goblets of glass, when he puts forth his hand to any implement of metal on that table except aluminum, when he eats his morning roll or cereal and drinks his glass of milk, or perhaps eats his morning chop cut from the flesh of a domesticated animal, when he rolls downtown in a vehicle supported on wheels, when he enters his office building through a porticus supported on columns, when he sits down at his desk, spreads out a sheet of paper, grasps his pen, dips it in ink, puts a date, at the head of the sheet, writes a check or a promissory note, or dictates a lease or contract to his secretary, when he looks at his watch with the sixty-fold division of the circle on its face, in all these and in an infinite number of other commonplaces of life-things without which modern life could not go on for a single hour, the average man of today is using items of an inheritance which began to pass across the eastern Mediterranean from the Orient when Europe was discovered by civilization five thousand years ago.

–From Harry Elmer Barnes’s An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, vol. 1, From earliest times through the Middle Ages (1937).

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