In the Beginning

At the end of last year I made public my resolutions, not only for the coming year, but also the next half decade, in the hopes that others would do likewise. I went through a little of the history and tradition around the setting of resolutions at the New Year and also outlined the 10 (or 11) things that I had determined I ought to do to improve myself and my life.

This will not be a retrospective. Safe to say that some objectives have been met with a measure of success whilst others remain a work in progress. I remind you all that I said at the time: the principle is to set targets such that you achieve more than you might have done without any. Nevertheless, one area in which I enjoyed particular success was in reading. As a child, free from the omnipresent internet and its infernal minions; computer games and social media, I read voraciously. Given that we were a poor family, most of my books came from local libraries and the time-constraint on borrowing (not nearly as generous as my local library now) meant that you had to work through your little stack of 6 books (also not as generous as my local library now) in very short order before fines became due. Contrary to my sibling, who could often be found watching our ‘portable’ black and white TV set, tuned by hand, I was often found with my head in a book.

As an adult there was a time where this became all but impossible due to work, family, study and yes, the aforementioned infernal minions; however last year I concluded those studies and decided to spend some of my newly freed up time returning to old friends. In 2021 I intended to read one book per month. I didn’t manage it but I enjoyed it and so set myself a bigger task in 2022: 14 books. I realise this might seem quite a mechanical way to approaching reading, I’d agree. It’s far more valuable to spend a long time reading a single good book than churning through endless piles of dross, a view shared by the stoics (more on them later). That said, I wanted to apply some pressure to ensure time that could be spent reading wasn’t spent in less aspirational ways.

It’s also worth pointing out that I have strongly criticised the act of reading political and philosophical theory for, what is in my view, pleasure and I have been called out for this by people who erroneously believe that I think the act of reading, as a whole, to be a waste of time. Clearly this is not the case. For the sake of clarity, what I think IS a waste of time is reading political or philosophical theory where application of that theory is seldom applied,  where the reader simply skips from theory to theory attempting to absorb, as if by osmosis, supposed knowledge without ever committing their learned theory to practical reality. Perhaps some of the books I have read this year have steered me in that direction of thought, or perhaps they have simply affirmed my own bias. I’ll let you be the judge.

Not only did I manage 14, but I’m currently reading number 20 (not pictured). What did I read? Was it worth it?

Here’s the list:

Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace 1814--1852 Rory Muir
Freedom and Reality J. Enoch Powell
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England Marc Morris
The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli
The Rage Against God Peter Hitchens
Anti-racism: An Assault on Education and Value Frank Palmer
Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche
WE Yevgeny Zamyatin
Selected Discourses of Epictetus, and the Enchiridion Epictetus
Meditations Marcus Aurelius
"Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich" Thomas Sowell
Cataclysm 90 BC: The Forgotten War That Almost Destroyed Rome Philip Matyszak
Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 Katja Hoyer
Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium Seneca
The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English Hana Videen (also not pictured)
In Search Of The Dark Ages Michael Wood
Meditations Marcus Aurelius
The Real Middle-Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages Brian Bates

and

The Valley of Adventure Enid Blyton

The astute will have noticed that Meditations is listed twice, this is not a mistake.

Obviously it would take too long to give a summary of all of the books above (I’ve got reading to do, remember), however I would like to leave you with my top 5 for you to read (or re-read) in 2023, in descending order.

The first two are books which I have read out on streams as part of the Publish and be Damned series on the Wellington Project youtube channel and also on the precursor to PabD, ‘The Pipe Stream’ (since renamed) over on my own youtube channel.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

I don’t believe it would be possible for an individual to read this book and for it to exert absolutely no influence upon their life. There are few individuals that will understand or experience the breadth and depth of power and responsibility that this man experienced as the emperor of the Roman Empire, arguably at its peak. Aurelius was the last of the ‘five good emperors’, reigning from 161AD to 180 AD.

Meditations is regarded as one of the key texts underpinning the Stoic school of philosophy which has been passed down to us. The fact we have the text at all is almost by accident, it was Aurelius’ personal diary, written whilst on campaign against the Germanic tribes, it wasn’t, as far as we are aware, intended for consumption by an audience. He isn’t trying to flatter anyone or to sell a book, these are his own, personal, inner-most thoughts and there are occasions in the text where we can but guess at the context of some of these brief jottings. Fortunately the Penguin classics hardbound edition (pictured) contains a comprehensive notes section which helps to add a little meat to the bones.

I read this twice in 2022, having become interested in the stoic school of philosophy after reading the second book in my top 5. I also read Seneca’s ‘Letters from a Stoic’ at a similar time (also for PabD) and, whilst Seneca’s work is arguably better and more wide ranging with less repetition, I find it incredibly hard not to come away with some sense of feeling a little cheated by Seneca. His book, allegedly a collection of correspondence, feels a little bit too much like an attempt at a legacy, written for a particular audience rather than a personal, lived, philosophy. I did not get this sense at all from Aurelius who comes across as entirely genuine, a man faced with the conflicted reality of being an emperor but desiring more than anything to be a philosopher.

Where Aurelius’ work really struck me is his commitment to not being carried away by the strong currents of life. He often reminds himself of the material reality of his position, the purple of his clothes being nothing more than the blood of a sea creature, for example. The purpose of Stoicism is to recognise the enquiring mind as being the only thing over which the individual can exert proper influence and that virtually everything else, especially the actions of others, are likely beyond the control of the individual. To all intents and purposes they may as well be the actions of the gods. 

God, gods, the universe and the Whole is another recurrent theme throughout the book and making peace with the ‘actions’ of this conglomeration is the aim. Whatever the prime mover may be, whether a pantheon or a freak accident, the end result has been a series of events, cause and effect, which result in us existing in our present condition, let the chips fall as they may, there is precious little one can do to overturn or influence the events of the past. Recognising this reality and paying it (whatever it may be) the due consideration it deserves is a part of obtaining happiness, or eudaimonia, something which the stoics assert can only, logically, be derived through virtue. All external things such as health, wealth and pleasure are not necessarily good or bad but they are, or can be, material for virtue to act upon.

Finally, a key focus, reflective of Aurelius’ age at time of writing, is what I perceive to be an obsession with death, almost alone as a constant feature of all human life (the other being birth). Marcus’ thoughts turn repeatedly to the hereafter, his assessment of death, I think, provides a necessary alternative to the dichotomy of conceptions of heaven and hell or an absence of anything. He concludes that death isn’t anything to fear because that which does no harm to the Whole can not possibly be harmful to the individual, at least in the cosmic sense. Either the Epicureans are right in the sense that we will return the to same state of non-existence that we enjoyed (or rather, had no conscious at all of) prior to being born, or we will be swept up in to the Whole to be born and reborn as dictated by the gods, living eternally in an endless cycle.

Freedom & Reality by Enoch Powell

“Powell, the political John the Baptist” wrote the Sunday Telegraph of Freedom and Reality.

My second pick is another person’s personal ideology made manifest in paper. Unlike the first, Freedom and Reality was written for an audience, it was intended to ‘establish the facts regarding what Powell actually believed and had said on particular occasions’, a rebuttal to the monotonous and monstrous accusation that he was simply a mono-dimension bigot.

The book is wide ranging, encompassing a great many of Powell’s own personal crosses to bear. On many of these subjects he cut a principled, if often lonely, tack, against the winds prevailing in a parliament gripped by a post-war, post-empire paralysis of thought. He tackles the devastating futility of central planning and the encroachment of socialism on the rights of the individual (expounded upon perhaps more thoroughly by the likes of F.A.Hayek), as well as the folly of state intervention in the setting of wages, something we have seen again recently, where the government and the Bank of England have attempted to invoke the supposed patriotism implicit in settling for less than one’s worth.

Whilst the first half of the book deals primarily with the economic, the latter half turns toward more social issues: Britain’s place in the world and his view on the myth of Britain’s world role (following the dissolution of the empire) as well as, of course, the consequences of the relatively modern and ill perceived phenomena of mass, globalised, migration on localised populations, attempting to establish a greater context regarding the (in)famous ‘Birmingham speech’.

As the title of the book suggests, Powell’s focus is on the freedoms we have enjoyed which he sees as being eroded, as well as the stark reality that he feels Britain faces as it seeks to shake off the legacy of Empire and establish a new vision and future for herself. Far from being downcast, Powell’s vision is strikingly positive, if only we would heed his warnings.

Whilst the book is relatively short and, as a consequence, fairly brief in some regards, Powell’s notable and renowned eloquence provides a force and clarity in a concise manner. My favourite chapter, the final one, deals with ‘Myth and Reality’ in which he provides a rather brutal put-down of the notion of holding on to a past that never really was the way in which we perceive it to have been now that it has already slipped us by. In dismantling our false illusions he then intends to plant the seeds of hope:

“That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the Imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead - in the eye of history, no doubt as inevitably as ‘Nineveh and Tyre’, as Rome and Spain. And yet, England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus related how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the midst of the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So we today at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of a demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.

Perhaps after all we know most of England, ‘Who only England know’.”

Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace by Rory Muir

Rory Muir’s second instalment in a two-part biography charting the life of one of Britain's most accomplished heroes. Commencing immediately after the Battle of Toulouse and Napoleon's abdication, Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace details the Iron Duke’s attempts to repair a fractured Europe and secure a shaky peace. Wellington is almost thwarted, of course, by Napoleon’s return and the commencement of the Hundred Days, also known as the War of the Seventh Coalition, which reaches a spectacular conclussion in the Belgique’ (then United Kingdom of the Netherland’s) mud in the form of the twin battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny, shortly followed by the gruelling widow-maker of Waterloo itself.

But all this is covered in the opening chapters of the book, what follows for the remainder of the chunky volume is a well researched and lively re-telling of what came after Waterloo for Wellington, following Waterloo, Wellington picks up where he left off, prior to his military career, in politics. 

Wellington’s detractors will argue that militarily he represented a mediocre commander, displaying a solid aptitude for prevailing wisdom, he was capable but reserved. Wellington did not enjoy some of the more spectacular victories achieved by his adversary, Napoleon, who pulled victory from the jaws of defeat on numerous occasions, often by eschewing conventional tactics. Whilst abroad, Wellington the Warrior could be accused of playing it safe, in the battles of Westminster however, I got the sense that he was more cavalier, mixing a tremendous brand of fastidiousness, tirelessness and charisma that often lead to his opponents being outmanoeuvred and out-gunned.

Rather on theme, I found that much of Wellington’s political career appears to have been spent in embracing the challenge of marrying reality and ideology, in the great, grey, gulf of compromise between the two. In trying to come up trumps, Wellington often met with frustration, angry mobs or intransigent colleagues (Wellington is alleged once to have remarked “An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.”) but he takes this in his stride and never swerves in his loyalty to duty in serving his King (who he doesn’t always agree with, in private) and his country.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We, written in 1921, is the progenitor of the dystopia genre, which can claim among its ranks the likes of Brave new World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451. Set hundreds of years after a global conflict which has resulted in the consolidation of all power in the hands of the One State, an urbanised nation where all the buildings are constructed from glass. Privacy is virtually non-existent and the lives of all those within the dome are rigorously structured according to a pattern of pure logic, derived by way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State, enforced, ruthlessly, of course, by the state’s secret police.

Interwoven throughout the book are biblical and mathematical references, D-503, the Winston Smith of We, is an Adam-like character in a ‘perfect’ paradise who is led astray by I-330 and a double agent who has a ‘bent and twisted form’, like a snake. D-503’s thoughts often turn to the irritation he experiences when considering the square-root of one, the basis for imaginary numbers (imagination being something that is frowned upon by the One State).

Of course, worryingly, as with the more commonly referenced Nineteen Eighty-Four the reader can find many parallels to modern society and of course many of the tools used by the state to direct society and limit the individual have their roots in the technological boom of the 20th century. Zamyatin takes a great deal of influence from the actions of the Russian state, both against him (The auditorium 112 referred to in the novel is a reference to a cell number in which he was imprisoned twice) and also against his contemporaries, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

George Orwell cites We as being a direct influence for Nineteen Eighty-Four and this is apparent throughout the novel, with a number of parallels that would be obvious after only a casual reading of the two. If you have a morbid enjoyment for learning about the dystopian hellscapes that the people of the past prophesied against and that you think you might be living through, then you can’t go far wrong with We.

Anti-Racism: An Assault on Education and Value edited by Frank Palmer

A compilation of lectures and contributions from various academics and philosophers, including Sir Roger Scruton and Frank Palmer (the book’s editor) that attempts to answer the question: Is Britain really a racist society?

First published in 1986, it is set against the backdrop of the racially motivated reaction to the conflict of cultures which Powell, correctly, identified would be the consequence of large scale, unintegrated, immigration. Though one of the writers opposes Powell’s view that the White British population would be unable to absorb such large numbers (small as they now appear to present day movements), a great deal of the book centres around the fast growing roots of an ideology that we are observing in full bloom today. The origins of critical race theory and the laser-like focus on racial disparity observable in institutions today is painstakingly laid out in a number of the contributions. 

One such contribution that I was reminded of most recently is encompassed in the opening paragraph to Ray Honeyford’s offering:

“Language is rarely neutral, though we in the liberal West often behave as though it were, Sally Shrier has recently and effectively reminded us that this is a grave error in the realm of politics; an error which can pave the way to tyranny, as the ruling classes of many dictatorships have repeatedly demonstrated. Words, and the grammar which encapsulates and controls them, not only condition our perceptions; they enable us both to describe the world and to transact our relationships with it, through the expression of cognitions, reflections and feelings. Our very concepts and categories of thought are largely a function of the words which, from infancy, we have inherited from the culture. The Soviet tyranny has survived and flourished largely because its rulers have grasped the necessity not only of using words to demonstrate, and compel, support for, prevailing hegemonies by rewriting history, but also because they have created a lexis in which the tools to protest have effectively disappeared. If the state controls the language, it controls the citizen. When humane dissent is used as evidence of insanity and psychiatric prisons flourish, then we may rest assured that the vocabulary of liberty has disappeared. As Milovan Djalis has reminded us, ‘Tyranny over the mind is the most complete and most brutal type of tyranny: every other tyranny begins and ends with it’.”

I thought this was prescient as I read this first whilst living through the tail end of the covid restrictions and I think it is prescient now as silent pedestrians are arrested for the admission of prayers said in their head.

Finally an honourary mention for the smallest of the bunch, more of a pamphlet than a book:

Trickle Down Theory and Tax Cuts for the Rich by Thomas Sowell

Became relevant again this year as the ill-fated premiership of Liz Truss was torpedoed by a media and chattering class which were unable to comprehend that a bigger pie has the capacity to enrich more people than a smaller pie, however brutally equitably you attempt to cut the smaller one (of course, Truss being unable to make this case for her minor reforms did not help). Sowell dispels the lie that economists who propose a reduction in the burden of taxation (largely a burden on the middle and upper classes) are operating under the belief that this wealth will then trickle down to the poor by some other means. Instead he outlines the case for a reduction in taxation resulting in an increase in government revenues (and therefore a greater ability to distribute a bigger pie) using real world examples in such a concise format that even a journalist could manage to read it cover to cover.

There really is no economic excuse for them to peddle their trite rubbish, but hey, it’s great for column inches.

Wrap it up

If you do decide to read (or listen!) to any of the books on this list, do let me know what you thought of them, The Wellington Project has an active discord, or you can of course @ us on twitter.

In the spirit of the season, it’s time to wrap it up. From my home to yours, I wish you a very Merry Christmas full of literary gifts, both given and received.