How Thomas Cahill Proved That Any Idiot Can Write a Bestseller
Written: Jun 06 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brief survey of early medieval times is interesting
Cons: The analysis is about what I'd expect from a Juco extension professor
The Bottom Line: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Thomas Cahill - How the Irish Saved Civilization: ... |
The girlfriend, she’s got one o’ them PhD.’s, in an academic discipline that requires her to be an expert in something called “discourse analysis.” I haven’t a clue what “discourse analysis” is, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, at her office, she’s got a nameplate that identifies her as “Associate Professor of Kicking Your Ass” and that the discourse analysis has something to do with it. The “Kicking Your Ass” part, I mean. Discourse analysis seems to have something to do with being able to accurately read peoples’ minds and separate what they’re saying from what they think their saying from what they claim to be saying. Which is a cool little trick, especially in a place like epinions. She can name that fake account in three paragraphs, and she can usually name that personality defect in two.
It’s not such a cool trick when you try to argue with her, though. The little games you play when you’re having an fight – little passive-aggressive tics, dismissive asides, denials, backtracking – all these things apparently have names, and labeling them takes you a long way towards being able to call people – or in this case, me – out when they’re trying to be weasels. Whereas with most people, you can pull the old, “Yeah, your theory about me is nice, but it’s pure speculation, and you have no choice but to believe what I say I’m saying,” a discourse analyst has the tools to say, “Nice try weasel-boy. Sell it to someone who’s buyin’ yer bullshit.
Well, Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization has no such retort. His analysis is speculative and weak in nearly every respect, and you get the sense that if you called him out on it, he wouldn’t have any of the tools necessary to defend the giant leaps of reason he makes. You get the sense that he’s being kind of intuitive with regard to reaching his conclusions, but he has none of the intellectual rigor that might give that analysis some heft.
This lack of intellectual rigor is unsurprising, coming from a man who sees fit to justify his lack of a proper bibliography with the dismissal that “some of the most deeply held things are sourceless – or rather, one can no longer remember where one first learned them. They are like the radiation left over from the Big Bang – general, constant and unplaceable.” That’s great, except that the man is attempting with this book to make an argument, and that his thoughts on the subject of the tome may be constant does not thereby render the alleged facts contained therein constant. Every premise, and each conclusion, is speculative in the extreme.
Equally annoying is his askewing of proper footnotes in favor of occasional trivial asides that neither support his arguments nor move the story along. Particularly bizarre is the following “Six Degrees of Flannery O’Conner” bubble, cited ostensibly in support of the notion that St. Patrick’s use of the phrase “seize the everlasting kingdom” was an echo of a similar phrase used by Jesus:
The phrase “the violent bear it away” fascinated the twentieth century Irish-American Flannery O’Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O’Connor’s surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor ... the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchuliann and “husband” of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.
The book’s general thesis appears to go along the following lines: The Roman Empire was way big, and super literate, until about 500 A.D., when little mini-feifdoms began to undermine the effectiveness of the central bureaucracy, leaving outlying areas open to constant whackage from Vandals and Ostrogaths and Huns, oh my. The Barbarian hordes raped and killed and pillaged, but mainly, they just kind of assimilated their illiterate asses into the feifdom structure of the empire, toppled the central government and stopped teaching everyone to read. Meanwhile, as the empire is crumbling, a Roman boy on an outlying island is stolen from his family and made a slave to a horny Celtic shepard. The boy escapes, goes home, picks up a little Jesus, then heads back to the land of his captures and starts spreading the good word. He does it so well, the people he’s preaching to eventually love him and create a special day in his honor so drunk people can roam the streets of New York and Boston drinking green beer and beating up Puerto Ricans.
The Irish really take to the Jesus thing, and for a variety of cultural reasons, including the fact that they didn’t have much else to do or anyone cool to follow, they start building lots of monasteries where they mostly spend their time transcribing old books over and over again onto the inside of dead sheeps’ hides. About 150 years later, a bunch of these Irish monks start heading out of Ireland into the wilds of Barbarian-run Europe, and building more monasteries and making more books, thereby re-educating the world and saving civilization. The end.
It’s an interesting theory, but it’s a theory largely dependent for its importance on the convenient definitions the author provides for himself. In particular, Cahill defines civilization largely by the existence of books. And this is what drives his thesis – that as books became largely extinct in Western and Central Europe and the Mediterranean, the Irish kept them, translated them, and passed them down to succeeding generations. Surely, books (and the learning that they imply) are one of the hallmarks of civilization, but they are not, in and of themselves, Civilization. Things like a functioning political system, some system of dispensing justice and resolving disputes, perhaps a stable, agricultural society, an oral tradition, language, money, the development of trades ... all of these things, one would think, are also hallmarks of a civilization. And if you can plausibly argue that a society can exist without books, then you can’t rightly say that anyone who saved a written tradition “saved civilization.” The Irish surely institutionalized a certain tradition of learning and scholarship more effectively than was being done elsewhere, but Saved Civilization? That’s a tough sell.
Worse, Cahill can’t really even effectively argue that the Irish saved books or institutional scholarship. He doesn’t persuasively show that books had become extinct in the intervening 150 years (in fact, he acknowledges that most Greek literature and philosophy was being well preserved in Byzantium, and that small libraries of Latin work existed in a few places throughout Europe, most notably over at the Pope’s crib.) He really only proves that the Irish did it better than others. Great. That’s important. Couldn’t the book have been called How the Irish Built Really Cool Libraries?
Another minor logical flaw exists in Cahill’s view of civilization: Since when is that term limited only to Western History? Are we to assume that if the Irish hadn’t taken on the task of preserving Greek and Roman literary and philosophical gems, the great burgeoning civilizations in China, Japan, the Yucatan Peninsula and Peru would have perished as a result? Those “civilizations” merit not a word from Cahill.
There are other weak spots too. Chapter III “A Shifting World of Darkness” is particularly tedious in its attempt to tie “iron age virtues” (generosity, grace and courage) to modern Ireland, through prehistoric Ireland, and back to Homeric Greece. The links are speculative, and the examples given to illustrate the point are at once over-sampled and under-representative of each nation and era’s literature. As he does throughout the book, Cahill goes on for page after stultifying page with transcriptions from the poems and epics he hopes will make his case. (The upside to this is that, if you just skip all that crap, the book is only about 175 pages, instead of 225, making it an even quicker read.)
Cahill over-reaches throughout, as when he compares Irish scribal scholars’ penchant for inserting personal thoughts into transcriptions of classical works to Joyce’s Ulysses, or when he calls Augustine both the first memoirist and the father of the novel. His placing of Patrick on a par with Augustine as one of the great Christian thinkers is interesting, but his defense of the thought is weak. Even his final chapter, which seems like an out-of-place defense of Irish Catholocism as superior to the Roman branch, relies on meaningless evidence of the Irish’s superior position in meaningless arguments they lost to the Romans 1400 years ago.
None of this means that the book is not, at times, enjoyable and informative. Cahill is certainly right when he notes the dearth of publications, particularly for lay readers, regarding the history of the last days of the Roman Empire, the early days of the Christian church, and the development of feudal societies in the early medieval period. The first 60 or so pages of “How the Irish Saved Civilization” are particularly readable, if for no other reason than that they provide a broad survey of this time (the late 4th and early 5th centuries) and personify the political/philosophical threads of the era in three known characters: Ausinius (a minor poet of dubious intellect, and huge political player), Augustine of Hippo (probably one of the three most important theologians – along with Boethius and Aquinas – of the pre-Enlightenment) and St. Patrick.
But beyond these general statements of history, How the Irish Saved Civilization is a useless book. It’s not a particularly fun read. The evidence contained therein appears facially unreliable, and the analysis Cahill provides is third rate.
Recommended:
No
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