Celestial Cities and their Citizens
In which we build our internal council of wisdom.
The Past as a Celestial City
This week I was finally able to finish up Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. It’s a very accessible compendium of history, interspersed with the Durants’ philosophical asides. It reads like a long essay that reveals some of the major historical themes and the many cycles inherent in the human condition. This passage near the end struck out to me particularly:
To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.
I’ve talked about history before, but have always considered it as a dead, static thing. Here, the authors’ analogy turns it into a lively and bustling metropolis of wisdom, from whose lanes and pathways we have much to learn. Reading through this slim book I realized that the most formidable part of good historical writing is that 1) it lays bare eras often removed from us, and 2) gives us a window into the people who shaped these respective eras.
In a way, good histories also evoke a “Sense of Place”, a term whose full meaning I didn’t understand until reading the mini-essay in Robert Caro’s Working with the same title. As Caro the biographer tries to make sense of Lyndon Johnson his subject he realizes that he’s missing a key aspect of what drew Johnson to the Presidency. And so Caro decides to travel to Washington to see what LBJ saw. He follows LBJ’s trail through the city, mimicking his routine. And then it hits him. The morning walk that Johnson took at 5:30 on his way to work was at a time when the sun hit the eastern facade of the Capitol building in full-force; illuminating its “dazzling” Corinthian columns made of marble. In that image lay the ambition of Lyndon Johnson, a man running away from the “land of dog-run cabins” to this magnificent city.
By tying him to a place, Robert Caro turns Lyndon Johnson into a universal artifact from whom anyone can learn. Passages like this would make the study of history a much more palatable experience - because they truly make its study feel like one is interacting with a “celestial city”.
Who sits on your “Internal Council”?
Such a celestial city is nothing without its citizens. Even though we should know and read about as many great thinkers as possible, only a few should really occupy our day to day, and aid us in our decision making. This concept of an “internal council” was inspired by a piece written by Tanner Greer titled, “Why I Read Thucydides”1. For him, a few thinkers like Thucydides, Ibn Khaldun, Tocqueville and Madison are part of his internal council. His advice: to “find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind — a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.”
This notion is also echoed by Charles Hill. Himself a diplomat-in-residence at Yale and one of the three pillars of Yale’s Studies in Grand Strategy program2, Hill used to urge statesmen, students and the general public to follow the practice of great men and women of old who always carried with them a few key texts:
Queen Elizabeth I read Cicero for rhetorical and legal strategy. Frederick the Great studied Homer’s Odysseus as a model for princes. John Adams read Thucydides in Greek while being guided through the "labyrinth" of human nature by Swift, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Abraham Lincoln slowly read through Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and was changed by it.
Hill is urging us to engage with literature. Fictional characters can also be part of our internal council. Even though they may be fictional, the realities they are dealing with are all too real and human. The real challenge, is applying this wisdom to our lives.
https://scholars-stage.org/why-i-read-thucydides/
For an overview of the Grand Strategy program, see Linda Kulman’s Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University