A long, long time ago, under false auspicies, I bought a book, a very large book, with the title “Tragedy and Hope” by one Carroll Quigley. After multiple false starts, getting bogged down in the sheer mass of information, I finally finished reading it end of 2023—It had taken me ten years.

When the world is burning, reading a huge, cerebrally challenging book is not that important. On top of firefighting, working for a living, starting a family and being a dad takes up quite a lot of time. Two full time jobs and a passion for reading…

Apart from the obvious answer to the question, how does one read a book in ten years, ie. very slowly, what is the recipe for sticking with something for so long, when the first attempts ended in failure?

Keep the thing present

In the film How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days the protagonists become ever more outrageous in their attempts to sever their relationship. I did everything I could to keep the book within reach: it was on every iteration of my todo and reading lists; it was always there on the shelf or being used as a step up (>1,000 pages) or a weapon by my kids; I took it to France, Italy, England, on holiday (and didn’t read it).

Have a question to answer

What appealed to me in the beginning was the juxtaposition of tragedy with hope in the title. It comes as no surprise that history is full of conflict, scandal, abuse of power…and the book is full of it. What about hope? That is a question worth answering. Indeed, the final pages of the book could be a book in their own right about the substance of Western Civilization and why it is worth fighting for.

In a word: curiosity.

Stubbornness

It’s not always a good quality, but married with a positive outcome, it makes the difference between action and inertia. There is the question of throwing good money after bad, or not knowing when to quit, but that would have happened after a few pages—I’m pretty ruthless with books. My ‘failures’ gave me enough taste of the substance of the work to keep alive the chance of getting through it, and my upbringing did the rest.

Other thoughts

Maybe the biggest dysfunction of humanity is this: once an individual or group has experienced power, it cannot be given up; not without a struggle, and if the struggle is lost, not without bitterness and recrimination.

Reading two hundred years’ worth of Western history in a decade is actually 2000% more efficient than living through them in their entirety.

The freedom we have (in the West) to criticize the system we are part of and subject to is of incredible value, but without the historical perspective, meaningful criticism is difficult. The news feed is incredibly present and intense with meager pointers to consider how we got here. While we may have some understanding of our own system and history, we are almost completely unknowing of other systems and histories—and there are many. This level of understanding is simply unavailable to the vast majority of people, who have to make do with the explanations that are either thrust upon them or that they themselves seek out. This is coupled with a tendency on the part of the information consumer and a more or less implicit motive on the part of the information provider—namely, that of taking sides. Polarisation, anyone? It was probably ever thus, but after these three things in recent years:

  1. watching society bend to the right
  2. living through the pandemic with small kids
  3. Having a massive breakdown and finally becoming a mature adult

My observation is this: ignorance is, unfortunately, massively scalable.

Courage, then, because the opposite must also be true.

To give Prof. Quigley his dues, what is it worth actually taking sides for? What do we have, which has taken us centuries to get to, and which we must never take for granted? Even when the system creaks and groans and is skewed and full of vested interests…

  • Diversity not uniformity
  • Pluralism not monism
  • Inclusion not exclusion
  • Liberty not authority
  • Truth not power
  • Conversion not annihilation
  • The individual not the organization
  • Reconciliation not triumph
  • Heterogeneity not homogeneity
  • Relativisms not absolutes
  • Approximations not final answers

In my words:

  • Messy and colorful not black and white.

Look around: the colors are bleeding, and in ten years it might be too late.