On this day in history men descended from monkeys. Well, not exactly. But Nov. 24 is the day on which in 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. And life was never the same again.

Darwin’s insight about the selection of advantageous mutations as the driving force in changing patterns of life on earth was a classic, profound and yet “simple” in the sense that, although it was very hard to think of, it was incredibly obvious once explained and incredibly powerful.

It seemed to explain everything at once. And I do mean everything. It was recently voted the most important academic book of all time in an elaborate exercise in which publishers submitted titles to an academic panel that chose 20 to be voted on by the public. It wasn’t a “scientific” exercise but it was a carefully thought-out one and I happen to think the result was correct. Darwin didn’t just change biology, he changed philosophy and metaphysics and powerfully challenged religion.

Important is not, of course, a synonym for good. Because evolution seemed to explain everything about humans by reference to purely material random causes, it also seemed to unthrone God and reduce man to a beast, while reducing beasts to random products of a heartless universe rather than “creatures,” that is, products of a creator.

I do not think this interpretation is correct. I have met people who insist that we are just bags of chemicals whose intellectual processes are just the inexorable product of electrochemical reactions driven by the laws of physics and chemistry. Our emotions, our thoughts, all are adaptive mechanisms to help us propagate successful descendants. Our ideals are illusions, free will absurd, morality and religion just tricks to make us cooperate for the benefit of our unthinking, soulless genes.

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that if true it’s false or at least unreliable. Our belief in evolution and materialism is not itself the product of genuine intellectual processes but just the random cast-offs of those inexorable processes that result when sodium meets chlorine and energy is released and so forth. If true, materialism it is true by accident and unverifiable. We have no independent reliable standard of rationality, no way to test our conclusions against truth, just a bunch of chemical reactions burbling away and hurling “thoughts” at us.

Or non-us. For in this way of seeing the world, we don’t exist. Our sense of self is just one more trick of the light particles. We do not decide, we do not choose, we simply react in extremely complex conditioned ways that, for some inexplicable reason, include the illusion of self-awareness.

It must be an illusion in the materialist vision because the chemicals are doing the “thinking” according to unchanging mechanical scientific laws. At no point can “we” step into the chain of reasoning, or out of it, and make a decision. There are no forks in the mental road, only equations with inevitable solutions. If we knew the initial position and velocity of every particle, we could predict everything including all your thoughts. Or, again, non-thoughts, because thought, as a deliberate self-controlling process of sifting truth from error, has no place in this vision. It cannot get in anywhere. There are no cracks.

In that sense, as C.S. Lewis once put it, arguing with a materialist is absurd because you are arguing with a man who insists he’s not there, and passionately defends as truths mental patterns his own theory insists are just useful conditioned reflexes. That includes Darwin, who downplayed his own commitment to such metaphysics for public relations purposes but accepted them privately and who is, ironically, buried in Westminster Abbey.

To say all this is not to dispute evolution in the narrow sense. I believe it is the principal mechanism driving the propagation and differentiation of life on Earth though I grant that there are some compelling critiques of its details, especially the question how such a complex mechanism as vision could “evolve” when the multiple independent steps necessary to complete an act of seeing are useless except in sequence which makes it very hard to grasp why they would have been selected as advantageous one by one. But I do not think that evolution is incompatible with the notion of a Creator directly concerned with his creatures on whom He has bestowed free will.

Many people disagree with me. And in doing so, in convincing many people that they are merely beasts, devoid of rationality, souls or dignity, they have helped to make them act that way. Thus Darwin’s impact was greater than that of any other abstract thinker, and helped shape the ghastly 20^th century. But not in a good way.

In the face of evil, true evil, including the evils of Naziism and Bolshevism, we recoil in horror, knowing that our reaction is not just a conditioned reflex designed to help our DNA spawn mindlessly and pointlessly. Darwin was right about many things, but quite wrong about the biggest one.

We are not beasts. Indeed, we must either rise above monkeys or descend far below them. For when we act like brutes we sink below our true nature, which is not random products of clashing chemicals whose noblest aspirations are strange illusions. Westminster Abbey still stands above Darwin’s bones. And so it should, because we are here and we must choose.

On this day in history, Nov. 23, back in 1499, Perkin Warbeck was executed for not being Richard IV. Or for trying to escape. Or for being in the Tudors’ way. Or for not grasping that someone named Perkin cannot seize a throne. Or for actually being Richard of Shrewsbury, younger son of Edward IV. It’s not entirely clear.

It’s not clear because here we have one case where the victors did write the history. And the victors were the Tudors, specifically the cold, cunning and ruthless King Henry VII, who seized the throne by killing Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Part of Henry’s claim to the crown, bolstered by propaganda from the brilliant playwright William Shakespeare, who I admire in virtually every other way, was that Richard III had himself usurped the throne by murdering his two nephews, Edward V and his younger brother Richard, sons of Edward IV.

It is not clear that Richard III did any such thing. Josephine Tey makes a convincing case to the contrary in my opinion in The Daughter of Time. And it’s also not clear that Perkin Warbeck was Perkin Warbeck. He originally claimed to be Richard and only changed his story under torture by Henry VII’s henchmen.

Of course he might have been a fake, whether he really had the unroyal name of Perkin and came from Tournai in Flanders or was Bob from Bristol or anything else. The fact that Henry VII said a man wasn’t king of England doesn’t automatically mean he was, though on at least one occasion it did. (Nor does the fact that Warbeck/Richard was declared the real deal by Richard’s aunt, Margaret of York, who may have been lying ot try to get rid of Henry VII before he got rid of her. She also supported the claims of Lambert Simnel, whose name alone was again surely a bar to any hope of royal achievement.)

Likewise, the fact that “Perkin Warbeck” he was executed for trying to escape from the Tower of London doesn’t mean he really was trying to escape, or that he wasn’t. But basically all we have is Henry VII’s word for it, which I trust as far as I can comfortably spit a rat.

Still, if his name was Perkin, he should have found some other ambition. No one has ever been crowned King Perkin and no one ever will be. If he was Richard IV, it just compounds Henry VII’s villainy which to my mind would be absolutely in character for the man.

I do feel that there’s a certain pitiful haplessness about this particular lunge for the crown. If he really was Richard IV, it’s a sad comedown. If not, it’s a predictable comeuppance. As for Henry VII, well, he got away with it, and wrote the history of it as well.

November 22 isn’t a great day to die. For one thing, you’ll be dead. For another, you’ll have a hard time getting people to notice. It’s still remembered overwhelmingly in that regard as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an event oddly traumatizing to a nation that still idolizes their 35^th president in ways he didn’t deserve. Yet it was on the same day, in the same year in fact, that C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died, and arguably both were better and more important men than Kennedy.

Also, matey, it’s the day the famous pirate “Blackbeard” was killed by the British navy in the battle of Ocracoke Island in 1718. OK, maybe the second most famous pirate after Long John Silver. But the most famous really alive pirate. Briefly.

It’s a curious thing about Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, that his terrifying bloody career was also extremely short. Details are sketchy for some reason; pirating not being like major league baseball there aren’t records of every aspiring scurvy knave who stepped definitively onto the wrong side of the law and the deck of a buccaneer’s vessel. But he is thought to have been English and to have taken up pirating in 1713 as a crew member under Benjamin Hornigold, who had the good sense to accept a British amnesty in 1717 and hang up his cutlass, eyepatch, hook, wooden leg or whatever.

Not Blackbeard. He took over a captured French merchant ship (originally British, taken by the French and used as a slaver, then captured by Hornigold, increased its arsenal from 26 to 40 guns, renamed it “Queen Anne’s Revenge” for reasons that are unclear, and wreaked havoc for six months with a flotilla of up to four ships, capturing dozens of vessels, butchering prisoners, sometimes lighting his beard on fire to scare his enemies (frankly I would have thought seeing the captain’s face in flames would have scared his own men but perhaps they didn’t frighten easily) before accepting an amnesty from the governor of North Carolina in return for much of his loot, returning to pirating, and meeting a squalid and brutal end.

Despite fancy speeches by paper pirates like Long John Silver about “gentlemen of fortune” Blackbeard’s fate is unsurprising. It was a grubby as well as a brutal business and it didn’t just usually end badly, it usually ended quickly. There are exceptions; Edward Morgan having the sense to concentrate on England’s enemies wound up as deputy governor of Jamaica and a rum. Francis Drake was basically disguised as a pirate while secretly working for the English Queen Elizabeth I, though he died of dysentery rather than retiring in comfort. But most were squalid and vicious and soon dead.

Indeed, it’s odd that Blackbeard should have become so iconic despite having lasted so short a time. The legend says it took five musket balls and 20 sword thrusts to finish him off. But it would say that; for all we know a yard-arm fell on his head.

Perhaps the fact that he died on Nov. 22 has rather obscured the end of his career recently. But the truth is he was a wretched awful man who for once met exactly the fate he deserved roughly when he deserved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZV3365a7Ew On November 21, 1980, millions of people turned on their TVs to discover who shot JR. I was not among them. In fact, I still don’t know despite spending much of the 1980s in Texas with the initials JR.

In case readers who type with their thumbs know even less than I do about the matter, it happened on a very popular prime-time television soap opera from 1978-91 called Dallas. Huh? Oh. You don’t know what prime-time television was? It was this deal where you sat like victims of an alien experiment bathed in blue light subjected to whatever came on including things called “advertisements” or “ads”. Now we have Facebook instead. But I digress.

It might seem that ignorance of popular culture is a bad thing, especially in a cultural commentator. Certainly it can quickly shade into snobbery. And it’s perilous not to have your finger on the popular pulse because the Zeitgeist matters. Oh, did I mention snobbery?

The point is, you need to know what people are thinking, how they understand themselves, their society, the meaning of life and its opportunities. That means understanding popular entertainment, which has a far greater immediate impact than abstract treatises and ruminations. Even when it is bad, especially when it is bad, you should pay attention.

On the other hand, you don’t want to rot your brain or waste your life watching bad television, a surprisingly broad category. You don’t want to get to your deathbed with a shelf of great unread books, a long list of important unlived experiences, and a vast knowledge of sitcoms and soap operas. I know who committed the murder on the Orient Express and it’s good enough for me.

Recently a friend observed in conversation that far more people watch South Park than the evening news and that it’s probably a good thing. In one sense he’s right; South Park has far less politically correct cant than a newscast and is far more likely to talk about things that matter, including culture, than about political ephemera and cat-fights. On the other hand, South Park is clearly vulgar and dismal and if it’s where people seek refuge from the chattering classes we’re in trouble, mate.

I say that having watched very little South Park. I find it so grating, so wilfully base, that I cannot sit through it and do not want to try. It may be pushing back against prissy political correctness, and it may sometimes be clever. But on the whole it surrenders to the debasement of life around us rather than standing against it.

Dallas wasn’t even pushing back. After the failed idealism of the 1960s and the sour backlash of the 1970s, it stood for the empty hedonism on which people seemed to reach an exhausted compromise and that rather jumped the shark when Arnold Schwarzenegger bought a Hummer. Of course, with Dallas as with Mad Men, you were allowed to watch because of course you disapproved, well naturally, I mean you didn’t want to be Don Draper or be underneath him depending. But he was just so sexy and successful and … where was I?

Oh yeah. J.R. Ewing. Same story. Rich, ruthless, cynical, successfully lecherous and treacherous. The audience disapproved and, that established, stared and salivated.

It’s important to know that. But to know more is to plunge into the problem not observe it. So yes, I can tell you endless trivia about the Lord of the Rings, a profound as well as lavish morality tale. But I still don’t know who shot JR.

Anyone would have done was my opinion then, and still is.

On November 20 1945 the Nuremberg Trials began. I still think it was a mistake.

Not, of course, from any sympathy with the defendants. Rather, I’m with Churchill that the Nazi leaders should have been shot on sight. Their “crimes” were not crimes in the normal legal sense. They were enormously depraved acts on a vast scale. They were acts of war, not just against the Allies, or Jews, but against all mankind. And calling them “war crimes,” even when motivated by well-meaning righteous indignation, is a confusion of categories.

The problem is not primarily that there was no formal law that really applied. It is true that under the actual laws of Nazi Germany, and certainly given its governing philosophy, the acts of its leaders were “legal.” It is true that the court was convened on an ad hoc basis to try the defendants under rules that were not agreed on at the time. And it is true that these limitations are connected with the main problem. But the main problem is cosmic in scale.

The reason trying the Nazis did not make sense is that no act of human judgement could possibly assign a suitably severe punishment and nothing the defendants could say could possibly excuse their actions or reduce their responsibility. They broke the law written on the human heart; they defiled the image of God in whose image men are made; they denied the very existence of right and wrong. It’s not the sort of thing where you issue a ticket, weigh mitigating factors and mete out a carefully reasoned sentence. It’s the sort of thing you crush under foot.

I am not insensible to the need for formal proceedings for a number of the defendants. There is a question how far down the Nazi party or German governmental, hierarchy the shoot-on-sight order should have applied. And clearly in marginal cases people should be given a chance to defend themselves, to plead compulsion, necessity, ignorance or some other sort of mitigating circumstances including mistaken identity.

One of the defendants given a measured, rational sentence (15 years) was the Foreign Minister from 1932 to 1938 and “Protector of Bohemia and Moravia” from 1939-43 Konstantin von Neurath, who was on leave after 1941 and quit in 1943. Arguably he was caught up in something he did not really understand, direct or sympathize with, only seeing the truth too late. Banker Hjalmar Schacht was acquitted outright; part of the economic administration until the late 1930s, he was in a concentration camp by 1944. So was Hans Fritzsche, head of the news division of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, whose voice resembled that of Goebbels. And though I think he ought to have been imprisoned for abetting the horror he’s not on my shoot-on-sight list.

I understand the need to try this sort of person fairly on the basic charge “Were you an enthusiastic Nazi or a German patriot dragged into a nightmare?” But Hermann Goering? Martin Bormann? I would say you must be joking except it is not a fit subject for a jest.

The only suitable way to carry out trials of this sort is to target secondary figures to see how secondary they were. Those at the top deserve a bullet in the head as soon as they are positively identified, a point underlined in my mind by the fact that after the Israelis tracked down, captured and tried Adolf Eichmann, they executed him even though Israel did not and does not have capital punishment. These are cases where the law is insufficient.

Applying it anyway is a mistake and sets a pernicious precedent. Indeed, one bad result of the Nuremberg proceedings is the way they reinforced the mistaken impression that there was such a thing as “international law” that could and should be trusted to bring order to the world. It is not so in practice, and many horrible tyrants are never punished because there is no international police force.

The ad hoc nature of such tribunals also illustrates their arbitrary and sometimes even unjust nature. Indeed, the Nuremberg proceedings involved Stalinist judges and prosecutors some of whom ought themselves to have been shot, especially Roman Rudenko, who after the trial presided over a former Nazi concentration camp run by the NKVD in which over 10,000 inmates died from deliberate mistreatment. But the problem runs even deeper.

Treating the mass evil of Stalinism, Nazism or today the deeds of ISIL as ordinary crimes downplays the depth of disagreements between political philosophies that makes the world so chaotic and dangerous, a troubling form of intellectual disarmament. When someone is tried for murder, it happens within a framework in which everyone including the accused agrees that murder is wrong. The Nazis didn’t think mass murder was wrong. Their “crime” was being Nazis and acting on it, and it was a metaphysical rather than legal transgression.

In denying that leading Nazis should have been tried I am not diminishing their evil. I am emphasizing it. A higher judge can weigh their guilt and punish them properly. We can only send them to that tribunal as swiftly as possible.

On Nov. 19 1863 Lincoln delivered the immortal Gettysburg address. It was and remains an incredible performance.

Spare, powerful, haunting, it forever captures the meaning of the war. After renowned orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours in characteristically florid style, only to have the president one-up him with ten sentences taking about two minutes.

It was not in fact written on an envelope or scrawled during a train ride. It was prepared with care and reworked to the point that we are not sure what the president actually said in November 1863. Contemporary accounts differ, as they do on its reception. And we do know that he was suffering an attack of smallpox at the time. But the classic version considered authoritative is the last one he wrote and the only one he signed. And as his final word on the subject, regardless of how it came about, it is both brilliant and sublime.

Such oratory, or writing, is rarely encountered. Indeed, it turned what would otherwise be a forgotten ceremony, one Lincoln expected would quickly be forgotten, into a pivotal moment in American history.

Among other things, it marks the definitive transition of Lincoln from a standard if talented Whig/Republican politician to reluctant wartime president to genuine statesman and enduring historical figure. We would of course take note of the president of the winning side during the American Civil War whoever he was, though perhaps without Lincoln’s steady hand and deepening wisdom the Union would not have prevailed. But Lincoln is more than that.

Perhaps he had greatness thrust upon him. But if so it fit.

The Gettysburg Address is not his only moment of transcendent rhetorical brilliance. His Second Inaugural sends shivers down my spine. And if he had not been assassinated on Good Friday of 1865 there might have been a third, even more important address, connected with a successful Reconstruction that conciliated North and South and white and black, generous with regard to the future while firmly closing the door on the past, instead of the botched, bitter mess foisted on the nation by unreconstructed Democratic president Andrew Johnson and his Radical Republican enemies.

We cannot know for sure. History is not a science and cannot be revisited in laboratory experiments. But the trajectory from his early partisan days through Lincoln-Douglas debates to the Gettysburg Address and beyond, and his increasingly impressive performance as a statesman and commander-in-chief, strongly suggest he had much more to give.

In any case, the Gettysburg Address is worth rereading and pondering year after year, unlike Everett’s competent if purple sludge and most of everything else politicians say on occasions great and small.

Speaking of scandals, Nov. 18 is the date a joint Congressional committee issued its final report on the idiotic and baffling Iran-Contra affair, basically concluding with a question I can’t print here. Perhaps Nixon, who was still alive, was wondering why Reagan survived when he didn’t. Partly he was a much nicer guy. And partly it was a better scandal, if you were behind it, because it was incomprehensible.

I mean that in every sense. It was impossible to understand the original plan; the execution was mind-numbingly complex; the lines of accountability were too tangled to follow and the result was … was… say, what happened again?

Oh come now. Surely you remember Bud McFarlane going to Iran with a cake shaped like a key so… I beg your pardon? I’ve wandered into a baroque and implausible spy novel? If only. But actually I haven’t. The original plan, to dignify it with that name, was for the Israelis to sell weapons to Iran, the US would replace the Israeli weapons and get the money, and in return the Iranians would pressure Hezbollah to free seven American hostages in Lebanon.

Hey. Come on. What could go wrong? I’ll tell you. Lt.-Col. Oliver North could get involved, and decide to divert some of the profits from the arms sale to Nicaraguan rebels against the left-wing Sandinista government that, thanks to obtuse Democrats in Congress, the Reagan Administration wasn’t allowed to supply directly at that point. And then you could get found out. Which they did.

Now Reagan escaped partly because there was no evidence that he’d directly authorized the transfer of money to Iran. His subordinates sheltered him loyally (I admire Oliver North’s conduct after the plan started to unravel, while deploring the daffiness of the original scheme), Reagan may not actually have approved the worst bits or key details, and his genial denials and inability to remember everything were made especially plausible by the fact that his enemies had been calling him a genial forgetful dolt for decades. By contrast Nixon was described as some sort of big evil spider controlling everything, watching everything, remembering everything and nursing resentments for decades.

Both descriptions had a certain plausibility, although Reagan was by no means a dolt. Indeed, he made a career of being underestimated, another lesson worth noting in passing. But while he probably wasn’t directly involved, he also probably didn’t remember everything he did hear or even say and no one could pin it to him. Others were charged, prosecuted and in some cases convicted (and then pardoned) but Reagan glided benignly above it all.

Also, by that point Reagan was nearing the end of his second term and his powers, political and personal, genuinely were fading. He didn’t pose, or seem to pose, the menace Nixon did in 1973.

Finally, Nixon’s scandal was at bottom easy to understand: A sinister group of special operatives committing burglaries and wiretappings to try to undermine his political opponents, sheltered by the considerable powers of the American presidency. Reagan’s was, um, what happened again? I just wrote some of it down and you just read it and neither of us knows.

Nor, in the end, did the Congressional investigators. And you can’t impeach a president for what the heck was that all about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh163n1lJ4M On Nov. 17, 1973, Richard Nixon convinced everyone he was a crook by denying it pointedly on TV. There’s an important lesson here.

Now to be fair to Nixon, not always an easy task, he was in pretty deep trouble over Watergate by that point anyway. There wasn’t much he could say that would have helped and much he could say that would have hurt and he had to say something. And it was all his fault.

Hey, I’m trying to be fair to him. So while he doesn’t make it easy let me add that technically he was not a crook. Watergate wasn’t about shoplifting. It was about sinister abuse of power. Indeed the emphasis Nixon placed on Nov. 17, 1973 on not having profited from his long years in public life, though literally true and perhaps an unconscious or even deliberate attempt to repeat his brilliant 1952 escape from scandal with the “Checkers” speech about not profiting from public life, was a fairly transparent piece of misdirection and thus deeply dishonest and clearly desperate.

It didn’t work. Nor could it work. It’s not just that Nixon always looked shifty, guilty, paranoid, grim, glum, sweaty and bitter, even in triumph, a bad foundation for an appeal to be judged on one’s character. It’s that the vehemence with which he denied something of which he had not been accused was a clear, as well as shifty, guilty, paranoid, grim, glum, sweaty and bitter effort to change the subject.

His presidency endured, or was endured, for nearly nine more months. But it was just a very slow motion tumble into a pit, painful for the audience and the performer. It was inevitable before that Nov. 17 press conference. But it was obviously inevitable afterward and that’s not good.

If you’re accused of something you didn’t do, obviously you want to deny it. Ideally you want to laugh it off. Unless, say, you have a laugh like Nixon’s, which was shifty, guilty… well, you get the idea. But that assumes you didn’t do it and basically he did. At that point you’re in a heap of trouble, because when you have uttered a vehement denial, pounding the table, of something irrelevant, the message is clear.

I’m guilty. That’s g-u-i-l-t-y, pronounced “Rich-ard Em Nick-son”. Guilty of the big stuff. You know it, I know it, I know you know it and um what was I saying? And at that point, you’ve had it.

Since I’m giving advice, obviously I should say the key point is not to abuse power, corrupt the Constitution, give in to paranoia and seek unjustified vengeance especially if you’re winning handily anyway, as Nixon was, after a landslide reelection in 1972, an end to the Vietnam war, an opening to China, an arms deal with the Soviets and so on. But while I’m on the subject, if you do these things, don’t then deny being a crook while a bead of sweat trickles down your manifestly dishonest nose.

It won’t work, it can’t work, and it didn’t work.