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Category: Thoughts on Culture

  • Thoughts on the Old West: Violent, Racist, Misogynistic?

    Thoughts on the Old West: Violent, Racist, Misogynistic?

    I recently completed my first novel in the Western genre.

    I have read this novel at least ten times by now, and just finished reading the author’s proof that I received in the mail. I feel somewhat guilty about really enjoying this book—surely I’m biased and am missing something.

    One thing I consciously chose to avoid in this novel—the first in a series of three that is going to explore the terrible things that happened in the Pleasant Valley range war of 1880’s Arizona Territory—is graphic violence of the sort that our culture enjoys in the abstract sense provided by books and movies. Perhaps this is because modern America is unfamiliar with real violence. In my novel, when the first few murders of the range war occur, they happen off stage—still incredibly impactful to the community, but not graphically represented for the reader. I’m doing this on purpose, but I will need to adjust this stylistically as the range war erupts and chaos starts to take over. I’m pondering how to do this in a consistent way.

    My main character is a pretty unusual one. She becomes our guide to the humanity and the inhumanity behind the cause of this range war. She is a widow who had plans to go to Arizona before her husband passed away suddenly. Very unusual case. I have considered if she’s too unusual, but then I remember my grandma and my great-grandma and their hard, adventurous people, and I think maybe she’s not completely unreal.

    One thing in the first book I intentionally showed was how the ranch community welcomed her and admired what she brought to the community. She’s tough and unbending—even while silently grieving a recently dead husband. She has great powers of observation. She counts things and remembers them. She works on the small plot that she bought with the first proceeds from her freighting business—driving small numbers of cattle and hauling goods between the isolated valley and the two closest towns—each of which is over eighty miles away.

    I made a point to reflect a culture we no longer remember where men showed respect to women, particularly women they admired. I also am trying to show a historically representative ranching culture where Anglos expanding to the west interact with families who had moved north from Mexico generations earlier. In my book, just like in the world of my grandparents, these two different cultures have the general tendency to appreciate each other and each other’s traditions.

    I read an interview with Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”) recently where he felt over-focused on the “badness” of the American West. He stated his goal was to “demythologize” the West, mostly because he believed that “The history of our country is a violent history, a racist history, and a misogynistic history. It wouldn’t be correct, politically or otherwise, to paint it as civilized.”

    Though I love his characters and books while disagreeing with the decisions he made in them, I wonder if it’s the place of any author to “demythologize” history. Especially if we are doing this from within the comfortable boundaries of our own mythologies. My objective is to present the history accurately and with as little of my twenty-first century bias as I can manage.

    I think about the mythology of the 1880’s in the West. The mythology of my Great Great Grandfather, who sold a horse to Jesse James after fighting in a Civil War on the opposite side of Jesse. Who built a small farm despite pressure from outlaws, dangerous wildlife, and disease and loss. I suspect we have exaggerated the more brutal aspects of his mythology for our own entertainment, but they were certainly a part of it.

    In interviews, McMurtry admitted that though he had intended “Lonesome Dove” to “demythologize” the West, he quickly recognized that he had only accomplished the opposite. “Lonesome Dove,” which had been intended to be a long critique of western mythology, had become the chief source of western mythology. So when I write this book about the Old West, I try to do something different: navigate the place between the wilder parts of their era without forgetting the basic humanity they held, which in many ways was stronger than our own.

    This “navigation” will be a good challenge as I move into the rest of the story, though. Stay tuned for Book Two in “The Rim Country,” where things begin to drift out of control and new players emerge with their own objectives and goals.

    Find Book One of “The Rim Country” at the links below:

    The Rim Country: Book One, ‘The Invitation’ (paperbook)

    The Rim Country: Book One, ‘The Invitation’ (ebook)

  • The Retreat from Excellence: How Postmodern Relativism Undermined Literary Standards

    The Retreat from Excellence: How Postmodern Relativism Undermined Literary Standards

    When a culture abandons the pursuit of objective excellence, it doesn’t simply become more inclusive of wider ranges of thinking—it becomes incapable of discernment.

    Over the past three decades, we’ve witnessed a striking decline in literary quality (I don’t think this is terribly controversial–there are many indicators). I submit that this decline correlates directly with the ascendancy of postmodern thinking in academia and publishing. The culprit isn’t difficult to identify: when “good is merely a perspective” driven by an esoteric “System of Thought” becomes the operative philosophy, the distinction between mediocrity and mastery dissolves.

    The Death of Standards

    The postmodern project, at its core, represents a philosophical surrender. Rather than wrestle with the philosophical inconsistencies in Naturalism, then Realism, then Modernism, the postmodernists decided that solving these problems was impossible because truth itself was merely projected by dominant Systems of Thought. This was a pretentious error and we are now paying the bill.

    By denying that there can be such a thing as “true good” in art, postmodernism hasn’t liberated us at all from oppressive standards—rather, it has left us defenseless against the tide of trivial and insupportable newly-born standards. When every text is merely another perspective, when every voice carries equal weight regardless of craft or vision, the result is predictable: the market floods with work that previous generations would have recognized immediately as unserious. Walk into any major bookstore today and survey the literary fiction section. You’ll find novels praised to the heavens by prestigious review outlets that lack basic narrative coherence, that substitute cleverness for wisdom, that mistake the transgressive for the profound. This isn’t an accident of taste. It’s the logical outcome of a system that has lost the vocabulary—and the courage—to say that some work is simply better than other work.

    Academia’s Capitulation

    The academy, which once served as a guardian of literary standards, has become their primary subverter. English departments that once trained students to recognize excellence now teach them to deconstruct it to fit their preconceptions. This has brought us to the era where a literary PhD dissertation can be generated by an AI, and it is happening all over.

    Close reading—that patient attention to how language achieves its effects—has given way to reading for power dynamics, for representations of identity, for the political implications of competing Systems of Thought. These approaches aren’t completely without value, but when they become the dominant approaches, literature ceases to be evaluated as literature. At that point, it becomes far easier to deconstruct the physical words on a page into representations that reflect whatever system the professional academic rewards. I’ve been occasionally surprised on the literary side of X to find academics who have creatively deconstructed religious works into polemics about post-industrial society and other fashionable concerns. The result? Entire generations of writers emerge from MFA programs unable to distinguish between craft and ideology, between a sentence that sings and one that merely signals. They’ve been taught that traditional notions of beauty, structure, and moral seriousness are suspect—tools of cultural hegemony rather than hard-won insights into what makes language live on the page.

    Publishing’s Moral Vacancy

    The publishing industry—always responsive to cultural currents—has enthusiastically embraced the postmodern turn. Editors who might once have rejected a manuscript for technical deficiencies now celebrate those same deficiencies as formally innovative. Marketing departments that once sought to identify lasting work now scramble to ride waves of social media enthusiasm, no matter how shallow. Consider how contemporary publishing determines what’s worthy of publication. Increasingly, the question isn’t “Is this excellent?” but “Does this fill a slot in our diversity portfolio?” or “Will this generate the right kind of attention on Twitter?” These aren’t questions about literary merit. They’re questions about market positioning and cultural optics—and while both have their place in business decisions, when they crowd out questions of quality entirely, literature suffers. When there is no gate on the process for quality and excellence the bottom line becomes the only motivator. And if the bottom line itself is ignored, then political projection is probably the only remaining motivation.

    The Evidence Is in the Reading

    The proof of this decline doesn’t require theoretical argumentation—it requires only that we read. Pick up a celebrated novel from 2020 and set it beside one from 1950. The difference in linguistic precision, in structural sophistication, in moral and intellectual seriousness is often startling. This isn’t nostalgia speaking. It’s the recognition that when a culture ceases to believe in excellence, it ceases to produce it. The postmodern response to this observation is predictable: “You’re merely privileging one aesthetic over another. Who are you to say Faulkner is better than Toni Morrison?” But this response itself reveals the problem. It treats evaluation as an arbitrary exercise in power (i.e., politics) rather than a learned skill requiring attention, knowledge, and intellectual humility. It assumes that because perfect objectivity is impossible, all judgments are equally subjective—a logical leap that would be easily recognizable as folly in any other field.

    Recently, I was discussing books with an adult reading enthusiast who had discovered a new passion for H. Rider Haggard. His books are exciting “lost world” adventures written during the late 1800s, and the writing was considered accessible to young children of that era. My friend was surprised that young boys were drawn to these books in the past, because even the average adult reader would find the writing challenging today. There are scores of examples like this of what we have lost by losing our way regarding excellence in literature.

    What We’ve Lost

    When we abandon the pursuit of objective literary standards, we lose more than just the ability to distinguish good books from bad ones. We lose the cultural infrastructure that allowed great writers to develop. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—these writers emerged in cultures that, whatever their other failings, took literature seriously as a vehicle for communicating truth. They wrote for audiences that expected not just to be entertained or validated, but to be challenged, elevated, transformed. Today’s literary culture, by contrast, often seems content with books that function as mere mirrors—reflecting readers’ existing beliefs back to them, confirming what they already think about the world. This isn’t literature’s highest calling. It’s literature’s descent to valueless entertainment—essentially Vanity Fair from “Pilgrim’s Progress”.

    The Way Forward

    The path forward requires recovering what postmodernism has taught us to abandon: the courage to discriminate between truth and falsehood, the willingness to say that some work achieves what other work only attempts. This doesn’t mean returning to a narrow canon or dismissing new voices, but rather means insisting that new voices, like old ones, be held to standards of excellence rather than given passes based on novelty or identity. Editors should be willing to reject manuscripts that fail to meet high literary standards, regardless of their political or cultural appeal. Critics need to be willing to write honest reviews rather than promotional copy. It means readers willing to demand more than what’s merely current or trendy. Most importantly, it means recovering the belief that drove the greatest writers of the past: that literature matters precisely because it can access truth, beauty, and moral wisdom in a genuine (but not infallible, of course) way.

    When we believe there’s a “true good” worth pursuing in art, we create the conditions for excellence. When we don’t, we get what we have now: a literary landscape cluttered with forgettable cash generators (some of which is now machine generated…), while genuine talent goes unrecognized because we’ve lost the language to recognize it. The decline of contemporary literature isn’t a mystery. It’s the inevitable result of ideas taken to their logical conclusion. Postmodernism promised liberation from the struggle to define truth and beauty but all it delivered was mediocrity. The question is whether we have the cultural courage to admit it.

    Other Links of Interest

    MORE BOOK REVIEWS by Tod Newman

    POSTS ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING by Tod Newman

    If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy Novels authored by Tod Newman.

  • The Paradox of Self-Centeredness and an Omnipotent God

    The Paradox of Self-Centeredness and an Omnipotent God

    We have all learned from experience at being humans to ferret out and subsequently be disgusted by self-centeredness. The paradox is that this tendency toward pride in one’s self may be one of the great hallmarks of humanity (and is the plague of those in pursuit as well). And due to the recent collapse of restraining virtues, it has become a condemning feature of our culture at large.

    We hate this in others, yet we tolerate it in ourselves. Why?

    I’ve been thinking about how God is perfectly justified to be self-centered. He embodies perfection; angels and humans were created to know and worship Him. Does this trigger our revulsion to self-centered behavior? Probably, if we don’t think through the situation much. Perhaps this is a chief complaint made by those offended by God—His glory conflicts with an unreasonable expectation of our own.

    But pondering this honestly, we quickly realize that if God is exactly as He describes Himself, He fully possesses the right to be self-centered—meaning, He organizes reality to demonstrate His glory. This would indicate that He is the center of all things and knows this because it is true. Does this still bother us?

    One more thing is puzzling—something we as imperfect beings don’t yet understand. The one who should rightly elevate Himself over all others chose to demonstrate that perfect self-awareness also involves sacrifice.

    Where Do We See This in Scripture?

    All throughout, if one pays attention. For instance, in Hebrews 2 we read:

    But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

    A Monumental Change Happened

    For a “little while” He “was made” lower than the angels. This was not His normal state. He is the one “for whom and by whom all things exist.” But He became lower than the angelic forms and joined humanity.

    The Paradox, Resumed

    Why did this change happen? The one who is the very definition of truth demonstrated that His form of self-existence was not complete without the rescue of the ones who were created to love and adore Him. For God’s glory is not the shadow of self-centeredness we have authored. It is something true and higher.

  • My Thoughts about Recent Events

    My Thoughts about Recent Events

    I have allowed a few days to pass so I can better process my thoughts about Charlie Kirk’s recent assassination. As someone who is uncomfortable with politics, I wasn’t a passionate follower of Charlie and TPUSA, but I was very familiar with his videos and I enjoyed his debating style; honesty, directness, but sprinkled with compassion. In his videos, it was easy to see that he treated those he was debating like actual people rather than strawmen to knock over. He often asked for their story and would pause to make them feel heard.

    I’ll be honest — when I first heard of his murder, it felt like a gut punch.

    The Public Humiliation and Beheading of Bishop Sixtus II

    Recently, I completed a series of books set in the 3rd century Roman Empire. One historical event that particularly struck me during this writing process was the murder of the Bishop of Rome—a man we now know as Pope Sixtus II.

    According to historical records, Emperor Valerian launched an aggressive persecution campaign against the early Church, prohibiting collective worship and confiscating church property and funds. Despite these dangers, Bishop Sixtus courageously organized a large service in a remote cemetery, hoping to avoid detection by imperial authorities.

    Unfortunately, an informer must have been present. Roman soldiers arrived at the cemetery, and according to historical accounts, Bishop Sixtus surrendered himself so his congregation could escape. The Romans later publicly beheaded him along with six of his deacons.

    My Attempts to Understand the Impact

    While writing about this event in “The Halls of the Shadow King: The Apprentice,” I spent considerable time imagining what the Roman church must have experienced watching their most trusted leader publicly executed. Seeing someone they may have considered untouchable brutally killed in public must have been shocking and deeply traumatic. Many likely saw Bishop Sixtus’ treatment as indicative of their own vulnerability in the future.

    Then, this past Wednesday as I prepared to coach our school’s JV football game, it suddenly struck me that perhaps I now understood a little of what those early Christians felt.

    In ancient Rome, I’m certain many people felt secure in their positions within the empire and openly mocked the humiliating death of this small Christian community’s leader. Some may have felt remorse afterward, but others probably appreciated the disappearance of this “irritant”, now enabling them to return to their undisturbed lives protected from any awareness of this community.

    The Romans beheaded Bishop Sixtus publicly in August 258 AD. Yet just over fifty years later, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and by 380 it became the empire’s official religion. Meanwhile, Emperor Valerian was eventually captured by Persian ruler Shapur I and died in captivity. In 258, however, no one could have predicted these remarkable reversals.

    There’s no way to know what will unfold from here, but history shows us how significant events—along with collections of seemingly minor ones—can create profound change.

    If you’re interested in reading more about this time period in the early church, I’d welcome you to check out the full series, “The Halls of the Shadow King” in both Kindle and paperback formats on Amazon.

    Other Links

    Erika Kirk’s statement – what a courageous woman

    Here‘s where I talk at length about the full book series in another blog post.

    Turning Point USA website