Holiday Inn (Film)

Holiday Inn. Writ. Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice. Dir. Mark Sandrich. With Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Paramount, 1942.

Holiday Inn is one of my favorite movies. It has great music by Irving Berlin. It has performance by Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire; they only appeared together in one other movie. It’s a good romantic comedy, too. The film works in each of these areas.

Berlin originally conceived it as a showcase for his music, with a song for every holiday. He wrote the song “White Christmas” for the film and it went on to become one of the most popular songs ever. All the songs are solid and some are nearly as good as “White Christmas.” I think the song for Washington’s Birthday is the weakest, especially in comparison to the great tune for Lincoln’s Birthday, but in light of where it fits in the movie I feel like cutting it a little slack. I’m especially fond of “You’re Easy to Dance With.”

Crosby and Astaire provide good acting performance, but audiences rightly expect them to sing and dance and they deliver. Two of Astaire’s dance numbers are worth particular mention; the first is supposedly drunk and the other involves firecrackers. These two dances themselves are enough to make the movie worth seeing.

It’s a fair romantic comedy. There is a lot of chemistry between Crosby and Astaire, who deliver clever lines with snap. There is also good chemistry between them and their leading ladies, Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds. The basic plot is boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl is ambivalent about ambitions, conniving friend takes advantage and sweeps away girl, repeat.

The film is an interesting look into race relations at the start of World War II. The film only has three black characters, a female house servant (played by Louise Beavers) and her two children. As if the role of cook-maid isn’t stereotypical enough, she is even called Mamie. The film plainly shows how things would have been done at the time, but seems to have slight moments of reticence about it. Here is an example.



On Lincoln’s Birthday, the white server-performers at Holiday Inn have darkened skin. The actual black people stay in the kitchen, out of sight of the guests. The song for the holiday focuses on Lincoln’s role in ending slavery. The original plan is to play it straight, but at the last minute Crosby’s character decides to change it to a blackface number to hide the identity of a starlet, his love interest, from his rivals. Even in a celebration of the end of slavery, the segregation is so complete that the white guests come no closer to interacting with black people than the make-up darkened skin of white performers.

Even so, the film isn’t about race. It’s a fun love story. It has great music and singing. It has wonderful dance numbers. It’s worth seeing, especially around Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005.

Rodney Stark argues in The Victory of Reason that the West grew to prominence in science, technology, commerce, and power because of its foundations in Christianity. Personal freedom, democracy, and capitalism grew and eventually flourished in Western Civilization because Christianity provided a philosophy and set of beliefs that such things were possible, achievable, and valuable. These things failed, stumbled, and declined in other parts of the world because the cultures, particularly religions, that prevailed there supported philosophies and beliefs that lead another direction.

It starts with a notion of God that is almost unique to Christianity: God is a being of reason. Therefore they could use human reason, however imperfect, to understand God and increase our understanding of Him. Christian theology wasn’t simply asserting scripture, but reasoning about God and His Word to increase, refine, and improve knowledge and doctrine.

The Christian faith embraced progress through reason in doctrine. Christians looked forward to becoming progressively better believers. God is immutable, but those who believe Him can grow in understanding as they mature and with successive generations. This religion of belief contrasted with religions of practice, which inherently looked backward to established law.

These foundational beliefs in reason and progress carried over into Christian views of the physical world. It was a real place made by God. In addition, because God created the world using His reason, we can understand it using ours, just as we can use reason to increase our understanding of God. This belief gave impetus to modern science. Some credit goes to the ancient Greek philosophers, some of who had faith in reason and others in experimentation, though not both at the same time. Islamic philosophers admired, preserved and closely studied the Greeks. However, it was Christians who took these resources and added their own worldview to create modern science. Early scientists were Christians, often supported by the church directly or through universities, which were connected to the church at the time. Western nations gained a lead in science that they still hold.

Progress carried over to social and political issues as well. In particular, Christian beliefs about human equality made the church a leader in the abolition of slavery in Europe and later the Americas. It also gave rise to increasingly democratic governments, personal freedoms, and property rights. This created an environment where capitalism could flourish. Capitalism love technological development, and it didn’t hurt that it was growing in cultures that were amenable to science, and these things grew together creating new levels of freedom, opportunity, and wealth. Christian theologians had the flexibility and reasoning power to adapt doctrine to these new developments while remaining true to received scripture.

Stark supports his arguments with examples from history. One of the more interesting things about the book is the way he compares examples from the Christian world to counterexample from other cultures, such as China or Islam. China was a prominent, technologically advance culture that did not hold its lead. Islam preserved Greek knowledge during Europe’s supposedly dark ages, but did not advance. It was the late bloomers in the Christian West who had the philosophical tools to build success upon success. He also contrasts the winners and decliners in Europe and the Americas, showing how successful and wealthy nations became that way by embracing religious liberty, democracy, and capitalism, while those that declined held to or recreated feudal systems.



If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck
Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel
God Wants You to Be Rich by Paul Zane Pilzer
How We Got Here by Andy Kessler
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Steven K. Scott
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by Frances & Joseph Gies

Among many the Middle Ages, between the Classical period and the Renaissance, is still thought of as the Dark Ages.  In their book Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Frances and Joseph Gies summarize scholarship that shows that the Medieval period was one of commercial and technological advancement that welcomed invention and the dispersion of knowledge.

The authors present a history of technology beginning with the contributions of Greek and Roman civilization and culminating with European developments on the cusp of the Age of Discovery.  The period in between is sometimes called the Dark Ages because of the lack of documentary history, the loss of the centralizing influence of Roman Empire, and the loss of Greek texts and knowledge in much of Europe.  The Gieses attempt to debunk the notion that this time was “dark” in the sense of being backward, especially superstitious, and lacking in advancement in knowledge, commerce, science, and especially technology.

From a technological point of view, the Middle Ages didn’t inherit from the Greeks or Romans much more than they might have learned for more ancient civilizations.  The Greeks little esteemed the useful arts.  The Romans were very practical adopters of technology, and they certainly did things on a large scale, but their main contribution was size and organization.  Medieval Europe more fruitfully borrowed and built upon technology from China.  Ancient China had very advance technology in comparison to contemporary civilizations, and the spice trade aided the transmission of technology, in the form of both devices and ideas, from East to West.

I think some of the greatest advances in this period occurred in architecture and materials.  In architecture, builders began to move away from Roman circular arches to something more like true arches.  This, along with the flying buttress, another Medieval development, made a new architecture of more open and brighter spaces possible.

Materials greatly improved, too, especially iron.  Either directly or as an idea, iron-making technology moved from China to Europe.  The blast furnace gave Europeans the ability to make cast iron.  Though casting iron parts was in their grasp, the more significant issue was that a lot more iron could be made.  Iron tools and parts made a host of other technology practicable.

Technological changes led to cultural changes, too.  Improved applications of animal and water power to agriculture and food production led to a transition away from slavery to a serf-tenant system in which the people who worked the field had a right to portion of their production.  Agricultural surpluses led to the development of cities along with a decline of bound serfs rise of free tradesmen.  The development of manufacturing led to all kinds of trade and improvements in commercial practices including double-entry bookkeeping.

I think this book may be a good introduction to the history of technology for people seeking an entry point to the field.  It is neither too technical nor too academic in its style.  It covers a period of history that is not as well covered by other popular books.  It also acknowledges and summarizes the technology of the immediately preceding and succeeding ages, so it covers a very wide timeframe.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp 

The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Gies, Frances, & Joseph Gies. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages.  New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Links related to Medieval science and technology

Grotesque mummy head reveals advanced medieval science

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A Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen

Esolen, Anthony. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008.

Our civilization is on the verge of disintegration. However, by recovering the best of our historic culture, philosophy, religion and government, the wisdom of our ancestors, we can recover the great things we’ve lost and continue to enjoy the advancements they’ve made possible. That’s Anthony Esolen’s message in this book.

Esolen is unabashedly conservative and religious. He sees this as keeping with the best traditions of the West. He wants to build on the hard won lessons of history, not throw it out because a new age supposedly calls for new thought.

He does not romanticize the ancients. The Greeks who bequeathed to us logic and democracy practice some of the worst kind of rhetoric and abuse of power. The Romans who had some wisdom in affairs of family and state pervert patriarchy with misused authority and undermine industry with slavery. Even the Church, with its worldview that made the best of Western Civilization possible, could go astray. If anything is consistent through history, it’s that evil people do evil things and even people of good intentions can fall short of their ideals.

Our age has dispensed with ideals. Many of the historic revolutions that advanced human happiness were surprisingly conservative in that they carried with them the best traditions of the past. The revolution we’re experiencing discards tradition as irrelevant and dangerously ignores the lessons of even the recent past. Government takes the place of God, or takes on nearly god-like power, scientific management of society supplants individual kindness and community and convenience and convention take over for law and ethics.

In spite of the alarm he sounds, Esolen is optimistic. Western Civilization, especially the Christian West, is built on hope, a hope in One who is good and active in accomplishing good in the lives of men. He doesn’t say abandon the present, but neither abandon our past, especially not the One that gives meaning to the story of human history.

Unimaginable by Jeremiah H. Johnston

What would the world be like if Christ had never come and the Christian church had never been create? New Testament scholar Jeremiah J. Johnston imagines it would be a bleak place. He describes why he thinks so in Unimaginable.

Johnston contrasts the Christian worldview, and its results, with cultures where non-Christian worldviews were dominant. The first of these is the pre-Christian era, especially Greek and Roman culture in the centuries shortly before and after the ministry of Jesus Christ. The second is the 20^th Century political regimes that opposed Christian mores if not religion altogether: Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Adolf Hitler and Bonito Mussolini imagined a return to a pre-Christian, pagan age of Aryan or Roman dominance. The Communists were opposed to any religion; the state operating on behalf of the workers was the dominant force. These movements in some ways were reversions to the morals that predated Christian influence.

The gods of Greece and Rome were immoral characters who had little concern for humanity. The Caesars, god-kings, were largely selfish and self-aggrandizing. In contrast, the Christian God proclaimed His love for people. He demonstrated his benevolence in Jesus, son of God and king of kings, who lived a humble life of service and sacrifice.

Life was cheap in ancient Greek and Roman culture. For instance, babies who were diseased or deformed, or simply girls, were often abandoned to die. In contrast, Christians believed that human life was inherently valuable.

Women were not considered equal to men in pre-Christian times. In contrast, women were present at the major events in Jesus’ ministry and were often acknowledged in the New Testament for their leadership in the early church.

Women were considered of little worth in the ancient world. In addition, slavery and racism were common in the in the Greek and Roman Empires. The superiority of some people was considered plain, and it was appropriate for them to dominate, control and enslave lesser people. Jesus taught that there was no meaningful difference between races (Jews or Greeks), free men and slaves, or the sexes.

There was not religious freedom in the Roman Empire. The Jews were tolerated because of the antiquity of their religion, but others were required to worship the major Roman gods and to acknowledge the divinity of Caesar. Christians were considered atheists for their refusal to acknowledge Roman gods.

Johnston describes an opening of the door in the late 19^th Century to anti-Christian ideas and morals. Philosophers and scientists of the time such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friederich Nietzche and Sigmund Freud were committed to a materialistic view of the world. Humans were not special creations; they were simply sophisticate animals that arrived from the same undirected happenstance that brought for every other thing without purpose. Religion and morals were inventions of people, not revelations from a higher authority.

These influencers, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, challenged Christian morals. They opened the door to devaluing human life, devaluing women (Nietche was explicit about his belief that women were inferior to men), justifying racism with science along with subjugation of “lesser” races, and the elimination of religious freedom, or even individual freedom. The likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Josef Stalin put these ideas into practice, leading to impoverishment, oppression, and death for millions of people.

Some would lay a lot of suffering at the feet of Christianity. Johnston argues that Christianity has alleviated a lot of suffering and paganism and atheism have much greater sums of human misery on their accounts.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Johnston, Jeremiah H. Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017.