WIth the Blue Guitar

Prevention's Anti-Aging Guide (from Prevention Magazine)

2007-07-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

We used to think our fate was in the cards--or in the stars. Now, thanks to research unlocking the secrets to living longer and better, we know different. It turns out that 70% of the factors influencing life expectancy are due to good choices and good luck--not good genes. What are the moves that will peel off the years? Prevention asked dozens of scientists studying aging, exercise, nutrition, and related fields which changes deliver the biggest payoff. Read on for their picks--powerful enough to make these researchers adopt them in their own lives.1. Stay the weight you were at 18"Next to not smoking, this is probably the most important thing we can do to stay healthy and live longer," says Walter Willett, MD, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Leanness matters, because fat cells produce hormones that raise the risk of type 2 diabetes. They also make sub-stances called cytokines that cause inflammation--stiffening the arteries and the heart and other organs. Carrying excess fat also raises the risk of some cancers. Add it up, and studies show that lean people younger than age 75 halve their chances of premature death, compared with people who are obese. The government deems a wide range of weights to be healthy (between 110 and 140 pounds for a 5-foot-4 woman), partly because body frames vary tremendously. So to maintain the weight that's right for you, Willett suggests you periodically try to slip into the dress you wore to your high school prom--assuming, of course, that you were a healthy weight at that age. If not, aim for a body mass index of about 23.5.Willett can't use the prom-dress test himself. Nevertheless, at 6-foot-2 and a lean 184 pounds, he dutifully hews to the BMI of his youth.2. Take the dynamic duo of supplementsThey're what Bruce N. Ames, PhD, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, swears by: his daily 800 mg of alpha-lipoic acid and 2,000 mg of acetyl-L-carnitine. In these amounts, he says, the chemicals boost the energy output of mitochondria, which power our cells. "I think mitochondrial decay is a major factor in aging," Ames says--it's been linked to diseases such as Alzheimer's and diabetes.In his studies, elderly rats plied with the supplements had more energy and ran mazes better. "If you're an old rat, you can be enthusiastic," Ames says. "As people, we can't be sure until clinical trials are done." (They're under way.) But the compounds look very safe--the worst side effect documented in humans is a rash, Ames says--and "the data in animals looks really convincing," says S. Mitchell Harman, MD, PhD, president of the Kronos Longevity Research Institute in Phoenix.3. Skip a meal This one move could have truly dramatic results. Rats fed 30% less than normal live 30% longer than usual--and in a recent study at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the hearts of the leaner human calorie-cutters appeared 10 to 15 years younger than those of regular eaters.In other research, calorie restrictors improved their blood insulin levels and had fewer signs of damage to their DNA. Eating less food, scientists believe, may reduce tissue wear and tear from excess blood sugar, inflammation, or rogue molecules known as free radicals. Edward Calabrese, PhD, and Mark Mattson, PhD, have opted for "calorie restriction lite." Calabrese, a professor of toxicology and environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, dumped the midday meal. Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, has done without breakfast for 20 years.Try itSkip a meal a day. You don't need to try to cut calories; Mattson's research suggests you'll naturally consume less that day. Or try fasting one day a week. Just drink plenty of water.4. Get a petOpen up your home and heart to Rover or Boots. Owning a pet reduces the number of visits to the doctor, prolongs survival after a heart attack, and wards off depression, says James Serpell, PhD, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. (His family has a cat, a dog, a large green iguana, a bearded dragon, and a dozen fish.)Pet ownership also protects against a major problem of aging: high blood pressure. In one standout study at State University of New York, Buffalo, stockbrokers with high blood pressure adopted a pet. When they were faced with mental stress, their BP increased less than half as much as in their counterparts without animal pals. But pick your pet with care. There is nothing stress-reducing about a dog that chews the baseboard to bits.5. Get help for what hurtsStudies suggest that continuous pain may dampen the immune system--and evidence is clear that it can cause deep depression and push levels of the noxious stress hormone cortisol higher. So enough with the stoicism: Take chronic pain to your doctor and keep complaining until you have a treatment plan that works, says Nathaniel Katz, MD, a neurologist and pain-management specialist at Tufts University School of Medicine. Your mood will improve--and your immune system may perk up, too.

The Thing About Retin-A: It Works

2006-12-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

THE beauty aisles of a typical drugstore are a veritable fortress stacked with lotions and potions that promise to turn back the clock, rejuvenate the skin and restore a youthful glow. Their labels list an arsenal of ingredients —alpha hydroxy acids, antioxidant vitamins, green tea, copper, caffeine, soy, peptides, among many others.

Yet within the walls of products and tiers of claims, one ingredient still stands out: Retin-A. It is available in prescription-strength products, including generic formulations, and under brand names like Retin-A Micro, Renova, Avage and Tazorac. Its less potent over-the-counter cousin, retinol, is found in products on department and drugstore shelves.

According to the Mintel Global New Products Database, nearly 300 retinol-containing cosmetics have hit the market since 2003. The latest crop includes Neutrogena Healthy Skin Anti-Wrinkle Intensive Eye Cream, RoC Retinol Correxion Deep Wrinkle Daily Moisturizer with SPF 15, Avon Anew Line Eliminator Neo-Retinol Line Plumper SPF 15, MD Skincare Alpha Beta Daily Face Peel and overnight creams like SkinCeuticals retinol 0.5 and 1.0 formulas.

With so many doctors and beauty companies on a hunt for the next big anti-aging product, why do Retin-A and retinol still have so much appeal? The answer, many dermatologists say, is simple: They work.

Even better, unlike most other beauty products with lofty claims, there’s proof that they work. “To my knowledge, this is the only drug for which there has been crystal-clear demonstration that it works on the molecular level,” said Dr. John J. Voorhees, the chairman of the dermatology department at the medical school of the University of Michigan.

Prescription Retin-A first became popular more than 20 years ago as an acne treatment. But doctors and patients soon noticed another benefit, one with enormous impact on those who were looking for a way to keep skin vibrant and smooth.

Retin-A users reported improvements in skin texture, including diminished wrinkles and brown spots. Early studies soon confirmed its anti-aging effects. In 1988, Dr. Voorhees and his colleagues at Michigan published the first double-blind study of Retin-A’s effect on photodamaged skin and found that all 30 patients who completed the 16-week study showed statistically significant improvement.

“There is so much historical evidence that this ingredient works better than anything else,” said Dr. Joel L. Cohen, clinical assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Colorado and a consultant for OrthoNeutrogena, the maker of Retin-A Micro. And the effects are more than superficial. “It actually works to remodel skin on a cellular level,” Dr. Cohen said.Retin-A, the drug known generically as retinoic acid or tretinoin, is derived from vitamin A. Retinol, a less potent form of Retin-A, also has some strong science to support its effectiveness. Skin cells contain retinoid receptors that help regulate how the cell functions. As people age, their cells behave more erratically. “But consistent use of Retin-A helps normalize the cells,” said Dr. Min-Wei Christine Lee, a dermatologist in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Retin-A can improve skin texture and fade dark spots and freckles because it causes skin cells to turn over more rapidly. It shrinks dilated pores and improves cell turnover within the pores so they are less likely to clog and become blackheads and whiteheads. But what has earned Retin-A its long-held reputation is its ability to affect the retention of collagen.

Collagen is what gives skin its structure, firmness and elasticity. Repeated sun exposure breaks down collagen and, with age, cells produce less and less collagen to repair the damage. Skin wrinkles, sags and loses fullness.

Retin-A does double duty in helping to boost collagen. According to research at Michigan, it has the potential to stop photoaging before it starts. “The retinoids prevent the rise of collagenase after UV exposure,” Dr. Voorhees said. Collagenase is what breaks down collagen.

But regular use of a retinoid product also increases the amount of new collagen formed, research has found, and that new collagen will last for years.

Susan Hobbs, 56, of Royal Palm Beach, Fla., a retired firefighter, said she spends a lot of time outdoors, and has been using Retin-A for about 15 years. “And I really don’t have a lot of wrinkles, compared to other people my age," she said.“I think that using Retin-A has made a big difference,” Ms. Hobbs said. “I think if I didn’t use it, the sun damage would have really taken its toll.”

The results are not just cosmetic. Dr. Voorhees said that retinoids have been used to treat precancerous skin cells. Studies show that after two years of use, those abnormal cells returned to normal.

News Source: http://www.nytimes.com/

Why do we believe in God?

2005-10-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Faith in a higher being is as old as humanity itself. But what sparked the Divine Idea? Did our earliest ancestors gain some evolutionary advantage through their shared religious feelings? In these extracts from his latest book, Robert Winston ponders the biggest question of them all

Thursday October 13, 2005The Guardian

The Dolley Pond Church of God With Signs Following was founded in Tennessee in 1909 by one George Went Hensley. This former bootlegger took to the pulpit in a rural Pentecostalist community in Grasshopper Valley. One Sabbath, while he was preaching a fiery sermon, some of the congregation dumped a large box of rattlesnakes into the pulpit (history does not record whether they were angry or just bored). Without missing a beat, in mid-sentence, Hensley bent down, picked up a 3ft-long specimen of this most venomous of snakes, and held it wriggling high above his head. Unharmed, he exhorted his congregation to follow suit, quoting the words of Christ: "And these signs will follow those who believe ... in my Name ... they will take up serpents."

News of Hensley's sermon spread through Grasshopper Valley; others joined him in handling snakes, and the practice caught on. There have since been around 120 deaths from snakebite in these churches, but most of the congregants tend to refuse medical help if they are bitten, preferring to believe that divine intervention will be more efficacious. Sadly, Hensley himself perished from a snakebite in 1955, and shortly afterwards the US government wisely acted to prevent the practice - although it is still legal in parts of the States.

Today, snake-handling continues mostly in small communities in rural areas of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as pockets in other southern states. Participants feel that "the spirit of God" comes upon them as they open the boxes containing the snakes. Often lifting three or four of them up simultaneously in one hand, holding them high and allowing the creatures to wind around their arms and bodies, they praise God ecstatically.

To many of us, religious or not, this type of activity seems little short of outright lunacy. And it's certainly the case that religion and mental ill-health have long been linked. The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.

Many years ago, a team of researchers at the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota decided to put this association to the test. They studied certain fringe religious groups, such as fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostalists and the snake-handlers of West Virginia, to see if they showed the particular type of psychopathology associated with mental illness. Members of mainstream Protestant churches from a similar social and financial background provided a good control group for comparison. Some of the wilder fundamentalists prayed with what can only be described as great and transcendental ecstasy, but there was no obvious sign of any particular psychopathology among most of the people studied. After further analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional Protestant churchgoers - the "extrinsically" religious - than among the fervently committed.

A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport did some key research in the 1950s on various kinds of human prejudice and came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today. He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he defined as religious self-centredness. Such a person goes to church or synagogue as a means to an end - for what they can get out of it. They might go to church to be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring respectability or social advancement. Going to church (or synagogue) becomes a social convention.

Allport thought that intrinsic religiosity was different. He identified a group of people who were intrinsically religious, seeing their religion as an end in itself. They tended to be more deeply committed; religion became the organising principle of their lives, a central and personal experience. In support of his research, Allport found that prejudice was more common in those individuals who scored highly for extrinsic religion.

The evidence generally is that intrinsic religiosity seems to be associated with lower levels of anxiety and stress, freedom from guilt, better adjustment in society and less depression. On the other hand, extrinsic religious feelings - where religion is used as a way to belong to and prosper within a group - seem to be associated with increased tendencies to guilt, worry and anxiety.
It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages. Many anthropologists and social theorists do indeed take the view that religion emerged out of a sense of uncertainty and bewilderment - explaining misfortune or illness, for example, as the consequences of an angry God, or reassuring us that we live on after death. Rituals would have given us a comforting, albeit illusory, sense that we can control what is in fact ultimately beyond our control - the weather, illness, attacks by predators or other human groups.

However, it is equally plausible that the Divine Idea would have been of little use in our prehistoric rough-and-tumble existence. Life on the savannah may have been in the open air, but it was no picnic. Early humans would have been constantly on the lookout for predators to be avoided, such as wolves and sabre-tooth tigers; hunting or scavenging would be a continual necessity to ensure sufficient food; and the men were probably constantly fighting among each other to ensure that they could have sex with the best-looking girl (or boy) or choose the most tender piece of meat from the carcass. Why would it be necessary, in the daily scramble to stay alive, to make time for such an indulgent pursuit as religion?

Richard Dawkins, our best-known Darwinist and a ferocious critic of organised religion, notes that religion seems to be, on the face of it, a cost rather than a benefit: "Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of man-centuries in its building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolised medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion."

It seems at first glance as if Dawkins is arguing that religion is an evolutionary disaster area. Religious belief, it seems, would be unlikely, on its own merits, to have slipped through the net of natural selection. But maybe that interpretation of what Dawkins is saying neglects some of the further benefits that religion might well offer in the human quest for survival and security.
In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a "useful" genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by "natural selection": adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes. Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes?

While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain. Dopamine is one neurotransmitter which we know plays a powerful role in our feelings of well-being; it may also be involved in the sense of peace that humans feel during some spiritual experiences. One particular gene involved in dopamine action - incidentally, by no means the only one that has been studied in this way - is the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4). In some people, because of slight changes in spelling of the DNA sequences (a so-called polymorphism) making up this gene, the gene may be more biologically active, and this could be partly responsible for a religious bent.

And it is easy to suggest a mechanism by which religious beliefs could help us to pass on our genes. Greater cohesion and stricter moral codes would tend to produce more cooperation, and more cooperation means that hunting and gathering are likely to bring in more food. In turn, full bellies mean greater strength and alertness, greater immunity against infection, and offspring who develop and become independent more swiftly. Members of the group would also be more likely to take care of each other, especially those who are sick or injured. Therefore - in the long run - a shared religion appears to be evolutionarily advantageous, and natural selection might favour those groups with stronger religious beliefs.

But this is not the whole story. Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion. Psychologist Eliot Turiel observed that even three- and four-year-olds could distinguish between moral rules (for example, not hitting someone) and conventional rules (such as not talking when the teacher is talking). Furthermore, they could understand that a moral breach, such as hitting someone, was wrong whether you had been told not to do it or not, whereas a conventional breach, such as talking in class, was wrong only if it had been expressly forbidden. They were also clearly able to distinguish between prudential rules (such as not leaving your notebook next to the fireplace) and moral rules.

This would suggest that there is a sort of "morality module" in the brain that is activated at an early age. Evidence from neuroscience would back this up, to a degree. In my last book, The Human Mind, I noted that certain brain areas become activated when we engage in cooperation with others, and that these areas are associated with feelings of pleasure and reward. It also seems that certain areas of the brain are brought into action in situations where we feel empathy and forgiveness.

So religion does not seem to be produced by a specific part of our psychological make-up. Is it more likely, then, that religious ideas are something of an accidental by-product created by other parts of our basic blueprint, by processes deep in the unconscious mind that evolved to help us survive?

Shared beliefs
What identical twins teach us about religion

In the United States during the 50s and 60s,it was considered best to separate at birth twins who were to be adopted. This led to a number of these children being brought up by families who did not even know that their adopted baby had a twin; and sadly, the children themselves were brought up intotal ignorance of their "lost" twin.

Identical twins, of course, are formed in the uterus by the embryo splitting; so identical twins have exactly the same DNA.

Non-identical twins -growing from two separate eggs fertilised by different sperm - do not have identical genes, but will just share many general aspects of their genetic inheritance, as do any other brothers or sisters in one family unit.

Thomas Bouchard, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, recognized that these twins, if compared with each other as they grew up, would provide an important way of measuring genetic and environmental influences.

His groundbreaking work in the 1980s and 90s gave rise to some extraordinary insights into which aspects of the human condition are more likely to be due to nature, and which to nurture.
In one study, Bouchard concentrated on72 sets of twins who had reached adulthood. He first established which of the twins (35 sets in all) were genuinely identical by genetic testing.
These were then invited to complete personality tests.

Such questionnaires, which are widely used by psychologists, pose questions in the form of statements, to which the respondents have to rate their level of agreement on a scale of one to eight. The following is a small sample of the many statements relating to religion:
· I enjoy reading about my religion.
· My religion is important to me because it answers many questions about the meaning of life.
· It is important to me to spend time in prayer and thought.
· It doesn't matter to me what I believe as long as I am good.
· I pray mainly to gain relief and protection.
· I go to my (church, synagogue, temple) to spend time with my friends.
· Although I am religious, I don't let it affect my daily life.

When Bouchard and his team compared the answers to these and other personality questions, they found strong statistical evidence that identical and non-identical twins tended to answer differently. If one identical twin showed evidence of religious thinking or behaviour, it was much more likely that his or her twin would answer similarly.

Non-identical twins, as might be expected (they are, after all, related), showed some similarities of thinking, but not nearly to the same degree. Crucially, the degree of religiosity was not strongly related to the environment in which the twin was brought up. Even if one identical twin had been brought up in an atheist family and the other in a religious Catholic household, they would still tend to show the same kind of religious feelings, or lack of them.

Work by several other scientists has inclined to confirm Bouchard's findings. One study, conducted by an international team at the Institute of Psychiatry in London under Dr Hans Eysenck, looked at information from twins living in the UK and Australia.
The researchers found that attitudes to Sabbath observance, divine law, church authority and the truth of the Bible showed greater congruity in identical rather than non-identical twins - again supporting the idea of a genetic influence.

Bouchard has consistently found in many of his studies that intrinsic religiosity -which seems to incorporate a notion of spirituality - is much more likely to be inherited. Extrinsic religiosity tends to be a product of a person's environment and direct parental influence. Bouchard also found that tendencies towards fundamentalism were also rather more likely to be inherited.
It is of some interest, too, that, in the populations that Bouchard and his colleagues have studied, women tend to have inherited rather more religious attitudes than men.

· The Story of God by Robert Winston is published by Transworld at £18.99. Winston's new series of the same name will be broadcast on BBC TV, starting in December.

Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio in an Age of War

2005-07-23T05:07:00.000-07:00

New Left Review 31, January-February 2005
In an era of serial war, Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio as theorists of a perpetual peace. Jurisprudence and force in three parallel philosophical constructions of the present international order, and the unsettled afterthoughts—American, German, Italian—that accompanied them.
PERRY ANDERSON
ARMS AND RIGHTS

In the final decade of the century that has just ended, three of the most distinguished political philosophers of the time turned their attention to the international scene. In the early nineties, each had published what could be seen as a culminating statement of their reflections on the internal life of Western liberal democracies: Jürgen Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung (1992), John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993), and Norberto Bobbio’s Destra e Sinistra (1994). There followed, focusing now on external relations between states, Habermas’s ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: at Two Hundred Years’ Historical Remove’ (1995) and ‘The Postnational Constellation’ (1998), and Rawls’s Law of Peoples (1999). Bobbio, who had started thinking about international relations much earlier, and anticipated many of their concerns in ‘Democracy and the International System’ (1989), produced more punctual interventions in these years, each arousing major intellectual debates. [1] The apparent alteration in attention of Rawls and Habermas, previously often reproached with lack of concern for global issues, was by contrast striking. In the background to a new set of preoccupations, on the part of all three thinkers, stretched the frieze of world history, as the end of the Cold War brought not pacification of relations between states, but military engagements of a frequency not seen since the sixties, in the Gulf, the Balkans, the Hindu Kush and Mesopotamia. Each philosopher sought to offer proposals appropriate to the time.
Of the three, it was Rawls who offered the most systematic outline of a desirable international order. The Law of Peoples extends the modelling devices of A Theory of Justice from a national to a global plane. How is international justice to be realized? Rawls argues that we should imagine an ‘original position’ for the various peoples of the earth parallel to that for individuals within a nation-state. In it, these collective actors choose the ideal conditions of justice from behind a veil of ignorance concealing their own size, resources or strength within the society of nations. The result, he argues, would be a ‘law of peoples’ comparable to the contract between citizens in a modern constitutional state. But whereas the latter is specifically a design for liberal democracies, the scope of the former extends beyond them to societies that cannot be called liberal, yet are orderly and decent, if more hierarchical. The principles of global justice that should govern democratic and decent peoples alike correspond by and large to existing rules of international law, and the Charter of the United Nations, but with two critical corollaries.
On the one hand, the Law of Peoples—so deduced from an original position—authorizes military intervention to protect human rights in states that are neither decent nor liberal, whose conduct brands them as outlaws within the society of nations. Regardless of clauses to the contrary in the un Charter, these may be attacked on the grounds of their domestic policies, even if they present no threat to the comity of democratic nations. On the other hand, the Law of Peoples involves no obligation to economic redistribution between states comparable to the requirements of a justice within democratic societies. The Difference Principle, Rawls explains, does not apply between peoples, since the disparities in their wealth are due not to inequality of resources, but principally to contrasts in culture. Each society is essentially responsible for its own economic fate. Better-off peoples have a duty of assistance to those that are historically more burdened by their culture, but this does not extend beyond helping them achieve the sufficiencies needed for a decent hierarchical order. A legal empyreum that conformed to these rules would have every chance of extending the peace that has reigned for more than a century between the world’s democracies to all corners of the earth. The Law of Peoples, inspired by the long experience of this silence of arms among liberal societies, configures a ‘realistic utopia’.
Rawls explains at the outset of The Law of Peoples that the basic intention of his work was to offer a contemporary version of Kant’s For a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch of 1795. Habermas, proceeding from the same inspiration, sought more explicitly to update Kant, reviewing the posthumous fortunes of his scheme on the occasion of its bicentenary and, where necessary, adjusting it to present conditions. War could be abolished, Kant had believed, by the gradual emergence of a federation of republics in Europe, whose peoples would have none of the deadly impulses that drove absolute monarchs continually into battle with each other at the expense of their subjects—the drive for glory or power. Rather, interwoven by trade and enlightened by the exercise of reason, they would naturally banish an activity so destructive of their own lives and happiness. For well over a century, Habermas observes, history rebuffed this prospect. Democratic peoples showed they could be just as bellicose as autocratic princes. Instead of peace-giving trade, there came industrial revolution and class struggle, splitting rather than uniting society. The public sphere became prey to distortion and manipulation with the arrival of modern media. Yet since the close of the Second World War, Kant’s vision has come to life again, as his premises have been fulfilled in altered conditions. Statistical research confirms that democracies do not war with each other. Within the oecd, nations have become economically interdependent. The welfare state has pacified class antagonisms. ngos and global summits on population or the environment show that an international public sphere is taking shape.
But if Kant’s diagnostic has today been vindicated, his institutional scheme for a perpetual peace has proved wanting. For a mere fœdus pacificum—conceived by Kant on the model of a treaty between states, from which the partners could voluntarily withdraw—was insufficiently binding. A truly cosmopolitan order required force of law, not mere diplomatic consent. The un Charter, in banning aggressive wars and authorizing measures of collective security to protect peace, and the un Declaration of Human Rights, laid some of the legal bases for one. But in continuing—inconsistently—to proclaim national sovereignty inviolable, the Charter had not advanced decisively beyond Kant’s original conception. The transformative step still to be taken was for cosmopolitan law to bypass the nation-state and confer justiciable rights on individuals, to which they could appeal against the state. Such a legal order required force: an armed capacity to override, where necessary, the out-dated prerogatives of national sovereignty. The Security Council was an imperfect instrument of this imperative, since its composition was open to question and its actions were not always even-handed. It would be better if it were closer in model to the Council of Ministers in the European Union, but—in this unlike the latter—with a military force under its command. Nevertheless, the Gulf War was evidence that the un was moving in the right direction. The present age should be seen as one of transition between international law of a traditional kind, regulating relations between states, and a cosmopolitan law establishing individuals as the subjects of universally enforceable rights.
Bobbio’s starting-point, by contrast, lay in Hobbes. For theorists of natural law, the passage from a state of nature to a civil union required two distinct contracts: the first, an agreement between warring individuals to form an association; the second, to submit to the decisions of an authority in case of disputes among them; a pact of non-aggression, and a pact for pacific settlement of conflicts. For Hobbes, neither were possible in relations between states. For them, peace could never be more than a temporary suspension of war, the inescapable condition of competing sovereign powers. This was an accurate description, Bobbio agreed, of the classical system of international relations, down to the twentieth century. But with the advent of the League of Nations, and then of the United Nations, for the first time a pactum societatis started to take shape between sovereign states. Still lacking, however, was any pactum subiectionis for the resolution of conflicts and the enforcement of rights. Democratic ideals plainly informed the un’s Declaration of Human Rights, and the representative equality of its General Assembly. But national sovereignty continued to frustrate the first, and the character of the Security Council to thwart the second. Transactions between the Great Powers still essentially determined the fate of the earth.
Yet now these coexisted with another and better framework. If it was wrong to idealize the un, scepticism about it was also misplaced. The new system of international relations it half-embodied had not done away with a much older one; but nor had the latter succeeded in dispatching this more recent version. The two rubbed against each other—one still effective but no longer legitimate, the other legitimate but not yet effective. [2] For what was still missing from the contemporary inter-state system was the juridical figure of the Third—Arbiter, Mediator or Judge—created by any pact of submission, of which Hobbes’s Leviathan, governing those who had voluntarily made themselves its subjects, had offered a compelling, if autocratic, intra-state model. Today, the abstract outline of such a Third could acquire democratic form as a cosmopolitan sovereignty based on the consent of states, empowered to enforce universal peace and a catalogue of human rights. The first condition of such a desirable order had already been perceived by Kant. It was the principle of transparency, abolishing the arcana imperii that had always characterized the foreign policies of democracies and tyrannies alike, under the pretext that affairs of state were too complex and delicate to broadcast to the public, and too dangerous to reveal to the enemy. Such secrecy could not but erode democracy itself, as innumerable actions—at home as well as abroad—of the national security services of contemporary states testified. Here a vicious circle was at work. States could only become fully democratic once the international system became transparent, but the system could only become fully transparent once every state was democratic. Yet there were grounds for hope: the number of democracies was increasing, and a certain democratization of diplomacy was visible. As Kant had once seen in general enthusiasm for the French Revolution a ‘premonitory sign’ of the moral progress of humanity, so today universal acceptance of human rights, formal as this still might be, could be read as a portent of a pacified future to come. [3]
Maryland, Rhineland, Piedmont
The similarity of these constructions, arrived at independently, is all the more notable for the differing profiles of their authors. Biographically, the formative experience of each lay in the Second World War, but these years were lived in sharply contrasting ways. Rawls (1921–2002), who came from a wealthy family in Maryland and originally intended to become a Protestant minister, fought as an infantryman in the New Guinea and Filipino theatres of the Pacific War. The moral crises of the battlefield seem to have affected him deeply, changing a religious into a philosophical vocation. Returning home to pursue an academic career, he became the most widely read political thinker of his time with the publication, in the early seventies, of A Theory of Justice. Although framed entirely abstractly, Rawls’s work was at the same time consistently prescriptive, however ambiguous its practical implications might be. His intellectual horizon of reference could be described as quite narrow: principally, Anglo-American moral philosophy from the time of Victoria to the Cold War, and an animating inspiration from Kant. Politically, Rawls described himself as a left liberal, and no doubt voted Democrat. But one of the most striking features of a thinker often admiringly described by colleagues as unworldly, was a complete abstention from any commentary on contemporary public affairs, throughout his life.
Eight years younger, Habermas grew up in a small Rhenish town under Hitler. His father joined the Nazi party in 1933, and Habermas himself briefly took part in defensive work with the Hitlerjugend at the end of the war. After discovering the realities of the Third Reich and breaking with Heidegger, who had been his first major influence, Habermas became the major philosophical descendant of the Frankfurt School, absorbing its distinctive transformations of Marx, and then in turn criticizing these in the light of American pragmatism and systems theory. Intellectually heir to the totalizing ambitions of German idealism, scarcely any major philosophical tradition has fallen outside the range of his interests, in which sociology—classical and contemporary—has also occupied a central place. As a political thinker, the pattern of Habermas’s writing reverses that of Rawls, whom he has criticized for his inappropriately substantive intentions. His own political theory is purely procedural, abstaining from any programmatic proposals. On the other hand, Habermas has never hesitated to intervene politically on topical issues, adopting public positions on leading disputes of the day in Germany, as a citizen of the left. His Kleine politische Schriften now run to nine volumes, rivalling the number of Sartre’s Situations. At the same time, he has never been involved in any political organization, keeping his distance from spd and Greens alike.
A generation older, Bobbio (1907–2004) was born into a well-connected family in Turin which, like most of the Italian bourgeoisie, welcomed the March on Rome and Mussolini’s dictatorship. After early work on Husserl, he turned to the philosophy of law. In his late twenties, friendship with intellectuals in the anti-fascist resistance led to brief arrest and release in 1935, after which he resumed a university career with a letter of submission to Mussolini, and intervention by an uncle acquainted with a leading hierarch of the regime. By the outbreak of the war he was a member of a clandestine liberal socialist circle, and in 1942 became one of the founders of the Partito d’Azione, the leading force of the independent Left in the Italian Resistance. Active in the Partito d’Azione until 1948, when it faded from the scene, Bobbio became the most eloquent critical interlocutor of Italian Communism during the high Cold War. In 1966, when the long-divided Italian Socialists united again, he joined the reunified party, playing a major role both in its internal discussions and in public debates at large—after 1978, in sharp opposition to Craxi’s leadership of the psi. In 1984, on his retirement from the University of Turin, he was made a Senator for life, and in 1992 his name was canvassed as a candidate for President of the Republic.
If Bobbio’s career was thus a much more intensely political one than that of Habermas, let alone Rawls, as a theorist he was less systematic or original—limitations he was the first to emphasize. Steeped in the philosophy of law, which he taught for most of his life, and taking his primary inspiration from Kelsen’s positivism, from the early seventies he occupied a chair of political science. In both fields he displayed a notably richer historical sense of his disciplines than either the American or the German thinker. The most influential of his voluminous writings were concerned with the origins, fate and future of democracy, and its relations with socialism. In these, he drew equally on Constant and Mill, on Weber and Pareto, to confront the legacy of Marx. They are texts that vividly reflect the energy and variety of Italian political culture in the post-war period, thrown into sharp relief against the monochrome landscape of the United States or the Federal Republic. To that extent, Bobbio’s thought was the product of a national experience without equivalent elsewhere in the West. But in one critical respect he was also at an angle to his country. From the early sixties onwards, Bobbio was preoccupied with global problems of war and peace that had little, if any, resonance in Italy—a subordinate state within the American security system, with no post-war colonies, and hardly a foreign policy worth speaking of, whose political class and electorate, famously polarized by domestic conflicts, took correspondingly little interest in affairs beyond their borders. Acutely concerned by the dangers of thermonuclear war between East and West, Bobbio devoted a series of his finest essays to inter-state relations in the atomic age, first collected as Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace in 1979, long before either Rawls or Habermas had got around to considering the plane of international politics.
Americana
Service in America’s war to regain the Pacific; a boyhood in Nazi Germany; underground resistance against fascism. It would be surprising if three such distinct experiences were without trace in the work of those who went through them. Rawls and Habermas offer the most clear-cut contrast. From the beginning, there were critics—nearly every one also an admirer—of A Theory of Justice who were puzzled by its tacit assumption, never argued through as such, that the only relevant unit for its imaginary ‘original position’, from which a just social contract could be derived, was the nation-state. How could a Kantian constructivism, deducing its outcome from universal principles, issue into the design merely of a particular community? The categorical imperative had known no territorial boundaries. At the time, the restriction could appear anodyne, since Rawls’s two principles of justice, and their lexical order—first, equal rights to political liberty; second, only those socio-economic inequalities of benefit to all—presupposed conditions common to the wealthy capitalist countries of the West, with which his commentators were also essentially concerned.
With the publication of Political Liberalism, however, the extent to which Rawls’s preoccupations centred on just one—highly atypical—nation-state, his own, became clear. The whole problematic of this sequel, still couched in general terms, but now referring with diminishing compunction to strictly American questions or obsessions, revolved around the permissible role of religion in political life: an issue of small relevance in any major advanced society other than the United States. In the background, standard patriotic landmarks—the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, Lincoln’s Inaugurals, the New Deal—demarcate the space of reflection. Moving into less familiar terrain, The Law of Peoples unfolds the logic of such introversion. Given that in A Theory of Justice it is the rational choice of individuals that is modelled in the original position, why does the same procedure not obtain for the law of peoples? Rawls’s most impressive pupil, Thomas Pogge, deploring the conservative drift of his later work, has sought to extend its radical starting-point in just the way Rawls refuses, offering a vision of ‘global justice’ based on the application of the Difference Principle to all human beings, rather than simply the citizens of certain states. [4] The reason why Rawls declined this amplification goes to the unspoken core of his theory. For individuals in the original position to reach unanimous agreement on the two principles of justice, Rawls had to endow them with a range of information and a set of attitudes derived from the very liberal democracies that the original position was supposed to generate—its veil of ignorance screening the fortunes of each individual in the social order to be chosen, but not collective awareness of its typical institutions.
In The Law of Peoples, this circular knowledge resurfaces as the ‘political culture’ of a liberal society. But just because such a culture inevitably varies from nation to nation, the route to any simple universalization of the principles of justice is barred. States, not individuals, have to be contracting parties at a global level, since there is no commonality between the political cultures that inspire the citizens of each. More than this: it is precisely the differences between political cultures which explain the socio-economic inequality that divides them. ‘The causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political culture and in the religious, philosophical and moral traditions that support the basic structure of their political institutions’. [5] Prosperous nations owe their success to the diligence fostered by industrious traditions; lacking the same, laggards have only themselves to blame if they are less prosperous. Thus Rawls, while insisting that there is a right to emigration from ‘burdened’ societies, rejects any comparable right to immigration into liberal societies, since that would only reward the feckless, who cannot look after their own property. Such peoples ‘cannot make up for their irresponsibility in caring for their land and its natural resources’, he argues, ‘by migrating into other people’s territory without their consent’. [6]
Decorating the cover of the work that contains these reflections is a blurred representation, swathed in a pale nimbus of gold, of a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The nationalist icon is appropriate. That the United States owes its own existence to the violent dispossession of native peoples on just the grounds—their inability to make ‘responsible’ use of its land or resources—alleged by Rawls for refusal of redistribution of opportunity or wealth beyond its borders today, never seems to have occurred to him. The Founders who presided over these clearances, and those who followed, are accorded a customary reverence in his late writings. Lincoln, however, held a special position in his pantheon, as The Law of Peoples—where he is hailed as an exemplar of the ‘wisdom, strength and courage’ of statesmen who, unlike Bismarck, ‘guide their people in turbulent and dangerous times’—makes clear, and colleagues have since testified. [7] The abolition of slavery clearly loomed large in Rawls’s admiration for him. Maryland was one of the slave states that rallied to the North at the outbreak of the Civil War, and it would still have been highly segegrated in Rawls’s youth. But Lincoln, of course, did not fight the Civil War to free slaves, whose emancipation was an instrumental by-blow of the struggle. He waged it to preserve the Union, a standard nationalist objective. The cost in lives of securing the territorial integrity of the nation—600,000 dead—was far higher than all Bismarck’s wars combined. A generation later, emancipation was achieved in Brazil with scarcely any bloodshed. Official histories, rather than philosophers, exist to furnish mystiques of those who forged the nation. Rawls’s style of patriotism sets him apart from Kant. The Law of Peoples, as he explained, is not a cosmopolitan view. [8]
A transcendental union
Habermas offers the antipodal case. In post-war Germany, reaction against the cult of the nation was stronger in his generation, which had personal memories of the Third Reich, than anywhere else in the West. Division of the country during the Cold War compounded it. Here there was little chance of taking the nation-state simply as an unspoken given of political reflection. For Habermas, the question was the opposite: what place could there be for the nation as a contingent community, whose frontiers were delimited by arms and accidents, within the necessary structure of liberal democracy? Since the Rechtsstaat embodies universal principles, how can it abide a particularistic core? Habermas offers two reasons, one theoretical and the other empirical. So far as the first is concerned, he observes that ‘there is a conceptual gap in the legal construction of the constitutional state, that it is tempting to fill with a naturalistic conception of the people’—for ‘one cannot explain in purely normative terms how the universe of those who come together to regulate their common life by means of positive law should be composed’. [9] As for the second, in historical practice the ideals of popular sovereignty and human rights were too abstract to arouse the energies needed to bring modern democracy into being. Ties of blood and language supplied the extra momentum for the mobilization required, in which the nation became an emotional driving force akin to religion, as ‘a remnant of transcendence in the constitutional state’. [10] Nationalism then bred imperialism far into the twentieth century, sublimating class conflicts into wars of overseas conquest and external expansion.
Today, however, two broad forces are weakening the political grip of the nation-state. On the one hand, globalization of financial and commodity markets are undermining the capacity of the state to steer socio-economic life: neither tariff walls nor welfare arrangements are of much avail against their pressure. On the other, increasing immigration and the rise of multi-culturalism are dissolving the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. For Habermas, there are grave risks in this two-sided process, as traditional life-worlds, with their own ethical codes and social protections, face disintegration. To avert these dangers, he argued, a contemporary equivalent of the social response to classical laissez-faire that Polanyi had traced in The Great Transformation was needed—a second remedial ‘closure’ of what had become a new, ‘liberally expanded’, modernity. [11] The European Union offered the model of what such a post-national constellation might look like, in which the powers and protections of different nation-states were transmitted upwards to a supra-national sovereignty that no longer required any common ethnic or linguistic substratum, but derived its legitimacy solely from universalist political norms and the supply of social services. It is the combination of these that defines a set of European values, learnt from painful historical experience, which can offer a moral compass to the Union. [12]
Such a European federation, marking as it would a historic advance beyond the narrow framework of the nation-state, should in turn assume its place within a worldwide community of shared risk. For ‘the great, historically momentous dynamic of abstraction from the local to dynastic, to national to democratic consciousness’ can take one more step forward. [13] World government remains impossible, but a world domestic policy does not. Since political participation and the expression of popular will, as Habermas puts it, are today no longer the predominant bases of democratic legitimacy, there is no reason to demand a planetary suffrage or representative assembly. The ‘general accessibility of a deliberative process whose structure grounds an expectation of rational results’ is now more significant and, in such forms as a role for ngos in international negotiations, may largely suffice for the necessary progress. For a cosmopolitan democracy cannot reproduce the civic solidarity or welfare-state policies of the European Union on a global scale. Its ‘entire normative framework’ should consist simply of the protection of human rights—that is, ‘legal norms with an exclusively moral content’. [14]
Beyond the obvious contrast in their valuations of the nation, a wider difference of outlook is noticeable in Rawls and Habermas here. Habermas’s vision of the requirements of the time is more sociologically informed, offering a general account of objective changes in the contemporary world. Rawls, lacking such sociological imagination, appears—as Pogge notes—to have been blind to the implications of globalized capital markets for his account of the moral qualities that distinguish peoples in the tending of their natural assets. This is not a mistake Habermas could have made. On the other hand, unlike Rawls, here too he eschews any specific proposal for economic relations between rich and poor zones of the earth, even of the limitative sort advanced in The Law of Peoples. All that the community of shared risk involves is international enforcement of human rights. Here the two thinkers return to each other. For both, human rights are the global trampoline for vaulting over the barriers of national sovereignty, in the name of a better future.
Consensus of religion
How are these prerogatives derived in the two philosophies? In A Theory of Justice, they are an unproblematic deduction from the device of the original position, as rights that hypothetical individuals would rationally select, inter alia, behind the veil of ignorance. This was an elegant solution, that avoided determination of the status of rights claimed in the real world. By the time of Political Liberalism, concerned to construct an overlapping consensus from a variety of existing ideological standpoints—so inevitably requiring more empirical reference—it was no longer sufficient. To show that such a consensus would comprise his principles of justice, Rawls was now obliged to argue that all major religions contained moral codes compatible with them. In The Law of Peoples, the two lines of argument merge. Universal human rights are deducible from the choice that variant peoples, endowed as they are with differing faiths, would make if assembled together in an original position. Since they form a narrower set than the full range of liberal rights, decent as well as democratic societies will select them; symptomatically, Rawls’s examples of the former are consistently Muslim.
Lacking a counter-factual artifice to derive them, Habermas is compelled to express a clearer view of human rights as they are actually invoked in the political world. Noting ‘a certain philosophical embarrassment’ surrounding them, he concedes that they cannot be taken as moral rights inherent in each human being, since they are ‘juridical by their very nature’—that is, can exist only as determinations of positive law. Yet they are also ‘suprapositive’, for their justification—unlike that of other legal norms—can be exclusively moral, requiring no further arguments in support of them. [15] What then is the morality that legitimates them? Here Habermas directly rejoins Rawls. ‘Does the claim to universality that we connect with human rights merely conceal a particularly subtle and deceitful instrument of Western domination?’, he asks, ‘or do the universal world religions converge on them in a core repertoire of moral intuitions?’ There are no prizes for guessing the answer. ‘I am convinced Rawls is right, that the basic content of the moral principles embodied in international law is in harmony with the normative substance of the great world-historical prophetic doctrines and metaphysical world-views’. [16]
Habermas’s more sociological side, however, which remembers Weber, cannot let the matter rest there. After all, surely the doctrine of human rights is specifically Western in origin, rather than of pan-confessional inspiration? Adjusting his sights, Habermas meets this objection by explaining that ‘human rights stem less from the particular cultural background of Western civilization than from the attempt to answer specific challenges posed by a social modernity that has in the meantime covered the globe’. [17] How, in that case, is it that the social challenges of modernity happen to coincide with the moral intuitions of antiquity—the Atomic and Axial ages unexpectedly melting into each other in the eloquence of un prose? Habermas has a proviso ready to square this circle. The faiths that so harmoniously agree with each other, and with lay wisdom, are not ‘fundamentalist’, but aware that their own ‘religious truths must be brought into conformity with publicly recognized secular knowledge’, and so, ‘like Christianity since the Reformation’, are ‘transformed into “reasonably comprehensive doctrines” under the reflexive pressure generated by modern life circumstances’. [18]
With this gloss, the vacancy of the claim that human rights are validated by all world religions is laid bare. The slightest acquaintance with the Pentateuch, Revelations, the Koran or the Bhagavadgita—replete with every kind of injunction to persecution and massacre—is enough to show how absurd such an anachronistic notion must be. All that is really postulated by Rawls and Habermas is that, once religious beliefs are rendered indistinguishable from ‘public reason’ or ‘secular knowledge’, they can be enlisted like any other platitude as sponsors of whatever conventional wisdom requires. The fact that in the real world, transcendent faiths continue to represent contradictory ethical imperatives, waging ideological or literal war with each other, becomes an irrelevant residue: the domain of a ‘fundamentalism’ that is no longer even quite religion, properly understood.
In Habermas’s construction, something similar occurs to democracy. Once this is redefined as principally a matter of ‘communication’ and ‘consciousness’, political participation and popular will become residuals that can be bypassed in the design of a cosmopolitan legal order. Here too, the presiding concept ensures the desirable outcome—Habermas’s discourse theory functioning, like Rawls’s public reason, to neutralize democracy as once religion. For rather than a critique of the involution of classic democratic ideals in the dispersed and depoliticized representative systems of the West today, Habermas furnishes a metaphysical justification of it, in the name of the salutarily impersonal and decentred flux of communicative reason. The result is a political theory tailor-made for the further dissolution of popular sovereignty at a European level, and its vaporization altogether at a putative global level. To his credit, when writing on the actual European Union before his eyes, Habermas has sought to resist the logic of his own weakening of any idea of collective self-determination—calling, indeed, for more powers to the European parliament and the formation of European parties. But when, untempered by any comparable experience, he envisages a cosmopolitan order to come, the logic of his projection ends in a political wraith: democracy without democracy, shorn even of elections or voters.
Hiroshima’s minatory shadow
The intellectual framework of Bobbio’s prospectus stands apart from these two. The reason for that is its quite distinct historical starting-point. Rawls and Habermas were moved to reflections on the inter-state system only with the end of the Cold War. Their theories are plainly responses to the new world order announced in the wake of the Gulf War. By contrast Bobbio’s concerns, predating theirs by three decades, were a product of the Cold War itself. The dangers of a nuclear exchange were all but completely absent from the analytics of either the American or the German. But it was these which determined the Italian’s approach to the international scene. The lesson of Carlo Cattaneo in the time of the Risorgimento, and of his teacher Aldo Capitini in the Resistance, had been that the elimination of violence as a means of resolving conflicts, represented by the procedures of democracy within states, required a structural complement between states. Liberty and peace, whatever the empirical gaps or torsions between them, logically belonged together.
In the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, a considerable range of thinkers had believed that history was in the process of delivering their union. Kant or Mazzini were confident that the spread of republican governments would do away with war. Saint-Simon, Comte and Spencer thought that industrial society would make military conflict an anachronism. Cobden expected the growth of trade to ensure amity between nations. Bebel and Jaurès were sure socialism would bring lasting peace between peoples. All of these hopes, plausible as they seemed at the time, were dashed in the twentieth century. The barriers against mutual slaughter to which they had looked proved to be made of clay. Merchants did not replace warriors; peoples proved as truculent as princes; communist states attacked each other. [19] Yet now that nuclear annihilation threatened humanity, peace was a universal imperative as it had never been before. Bobbio had no time for Cold War orthodoxy. Deterrence theory was self-contradictory, purporting to prevent the risk of atomic war by the very weapons that created it. The balance of terror was inherently unstable, preordained to escalation rather than equilibrium. [20] Disarmament treaties were welcome if secured, but did not constitute either a radical or a reliable alternative.
Moral solutions to the problem of war, however noble, were not more satisfactory than such instrumental ones, since they required an improbable transformation of humanity. The most credible path for putting an end to the nuclear arms race was institutional. If the roots of war lay in the system of states, logically two remedies were possible. If conflicts were generated by the structure of international relations, a juridical solution was indicated; if their causes lay in the internal character of the states making up the system, the solution would have to be social. In the first case, peace could be secured only by the creation of a super-state, endowed with a global monopoly of violence, capable of enforcing a uniform legal order across the world. In the second, it could come only by a transition to socialism, leading to a universal withering away of the state itself. A single Hobbesian sovereignty, or a Marxist Sprung in die Freiheit: such was the choice. [21] Without claiming that this meant the elimination of coercion, since by definition the state was always a concentration of violence, Bobbio held the sole realistic prospect for global peace to be Hobbesian. The menace of a nuclear conflagration could be laid to rest only by a universal state. Structurally, that could become a super-despotism, such as Kant had feared. [22] But, unlike Rawls or Habermas, Bobbio was prepared to contemplate this risk, because it was less than the danger of planetary destruction they ignored.
Once the Cold War was over, Bobbio became more concerned to furnish his Hobbesian framework with a Lockean foundation, by stressing the need for a democratic, rather than authoritarian, incarnation of the Absent Third—one always preferable, but now that the Soviet bloc had collapsed, increasingly possible. Nevertheless, the world government he advocated remained a much more centralized structure than Rawls’s law of peoples or Habermas’s cosmopolitan consciousness, and involved less idealization of its conditions. Even adjusted to post-Cold War circumstances, the link of any such authority to democracy was logically weaker, since its primary legitimation was pacification of inter-state relations rather than a mimesis of intra-state norms—not devices like the original position or discourse theory replicated at international level, but a supervening logic at that level itself, in keeping with Bobbio’s dictum, unthinkable for the other two, that ‘it cannot escape anyone who views history without illusions that relations between rulers and ruled are dominated by the primacy of foreign over domestic policies’. [23]
Swords and paper
So too human rights, though they eventually played a role in Bobbio’s prescriptions for a peaceful international order very similar to their position in the agendas of Rawls and Habermas, were always seen in a quite different light. At no point does Bobbio suggest that they magically harmonize the moral intuitions of the world’s great religions, or can be regarded as principles of natural law, or are general requirements of modernity. They were not less precious to him for that. But a realistic view of them is incompatible with their standard descriptions. There are no ‘fundamental’ natural rights, since what seems basic is always determined by a given epoch or civilization. Since they were first proclaimed, the list of human rights has typically been ill-defined, variable and often contradictory. Such rights continually conflict with each other: private property with civic equality, freedom of choice with universal education, and more. Since ultimate values are antinomic, rights appealing to them are inevitably inconsistent. No historical synthesis between liberal and socialist conceptions has yet been realized. Thus human rights lack any philosophical foundation. Their only warrant is factual: today, all governments pay formal homage to the un Declaration of Human Rights. This empirical consensus gives them a contingent universality that is their real basis. [24]
Bobbio’s account of human rights is thus a far cry from the deontological versions of Rawls or Habermas. It is radically historical. For Hobbes, the only right was to life itself—the individual could refuse to lay it down for the state. Since Hobbes’s time, the list of rights claimed by citizens has been progressively extended: at first comprising liberties from the state, then liberties in the state, and eventually liberties through the state. The right to national self-determination, vehemently rejected by Habermas, belonged to these conquests. There was no end in sight to the dynamic of an ‘Age of Rights’—today, rights to truthful information and to participation in economic power were on the agenda. But theoretical declamation was one thing; practical observance another. The new global ethos of human rights was resplendent only in solemn official declarations and learned commentaries. The reality was ‘their systematic violation in virtually all countries of the world (perhaps we could say all countries, without fear of error), in relations between the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, the knowing and the uninstructed’. [25]
Law, in turn, could not be viewed in the starry-eyed fashion of Habermas or Rawls. Wars and revolution—the exercise of external and internal violence—were often the source of legal codes. Legitimacy was typically conferred by victory, not the other way around. Once in place, laws could be compared to a damming or canalization of the powers of existing social groups. When the dykes break, an extraordinary law-making power tumbles forth, creating a new legitimacy: ex facto oritur jus. ‘Law cannot dispense with the use of force and is always founded in the last instance on the right of those who are strongest, which only sometimes, and contingently, coincides with the right of those who are most just’. [26] We are a long way from the premises of a Habermasian jurisprudence. Bobbio, though his accents could alter, never wavered from a basic fidelity to Hobbes’s maxim: auctoritas sed non veritas facit legem. The un should be vested with powers to enforce the human rights it proclaimed. But the gap between its promises and performance remained wide. It had not secured the peace or friendship between nations that its Charter had invoked. Its main achievement to date was never envisaged by its founders—the impetus given by the General Assembly in December 1960 to decolonization, the greatest single progress of political emancipation in the second half of the twentieth century. [27] Like Habermas, Bobbio proposed no determinate programme for reduction of social inequalities on a global scale. But the strength of his feeling about these set him apart too. The real problem of the time, which the nuclear arms race prevented any of the rich nations from addressing, was death by famine in the poor countries of the South. [28]
War on outlaws
If such were the principal differences of theoretical prospectus, what of the political responses of the three thinkers to the new landscape of violence after the Cold War? Rawls, coherent with the silence of a lifetime, made no comment on the guerres en chaîne of the nineties. But the logic of a sanction for them is written on every other page of The Law of Peoples. There the philosopher of justice not only offers a blank cheque for military interventions to protect human rights, without even specifying what authority, other than ‘democratic peoples’ at large, is empowered to decide them. He even exceeds State Department jargon with his talk of ‘outlaw’ states—a term inviting law-abiding nations to dispatch them still more swiftly than merely ‘rogue’ ones.
The political assumptions at work in such language can be found in such historical illustrations as the book offers. Although Rawls mentions no contemporary political events, he touches on enough past ones to reveal, in this area, a disconcertingly uncritical mind. The slaughter of the First World War was inevitable, because ‘no self-respecting liberal people’ could have accepted German demands on France in 1914. [29] The fire-bombing of Hamburg was justified in the Second World War, if not that of Dresden. Though the destruction of Japanese cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a great wrong, it represented simply a ‘failure of statesmanship’ on the part of Truman, who otherwise—loyalty oaths and suborning of the un presumably to witness—was ‘in many ways a good, at times a very good president’. [30] An excellent guide to just wars is provided by a work explaining why Israel’s pre-emptive strike of 1967 was one. [31] Outlaw societies at one time included Habsburg Spain and Bourbon or Napoleonic France—but not Hanoverian or Victorian England, let alone Gilded Age America. Such miscreants are ‘unsatisfied’ powers. Nuclear weapons are essential to keep their modern counterparts in check. [32] Even Rawls’s coinage of the notion of ‘decent’, as distinct from democratic, peoples simply shadows the geography of the us security system. The imaginary Muslim society of ‘Kazanistan’ that Rawls conjures up to illustrate the notion can be read as an idealized version of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia—reliable clients whose traditional, if less than liberal, political systems are to be respected, while outlaws in their neighbourhood are removed. Equipped with such credentials, Operation Desert Storm might well be described as the Law of Peoples in real time.
Habermas was more explicit. The allied campaign to punish Iraq’s brazen violation of international law in seizing Kuwait was an important step forward in the creation of a global public sphere. Although it was not fought under un command, and was unaccountable to the Security Council, it invoked the un and this was better than nothing: ‘for the first time the United States and its allies were offered the objective possibility of temporarily assuming the (presumably neutral) role of police force to the United Nations’. Admittedly, the result was a hybrid action, since power-political calculations were not absent from its execution; but it was now plain that ‘the enforcement of international law has to be carried out by an organized co-operation of the international community, not by some utopian (in the worst sense of the word) world government’. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, the Gulf War was justified not merely by Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, but its menace to Israel, which posed ‘the nightmare scenario of an Israel encircled by the entire Arab world and threatened with the most horrific kinds of weapons’. [33]
Since violations of international law had never hitherto troubled Habermas overmuch—when Turkey invaded Cyprus, Indonesia annexed East Timor, let alone Israel seized East Jerusalem and occupied the West Bank, there is no record of his being moved to comment on them—it seems clear that political feelings rather than legal arguments were the principal pressure behind Habermas’s endorsement of Desert Storm. On the one hand, there was his self-declared, long-standing posture of loyalty to the West. For forty years he had held that Germany could only be purged of its malign past, and put all suspect notions of a Sonderweg behind it, by an ‘unconditional orientation’ to the West. This had been Adenauer’s great achievement, which as a young man he had failed to understand, and which must remain the pole-star of the Federal Republic. After 1945, it was this orientation that had given Germans ‘an upright posture’. [34] But there was also, after the Final Solution, and crucially, the special responsibility of Germany to Israel—a vulnerable democracy ‘still obliged to act as an outpost of the Western world’ in the Middle East. Since the founding of the Federal Republic, Habermas notes approvingly, ‘solidarity with Israel has been an unwritten law of German foreign policy’; only anti-Semites could question it. [35] In the mixture of motivations for Habermas’s support of the Gulf War, this was probably the most powerful.
Scruples
Not a few admirers of Habermas, in Germany and outside it, were taken aback by this philosophical theorization of a war fought, on the admission of the us administration, essentially over the control of oil-wells. Signs of an uneasy conscience could be detected in Habermas himself, who was quick to express reservations about the military tactics employed to win the war, and even to concede that the claim to un legitimacy for it ‘served largely as a pretext’. [36] But such qualifications, calculated to disarm critics, only underline the crudity of his subsequent conclusion, sweeping principles away in the name of deeds. Dismissing the objection that negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the conflict had scarcely been exhausted, Habermas declared in the spirit of a saloon-bar Realpolitik: ‘It is a little academic to subject an event of such brutality to a pedantically normative assessment after the fact.’ [37]
The rhetorical movement of Bobbio’s response to the Gulf War was uncannily similar. Operation Desert Storm, Bobbio explained as it rolled into action, was a just war of legitimate defence against aggression. Saddam Hussein, bidding to become a future emperor of Islam, was a great international danger. A sanguinary dictator at home, and an expansionist warlord abroad, he would multiply aggressions to the end of his days, if he were not checked now. Like Hitler, he was bent on extending the theatre of conflict ever further, as his raining of rockets on Israel showed. [38] Bobbio’s position caused more of an uproar than Habermas’s, in part because there was still a much stronger Left in Italy than in Germany, but also because he himself had been such an eloquent voice against the bellicosity of the Cold War. Criticism from friends and pupils, shocked by his apparent volte-face, came thick and fast. In the face of this, Bobbio too, having approved the principle of the war, took his distance from the practice of it. ‘I readily acknowledge that in the course of the fighting the relationship between the international organism and the conduct of the war has become ever more evanescent, with the result that the present conflict more and more resembles a traditional war, except for the disproportion in strength between the two combatants. Has a great historical opportunity been lost?’, he asked after five weeks of uninterrupted American bombing. Looking around him, he confessed ‘our conscience is disturbed’. The war was just, but—a separate question—was it obligatory? If so, did it have to be fought in this way? Bobbio’s reply was taxative. Just as with Habermas, it served no purpose to scruple after the fact. ‘Any answer to such questions comes too late to change the course of events. Not only would it be irrelevant—“what is done, is done”—but it could appear downright naive, for no-one is in a position to say what would have happened if another path had been chosen to reach the same goal’. [39] The war might not have been necessary, or so bloody. But it was now an accomplished fact. What point was there in quarrelling with it?
nato’s moral order
Eight years later, Habermas greeted Operation Allied Force with more emphatic applause. nato’s attack on Yugoslavia was necessary to stop the crimes against humanity of the Miloševic´ regime—‘300,000 persons subjected to murder, terror and expulsion’, before their rescue by American air-strikes began. There was no basis for casting suspicion on the motives of this intervention, from which the United States stood to gain little. It was a humanitarian war that, even if it lacked a un mandate, had the ‘tacit authorization of the international community’. The participation of the Bundeswehr in the attack was the decision of a Red–Green coalition that was the first German government ever to be committed to a cosmopolitan legal order in the spirit of Kant and Kelsen. It expressed a public mood in the Federal Republic which was reassuringly similar to that in the rest of Western Europe. There might be some disagreements between the continental Europeans and the Anglo-Saxons on the importance of consulting the un Secretary-General or squaring Russia. But ‘after the failure of negotiations at Rambouillet’, the us and member states of the eu proceeded from a common position. [40]
It was true, of course, that since human rights were only weakly institutionalized at the international level, ‘the boundary between law and morality may blur, as in the present case’. Once authorization from the Security Council was denied, nato could ‘only appeal to the moral validity of international law’. But that did not mean Carl Schmitt’s critique of the moralization of inter-state relations, as fatally radicalizing conflicts between them, applied. Rather, humanitarian interventions like the bombing of Yugoslavia were forced to anticipate the future cosmopolitan order they sought to create. Here there was a distinction between Washington and most European capitals. For the us, global enforcement of human rights supplied a moral compass for national goals. To that fruitful union of idealism and pragmatism, going back to Wilson and Roosevelt, Germans owed their own liberation, and it continued to be as vital as ever. ‘The us has assumed the tasks of keeping order that are incumbent on a superpower in a world of states that is only weakly regulated by the un’. But the moral imperatives it acted on needed to be institutionalized as legal norms with binding international force. Happily, the un was on the road to closing the gap between them, even if the transition between power politics and an emergent cosmopolitan order still involved a common learning process. [41]
In the Balkans as in the Gulf, Habermas was careful to season his plea for war with provisos of conscience. On the one hand, collateral damage to the civilian population of Yugoslavia created a sense of disquiet: were the brutal military means used to rescue the Kosovars always proportionate to the compassionate end? There was reason to doubt it. On the other hand, what would happen if Operation Allied Force henceforth provided the model for humanitarian interventions at large? The West had been obliged to bypass the un in this case: but that should remain an exception. ‘nato’s self-authorization cannot be permitted to become a matter of routine’. [42] With this, ironically—in an essay whose title is taken from Schmitt’s lapidary dictum ‘humanity, bestiality’, and is devoted to refuting it—Habermas ended by innocently illustrating the very theory of law he wished to refute. ‘Sovereign is he who decides the exception’, runs the famous opening sentence of Political Theology. Not norms, but decisions, argued Schmitt, were the basis of any legal order. ‘The rule proves nothing, the exception proves everything. It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception’. [43] Kant or Kelsen, invoked by Habermas at the outset, offered no affidavits for America’s war in the Balkans. To justify it, he unwittingly found himself driven to reproduce Schmitt. For sovereign, in effect, was the superpower that delivered the ultimatum of Rambouillet designed to furnish the occasion for war, and disseminated the myth of a hundred thousand dead to motivate it; and sovereign the philosopher who now explained that the exception anticipated the rule of the future.
Unlike Habermas, Bobbio had admired and corresponded with Schmitt. But in justifying the Balkan War, he had a greater authority in mind. Miloševic´ was a tyrant like Saddam, who needed to be wiped off the face of the earth: nato’s attack on him should be regarded as a police action rather than an international war, and its means be proportional to its ends. It made no sense to speak any longer of just or unjust wars: all that could be asked was whether a war was legal or not, and effective or not. But today another kind of warrant existed. For as a superpower the United States had acquired a kind of ‘absolute right that puts it completely outside the constituted international order’. In practice, America had no need of legal justification for its wars, for its record in defending democracy in the three decisive battles of the twentieth century—the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War—gave its de facto pre-eminence an ethical legitimacy. Europeans owed their freedom to the United States, and with it an unconditional gratitude. Wilson, Roosevelt and Reagan had fought the good cause, defeating the Central Powers, Fascism and Communism, and so making possible the normal democratic world we now live in. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right had understood such a role. In every period of history, one nation is dominant, and possesses an ‘absolute right as bearer of the present stage of the world spirit’s development’, leaving other nations without rights in face of it. [44]
This far-reaching accolade was, once again, not without troubled after-thoughts; which were, once again, quieted with a further reassuring reflection. After seven weeks of bombing, Bobbio felt that Operation Allied Force had been incompetently executed, and produced a mess. Now expressing doubts that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo had started before the war, rather than being occasioned by it, he feared that a campaign to protect human rights was in the process of violating them. Yet this did not alter the war’s general character, as an exercise of licit against illicit force. Habermas was right to maintain that international law was becoming—however imperfectly—institutionalized as a set of enforceable rules, in one of the most extraordinary and innovative developments of its history. Humanity was moving across the frontier from the moral to the juridical, as his German colleague had seen. [45]
‘Redeeming the irredeemable’
By the time of the next Western military expedition, Bobbio had withdrawn from comment on public affairs. But in the Afghan war Habermas found vindication for his judgement of the trend of the time. Although the new Republican administration was deplorably unilateralist—even if European governments bore some responsibility for failing to sustain sager counsels in Washington—the coalition against terrorism put together by it was a clever one, and had acted with good reason to remove the Taliban regime. True, the staggering asymmetry in weaponry between the American armada in the skies and bearded tribesmen on the ground, in a country long victim of rival colonial ambitions, was a ‘morally obscene sight’. But now it was over, and there was no point in repining. For ‘in any case, the Taliban regime already belongs to history’. The un was still too weak to fulfill its duties, so the us had taken the initiative, as in the Balkans. But with the un-sponsored conference in Bonn to establish a new government in liberated Kabul, the outcome had been a happy step forward in the transition, which had begun with the establishment of no-fly zones over Iraq, from international to cosmopolitan law. [46]
A year later, Habermas was less serene. The new National Security Strategy of the Republican administration was provocatively unilateralist. The United States should not invade Iraq without the authorization of the United Nations—although the German government was also wrong in refusing such an invasion in advance, rather than declaring its unreserved respect for whatever the Security Council might decide. There might have arisen something whose possibility Habermas had never imagined, ‘a systematically distorted communication between the United States and Europe’, setting the liberal nationalism of the one against the cosmopolitanism of the other. [47] Once launched, Operation Iraqi Freedom confirmed these forebodings. On the one hand, the liberation of a brutalized population from a barbaric regime was ‘the greatest of all political goods’. On the other, in acting without a mandate from the United Nations, the us had violated international law, leaving its moral authority in ruins and setting a calamitous precedent for the future. For half a century, the United States had been the pacemaker of progress towards a cosmopolitan order vested with legal powers, overriding national sovereignty, to prevent aggression and protect human rights. Now, however, neo-conservative ideologues in Washington had broken with the reformism of un human-rights policies, in favour of a revolutionary programme for enforcing these rights across the world. Such hegemonic unilateralism risked not only stretching American resources and alienating allies, but also generating side-effects that ‘endangered the mission of improving the world according to the liberal vision’. Fortunately, the un had suffered no really significant damage from this episode. Its reputation would only be injured ‘were it to try, through compromises, to “redeem” the irredeemable’. [48]
Such thoughts did not last long. Six months later, when the un Security Council unanimously passed a resolution endorsing the American occupation of Iraq and the client regime it had set up in Baghdad, Habermas offered no word of criticism. Though saddened by the change of political scene in America—‘I would never have imagined that such an exemplary liberal country as the United States could be so indoctrinated by its government’—he now had no doubt that the Coalition Provisional Authority must be supported. ‘We have no other option but to hope that the United States is successful in Iraq’. [49]
The response by the two philosophers to successive wars waged by the West after the collapse of the Soviet bloc thus exhibits a consistent pattern. First, military action by Washington and its allies is justified on normative grounds, invoking either international law (the Gulf), human rights (Kosovo, Afghanistan), or liberation from tyranny (Iraq). Then, qualms are expressed over the actual way that violence is unleashed by the righteous party (Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq), in a gesture of humanitarian punctilio. Finally, these in turn are casually minimized or forgotten in the name of the accomplished fact. The tell-tale formula ‘in any case’, peremptorily ratifying the deed once done, says everything. The political complexion of such positions is clear enough. What is most striking about them, however, is their intellectual incoherence. No-one could suspect Bobbio or Habermas of an inadequate background in logic, or inability to reason with rigour. Yet here philosophy gives way to such a lame jumble of mutually inconsistent claims and excuses that it would seem only bad conscience, or bad faith, could explain them.
The best of states?
Behind the dance-steps of this occasionalism—swaying back and forth between impartial principle, tender scruple and brute fact—can be detected a simpler drive shaping the theoretical constructions of all three thinkers. Rawls describes his Law of Peoples as a ‘realistic utopia’: that is, an ideal design that withal arises out of and reflects the way of the world. Habermas’s cosmopolitan democracy, a global projection of his procedural theory of law, has the same structure. Even Bobbio, in the past resistant to any such confusion between facts and values, eventually succumbed to his own, with sightings of a new signum rememorativum of historical development as humanity’s improvement. In each case, the underlying wish is a philosophical version of a banal everyday inclination: to have one’s cake and eat it. Against criticisms pointing to the disgraced reality of inter-state relations, the ideal can be upheld as a normative standard untainted by such empirical shortcomings. Against charges that it is an empty utopia, the course of the world can be represented as an increasingly hopeful pilgrimage towards it. In this va-et-vient between ostensible justifications by universal morality and surreptitious appeals to a providential history, the upshot is never in doubt: a licence for the American empire as placeholder for human progress.
That this was not the original impulse of any of these thinkers is also clear, and there is something tragic in the descent that brought them to this pass. How is it to be explained? Part of the answer must lie in a déphasage of thinkers whose outlook was shaped by the Second World War, and its sequels, in the new landscape of power after the end of the Cold War. Old age mitigates judgement of the final conceptions of Rawls or Bobbio. When he published The Law of Peoples, Rawls was already the victim of a stroke, and writing against time. When he pronounced on the Balkan War, Bobbio was over ninety; and no contemporary has written so movingly of the infirmities of such advanced years, in one of the finest of all his texts, De Senectute.
But certainly, there was also long-standing blindness towards the global hegemon. In Rawls’s case, veneration of totems like Washington and Lincoln ruled out any clear-eyed view of his country’s role, either in North America itself or in the world at large. Regretting the us role in overthrowing Allende, Arbenz and Mossadegh—‘and, some would add, the Sandanistas [sic] in Nicaragua’: here, presumably, he was unable to form his own opinion—the best explanation Rawls could muster for it was that while ‘democratic peoples are not expansionist’, they will ‘defend their security interest’, and in doing so can be misled by governments. [50] So much for the Mexican or Spanish–American Wars, innumerable interventions in the Caribbean, repeated conflicts in the Far East, and contemporary military bases in 120 countries. ‘A number of European nations engaged in empire-building in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, but—so it would seem—happily America never joined them. [51]
Habermas’s vision of the United States is scarcely less roseate. Although undoubtedly culpable of lapses in such lands as Vietnam or Panama, Washington’s overall record as a champion of liberty and law has been matchless—for half a century blazing the trail towards a disinterested cosmopolitan order. No exhortation recurs with such insistence in Habermas’s political writing as his call to his compatriots to show unconditional loyalty to the West. The fact that Germany itself has usually been thought to belong to the West indicates the more specialized, tacit identification in Habermas’s mind: intended are the Anglophone Allies who were the architects of the Federal Republic. If the United States looms so much larger than the United Kingdom in the ledger of gratitude and allegiance, this is not simply a reflection of the disproportion in power between the two. For Habermas, America is also a land of intellectual awakening in a way that Britain has never been. To the political debt owed General Clay and Commissioner McCloy was added the philosophical education received from Peirce and Dewey, and the sociological light of Mead and Parsons. This was the West that had allowed Germans of Habermas’s generation to stand erect again.
Against such a background, endorsement of American military interventions in the Gulf, the Balkans and Afghanistan came naturally. At the invasion of Iraq, however, Habermas baulked. The reason he gave for doing so is revealing: in marching to Baghdad, the United States acted without the authorization of the Security Council. But, of course, exactly the same was true of its attack on Belgrade. Since violation of human rights was, by common consent, far worse in Iraq than in Yugoslavia, why was a punitive expedition against the latter fully justified, but not the former? The difference, Habermas explains, is that the Balkan War was legitimated ‘after the fact’, not only by the need to stop ethnic cleansing and supply emergency aid, but above all by ‘the undisputed democratic and rule-of-law character of all the members of the acting military coalition’—even if the us and uk had approached the necessary task in a less pure spirit than Germany, France, Italy or other European members of nato. Over Iraq, however, a once-united ‘international community’ had split. The phrase, standard euphemism of every mendacious official broadcast and communiqué from Atlantic chancelleries, speaks for itself. The political confines of the community that stands in for the world are never in doubt: ‘today, normative dissent has divided the West itself’. [52]
Yet since, in Habermas’s own words, there can be no greater good than liberating a people from a brutal tyranny, why should prevention of ethnic cleansing or provision of aid—presumably lesser objectives—supply General Clark with philosophical credentials denied to General Franks? It is plain that the crucial distinguo lies elsewhere: in European responses to American initiatives. So long as both sides of the Atlantic concur, the ‘international community’ remains whole, and the un can be ignored. But if Europe demurs, the un is sacrosanct. So naively self-serving an assumption invites, in one sense, only a smile. What it points to, however, is the disintegration of a larger one. The West upheld in Habermas’s credo was always an ideological figure, an unexamined topos of the Cold War, whose assumption was that America and Europe could for all practical purposes be treated as a single democratic ecumene, under benevolent us leadership. The unwillingness of Berlin and Paris to rally behind Washington in the attack on Iraq undid that long-held construction, rendering an unconditional orientation to the West meaningless. In this emergency, Habermas fell back on European values, now distinct from somewhat less commendable American ones, as a substitute lode-star in international affairs. But, setting aside the work of lustration required to yield an uplifting common ethos out of Europe’s bloody past, or even its self-satisfied present, the new construct is as incoherent as the old. Not only does Europe, as currently understood by Habermas, have to exclude Britain, for undue similarity of outlook to the United States, but it cannot even encompass the continental states of the eu itself, a majority of whose members supported rather than opposed the liberties taken by the us with the un Charter. So in a further geopolitical contraction, Habermas has been driven to advocate a Franco-German ‘core’ as the final refuge out of which a future and better eu, more conscious of its social and international responsibilities, may one day emerge, harbinger of a wider cosmopolitan order. [53]
But this is a reculer pour mieux sauter without self-criticism. Habermas still appears to believe, heedless of well-advertised findings to the contrary, that nato’s attack on Yugoslavia—for him, a last precious moment of Euro-American unity—was warranted by Belgrade’s refusal to treat, and determination to exterminate. That the Rambouillet ultimatum was as deliberately framed to be unacceptable, furnishing a pretext for war, as the Austrian note to Serbia in 1914; that Operation Horseshoe, the plan for mass ethnic cleansing of Kosovo invoked by his Foreign Minister to justify the war, has been exposed as a forgery of the Bulgarian secret services; and that the number of Albanians in the region killed by Serb forces was closer to five than to the hundreds of thousands claimed by Western spokesmen—details like these can be swept under the ethical carpet as casually as before. For now Yugoslavia too, like the Taliban, ‘already belongs to history’. Even in Iraq, Habermas—in this like most of his fellow-citizens in Germany or France—objects only to the American invasion, not occupation of the country. The deed once consummated, it becomes another accomplished fact, which he wishes well, even if he hopes it will not be repeated.
Leviathan on the Potomac
Bobbio’s embrace of American hegemony was quite distinct in origin. Unlike Habermas, he never showed any special attachment to the United States after 1945, or even much interest in it. Did he ever so much as visit it? No reference of any intellectual significance for him seems to have been American. His post-war sympathies went to Britain, where he inspected the Labour experiment and wrote warmly, if not uncritically, about it. During the high Cold War, he sought energetically to resist polarization between East and West, and when he became active in the peace movements of the seventies and eighties, he never put the United States on a higher moral or political plane than the ussr as a nuclear power, holding them equally responsible for the dangers of an arms race threatening all humanity. America, however, was ‘the more powerful of the two masters of our life and of our death’, and it was therefore all the more discouraging to hear maxims from Reagan that could only be compared to the motto Louis xiv had inscribed on his cannon: Extrema ratio regis. [54]
But when the unexpected happened, and Gorbachev lowered the Soviet flag, ending the Cold War with a complete American victory, there was in Bobbio’s outlook one tenacious idea that allowed him to make a radical adjustment to the new world order. He had always maintained that the most viable solution to the problem of endemic violence between states was the creation of a super-state with a monopoly of coercion over all others, as guarantor of universal peace. During the Cold War he envisaged this hitherto Absent Third ultimately materializing in the shape of a world government, representing a de jure union based on a multiplicity of states. But when, instead, one existing state achieved a de facto paramountcy over all others of a kind never seen before, Bobbio could—without inconsistency—adapt to it as the unpredictable way history had realized his vision. America had become the planetary Leviathan for which he had called. So be it. The Hobbesian realism that had always distinguished him from Rawls or Habermas made him, who had been far more critical of the international order as long as the Cold War persisted, ironically capable of a much more coherent apology for the us empire once the Cold War was over. Hobbes could explain, as they could not, why the pax Americana now so often required resort to arms, if a juridical order protected by a global monopoly of force was finally to be created. ‘The law without a sword is but paper’.
Bobbio’s realism, what can be seen as the conservative strand in his thinking, had always coexisted, however, with liberal and socialist strands for which he is better known, and that held his primary moral allegiance. The balance between them was never quite stable, synthesis lying beyond reach. But in extreme old age, he could no longer control their tensions. So it was that, instead of simply registering, or welcoming, the Hobbesian facts of American imperial power, he also tried to embellish them as the realization of democratic values, in a way that—perhaps for the first time in his career—rang false and was inconsistent with everything he had written before. The triptych of liberation invoked as world-historical justification for the Balkan War is so strained as virtually to refute itself. The victory of one set of imperialist powers over another in 1918, with the American contribution to mutual massacre tipping the balance: a glorious chapter in the history of liberty? The D-Day landings of 1944, engaging less than a sixth of Hitler’s armies, already shattered in the East: ‘totally responsible for the salvation of Europe’? [55] An apotheosis of Reagan for his triumph in the Cold War: who would have imagined it from the descriptions of Il terzo assente? There was something desperate in this last-minute refrain, as if Bobbio were trying to silence his own intelligence.
Sparks of defiance
It would be a mistake to deduce the late conclusions of all three thinkers in any simple way from the major body of their writing. That this is so can be seen from the chagrin of pupils and followers, steadfast in admiration for each man, but also loyal to what they felt was the original inspiration of a great œuvre. Pogge’s disappointment with The Law of Peoples, Matuštík’s discomfort with Between Facts and Norms and dismay at plaudits for the Balkan War, the reproaches of Bobbio’s students to the claims of Una guerra giusta?, form a family of similar reactions among cohorts less disoriented in the new international conjuncture. [56] Nor would it be right to think that involution was ever complete in these philosophical minds themselves. To the end, flashes of a more radical temper can be found in them, like recollections of a past self. For all his apparent acceptance of capital as an unappealable condition of modernity, ratified by the irresponsible experiment of communism, Habermas could yet write, less reassuringly for its rulers, of a system breeding unemployment, homelessness and inequality: ‘still written in the stars is the date that—one day—may mark the shipwreck of another regime, exercised anonymously through the world market’. [57] Bobbio, despite his approval of the Gulf and Balkan Wars, could in the interval between them denounce the ‘odious bombardments of Baghdad’ ordered by Clinton, and the ‘vile and servile’ connivance of other Western governments with them, as ‘morally iniquitous’. Few intellectuals then spoke so strongly. [58] Rawls offers perhaps the most striking, and strangest case of all. In the last year of his life, when he could no longer work on them, he published lectures he had given over a decade earlier, under the title Justice as Fairness. Beneath the familiar, uninspiring pleonasm lay a series of propositions at arresting variance with the tenor of Political Liberalism, let alone The Law of Peoples.
It had been an error of A Theory of Justice, he explained, to suggest that a capitalist welfare state could be a just social order. The Difference Principle was compatible with only two general models of society: a property-owning democracy or liberal socialism. Neither of them included a right to private ownership of the means of production (as distinct from personal property). Both had to be conceived as ‘an alternative to capitalism’. Of the two, a property-owning democracy—Rawls hinted that this would be the more congenial form in America, and liberal socialism in Europe—was open to Marx’s criticism that it would re-create unacceptable inequalities over time, and do little for democracy in the workplace. Whether his objections could be met, or liberal socialism yield better results, only experience could tell. On the resolution of these questions, nothing less than ‘the long-run prospects of a just constitutional regime may depend’. [59] Such thoughts are foreign to Political Liberalism. They outline, of course, only the range of ideal shapes that a just society might assume. What of actually existing ones? Rawls’s answer is startling. After observing that favourable material circumstances are not enough to assure the existence of a constitutional regime, which requires a political will to maintain it, he suddenly—in utter contrast to anything he had ever written before—remarks: ‘Germany between 1870 and 1945 is an example of a country where reasonably favourable conditions existed—economic, technological and no lack of resources, an educated citizenry and more—but where the political will for a democratic regime was altogether lacking. One might say the same of the United States today, if one decides our constitutional regime is largely democratic in form only’. [60] The strained conditional—as if the nature of the American political system was a matter for decision, rather than of truth—barely hides the bitterness of the judgement. This is the society Rawls once intimated was nearly just, and whose institutions he could describe as the ‘pride of a democratic people’. In one terse footnote, the entire bland universe of an overlapping consensus capsizes.
Reason and rage
It is unlikely such flashes of candour were mere passing moments of disaffection. What they suggest is rather an acute tension buried under the serene surface of Rawls’s theory of justice. Perhaps the most telling evidence for this is to be found in the unexpected entry of Hegel into his last published writings. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy concludes with a respectful, indeed admiring portrait of Hegel as a liberal philosopher of freedom. What drew Rawls, against apparent temperamental probability, to the philosopher of Absolute Spirit? His reconstruction of The Philosophy of Right pays tribute to Hegel’s institutional insight that ‘the basic structure of society’, rather than the singular individual, is ‘the first subject of justice’, and sets out Hegel’s theory of civil society and the state with historical sympathy. [61] Here too a sharp aside says more than all the glozing pages of Political Liberalism. Hegel’s constitutional scheme, Rawls remarks, may well strike us, with its three estates and lack of universal suffrage, as a quaint anachronism. ‘But does a modern constitutional society do any better? Certainly not the United States, where the purchase of legislation by “special interests” is an everyday thing’. [62] Clinton’s America as no improvement on Frederick William iii’s Prussia: a more damning verdict is difficult to imagine.
The principal interest of Hegel, however, lay elsewhere. For Rawls his most important contribution to political thinking, flagged at the outset of the relevant Lectures, and reiterated in Justice as Fairness, was his claim that the task of philosophy was to reconcile us to our social world. Rawls emphasizes that reconciliation is not resignation. Rather, Hegel saw Versöhnung as the way in which we come to accept our political and social institutions positively, as a rational outcome of their development over time. [63] The idea of justice as fairness belongs to this conception of political philosophy as reconciliation, he explained. For ‘situated as we may be in a corrupt society’, in the light of its public reason we may still reflect that ‘the world is not in itself inhospitable to political justice and good. Our social world might have been different and there is hope for those in another time and place’. [64]
In these touchingly incoherent sentences, Rawls’s philosophy breaks down. Our society may be corrupt, but the world itself is not. What world? Not ours, which we can only wish might have been different, but another that is still invisible, generations and perhaps continents away. The wistful note is a far cry from Hegel. What the theme of reconciliation in Rawls expresses is something else: not the revelation that the real is rational, but the need for a bridge across the yawning gulf between the two, the ideal of a just society and the reality of a—not marginally, but radically—unjust one. That Rawls himself could not always bear the distance between them can be sensed from a single sentence. In accomplishing its task of reconciliation, ‘political philosophy may try to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history’. [65] Rage: who would have guessed Rawls capable of it—against his society or its history? But why should it be calmed?
Rawls resorted to Hegel in his internal reflections on a constitutional state. On the plane of inter-state relations, Kant remained his philosopher of reference, as the theorist of conditions for a perpetual peace. So too for Habermas. But since Kant failed to envisage the necessary legal framework for a cosmopolitan order, as it started to take shape through the permanent institutions of the United Nations, Habermas, when he came to review the progress made since 1945, also looked towards the philosopher of objective idealism. Measured against the sombre background of the disasters of the first half of the twentieth century, he decided, ‘the World Spirit, as Hegel would have put it, has lurched forward’. [66] As we have seen, Bobbio was responsible for the most pointed appeal to Hegel of all. In one sense, he was more entitled to make it. Welcoming Hegel’s idea of reconciliation as akin to his own enterprise of public reason, Rawls drew the line at his vision of the international realm as a domain of violence and anarchy, in which contention between sovereign states was bound to be regulated by war. Habermas’s gesture enlisted Hegel, on the contrary, as a patron of cosmopolitan peace. The first could not square his Law of Peoples with the lawlessness of Hegel’s states, the second could only enroll Hegel for pacific progress by turning him philosophically inside out. Bobbio, by contrast, could take the measure of Hegel’s conception of world history, as a ruthless march of great powers in which successive might founds over-arching right, and invoke it in all logic to justify his approval of American imperial violence. Law was born of force, and the maxim of the conqueror—prior in tempore, potior in jure—still held. ‘However difficult it is for me to share the Hegelian principle that “what is real is rational”, it cannot be denied that sometimes history has vindicated Hegel’. [67] At the end of the twentieth century, reason had once again proved to be the rose in the cross of the present.
Yet three less Hegelian thinkers than these could hardly be imagined. The guiding light of all their hopes of international affairs remained Kant. In reaching out at the end for his antithesis, each in their different way engaged in a paradox destructive of their own conceptions of what a just order might be. Bobbio, who had most claim on Hegel, was aware of this, and tried to correct himself—he had intended not to justify, but only to interpret the course of the world in the register of the Rechtsphilosophie. There are coherent Hegelian constructions of the time, but they come from minds with whom these thinkers have little in common. Perhaps they would better have avoided wishful thinking by looking again at Kant himself, more realistic than his posterity in imagining a universal history for a race of devils.
[1] Bobbio’s essay first appeared in the revised third edition of Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace, Bologna 1989, and in English in Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds, Cosmopolitan Democracy, Cambridge 1995, pp. 17–41. Habermas’s essays appeared in, respectively, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, Frankfurt 1996, pp. 192–236, and Die postnationale Konstellation, Frankfurt 1998, pp. 91–169; and in English in The Inclusion of the Other, Cambridge, ma 1998, pp. 165–202, and The Postnational Constellation, Cambridge 2001, pp. 58–112.
[2] ‘Democracy and the International System’, pp. 22–31.
[3] Il terzo assente, Milan 1989, p. 115 ff.
[4] See Realizing Rawls, Ithaca 1989, pp. 9–12; ‘Priorities of Global Justice’, in Pogge, ed., Global Justice, Oxford 2001, pp. 6–23.
[5] The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 108; henceforward lp.
[6] lp, p. 39.
[7] lp, p. 97. For Rawls’s cult of Lincoln, see inter alia Thomas Nagel, ‘Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue’, New Republic, 13 January 2000.
[8] lp, pp. 119–20.
[9] Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, pp. 139–40; The Inclusion of the Other, p. 115; henceforward ea and io.
[10] Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik, Frankfurt 1995, pp. 177–9; A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, Lincoln, ne 1997, pp. 170–2; henceforward nbr and br.
[11] Die Postnationale Konstellation, pp. 122–35; The Postnational Constellation, pp. 80–8; henceforward pk and pc.
[12] pk, pp. 155–6; pc, p. 103.
[13] pk, p. 89; pc, p. 56.
[14] pk, pp. 162–6; pc, 108–11.
[15] ea, pp. 221–4; io, pp. 189–91.
[16] Vergangenheit als Zukunft, Zurich 1991, p. 30; The Past as Future, Lincoln, ne 1994, pp. 20–1; henceforward vz and pf. Rawls had explained that all major world religions were ‘reasonable’ doctrines capable of accepting his principles of justice: Political Justice, New York 1993, p. 170.
[17] pk, p. 181; pc, p. 121.
[18] pk, pp. 191–2; pc, p. 128. Here too the reference—of ‘reasonably comprehensive doctrines’—is explicitly to Rawls.
[19] Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace, Bologna 1984, pp. 113–4, 143–6; henceforward pgvp;Il terzo assente, pp. 34–8; henceforward ta.
[20] pgvp, pp. 50–5; ta, pp. 60–8.
[21] pgvp, pp. 83–6.
[22] pgvp, p. 116; ta, pp. 49–50.
[23] ta, p. 94.
[24] pgvp (first edition), Bologna 1970, pp. 119–57.
[25] Autobiografia, Bari 1999, p. 261.
[26] pgvp, p. 111; ta, p. 135.
[27] ta, pp. 108–9.
[28] ta, p. 181.
[29] lp, p. 48.
[30] lp, pp. 99–102; Collected Papers, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 572.
[31] ‘I follow here Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars. This is an impressive work, and what I say does not, I think, depart from it in any significant respect’: lp, p. 95.
[32] lp, pp. 48–9.
[33] vz, pp. 19, 18, 23; pf, pp. 12, 11, 15.
[34] vz, p. 64; pf p. 48; nbr, pp. 93–4, 108; br, pp. 88–9, 102.
[35] vz, p. 28; pf, p. 18; ‘Letter to America’, The Nation, 16 December 2002.
[36] vz, p. 20; pf, p. 12.
[37] vz, p. 22; pf, p. 14.
[38] Una guerra giusta?, Venice 1991, pp. 39, 22, 48, 60; henceforward gg.
[39] gg, pp. 23, 90.
[40] ‘Bestialität und Humanität: ein Krieg an der Grenze zwischen Recht und Moral’, Die Zeit, 29 April 1999; in English as ‘Bestiality and Humanity: a War on the Border between Law and Morality’, in William Buckley, ed., Kosovo. Contending Voices on the Balkan Intervention, Grand Rapids, mi 2000, pp. 307–8, 312.
[41] ‘Bestiality and Humanity’, pp. 313–6.
[42] ‘Bestiality and Humanity’, pp. 309, 316.
[43] Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, Munich and Leipzig 1922, p. 15.
[44] ‘Perché questa guerra ricorda una crociata’, L’Unità, 25 April 1999.
[45] ‘La guerra dei diritti umani sta fallendo’, L’Unità, 16 May 1999.
[46] ‘Fundamentalism and Terror’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago 2003, pp. 27–8.
[47] ‘Letter to America’, The Nation, 16 December 2002.
[48] ‘Verschliessen wir nicht die Augen vor der Revolution der Weltordnung: Die normative Autorität Amerikas liegt in Trümmern’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 April 2003; in English as ‘Interpreting the Fall of a Monument’, Constellations, vol. 10, no. 3, 2003, pp. 364–70.
[49] ‘Ojalá Estados Unidos tenga éxito en Iraq’, La Vanguardia, 4 November 2003.
[50] lp, p. 53.
[51] lp, pp. 53–4.
[52] ‘Interpreting the Fall of a Monument’, p. 366.
[53] ‘Unsere Erneuerung—Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas’ (with Jacques Derrida), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003; in English as ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, Constellations, September 2003, pp. 291–7.
[54] ta, p. 208; written on 28 August 1983.
[55] ‘Perché questa guerra ricorda una crociata’.
[56] See Thomas Pogge, Global Justice, pp. 15–7; Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas. A Philosophical-Political Profile, Lanham, md 2001, pp. 247–51, 269–74; Eleonora Missana, Massimo Novarino, Enrico Passini, Stefano Roggero, Daniela Steila, Maria Grazia Terzi, Stefania Terzi, ‘Guerra giusta, guerra ingiusta. Un gruppo di studenti torinesi risponde a Norberto Bobbio’, Il Manifesto, 29 January 1991.
[57] nbr, p. 17; br, pp. 12–13.
[58] ‘Questa volta dico no’, La Stampa, 1 July 1993.
[59] Justice as Fairness, Cambridge, ma 2001, pp. 178–9; henceforward jf.
[60] jf, p. 101.
[61] Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Cambridge, ma 2000, p. 366; henceforward lhmp.
[62] lhmp, p. 357.
[63] lhmp, pp. 331–2.
[64] jf, pp. 37–8.
[65] jf, p. 3.
[66] ea, p. 207; io, p. 178.
[67] ‘Perché questa guerra ricorda una crociata’.

Life Is Beautiful(1998)

2005-07-17T05:32:00.000-07:00

From New Yorker

Would that it were. The great, donkey-faced Italian clown Roberto Benigni attempts an ambitious fable of comedy's redemptive power. He plays an Italian Jew who keeps alive his little boy's innocence in a Nazi concentration camp by pretending that the routines of the camp are no more than an intricate game staged for his son's benefit. After all, Benigni appears to be saying, the Germans were indulging a fantasy, too—the fantasy of total control. But Benigni's ironic counter-reality undermines this movie, not the Nazis, who were beyond ridicule for the same reason that they were beyond rationality. Totalitarianism makes the fantastic literal—that is its demonic appeal. Benigni's jokes and games just aren't enough, and you leave the movie thinking that what's touching is not Benigni's ministrations to the little boy but his own need to believe in comedy as salvation. With Nicoletta Braschi as the hero's wife, and Giorgio Cantarini, who has the heartbreaking quality of the children in the old neorealist movies, as the boy. Set design by Danilo Donati. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. In Italian.
— David Denby

11 steps to a better brain

2005-06-14T17:49:00.000-07:00

It doesn't matter how brainy you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.
Smart drugs
Does getting old have to mean worsening memory, slower reactions and fuzzy thinking?
AROUND the age of 40, honest folks may already admit to noticing changes in their mental abilities. This is the beginning of a gradual decline that in all too many of us will culminate in full-blown dementia. If it were possible somehow to reverse it, slow it or mask it, wouldn't you?
A few drugs that might do the job, known as "cognitive enhancement", are already on the market, and a few dozen others are on the way. Perhaps the best-known is modafinil. Licensed to treat narcolepsy, the condition that causes people to suddenly fall asleep, it has notable effects in healthy people too. Modafinil can keep a person awake and alert for 90 hours straight, with none of the jitteriness and bad concentration that amphetamines or even coffee seem to produce.
In fact, with the help of modafinil, sleep-deprived people can perform even better than their well-rested, unmedicated selves. The forfeited rest doesn't even need to be made good. Military research is finding that people can stay awake for 40 hours, sleep the normal 8 hours, and then pull a few more all-nighters with no ill effects. It's an open secret that many, perhaps most, prescriptions for modafinil are written not for people who suffer from narcolepsy, but for those who simply want to stay awake. Similarly, many people are using Ritalin not because they suffer from attention deficit or any other disorder, but because they want superior concentration during exams or heavy-duty negotiations.
The pharmaceutical pipeline is clogged with promising compounds - drugs that act on the nicotinic receptors that smokers have long exploited, drugs that work on the cannabinoid system to block pot-smoking-type effects. Some drugs have also been specially designed to augment memory. Many of these look genuinely plausible: they seem to work, and without any major side effects.
So why aren't we all on cognitive enhancers already? "We need to be careful what we wish for," says Daniele Piomelli at the University of California at Irvine. He is studying the body's cannabinoid system with a view to making memories less emotionally charged in people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Tinkering with memory may have unwanted effects, he warns. "Ultimately we may end up remembering things we don't want to."
Gary Lynch, also at UC Irvine, voices a similar concern. He is the inventor of ampakines, a class of drugs that changes the rules about how a memory is encoded and how strong a memory trace is - the essence of learning (see New Scientist, 14 May, p 6). But maybe the rules have already been optimised by evolution, he suggests. What looks to be an improvement could have hidden downsides.
Still, the opportunity may be too tempting to pass up. The drug acts only in the brain, claims Lynch. It has a short half-life of hours. Ampakines have been shown to restore function to severely sleep-deprived monkeys that would otherwise perform poorly. Preliminary studies in humans are just as exciting. You could make an elderly person perform like a much younger person, he says. And who doesn't wish for that?
Food for thought
You are what you eat, and that includes your brain. So what is the ultimate mastermind diet?
YOUR brain is the greediest organ in your body, with some quite specific dietary requirements. So it is hardly surprising that what you eat can affect how you think. If you believe the dietary supplement industry, you could become the next Einstein just by popping the right combination of pills. Look closer, however, and it isn't that simple. The savvy consumer should take talk of brain-boosting diets with a pinch of low-sodium salt. But if it is possible to eat your way to genius, it must surely be worth a try.
First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work.
But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children's scores on a variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best. Beans are also a good source of fibre, and other research has shown a link between a high-fibre diet and improved cognition. If you can't stomach beans before midday, wholemeal toast with Marmite makes a great alternative. The yeast extract is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been demonstrated in many studies.
A smart choice for lunch is omelette and salad. Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Researchers at Boston University found that when healthy young adults were given the drug scopolamine, which blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduced their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are also associated with Alzheimer's disease, and some studies suggest that boosting dietary intake may slow age-related memory loss.
A salad packed full of antioxidants, including beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, should also help keep an ageing brain in tip-top condition by helping to mop up damaging free radicals. Dwight Tapp and colleagues from the University of California at Irvine found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive skills of 39 ageing beagles - proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
Round off lunch with a yogurt dessert, and you should be alert and ready to face the stresses of the afternoon. That's because yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among others. Studies by the US military indicate that tyrosine becomes depleted when we are under stress and that supplementing your intake can improve alertness and memory.
Don't forget to snaffle a snack mid-afternoon, to maintain your glucose levels. Just make sure you avoid junk food, and especially highly processed goodies such as cakes, pastries and biscuits, which contain trans-fatty acids. These not only pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to autism. Hard evidence for this is still thin on the ground, but last year researchers at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California, reported that rats and mice raised on the rodent equivalent of junk food struggled to find their way around a maze, and took longer to remember solutions to problems they had already solved.
It seems that some of the damage may be mediated through triglyceride, a cholesterol-like substance found at high levels in rodents fed on trans-fats. When the researchers gave these rats a drug to bring triglyceride levels down again, the animals' performance on the memory tasks improved.
Brains are around 60 per cent fat, so if trans-fats clog up the system, what should you eat to keep it well oiled? Evidence is mounting in favour of omega-3 fatty acids, in particular docosahexaenoic acid or DHA. In other words, your granny was right: fish is the best brain food. Not only will it feed and lubricate a developing brain, DHA also seems to help stave off dementia. Studies published last year reveal that older mice from a strain genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's had 70 per cent less of the amyloid plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA diet.
Finally, you could do worse than finish off your evening meal with strawberries and blueberries. Rats fed on these fruits have shown improved coordination, concentration and short-term memory. And even if they don't work such wonders in people, they still taste fantastic. So what have you got to lose?
The Mozart effect
Music may tune up your thinking, but you can't just crank up the volume and expect to become a genius
A DECADE ago Frances Rauscher, a psychologist now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and her colleagues made waves with the discovery that listening to Mozart improved people's mathematical and spatial reasoning. Even rats ran mazes faster and more accurately after hearing Mozart than after white noise or music by the minimalist composer Philip Glass. Last year, Rauscher reported that, for rats at least, a Mozart piano sonata seems to stimulate activity in three genes involved in nerve-cell signalling in the brain.
This sounds like the most harmonious way to tune up your mental faculties. But before you grab the CDs, hear this note of caution. Not everyone who has looked for the Mozart effect has found it. What's more, even its proponents tend to think that music boosts brain power simply because it makes listeners feel better - relaxed and stimulated at the same time - and that a comparable stimulus might do just as well. In fact, one study found that listening to a story gave a similar performance boost.
There is, however, one way in which music really does make you smarter, though unfortunately it requires a bit more effort than just selecting something mellow on your iPod. Music lessons are the key. Six-year-old children who were given music lessons, as opposed to drama lessons or no extra instruction, got a 2 to 3-point boost in IQ scores compared with the others. Similarly, Rauscher found that after two years of music lessons, pre-school children scored better on spatial reasoning tests than those who took computer lessons.
Maybe music lessons exercise a range of mental skills, with their requirement for delicate and precise finger movements, and listening for pitch and rhythm, all combined with an emotional dimension. Nobody knows for sure. Neither do they know whether adults can get the same mental boost as young children. But, surely, it can't hurt to try.
Bionic brains
If training and tricks seem too much like hard work, some technological short cuts can boost brain function
(See graphic, above)
Gainful employment
Put your mind to work in the right way and it could repay you with an impressive bonus
UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.
Working memory is the brain's short-term information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.
A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).
Perhaps more significantly, when the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power. "Genetics determines a lot and so does the early gestation period," he says. "On top of that, there is a few per cent - we don't know how much - that can be improved by training."
Memory marvels
Mind like a sieve? Don't worry. The difference between mere mortals and memory champs is more method than mental capacity
AN AUDITORIUM is filled with 600 people. As they file out, they each tell you their name. An hour later, you are asked to recall them all. Can you do it? Most of us would balk at the idea. But in truth we're probably all up to the task. It just needs a little technique and dedication.
First, learn a trick from the "mnemonists" who routinely memorise strings of thousands of digits, entire epic poems, or hundreds of unrelated words. When Eleanor Maguire from University College London and her colleagues studied eight front runners in the annual World Memory Championships they did not find any evidence that these people have particularly high IQs or differently configured brains. But, while memorising, these people did show activity in three brain regions that become active during movements and navigation tasks but are not normally active during simple memory tests.
This may be connected to the fact that seven of them used a strategy in which they place items to be remembered along a visualised route (Nature Neuroscience, vol 6, p 90). To remember the sequence of an entire pack of playing cards for example, the champions assign each card an identity, perhaps an object or person, and as they flick through the cards they can make up a story based on a sequence of interactions between these characters and objects at sites along a well-trodden route.
Actors use a related technique: they attach emotional meaning to what they say. We always remember highly emotional moments better than less emotionally loaded ones. Professional actors also seem to link words with movement, remembering action-accompanied lines significantly better than those delivered while static, even months after a show has closed.
Helga Noice, a psychologist from Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Tony Noice, an actor, who together discovered this effect, found that non-thesps can benefit by adopting a similar technique. Students who paired their words with previously learned actions could reproduce 38 per cent of them after just 5 minutes, whereas rote learners only managed 14 per cent. The Noices believe that having two mental representations gives you a better shot at remembering what you are supposed to say.
Strategy is important in everyday life too, says Barry Gordon from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Simple things like always putting your car keys in the same place, writing things down to get them off your mind, or just deciding to pay attention, can make a big difference to how much information you retain. And if names are your downfall, try making some mental associations. Just remember to keep the derogatory ones to yourself.
Sleep on it
Never underestimate the power of a good night's rest
SKIMPING on sleep does awful things to your brain. Planning, problem-solving, learning, concentration,working memory and alertness all take a hit. IQ scores tumble. "If you have been awake for 21 hours straight, your abilities are equivalent to someone who is legally drunk," says Sean Drummond from the University of California, San Diego. And you don't need to pull an all-nighter to suffer the effects: two or three late nights and early mornings on the trot have the same effect.
Luckily, it's reversible - and more. If you let someone who isn't sleep-deprived have an extra hour or two of shut-eye, they perform much better than normal on tasks requiring sustained attention, such taking an exam. And being able to concentrate harder has knock-on benefits for overall mental performance. "Attention is the base of a mental pyramid," says Drummond. "If you boost that, you can't help boosting everything above it."
These are not the only benefits of a decent night's sleep. Sleep is when your brain processes new memories, practises and hones new skills - and even solves problems. Say you're trying to master a new video game. Instead of grinding away into the small hours, you would be better off playing for a couple of hours, then going to bed. While you are asleep your brain will reactivate the circuits it was using as you learned the game, rehearse them, and then shunt the new memories into long-term storage. When you wake up, hey presto! You will be a better player. The same applies to other skills such as playing the piano, driving a car and, some researchers claim, memorising facts and figures. Even taking a nap after training can help, says Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
There is also some evidence that sleep can help produce moments of problem-solving insight. The famous story about the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev suddenly "getting" the periodic table in a dream after a day spent struggling with the problem is probably true. It seems that sleep somehow allows the brain to juggle new memories to produce flashes of creative insight. So if you want to have a eureka moment, stop racking your brains and get your head down.
Body and mind
Physical exercise can boost brain as well as brawn
IT'S a dream come true for those who hate studying. Simply walking sedately for half an hour three times a week can improve abilities such as learning, concentration and abstract reasoning by 15 per cent. The effects are particularly noticeable in older people. Senior citizens who walk regularly perform better on memory tests than their sedentary peers. What's more, over several years their scores on a variety of cognitive tests show far less decline than those of non-walkers. Every extra mile a week has measurable benefits.
It's not only oldies who benefit, however. Angela Balding from the University of Exeter, UK, has found that schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher than average exam grades at age 10 or 11. The effect is strongest in boys, and while Balding admits that the link may not be causal, she suggests that aerobic exercise may boost mental powers by getting extra oxygen to your energy-guzzling brain.
There's another reason why your brain loves physical exercise: it promotes the growth of new brain cells. Until recently, received wisdom had it that we are born with a full complement of neurons and produce no new ones during our lifetime. Fred Gage from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, busted that myth in 2000 when he showed that even adults can grow new brain cells. He also found that exercise is one of the best ways to achieve this.
In mice, at least, the brain-building effects of exercise are strongest in the hippocampus, which is involved with learning and memory. This also happens to be the brain region that is damaged by elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. So if you are feeling frazzled, do your brain a favour and go for a run.
Even more gentle exercise, such as yoga, can do wonders for your brain. Last year, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported results from a pilot study in which they considered the mood-altering ability of different yoga poses. Comparing back bends, forward bends and standing poses, they concluded that the best way to get a mental lift is to bend over backwards.
And the effect works both ways. Just as physical exercise can boost the brain, mental exercise can boost the body. In 2001, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio asked volunteers to spend just 15 minutes a day thinking about exercising their biceps. After 12 weeks, their arms were 13 per cent stronger.
Nuns on a run
If you don't want senility to interfere with your old age, perhaps you should seek some sisterly guidance
THE convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minnesota, might seem an unusual place for a pioneering brain-science experiment. But a study of its 75 to 107-year-old inhabitants is revealing more about keeping the brain alive and healthy than perhaps any other to date. The "Nun study" is a unique collaboration between 678 Catholic sisters recruited in 1991 and Alzheimer's expert David Snowdon of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
The sisters' miraculous longevity - the group boasts seven centenarians and many others well on their way - is surely in no small part attributable to their impeccable lifestyle. They do not drink or smoke, they live quietly and communally, they are spiritual and calm and they eat healthily and in moderation. Nevertheless, small differences between individual nuns could reveal the key to a healthy mind in later life.
Some of the nuns have suffered from Alzheimer's disease, but many have avoided any kind of dementia or senility. They include Sister Matthia, who was mentally fit and active from her birth in 1894 to the day she died peacefully in her sleep, aged 104. She was happy and productive, knitting mittens for the poor every day until the end of her life. A post-mortem of Sister Matthia's brain revealed no signs of excessive ageing. But in some other, remarkable cases, Snowdon has found sisters who showed no outwards signs of senility in life, yet had brains that looked as if they were ravaged by dementia.
How did Sister Matthia and the others cheat time? Snowdon's study, which includes an annual barrage of mental agility tests and detailed medical exams, has found several common denominators. The right amount of vitamin folate is one. Verbal ability early in life is another, as are positive emotions early in life, which were revealed by Snowdon's analysis of the personal autobiographical essays each woman wrote in her 20s as she took her vows. Activities, crosswords, knitting and exercising also helped to prevent senility, showing that the old adage "use it or lose it" is pertinent. And spirituality, or the positive attitude that comes from it, can't be overlooked. But individual differences also matter. To avoid dementia, your general health may be vital: metabolic problems, small strokes and head injuries seem to be common triggers of Alzheimer's dementia.
Obviously, you don't have to become a nun to stay mentally agile. We can all aspire to these kinds of improvements. As one of the sisters put it, "Think no evil, do no evil, hear no evil, and you will never write a best-selling novel."
Attention seeking
You can be smart, well-read, creative and knowledgeable, but none of it is any use if your mind isn't on the job
PAYING attention is a complex mental process, an interplay of zooming in on detail and stepping back to survey the big picture. So unfortunately there is no single remedy to enhance your concentration. But there are a few ways to improve it.
The first is to raise your arousal levels. The brain's attentional state is controlled by the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin. Dopamine encourages a persistent, goal-centred state of mind whereas noradrenalin produces an outward-looking, vigilant state. So not surprisingly, anything that raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration.
One way to do this is with drugs such as amphetamines and the ADHD drug methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin. Caffeine also works. But if you prefer the drug-free approach, the best strategy is to sleep well, eat foods packed with slow-release sugars, and take lots of exercise. It also helps if you are trying to focus on something that you find interesting.
The second step is to cut down on distractions. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such as a phone call. Just a few such interruptions and half the day is wasted.
Music can help as long as you listen to something familiar and soothing that serves primarily to drown out background noise. Psychologists also recommend that you avoid working near potential diversions, such as the fridge.
There are mental drills to deal with distractions. College counsellors routinely teach students to recognise when their thoughts are wandering, and catch themselves by saying "Stop! Be here now!" It sounds corny but can develop into a valuable habit. As any Zen meditator will tell you, concentration is as much a skill to be lovingly cultivated as it is a physiochemical state of the brain.
Positive feedback
Thought control is easier than you might imagine
IT SOUNDS a bit New Age, but there is a mysterious method of thought control you can learn that seems to boost brain power. No one quite knows how it works, and it is hard to describe exactly how to do it: it's not relaxation or concentration as such, more a state of mind. It's called neurofeedback. And it is slowly gaining scientific credibility.
Neurofeedback grew out of biofeedback therapy, popular in the 1960s. It works by showing people a real-time measure of some seemingly uncontrollable aspect of their physiology - heart rate, say - and encouraging them to try and change it. Astonishingly, many patients found that they could, though only rarely could they describe how they did it.
More recently, this technique has been applied to the brain - specifically to brain wave activity measured by an electroencephalogram, or EEG. The first attempts were aimed at boosting the size of the alpha wave, which crescendos when we are calm and focused. In one experiment, researchers linked the speed of a car in a computer game to the size of the alpha wave. They then asked subjects to make the car go faster using only their minds. Many managed to do so, and seemed to become more alert and focused as a result.
This early success encouraged others, and neurofeedback soon became a popular alternative therapy for ADHD. There is now good scientific evidence that it works, as well as some success in treating epilepsy, depression, tinnitus, anxiety, stroke and brain injuries.
And to keep up with the times, some experimenters have used brain scanners in place of EEGs. Scanners can allow people to see and control activity of specific parts of the brain. A team at Stanford University in California showed that people could learn to control pain by watching the activity of their pain centres (New Scientist, 1 May 2004, p 9).
But what about outside the clinic? Will neuro feedback ever allow ordinary people to boost their brain function? Possibly. John Gruzelier of Imperial College London has shown that it can improve medical students' memory and make them feel calmer before exams. He has also shown that it can improve musicians' and dancers' technique, and is testing it out on opera singers and surgeons.
Neils Birbaumer from the University of Tübingen in Germany wants to see whether neurofeedback can help psychopathic criminals control their impulsiveness. And there are hints that the method could boost creativity, enhance our orgasms, give shy people more confidence, lift low moods, alter the balance between left and right brain activity, and alter personality traits. All this by the power of thought.
From issue 2501 of New Scientist magazine, 28 May 2005, page 28

A Rational Don Quixote

2005-04-29T04:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6892&issue=505&category=&author=927&AuthKey=de05cc17a927e64de7fbcc9174f859db

Julian Evans

In all the battles for the Enlightenment, one combatant's name is rarely mentioned. Don Quixote de la Mancha, icon of everything in humanity that is calamitously idealistic, is renowned for qualities other than rationalist courage: for kindness and foolishness; for unintended comedy and a refusal to be disenchanted; for clairvoyant lunacy and obstinate romanticism in a rotten, factual world. He rides out with Sancho Panza from his village in la Mancha to discover that the world is not as he has read about it in books of chivalry and, impervious to ridicule or failure, for 124 chapters seeks to live up to the pastoral ideal of the knight errant, that fiction of the good man. Only in the 126th and final chapter does he acknowledge the "absurdities and deceptions" of the books that inspired him and then, in an ending of unbearable sadness, finally renounces his world of fantasy, returns to his senses, and dies.For 400 years—the first edition of the Quixote was distributed in Madrid in 1605—his story has supplied the archetype of the bookish dreamer and the outermost comic landmark of our idealism. Yet Don Quixote's achievement is surely greater than that. Without him, and without Cervantes's own constant shifting between tradition and modernity, we might have remained for longer in a world of superstition and dogma. "Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity," Kant wrote in 1784, 180 years after the first publication of the Quixote. "The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence." On the knight's 400th anniversary we can see that this was the courage that Don Quixote has bequeathed us. His own misguided intelligence, bound to an immaturity that leads to folly, takes him on an epic of discovery in which he finally leads the reader out of his or her own immaturity. Frequently evoked as picaresque, the Quixote is more accurately seen as a Bildungsroman. It takes its Bildung in two directions, the one in which Don Quixote is shown his own folly, and the other in which the reader is invited to understand the difference between appearance and reality.How much did Cervantes intend such a reading of his book? There is no reason to disbelieve his claim that his main object was to ridicule the romances of chivalry which, in their late 16th-century incarnation, had become increasingly absurd. Cervantes wrote, like most writers, for money, and his intention at the outset was to write a prose tale in which these absurdities could be satirised. As he continued, his story expanded into a brilliant panoramic fresco of Spanish society declining into economic chaos and class resentment under the decadent rule of Philip II and III. But Cervantes could not have understood that he was also composing something else, a determining text, the first story to be aware at every moment of its own fictitiousness, the book which would send a continent of writers off in search of a new identity—the original modern novel.When the first part, the 1605 publication, became successful Cervantes saw the logic of producing a sequel, but we have a rival "second volume" by Fernández de Avellaneda, published in 1614 in an attempt to cash in on Quixote's popularity, to thank for Cervantes finally finishing the second part (Cervantes was always a leisurely writer). We may also owe the deep well of pathos that is Quixote's death scene to Avellaneda's attempted hijacking. The death of his hero may have been Cervantes's way of ensuring that no one could ever again interfere with his character. But the novel's contemporary popularity was due to its wealth of incident and its strokes of comic timing. Full appreciation of its political insight, its grasp of its own times and its humanity came much later. It is Jorge Luis Borges who, 300-odd years after publication of the Quixote, writes in his story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" about how we are able, in the light of what has happened to the world since Cervantes's novel appeared, to find it much richer in allusion and significance now than it was then. We cannot attribute to Cervantes a sense of his own future greatness or influence. He was experienced in matters of state: he had seen Spain fall from greatness through misgovernment, bankruptcy and military arrogance, a fall so sudden that Spaniards wondered if their country's original grandeur had been "no more than un engaño [illusion]?" This land of depopulation and unrest was Don Quixote's country; foolish and unsuccessful wanderer he may have been, but Cervantes intentionally set him up in stark opposition to Philip II, who rarely rose from his desk in the Escorial.The author was, however, aware of his novel's early success. We are told that by June 1605, only a few months after publication, "the citizens of Valladolid [where he was living] already regarded Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as proverbial types." He would also have known that his novel was first translated into English in 1612 and into French in 1614. (There may be a strand of the English character that uniquely identifies with a strand of the Quixote's romanticism, not so much its idealism and emotion as its eccentricity. The English feel a special sympathy for folly committed in the name of loyalty to an utterly outmoded code of conduct.) But Cervantes could not know that in 2002, in a poll organised by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 writers worldwide would vote Don Quixote the "best and most central work" in literature, eclipsing the plays of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky's novels and Homer's epics. So the Quixote is, like all masterpieces, accidental. But how, as readers, are we to discern its greatness from the perspective of our own post-Enlightenment times? Do its concerns still speak to us? We need to start by reading it, but do we actually read it? Well, not individually, as the head of a modern publishing conglomerate recently said to an author he met by chance. We do not read the Quixote because of its length and, even in most recent English versions, difficult prose. But we also do not read it because we do not need to. In critical terms, one problem, perhaps unique to Cervantes's work, is that we have no perspective on the novel, because the Quixote itself created our perspective. Harold Bloom writes, in his introduction to Edith Grossman's excellent 2003 translation, that "it so contains us that, as with Shakespeare, we cannot get out of it." The day Quixote and Sancho rode out from their unnamed village, a fictional blueprint came to life. Don Quixote is our prototypical text, the first story to emerge out of a self-awareness of its own fictional form, to take as its theme the gap between appearance and reality; to be, in our terms, modern. It is to the modern novel what Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis. Freud, in fact, was an admirer of Cervantes: in the summer of 1883 he confessed to his fiancée Martha Bernays that he was more interested in Don Quixote than in brain anatomy. He found Quixote's dialogues with Sancho Panza significant for the lesson they offered of the need both to discriminate between reality and fantasy and to understand their interplay. He expressed an oddly romantic sympathy for Quixote's idealism: "Once we were all noble knights passing through the world caught in a dream, misinterpreting the simplest things, magnifying commonplaces into something noble and rare, and thereby cutting a sad figure… we men always read with respect about what we once were and in part still remain."In the 21st century, with our potent self-consciousness, we not only know too much but know that we do, and to read Don Quixote is to be heartened that in the embrace of their illusions people are capable of decent, funny, unpredictable acts. The Enlightenment was essential for our freedoms, but more than rationalism is needed in the world. Carlos Fuentes has written that at the end of the novel, Don Quixote suffers from "the nostalgia of realism"—not the realism Cervantes has invented but the realism of old, of impossible adventures with knights errant, magicians and frightful giants. "Before, everything that was written was true," writes Fuentes, "even if it were a phantasy. There were no cracks between what was said and what was done in the epic. 'For Aristotle and the middle ages,' explains Ortega y Gasset, 'all things were possible that do not contain an inner contradiction. For Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility; not for us, since biology will not tolerate it.'" Fuentes illuminates well Don Quixote's suffering—that he must choose between the drama of make-believe and the mean necessities of reality—but the novel additionally lights the way of readers yet unborn through the knight's dual lesson of the choice he must make and the choice the reader must make about his fictional necessity (or not).Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the empress of la Mancha, the unrivalled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me.Reality, as Fuentes writes, "may laugh or weep on hearing such words." But reality also feels itself outmanoeuvred, outgunned by their appeal. After hearing them, we as readers can forever understand that there is more than one objective reality.Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra personally felt the disenchantment of reality. His novel is driven by the rebuffs and misfortunes he was dealt: to choose refuge in noble dreams would have been an obvious choice for a man whose aspirations repeatedly failed to bear fruit. Little is known of Cervantes's first 24 years. In 1571, enlisted with his brother Rodrigo as a soldier, he sailed on the Marquesa from Messina as a member of Don Miguel de Moncada's regiment to repel the Ottoman advance in the fleet of Don John of Austria. At the battle of Lepanto, in the gulf of Corinth, the Marquesa was in the thick of the eventually victorious fight. Cervantes received three gunshot wounds, one of which maimed his left hand, "for the greater glory of the right" as he said afterwards. After Lepanto his military service was spent in Naples and Palermo. In 1575, returning to Spain, he and Rodrigo were captured by Barbary corsairs. Cervantes was enslaved to a Greek renegade at Algiers. Repeated escape attempts failed: twice betrayed, he then saw his brother liberated when funds sent by his parents were inadequate to ransom them both. Resold to the viceroy of Algiers and betrayed again by a Dominican monk, he was finally released after five years of slavery when two Trinitarian friars successfully ransomed him. On his return he wrote plays and the pastoral novel Galatea, a serious bid for fame that failed; it was inconclusive and derivative, and pushed him back into paid employment. At Seville in 1587 he found employment provisioning the Armada and was excommunicated for excessive zeal in collecting wheat. He then applied for a complete getaway, to a post in the Indies. "Let him look for something nearer home," his petition was drily annotated. He found work as a tax collector and was imprisoned at least four, possibly six times for everything from irregularities in his accounts to allegedly making a pass at the sister/niece/mistress of a (probably tax-evading) landowner, Don Rodrigo de Pacheco. It may be that Don Quixote began as a desire to get his own back by satirising Don Rodrigo as a mad knight who "slept so little and read so much that his brain dried up and he lost his reason." A continuing run of professional bad luck during the 1590s produced increasing disillusionment, chiefly with Spain's imperial outlook and incompetent absolutist monarchy. His poetry and prose began to show signs of intensifying parody and of the mock-heroic attitude that would become his strongest comic device.Cervantes's whereabouts in the early 1600s are unclear, but if he was in the prison cell in Argamasilla de Alba where Don Rodrigo had slung him, he was using his time well, writing the novel that would reverse his fortunes and determine the form of fiction for the next four centuries. He suspected neither of these things, and curiously, though he read some of the manuscript, neither did Lope de Vega, Spain's greatest playwright, who had written to a friend that "no poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so foolish as to praise Don Quixote."And what of everything else that Cervantes could not suspect? Bloom compares Cervantes with Shakespeare but makes a key distinction between their methods: "Cervantes remains the best of all novelists, just as Shakespeare remains the best of all dramatists. There are parts of yourself that you will never know fully until you know Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But there's a fundamental difference between Cervantes and Shakespeare: Sancho and the Don develop newer and richer egos by talking to each other. Falstaff and Hamlet perform the same process through lonely soliloquies." On the one hand, we first realise through Don Quixote that the novel exists as a new kind of meaning, a sign, as Carlos Fuentes writes "of a modern divorce between words and things." On the other hand, in Quixote's search for a new union between reality and the words to articulate it, we also realise that it is dangerous to attempt this enterprise alone. The novel has become a social form for a very good reason: the identity that emerges from each of us is composed not only of our egos but our links with other egos. How can the novel tell us who we are, or ask us if we recognise anything human in it, without reflecting on those links? A modern or postmodern Quixote might consider it his duty to liberate, as well as the widows, maidens and orphans, the millions of urban dwellers who live alone. For such reasons has Cervantes's novel held its ground since 1605. In the 17th century, at a time when more ruthlessly than today the market decided, the wide pirating of the Quixote was an infallible mark of its popularity. In the 18th, as the English novel established itself, British novelists paid Cervantes constant tribute: witness Defoe's inspirations in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe; Fielding's 1742 preface to Joseph Andrews, "written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote" (he also wrote Don Quixote in England, for the theatre); Sterne's blithe obviousness, among countless borrowings, in using Quixote and Sancho Panza as models for uncle Toby and corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy; and Smollett's translation of 1755 that ran to 13 editions. The English love of folly and, in Smollet's words, Cervantes's "strength, humour and propriety," not to mention the obvious commercial success of his model, ensured the Quixote's endurance.A century later, Dickens's and Thackeray's conversion of Quixote's horizontal and eschatological wanderings into fiction that journeyed vertically, socially and materially, was mirrored by Balzac and Stendhal. In Germany, Don Quixote may have been the last book Kleist ever read—found with his barest possessions after his suicide—while in France it was the first that the six-year-old Flaubert read, in an abridged version with 34 large illustrations. (The tragi-comic theme of the romantic hero at odds with reality explains almost all of Flaubert's work, from Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education to Bouvard and Pécuchet.) The Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina once said to me that although modern Spanish novelists do not make much of Cervantes—the anxiety of influence is too great—they cannot avoid his fictional blueprint. In the 20th century, neither Kafka nor Nabokov, Borges, Bellow or Kundera could have clothed their worlds in fiction without the pattern furnished by their Spanish ancestor. One might go even further: Don Quixote's influence has been super-literary—without it the French revolution, with its notion that individuals can be right, society wrong, might never have happened, and Martin Luther King Jr might never have delivered a speech that contained the words "I have a dream."Anglophone readers have never had a better chance to confront that greatness directly. Edith Grossman's new translation (apart from brief confusions of "thee" and "thou") is so good that it ought to compel us to start reading the Quixote again. Her text restores Cervantes's readability, the vitality of his dialogue and characterisation and the darkening quality of his vision. The thought patterns of his madness, which earlier translations obscured by rendering the original too literally or too loosely, are here rendered as logical, and thus funnier and sadder. One of my favourite episodes is the "enchanted boat" adventure in the second part, in which the two travellers steal a small rowing boat, Quixote believing that it has been sent by an enchanter as a kind of celestial cab to transport them to some knight or maiden requiring assistance. Knight and squire dispute their way downstream, one hurling curses at his servant's cowardice, the other cursing his master's madness, and as they are swept into the dangerous millrace their exchange climaxes in a superbly indifferent discourse by Quixote on how enchantment works. "'Be quiet, Sancho,' said Don Quixote, 'for although they seem to be watermills, they are not; I have already told you that enchantments change and alter all things from their natural state. I do not mean to say that they are really altered from one state to another, but that they seem to be, as experience has shown in the transformation of Dulcinea, sole refuge of my hopes.'" The comic timing of which Cervantes was capable, and his understanding of Quixote's pathos, have rarely been so in evidence for English readers. In the last third of the novel, Cervantes's increasingly unkind mischiefs towards his hero bespeak not just impatience but also a yearning to eliminate him, yet the admiration and compassion he has already instilled in us is proof against everything the author can do to undermine them.There is a view in literary-critical circles that Don Quixote's signal accomplishment was the victorious elevation of the novel over the romance. The deluded knight's attack on Master Pedro's puppet theatre for example, is, according to Bloom, "a parable of the triumph of Cervantes over the picaresque and of the triumph of the novel over the romance."Yet this seems a limited reading of the novel. It is as unfair to say that the Quixote is merely a "critical parody" of the romance as it is to say that its eponymous hero is merely mad. The forms of Cervantes's moral thought are pointed to in his humour: the author is simultaneously satirising Quixote's belief in chivalry and commemorating it through the comic forms of his forgiveness. There is no better example of the comedy of compassion. And Cervantes did not abandon the form of the romance; it is present in his Exemplary Novels, which he was writing between the two parts of Don Quixote, and in his posthumously published epic, Persiles and Sigismunda. Romance is in all his work. In the Quixote it is the engine both of Quixote's folly and of our deepening sympathy—a reader's way of recognising a hero's predicament as latently his or her own. Through the innumerable possible readings of the Quixote, we can perhaps identify a core of distinct principles: that there is no reality without folly, and no underlying perception of reality without romance, of one kind or another, to draw out human curiosity. To read Cervantes's Quixote as the first and greatest modern novel, and then, self-satisfied, to read back into it that we have nailed the folly of romance, is to miss half of Cervantes's intention. Having delineated Enlightenment rationality by the comic delineation of its opposite, Cervantes overflows the dimensions of both. If we admire Don Quixote today, it is surely because we continue to agree with him that his madness, not his reason, enables him to transcend the world of things and believe in a world of value. Enlightenment virtues we may all share. Our madness is our faith, and belongs to us alone.

10,000 years of nostalgia

2005-04-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

the antiquity of ‘the progress paradox’

Roger Sandall

Life gets better, but people feel worse. In seven short words that’s what Gregg Esterbrook’s book is about. The Progress Paradox (2003) is a revealing survey of modern discontents ranging widely in the social sciences and medicine, and it’s certainly interesting that ten times as many people may now suffer from depression as did half a century ago. But Easterbrook is broad rather than deep, and seems largely unaware that people have been complaining about progress, and looking nostalgically back at the past, for as long as there’s been a past to look back at. How depressed they felt when they did so is hard to say—as often as not they seem to have got into a towering rage—but the progress paradox has been with us for thousands of years.

primitivist fantasy: as old as civilization itself

One of its most striking sentimental manifestations is a widespread admiration for the tribal world. Anyone who thinks this began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century is deeply mistaken. We mentioned Lucretius in this connection last month, citing A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas’s Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, but this book also makes plain that there were numerous other thinkers from 2000 years ago who admired the simple life. And none of them liked stuff.

In fact, they all believed that less stuff was better than more. Socrates said that man’s basic requirements were few and easily satisfied, and Epicurus agreed. Diogenes once talked a prosperous Athenian into turning his agricultural land into sheep pastures—pastoralism has always had a special appeal with its visions of rustic tranquillity—and talked him into throwing his money into the sea. Plato’s Republic dwelt fondly on the idyllic picture of an earlier communal society, while any number of Greek thinkers were convinced that the savage Scythian tribes, somewhere beyond Thrace along the shores of the Black Sea, exemplified primitive virtue in contrast to degenerate Athens.

Reaching back a bit further we find that as early as 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod felt humanity’s heroic days were past and that he lived in an era of lamentable decline. In the Golden Age (which Hesiod says was long before his own time) men were naturally peaceable, and for that reason there was no war. Nor was there any foreign trade or travel to confuse us with luxuries: everyone stayed home happily knitting their own sweaters, and no-one fussed about Paris or Pierre Cardin. Among other attractive features of the Golden Age, the people were vegetarians, made everything out of wood, and because they were naturally good their communal society was free of conflict and required no lawyers.

Notice that from the Golden Age all the way down through a series of inferior ages (Silver, Bronze, and Iron) this is a story of degeneration. Not a story of progress, but of regress. It is virtually certain that Hesiod did not live like a savage: he used a spoon and slept in a bed. But paradoxically—as Easterbrook might say—he hated progress. And notice also what is admired above and beyond all these particularities: the social and economic virtues described are only to be found in an imagined community where xenophobia and group hostilities had been vanquished and universal love prevails. In all these idealistic visions communal order was an implied prerequisite: some tight-knit form of collectivity was thought to be inseparable from the social virtues portrayed.

One last thing should be mentioned in this connection. In Scientific American Discovering Archaeology for Jan/Feb 2000 evidence was presented from 8,500 years ago of a cult in Cyprus that, somewhat incredibly, wanted to turn the clock back. According to the author, there were people at that time who found the decadence of Anatolian life intolerable, so they sailed across the sea to Cyprus, and gave up pottery, individualism, and sex. It must be added, however, regarding this intriguing article, that extrapolating from stones and bones to what people may have thought or believed eight and a half thousand years ago is a less than exact science.

But from these many examples one is forced to conclude that romantic primitivism has been with us for a very long time. In round figures, it looks as if people have been gazing nostalgically backward for nearly ten thousand years. And that is highly significant. Because the last ten thousand years is exactly the epoch in which civilization itself emerged; and what it suggests is that idealizing earlier and more primitive ways of life is a fixed mental tendency, a psychological constant if you will, inseparable from the rise of civilization itself.

from xenophobia to xenophilia

For anyone who doesn’t have them, it is obvious that the most important features of civilization are soap and toilet paper. These are the items that distinguish civilized from precivilized life, and distinguish barbarism from the dark abyss of unwashed and unwiped prehistory.

Yet today, surprisingly, many nice, clean, sweet-smelling middle class folk have somehow persuaded themselves that the tribal world, where there is no soap, no toilet paper, no shampoo, no deodorant and certainly no tampons, represents a better way of life than their own. No doubt if you pressed them about this after a good dinner they might concede that the pre-civilized world lacks amenity; but that it is morally superior and altogether more virtuous they feel in their bones to be true. And the deep reason for feeling this way about early human society is always the same: it is more communal, more collectivist, more committed to the solidarity of the group.

The reason for this persistent attraction to the tribal lies, I believe, somewhere in the complicated moral evolution of humanity—in the historical passage and shift in moral judgement from xenophobia to xenophilia. To grasp this it is necessary to be clear about these contrasting attitudes and psychological types. A xenophobe is one who holds that the humanly foreign, the Other, the culturally unseen and unknown—perhaps some vaguely reported and misunderstood tribe across the sea—is really a bit sus, and definitely not what we want at home in our living room. A xenophile on the other hand holds that the foreign, the remote, the exotically Other, precisely because it is only vaguely apprehended, and just because it radically differs from ourselves, is something wholesome and admirable that should be warmly embraced.

Of course in evolutionary terms xenophobia is probably as old as the hills—it is certainly as old as the apes. Go back a million years or so and one finds that xenophobia was the primordial attitude regulating the association of bands of violent prehumans, or low-browed protohumans, virtually everywhere you looked. Xenophobia taught that while the inhabitants of your own country were generally okay, the inhabitants of the adjacent territory were a disgraceful and unmanageable bunch who were always trying to invade your land, seize your wife and children, burn down your house, laugh at your gods, and defile all you held sacred.

The primaeval xenophobic attitude was once illustrated in a cartoon showing two English rustics, about 1890, leaning on a farm gate when a toff from London walks by.

First Rustic: “Who’s him?”
Second Rustic: “Dunno”
First Rustic: “Chuck a brick at him.”

Given a spontaneous tendency on the part of rustics to toss bricks at passing strangers, xenophobia is clearly a social problem, and quite possibly a moral problem, and it is clear that civil society cannot allow it to flourish unrestrained. At the same time it is hard to see it as an intellectual problem. There is nothing at all puzzling about it, nothing mysterious to be explained, nothing that some anxious academic commission should be asked to look into. It is obviously an expression of the same unaccommodating instincts we share with countless other animals, including chimpanzees, and goes far back into the primate past.

But the modern phenomenon of anti-civilizational xenophilia is an intellectual problem. The adoration of cultures other than our own, the worship of gods other than those we were brought up with, a devotion to all religions other than the one our parents believed—what A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas call in their book the “revolt of the civilized against civilization” with its admiration for pre-civilized social forms and a love of the exotic, the strange, and the outré—this is indeed a genuine puzzle. It is by no means obvious how it arose. What is clear at the outset, however, is that it involves an inversion of much that is natural, normal, and universal in social life.

moral rules: from Freud to Mary Midgley

Freud’s psychology may be of help here. First and most simply, he tells how the calm exterior of every man and woman conceals a tumult of instinctual desires and drives. Second, in order for the human animal to live peaceably with his fellows these instincts must be tamed, diverted, redirected—sublimated is the usual term—and made compatible with peaceful collective life. Human cultures invent moral rules to do this, the male impulse to aggression being subject to a variety of restraints on bad behaviour.

Then with the rise of civilization it becomes subject to such difficult rules as ‘Love thy Neighbour’, and the even more counterintuitive ‘Love thy Enemy’. Third, although conscience as an internal system of control is erected on the basis of these rules, those bad old violent and aggressive drives just won’t go away. They cannot and will not be eradicated. They are overlaid by the artificial rules of the super-ego, but though overlaid they won’t lie down. In the darkest subterranean levels of the human psyche they persist, producing anxiety, guilt, and neurotic symptoms up on the surface.

Now my argument is that romantic primitivism, which we have seen is a recurrent feature of western civilization for about 3,000 years, and possibly much longer, is part of a guilt complex involving moral rules idealizing the communal way of life. This idealization is deeply inscribed in conscience; and guilt arises because of the claims of this communal social conscience on the one hand, and the opposing need in civilized societies to assert oneself individualistically against the communal, against the collective, against the claustrophobia of the tribe, against the tyranny of the human herd.

Freud’s relevant statements appear in a number of places. In Totem and Taboo, for example, he states as an axiom that “where there is a prohibition, there must be an underlying desire.” This of course makes sense. Why prohibit something we have no wish to do anyway? The only reason for having a speed limit is that we want to go faster. The only reason for having a rule like “Love thy enemy” is that we want to xenophobically beat the enemy to a pulp and would like to do so.

This is the instinct which the moral norms of civilization arise to counterract: the wish to aggress, to fight, to kill. We began by saying that the normal relation of tribe to tribe is territorially xenophobic—fearful, hostile, and ready to strike and destroy: “Chuck a brick at him.” By way of reinforcing this proposition consider what Mary Midgley has to say in her book Beast and Man:

War and vengeance are primitive human institutions, not late perversions; most cosmogonies postulate strife in Heaven, and bloodshed is taken for granted as much in the Book of Judges as in the Iliad or the Sagas. There may be nonaggressive societies, as anthropologists assure us, but they are white blackbirds and perhaps not so white as they are painted.

It seems possible that man shows more savagery to his own kind than most other mammal species… Abimelech, the son of Gideon, murdered, on one stone, all his brothers, to the number of three score and ten (Judges 11:5). An animal that did anything remotely similar would (surely rightly) be labelled ‘dangerous’. (pp28–29)

war before civilization

It is frequently claimed either that war did not exist before civilization, or that it was relatively trivial with little loss of life, or that it was ritualised and involved no serious levels of death or injury, or that when conflict has been recorded between tribal societies it grew solely out of their clash with civilization itself. There is alas nothing to support these views. We are here presenting speculative moral psychology: we don’t have much space for empirical evidence. But on the subject of precivilized tribal warfare you should know there’s a lot of evidence around, especially in two recent books which show the folly of trying retrospectively to pacify the human past.

One of them is Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization (Oxford, 1996). The other is Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles: the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, 2003. Keeley tells us that whether comparison is made between the frequency of war in primitive and civilized society, the scale of massacres, the proportion of those of the general population actively involved, the toll of dead and injured, in each case the surprising thing—and it certainly surprises me—is that the tribal world looks both more bloody and more deadly. As to frequency: Keeley notes that the early Roman Republic initiated a war or was attacked only about once every twenty years, while the average modern nation-state between 1800 and 1945 went to war about once in a generation.

Compare this with pre-state, preliterate, precivilized tribal societies: 65% were at war continuously, while 55% were at war every year. As to massacres: at the site of Crow Creek in South Dakota, in what seems to be the year 1325 according to archaeological dating, more than 500 men, women, and children were slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated, and all this well before anything remotely resembling civilization was available locally—and long before Columbus. Regarding the toll of dead and injured, Keeley writes that “the proportion of war casualties in primitive societies almost always exceeds that suffered by even the most bellicose or war-torn modern states.”

Traditional Australian Aboriginal life is presented as blandly pacific, the standard image used over and over again by the Australian Broadcasting Commission showing a family group wading thoughtfully into a lily pond, with flowers between their teeth. But it wasn’t quite like that in the old days. The convict William Buckley, who escaped in 1803 and lived with Aborigines on the southern coast for thirty-two years, provides a rare glimpse, from the inside, of the level of conflict among his people. One day, he writes, “we were unexpectedly intruded upon by a very numerous tribe, about three hundred. Their appearance coming across the plain, occasioned great alarm… On the hostile tribe coming near, I saw they were all men… In a very short time the fight began. Men were fighting furiously, and indiscriminately, covered with blood, two of them later were killed in this affair”.

He goes on to say that the battle ended with three killed, and then describes the counterattack that his people staged the following night: “ finding most of them asleep, laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot, and wounding several others. The enemy fled, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs.”

In pre-civilized war the beating, stabbing, or spearing to death of the wounded was routine. It may be appropriate here to mention that in accounts of the battle of Culloden, near Inverness in 1746, writers often wax indignant about the “atrocities” which followed the fighting. It is said that about 1,200 Highlanders of the Macdonald and Cameron clans lay dead or dying, and (in one author’s words) “what happened next was completely foreign to the rules of war…” Apparently the Duke of Cumberland “ordered his soldiers to spare no one, not even the wounded lying in the fields and woods. Hundreds of the fallen were shot or stabbed where they lay. Some were even buried alive. And so on.

But this is how it has always been in tribal fighting. A 12-year-old girl who was taken captive by the Yanomamo in South America in the 1930s recalled later of one fight she witnessed, “then the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but they caught them, and threw them on the ground, and stuck them with bows which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and rocks. The children’s eyes trembled. They killed so many.”

the social contract

Returning again to our wider moral speculations, it would seem that if this is how bad things were for the last million years or so, then there would seem to be a strong case for strong authority to stop it. And what Freud himself says is close to contract theory in more ways than one. For example, Freud writes that “Man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes the programme of civilization.” In Civilization and Its Discontents he tells us, “I adopt the standpoint that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man . . . (and) constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.”

The fact that instinctual aggression is such a huge impediment must have been recognised quite early on, many thousands of years back. Once this happened, and reasonableness and the values of rationality attained critical mass, then a deal was done. “Human life in common”, he writes, “is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’ (and) this control represents the decisive step of civilization”.

It’s a pretty picture. Reasonable chaps meet other reasonable chaps and agree to behave better. But the raw material of many men and women is not reasonable. It is deeply instinctual, driven by the sort of animal desires which regularly end up in the more sensational newspapers. Sublimation is an unending social process. The work of taming instinctual impulses must be undertaken again and again with every new recruit to the social order. In brief, each individual conscience must be newly built, newly constituted, and newly installed in each individual, year after year, generation after generation, because (in Freud’s words) without this “civilization is perpetually threatened with disintegration”.

Freud employs a vivid metaphor to describe the setting up of conscience as a mechanism of moral control. “Civilization”, he writes, “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”

What has been conquered is the instinctual city of dreadful night, the city of sinful homicidal wishes. What is set up like a garrison in the city is conscience, for without it collective life of a kind embracing millions of people living together could not take place. And that of course is what civilization is: not a family, not a hunting band, not a clan, and certainly not a tribe. It is a wholly new and unprecedented form of collective social life in which hundreds of millions somehow rub along together, largely anonymously.

beyond Freud

We will soon have to go beyond Freud. But let us first agree with Freud in stressing just how extraordinarily important the civilizational blocking of aggressive drives has been. He himself believed that in the evolution of civilization nothing was more psychologically important than the suppression of powerful animal instincts, socially destructive instincts representing a constant “hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle.” And nothing showed how important was the spread of wider and wider forms of peaceful association than that amazing injunction—so totally counterintuitive, so downright bizarre—“love thy enemy”.

But at the same time something else went completely unnoticed by Freud. Who was not, of course, an economist. This being that modern civilization as a whole, is not and cannot be along old-style communal lines. Yes, indeed: we can agree that the suppression of individualistic aggressive drives is necessary for the wider form of human association we call civilization. There Freud got it right. But after this we have to say no. Wider forms of association, the form of human association Hayek called ‘the extended order’ involving hundreds of millions of people, cannot be based on the communal arrangements of older, more primitive social units, simply sustained by the moral rule that it is desirable to “love thy neighbor”.

There Freud got it wrong. This is of course the classical collectivist delusion. In fact, the lines on which peaceful, modern, spontaneously cooperative organization is built are broadly those of the free market—as indeed, from the 1930s on, people like Mises, Hayek, and Michael Polanyi tried patiently to explain—and these spontaneous forms of large-scale social order consist of vast self-regulating systems utterly different in their dynamics from tight little fraternally bonded communes.

So what have we here? A contradiction which splits many minds and many societies quite profoundly. It also produces loads of guilt among those who have deeply internalised the communal injunction “love thy neighbor as thyself”. From that guilt in turn comes a determination to uphold, to idealise, to promulgate as desirable and preach and promote the ancient communal ideal, come what may. But where can we find a living example of this ideal? The answer for many people is that we can now only find it in concrete form, incarnated so to speak, in those small-scale tribal societies that modern civilization has marginalised or actually swept away.

And the very fact that modernity has destroyed them deepens the feeling of guilt, and adds to the determination to overcompensate by honouring their memory, to atone for the sins of modernity by presenting them as worthy and admirable, to seek expiation by rehabilitating them as uniquely sympathetic cultural forms. And in everything we say about them, by morally transfiguring the primitive world so that all traces of violence and war have been tastefully air-brushed away. This, I suspect, is what underlies much romantic primitivism today.

(This essay originated as a talk for Blackheath Philosophy.)

April 2005

Goodbye to All That

2005-04-02T06:25:00.000-08:00

The spirit of '68 still lives on in some quarters of the left.

Too bad -- there are much more effective ways to be an opposition party than by reliving the past.

By Kevin Mattson Web Exclusive: 03.28.05

With conservatism dominant in every branch of government, it is clear that liberals are an opposition party. We have to think, act, and strategize like an opposition party. That means ﬁguring out ways to articulate what we stand for while not alienating those who may disagree with us but can be persuaded to see things our way. That’s a difﬁcult balancing act. Of course, the postwar left has been in opposition before, and that’s a historical fact that can be turned to advantage -- there’s a track record to examine and think through, and a set of political styles and strategies for change to reﬂect upon. Examining this history can mean recycling good ideas and tactics. But what if it means recycling bad ones?
No doubt, some progressives will be drawn to the protest movements of the 1960s to inspire opposition today. There are good reasons for this. The world that existed before the ’60s is one that no one wants to go back to. The decade witnessed enormous victories for African Americans, women, and the poor. The civil-rights movement -- with its pioneering use of nonviolent and grass-roots “direct action” -- prompted these advances. It also gave birth to a new form of politics that championed the energy of ordinary citizens and that carried on within the peace movement’s struggle against the Vietnam War. College students, through the teach-in movement, learned how to connect their learning to political engagement. The decade seemed a golden age of political idealism.
Remembering the ’60s as a time of heroic activism -- when ordinary citizens changed the terms of politics -- suggests we might be able to recycle those protest styles today. Younger activists are doing that as they march on Washington, against the Iraq War or in favor of abortion rights. The left is often identiﬁed, in the press and in popular imagination, as a series of marches. Protest has become an easy way to express dissent. It’s often highly visible and focused in terms of time and resources. When people mass in the streets -- as they were known to during the 1960s -- it appears something is wrong in the country that demands attention. And because protest activists are the most vocal element of the left, they attract the energy of young idealists yearning for a way to express their political disaffection. Take it from someone who’s marched a lot in his life: There’s an emotional appeal to massing with others you share solidarity with.
But there’s also a limit to protest. With its emphasis on criticizing rather than building, it nurtures a narrow conception of opposition. Of course we need to criticize, especially with this administration in power. But for the long term, it’s far more important at this historical moment that we build. The left needs to think about long-term and broader ideas of change. Protest doesn’t help here; it’s too ﬂeeting and spasmodic.
To romanticize protest and the decade of the 1960s cuts us off from rethinking -- with a cold, analytical eye -- the decade’s lessons. The spirit of the ’60s has something to teach us, for sure, but it’s a mixed message, one that lives on in the activist wing of today’s left in troubling ways. We need to search out styles, dispositions, and ideas that can inform our present sense of being an opposition party -- and we need to widen what we choose from. We also need to recognize how the past’s inﬂuence precludes more productive strategies for the present, how what might have worked in a previous context no longer works today. To get a sense of this, we need to travel back to 1968, to a time when the decade’s meaning crystallized, a time that seems far gone at ﬁrst but whose images and memories live on in disturbing ways today. Remembering the past critically allows us to be a more effective opposition in the present.
Protest and Confrontation as Politics Both internationally and in the United States, 1968 remains one of the most evocative years in the history of the left. The spirit lives through images of protesters massing in the streets and Molotov cocktails zinging through the air. Protest and anger aren’t the only tendencies from the time, but they are certainly the most evocative. Mark Kurlansky, in his book 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, explains the allure: “People under twenty-ﬁve do not have much inﬂuence in the world. But it is amazing what they can do if they are ready to march.” Breaking from the limitations of the sidewalk into the streets now conjures a feeling of exhilaration and radical accomplishment.
No occasion in American history symbolizes this more than Chicago’s Democratic convention during the summer of 1968. Memories of Chicago come easy due to its highly charged political theater. Abbie Hoffman’s organization, the Youth International Party (Yippies), planned to protest the Democratic convention with a “Festival of Life” that would nominate a pig picked up from a local farm for president. Protesters were refused permits but insisted on marching, while Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, did all he could to spark a ﬁght. Chicago became a pressure cooker, a leading Yippie calling it “a revolutionary wet dream come true.” When the riots occurred and the police clubs started swinging, protesters chanted, infamously, “The whole world is watching.” Unfortunately for the protesters, America watched, all right -- and cheered for the working-class cops of Chicago, for the “man” sticking it to the longhairs in the streets. Protest, confrontation, and outrage didn’t elicit the intended sympathetic response. Anger killed strategy.
It may be easy to overstate the resonance of such tactics today, but a romanticism about them does exist among those who still believe in street protests. When Rick Perlstein interviewed organizers of the 2004 protests at the Republican convention, he found them championing direct action and confrontation as a tactic. Check out the A31 (August 31) Action Coalition, an organization based in Brooklyn that was angry at New York City’s permitting system that conﬁned protesters to certain areas. A31’s leaders hoped to “transform the streets of NYC into stages of resistance ... .” They called for people to “sit down and refuse to move,” and to ignore the limitations of “protest pens” set up by police. To make the connection to 1968 crystal clear, they posted a recent op-ed by Tom Hayden on their Web site -- no surprise, as Hayden had argued in 1968 that Chicago symbolized a move toward “direct action and organization outside the parliamentary process,” language remarkably similar to that used by A31.
This was not the only organization that recycled protest styles of 1968. There was Dontjustvote.com and the old peace movement organization, The War Resisters’ League (WRL), both celebrating action in the streets, no matter the consequence. A leader of the WRL told Perlstein, “We need to do what we think is right to do, and not so much worry about, ah, ‘Well, what if this? What if that?’ I think we need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do … .” When Perlstein asked if this might alienate the wrong people, the organizers shrugged. These activists seemed in the clutches of 1968, transported back to Chicago and prepared for the worst. Fortunately, this time, the “whole world” wasn’t watching.
It’s remarkable how much these protesters live in another era. Over and over, they use Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to justify their actions. They especially like the following quote (seen on numerous Web sites) from “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail” (1963): “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create … a crisis and establish such creative tension so that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” Plucked out of context, the quote suggests thoughtful political strategy. After all, these activists are appropriating America’s best political thinker on nonviolence and democratic change.
But in plucking the quote, these activists ignore its context. Go to the rest of the document and you ﬁnd much more. King was explaining how a minority, African Americans, could struggle to make a moral appeal to a majority. He believed black Americans had to highlight “the best in the American dream” in order to be heard. And civil-rights protesters had to rule out other options before embracing the challenging ethic of nonviolent direct action. You had to have moral merit on your side -- what Reinhold Niebuhr called a “spiritual discipline against resentment” -- before rushing into the streets.
Today’s protesters ignore King’s reﬂections on his own historical context. Consider that John F. Kennedy was president when King wrote his letter, and that King was one of Kennedy’s most astute critics. King believed in 1960 that candidate Kennedy “had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership” the civil-rights movement had “been waiting for.” Soon, though, King realized Kennedy had “the political skill” but not “the moral passion.” Nonviolent direct action, with its intention of creating conﬂict to expose tension, was precisely the tool to jump-start that moral passion. King saw an opening that the movement could prod, and this got him the legislation he desired: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The year 1963 was its own time, distinct from 1968 and certainly 2004. George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy, and today’s Republican leadership in Congress is a far cry from the Congress of 1963–64. The chance that Bush and congressional Republicans would be prodded into some kind of action by such protests is zero (unless, indeed, protest moves them to act more forcefully in the other direction). The protesters at the Republican convention of 2004 might have imagined themselves as working in the tradition of King. But the context had shifted so drastically that their actions fell on -- quite literally -- deaf ears. It wasn’t even clear what they hoped to accomplish. And when the goals aren’t clear, protest means little more than expressing rage. That’s why it often takes the form of political theater, which too often encapsulates those who make it in their own hermetic world; it replaces explanation of political ideas and policies with in-jokes and references that conﬁrm pre-existing opinions. If you know a pig stands for a white guy with power, you get it; if not, you don’t.
There’s a recent, evocative documentary, The Yes Men, that focuses on two activists inspired by the French Situationists (intellectual forerunners to 1968 France) and the Diggers (politically minded hippies before Hoffman). They pose as representatives of the World Trade Organization and attend business gatherings exhibiting a television monitor that polices workers and pops up like a phallus in a blow-up suit. They get applause in rooms of 30 people, although it’s not clear why. The movie winds up showing these “activists” as all-knowing lefties snickering at their opposition. The climactic scene involves their presentation to a college classroom, where students protest their idea of turning human feces into McDonald’s hamburgers sold to citizens of the Third World.
Unlike political humor that entertains, political theater has a pretense of changing public life. The Yes Men think of themselves as activists, but the tendency to laugh at their opposition rather than engage it betrays their project’s limitation. Asked about the “mind-set of the corporate man” who might resist their jokes, these activists call them “ready to goosestep.” Generally, people are “easy prey for the ideas of the corporate decision-makers.” The Yes Men characterize their opposition as “dumb asses” who wouldn’t “listen anyhow.” “Criticizing those in power with a smile and a middle ﬁnger” is what they intend. Expression trumps strategy.
Expressive Anti-Politics Indeed, guerilla theater and protest as outrage suggest another legacy of 1968: expressive anti-politics. This element of political style draws from pop existentialism and participatory democracy. Once again, it crystallized in Chicago, and speciﬁcally in Tom Hayden. By 1968, Hayden was disenchanted with electoral politics and supported urban riots and Third World guerilla ﬁghters. Chicago ratiﬁed his break from electoral politics, especially when Eugene McCarthy’s supporters spilled out of the convention and into the streets. The left had literally split -- those inside the hotel symbolizing electoral politics (the fogies), and those outside practicing direct democracy in the streets (the youth). Here can be found the essence of expressive anti-politics and its long legacy of liberal powerlessness.
The impulsive nature of direct action -- its immediacy -- is precisely its major appeal for today’s activist left. L.A. Kauffman, an organizer involved with United for Peace and Justice (a leading anti-war organization that formed in the last few years), explains, “Direct actionists devote little if any energy to lobbying or passing legislation; if they interact with the government, it’s almost always by raising a ruckus.” Here’s a curious embrace of protest over power -- the bizarre idea that a presence in the streets can substitute for a presence in the halls of government, or that reacting to government action is morally superior to initiating it. The sentiment is echoed in the ideas of Dontjustvote.com, an organization that was created for protests at the Republican convention of 2004 and a clear inheritor of the spirit of ’68. As its Web site explains, the organization embraces “the power of direct action” and “direct democracy as a viable alternative to representation.” This is the political theory of street action or, put more positively, “participatory democracy.”
The idea’s salience arises from its respectable lineage in American political thought, which stretches back to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. Dewey believed democracy required a home in the local neighborhood where discussion and association took place. When members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered in Michigan in 1962 to write the famous “Port Huron Statement,” they outlined the demands of participatory democracy and invoked Dewey’s ideals. But they also invoked a jargon of authenticity taken from existentialist philosophy. While embracing “a democracy of individual participation,” they hoped to ﬁnd “a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”
But there’s a problem with proclaiming both of those as goals: Authenticity of the self and actually living in a democratic community with other citizens who hold varying opinions are two very different -- if not, in fact, irreconcilable -- demands. In Chicago, the two ideals clashed, and authenticity won out. Protesters pitted themselves against the inauthentic masses -- the police, those who believed in the Vietnam War, the “pigs.” When this occurred, participatory democracy no longer supplemented representative democracy but replaced it; authenticity displaced the challenge of deliberating with other citizens who might disagree. To be authentic meant to give direct expression to desire rather than to work through a longer process of changing representative institutions. It focused on what George Cotkin, the historian of American existentialism, called “catharsis.”
Critics noticed the dangers at the time. As Christopher Lasch wrote soon after the Chicago convention, “The search for personal integrity could lead only to a politics in which ‘authenticity’ was equated with the degree of one’s alienation, the degree of one’s willingness to undertake existential acts of deﬁance.” Bayard Rustin agreed, arguing that the participatory ethic of protest threatened the importance of doing actual politics, which required coalition-building and compromise, and wound up pitting leftists against liberals in a dangerous internecine warfare and mutual alienation. But clear as this might have been to some back then, the idea’s appeal lives on in the activist left’s disposition to political action combined with a lack of realism -- a disposition apparent today when expression trumps effectiveness. Go back and read the statements of Naderites in 2000, or the shriller ones from 2004. You can hear moral fervor trumping political responsibility -- the idea that voting is about expressing conscience rather than inﬂuencing policy. When The Progressive interviewed the few remaining Naderites working in the swing state of Wisconsin in 2004, the publication confronted purist sentiment. Supporters explained that they were “principled” while those supporting the Democrats were “muted.” One went so far as to say, “It’s not important who’s sitting in the White House, it’s who’s sitting in.”
This is the ugly legacy of 1968: the authenticity of conscience pitted against the requirements of a pluralistic and conﬂicted society, the ethic of expression winning out against all other aims, including practicality. “Direct nonviolent action” no longer means what King believed it meant; it now means remaining pure by turning “Your Back on Bush,” as recent protesters did at the inauguration, even if the result wasn’t anything more than making them feel better. Expressive anti-politics is the last refuge of the powerless. Impulsive, it bursts like a ﬂame and then burns out, to be felt only in the heart of the participant while the ruling class, unperturbed, goes on its merry way.
The Right(’s) Lessons from the ’60s Burnout is a constant theme of 1968. We’ve heard the refrain about “tired radicals,” and the one about Yippies turning into yuppies. Even while appreciating the social movements from this time, Paul Berman (who was a part of it all) admits, “The uprisings proved amazingly unproductive in regard to conventional political or economic change.” The historian Alan Brinkley comments, “The new radicals” of 1968 “never developed the organizational or institutional skills necessary for building an enduring movement.”
Meanwhile, of course, an enduring movement was being built during the ’60s -- but it was on the right. Historians of the decade used to focus on left-wing organizations, writing books about sds, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, typically culminating in the tumult of 1968 and thus telling a story of factionalism and decline. Today, however, historians are growing more interested in documenting the right and telling a tale not of decline but of ascendance. James Miller, who wrote a marvelous book about sds, explained to the magazine Lingua Franca a few years back that “in terms of the political history of this country, the New Left just isn’t an important story.” Focusing on the left, he explained with a certain irony about his own historical work, evades “the extraordinary success of the forces that ﬁrst supported [Barry] Goldwater, then [Ronald] Reagan as governor of California, and then [George] Wallace. I can’t help but see that absence in the historiography as integral to the mythologization of the Sixties.” Miller echoes the argument of M. Stanton Evans, a leading conservative intellectual and popular writer, who wrote, “Historians may well record the decade of the 1960s as the era in which conservatism, as a viable political force, ﬁnally came into its own.”
When Evans wrote that line he was discussing an organization that still grabs the attention of young historians today: Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). YAF’s membership was always more stable and often larger than SDS’s, but more importantly, the group created a longer-lasting infrastructure. It engaged young people philosophically, through a ringing endorsement of liberty and individualism; but it also engaged them with well-organized chapters on campuses that cultivated long-lasting skills for activists (Richard Viguerie, for instance, pioneered his direct-mail tactics through YAF). YAF worked with the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists to coordinate lectures of right-wing thinkers and circulate conservative books to students. It linked up with Goldwater and Reagan, supplying an army of young volunteers for their campaigns. Did it engage in protest? Certainly not. During its “heyday in the early ’60s,” Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin point out, YAF members went to “the lectern and the party caucus more than into the streets.”
The networks of YAF were replicated for adults in places like Orange County, California. Here, there were chapters of the John Birch Society that supported local school-board candidates and institutions like the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, where conservatives could fraternize, learn about boycotts of corporations selling products to communist countries, and hear Reagan speak before he even considered a run for governor. There were also barbecues, coffee klatches, and discussion groups that congealed a conservative animosity toward the federal government and liberalism. Churches and right-wing bookstores helped provide “movement centers,” and the infrastructure was especially impressive considering the decentralized, suburban setting.
These networks explain the passion and long-lasting inﬂuence behind Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964. Traditionally, the campaign was seen as a right-wing disaster. Goldwater’s convention speech in favor of “extremism” still sounds scary. But now, more remarkable is the infrastructure that stood behind Goldwater. A strong network of activists worked hard to push the Republican Party toward the right, away from centrists like Nelson Rockefeller. It wasn’t enough to win the presidency in 1964, but that same infrastructure -- YAF, John Birch Society chapters, and general right-wing networks -- helped Reagan become governor of California in 1966. As Isserman and Kazin explain, conservatives “sustained morale and kept expanding their numbers for years after the young radicals had splintered in various directions.”
We can link this scholarship about conservative grass-roots activism to something already well-known: that throughout the 1960s, the right was developing ideas that would come to fruition much later. Leading this initiative was the well-known (now at least) American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Though founded in 1943, it changed form during the 1960s. Its leader, William Baroody, believed it should not just reﬂect the right’s primary “special interest” -- corporations -- but develop bigger ideas. Baroody “understood,” as Sidney Blumenthal explained in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, “that without conservative theory there could be no conservative movement.” Baroody forged alliances with the Goldwater campaign quietly, behind the scenes. He focused on long-term goals so that, when the excesses of the ’60s erupted, there was a place neoconservative intellectuals could go to develop their ideas during the ’70s. The AEI articulated both particular public policies and a broader philosophy of the free market -- something that undergirds conservative political action today. And, of course, it provided a model for other conservative think tanks during the ’70s.
The power of YAF, grass-roots networks, and think tanks like the AEI show that the right focused its energy on infrastructure and ideas during a time when the left focused on protest. The right’s tactics weren’t loud or theatrical. Its activists operated under the radar to lay the groundwork. They worked almost entirely within the system, changing the Republican Party from moderate to conservative precinct by precinct. And their story challenges the left-wing narrative of idealism during the decade. That’s precisely why it should inform the way liberals think about the future. To win real power, liberals need to think about infrastructure, institutions, and ideas. And they’re not going to get these if they look to the late ’60s for inspiration.
The Spirit of 1948: New Ideas in the Old This is especially true for ideas. Who now reads left-wing books from 1968? Just try Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It or Woodstock Nation. Or try Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, a puff piece about the “non-intellective” exploration of “visionary splendor” and “human communion.” Or read the prognostication of “revolution” of “consciousness” in Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Read even the otherwise smart Susan Sontag, who praises the worst elements of Third World revolutions in Styles of Radical Will (she later stood down from many of those positions). All of these books reﬂect a utopian hallucination not dissimilar from the style of protests on the streets of Chicago in 1968.
Younger thinkers today are going further back than the ’60s to rediscover good ideas. It’s been the Cold War liberalism of the ’40s and ’50s that has garnered the most interest. Books like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center or Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History or John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism seem much more interesting than The Making of a Counter Culture. There’s good reason for this, because though we might feel closer to the ’60s chronologically, our own age is much more parallel to the ’40s. Then, as now, liberals faced an international enemy -- Niebuhr’s “children of darkness” -- willing to murder for salvation. Then, as now, liberals confronted conservatives who entertained dangerous ideas of launching preemptive wars abroad while slashing social programs at home. And, if we take the ’48ers up to 1952 and the election of JFK in 1960, then, as now, liberals were often an opposition party.
The ’48ers knew they had to articulate a public philosophy, the way conservatives would later. They sketched out broad principles that transcended liberal interest groups. Those principles grew out of their faith in the American nation as a community of citizens sharing mutual obligations to one another -- the sort that they saw during World War II and that they hoped could live on afterward. The ideas of national greatness and patriotism grounded their political thought. They upheld a public purpose that highlighted the weaknesses of the libertarian right and led them to criticize the “social imbalance” of a society enamored of consumerism and markets, and not America’s civic fabric. Politically, they supported the idea of a “pluralist” government with many voices participating, not just those of business and privilege. They wanted inﬂuence on the inside, not protest from the outside. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger wrote, “Our democratic tradition has been at its best an activist tradition. It has found its fulﬁllment, not in complaint or in escapism, but in responsibility and decision.”
The ’48ers, so far as I know, never marched against American actions abroad. What they did do was construct a framework for a liberal foreign policy, a robust alternative to conservative emphasis on military action and “rolling back” the enemy. The idea of containment was not simply a doctrine of realism but a moral disposition toward the demands of national power. America certainly had a strong role to play abroad, the ’48ers argued, but it had to do so with a sense of “humility.” So, for instance, Niebuhr, drawing upon Christian ethics (not yet the sole property of the right), argued against “preventive war.” Those who articulated such an idea “assume a prescience about the future which no man or nation possesses.” He went on to explain, “We would, I think, have a better chance of success in our struggle against a fanatical foe if we were less sure of our purity and virtue.” Learning this lesson required America to work with others to “reconstruct” poorer economies as much as engage with military power. This was to be a war of ideas as well as guns.
These thinkers didn’t just think; they put ideas into action. They attended international conferences of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, where they argued that America stood for more than a prosperous consumer economy. (Richard Nixon had made this assertion to Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, displaying a gleaming American kitchen to the Soviet leader at an exhibition fair; Galbraith chided Nixon’s equation of democracy with consumer triumph as a “simple-minded and mechanical view of man and his liberties.”) The ’48ers also befriended politicians. Unlike our own age, when politicians hire overpaid consultants with few ideas, during the ’50s, politicians turned to intellectuals. In 1953, Galbraith formed the Finletter Group, which collected papers on topics by scholars and writers, crafted speeches, and found ways to have ideas inform public debate. Most famously, Americans for Democratic Action became an organizational forum where intellectuals and politicians could formulate foreign and domestic policy together. In this and other ways, they found outlets for ideas that could become a source of opposition as well as inspiration.
These strengths shouldn’t allow us to ignore their limitations. These thinkers took things for granted, including their privileged status as white, highly educated men. They sometimes had a hard time accepting the activism of the ’60s, and they were slow to see how their own anti-communism, legitimate though it was, could descend ineluctably into the disaster of Vietnam. Their experience of the staid 1950s, when bureaucratic corporations accustomed themselves to the welfare state, made them take Keynesian policies for granted. In going back to these thinkers, we need not romanticize them. Indeed, one of their central weaknesses, taking the welfare state for granted, should inspire our thinking today.
The Past’s Lessons for the Future This quick tour through postwar history gets us closer to what it means to be an opposition party today. First, we need to question the legacy of protest politics and political theater, which makes activists feel good but alienates and confuses others. We need to build a grass-roots infrastructure, like that developed by the right. We should also start reconstructing liberalism by going deeper into the past, while recognizing the limits any set of ideas from the past naturally have. These are some good ﬁrst steps to take, but obviously they are just the beginning, and mostly about looking backward, not forward.
If we take these lessons seriously, our biggest challenge moving ahead is how to articulate our opposition to the right’s well-developed agenda while simultaneously developing a public philosophy like that of the ’48ers. The need for this became abundantly clear in the last presidential election. John Kerry lost because Americans didn’t understand what he stood for. They understood him as an opposition candidate but not as someone who had “values” that could be articulated and explained. This wasn’t just Kerry’s problem; it is the problem of liberalism generally. The public perceives liberalism negatively, due to the long war the right waged against it from the 1960s onward. Unlike the ’48ers, we cannot assume that our ideas resonate; we need to make them resonate.
To rearticulate liberal ideals while acting in opposition is not as hard as ﬁrst appears. Take Social Security. Clearly, Bush is surprised by the backlash against privatization, as he scrambles around the country garnering support. This appears a dream come true for progressives, but it’s much more. It’s a challenge to articulate not just opposition but a public philosophy that can explain what liberals stand for. We shouldn’t defend a program inherited from the New Deal in a rearguard fashion but should reiterate the idea of a shared national purpose based on collective sacriﬁce.
Nor should we turn this into a demographic issue and bank on the elderly supporting Democrats; that’s interest-group politics, not a long-range public philosophy. We need to explain what Social Security teaches the nation about deeper principles. Why do Americans react against the term “privatize”? Because there is still a sense of shared obligation to one another, and it’s up to liberals to articulate that public philosophy while they oppose the president. We can show how the president’s proposal reﬂects the “social imbalance” the ’48ers perceived, the elevation of the self’s interest above the common good. None of this requires protest. It requires public argument. The time for protest may come, but it will undoubtedly rely on a change of leadership ﬁrst and serious thinking about strategy later.
The same needs to be done on foreign policy. It’s not good enough to protest the Iraq War. Occasionally, Kerry articulated an alternative, albeit muted, to Bush’s foreign policy that embraced the ’48er idea of national humility and a critique of hubris. Today, we need to articulate this liberal foreign policy more forcefully. Its central message should be that American responsibility abroad shouldn’t rely on guns alone or a sense of superior moral virtue. Liberals should argue for nurturing civil society and democratic institutions throughout the world, envisioning an equivalent of the Marshall Plan for the Middle East and elsewhere. Liberals need to emphasize that the war against terrorism is a war of ideas as much as a war of military power and intelligence. Like the ’48ers, liberal intellectuals should deﬁne America abroad as more than just its well-known Hollywood ﬁlms. We need not allow Bush to expropriate the rhetoric of democracy and freedom; we need to reshape these ideas in a more responsible and meaningful manner.
Liberals must also talk about shared sacriﬁce during wartime. This shouldn’t be about getting the military vote, even if that wouldn’t hurt. The tradition of national greatness expects shared sacriﬁce from all members of our society. As JFK quipped, “Ask what you can do for your country.” Only liberals will make it clear that the wealthiest elements of society should provide for the common good, so that we have enough to pay veterans’ beneﬁts and provide other services. None of this will come from protest marches against the war, which to date have accomplished little more -- as unfair as this might seem -- than to permit the partisans of the right to raise questions about the left’s patriotism.
The problem with what I outline here is the lack of places to build articulate ideas and have them inform the thinking of Democratic politicians. Now is certainly the time for progressives to invest in building an infrastructure -- the only alternative to spasmodic protests in the streets. The term “progressive infrastructure” seems to spark interest among some funders today, especially considering how the quickie infrastructure built in 2004 -- notably America Coming Together -- didn’t quite do the trick. It’s time for institutions that can approximate what Americans for Democratic Action did during the Cold War -- provide a space where thinkers and politicians meet -- and build local networks. Of course, this requires that Democratic politicians stop relying so heavily on overpaid consultants, and that wealthier progressives pony up money for institutions without immediate impact.
This leaves open the question of how to relate to the “actually existing” protest left today. The ’48er spirit was recently invoked to call for a purge of the protest wing of the left today. Writing in The New Republic, Peter Beinart suggested that MoveOn should be pushed out of a more responsible left. While I think MoveOn deserves criticism for its paciﬁsm and teaming up with hard-left dinosaurs like ANSWER, it doesn’t merit a purge (purge from what, exactly?). What MoveOn needs is an articulation of the principle of “responsibility” that Schlesinger set out against the spirit of alienated protest. There’s reason for hope on this front. After all, Mother Jones described MoveOn’s young leader, Eli Pariser, as a “scruffy indie-rock fan who not long ago was chanting anti-globalization slogans and confronting riot police at World Bank meetings.” At one anti–International Monetary Fund protest, though, he talked with police and, in his own words, “realized that the scripted confrontation of attacking and antagonizing them wasn’t going to get us anywhere. It changed the way I was thinking, tactically.” This idea of laying groundwork for an infrastructure also came out in MoveOn’s work during the last election; it didn’t succeed, but with a little help from a stronger intellectual infrastructure in the future, it might.
My tempered hope about this comes from a sense of urgency about the Bush administration. Such a sense threatens to degenerate into protest theatrics and expressive anti-politics. Instead of embracing those styles from the past, liberals should take their lessons from the right during the 1960s. Liberals will never be as powerful as the right. That’s not just because the right is richer but because the liberal faith is, by deﬁnition, weaker. Unlike evangelical Christianity, liberalism can never provide absolute zeal or commitment. We can draw some inspiration from the “ﬁghting faith” of the ’48ers’ liberalism, but we also face challenges that they never faced, especially the infrastructure the right has built over the last few decades. With this said, liberals don’t need to be as weak as they are now. We need not recycle protest and alienation from the past. Liberals have been in the opposition before, and they’ve managed to win back political power. But it took care and precision and some serious thinking about strategy. That’s our charge today.
Kevin Mattson teaches American history at Ohio University and is the author, most recently, of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Kevin Mattson, "Goodbye to All That", The American Prospect Online, Mar 28, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good'

2005-03-25T05:39:00.000-08:00

NEW HOLOCAUST BOOK, NEW THEORY

FuehrerBy Jody K. Biehl

in BerlinHitler not only fattened his adoring "Volk" with jobs and low taxes, he also fed his war machine through robbery and murder, says a German historian in a stunning new book. Far from considering Nazism oppressive, most Germans thought of it as warm-hearted, asserts Goetz Aly. The book is generating significant buzz in Germany and it may mark the beginning of a new level of Holocaust discourse.

DER SPIEGEL
Hitler took great care to pamper and coddle his people and they loved him -- and the Nazi regime -- for it.A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also -- in great contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says. Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich." Instead, Hitler continued on the easy path of self deception, spurring the war greedily forward. And the German people -- fat with bounty -- kept quiet about where all the wealth originated, he says. Was it a deplorable weakness of human nature or insatiable German avarice? It's hard to say, but imagine if today's beleaguered government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could offer jobs and higher benefits to the masses. "No one would ask where the money came from and they would directly win the next election," Aly says.

Stadtarchiv Oberhausen
The Nazis helped themselves to Jewish wealth and used it to feed the war machine.Likewise, in the 1940s, soldiers on the front were instructed to ravage conquered lands for raw materials, industrial goods and food for Germans. Aly cites secret Nazi files showing that from 1941-1943 Germans robbed enough food and supplies from the Soviet Union to care for 21 million people. Meanwhile, he insists, Soviet war prisoners were systematically starved. German soldiers were also encouraged to send care packages home to their families to boost the morale of their wives and children. In the first three months of 1943, German soldiers on the Leningrad front sent more than 3 million packages stuffed with artifacts, art, valuables and food home, Aly says. "About 95 percent of the German population benefited financially from the National Socialist system. The Nazis' unprecedented killing machine maintained its momentum by robbing from others. ... Millions of people were killed -- the Jews were gassed, 2 million Soviet war prisoners were starved to death ... so that the German people could maintain their good mood." By contrast, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cajoled his people in 1940, just after France had fallen, to "brace ourselves to our duties" so that in a thousand years, "men will still say, this was their finest hour."How to make a criminal regime thrive
DPA
The Nazi war plunder had a snowball effect. If Hitler stopped it, the Reich would have been bankrupt.Aly's theory is not only fascinating for its brazenness, but also for the ruckus it is causing in Germany, where lately the trend has been to accept that Germans, too, suffered under Hitler and under the Allied bombing raids at the war's end. Aly is now negating much of that suffering, insisting that every single German benefited from Hitler's culture of killing. The Feuilleton, or cultural pages, of German newspapers -- which only recently exploded with coverage of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz -- have teemed with articles about Aly since the book, "Hitler's People's State" came out on March 10. In the left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung, he has even engaged in an open fight with Cambridge economics historian Adam Tooze who has criticized the mathematical methods he used to substantiate his theory. Sales, too, are much better than he or his publisher imagined. "I didn't write the book for the lay person," he says. "It's crammed full of facts and dry historical and economic data and has close to 1,000 footnotes." But if people want to read it, he says he won't complain. It will come out in French this autumn and in English in 2006. The timing for the book's German release, as his publishers well know, couldn't be better. Germany will spend the next six weeks hitting dozens of World War II anniversaries before arriving at memorial celebrations on May 8 and 9 marking 60 years since the war's end. It is also, says Aly, no coincidence that the work comes close to three generations after Hitler's suicide. "The book could have been written 10 years ago, even 20 years ago," he says. All of the documents were there. We just weren't open to them. Personally, I didn't have the questions then." The documents include reams of complex economic, bank and tax records as well as thousands of clippings from regional newspaper archives that Aly spent the past four years scouring. In the book, he uses them to support his theory that half the war was financed by government credit and that close to 70 percent of the rest came from plunder. "I am not trying to turn the history of National Socialism on its head," he insists. "But I think -- despite all the time that has passed -- it is still important to ask the most fundamental questions, namely how all this happened. What were the most important elements that allowed this criminal regime to thrive? So much came out of the German middle class. That is the most troubling aspect of the history."
AP
Jewish slave workers toil at the Dachau concentration camp to benefit the Reich.Such ground has been broken before. In his 1996 bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," controversial Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen -- an American Jew -- dared to point his finger at average Germans and insist they not only knew about the Third Reich atrocities, but in their rabid anti-Semitism were eager co-conspirators. And for decades, historians have spoken of Hitler's popular appeal, his ability to head off unemployment and shore up the nation's shoddy infrastructure. In fact, Germany's famous "Autobahn" (highway) is sometimes called the "Hitler Bahn" because it was built by the Nazis. His Napola and Adolf Hitler schools famously cut through social classes, admitting rich and poor to Nazi indoctrination. Still, until now, economists have struggled to prove that the plunder from abroad really drove the war machine.Perhaps, says Aly, that is partly because German historians weren't ready to look at what he calls "secondary" questions about the structural and financial underpinnings of the Nazi war machine. "Writing about them would have reduced the human scale of the tragedy," he says. Plus, he insists, it is always "much easier to say it was the fault of a small group of elites, the power-crazed SS commanders, or even big businesses" than to point to your own greed. German society has spent decades digesting and "perhaps now we have reached a new level," he says. Were Germans liberated from the Nazis, too?

REUTERS
German President Horst Koehler bows in memory at Auschwitz. Do Germans belong at Holocaust memorial ceremonies?Current politics seems to mirror this sentiment. These days, making use of an agile word and mind flip, Germans have begun to insist that they -- like the rest of Europe -- were also liberated on May 8, 1945. They say it marks the day they and their children were freed from Nazi oppression. Still, in 1945, says Aly, Germans didn't think they were being liberated. "They had to be liberated from themselves," he says. "That's the problem." In truth, Germans have made great strides in accepting their guilt and have even "liberated themselves," enough that it is now politically acceptable for German politicians to participate in World War II anniversaries in other countries. In May, Gerhard Schroeder became the first German chancellor to participate in a D-Day celebration. In January, German President Horst Koehler bowed his head at Auschwitz in memory of the 1.5 million people killed before the Red Army liberated the camp. Another trip is planned to Moscow for May celebrations.Scholarship and even more delicately, German Holocaust sensitivities, too have progressed in recent years. In January, the first post-war German-Jewish comedy, "Alles Auf Zucker" (Bet it all on Zucker) was released and became an immediate box office hit. Before its release, film and television executives had long held that any productions involving Jews and Germans meant poison at the box office. Germans are also starting to talk about their own suffering during the war, particularly during the relentless Allied bombing of German cities such as Dresden. Aly accepts such suffering as truthful, saying talking about it shows that Germans have made advances from the shame-faced decades just after the war when no German academic could look at the war objectively. The question, he says is, "how do you relegate that suffering? We were also victims of our own aggression." The important thing, he says is that German perspectives continue to evolve. He sees his book as an important part of that process. "I think in 10 years, because of this book, our understanding will be very different than it was less say a year ago," he says. "That's because my book contains a large number of short descriptions and sketches, and I am quite certain that the questions I ask will be investigated by my colleagues. That will definitely give us a lot more information. I notice it already in the echo from the book. I am getting letters from families who corroborate what I write. I'm sure more of that will come."
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005All Rights ReservedReproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

Rhyme and reason

2005-03-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

(Filed: 10/03/2005)

A veteran of the vibrant 1960s poetry scene, Camille Paglia argues that critics can no longer read, poets can no longer write, and the unacknowledged legislators of our age are writing advertising jingles for peanuts

Poetry was at a height of prestige in the 1960s. American college students were listening to rock music, but also writing poetry. There were packed readings by poets on campuses and at political demonstrations. In 1966, for example, I attended an anti-war "poetry read-in" staged by visiting poets Galway Kinnell, James Wright and Robert Bly at Harpur College (my alma mater at the State University of New York at Binghamton). Harpur was then a hotbed of anti-academic poetry. During graduate school at Yale University, I attended readings by W H Auden, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and many others. In 1969, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared at the Yale Law School, in an event significantly not sponsored by the English department, where there was open disdain for Beat poetry (one of my primary influences).
At that magic moment, professors specialising in poetry criticism had stratospheric reputations at the major universities. But over the following decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious "theory" - which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to "read" any more - and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students.
My attraction to poetry has always been driven by my love of English, which my family acquired relatively recently. (My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Italy.) While my parents spoke English at home, my early childhood in the small factory town of Endicott in upstate New York was spent among speakers of sometimes mutually unintelligible Italian dialects. Unlike melodious Tuscan or literary Italian, rural Italian from the central and southern provinces is brusque, assertive, and consonant-laden, with guttural accents and dropped final vowels. What fascinated me about English was what I later recognised as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining and often funny, as it is to Shakespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time.
English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in America, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated north-eastern industrial town), I recognised commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M's chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: "I'm an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!" Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly towelled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.
My attentiveness to the American vernacular - through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs, and talk radio (which I listen to around the clock) - has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets laboured, affected and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations. I have no such friendships and am a propagandist for no poet or group of poets.
In my new book, Break, Blow, Burn, I offer line-by-line close readings of 43 poems, from canonical Renaissance verse to Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, which became an anthem for my conflicted generation. In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas are rampant - a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics (people good, government bad) that looks naive next to the incisive writing about politics on today's op-ed pages. To be included in this book, a poem had to be strong enough, as an artefact, to stand up to all the great poems that precede it. One of my aims is to challenge contemporary poets to reassess their assumptions and modus operandi.
In the 1990s, poetry as performance art revived among young people in slams recalling the hipster clubs of the Beat era. As always, the return of oral tradition had folk roots - in this case the incantatory rhyming of African-American urban hip-hop. But it's poetry on the page - a visual construct - that lasts. The eye, too, is involved. The shapeliness and symmetry of the four-line ballad stanza once structured the best lyrics of rhythm and blues, gospel, Country and Western music, and rock'n'roll. But with the immense commercial success of rock music, those folk roots have receded, and popular songwriting has grown weaker and weaker.
My title comes from a poem in this book, John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV": "That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new." Donne is appealing to God to overwhelm him and compel his redemption from sin. My secular but semi-mystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.
The sacred remains latent in poetry, which was born in ancient ritual and cult. Poetry's persistent theme of the sublime - the awesome vastness of the universe - is a religious perspective, even in atheists like Shelley. Despite the cosmic vision of the radical, psychedelic 1960s, the sublime is precisely what poststructuralism, with its blindness to nature, cannot see. Metaphor is based on analogy: art is a revelation of the interconnectedness of the universe. The concentrated attention demanded by poetry is close to meditation.
Commentary on poetry is a kind of divination, resembling the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. Poets speak even when they know their words will be swept away by the wind. In college Greek class, I was amazed by the fragments of Archaic poetry - sometimes just a surviving phrase or line - that vividly conveyed the personalities of their authors, figures like Archilochus, Alcman and Ibycus, about whom little is known. The continuity of Western culture is demonstrated by lyric poetry.
Another of my unfashionable precepts is that I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly "exposed" by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no "death of the author" (that Parisian cliché) in my world view. Authors strive and create against every impediment, including their doubters and detractors. Despite breaks, losses and revivals, artistic tradition has a transhistorical flow that I have elsewhere compared to a mighty river. Poems give birth to other poems. Yet poetry is not just about itself: it does point to something out there, however dimly we can know it. The modernist doctrine of the work's self-reflexiveness once empowered art but has ended by strangling it in gimmickry.
Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object; it is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species. In writing about a poem, I try to listen to it and find a language and tone that mesh with its own idiom. We live in a time increasingly indifferent to literary style, from the slack prose of once august newspapers to pedestrian translations of the Bible. The internet (which I champion and to which I have extensively contributed) has increased verbal fluency but not quality, at least in its rushed, patchy genres of e-mail and blog. Good writing comes from good reading. All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. Technical analysis of a poem is like breaking down a car engine, which has to be reassembled to run again. Theorists childishly smash up their subjects and leave the disjecta membra like litter.
For me, poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle. I sound out poems silently, as others pray. Poetry, which began as song, is music-drama: I value emotional expressiveness, musical phrasings, and choreographic assertion, the speaker's theatrical self-positioning toward other persons or implacable external forces. I am not that concerned with prosody except to compare strict metre (drilled by my Greek and Latin teachers) to the standard songs that jazz musicians transform: I prefer irregularity, syncopation, bending the note.
My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape. Many critics counsel memorising poetry, but that has never been my habit. To commit a poem to memory is to make the act of reading superfluous. But I believe in immersion in and saturation by the poem, so that the next time we meet it, we have the thrill of recognition.
We feel (to quote singer Stevie Nicks) the hauntingly familiar. It's akin to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love.
This is an edited version of the introduction to 'Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems', published by Pantheon Books

For Girls Only

2005-03-11T04:49:00.000-08:00

--all words taken from Dorothy Haskin’s For Girls Only,1956

I. Food Can Be FunIn the midst of the desert He placed: one of the most dated girls
the rich yellow squash, thorny cacti, the fragile
pink blossoms.Susie was pasty-faced, gawky
goes in a vicious circle.
Place both hands on the edge of the table, push back and shake
"I’m naturally fat"
the stout girl excuses. She learned thatfood could be
eggplant, the rich yellow squash, one of
from side to side. Her hands are poems of grace.
made her servant. Flaming red blossoms
He, too, married a charming woman.
II. Your Table of Contents
Study the shape of your face.
a warning against extreme hairstyling
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ You are a temple / the throb of the city.
Girls have to cultivate cleanliness.
she has given her hairstyling a place
Spots, soiled clothing reveal that a girlis not clean.
out of proportion
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ You are a temple / the throb of the city.
And odor offends.
This must be a warning: how a small child
resists being washed!
III. What Will It Cost?
Train yourself: you can look like an autumn leaf.
when he says, "You look so nice." She has learnedthe importance of "being herself."
The Lord must expect
Ugh! Inasmuch as you are a girl, you can look like an autumn leaf.
an ice blue blouse and pink
Even though you are not beautiful, you are well-dressed.
"My, what a pretty dress." Short, dumpy girls. Tall, angular girls.
Florence, who tends to be overweight
The normal girl dresses to please. Train yourselfto think: ice blue blouse, an autumn leaf.
Inasmuch, the Lord must expect, even thoughyou are not beautiful
you are well-dressed.
IV. The Deeper Need
Nancy was shortened to Ann
and she married Adoniram Judson
(That is a good definition. If your spirit is twisted, things which you do to your body are helpful. Makes you a child of God.)
Eunice, Norma, and Valerie
wanted a husband
(She has become a slave to tobacco. The things whichyou do to your body)
and all the dreams
which he symbolized
(makes you a child of God. You, having seen your needof Him: "beauty will radiate." We are all marred in themaking.)
A husband is yours for a lifetime.
Pray for the right one.
(The Christian girl need not have any of them. Chainsher own self, slave to tobacco.)
decided to make it
a duet for life
(That is a good definition. Slave to tobacco, your body)
Time after time,
by girl after girl,
Adoniram Judson,
who painted the world-famous
Head of Christ.
V. To Talk Or Not To Talk
Do you have a smile? Can you cook?
Get your collection in shape
such as making a luscious cake. It is soon playedto death and stale.
The next step: darken your bathroom.
You will hear music _____ from his fingers.
It takes more brains
circulate, percolate. An alertness for news
Tom had a knack
You don’t have to be too intellectual!
china dogs, salt shakers,
Make a hand puppet to use when making announcements. What is
Are you friendly?
What is Communism, anyway?
VI. How Long--Oh How Long?
You will be driven to the Lord.
Men can be perverse! Much to Selma’s friends’ relief, hemarried her. The man was a blur.
Ecstasy and heartache! Sex is a peculiar thing.
The boys sensed something wrong.Men are hold it in your palm.They couldn’t put it in words.
Ask the Lord to show it to you.
Beatrix’s smile grew doleful, and she neverYou’ll get one quicker if you can take ’em or let ’em alone.Camilla never learned.
Our inner beings are seared with loneliness.
Dorcas wasn’t taking any chances.See? You’re not so different.A man’s whole being must be satisfied.
As they are liked, so will you be.
VII. Don’t Walk--Run
The wiener roast will bring out whatever is in him.
VIII. The Thrill
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ in a form-fitting dress, in a hazy light
It is because it is all you have to offer.
She missed the good, clean fun
the singer warbles
lays in his heart
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ your walk, the way you looked at him, the flare to your dress.
Sex, like water and fire
died before they could. Food doesn’t interest a man who has eaten.
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ (the cheaper she is)
like an undigested lump.
"until I lost the power to say no."
The more she is handled,
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ dresses which fit like onion skin over the hips
If anyone tells an off-color joke,
Maybe her life will be ruined!
displayed at the dime store, picked up by anyone.
What does it matter? The path to the altar
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ (Cheap jewelry, a deadpan face)
of having it ruined by him!
IX. Tom, Dick or Harold
His selection of lamps made her sad.
1. Where did he come from?
topped with a trip to Europe, Ruth only laughed
Rhoda did.
Love is more than a burning
2. Where is he now?
her tendency toward the modernistic. His selection of lamps made her sad.
If he yaks
Tom, Dick, or Harold, duties of amother.
until after the honeymoon.
3. Where is he going?
repetitious to the point of irritation
blandly entered into marriage.
The one whose jokes you will hear
His selection of lamps made her sad.
His selection of lamps made her sad.
X. Drawbacks
Sheallowedthe LordtouseMarshallfully,timeaftertime.
The patternrepeatsitself.
She is the morepliableofthetwo.
XI. But Satisfied
The Lord needs women.
In contrast, Sybil was beautiful!
as if you were gutted within by a fire.
But the girl who is single
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
"I became my best self and attracted to Tom."
For me to see a baby throb
He will prey on your mind.
mediocre. Sybil was beautiful!
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
She begins to do the sort of things which please him.
limit the Holy One.
her physical best for the Lord.
It needs to be looked at squarely. Sybil
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
invited her places and gave her their love.
The Lord woos us, the Lord needs women.
In contrast, Sybil was beautiful!
Then, there was the
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
crumbled in her hand like charred paper.
She joined a week-end walking club.
--Laura Sims

The Impermanent Revolution

2005-02-28T04:39:00.000-08:00

by RONALD ARONSON

The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921by Isaac Deutscher
The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929by Isaac Deutscher
The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940by Isaac Deutscher

[from the March 14, 2005 issue]

Isaac Deutscher stands out among the early intellectual mentors of the New Left as the only one who expounded classical Marxism. On a mid-1960s "must read" authors list that included C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Deutscher alone stressed class conflict, the progressive movement of history and proletarian revolution. For those of us who were anti-Stalinist Marxists, reading Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy was a rite of passage. It was simultaneously a sympathetic, critical and reflective biography of Trotsky and a full-blown history of the Russian Revolution. In his Trotsky trilogy and other books and articles on Stalin, the contemporary Soviet Union and China, the cold war, Marxism, ex- Communists and Jewish history, Deutscher offered a living Marxism that was both unashamed of its revolutionary commitment and able to grasp historic ironies and tragedies.
Many of us who read Trotsky in study groups trying to puzzle through the "what might have beens" in the Bolshevik Revolution and Communism became practiced at arguing every major turn of Soviet history as we struggled to discover what went wrong. Paradoxically, the tragic story of Trotsky's rise and fall gave us a profound sense of hope, even as Deutscher showed at every turn the historical logic behind Stalin's victory and Trotsky's defeat. After all, Deutscher argued passionately that the logic of history would also demand the fulfillment of socialism's vision of equality, democracy and workers' power in an advanced industrial society freed from class rule and the market. Trotsky embodied the "good" Communism, destroyed by Stalin, that became a revolutionary inspiration for many in the New Left.
It is impossible to read Deutscher's Trotsky biography today without being struck by how remote these hopes now seem. The Soviet Union is gone, and revolutionary projects aiming at human emancipation seem to have exhausted themselves. In a world reconfigured by Islamist terrorism and the "war on terror," dreams of social justice are no longer propelled by mass social movements of the secular left. So how does one read Deutscher, for whom being a Marxist historian and political mentor were one and the same?
Deutscher was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Galicia, Poland, in 1907. A brilliant student of Torah and Talmud, he had already ceased to be a believer by the time of his bar mitzvah. He was soon publishing Polish and Yiddish poetry and translating poetry into Polish. At university in Krakow and then Warsaw, Deutscher studied literature, philosophy, history and economics, and became a Marxist. After joining the banned Polish Communist Party he soon became chief editor of its press. "For years," he wrote, "I was busy editing literary journals, writing political commentaries, illegal manifestoes, conducting as a soldier underground propaganda in Pilsudski's army, and all the time dodging the gendarmerie and the political police."
He traveled in 1931 to the Soviet Union, where he declined a position teaching socialist history and Marxist theory at Moscow University. Organizing an anti-Stalinist opposition upon his return to Poland, Deutscher was expelled from the party. In 1938 he wrote the Polish Trotskyists' statement urging their comrades not to initiate the Fourth International prematurely, which led to his break with organized Trotskyism. A journalist in London at the outbreak of World War II, he immersed himself in English in order to write for British publications, notably The Economist. His first book, Stalin: A Political Biography, appeared in 1949, and his Trotsky trilogy was published between 1954 and 1963. Irving Howe criticized its Marxism, while the British Trotskyist Tony Cliff accused him of "capitulation to Stalinism." Deutscher spoke at one of the first great anti-Vietnam War teach-ins, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. At the height of his powers and renown, Isaac Deutscher died suddenly at 60 in 1967.
Numerous English-language biographies of Trotsky have been published since the 1960s, most recently Cliff's four- volume work, which seeks to recapture Trotsky for the Trotskyists, and Ian Thatcher's more scholarly account, which aims to correct Deutscher's and others' biases by incorporating four decades of research. But none of these biographers rivals Deutscher as a storyteller. Alas, the new publisher of Deutscher's greatest achievement appears to have brought it out with some ambivalence, reprinting it without so much as an introduction to help the reader locate Deutscher's trilogy today. The photographs are omitted from all but the third volume, Deutscher's extensive, indispensable indexes have been replaced with a handful of name references, and the books are littered with dozens of typos. So we encounter the new version stripped down and unsituated, in a cheapened format that does little honor to publisher or author.
To read Deutscher's trilogy today is to undertake one of those several-month journeys that we begin with pleasure, and then continue joyfully and even obsessively until we reach its gripping end. Its protagonist, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was born in southern Ukraine in 1879 to an illiterate but enterprising Jewish farmer and his more cultured and religious wife. Raised in a world of hard work and upward striving, the boy was sent to a cosmopolitan school in Odessa, where he lived with literary-minded cousins who belonged to that city's small and timid liberal intelligentsia. Eagerly absorbing their culture, the country cousin excelled in school, displaying the competitiveness and sense of superiority that would mark the man.
Sent in 1896 to Nikolayev to complete his secondary schooling and study mathematics at the university, Bronstein first encountered socialist ideas and soon became enamored of the fading Narodnik socialism that romanticized the peasantry and endorsed acts of terrorism by intellectuals. Joining old and young radicals in a discussion group meeting at an orchard near town, he met his first serious intellectual interlocutor and future wife, a young Marxist named Alexandra Sokolovskaya. Within a year, Russian students and workers were in rebellion and the 18-year-old had converted to Marxism, confidently assuming the leadership of the Southern Russian Workers' Union. The group of old Narodniks, Marxists, students and workers grew to more than 200 members and feverishly engaged in agitation in the port city until the czarist police crushed them. Imprisoned for the next two and a half years, Bronstein was then carted off to Siberia along with his bride.
The precocious revolutionary had also discovered the power of the written word. Prison and exile now became his university, and he began to shape himself into one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century--reading the Bible and religious tracts, studying Marx and Lenin, and writing self-assured essays on Nietzsche, Zola, Ibsen, Ruskin and Gorky. Like Deutscher, Bronstein believed that "revolutionary socialism was the consummation, not the repudiation, of great cultural traditions" in which he made himself at home. Leaving his wife and two daughters behind in Siberia and traveling under the name of a jailer, "Trotsky" found his way to the exile colonies of London. There he joined Lenin, his wife, Krupskaya, and Martov in the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. Addressing audiences of fellow exiles, he discovered a new gift, as a master of the spoken word. Deutscher writes:
He appeared, as it were, with the drama in himself, with the sense of entering a conflict in which the forces and actors engaged were more than life-size, the battles Homeric, and the climaxes worthy of demi-gods. Elevated above the crowd and feeling a multitude of eyes centered on him, himself storming a multitude of hearts and minds below--he was in his element.
In unabashedly grand prose Deutscher captures the people, movements and events that resulted in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. At their center was the Russian working class, "one of history's wonders":
Small in numbers, young, inexperienced, uneducated, it was rich in political passion, generosity, idealism, and rare heroic qualities. It had the gift of dreaming great dreams about the future and for dying a stoic death in battle. With its semi-illiterate thoughts it embraced the idea of the republic of the philosophers, not its Platonic version in which an oligarchy of pundits rules the herd, but the idea of a republic wealthy and wise enough to make of every citizen a philosopher and a worker. From the depth of its misery, the Russian working class set out to build that republic.
Twelve years after the rehearsal of 1905, in which Trotsky chaired the St. Petersburg Soviet, czarism collapsed. After a spring and summer of upheaval the workers and Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, were ready to seize power in what soon became known as the October Revolution. Trotsky served as the revolutionary government's first foreign minister and then, as the civil war began, he created and led the Red Army. After four years of battle the Bolsheviks vanquished their White Russian enemies, but the country lay in ruins, and, as Deutscher notes, another side of the working class had begun to assert itself, "side by side with the dreamer and the hero...the lazy, cursing, squalid slave, bearing the stigmata of his past." Mired in backwardness, the revolution's ostensible constituency sank into the passivity that made it possible, by Lenin's death in 1924, for the "batlike" Stalin, the Communist Party secretary, to slowly gain control. Despite Lenin's warnings to remove him, it was already too late by Lenin's death: The great revolutionaries of the Politburo--Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin--ultimately supported the unassuming Stalin over the brilliant and voluble Trotsky. (Remarkably enough, during the crucial months of struggle with Stalin, he drafted one of the major works of Marxist literary criticism, Literature and Revolution.) Although sidelined by Stalin, he continued to publish essays on every conceivable topic, from culture to science to Soviet development to foreign affairs. In 1928, however, the great revolutionary hero was sent into internal exile. A year later he was expelled from Russia and forced to wander the world.
In exile, Trotsky struggled to organize a Communist opposition to Stalin, to comment on world events such as the rise of fascism, to defend himself against Stalin's ever more bizarre accusations and to explain developments in the Soviet Union. As his name and stature grew in defeat he became a magnet for radicals, some serious, others dilettantes, notably Max Eastman, the editors of Partisan Review, Victor Serge, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (with whom he famously had an affair). And Trotsky continued to write, under near impossible conditions, producing the memoir My Life, the great History of the Russian Revolution, prescient essays on the rise of fascism and the classic indictment of Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed. As ever, these writings displayed an immense range, self-confident sweep, appreciation of detail, descriptive flair and interpretive power; in the most pathetic and humiliating circumstances Trotsky continued to think and act as if he was shaping history. He reached deeply into himself again and again for the courage to lead, write and analyze, although he was constantly preoccupied with finding a place to live and protecting his family, which was not spared Stalin's wrath. Harassed and hunted down, his children were murdered by Soviet agents or died prematurely, while his daughters' spouses ended up in concentration camps and their children vanished.
This is a spellbinding tale, told by a great storyteller, and each reader will have a saddest moment. Mine is in 1935: In a cottage in a remote French village, Trotsky and his second wife, Sedova, hear two men pass by singing the Internationale. Although drawn to the song by a powerful compulsion, they have to stay hidden because these proud Communists might discover who they are and denounce them to the party, causing their death or deportation.
Still, Trotsky never gave up on Communism, refusing to side with bourgeois governments against the state led by Stalin, his sworn enemy, even as the purges targeted anyone suspected of Trotskyist sympathies. (One of the most interesting and curious documents of this period is Their Morals and Ours, an exchange about violence and political morality with John Dewey, who had taken it upon himself to investigate, and eventually reject, the accusations made against Trotsky at the Moscow trials of the late 1930s.) Trotsky's refusal to declare that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state ultimately drove away many of his intellectual fellow travelers, including Eastman and Serge.
Deutscher keeps the reader on tenterhooks as the story reaches its horrifying conclusion in 1940. Stalin had long since become absolute ruler, most Old Bolsheviks were dead, millions were in labor camps and primitive Russia had been brutally dragged into the modern world. Refusing "to let his existence become cramped by fear and misanthropy," the exiled onetime leader of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik insurrection, the Soviet Union's first foreign minister and first commander of the Red Army, sits down at his desk in a Mexico City suburb to read an amateurish article by a shadowy character who, posing as his bumbling follower, had wormed his way into Trotsky's household. After reading one page, "a terrific blow came down upon his head" from an ice pick. "His skull smashed, his face gored, Trotsky jumped up, hurled at the murderer whatever object was at hand, books, inkpots, even the dictaphone, and then threw himself at him. It had all taken only three or four minutes."
The word "tragedy" comes to mind again and again in reading Deutscher's Trotsky biography, not only because Trotsky's death was part of the enormous human catastrophe that was Stalinism but also because he helped call up and contribute to the very force that destroyed him and his followers. And, as in classical tragedy, Trotsky's strengths are inseparable from his weaknesses. Our appreciation of the trilogy as literature thus entails a political and historical understanding of where the man, and the Bolshevik Revolution, went wrong.
Deutscher notes Trotsky's puzzling unwillingness to combat Stalin until it was too late, attributing it to a sense of superiority that kept Trotsky from taking the party secretary seriously as an antagonist. But there are deeper reasons for Stalin's victory over Trotsky. Much earlier, during the famous Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903, Trotsky had denounced Lenin's notion of a vanguard party as "substitutism" and had accused him of "trying to force the pace of history." Indeed, he only reconciled with Lenin and decided to join the Bolsheviks in July 1917, three months before the Revolution. During the crucial next few years Trotsky's high position derived from his élan for analysis, public persuasion and organization under crisis, Stalin's from his capacity to create a network of loyalists and install them in positions of privilege and power. The party man easily outmaneuvered the brilliant revolutionary.
Trotsky's reliance on his powerful mind and his relative disinterest in creating personal relationships and networks take us deeper into the heart of the matter, namely that Trotsky's Marxism was of little use in negotiating the new situation created by the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin sought power; Trotsky did not. In the void of backward Russia in which the Bolsheviks ruled in the name of the workers but stood above all social classes, the "base" of workers so trusted by Trotsky mattered less than the "superstructure" of increasingly self-interested party officials appointed by Stalin. The reality that sealed Trotsky's and the Soviet Union's fate was not Marxist at all.
An effort to understand where the October Revolution went wrong leads us to the illusion that made it possible. Deutscher observes that Lenin and Trotsky fervently hoped that Bolshevik success in Russia would set off revolutions throughout Europe, and that they could not have acted to seize power without their "world- embracing hope to embrace a world-shaking deed." But what was the origin of this belief at the heart of Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution"? "History produced the great illusion and implanted it and cultivated it in the brains of the most soberly realistic leaders when she needed the motive power of illusion to further her own work." She? Needed? Her work? In a strange Hegelian twist Deutscher makes history with a capital "H" the active force, rather than Lenin or Trotsky or the Russian workers--as if these people were merely its vessels, as if History's hidden rationality could be discerned in Bolshevik irrationality.
Like that theoretical cornerstone of Bolshevism, Lenin's vanguard party, Trotsky's "permanent revolution" was an effort by revolutionaries to solve the deep contradiction between the dreamer and the slave--between the limits imposed by their Marxism, on the one hand, and their intoxicating grasp of the possibilities of seizing power, on the other. Although Russia was not remotely ripe for socialism, a determined group of revolutionaries sensed how vulnerable it was to a radical shift of power. They knew that no social class but the proletariat, led by them, was able to act decisively. But, as Deutscher also reminds us, Engels had warned that a leader coming to power before the time is "ripe for the domination of the class which he represents" is "irrevocably lost." The Bolshevik leaders accordingly pinned their hopes on socialist revolutions in one or more advanced countries, especially Germany. (As it turned out, Communism's abbreviated future lay, for the most part, in the least advanced countries of the colonial world.)
Making a proletarian revolution in Russia thus turned on clearheaded analysis of real possibilities--and wishful thinking. What, after all, were the grounds for thinking that the Russian Revolution would trigger a European revolution that would support the Soviet Union and transform the world? Hadn't French and German workers marched off to war proudly and spent four years killing one another at the behest of their rulers? Perhaps some of the survivors might be radicalized by the war, but Russia could hardly count on them. Deutscher leads us to, but does not draw, the obvious conclusion: The Bolshevik Revolution was a leap into the blue, a radical act of will. Its tragedy was not produced by "History" but by revolutionary zeal that flew in the face of sober Marxist analysis--that of Martov and the Mensheviks, for example. Recasting Marxism into the Bolshevism of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky abandoned Marxism's insistence on democracy and a high level of economic development and implicitly acknowledged this by dropping "Democratic" from their name and becoming the Communist Party. Martov, who refused to follow suit, was cast into Trotsky's "dustbin of history."
The leader of the revolution, creator of the army that defended it, soon came face to face with its result: the suffering, demoralization and even opposition of many of those workers who had been its backbone. The gifted but often abstract theorist now proposed a forced-labor system; the fiery workers' leader now demanded state control of trade unions. For the moment, both of these ideas were defeated. And then, in March 1921, with the civil war nearly won and the ruling party congress meeting in Petrograd, the radical sailors of nearby Kronstadt, once his greatest admirers, rose up against "Trotsky the hangman," calling for the Bolsheviks' overthrow and the fulfillment of the shelved promises of Soviet democracy. Commissar of War Trotsky ordered the murderous assault that, however necessary to protect Bolshevik power, effectively extinguished the revolution's dreams.
Writing a generation after these choices were made, Deutscher focused above all on the situation they created. To a point, his Marxism allowed him to produce forceful explanations of the revolution's fate--by 1921 the working class was exhausted, the cities depopulated and the economy destroyed by the civil war; rural Russia was backward and indeed "barbarous," and the new country found itself surrounded by hostile powers. But behind this litany of conditions in which the all-powerful Soviet state was constructed and Stalinism emerged, Deutscher discerned, once again, the logic of History: Russian modernization could be led only by a crude creature rising from its primitive depths, not by a sophisticated, cultured, Europeanized Jew.
Irving Howe argued thirty years ago that "Deutscher suffered from a modern disease: the infatuation with history." It is if anything even more obvious today that this was an occupational disease--Marxists usually focus on objective factors in such a way as to hide their own point of view, illusions and all. As if by some law of compensatory repression and displacement, the more Bolshevism came to depend on human will, the more fixated its analyses became on the "objective situation."
To be sure, such an approach can be coherent and persuasive, since almost everything can be explained by this logic: Stalin's role in the Communist Party, his ascent to power, his need to sideline first Trotsky, then Zinoviev and Kamenev, then Bukharin, then his decision to expel Trotsky and the opposition, to exile all of them, and so on, right up to the purges and murders. And it is this very objectivism that gave Trotsky's writings in exile such force, especially his powerful understanding of how Russian backwardness fostered Stalinism. Yet why did he proclaim to the end that the Soviet Union remained a workers' state and that only the leadership needed changing? Obviously this belief, and Deutscher's similar sense of the tragic necessity of Stalinism, directly fed each man's optimism about the future. Even as Deutscher explored, in more than 1,200 pages, what went wrong with the Soviet Union, he presented a considered sense of future Soviet possibilities based on the Bolshevik Revolution's and, more controversially, Stalin's accomplishments. Despite the brutality and human hecatombs, not only did a modern industrial society emerge but, Deutscher suggested, this was the only way it could have emerged in Russia. Building on its significant socialist accomplishments, including a nationalized and planned economy, Deutscher believed, the Russian working class in whose name the Communist Party ruled would eventually claim its rights, democratizing the Soviet Union and transforming it into a genuine socialist society.
Since Deutscher died in 1967, before the full scope of the post-Khrushchev sclerosis was evident, he did not live to see the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia or of Solidarity in Poland, let alone the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. In predicting that the post-Stalin Soviet Union would find its way to a more democratic form of socialism, Deutscher's sense of the dialectic of history was stunningly wrong.
Yet despite this bedrock optimism, Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy helps us grasp why in 1991 the people of the Soviet Union lacked the will and desire to create a democratic socialist alternative to Communism. The basso ostinato in Deutscher's trilogy is that the one-party state--the fundamental constitutional principle emerging from the Bolshevik Revolution, installed by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin--is a "contradiction in terms." Deutscher shows both the "objective" necessity and the nightmarish consequences of the Communist monopoly of power. He traces its logic in The Prophet Armed, and then in The Prophet Unarmed he returns often to two themes: why the triumphant Bolsheviks, Trotsky among them, "now thought themselves unable" to relinquish their monopoly of power, and how they began to fulfill Trotsky's dire 1903 prophecy: "The party organization [the caucus] at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single "dictator" substitutes himself for the Central Committee."
Deutscher concludes the trilogy with the hope, long shared by many on the left, that "a Marxism cleansed of barbarous accretions" would soon encourage "struggle against bureaucratic privilege, the inertia of Stalinism, and the dead-weight of monolithic dogma." But he failed to see that the "traditions of Marxism and of the October Revolution" had become inseparable from single-party rule. In the minds of its citizens, this had become the decisive--and detestable--feature of Soviet socialism. It has always been tempting, in the 1930s, in the 1960s and again today, to look for the original sin of the Bolshevik Revolution. But what if it was the revolution itself? Not its radicalism and not its use of violence but rather the vanguard party's determination to assume power over a backward society in the first place, and in the single-party state that followed?
Despite so much about it that seems to belong to the past--Trotsky's and Deutscher's belief in history, their faith in the revolutionary role of the working class, their Leninism--Deutscher's Trotsky biography is not yet ready to join Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War as a classic. Read it and see: It is too alive, too close to us, too much about our world. Trotsky and Deutscher's universe is essentially the same as ours, minus one decisive feature: their movement and its incarnation in the Soviet Union. The twenty-first-century world is still driven by the capitalist system's revolutionary dynamism; its main problem is the absence of any significant counterweight. While there is resistance to "globalization" and American hegemony today, it no longer comes principally from the socialist left but--violently, hellishly and uncomprehendingly--from radical Islamists and other fanatics fired by dreams of an imaginary past rather than visions of an egalitarian future.
What, then, do we make of Trotsky's hopes, Deutscher's hopes? It turns out that hope based on illusion is no more than a false hope, and has led, time and again, to disaster. But that is the easy lesson. The more difficult one is that sometimes it takes a lifetime, even generations, to dispel the power of illusion. Earlier generations of the left fell under its spell; gone today is our faith in history, gone today is the belief that radical acts of will can transform the world without degenerating into brutality. Perhaps the illusion that we have most recently abandoned is, as the late Nation writer Daniel Singer (himself a Deutscher protégé) said, the kind of thinking that misses "the connection between ends and means." To put it crudely, but in a way that indicts Trotsky and some of the wilder spirits of the New Left no less than Stalin, we have learned that force cannot create a humane society. It is a lesson that the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War and their liberal hawk fellow travelers have yet to absorb.

The Great Foreigner

2005-02-22T17:21:00.000-08:00

by Niccolò Tucci

Issue of 1947-11-22Posted 2005-02-21

This week in the magazine and here online, Jim Holt writes about the intriguing friendship between Albert Einstein and the logician Kurt Gödel. In this piece from 1947, Niccolò Tucci describes an afternoon visit with Albert Einstein in Princeton, New Jersey.
There is such a thing as being a foreigner, but not in the sense implied by passports. Foreigners exist, to be sure, but they may be found only in places where it would be impossible to discover a single policeman or a single immigration official—in the field of the intellect. A man who achieves anything great in any province of the mind is, inevitably, a foreigner, and cannot admit others to his province. If you are one of his own people, you will, of course, find him, because you yourself are there, but if you are not, your knowledge of him will be mostly confined to the petty intelligence of the gossip columns. Now, we all know from experience what it means, in this sense, to be refused entry, even as a temporary visitor, into this or that foreigner’s domain. We meet a great man and cannot talk to him, because, alas, we happen not to be able to get interested in the thing in which he excels. Silly though it seems, this is humiliating, for it makes us aware of our limitations. Yet that feeling is soon forgotten. There are people today, however, whose foreignness can’t be forgotten, and these are the physicists, who have done things to us that keep us wondering, to say the least. They have lessened—in fact, almost destroyed—our hopes of a quiet and happy future. It is true that they have also increased our hopes of surviving discomfort and disease, but, oh, how far away that seems, and how near seems the possibility of extermination! That is why, when my mother-in-law, who flew over from Europe a couple of weeks ago, said that she wanted me to accompany her on a visit to the home of her friend Albert Einstein, in Princeton, I was very reluctant to go.
I had seen Einstein several times in the past eight or nine years, and on the last occasion—in 1942, I believe—I had been bold enough to invite him to come out of his inaccessible territory and into that of all the unscientific people, like myself. Would he, I asked, explain, in words rather than in mathematical symbols, what he and his colleagues actually meant by the fourth dimension? And he did, so simply and so clearly that I left his house with an uncontrollable feeling of pride. Here, I, the living negation of anything even slightly numerical, had been able to understand what Einstein had said—had really said, for he had said it not only in his conversation with me but years before in his theories. Obviously, he had explained to me merely what a child would be able to grasp, but it impressed me as much more because my schoolteachers and my father, all of them less great than Einstein, had never forgone a chance to make me feel a perfect fool (and to tell me, lest I should have missed drawing the inference), even when they spoke to me about fractions or equations of the first degree. I consequently realized that Einstein belonged to the extremely rare type of foreigner who can come out of his seclusion and meet aliens on alien ground. Yet, much as I cherished the recollection of that pleasant experience, I did not think it altogether advisable to try my luck again. “This time,” I said to my mother-in-law, who is called Bice in the family, “he may easily make me feel like a fool. Besides, in 1942 Einstein’s achievements did not keep me awake at night, as they do now. If I saw him now, I would not be moved by the slightest scientific curiosity about his work. I would much rather ask him what he thinks of the responsibility of modern scientists, and so forth. It might be quite unfair to him and unpleasant for me.”
Well, mothers-in-law must have secret ways of persuasion, because a few days later I gave in, not only on seeing Einstein but also on taking along Bimba, my six-year-old daughter. “All right,” I said resignedly, “but you, Bimba, will be sorry for this. You don’t know who Einstein is. He has all the numbers; they belong to him. He will ask you how old you are.” And I must say here that Bimba, even more than myself, is the mathematical scandal of our family. She tries to count her six years on her fingers, but she forgets how high she has counted and must try again. Upon a guarantee from me that Einstein would not interview her on that delicate subject, we made peace and departed. On our way out of the apartment, we met my eight-year-old son, Vieri, who was playing ball on the sidewalk.
“Vieri,” I said, “want to come and see Einstein?”
“Einstein the great mathematician?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Naw,” he said. “I have enough arithmetic in school.”
On the train that morning, my mother-in-law and I talked a great deal about Maja, Einstein’s younger sister, one of two links Bice has with higher mathematics. But I must say that she is a weak link, because Maja is the opposite of all abstraction. She looks exactly like her brother (one would almost say that she, too, needs a haircut), but she is a Tuscan peasant, like the people who work in the fields near her small estate of Colonnata, just outside Florence. Even her frame of mind is, in spite of her cosmopolitan culture, Tuscan. Whatever in conversation does not make sense to her in plain, human terms she will quickly dismiss with a witty remark. But before becoming a Tuscan peasant, Maja was a brilliant young German student of philosophy in Paris. She interrupted her studies to take a job as governess in charge of young Bice, whose mother had just died, leaving her the only female of the family, surrounded by a number of older brothers and her father. All this happened forty years ago. Soon after her arrival in the family, Maja became Bice’s second mother and dearest friend. Even after Maja resumed her studies and got married, they remained very close, and did not lose touch with each other until shortly before the outbreak of the recent war, when Maja left Italy to join her brother in Princeton. And today Bice, accompanied by a somewhat impatient son-in-law and by a pestiferous young angel of a granddaughter, was rushing to Princeton for the great reunion.
On the way, we also talked pleasantly about America (like all Europeans who come here for the first time, Bice was eager to know about everything in the first week), we discussed the fate of the world and the wisdom of those who run it, we quarrelled over theology (Bice is fond of theologies, with a marked preference for her own, the Roman Catholic), and finally I noticed that she wasn’t listening to me any more. She frowned, she shook her head, then she smiled and nodded, staring in front of her, but not at me and not at Bimba. I knew that she was making an inventory of her sentimental luggage. All the news of the troubled years, from the death of her eldest son in the war to the latest item of family gossip, from the bombings of towns to the latest method of making a pound of sugar last a year, were being called to mind, so that everything would surely be ready for Maja. I made a sign to Bimba not to interrupt her grandmother, and Bimba sat there and stared, somewhat frightened by this woman who was looking so intently at her own life.
When we arrived in Princeton, it was quite misty, and there was a threat of rain in the Indian summer air. At the station, we took a cab and soon learned that the driver, a young student, was the son of a friend of ours in Florence. He was trying to make enough money driving a cab to finance a trip to South America. Our conversation with him was so interesting that only the sight of open country around us made us realize that we had driven all the way out of town. We drove back and stopped in front of a house on Mercer Street. I had forgotten the exact address, but this house looked like the right one. In her eagerness, Bice ran ahead of me toward the door, but the reunion could not take place, because, as we discovered when we rang the bell, it was the wrong house. Luckily for us, the cab was still there, so we drove along a little, and finally, after ringing the bells of two other families that refused, not without sorrow, to be the Einsteins, we decided upon one more house, which happened to be the right one. Miss Dukas, Einstein’s secretary, greeted us at the door; then came Margot, his delicate and silent stepdaughter, who looks so much like a Flemish painting; and Chico, the dog, who tried to snatch Bimba’s red ribbons from her pigtails.
“Bimba,” I said, “don’t get the dog excited. Remember how he ate your doll five years ago. Now, if you are not very quiet today, I am going to ask you in front of Einstein how much makes three and two—understand?”
She nodded, and whispered, “Four?”
We were asked to wait for a moment in the small anteroom that leads to the dining room. Maja was upstairs; she was being helped out of bed and into the chair in which she spends most of her day. She is recovering from a long illness, which has delayed her return to Italy, so it was only natural that this reunion should be delayed until she was ready and comfortable. And yet this addition of even a few minutes to years of separation created an effect of absurdity. One always imagines that the crossing of the last span of a trip bridging years will be something impulsive: when all the real impediments, such as continents, oceans, and passports, have been overcome, friends should run into each other’s arms as fast as they can. Still, it is never quite that way. We become so used to living at a distance that we slowly begin to live with it, too; we lean on it, we share it, in equal parts, with our faraway friends, and when it’s gone and we are again there, corporeally present, we feel lost, as if a faithful servant had abandoned us.
To fill in those extra minutes, we began to look at the furniture in the anteroom and dining room, and I noticed again what I had noticed five years ago in those same rooms: everything suggested the house of a faculty member of a German university. I could not trace this impression to any particular object. The large dining-room table in the center, with the white tablecloth on it, was not particularly German, nor was the furniture in the anteroom, but there was the same quiet atmosphere of culture that had impressed me so deeply in the houses of university professors, in Freiburg, Leipzig, and Berlin, to which my parents had taken me when I was a boy and spent my summers travelling over Europe. It is something that remains suspended in the air almost as stubbornly as the smell of tobacco; one might say that the furniture had been seasoned with serious conversation. Curiously, it is an atmosphere that can never be found in the apartment of a diplomat, even if he is the son of a professor and has inherited his father’s furniture.
We were finally called upstairs by Margot, who then disappeared into her study. Bice’s impatience was such that, not finding Maja in the first room we entered, she said disappointedly, “Not here,” and ran toward a closed door to open it, like a child playing hide-and-go-seek. This search lasted only a matter of seconds, because the house isn’t large enough for a long search. But by the time we reached Maja, Bice seemed almost to have lost hope that she would ever get there. Maja was standing near her chair waiting, quiet, dignified, almost ironical, under a cloud of white hair. She never shows any emotion, never speaks louder than a whisper, and never more than a few appropriate words—just like the Tuscan peasants, with the difference that when they whisper, they might as well be addressing a crowd across a five-acre field.
The “How well you look!” and “How unchanged you are!” were soon over, and then the Great Foreigner arrived, pipe in hand and smiling gently. He complimented Bice on looking just the same as ever, and received the same compliment with grace, then inquired about Michele, Bice’s eldest brother and her second link with higher mathematics. Uncle Michele is a gentle little man who sits in Bern, Switzerland, and looks out into the world, leaning on a white beard that descends from almost under his blue eyes to the end of his necktie. Every night for twenty years, in the company of a friend, he has looked into “The Divine Comedy,” taking time off to look into his soul with a fierce, puritanical spirit tempered by a great deal of natural goodness; he has also looked into the field of economics, trying to find mathematical formulae to solve the crisis of the world; and for a long time, in the company of Einstein, he looked into the mysteries of higher mathematics. We had just finished hearing all about Uncle Michele’s health and his many grandchildren when Bice seemed suddenly to recall an extremely urgent matter—as if, indeed, it were the very reason she had flown all the way over here from Europe. “Herr Professor,” she asked, in German (the whole conversation, in fact, was in German), “this I really meant to ask you for a long time—why hasn’t Michele made some important discovery in mathematics?”
“Aber, Frau Bice,” said Einstein, laughing, “this is a very good sign. Michele is a humanist, a universal spirit, too interested in too many things to become a monomaniac. Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.” And he giggled happily to himself.
Then we spoke about dreams. Bice told us two symbolic dreams she had had years ago; I told the dream that the grandfather of a friend of mine had had the day before he died; Einstein told an absurd dream of his. He seemed the only one to find the conversation interesting, which it was not. Bice was now sleepy (the emotion had been too great for her); Maja sat silent and ate her lunch, which a nurse had brought in on a tray; and I nodded to Einstein’s words, searching impatiently for a way out of dreams to the subject of the responsibility of modern scientists. But the atmosphere somehow weighed on me. The mist was getting thicker, and it had begun to rain, with that quick, fingertip drumming on the leaves, on the roof, on some pail outside, that makes you go to sleep. It was dark in the room now. The only points of light were the white of the bed, the white of the nurse’s uniform, and the white of Maja’s hair and of Einstein’s head against the window—and his laughing eyes, his voice, and the joy that sprang from him. “Damn the responsibility of modern scientists on a damp day like this,” I thought. It made me both envious and angry to see this man in front of me who laughed so heartily at the most trivial things, who listened with such concentration to our nonsense, who was so full of life while I could see no reason even for breathing in that damp, misty air. “Why is he so young,” I asked myself, “and what makes him laugh so? Is he making fun of us, or what is this?” Then I began to understand. He had just come from the other room; he was stretching his mind; he was “abroad.” All these words were only formally addressed to us; actually they were references to some demonstration he must have received, in the heart of his own secret country, that something was exactly as he had suspected it would be. Yes, it could be nothing but this: he had done fruitful work that morning. I saw it now because I recognized myself in him—not as a scientist, alas, but as a child of seven, at which age it was my hobby to make locomotives with tin cans and old shaving brushes (the smokestack with the smoke). The situation was the same. When the joy of toymaking became too great, I had to interrupt my work and run to the living room, where the grownups were boring themselves to death. And I laughed at their words without bothering to inquire what they meant; I found them interesting, new, exciting; I was praised for being such good company while in actuality I was still playing with my locomotive—I was deciding in my mind what colors I would paint it, what I would use for wheels and lanterns—and it was good to know that no one shared my secret. “You and your toys,” I thought, looking at Einstein with the envy that an ailing old man has for a young athlete.
Lunch was announced, and we went downstairs, leaving Maja alone. The smell of food consoled me for my humiliation. I began to eat. Einstein asked Bice for her impression of America, and she expressed her disappointment at the bad manners of children in this country. This led to a family argument, in which Einstein was asked to act as arbiter. Bice claimed that American children (she meant mine, of course) have no respect for the authority of their parents, or for that of such people as park attendants. To prove her point, she said that, on the day before, Vieri and his friend Herbert had laughed in the face of a park attendant when he told them not to play ball. Yes, they had obeyed him in the end, but not without making strange noises in his honor. (She didn’t know the name for this Bronx ceremony.) I conceded that this was frightful, but I reminded her that a park attendant in Europe was a sort of Commander-in-Chief of Leaves and Flowers and First Admiral of Public Fountains and of the paper boats in them. Even a smile addressed to him without proper authorization was considered daring. “When I was a boy in Italy, we never questioned anyone’s authority,” I said, “and thus we passed, with the most perfect manners, from the hands of our nurses to those of our tyrants.”
As moderator, Einstein asked me how I had managed to lose authority over my children.
“I didn’t have to work much,” I replied. “It was rather simple. I just told them, ‘Look at the kind of world in which we live. See what we, the grownups, are able to invent, from passports to radioactive clouds.’“
Bice contended that nothing is gained by embittering the lives of children with remarks of that nature, but Einstein was in full agreement with me when I answered that less than nothing is gained—in other words, that much is lost—by lulling them into the illusion that all is as it should be in the world. “You, as a scientist,” I said to Einstein, “know that the world is round and not divided naturally by cow fences into holy, restricted fatherlands. When you were young, there was still a semblance of good in governments and institutions, but today—see where we are today.”
He became very serious, as if he were seeing where we are today, but suddenly a smile lit up in his eyes, and it quickly spread all over his face and beyond it. He laughed happily, then said, “Let me tell you what happened to me years ago, before the other war, when there were no passports. The only two countries that required them were Russia and Rumania. Now, I was in Hungary and had to go to Rumania. I didn’t know where and how to apply for a passport, but I was told that it wasn’t necessary. There was a man who had a passport of his own, and he was kind enough to let anybody use it to cross the border. I accepted the offer, but when they asked me at the frontier what my name was, I said, ‘Wait a moment,’ took out the passport from my pocket, and had a great deal of trouble trying to find out who I was. Now, to go back to your point, I agree with you that those who exercise any kind of authority, be it the authority of a father or that of a government, have a definite obligation to show that they deserve respect, but the trouble with grownups in our day is that they have lost the habit of disobedience, and they should quickly learn it again, especially when it comes to the infringement of their individual rights.” He laughed again, this time like a bad boy, then, shaking his head, said, “These grownups. Isn’t it terrible how readily they will obey?”
“Take the loyalty test for federal employees, against which so few have protested,” I said.
“That is a case in point,” he answered. “People are asked to be loyal to their jobs. But who wouldn’t be loyal to his job? Too many people, indeed. Also in Italy and in Germany they used to test people’s loyalty to their jobs, and they found a far greater loyalty to jobs than to democracy. But now tell me another thing. What do you give to your children in the way of good news about the world?”
“Plenty,” I said. “For example, I tell them about Socrates, who was killed by the greatest democracy on earth for standing at the corner drugstore and asking questions that made the politicians feel uncomfortable.”
“That’s not a cheerful story, either,” he said, “but if they were able to absorb some of the spirit of the Greeks, that would serve them a great deal later on in life. The more I read the Greeks, the more I realize that nothing like them has ever appeared in the world since.”
“You read the Greeks?” I said.
“But of course,” he replied, slightly surprised at my amazement. And so I heard, partly from him and partly from Miss Dukas, that he reads the Greeks to Maja every night for an hour or so, even if he has had a very tiring day. Empedocles, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Thucydides receive the tribute of the most advanced and abstract modern science every night, in the calm voice of this affectionate brother who keeps his sister company.
“You know,” I said, “that is great news. Young Americans, who have an idea of the pure scientist worthy of the comics, should be told that Einstein reads the Greeks. All those who relish the idiotic and dangerous myth of the scientist as a kind of Superman, free from all bonds of responsibility, should know this and draw their conclusions from it. Many people in our day go back to the Greeks out of sheer despair. So you too, Herr Professor, have gone back to the Greeks.”
He seemed a little hurt. “But I have never gone away from them,” he said. “How can an educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science.”
Lunch was over, and Einstein announced that he was going to go upstairs for his nap. Bice was assigned, for hers, a couch under a red-nosed portrait of Schopenhauer in the library-and-music room. The sun was shining again, so Bimba was told that she could go out to the garden to play, and I went for a walk around the town.
When, after an hour or so, I came back to the house, I found Bimba still in the garden. I was quite disappointed to hear that I had missed an extraordinary event. Just after I had left and just as Einstein started to go upstairs, Bimba had asked him to play the violin for her. He had not touched his instrument for almost a year, but he took it out and played Bimba a few bars from a Mozart minuet.
I saw Einstein on the porch, waving to me. I joined him there and sat down next to him while he stretched his legs on a deck chair and leaned back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his pipe in mid-air. I had a volume of the German translation of Plato by Preisendanz in my briefcase and asked his permission to read aloud a passage from “Gorgias.” He listened patiently and was very amused by Socrates’ wit. When I was through, he said, “Beautiful. But your friend Plato”—and he extended his pipe in such a way that it became Plato—”is too much of an aristocrat for my taste.”
“But you would agree,” I said, “that all the qualities that make for a democratic attitude are noble qualities?”
“I would never deny that,” he said. “Only a noble soul can attain true independence of judgment and exercise respect for other people’s rights, while any so-called nobleman prefers to conceal his vulgarity behind such cheap shields as an illustrious name and a coat of arms. But, you see, in Plato’s time and even later, in Jefferson’s time, it was still possible to reconcile democracy with a moral and intellectual aristocracy, while today democracy is based on a different principle—namely, that the other fellow is no better than I am. You will admit that this attitude doesn’t altogether facilitate emulation.”
There was a silence, and he interrupted it, almost talking to himself. “I lived for a while in Italy,” he said, “and I think that the Italians are among the most humane people in the world. When I want to find an example of a naturally noble creature, I must think of the Italian peasants, the artisans, the very simple people, while the higher you go in Italian society . . .” and as he lifted his pipe a little, it became a contemptible specimen of a class of Italians he does not admire.
A small airplane was appearing and disappearing between treetops, and gargling noisily right into our conversation.
“In the past,” said Einstein, “when man travelled by horse, he was never alone, never away from the measure of man, because”—he laughed—”well, the horse, you might say, is a human being; it belongs to man. And you could never take a horse apart, see how it works, then put it together again, while you can do this with automobiles, trains, airplanes, bicycles. Modern man is besieged by mechanics. And even more ominous than this invasion of our lives is the rise of a class of people born of the machine, so to speak—people to whom certain powers must be delegated without the moral screening of a democratic process. I mean the technicians. You can’t elect them, you can’t control them from below; their work is not of the type that may be improved by public criticism.”
“Yes,” I said, “and they are born Fascists. What can you do against them?”
“Only one thing,” he said. “Try to prevent them from becoming a closed society, as they have become in Russia.”
“This is why,” I said, “now that we have lost the company of the horse, we may get something out of the company of men such as the Greeks were.”
“It may be an antidote to conformism,” he said.
“Don’t you think that American youth is becoming more and more conformist?” I asked.
“Modern conformism,” he said, “is alarming everywhere, and naturally here it is growing worse every day, but, you see, American conformism has always existed to some extent, because American society, being based on the community itself and not on the authority of a strong central state, needs the coöperation of every individual to function well. Therefore, the individual has always considered it his duty to act as a kind of spiritual policeman for himself and his neighbor. The lack of tolerance is also connected with this, but much more with the fact that American communities were religious in their origin, and religion is by its very nature intolerant. This will also help you understand another seemingly strange contradiction. For example, you will find a far greater amount of tolerance in England than over here, where to be ‘different’ is almost a disgrace, for everyone, starting with schoolboys and up to the inhabitants of small towns. But you will find far more democracy over here than in England. That, also, is a fact.”
“Tell me, Herr Professor,” I said. “This has nothing to do with what we were discussing, but what are the chances that a chain reaction may destroy the planet?”
He looked at me with sincere sympathy, took his pipe slowly out of his mouth, stretched out his arm in my direction, and explained why his pipe (now the planet) was not likely to be blown to bits by a chain reaction. And I was so pleased by his answer that I didn’t bother to understand the reasons.
“Tell me,” I now asked, “why is it that most scientists are so cynical with regard to the issues of war and peace today? I know many physicists who worked on nuclear reactions, and I am struck by their complete indifference to what goes on outside their field. Some of them are as conspicuous for their silence as they are for their scientific achievements.”
“So much more credit for those who talk,” said he. “But, believe me, my friend, it’s not only the scientists who are cynical. Everyone is. Some people sit in heated offices and talk for years and write reports and draw their livelihood from the fact that there exist displaced persons who cannot afford to wait. Wouldn’t you call this cynicism? I know that you were going to ask me about the responsibility of the scientists. Well, it is exactly the same as that of any other man. If you think that they are more responsible because in the course of their research they found things that are dangerous, such as the atomic bomb, then also Newton is responsible, because he discovered the law of gravitation. Or the philologists who contributed to the development of languages should be considered responsible for Hitler’s speeches. And for his actions. If scientists were to refrain from investigation for fear of what bad people might do with the results, then all of us might as well refrain from living altogether.”
“In other words,” I said, “it would amount to a form of censorship on all our actions and thoughts.”
“A rather useless censorship,” he said, “for you can trust man to find other channels of evil.” Then he laughed heartily and added, “You may underestimate man’s ability to do evil.”
It was time to go. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to Maja and call Bice. “We heard you laugh a good deal,” said Maja. “You must have had a good time downstairs.”
“Indeed,” I said. “And it was a great honor to have Professor Einstein spend such a long time chatting with me.”
“Macchè onore d’Egitto,” said Maja, which means, in colloquial Italian “Honor, hell.”
Einstein went slowly back into his study. I caught a glimpse of his face; he was miles away from everybody, back in his foreign land.
As Bice, Bimba, and I were walking to the station, Bimba began to cry because she had lost the hat of a paper doll Miss Dukas had given her. She wanted to run back to look for it, but there was no time for that. To console her, Bice said, “Think, Bimba, when you grow up, you will be able to say that Einstein played the violin for you.”
“Oh, come,” said Bimba, “it isn’t true.”
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t he play for you?”
“Call that play?” she said, making a sour face. “He had to use a stick to play it.”

Cold

2005-02-17T05:23:00.000-08:00

By DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

In late December I received a call from the White House Office of Presidential Personnel asking if I would be part of a small American delegation representing the president and the nation at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The dates fell smack at the beginning of the semester. I am loath to miss classes. Nonetheless, I decided that this merited the absence, and my dean agreed.

The delegation, which was being led by Vice President Dick Cheney, included Elie Wiesel; U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos and his wife, Annette, both Holocaust survivors; Fred Schwartz, who had spearheaded the rebuilding of a synagogue in the town of Auschwitz; Feliks Bruks, a Polish American who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in three concentration camps; and me. When I asked the White House official why I had been included, she explained that it was because of my work, especially my legal travails, exposing Holocaust deniers.

So that was how I found myself in the distinguished-visitors lounge at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Tuesday, January 25. We boarded a Gulfstream jet that seemed like it might have seated 40 but was configured for 10 passengers and six crew members. From the outside it looked like a miniature Air Force One, with the words United States of America emblazoned on the side. (Cheney was leaving later that night on Air Force Two, which was on the tarmac nearby.) I was able to answer my e-mail and to blog from the plane.

When we landed in Kraków in a blinding snowstorm, a convoy of police cars, limos, SUV's, and vans moved forward across the tarmac to greet us. The American ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe, emerged from a car and thanked us for coming. Our luggage was unloaded and placed on a truck that preceded us to the hotel. By the time I entered my room, the luggage was waiting for me. It was all very heady and quite unlike my life as a professor.

But the Sybaritic pleasures were severely tempered by the reason we were there. While I sat in the "control room" -- a hotel suite that had been turned into an office -- dealing with my e-mail, behind me State Department officials vigorously debated the most efficient way to get us to Auschwitz-Birkenau the next day for the ceremony. With the expected crowds and motorcades, the officials were unsure whether it was better to send us in the vice president's entourage or in our own van. After listening for a while, I turned around and observed that there was something surrealistic about discussing how to get to the death camp, the largest "cemetery" in the world, punctually. We laughed uncomfortably.
The next day we sat for three long hours in the falling snow listening to orations and participating in the commemoration. After a while the speeches, many by heads of state, began to morph one into another. What could the statesmen say, surrounded by camp survivors, in the shadow, literally, of the gas chambers? I was reminded of Adorno's pronouncement that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." It seemed to me that on a day such as this, prose fared little better, except for the words of those who had actually experienced the camps.

I tuned out the speakers and began to reflect on those survivors' writings, which were very much with me because I had just finished teaching a course on memoirs of the Holocaust. In Still Alive, Ruth Kluger describes watching an SS guard preening on the other side of the barbed wire with a walking stick that had a loaf of bread stuck to the end. He tormented the starving prisoners by dragging the bread in the mud. Watching the bread destroyed in the dirt hit Kluger "like a blow in the diaphragm because it was such a crudely sarcastic expression of undifferentiated hatred."

Primo Levi describes a similar experience in Survival in Auschwitz, when, during his first days at the camp, driven by thirst, he saw a large icicle hanging outside his window. He reached out and grabbed it only to have a "large heavy guard prowling outside" brutally snatch it away. "Warum?" Levi asked. The guard replied: "Hier ist kein warum." Here there is no why.

Sitting there in my four layers of clothing, heavy socks, special boots, earmuffs, and hat, and nursing a cup of hot coffee, which our minders had kindly provided us, I was thrust back to the final days of the camp, when the Germans, unwilling to let 60,000 surviving Jews fall into the hands of the Red Army, forced them to march through the snow toward Germany, where they were put in concentration camps.

In Speak You Also, Paul Steinberg recalled that as the march began he knew that "one thing is certain: In the days to come, many will die just when their wildest dreams are about to come true. And that will be the cruelest blow of all." And Steinberg was correct. So many people died that the trek entered history as a "death march."

In the final chapter of his memoir, Levi describes in detail the situation at Auschwitz during the days before the arrival of the Red Army. Levi, left behind in Auschwitz's so-called hospital, saw the camp decompose. "No more water, or electricity, broken windows and doors slamming in the wind. ... Ragged, decrepit, skeletonlike patients ... dragged themselves everywhere on the frozen soil, like an invasion of worms. They had ransacked all the empty huts in search of food and wood. ... No longer in control of their own bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, the only source of water remaining in the camp."

Levi attributed his survival during those difficult last days to the friendship and support of a small group of men who were in the hospital with him. Their only goal, he told Philip Roth years later, was to save "the lives of our sick comrades." On the night of the 26th of January one of them died. Levi and his friends were too cold and exhausted to bury him. There was nothing to do but go back to sleep and wait for the next day. "The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Sómogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher on the gray snow. Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having a beret."

Sixty years later, as darkness fell over Auschwitz, I turned to one of the members of our delegation and said: "It's really cold. I regret not having worn another layer of clothing." Suddenly Levi's words came cascading back on me. I was embarrassed. And then without explaining why, I stood up in silent tribute not just to Sómogyi, but to the countless nameless others who had died there or those, such as Elie Wiesel's father, who died soon after the death march. I also stood for people such as Levi, who survived but bore the terrible wounds of the place for the rest of their lives.

Despite the sharp wind, I took off my hat. After all, I had one.

Deborah E. Lipstadt is a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. She is the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press, 1993) and the just-published History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving (Ecco).

The ocean, the bird, and the scholar

2005-02-04T18:55:00.000-08:00

By Helen Vendler

"Poetry is the scholar's art."

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name "The Humanities," it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping, and that other forms of learning--the study of languages, literatures, religion, and the arts--would be relegated to subordinate positions. Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs.

in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines. The day of limiting cultural education to Western culture alone is over. There are losses here, of course--losses in depth of learning, losses in coherence--but these very changes have thrown open the question of how the humanities should now be conceived, and how the study of the humanities should, in this moment, be encouraged.
I want to propose that the humanities should take, as their central objects of study, not the texts of historians or philosophers, but the products of aesthetic endeavor: architecture, art, dance, music, literature, theater, and so on. After all, it is by their arts that cultures are principally remembered. For every person who has read a Platonic dialogue, there are probably ten who have seen a Greek marble in a museum, or if not a Greek marble, at least a Roman copy, or if not a Roman copy, at least a photograph. Around the arts there exist, in orbit, the commentaries on art produced by scholars: musicology and music criticism, art history and art criticism, literary and linguistic studies. At the periphery we might set the other humanistic disciplines--philosophy, history, the study of religion. The arts would justify a broad philosophical interest in ontology, phenomenology, and ethics; they would bring in their train a richer history than one which, in its treatment of mass phenomena, can lose sight of individual human uniqueness--the quality most prized in artists, and most salient, and most valued, in the arts.

What would be the advantage of centering humanistic study on the arts? The arts present the whole uncensored human person--in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form--as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments--in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer--and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plainchant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion. The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived--as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure--a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany--but when Prufrock says, "I am not Prince Hamlet," he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to every one who knows about the play.

If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them? Why not merely take our young people to museums, to concerts, to libraries? There is certainly no substitute for hearing Mozart, reading Dickinson, or looking at the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Why should we support a brokering of the arts; why not rely on their direct impact? The simplest answer is that reminders of art's presence are constantly necessary. As art goes in and out of fashion, some scholar is always necessarily reviving Melville, or editing Monteverdi, or recommending Jane Austen. Critics and scholars are evangelists, plucking the public by the sleeve, saying "Look at this," or "Listen to this," or "See how this works." It may seem hard to believe, but there was a time when almost no one valued Gothic art, or, to come closer to our own time, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.

A second reason to encourage scholarly studies of the arts is that such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony. We in the United States are the heirs of several cultural patrimonies: a world patrimony (of which we are becoming increasingly conscious); a Western patrimony (from which we derive our institutions, civic and aesthetic); and a specifically American patrimony (which, though great and influential, has, bafflingly, yet to be established securely in our schools). In Europe, although the specifically national patrimony was likely to be urged as preeminent--Italian pupils studied Dante, French pupils studied Racine--most nations felt obliged to give their students an idea of the Western inheritance extending beyond native production. As time passed, colonized nations, although instructed in the culture of the colonizer, found great energy in creating a national literature and culture of their own with and against the colonial model (as we can see, for instance, in the example of nineteenth-- and twentieth--century Ireland). For a long time, American schooling paid homage, culturally speaking, to Europe and to England; but increasingly we began to cast off European and English influence in arts and letters, without, unfortunately, filling the consequent cultural gap in the schools with our own worthy creations in art and literature. Our students leave high school knowing almost nothing about American art, music, architecture, and sculpture, and having only a superficial acquaintance with a few American authors.

We will ultimately want to teach, with justifiable pride, our national patrimony in arts and letters--by which, if by anything, we will be remembered--and we hope, of course, to foster young readers and writers, artists and museum--goers, composers and music enthusiasts. But these patriotic and cultural aims alone are not enough to justify putting the arts and the studies of the arts at the center of our humanistic and educational enterprise. What, then, might lead us to recommend the arts and their commentaries as the center of the humanities? Art, said Wallace Stevens, helps us to live our lives. I'm not sure we are greatly helped to live our lives by history (since whether or not we remember it we seem doomed to repeat it), or by philosophy (the consolations of philosophy have never been very widely received). Stevens's assertion is a large one, and we have a right to ask how he would defend it. How do the arts, and the scholarly studies attendant on them, help us to live our lives?
Stevens was a democratic author, and expected his experience, and his reflections on it, to apply widely. For him, as for any other artist, "to live our lives" means to live in the body as well as in the mind, on the sensual earth as well as in the celestial clouds. The arts exist to relocate us in the body by means of the work of the mind in aesthetic creation; they situate us on the earth, paradoxically, by means of a mental paradigm of experience embodied, with symbolic concision, in a physical medium. It distressed Stevens that most of the human beings he saw walked about blankly, scarcely seeing the earth on which they lived, filtering it out from their pragmatic urban consciousness. Even when he was only in his twenties, Stevens was perplexed by the narrowness of the way in which people inhabit the earth:

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.[Souvenirs and Prophecies, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1977), note of April 18, 1904, p. 134]The arts and their attendant disciplines restore human awareness by releasing it into the ambience of the felt world, giving a habitation to the tongue in newly coined language, to the eyes and ears in remarkable recreations of the physical world, to the animal body in the kinesthetic flex and resistance of the artistic medium. Without an alert sense of such things, one is only half alive. Stevens reflected on this function of the arts--and on the results of its absence--in three poems that I will take up as proof--texts for what follows. Although Stevens speaks in particular about poetry, he extends the concept to poesis--the Greek term for making, widely applicable to all creative effort.

Like geography and history, the arts confer a patina on the natural world. A vacant stretch of grass becomes humanly important when one reads the sign "Gettysburg." Over the grass hangs an extended canopy of meaning--struggle, corpses, tears, glory--shadowed by a canopy of American words and works, from the Gettysburg Address to the Shaw Memorial. The vacant plain of the sea becomes human when it is populated by the ghosts of Ahab and Moby--Dick. An unremarkable town becomes "Winesburg, Ohio"; a rustic bridge becomes "the rude bridge that arched the flood" where Minutemen fired "the shot heard round the world." One after the other, cultural images suspend themselves, invisibly, in the American air, as--when we extend our glance--the Elgin marbles, wherever they may be housed, hover over the Parthenon, once their home; as Michelangelo's Adam has become, to the Western eye, the Adam of Genesis. The patina of culture has been laid down over centuries, so that in an English field one can find a Roman coin, in an Asian excavation an Emperor's stone army, in our Western desert the signs of the mound--builders. Over Stevens's giant earth, with its tumultuous motions, there floats every myth, every text, every picture, every system, that creators--artistic, religious, philosophical--have conferred upon it. The Delphic oracle hovers there next to Sappho, Luther's theses hang next to the Grunewald altar, China's Cold Mountain neighbors Sinai, the B--minor Mass shares space with Rabelais.
If there did not exist, floating over us, all the symbolic representations that art and music, religion, philosophy, and history, have invented, and all the interpretations and explanations of them that scholarly effort has produced, what sort of people would we be? We would, says Stevens, be sleepwalkers, going about like automata, unconscious of the very life we were living: this is the import of Stevens's 1943 poem "Somnambulisma." The poem rests on three images, of which the first is the incessantly variable sea, the vulgar reservoir from which the vulgate--the common discourse of language and art alike--is drawn. The second image is that of a mortal bird, whose motions resemble those of the water but who is ultimately washed away by the ocean. The subsequent generations of the bird, too, are always washed away. The third image is that of a scholar, without whom ocean and bird alike would be incomplete:

Somnambulisma

On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rollsNoiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.
The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

The generations of the bird are allBy water washed away. They follow after.They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

Without this bird that never settles, withoutIts generations that follow in their universe,The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,
Would be a geography of the dead: not of that landTo which they may have gone, but of the place in whichThey lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

In which no scholar, separately dwelling,Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America) Without the bird and its generations, the ocean, says the poet, would be a geography of the dead-- not in the sense of their having gone to some other world, but in the sense of their being persons who were emotionally and intellectually dead while alive, who lacked "a pervasive being." To lack a pervasive being is to fail to live fully. A pervasive being is one that extends through the brain, the body, the senses, and the will, a being that spreads to every moment, so that one not only feels what Keats called "the poetry of earth" but responds to it with creative motions of one's own.

Unlike Keats's nightingale, Stevens's bird does not sing; its chief functions are to generate generations of birds, to attempt to sprout wings, and to try to leave behind some painstakingly scratched record of its presence. The water restlessly moves, sometimes noiselessly, sometimes in "sounding shallow[s]"; the bird never settles. The bird tries to generate wings, but never quite succeeds; it tries to inscribe itself on the shale, but its scratchings are washed away. The ocean is falling and falling, the mortal generations are following and following. Time obliterates birds and inscriptions alike.

Imagine being psychically dead during the very life you have lived. That, says Stevens, would be the fate of the generations were it not for the scholar. Stevens does not locate his scholar in the ocean or on the shale, the haunts of the bird; the scholar, says the poet, dwells separately. But he dwells in immense fertility: things pour forth from him. He makes up for the wings that are never wings, for the impotent claws; he generates fine fins, the essence of the ocean's fish; he creates gawky beaks, opening in fledglings waiting to be fed so that they may rise into their element, the air; and he produces new garments for the earth, called not "regalia" (suitable for a monarchy) but "personalia," suitable for the members of a democracy. How is the scholar capable of such profusion? He is fertile both because he is a man who "feels everything," and because every thing that he feels reifies itself in a creation. He gives form and definition both to the physical world (as its scientific observer) and to the inchoate aesthetic world (as the quickened responder to the bird's incomplete natural song). He is analogous to the God of Genesis; as he observes and feels finniness, he says, "Let there be fine fins," and fine fins appear.

Why does Stevens name this indispensable figure a "scholar"? (Elsewhere he calls him a "rabbi"--each is a word connoting learning.) What does learning have to do with creation? Why are study and learning indispensable in reifying and systematizing the world of phenomena and their aesthetic representations? Just as the soldier is poor without the poet's lines (as Stevens says elsewhere)1 , so the poet is poor without the scholar's cultural memory, his taxonomies and his histories. Our systems of thought--legal, philosophical, scientific, religious--have all been devised by "scholars" without whose aid widespread complex thinking could not take place and be debated, intricate texts and scores could not be accurately established and interpreted. The restless emotions of aesthetic desire, the wing--wish and inscription--yearning of the bird, perish without the arranging and creative powers of intellectual endeavor. The arts and the studies of the arts are for Stevens a symbiotic pair, each dependent on the other. Nobody is born understanding string quartets or reading Latin or creating poems; without the scholar and his libraries, there would be no perpetuation and transmission of culture. The mutual support of art and learning, the mutual delight each ideally takes in each, can be taken as a paradigm of how the humanities might be integrally conceived and educationally conveyed as inextricably linked to the arts.

"Somnambulisma" is the illustration of Stevens's adage that "Poetry is the scholar's art." What is necessary, asks "Somnambulisma," for creative effort? Emotion, desire, generative energy, and learned invention--these, replies the poem, are indispensable in the artist. But there is another way of thinking about art, focusing less on the creator of art than on those of us who make up art's audience. What do we gain in being the audience for the arts and their attendant disciplines? Let us, says Stevens, imagine ourselves deprived of all the products of aesthetic and humanistic effort, living in a world with no music, no art, no architecture, no books, no films, no choreography, no theater, no histories, no songs, no prayers, no images floating above the earth to keep it from being a geography of the dead. Stevens creates the desolation of that deprivation in a poem--the second of my three texts--called "Large Red Man Reading." The poem is like a painting by Matisse, showing us an earthly giant the color of the sun, reading aloud from great sky--sized tabulae which, as the day declines, darken from blue to purple. The poem also summons up the people of the giant's audience: they are ghosts, no longer alive, who now inhabit, unhappily (having expected more from the afterlife) the remote "wilderness of stars." What does the giant describe to the ghosts as he reads from his blue tabulae? Nothing extraordinary--merely the normal furniture of life, the common and the beautiful, the banal, the ugly, and even the painful. But to the ghosts these are things achingly familiar from life and yet disregarded within it. Now they are achingly lost, things they never sufficiently prized when alive, but which they miss devastatingly in the vacancy of space among the foreign stars:

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,
They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frostAnd cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leavesAnd against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they areAnd spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked. The ghosts, while they were alive, had lacked feeling, because they had not registered in their memory "the outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law." It is a triple assertion that Stevens makes here: that being possesses not only outlines (as all bodies do) and expressings (in all languages) but also a law, which is stricter than mere "expressings." Expressings by themselves cannot exemplify the law of being: only poesis--the creator's act of replicating in symbolic form the structures of life--pervades being sufficiently to intuit and embody its law. Poesis not only reproduces the content of life (its daily phenomena) but finds a manner (inspired, vatic) for that content, and in the means of its medium--here, the literal characters of its language--embodies the structural laws that shape being to our understanding.

Stevens's anecdote--of--audience in "Large Red Man Reading" suggests how ardently we would want to come back, as ghosts, in order to recognize and relish the parts of life we had insufficiently noticed and hardly valued when alive. But we cannot--according to the poem--accomplish this by ourselves: it is only when the earthly giant of vital being begins to read, using poetic and prophetic syllables to express the reality, and the law, of being, that the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives.

How could our life be different if we reconstituted the humanities around the arts and the studies of the arts? Past civilizations are recalled in part, of course, for their philosophy and their history, but for most of us it is the arts of the past that preserve Egypt and Greece and Rome, India and Africa and Japan. The names of the artists may be lost, the arts themselves in fragments, the scrolls incomplete, the manuscripts partial--but Anubis and the Buddha and The Canterbury Tales still populate our imaginative world. They come trailing their interpretations, which follow them and are like water washed away. Scholarly and critical interpretations may not outlast the generation to which they are relevant; as intellectual concepts flourish and wither, so interpretations are proposed and discarded. But we would not achieve our own grasp on Vermeer or Horace, generation after generation, without the scholars' outpourings.

If we are prepared to recognize the centrality of artists and their interpreters to every past culture, we might begin to reflect on what our own American culture has produced that will be held dear centuries from now. Which are the paintings, the buildings, the novels, the musical compositions, the poems, through which we will be remembered? What set of representations of life will float above the American soil, rendering each part of it as memorable as Marin's Maine or Langston Hughes's Harlem, as Cather's Nebraska or Lincoln's Gettysburg? How will the outlines and the expressings and the syllables of American being glow above our vast geography? How will our citizens be made aware of their cultural inheritance; how will they become proud of their patrimony? How will they pass it on to their children as their own generation is by water washed away? How will their children become capable of "feeling everything," of gaining "a pervasive being," capable of helping the bird to spread its wings and the fish to grow their fine fins and the scholar to pour forth his personalia?

To link, by language, feeling to phenomena has always been the poet's aim. "Poetry," said Wordsworth in his 1798 Preface, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science."2 Our culture cannot afford to neglect the thirst of human beings for the representations of life offered by the arts, the hunger of human beings for commentary on those arts as they appear on the cultural stage. The training in subtlety of response (which used to be accomplished in large part by religion and the arts) cannot be responsibly left to commercial movies and television. Within education, scientific training, which necessarily brackets emotion, needs to be complemented by the direct mediation--through the arts and their interpretations--of feeling, vicarious experience, and interpersonal imagination. Art can often be trusted--once it is unobtrusively but ubiquitously present--to make its own impact felt. A set of Rembrandt self--portraits in a shopping mall, a group of still lifes in a subway, sonatas played in the lunch--room, spirituals sung chorally from kindergarten on--all such things, appearing entirely without commentary, can be offered in the community and the schools as a natural part of living. Students can be gently led, by teachers and books, from passive reception to active reflection. The arts are too profound and far--reaching to be left out of our children's patrimony: the arts have a right, within our schools, to be as serious an object of study as molecular biology or mathematics. Like other complex products of the mind, they ask for reiterated exposure, sympathetic exposition, and sustained attention.

The arts have the advantage, once presented, of making people curious not only about aesthetic matters, but also about history, philosophy, and other cultures. How is it that pre--Columbian statues look so different from Roman ones? Why do some painters concentrate on portraits, others on landscapes? Why did great ages of drama arise in England and Spain and then collapse? Who first found a place for jazz in classical music, and why? Why do some writers become national heroes, and others not? Who evaluates art, and how? Are we to believe what a piece of art says? Why does Picasso represent a full face and a profile at the same time? How small can art be and still be art? Why have we needed to invent so many subsets within each art--within literature, the epic, drama, lyric, novel, dialogue, essay; within music everything from the solo partita to the chorales of Bach? Why do cultures use different musical instruments and scales? Who has the right to be an artist? How does one claim that right? The questions are endless, and the answers provocative; and both questions and answers require, and indeed generate, sensuous responsiveness, a trained eye, fine discrimination, and a hunger for learning, all qualities we would like to see in ourselves and in our children.

Best of all, the arts are enjoyable. The "grand elementary principle of pleasure" (as Wordsworth called it), might be invoked more urgently than it now is to make the humanities, both past and present, mean something relevant to Americans. Once the appetite for an art has been awakened by pleasure, the nursery rhyme and the cartoon lead by degrees to Stevens and Eakins. A curriculum relying on the ocean, the bird, and the scholar, on the red man and his blue tabulae, would produce a love of the arts and humanities that we have not yet succeeded in generating in the population at large. When reality is freshly seen, through the artists and their commentators, something happens to the felt essence of life. As Stevens wrote in the third of my texts, "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," the angel of reality then briefly appears at our door, saying:

. . . I am the necessary angel of earth,Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man--locked set,And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not,Myself, only half of a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a manOf the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turnOf my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?["Angel Surrounded by Paysans"]

That art--angel of the earth, renewing our sense of life and of ourselves, is only half meaning, because we provide the other half. Among us are the scholars who interpret those half--meanings into full ones, apparelling us anew in their personalia. In the apparels of his messenger, Stevens is recalling Wordsworth's great ode:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,The earth, and every common sightTo me did seemApparelled in celestial light,The glory and the freshness of a dream.

The secular angel refreshing our sense of the world, apparelled in Wordsworthian light, stays only for a moment, our moment of attention. But that moment of mental acutiy recalls us to being, the body, and the emotions, which are, peculiarly, so easy for us to put to one side as we engage in purely intellectual or physical work. Just as art is only half itself without us--its audience, its analysts, its scholars--so we are only half ourselves without it. When, in this country, we become fully ourselves, we will have balanced our great accomplishments in progressive abstraction--in mathematics and the natural sciences--with an equally great absorption in art, and in the disciplines ancillary to art. The arts, though not progressive, aim to be eternal, and sometimes are. And why should the United States not have as much eternity as any other nation? As Marianne Moore said of excellence, "It has never been confined to one locality."3

Notes:1. Epilogue, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction."2. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)3. "England," the Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan and Viking, 1967)
© Helen Vendler 2004

THE ROADS OF HOME

2005-02-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

by JOHN UPDIKE

In his rented beige Nissan, in a soft but steady November rain, David Kern exited from the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a new toll booth and was shot into an alien, majestic swirl of overpass and underpass. For some alarming seconds, he had no idea where he was; the little village of Morgan’s Forge—an inn, a church, a feed store—which should have been on his left, had vanished behind a garish stretch of national franchises and retail outlets. The southern half of the county, a woodsy stretch of rural backwardness when, soon after the Second World War, his family, at his mother’s instigation, had bought back the family farm, was now a haven for Philadelphians, who were snapping up the old stone farmhouses for weekend retreats. There were even, he had been told, daily commuters—more than an hour each way, but for them it was somehow worth it. For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.

He felt lost. Then a rusted, bullet-pierced road sign in the shape of a keystone, naming Route 14, oriented him, and he pressed on the accelerator with a young man’s verve. He knew this road: the gradually rising straightaway, with Morgan’s dam down below on the right; the steep downhill plunge, heralded by a sign advising trucks to shift to a low gear, toward the creek that curled around the roofless shell of the one-room schoolhouse his mother had attended as a child; and then the sharp right turn, slowing you more than the car pressing behind you ever expected, onto the stony dirt lane, long since macadamized, that led to what had been, for a time, his home.

He drove between the twin housing developments that had once been the Gengrich dairy farm and old Amos Schrack’s orchard, and from the crest saw what had been his family’s land. The meadow, low land once drained by stone-lined ditches that had been dug by his grandfather and great-grandfather, was no longer mowed; instead it was planted in rows of evergreens and birches for sale to landscapers. Beside it, quite buried in sumac and wild raspberry canes, lay the grassy road his mother used to walk, all by herself until joined by the Gengrich children, on her way to the one-room schoolhouse. There had been a towering tulip poplar beside the meadow which had survived into Kern’s middle age, as had his mother. She would tell him how, in warm weather, she would pause in her quiet walk beneath the tree’s big heart-shaped leaves, grateful for the shade and for the birdsong, subdued by the heat, in the branches.
His vivid image of her as a little girl—her hair braided and pinned so tight by her mother that her scalp hurt, walking in her checked dress and matching ribbons down this lonely road between the fields—had been her creation, as she conjured up for him those days of paradisiacal country loneliness, of trusting animals and hazy silence. She had wanted to infect him, another only child, with her primal girlhood happiness, so that when he inherited the farm he would live on it. In the event, he had inherited it only to get rid of it quickly. The thirty acres on one side of the road, with the barn and house and chicken house, he sold to a cousin, and the remaining fifty, fields and woods, he rented to the neighboring farmers, the Reichardts, thus keeping the green space free of development, as his mother would have wanted. He had inherited as well her childhood bird guide, with carefully pencilled annotations and in the back a list of the species she had spotted on this farm—an index of her loneliness, this absorption in birds. One of her tales of herself recalled, with a trace of lingering grievance, how fiercely her mother had scolded her for climbing into a basket of freshly dry wash in imitation of a nesting bird.

Kern, the absentee owner of fifty acres, felt guilty at the rarity of his visits. His career had taken him West. He had retired from teaching English at Macalester College, in St. Paul, and he and his wife, who hated the cold, had moved to Southern California. He drove past his old house with hardly a glance. The cousin had sold it, and then it had been sold again, to a Philadelphian, and renovated beyond recognition. Where sandstone stepping stones had once led the way across a lawn mostly crabgrass, a smooth circular driveway now enclosed a clump of shrubs in shades of green like a nursery display, crowded around a terra-cotta gargoyle. Kern’s mother’s many birdhouses, and her wind chimes on the back porch, were gone.

He kept driving and pulled into the parking lot for the Reichardts’ produce stand. Their farm, one of the few surviving in the region, had prospered as the south of the county filled in with new customers. The Reichardts were pious people but not superstitious about keeping up with the times. Kern’s annual check was now printed by a computer; the simple shed that he remembered, with an awning and a few boards on sawhorses holding bushel baskets of peaches and apples, sweet corn, and string beans, had sprouted freezers and cash registers and supermarket carts and a sizable section of imported gourmet delicacies. Young Tad Reichardt, who usually dealt with Kern on his rare visits, was off with his family for a week at Disney World. “He goes every year, down to Orlando,” a girl at the cash register explained, in the friendly local style. “He says it’s never the same trip—as the children get older, they see different things. Now, you live near Disneyland, I understand.”

“Miles from it. Miles and miles. I’ve never been.”

“Oh. Well, Mr. Reichardt got your letter saying you were coming. He said I was to fetch his father when you did.” Though her hair was worn in a Mennonite cap, she pulled a cell phone from her apron pocket and deftly punched in numbers with her thumb, a trick all young people seem to have.

Kern protested, “There’s no need to bother. I can see for myself. Things are going fine here.”

“He’s here,” she announced into the tiny phone. Within a minute a member of Kern’s own generation, Enoch Reichardt, appeared, damp with rain and grinning widely. They had been boys together, on adjoining farms, but their attempts to play together had not been successful. Enoch, a year younger, had brought a softball and bat over to the Kerns’ yard—the Reichardts had no yard, all the space between their buildings was used for equipment and animals—and David, newly a teen-ager and not yet used to his own strength, had hit the ball far over the barn, into the thorns and poison ivy past the dirt road, next to the tumbledown foundation of the old tobacco-drying shed. The road in those days, before it was macadamized and straightened, swung closer to the barn, to the broad dirt entrance ramp, and then dipped downhill to run along the meadow, under the tulip poplar. Though the boys searched for a scratchy, buggy twenty minutes, they never found the ball, and Enoch never came back to play.

But today, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge, and Kern was happy to see someone nearly as old as he looking so well—stocky and tan, repelling the rain as if waxed. His grin showed straight white teeth. Enoch’s teeth had been crooked and brown and must have pained him for years. He asked Kern if he would like to see his fields, how they were being farmed.

“It’s pretty wet out,” Kern said. “I think I get the idea.”
He had arranged to meet two old classmates, with their spouses, at the Alton Country Club that evening, and was wearing a Burberry, a gray suit, and thin-soled black loafers bought at a Simi Valley mall.
Enoch’s uncannily white smile broadened as he explained, “We’ll go in my car. It’ll take hardly a minute. There’s some new ideas around since you were here last. My car’s right outside. David, should I get you an umbrella?”

“Don’t be silly,” Kern said. “It’s just a drizzle.”

“Yes, well. That’s the way I look at it,” Enoch allowed. His car was a comforting relic—a black Ford sedan, with its chrome painted black. The former playmates slithered in. Not far along, on the edge of the enlarged parking lot, which even in this weather held a dozen customers’ cars and vans, stood the first of the new ideas—a kind of quonset hut of white plastic, upheld by arching ribs. “Remember how we used to grow strawberries?” Enoch asked.

“How could I forget?” Strawberries had been David’s 4-H project, a means of making a few hundred dollars a summer toward his eventual college expenses. He and his mother had stood along the road selling them, to his intense embarrassment.

Enoch braked. “Would you like to take a look inside?”

David felt he had no choice, though the rain seemed to be intensifying and his Burberry was rain-resistant rather than rainproof. Enoch roughly, in his proud excitement, widened a gap in the white plastic, and David peeked in. He saw strawberry plants up on several narrow troughs, four feet off the ground, so that the berries, ripe in November, hung down into sheer air like cherries, like Christmas ornaments. “Aquaponic,” Enoch told him. “The plastic keeps the warmth in and allows for the solar effect; all the nutrients are trickled in from a hose. There’s no dirt.”

“No dirt,” David numbly repeated.

“Remember how the berries would rest on the ground and pick up sand? And the turtles and snails would nibble at them before they could be picked?”

“And how your back would ache from straddling the row and bending over. The daddy longlegs would climb up your arms.”

“No more,” Enoch said, pleased that David remembered. “You pick these standing up.”

“Amazing,” Kern conceded, climbing back into the car, after checking the edges of his shoe soles for mud. Enoch wore thick yellow boots and a green slicker over denim bib overalls; he was one with the weather.

He asked, “Would you like me to drive you over the big field?”

“Sure,” David said. “If you won’t get stuck.”

“I don’t think we’ll get stuck.”

In farming the acres, and in selling to people who drove here and picked the fruits and sweet corn themselves, the Reichardts had laid out little roads, firmed up with spalls to check erosion, between the crops. Development, David thought. They drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother’s management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, which he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought secondhand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gently rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusty housing.

“Would you like to get out?” Enoch asked.

The car had gone as far as it could. David looked down at his shoes, and solicitously thought of the crease in his suit pants. He had never been a guest at the Alton Country Club before.

“Sure,” he said. He still owed Enoch that softball. They got out and stood together in the rain. A breeze made itself felt, at this high point of the hill. From here on a clear day you could see the tips of the tallest buildings in Alton, ten miles away. Today the city hid from sight.

As Kern feared, the red earth was as gummy as clay. Transferring his feet from one patch of old-fashioned hay mulch to the next, he watched his steps so carefully that he missed much of Enoch’s friendly lecture on crop rotation, and on new varieties of corn that didn’t take so much nitrogen out of the soil. Soil, Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some reason, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow.

Feeling his listener’s attention wander, Enoch said, with what seemed a twinkle but might have been raindrops in his eyelashes, “Your mother used to talk about how someday you might build a house up here.”

David said, “Well, I may yet.” He couldn’t resist adding, with a wave over the irrigated and plasticized acres, “And make all this my front yard.”

On the way back, sure enough, the Ford began to slew and wallow in a stretch of puddles a short distance from the paved road. But Enoch downshifted and the black Ford slithered free, and Kern was spared having to get out, in his delicate clothes, and push.

He took away a gift, a paper bag of Enoch’s fresh apples. Heading north toward Alton, he moved from his mother’s territory into his father’s; he and his father, a schoolteacher, had daily driven together in this same direction, away from the farm to the region of schools, of close-packed row houses, of urban pleasures.

Kern was staying the night at the Alton Motor Inn, in West Alton, but was in no hurry to get there—to make his way through a newly developed section of malls and highways sprung up in recent years. He turned off Route 14, past the Jewish cemetery and under the railroad bridge, into Alton, over a bridge that his father, out of work at the start of the Depression, had helped to build, hauling blue-tinged Belgian blocks and tamping them between the trolley tracks. The old man remembered that summer as pure misery, and his son never crossed the bridge without imagining drops of his father’s sweat as part of it, dried into the concrete. Kern’s bloodlines had left not just country traces.

Alton was a dying city, but its occupants persisted in living. The ebb of its prime, which David located in his own boyhood but which his elders put earlier yet, before the Depression, had stranded a population that occupied the tightly built grid like sleepy end-of-summer wasps clustering in an old paper nest. Even in his boyhood the venerable industrial town had been prolific of what the child had thought of as throwaway men—working-class males whose craft or occupation had withered and left them with nothing to do all day but smoke cigarettes and wait for a visit to the local bar to come due. Driving through south Alton, Kern spotted them through the flapping windshield wipers, standing on tiny porches, watching the rain drip from the aluminum awnings and darken the composition sidings up and down the street.

He drove on, into the wide center blocks of Weiser Street where the trolley cars would clang and pass, where the shoppers and moviegoers would throng, and where David, when his parents still lived a trolley-car ride away, would methodically wander through all the five-and-tens, from McCrory’s up to Kresge’s, looking to enlarge his collection of Big Little Books. At a dime apiece, it was possible, even on a thirty-five-cent-a-week allowance, to accumulate a sizable hoard. The five-and-tens all wore warm clouds of perfume and candy scent just inside the entrance doors, and some had pet shops, with canaries and parakeets and goldfish, at the back. Alton, it seemed to him then, had everything you could ever want in life.

He had been told by Ned Miller, one of the few high-school classmates with whom he kept in touch, that Blankenbiller’s Department Store was being torn down, to make way for a new bank. A dying city, Kern thought, and they keep putting up banks. In the old days you couldn’t find a parking space on Weiser Street; now he slid into one without trouble on the Blankenbiller’s side of the square. Not just the grand old department store, with its wrought-iron cage elevators and overhead pneumatic tubes for the whizzing brass cannisters carrying change and receipts from a hidden treasury above, was being torn down: a row of buildings beside it, where Kern remembered shoes and office supplies and hardware being sold, had vanished, baring walls whose sloppy mortar had never been meant to show, and basement chambers, now filled with rubble, that hadn’t seen daylight for a century. Even in the rain, with daylight draining from the autumn afternoon, men were pecking away with their dolefully creaking front-loaders.

His mother had once explained to him how she had gotten fat: she blamed Blankenbiller’s basement restaurant, where the apple or rhubarb or pecan pie à la mode had been irresistibly good, to top off a lunch when she was working in the Christmas season as an extra saleswoman. You got so tired, she explained, standing on your feet being gracious for ten hours; the ordeal had made her a food addict. Kern gazed down into the sodden, brick-strewn grave of his mother’s girlish figure, a figure he had glimpsed only as a toddler. It had been at Blankenbiller’s that, one day when shopping, he had let go of his mother’s hand and got lost, burbling to the floorwalker and wetting his pants.

One of the city’s surplus men, curious as to what Kern was seeing, crept out from one of the few sheltering doorways left on Weiser Street. Kern winced in fear of being asked for a handout; but the man mutely stared with him through the chain-link fence. Kern’s father used to embarrass him, in the city, by talking to strangers; the more disreputable they appeared, the more enthusiastically his father seemed to regard them as potential sources of enlightenment. Kern had been a fastidious, touchy adolescent, but had slowly shed many of his inhibitions. Now he turned to the poorly clad, indifferently shaven stranger and attempted conversation: “Some hole, huh?”

The man turned away, offended by such levity. He might have said “Yeah,” or said nothing at all, Kern wasn’t sure.

The Alton Motor Inn and Function Suites sat slightly north of the river, where Kern’s mental map of the county gave out. North of Alton had always had a different, hostile flavor: the high-school kids were tougher, the industrial landmarks were bigger and darker, and the rich, who had made their millions off the dismal mills and quarries, lived on fenced estates well back from the highways. The geography was a tangle to Kern; confusing new highways sliced through former villages and sped shoppers to malls that were themselves becoming shopworn. Just after his mother’s death, without her to guide him, he had got lost on his way to the Alton airport to meet his children for the funeral. Though he now managed, after several wrong turns, to find the motor inn on its little rounded hill of asphalt, Kern was afraid he could not find, in the dark, in the rain, the Alton Country Club.

The girl at the front desk, dressed in a mannish jacket, had tufty hair dyed in blotches of magenta. To her it was so obvious where the country club was that a few stabs of her pencil at a miniature map and a hurried recitation of several route numbers satisfied her that Kern was as good as there. Uncomprehending, but afraid of appearing senile, he docilely nodded and went to the room. His room, its picture window overlooking the muffled traffic of a mysterious cloverleaf, seemed a safe cave. But his classmates, in deference to their age and frailty, had urged an early dinner hour, so, instead of lying down on one of the inviting twin beds and turning on television, he unpacked his toilet kit, brushed his teeth, changed his tie to a more festive one, and tried to clean his muddy loafers with a wad of moistened toilet paper. Out in the parking lot, the controls of the rented Nissan still seemed foreign, the dashboard miniaturized and dim. There was an invasive sweet smell in the car: he had forgotten Enoch’s apples. Blazing streams of other cars were hurrying home; the county was not so depleted as to lack a rush hour. He was due at six, in just fifteen minutes.

As Kern squinted to see road signs, the headlights behind him pressed mercilessly; those coming at him wore troubling halos of refraction. He had turned off at the route number the neo-punk girl at the hotel desk had written for him, but possibly in the wrong direction. Anonymous mills and storage tanks hulked on one side, with silhouetted conveyor belts and skeletal stairways; on the other, after a distance, a restaurant in an old limestone house advertised itself with a discreet white sign, and, closed for the winter, a driving range and miniature-golf course hurtled by. None of this was exactly unfamiliar—ages ago he and some boisterous friends had played among those windmills and tunnels, or somewhere similar—yet nothing told him exactly where he was. He was being punished: he had lived his formative years in the county while disdaining to learn its geography, beyond the sections proximate to his ego and his selfish needs. Now in revenge, the area manifested itself as a shapeless shadowy mire, experienced at a perilous speed.

Then a sweeping searchlight straight ahead declared, he decided, the presence of the Alton airport. It was down to about two flights a day yet kept its lights on. But it seemed to be, if he remembered the hotel clerk’s sketchy indications, on the wrong side of the highway. Kern was beginning to sweat. He would never get there. The highway surround was thinning into countryside: distant isolated house windows, darkened low stores for carpeting and auto parts. He wanted to scream. He needed to urinate. At last, the broad glow of a combination Getty gas and 7-Eleven appeared. Yet the doughy woman behind the counter—the lone sentinel in a sea of darkness, wearing steel-rimmed granny glasses—seemed frightened of him, her only customer. He saw as if through her oval lenses his pink panicked face and wrinkled Burberry and California-style necktie, splashily patterned in poinciana blossoms. When he explained his disorientation, her face hardened; she appeared offended that he could have gone so far astray. “Go back the way you came,” she told him. “It’s after the airport. You passed it.”

“How far after?”

“Oh—a mile or so.”

“On the right or the left?” These people, it occurred to him, did not want out-of-staters to make themselves too much at home.

“On the left.”

“Is there a sign or anything?”

The woman mulled this over, continuing to size him up and keeping one hand out of sight below the counter, probably on the alarm button. “You’ll see it,” she grudgingly promised. “There’s two big gateposts.”

And Kern did, ten minutes later, see the gateposts, very faintly, on the other side of the road. They might have been ghosts—spectral apparitions between beats of the windshield wipers—but his only hope of refuge lay between them. It was the worst kind of highway, a two-lane wanting to be a three-lane. The streams of traffic behind him and coming toward him looked endless; he braked in the center of the road and, as halted headlights piled up in his rearview mirror, he swerved into the oncoming lane. The lead car gave him a long blast of protest on its horn but braked enough to avoid the head-on collision that Kern’s heart had leaped up to greet.

He was in. A tiny sign in a flowerless flower bed named the club. An allée of horse chestnut trees led him between two areas of darkness—golf-course fairways, he guessed. The clubhouse loomed, spottily lit. There was plenty of parking; it was a weekday night. He got out of the car. His eyes watered; his knees were trembling. Ned Miller was waiting for him in the foyer. “We were getting worried,” Ned said.

"I had trouble finding it,” Kern told him, fervently gripping his old friend’s hand. “Then when I finally found it I nearly got killed pulling in. The guy who had to brake gave me a huge blast.”

“That’s a bad left turn. You should have been coming from the other direction.”

“I know, I know. Don’t rub it in. I’ll do better next time. Maybe.” Ned said nothing; both men were estimating that there might not be a next time.

Ned had been, like Kern, a good student, but less erratically and noisily so. He spoke no more than he needed to, and talkative Kern, so excitable he sometimes stuttered as the words crowded in, had realized that Ned was his best friend only when he realized that silence was the other boy’s natural, companionable mode. Ned’s head was full of unvoiced thoughts; they were for him a reservoir of strength. He had become a lawyer, a professional keeper of secrets.

The three other guests were seated at the table, their faces glamorously lit by glass-shaded candles. Ned’s wife was Marjorie, a firm-textured, silver-haired graduate of a different high school, north of Alton. Kern’s other classmate he had known as Sandra Auerbach, though she had long since married one of Ned’s legal partners, Jeff Lang. It must have been Ned’s sly, considerate idea to include the Langs, since Kern had, at a safe distance, loved Sandra all through school. It had taken no great imagination to love her—she was conspicuously vivacious, an athlete and a singer as well as the class beauty. He had heard, though, that she had fallen prey to various ills. He wondered if the aluminum walker tucked over by the windows was hers. Even as he gratefully took the place they had saved for him, beside Sandra, he observed that her face had been stiffened and distorted by some sort of stroke. Yet, since his love for her had been born in kindergarten, before sex kicked in, it was purely spiritual and impervious to bodily change.

In his happiness to be next to her, he gushed, “Sandra, I had the most terrible time getting here, not knowing where anything is anymore. Not that I ever did. Furthermore my night vision isn’t that great. All the headlights had this rainbowy hair on them. In my panic I pulled right into the path of an oncoming car, and even in that split second I was thinking, Well, Stupid, you were born here, you might as well die here. Was the traffic always this bad?”

She stared at him out of her stony, twisted face, and with a spasmodic motion lifted her hand toward his lips as if to touch them, to still them. “David,” she said carefully, “I don’t hear well. Speak more slowly, and let me watch your mouth.” Her hair, a silky chestnut-brown permitted some streaks of gray, was sleekly swept back; he saw that the socket of her dainty ear was daintily filled by a flesh-colored hearing aid. But her voice had kept its old quiet confidence; she had never had to shout to get attention. Except for her bust, spectacularly bloomed by the eighth grade, Sandra’s physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness. Her nose had a barely noticeable bump at the bridge and her mouth a slight, demure, enchanting overbite. Kern’s lips tingled where Sandra had almost touched them.

He slowly mouthed, for her eyes, the words “It’s won-der-ful to see you. I’m sor-ry I was late.”

The general conversation sought its rhythm, and David, the returned prodigal, for a time was assigned the lead voice. But the questions he asked, the details he remembered, related to a few decades that for him had the freshness and urgency of youthful memories but that for his friends were buried beneath a silt of decades, of thousands of days spent in this same territory, maturing, marrying, childbearing, burying parents, laboring, retiring. He called across the table to Ned, “Remember how our mothers used to take us out once a summer to the Goose Lake Amusement Park, at the end of the trolley line? They would sit there,” he explained to the others, “side by side on a bench, while Ned and I went into the arcade and put pennies in these little paper peepshows that you cranked yourself—girls doing the hoochy-coochy in petticoats, all very tame, in retrospect. What the kids nowadays see, my God.”

Decades of teaching had left him perhaps too fluent. He evoked aloud the long-gone trolley cars—their slippery straw seats, the brass handles at the corners to switch the backs back and forth at the end of the line, the serious-faced conductor with the mechanical changemaker on his belt.

“Every child had to have one,” Ned chimed in. “As a toy.”

“Exactly!” Kern agreed. He recalled aloud Ned’s old house—its abundance of toys, its basement playroom, its side yard big enough for fungo, and the slate-floored screened side porch where they used to play Monopoly for hours. Kern, a poor schoolteacher’s son, had envied that house, and intended to praise it. But he got the name of Ned’s pet Labrador slightly wrong, Blackie instead of Becky; Ned made the correction with an uncharacteristic, irritated quickness.

Monopoly made Kern think of the canasta craze in their junior and senior years, those rows and rows of cards laid out on their parents’ dining-room tables, and asked if anybody could still remember the rules. Nobody volunteered. Marjorie Miller began to look glazed, and stated firmly that no one in her high school played canasta; it never spread, she insisted, to this part of the county.

Deferential waiters, meanwhile, took orders and brought food. They kept calling Ned “Mr. Miller” and Sandra “Mrs. Lang”; only Kern went unnamed, the club outsider. He had his own clubs, far from here, but had he stayed he could never have made the Alton Country Club; there was no road for him up into it.

As, feeling the fatigue of his day’s adventures, he fell relatively silent, his companions lapsed into local talk—the newest mayoral scandal in Alton, the hopeless condition of the downtown, the misfortunes (illnesses, business misjudgments, ill-advised second marriages) of mutual friends. Kern thought that Sandra kept up with the conversation pretty well, her calm gray-blue eyes darting from mouth to mouth, her own lips opening in a frequent laugh. When she laughed, the gleeful pealing, a bit shriller than expected, sounded a chord in Kern’s head first heard during recess at elementary school, on the little asphalt lake around the old red brick building, strictly divided into boys’ and girls’ sections. Her voice, though not loud, could be heard over those of all the other girls at play. He must have been listening for it.

The waiters—two of them, for this was a light night—stood ready, in their pleated shirts and striped bow ties, to take orders for dessert and coffee. The group looked toward Kern, and he said what he sensed they wanted to hear: “I don’t need anything. It’s late for us old-timers.” There was a babble of grateful agreement, and a pronged fuss of gathering coats and umbrellas. Sandra used her walker, but as if it were a plaything, swinging it jauntily ahead of her. Outside, the rain had stopped, and Kern could see off to the left a shadowy green, with its numbered flag still in the hole, ready for play if November relented.

On the glistening driveway, they shook hands and hugged goodbye. He and Sandra studied each other’s face a second, trying to decide between a kiss on the cheek or on the mouth; he decided on a cheek—as it happened on the side somewhat paralyzed. Backing off, he said, “Take care. You’re the best.” Not sure the lamplight was strong enough for her to read his words, he absurdly gave her a thumbs-up, and blushed.
Marjorie, hugging him almost too firmly, said, “We’re all in one car; you follow us. We don’t want you getting lost again.”

“Oh, I don’t think I will. I just do the same thing backwards, more or less. Don’t go out of your way. Ways.”

“David. You follow us.”

The four had come in a big midnight-blue S.U.V. belonging to the Langs. Marjorie’s silver hair flashed in the back seat; Sandra’s tidy profile sank into shadow beside her. Women rode contentedly in the back seat here. Jeff Lang’s tail-lights led Kern down the long, hushed double row of horse chestnuts; at the highway, after a wait for all traffic to clear, the tail-lights turned left, away from the airport, then right at the restaurant in the limestone house. Almost immediately, they were moving down narrow city streets. They had been on the edge of Alton, all along. What was I doing way out at the airport? Kern asked himself.

This section of the city was strange to him. Lone pedestrians flitted warily across the rain-stained streets. The glowing windows of laundromats, delicatessens, and corner taverns slid by like the illumined spectres and tableaux in the water ride at the Goose Lake Amusement Park. Some of the signs were in Spanish. The S.U.V., seeming almost to brush the parked cars on either side, led him first downhill, and then up. Continuing uphill, the street smoothly became a strange bridge, high above the black river. It descended on the other side into blocks where gaunt semi-detached houses were approached up long flights of concrete steps. The two-car caravan came to a traffic circle near a large parking lot, with a garish state-run liquor store on one side, and Kern at last knew where he was: in West Alton.

He and his mother used to come to West Alton from the trolley stop in front of Blankenbiller’s for his piano lessons with—yes, of course—Miss Schiffner. Thin, wan, wistful Miss Schiffner, perhaps once beautiful in her way, had he not been too young to notice. Concrete steps covered by green outdoor carpeting led up to her front parlor, where the upright piano waited amid doilies and porcelain figurines and dusty plush. Its white-and-black teeth were cold to touch, with his nervous hands. The keyboard had a right-angled lid that came down after the lesson, protecting the keys against dust. The trolley car at its stop—there had been no traffic circle then—would unfold a step with a harsh clack and David, leaping down, jarred the sour dread in his belly at not having mastered his lesson. This was before their move to the country, the beginning of his exile. His mother was still a city dweller, still banking on civilization, handing over precious Depression dollars in gullible hopes of lifting her son up from the ruck. It was clear to him and must have been to Miss Schiffner that he was no little Mozart, standing on tiptoe to tap out his first minuet.

Jeff Lang’s smug ruby tail-lights continued halfway around the traffic circle, passed the liquor store, and headed up Fourth Street, toward the old textile mills that had been reborn as discount outlets and then had gone empty again, as the busloads of Baltimore bargain hunters went instead to the outlets near Morgan’s Forge. It came to Kern that behind him, one block over from Fourth Street, there used to be an all-night diner where he, in no hurry to get back to the farm, would go alone after dropping off his date at her house. After a school dance, he would go with a gang of others, all the girls wearing strapless taffeta dresses if it had been a prom, their naked shoulders shining in the booths. Each booth had its own little jukebox, with “Stardust” and “Begin the Beguine” and Russ Morgan’s “So Tired” among the selections. If Kern went there now, he could get a piece of Dutch apple pie with a scoop of butter-pecan ice cream, to make up for the dessert he had missed.

He wanted to reverse his course, but the Langs’ tail-lights inexorably receded, waiting at every intersection for him to catch up. He couldn’t believe it: they were going to lead him like some moron right to the parking lot of the Alton Motor Inn. In his head he shouted furiously, I know where I am now! I’m here.

How Can I Keep From Singing

2005-02-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

My life flows in endless song,

above earth's lamentation,

I hear the real though far off hymn,

that hails a new creation.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,

I hear the music ringing,

It sounds an echo in my soul.

How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,

and hear their death-knells ringing,

When friends rejoice both far and near,

how can I keep from singing?

In prison cell or dungeon dark,

our thoughts to them are winging,

When friends by shame are undefiled,

how can I keep from singing.

What though the tempest 'round me roars,

I know the truth, it liveth.

What though the darkness 'round me close,

songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,

while to that rock I'm clinging.

Since love is Lord of heaven and earth.

How can I keep from singing?

I lift my eyes, the clouds grow thin,

I see the blue above it.

And day by day this pathway clears,

since first I learned to love it.

The peace from love makes fresh my heart,

a song of hope is ringing.

All things are mine,

since truth I've found.

How can I keep from singing.

The Man With The Blue Guitar

2005-02-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

One

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."

Two

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If a serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Three

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

Four

Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentarily declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.