A fascinating book on American regionalism is just out by journalist Colin Woodard. In American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, he explores the different cultures that he depicts as 11 different “nations” within the United States. You can quibble with his definitions and descriptions (and as a Maine Yankee he is of course subject to his own regional bias!) but his characterization of cultures such as Appalachia, Midlands, and “Yankeedom” as distinct entities with centuries-old formative histories – but which are as discrete and influential as ever – is insightful and important for understanding this strikingly diverse country. It’s an argument that demographers and historians have been teasing out for decades and that anyone who follows red-state blue-state politics can intuit, but which few in the general public ever actually identify. Check out some short articles by Woodard for a taste of what he’s talking about.

Our sheikh was very happy.  Surely, he thought, everyone will see how large and impressive the letters of my name are and they will understand what a rich and accomplished person I am.

The sheikh would have saved a lot of money if he’d studied English lit in sheikh school.  He would have read a poem called “Ozymandias” by a certain Percy Bysshe Shelley and realized what a colossal waste of time and money scratching letters in the sand really is.

Thanks to this project there is one question which Hamad can now answer better than anybody else who ever lived:  How much money does it take to tell the world that you are a fool?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear –
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

“History is bunk,” said Henry Ford; the limits of the past do not and should not hold us back today.  This is not just an anti-intellectual slogan from a notorious anti-Semite; it has been a statement of America’s core faith.  If the Founding Fathers had not believed that history is bunk, it is doubtful that they would have tried to build something as daring and new as a continental republic.  If the Wright brothers had not believed that history is bunk, they would have failed to understand that people were not born to fly.  If Martin Luther King had not believed that history is bunk, the thought of breaking Jim Crow through a process of peaceful, non-violent resistance would never have entered his mind.

It is hard to think of anybody in American life less like Henry Ford than Henry Adams.  One was a hardboiled industrialist who was profoundly indifferent to culture as well as to history; the other was a cultivated aristocrat and one of America’s most distinguished historians.  Yet Henry Adams’ late life masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, is basically a long and complex restatement of Henry Ford’s thesis.  After looking back on his varied experiences as a diplomat, journalist, historian, professor and novelist, Henry Adams finally concluded that history can’t be explained — and that the world is changing so rapidly that the experiences of past generations cannot really help people today.

Harvard graduation photo of Henry Adams, who eventually wrote about the failure of education (Source: Wikicommons)

Like a lot of people, I first read The Education of Henry Adams in college, and it didn’t do much for me.  It is an old man’s book in many ways; I read it more easily and respond to it more naturally as I near sixty than I did when I was still in my teens.  This is not just because Adams’ lifetime of reading and reflection led him to write a dense and complicated book with many layers of allusion and a maturity of perspective that young minds find hard to grasp; it is also a book about something young students don’t really want to think about: the failure of education.

As a grumpy old man, his wife and virtually all of his close friends dead, his political and literary ambitions seemingly frustrated, Henry Adams looked back on what seemed to be a life of missed opportunities.  The grandson and great-grandson of presidents, the son of the man who, next to Lincoln and Grant, may have done the most to save the Union by keeping Britain out of the war, one of the most gifted writers in 19th century America, Henry Adams felt that he’d been a helpless spectator most of his life.  His experience as a diplomat working for his father in Civil War era London only showed him the futility of diplomacy.  His political ambitions collapsed as a wave of populism aligned with plutocracy forced sophisticated intellectuals and lovers of nuance to the sidelines.

What was the point of knowledge, connections, intellectual sophistication?  In America, it just makes you an outsider.  The hungry barbarian, the crass entrepreneur, the extroverted Philistine will always do better than the neurotic, introverted, pointy-headed intellectual.  Forget writing two volume histories of the Jefferson administration; the way to have an impact in the United States is to build a cheaper car.

But Henry Adams’ despair about history is deeper than personal frustration.  First, he believes that the historical process itself is inscrutable.  The Calvinism of his New England ancestors seems to have left him with an ingrained sense of an incomprehensible and irresistible providence shaping events to an end we cannot understand.  For Adams, this expresses itself in what he sees as a flat contradiction between evolution (and more generally, theories of progress) and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the universe is running downhill; this seems to be a fundamental characteristic of matter.  In the end the fireworks and excitement will fade.  The stars will go out, and the universe will be cold and dark.

Yet evolution seems to suggest that biologically at least we are moving in a different direction.  The lobster is more organized than the amoeba; the monkey more complex than the salamander.

In American culture we routinely apply this idea of evolutionary progress to social conditions and institutions.  The world is getting better and better as time goes by, and science is the motor of progress.  The study of history for the average American is the study of the story of progress: how humanity rose to its present heights from the mud and muck of the past.

But Adams cannot forget that second law of thermodynamics; the universe is slowing down, higher and more complex structures are eroding into simpler, lower energy states as time goes by, and all will be cold, simple and dark in the end.  Adams is not so sure that progress is real; he cannot see evolution or progress at work in the process that led from General Washington to General Grant.

It took me a long time to feel the force of Adams’ point of view.  But the suspension between a confident faith in progress and a fearful anticipation of a dark future has only become more common since Adams wrote.  On the one hand we have the fear of nuclear (or biological or ecological) apocalypse; on the other we have the faith in progress leading humanity to an ever richer, ever higher life.  The two interpretations of the historical process exist side by side in our minds, and history does not seem to provide us with the ability to determine which of the two scenarios is most likely to come true.

Adams, I think, concludes that the result of a lifetime of study, travel and experience leaves him unable to choose between these two views of the human prospect.  And if all that study and work can’t answer basic questions like this, he says, what’s the point of it all?   In Biblical terms, we are back to the words of Ecclesiastes:  Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh  (12:12).

Adams has another problem with history: it is not only so inscrutable that study it how we may we can never hope to figure it out; it is also moving so fast that the experiences of past generations have less and less meaning for the next.  With the dramatic acceleration of the pace of change in modern times, history is becoming steadily less relevant.

This is probably where Adams comes closest to Ford — and to many millions of his fellow citizens.  Americans live in the New World, and that world is renewed in every generation.  The dreary stories of past failures have no power over us here; our opportunities and our dangers are so different from those known to the past that there is no real point in studying them now.  For better or worse, we are on our own.

This may be true one day; in fact, that is my working definition for the Singularity — a time when history stops being a meaningful guide to the human future.  But we are not there yet.

Henry Adams came to despair that his experience had any use; yet in the hundred plus years since he wrote, increasing numbers of people have grappled with this distillation of a life — and found it helpful.  Adams doesn’t tell me what the future will be like; he does, however, help me to live more alertly and attentively in the present.  Thanks to Henry Adams, I have been able to perceive the realities of life in the shadow of the Singularity far better than I could otherwise have done.  He’s written a book so wise, so deep, so useful and (after a generation of reading and rereading) so clear that he brilliantly and convincingly refutes the ideas he sought to share.

Henry Ford was wrong: read Henry Adams to learn why.

I have read a lot of science fiction.  I started reading this stuff when Sputnik was still in the news; the first satellites were spooking through the sky when I was turning the pages of novels by Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt.  I read everything in the genre that the Glenwood Elementary School and Chapel Hill public libraries contained — and I have stuck with it ever since.

A scene from Gulliver’s Travels, a classic work of science fiction.

This isn’t because the genre is producing great literature.  For the most part, it isn’t.  A lot of the best known science fiction looks either dated (Jules Verne, HG Wells) or dumb: the platitudinous and banal ‘philosophical’ discussions of the Star Trek crew on their pointless and endless galactic cruise. Or take (please!) the movie Avatar, a lot of science fiction is about flashy special effects grafted onto silly politics and creaky plots.  And while there is a lot of fine writing in the genre (names like Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany spring to mind), there is a lot of flapdoodle as well: bad western plots tricked out with Buck Rogers gear. Some of the genre’s most venerated names (Isaac Asimov comes to mind) were gifted hacks whose ability to spin entertaining tales overcame their leaden prose, superficial ideas and pasteboard characters.  It was only in the last generation that interesting women began to pop up in space; science fiction novelists as a class seemed to think of women the way sailors did back in the age of sail.  Alluring, incomprehensible and rare: fun in port, but bad luck on a voyage.  And some of the funniest pages you will ever read are found when scifi hack writers whose own thought processes are sludgy and slow try to reproduce the inner voices and thought processes of superhuman intelligences.  At its best (worst), such writing achieves the unintentional hilarity of “Battlefield Earth”, the ponderously leaden and reverential movie adaptation of a crashingly bad book by the Grand Poobah of Science Fiction Hackery, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

Nor should you read science fiction to find out where technology is going.  Sometimes the genre gets lucky.  The (very mediocre) writer Arthur C. Clarke did predict the rise of the geosynchronous satellite; the much more gifted and interesting Vernor Vinge not only predicted the rise of the internet; he has continued to produce very thoughtful and sometimes even accurate predictions about how it might develop and what its consequences might be.  But science fiction misses as much as it gets; there were not, for example, many computers in space before they started popping up down here on earth.  Flying cars were frequently posited in old science fiction, but it is hard to find anybody who predicted the Ipod — or Moore’s Law.

Not that you don’t learn something about science from science fiction; over the years my reading in the genre has certainly helped me keep abreast of the direction of scientific research – and the accounts of the lives of scientists by writers like the accomplished and entertaining Connie Wills can give non-scientists a better sense of what doing science is like. (Outside the genre, the brilliant Andrea Barrett does this as well.)   ‘Hard’ science fiction writers like Larry Niven and Gregory Benford make a point of writing fiction in which the most arcane and speculative arenas of contemporary scientific theory are shown playing out — and in which everything from the physics of far off solar systems to the principles by which space ships travel is extrapolated from and consistent with contemporary scientific knowledge.  One of the ways in which a history and word person like me can at least maintain a reasonable lay knowledge of the great scientific achievements that are defining and shaping our times is to read hard science fiction — and follow up by checking out theories and principles that seem particularly challenging or unexpected.

But science fiction is not really about science.  A book like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels really captures what science fiction is about.  Writing in a scientific and enlightened era, Swift knew his readers wanted plausible explanations that helped them suspend disbelief and follow his plot.  Swift made the manner of Gulliver’s travels consistent with the scientific knowledge of the day; the countries he described are located in remote locations that were still unexplored in Swift’s time. As a result, Gulliver’s voyages to Lilliput, Brobdinag, the land of the Houyhnhnms and Laputa were consistent with what was scientifically known at the time — just as C.S. Lewis worked in his famous space trilogy to make Dr. Elwin Ransom’s voyages to Malacandra and Perelandra consistent with the science his readers would know.  (The houyhnhnms are related to the Malacandrian hrossa in many ways, just as Swift’s yahoos look a lot like Lewis’ Weston and Divine.)  The books describe voyages to Lilliput and Mars — but the subject is always home.

Science fiction is perhaps best understood by an alternative name for the genre: speculative fiction.  It is fiction that asks questions about the human condition and the meaning of life by taking us beyond everyday life.  We go to strange planets, far distant futures or even to our own past — in order to learn about who we really are.  Science fiction takes its readers to far off galaxies in order to help them understand life on earth more clearly — just as Dorothy traveled to Oz to learn what Kansas was really all about.  The results can be startling and profound; The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is a riveting and harrowing exploration of faith and intercultural contact as a Jesuit missionary lands on an alien planet.  Reflecting earlier Jesuit missions in China and the Americas, the novel casts startling new light on those encounters and leads readers to think more deeply and more richly about what faith and culture are really about. Less profound, but a great deal of fun, the 1632 series of novels and short stories by Eric Flint and various collaborators that postulates the arrival of a small West Virginia town from our time thrown back into the middle of Germany during the Thirty Years’ War.  The impact of Grantsville’s technology and ideas on historical figures ranging from Cardinal Richelieu to Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter Kristina allows readers a chance to see the world in a fresh and stimulating way.

Taken as a whole, the field of science fiction today is where most of the most interesting thought about human society can be found.  At a time when many academics have become almost willfully obscure, political science is increasingly dominated by arcane and uninspiring theories and in which a fog of political correctness makes some forms of (badly needed) debate and exploration off limits, science fiction has stepped forward to fill the gap.  In the work of writers like David Brin and Neal Stephenson there is more interesting reflection on America’s place in the world than you will find, I fear, in a whole year’s worth of reading in foreign policy magazines.  Robert Heinlein’s work brilliantly lays out the ideology of populist libertarianism and predicted the revolt against the welfare state that has defined American politics since the 1980s.  Read C. J. Cherryh’s foreigner novels for insight into international relations and her Cyteen novels to sharpen your wits about both international politics and the impact of technological change on human society.

The biggest single task facing the United States today is the unleashing of our social imagination.  We are locked into twentieth century institutions and twentieth century habits of mind.  Science fiction is the literary genre (OK, true, sometimes a subliterary genre) where the social imagination is being cultivated and developed.  Young people should read this genre to help open their minds to the extraordinary possibilities that lie before us; we geezers should read it for the same reason.  The job of our times is to build a radically new world; speculative fiction helps point the way.

Wear cheap ties, shop Walmart, and read lots of science fiction.  Follow this advice, friends, and you are sure to go far.

Captain Delano (the author of the memoir and the protagonist of the novella) approaches the gloomy Spanish vessel; decayed and broken down it still bears signs of its former role as a flagship of empire.  Coming aboard he greets the touchy, sallow and mysterious young captain, Don Benito Cereno and notes that the ship appears to be carrying a cargo of African slaves.  There are few officers or white sailors on board; Delano gradually learns the history of the ship from Cereno.  Damaged by wild gales off Cape Horn, the ship was becalmed for weeks.  Scurvy and fever struck the weakened crew; most of the officers and Spanish crew died — and perhaps half the slaves.  Too few and too weak to control the blacks, the whites — and the ship — have only survived because the slaves have been so helpful and orderly.

The tale seems inconsistent; the narrator untrustworthy.  Delano, a trusting and optimistic soul, wonders whether the Spanish captain is a pirate — if some horrible plot against his life and ship is unfolding.  But common sense returns, and he shakes these fears aside:

“What, I, Amasa Delano- Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad- I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the schoolhouse made from the old hulk;- I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard?- Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drool, I’m afraid.”

I’ll get to the denouement below (warning: the ending is a surprise; readers who don’t know how the book comes out might want to go read it first and then return to the post), but already by this point the story is shaping up as a classic of American foreign policy.  The optimistic American, venturing far from home in his orderly and well managed ship, encounters a mysterious — and mysteriously ramshackle — ship abroad.  Delano’s first instinct is to help: he offers technical assistance, piloting the ship toward a safe anchorage.  Noting the hunger and thirst of the ship and its crew, he offers humanitarian aid: fresh water and food from his stores.  That won’t be enough, he soon realizes.  Development aid is also needed: sails and ropes to enable the Latin ship to make better progress on its own.

But the captain doesn’t respond as expected.  Evidence of misgovernment abounds.  The slaves are insubordinate; the Spanish sailors strange.  The moody captain is erratic and unsuited to command: at one moment inexcusably lax as slaves seem to attack a white sailor, at others inflexibly cruel, keeping one particular slave in chains.  Amasa Delano starts thinking about regime change: perhaps nothing will go well on the ship until he replaces the captain — perhaps with an officer from the Bachelor’s Delight.

For Melville’s readers, the decrepit Spanish empire was the symbol of tyranny and misgovernment.  Benito Cereno constantly refers to symbols of Spanish bigotry and backwardness.  The name of the ship — San Dominick — is the name of the founder of the chief order of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition.  The Dominican Friars (by a Latin pun sometimes known as the hounds of God — domini canes) were, for the Anglo-Protestant audience Melville was writing for, the ultimate symbols of the cruelty and tyranny of Popish superstition.  Most Americans at that time believed that by and large Catholicism was directly opposed to republican governance and that wherever Catholicism ruled, liberty and prosperity were crushed.  The Latin American republics, founded with such optimism earlier in the 19th century, had mostly gone backward since then — much as Africa degenerated in the half century following independence.

Poor Amasa Delano confronting this shipwreck of hopes, this failed state, is groping for some kind of policy, some way to fix a problem that, from time to time, he dimly realizes may be beyond his ken. His philanthropy, his optimism, his quest for win-win solutions don’t seem to be getting very far.  The Spanish hulk drifts on; what ails it is too deep for him to cure.

The relationships on the ship are incomprehensible to him.  Don Benito enjoys the services of a favorite slave — Babo.  Babo is with his master all the time, solicitously seeing to his every need.  Yet when Babo shaves his master, who trembles with some kind of ague or nervous distress as he tells Delano about the ship’s misadventures and the heroism of its blacks, Babo accidentally cuts Don Benito with the straight razor.  Delano goes out on deck, a few minutes later Babo appears, nursing a cut in his cheek and sighing that his master has punished him for his slip of the hand.  What kind of cruel and strange man is this Spaniard, Delano wonders, who can rely so closely and so heavily on a favorite slave and then cut him in a fit of pique.  What a sad thing slavery is, reflects Delano, that it degrades servant and master alike.

As Delano leaves the ship to return in the boat to his own vessel, he’s startled when Don Benito leaps over the side and into his boat — apparently in a treacherous attack.  Spanish sailors jump into the waters around the San Dominick and Babo jumps after his master.  The scales fall from Delano’s eyes.  A successful slave revolt had occurred on the San Dominick; a few whites had been left alive to navigate the ship back to Africa.  Then the ship had been becalmed and provisions grew short.  When Delano’s ship appeared, Don Benito had been forced on pain of immediate death to him and to all other whites on the ship to tell him the fabricated story.  The blacks were planning to seize the Bachelor’s Delight; Benito jumped off the ship as his last and only hope of warning Delano and saving himself and perhaps what remained of the crew.

As the Americans realize what is going on, they rally.  As the blacks try to sail their crippled ship out of the harbor, the American sailors chase and ultimately capture it.  The slave revolt is crushed, order restored, and the Americans lead the crippled ship back to Peru, and are ultimately congratulated and paid by Spanish officials for their service. The black rebels are executed; Babo’s head is mounted on a pike in the main Lima plaza.

Yet what really happened?  Had order been restored, justice done?  As they sail back toward civilization, Delano is surprised to find that Benito Cereno isn’t recovering his spirits.  On the contrary; he falls into a deeper and deeper depression.  Why so gloomy, Delano asks:

“The past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

“Because they have no memory,” he [Benito Cereno] dejectedly replied; “because they are not human.”

“But these mild trades that now fan your cheek, Don Benito, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades.”

“With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, Senor,” was the foreboding response.

“You are saved, Don Benito,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?”

“The Negro.”

Delano never realizes what Cereno was talking about, and goes on about his business, prosperous and unaffected.  It will be another story to tell by the fires of Duxbury, another chapter in his memoirs.

Melville was a rarity in the nineteenth century: a white American who had something close to a non-racial view of the world.  He has written a powerful anti-slavery book in the guise of a sea story — and linked America’s inability to understand the world to its imperfect knowledge of itself.  The slave trade had long been a pillar of Massachusetts sea commerce; Delano’s instinctive sense that Cereno and the whites were in the rights and the revolting slaves obviously and unquestionably in the wrong was embedded so deeply in his worldview that it never occurs to him to ask questions.  The gentle servant Babo, so loyal solicitous of his master that Delano wishes he could buy him, is a ringleader of the revolt.

Appearances deceive, and they keep on deceiving.  That is one of the many lessons of this powerful and haunting book — which in my judgment stands with Moby Dick and Billy Budd as Melville’s greatest work.  Its unforgettable portrayal of a not-so-innocent American abroad, a Mr. Magoo blundering into and out of conflicts and dangers that he never understands, is something that all Americans need to reflect on as they struggle to come to grips with our country’s engagement with the world.

But it would be a mistake to read Melville’s book as a kind of prot0-Chomsky screed, an attack on American ignorance and racism combined with a warning about the perils of blowback.  After all, Bachelor’s Delight is a much better managed ship that the San Dominick: more seaworthy, more prosperous, better organized in every possible way.  Amasa Delano’s benevolence, unwitting and uninformed as it may be, carries him safely through a dangerous crisis.  Where Amasa seems to have gone wrong is that he has lost something his Puritan forebears had in spades: an awareness of the reality of human evil and an understanding of tragedy.  Amasa is a Puritan degenerated into a Whig, the stern Calvinist belief that a transcendent God is ordering the world declining to a smug assurance that progress is inevitably and rapidly making the world a better place.   Melville and his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne make this point repeatedly in their dark fictions; read Hawthorne’s mordant The Celestial Railroad, contrasting the ease and passivity of New England spirituality in his day with the world of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to see what I mean.  In any case, Benito Cereno links that spiritual point about the superficiality of conventional American progressive thought with the question of America’s ability to understand the world.

That deserted cove in southern Chile with its unmoving gray sea and its haunted, drifting hulk of a Spanish treasure ship is a place we should all visit from time to time.  I’m glad that my teaching duties have bring me there so often; I look forward to revisiting the Bachelor’s Delight next year.

But if we do not have him, we still have his work to comfort us during the long and lonely hours.  True, his remarkable novel Return to Almora has unaccountably failed so far to find a US printer, but thanks to Amazon a trickle of copies is available for those who simply can’t do without him.  Count me among that number; I’ve read every word of this fascinating book, trying to learn about the man that the global environment movement placed at the forefront of the science of climate change.

Rajendra Pachauri, receiving another award (Internews).

Return to Almora is something of an extended Bildungsroman: a fictionalized autobiography in which the main character goes from extreme youth to full maturity — in this case, until his early sixties.  We see our hero Sanjay Nath as an infant in his parents’ arms, at school and at play, suffering as the British imperialists punish his father for his courageous patriotic defiance, enduring the pangs of first love, recalling memories of his previous incarnation in Almora, winning honors and prestigious job offers, overcoming boyish sexual misadventures to become a smoother adult operator, opening a successful chain of meditation centers across the United States, accepting the salutes of holy men and saints who spontaneously and miraculously step forward to acknowledge his spiritual grandeur, and doing his best not to hurt the feelings of the many talented and beautiful women who keep throwing themselves at his feet.  In the end, Sanjay finds happiness and fulfillment.  As gurus and holy men prostrate themselves before him and acknowledge his awesome spiritual achievements in the Himalayan caves, Sanjay reaches a new level of insight.  It is not enough to teach the world to meditate: he has a new truth to reveal — that it is also important to help the unfortunate.  He determines to do this; he will help the simple people of the hills.  The closing pages of the novel see him contemplating new tours of the international lecture circuit where he can share this insight and his experiences of helping the poor (when he gets around to having them) with the many, many people who need the wisdom that only he can bring.

It is hard to evaluate this novel.  Pachauri, who claims to have dashed the book off while flying from one international meeting to the next, is not without talent; this reader at least found himself compulsively turning the pages.  The dialog is often clunky and obtuse; the plot frequently loses all sense of direction, wandering pointlessly across unvarying terrain; descriptions are casual and brusque.  Yet the story moves.  Readers wonder which of the many women candidates will land the hypnotically attractive but elusive Sanjay — and how long they will keep him before his spiritual quest sends him off again, the Lone Ranger of Love.

One doesn’t quite get what women see in him.  Sanjay is a narcissistic ninny and fop who is the most embarrassing when he is the most sincere.  No new age cliche can be too silly for him, no piece of parapsychological quackery too ludicrous for him to embrace.  (At one point, a mysterious holy man with a great deal of funding has graduate students wear special tin hats through which they are put into contact with the ‘divine’.  This is all very scientific, the narrator reassures us; the subjects report on a scale of one to ten how close to the deity they feel and the resulting data is averaged and calculated using the best available statistical methods.  This data allows the holy man to determine that, just as the ancient Hindu sages taught, the earth has specially holy places where the electro-magnetic waves emanating from the divine are felt more strongly than at others.  The mountains of Peru, the Arctic and of course the sacred mountains of India are places where the Force is particularly strong.)  In a brief walk on role in the novel, Shirley Maclaine explains about the mountains of Peru and immediately recognizes Sanjay as a kindred spirit and fellow Great Soul.

The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable.  Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths. After Sanjay writes an angry letter to the editor denouncing Ronald Reagan for reasons that will sound silly to the reader but are evidently convincing to the narrator, Senator Chuck Sommers, the junior senator from Pennsylvania begs Sanjay to be accepted as a student of meditation — and speaks to him about the importance of enlightened political action. To quote Pachauri’s own scintillating prose and sparkling dialog:

“Sandy, you must work for larger causes in which you believe,” Chuck Sommers said, putting his arm around Sanjay’s shoulder.  “I greatly admire what you are doing to bring peace to so many human souls.  But we must also bring peace on earth.  There is too much strife around us, and too little compassion.  Political leaders use people and events for their own narrow purposes, putting a spin of superficial nobility and righteousness on everything.  We have to raise our voices against this evil.”

Sharp, focused, useful: that is our Sanjay’s political approach.  As for the politics of Shirley MacLaine, here is how Pachauri describes them:

“Shirley talked about the rally in which she had come to take part.  She had decided, along with a few other committed people to protest US foreign policy and to demonstrate in favor of pro-choice legislation.  She would handle General Zia and Pakistan, a bit later on, after she had mobilised support from other quarters.”

That is pretty much the level of ‘intellectual’ conversation in the book.  No one really struggles with ideas; no one grapples with logic or evidence.  No piece of platitudinous claptrap is ever contested, and no religious doctrine or precept ever seriously interferes with anyone’s desire to do as they please.  In Return to Almora, at least, the truth is what ‘we’ think, and we recognize it not because we sift evidence and chop logic.  We perceive the truth because of who we are; some people just happen to know what is right and, fortunately, we just happen to be that kind of people.  Whether it is the impending doom of the glaciers (whose disappearance is a recurring minor theme), the errors of American Republicans (another theme), or the superiority of Hinduism to all other religious traditions (the dominant underlying message, expressed with extraordinary naivete that is almost but not quite endearing), we are guided by the inner light rather than anything so vulgar as logical disputation.

A family friendly website like this one is not the proper place to describe Pachauri’s portrait of Sanjay’s sex life.  It is not a pretty picture; parts of the book read like the Memoirs of a Disgusting Old Goat — by the kind of Old Goat that doesn’t understand the concept of too much information.

The difficulty in reading Return to Almora isn’t rendering judgment on a vacuous ninny like Sanjay.  The libraries of world literature are rich, but there are few main characters as vain, as blind, as ludicrous and as lacking in self-awareness as Pachauri’s protagonist.  The question is whether Pachauri understands what a fool he’s created: is Pachauri in on the joke or is he part of the joke?  Is he mercilessly and cleverly exposing the absurdities and obsessions of a certain type of unreflective smoothie, or is he naively celebrating that success because he himself is so vain, so blind and so caught up in fame that he is as clueless as Sanjay?

The narrative voice gives us no clue.  The narrator uncritically reports Sanjay’s self assessments and observations as fact; the authorial voice neither challenges nor reflects on Sanjay’s swollen ego and narcissistic obsession.  If Pachauri is in on the joke, this is a truly masterful satire — viciously mocking the spiritual pretentiousness of shallow Hindu practice, the intellectual weakness of India’s aspiring upper middle class and the callous disregard for family and friends of the opportunistic male striver.  Perhaps Rajendra Pachauri is an unacknowledged literary genius: the Jonathan Swift of modern India.

Or maybe as the Times of India theorized in its review, Pachauri has just written a cynical potboiler.  Perhaps Pachauri recognizes the folly and stupidity of the world’s Sanjays, but he believes that a lot of Indian readers share some of these ideas.  He wants to sell books, not challenge world views, and so he’s decided to pander rather than to teach.  He wouldn’t be the first intellectual who decided there’s more money in backing popular illusions than fighting them.

The most troubling possibility, however, is that Pachauri doesn’t criticize or undercut Sanjay in the novel because he doesn’t recognize Sanjay for what he is.  Some reviewers have spoken of Sanjay as an idealized version of Pachauri: this is Rajendra Pachauri as he would like to be and Rajendra Pachauri’s Sanjay is his portrait of a hero.

This is a truly chilling thought — that the global environmental movement might have accepted someone whose ideas and culture are this vapid and banal into its leadership.  Putting on a tin hat and telling a guru on a one-to-ten scale how close to the divine you feel is, literally, voodoo science and neither Sanjay nor the narrator seem to grasp the difference between tinfoil hats and the real thing.  Greens should be deeply, deeply grateful that Pachauri’s novel has stayed off the shelves in the US.

The complete silence surrounding this important publishing event (how many celebrity Nobel prize winners publish racy sex novels?) in the US is all the more surprising because the novel was a big deal in India.  The sudden disappearance of Dr. Pachauri from global media and the iron curtain of silence that fell in the west over this truly appalling book may be welcome signs that the global environmental leadership is belatedly beginning to acquire some elementary caution and good sense.

The lack of any intellectual rigor or evidence of rational thought in this book is remarkable.  Sanjay doesn’t think, really; he swims.  When persons of good credentials and backgrounds appear, he accepts their ideas into his worldview.  Criticism and rigorous thinking are just not in his repertoire.  When famous gurus fall at his feet, when glamorous women kneel by the door of his bedroom, Sanjay doesn’t ask many questions — other than, in the case of the women, asking whether this particular one needs him so badly that it is worth suspending his normal vow of chastity.  Sanjay’s views on Himalayan glacier melt are very much like his views on reincarnation and tinfoil hats: intuition tells him that it must be so.

Fundamentally, Sanjay is a person who intuits rather than thinks.  Whatever ideas are accepted and popular around him are the raw materials with which he builds his own worldview and, more importantly, his career.  He is a fixer, a negotiator, adept at finding his path through the accepted ideas and powerful institutions of his time.  Intellectually, spiritually and romantically, Sanjay is a playboy: he’s a lover not a fighter whose goal is to find a comfortable place for himself in the world rather than stage some kind of lonely, adversarial struggle for truth.  Not that he won’t sometimes pose as a lonely individualist — it’s a good way to get dates.

Although it remains unclear whether Pachauri is the Sinclair Lewis or the Babbit of this story, the satirist or the unintentional and unknowing butt, Return to Almora is a vicious and deflating portrait of international civil society and the Great and the Good.  Vapid and unthinkingly fashionable intellectuals and activists drift in and out of international conferences and fancy hotels, propelled on gassy clouds of consensus, chattering like the characters in Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah.”  Professors, business people and officials swirl pointlessly around one another, feeling good about themselves while getting little or nothing done.  There is a great deal of compassion for the poor, but nobody breaks a nail.

Lucky for him, Sanjay never encounters any serious criticism in this book.  No one accuses him of scientific fraud, no one seriously disagrees with his ‘research’, no one takes him to task over the fee structures of his Meditation Huts (or whatever he calls his 400 plus franchised enlightenment outlets).  It seems likely that if controversy ever came Sanjay’s way he would respond badly.  First he’d try lofty, above it all condescension; when that failed to stifle opponents he’d result to angry and unthinking vituperation.  In neither case would he show much talent for detailed, evidence-based argument.  At the end, he would vanish from the scene, looking and sounding hurt, and go off to seek inner peace among the forgiving silence of the Himalayan hills. There, where the Force is strong, he would heal.  The gurus and saddhus would throw themselves at his feet; women would batter down his door; memories of his past incarnations would distract him from unpleasant events; from time to time he would consider ways to help the poor and spread the light.

Let us hope that Rajendra Pachauri’s new and quieter life suits him well.  It is unlikely that the world’s environmentalists will ever again ask him to play a conspicuous part in their affairs.

As for the novel-writing, I’d suggest that he not quit his day job–the Peace Prize he shares with Al Gore is probably all the Norwegian love that Pachauri can expect.

I’m glad I read Return to Almora, but unless the book is the diabolically clever product of a satirical mastermind it will, I very much hope, be the last piece of Pachauri’s fiction that I’ll ever see.  Reading one novel like this could happen to anybody; reading two of them begins to look careless.

But even bracketing off personal anxiety, trying to do one of these posts is a daunting task. The breadth of knowledge on regular display here is conservatively best described as encyclopedic. What can I bring to such an opulent table? Walter tends to focus on the classics of history and philosophy, arguing that we cannot possibly understand the present without properly understanding the Western tradition. I suppose I’d like to try something narrower while still keeping with the general spirit of the project.

I’ve been re-reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita all this week. I haven’t touched the book in over 12 years, during which my memory of it has more or less been completely subsumed by the experience of having watched Stanley Kubrick’s remarkable film version several times. What didn’t quite make it over in the transition from novel to big screen is that which Nabokov is perhaps most trying to achieve in his art—namely a sense that the narrator gives us an unreliable picture of reality. Lolita‘s Humbert is next to impossible to pin down as he veers from defiance to regret to shame over his pedophile instincts, weaving a web of allusions so dense that you begin to wonder if he’s not making up parts of his story for more sinister reasons. (Incidentally, if you plan on taking up Lolita, I very much recommend the annotated version. The notes are very unobtrusively presented, so you can use them as much or as little as you choose.)

The idea of the unreliable narrator is far from unique to Nabokov—it’s arguably been one of the key obsessions of modernist novelists since at least James Joyce. Indeed, the idea that our access to truth and reality is at best indirect has a lengthy pedigree in Western philosophy. And from the earliest times, historians from Thucydides onwards were very conscious that they were, through sound judgment, experience and research, nevertheless telling us stories about how things came to pass.

Yet perhaps as a reaction to the excesses of radical postmodernism, which saw in everything attempts to subjugate and marginalize “the other” and thus set about relativizing and contextualizing every field that it touched, it’s become unfashionable to dwell on these kinds of questions. In the rush to re-canonize the canon of “old dead white males,” a particularly crude attitude to the truth and reality has snuck in through the back door—that the truth plainly exists and that we can all have easy access to it.

I hope I’m not sounding too highfalutin, or indeed too postmodernist. It’s just that these ideas always buzz around in the back of my head whenever a debate arises over the biases of the American mainstream media. I’m not 100% clear on the history of this useless debate, but I believe these biases were first “discovered” by conservatives around the dawn of the popular Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Similar “discoveries” were soon enough made by the other side, and rhetorical battle was joined. This has escalated to the point where we now have an increasingly unhealthy amount of energy being expended by politicians, journalists, and bloggers on what amounts to a baroque game of gotcha.

It needn’t be this way. It’s particular to America that we obsess over the impartiality of our press. Or, to put it another way, it’s particular to America’s press that it takes such pride in claiming to be completely impartial. Either way, it’s not how things work elsewhere in the world. Where there is a free press, you’ll often find different papers catering to different kinds of audiences. Let’s call it an ideological press. In England, The Guardian leans left and The Telegraph leans right. In Germany, Die Welt leans right and Süddeutsche Zeitung leans left. Each country has different restrictive legal frameworks to prevent outright slander and defamation, and the papers strive to write stories they won’t be forced to retract. But apart from that, the papers’ ideological slant is explicit and acknowledged, and it shapes their coverage.

Our ongoing debates over news coverage bias aren’t merely a waste of time, however. There’s something to the moralizing tone and indignant righteousness evident on both sides that feels like it may be worse for the Republic than whatever ill effect a merely ideological press might have. It’s been particularly apparent in the flare-ups all last week over the liberal JournoList listserv. Even if one rejects the breathless insinuations coming from conservatives that the members of JournoList were actually colluding and message-coordinating rather than venting and kibbitzing, there’s something disheartening about the tone of the discussions going on behind closed doors. This is not ideology at work, but rank short-sighted politics—the stirrings of a partisan press.

I only single out the Left here because it was in the news last week. It’s very much a “pox on both their houses” sort of situation. As Andrew Sullivan noted the other day, it’s not that journalists can’t have political sympathies and opinions, but that their attitude towards those in power should be fundamentally one of skepticism. They should never feel they’re part of a team. The clubby nature of Washington DC undermines this skepticism, and the vicious churn in the industry as the old guard publications struggle to retain relevance in a sea of nimble Internet-only startups has caused people to lose their bearings. We’re sure to suffer through scores more inane and spiteful news cycles (like the one kicked off by Andrew Breitbart last week) as this new system organizes itself.

For my part, I’m generally optimistic for the long run. It seems to me that the rise of a partisan press is but a passing phenomenon. It’s not that websites like Breitbart’s will die out, ceasing to cater to the lizard brain of the partisan political junkie. It’s that new organizations will hopefully continue to emerge, merging serious accountable journalism with a lack of shame over ideological slant. At the end of the process, the only casualty will be the old delusion of objectivity. And we, as both consumers and citizens, will be better served by a news industry that will devote less energies to censoring itself and more of its time holding those in power accountable, regardless of party affiliation.

This was not even scratching the surface of literary and intellectual London — no visit to the Reading Room or to Marx’s tomb, no stroll through Bloomsbury (though I did see Virginia Woolf’s entry in the guest book at the Carlyle House), no visit to the Dickens Museum, the new Globe or to countless other places associated with the great people and great minds who placed this city on a level with Athens, Jerusalem and Rome in the annals of western and indeed world civilization.  But it was enough to challenge and sharpen my thinking about what blogging is about, what intellectuals should be up to, and what we are trying to do at The American Interest Online.

Joseph Addison, ur-blogger.

If you go back far enough, all the intellectuals were in the Church.  It’s been frequently noted that during long stretches of the Middle Ages, the nobility and the fighting men thought literacy beneath them — and nobody bothered teaching anything to the common people.  If you were literate, you must be in the church — this belief was so firmly fixed that it was part of the law.  From 1351 on, if you could read (or recite Psalm 51, the Scripture passage usually used for the test), you could plead ‘benefit of clergy’ and either have your case transferred into the (dilatory and merciful) ecclesiastical courts or get off entirely.  The English practice crossed the ocean with the early colonists; Wikipedia asserts that in South Carolina defendants were still pleading benefit of clergy on the eve of the Civil War.

(I would hate to think that it was because literacy was so rare in my native state that this practice survived its elimination in federal courts by sixty years.  One hopes it was South Carolina’s deep reverence for learning that kept this medieval survival alive even after the British got rid of it.)

In any case, during much of western history, the universities were part of the Church and the high offices of state were filled by the clerics who, alone, had the learning to manage the business of government.  The rest of the learned were mostly found in monasteries, partly because before printing became widespread there were so few collections of books in private hands.

What we might now consider free range intellectuals, people like Macchiavelli and Thomas More who made intellectual careers outside the Church, start to pop up in significant numbers with the invention of printing.  The closure of the monasteries in Protestant countries sent scholars and thinkers out to make a living in the wide and bitter world.  Men like Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s famous tutor, in earlier eras probably would have found a niche somewhere inside the ecclesiastical establishment; although thanks to his famous pupil Ascham ended up with a nice clerical living, he never took holy orders.  In England, the break comes in the reign of Henry VIII; when Cardinal Wolsey fell, he was replaced by the layman Thomas More; from that time forward the government of England has largely kept the clergy to the side.

As Thomas Macaulay observed from his comfortable and well upholstered perch in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century saw a revolution in the social and economic position of intellectuals.  At the beginning of that century, there were four ways to earn a gentleman’s living as a thinker or writer: a university fellowship, a clerical ‘living’, a comfortable government place (whether active like Lord Chancellor or honorary like Poet Laureate), or a private post (tutor or librarian in a great noble house).  Men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton navigated this system fairly well; the unattached writers of Fleet Street floundered on the outskirts of destitution, living from hand to mouth and frequently in peril of arrest for outstanding debts.

Samuel Johnson lived through this transition, desperately working to keep body and soul together for many years, angling for and failing to get the patronage of Lord Chesterfield, and at times he was literally homeless.  Arrested for debt in 1756 he did not become truly secure until George III gave him an annual pension worth about $50,000 in today’s money.  Nevertheless, Johnson carved out an independent career as a free lance poet, essayist (like Addison he wrote a blog-like series of essays known as The Rambler) and lexicographer.  From Johnson’s heyday through the middle of the twentieth century, a galaxy of writers and critics were able to support themselves from the commercial proceeds of their work — though not a few endured financial setbacks and uncertainty as harrowing as Johnson’s early life.

A handful of ‘wits’ in London got the ball rolling, and the more I look at their work the more I see the similarities between what they did and what bloggers now do.  Writers like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (occasionally joined by people like Alexander Pope) started writing informal essays and observations about politics, society, the theater, fashion and anything else that caught their fancy.  These essays were handed to the printers and distributed by post and sold to subscribers.  The Tatler, one of the first of these publications, even had a precursor of the comments section; if you paid a little extra you got an additional page on which you could post observations and gossip of your own before mailing the issue on to a friend.

These paleoblogs took the country by storm; they also made money for their authors.  For the first time, English writers could make money based on the popularity of their work with the general public.  As a mass audience developed for contemporary literature and criticism, more and more writers would be able to follow this path, supporting their study and their work by the contributions of their readers.  The rise of the intelligent lay public and its ability to support independent writers and analysts was one of the most important developments in the history of the modern world and in the growth of democracy.  Writers no longer had to please exalted patrons in church or state; with a lively style, keen sight and an instinct for what the public wanted to know, writers and thinkers could make their own way in the world.

It was never particularly easy; nor should it be.  But the eighteenth and nineteenth century saw more and more thinkers and writers finding ways to support their work by engaging with the public.  The proliferation of magazines and book publishers, the gradual move to provide writers better copyright protection, and, when the railroads made travel easier, the rise of the lecture circuit enabled people like Frederick Douglass to enter public debate in new ways.

I’m not going to attempt an economic history of the intellectual in a blog post, but the twentieth century seems to have reversed the trend of the previous two hundred years.  Increasingly as the twentieth century moved on, intellectuals and writers were forced back into the pre-modern pattern.  Poets, novelists, essayists, critics, historians: it became increasingly difficult to sustain any of these vocations outside the universities and the think tanks and university and think tank presidents took over the old task of shaking down the wealthy to subsidize the learned through patronage of various kinds.

There was another way in which the writer was increasingly yoked — not always happily — to institutions.  During the twentieth century, magazine and book publishing inexorably became more businesslike.  To print and distribute a book or a magazine was so expensive that with a handful of noble exceptions only large and well financed companies could succeed.  This gave tremendous power to editors; the editor’s ability to figure out what would sell was the vital spark that kept book and magazine publishers going.  At the limit, writers for magazines like the old Time, Life, Newsweek — and in the Economist today — wrote anonymous copy that was heavily edited into a homogeneous house style.  But even in publications and publishing houses where individual voices were prized, writers were dependent on editors for the opportunity to put their work before the public.

This is not the way it was when Addison and Steele were writing the Spectator.  The writers produced the paper: they decided what went into it, how long each article should be, when it would appear and what it should look like.

Today’s blogger has the same freedom that the progenitors did.  Anybody with a computer and an internet connection can set up a blog; you don’t need the mighty machinery of a powerful media company to get your message out to the world.  Figuring out how to get and keep an audience is as hard as it ever was, and converting public interest into a reliable revenue stream remains dicey.  Nevertheless, it is easier and cheaper to put ideas in front of the public than it has ever been.

What remains to be seen is whether the new media will reverse the decline of the free range intellectual, allowing more creators, writers and thinkers to earn their living from the public, rather than seeking the patronage of institutions.  I hope so; as I wrote in The Last Post, the institutions that support intellectual work in this country are in trouble, and I suspect that the financial bind affecting all levels of government will soon result in some very painful university cutbacks while the great journalistic meltdown will only get worse.

But I also think something vital is lost when a society’s artists and thinkers live on the bounty of established institutions and must negotiate the complicated political and ideological dances such institutions require in order to live.  The quirky, cranky critic who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks is often wrong, but sometimes these people at their rudest and crankiest are pointing to vital truths that the complacent and timeserving cultural bureaucrats and custodians of conventional wisdom cannot see or will not speak.  In revolutionary times like ours we need to hear from the thinkers who won’t be politically house trained, who speak the ugly truths that no decent person would utter, are atrociously rude to the donors and make no secret of their belief that the dean is a hack.

To visit London and poke among the tombs and shrines of long dead writers is to be reminded that the intellectual professions don’t stand above history, judging from on high.  We are shaped by the times we live in, the way we earn our livings, the technology that allows us to reach the public as well as by the changing fashions in ideas.  The economic and social turbulence that is reshaping American life is not going to pass intellectuals by.  Every profession and every trade in America is being transformed; the literary and intellectual professions are going to change in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Here at The American Interest we are going to have to do more than host interesting pieces by insightful people; like everyone else in the business we are going to have to rethink the way that authors and publishers collaborate in this changing world and find new ways of connecting with the public.  We will be writing about the many faceted and accelerating changes that are remaking the world of the American thinker, but we will also be trying to be a part of those changes and to follow as best we can in the footsteps of those earlier generations who repeatedly reinvented and reformed the relationship of thinkers and writers to society even as they wrote books that we still read with astonishment and delight after hundreds of years.

I grew up wanting to be a writer, and have been trying my hands at different writing forms since I was a kid.  At the tender age of ten I made my debut as a public intellectual and journalist; with my brothers, my sister and the kids in our neighborhood (and a lot of support from my parents) I launched my first journalistic venture: The Neighborhood Gazette.  This was a more or less biweekly newspaper that came out during the school year; we produced it on the mimeograph machine at the Episcopal church where my father served as rector and we sold it door to door through the neighborhood at a nickel a copy.  After a couple of years I turned it over to my brother Chris, and he left it in such a flourishing state that both of my other siblings were able to have a year or two at the helm.  (Apparently, the Gazette is available through a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Those folks are pretty thorough, is all I can say.)

Journalism was a lot of fun then.  First, we made money.  As the revenue rolled in from our sales force, we spread the take (almost all change) across the living room floor and sorted and wrapped the coins.  We set aside money for mimeograph stencils (sold by the ‘quire’ of 24), paper (sold then as now by the ‘ream’ of 500 sheets) and ink.  We took the rest to the bank and when enough had accumulated — usually between fifty and a couple of hundred dollars — we turned it over to the local public library to buy books for children.

Second, we got a lot of attention.  People in the neighborhood loved the paper.  Our features like “Baby of the Week” and “Pet of the Week” were huge hits.  One week we had a mistake in the “Recipe of the Week” — and my family’s phone number was inundated with calls from neighbors to complain.  As the paper got older and more successful (our circulation eventually hit 600 copies an issue), the local ‘grown-up’ newspaper started quoting our editorials.  Feature writers in North Carolina and surrounding states figured out that a kids’ newspaper was a perfect Sunday supplement story; articles about our paper were soon popping up all over.

We also got access.  Celebrities like Bob Hope and Richard Chamberlain (then at the peak of his fame as TV’s Dr. Kildare) came to town; the Neighborhood Gazette got face time.  I published an editorial calling on the state to raise money for education by taxing bubble gum; the governor wrote a letter in response.  (This brilliant policy idea, like so many of my innovative suggestions over the years, has still not been made law.)

Third, we built a team.  A substantial fraction of the kids in our part of town ended up on the staff.  The main requirement to be on staff was that you had to contribute three short news items each issue for our ever-popular “Neighbors in the News” feature: whose grandparents were coming to visit, whose dog went to the vet, and so forth.  (The best item that ever ran in this column was from one of our crack Glen Lennox reporters.  As best I remember, it said simply that “Two birds built their nest in Peachy Wickers’ bra.”  Peachy, apparently, had left her bra on the clothesline a little too long.)  The weekend of publication we’d meet for Kool-Aid and cookies (thanks, Mom!) and set forth in groups of two to sell the paper door to door.

Fun, fame, fortune and friends: what’s not to like?  I went on to start what still, after forty years, is the newspaper of record at my old high school — and here I am, blogging and writing articles and books almost half a century since The Neighborhood Gazette first saw the light of day.

At no stage along the way, however, did I ever realize just how much of my writing life would be wrapped up in book reviews.  Even back in the Gazette days I was writing plenty of book reports — Mrs. Blaine, the matriarchal ruler of the fifth grade at Glenwood Elementary was a particular fan of this genre — and as an English major I would go on to write many term papers that were, essentially, review essays; it never occurred to me to think of this work as writing.  Writing was novels, poetry, articles.  Book reports were homework.

Ever since I started writing for money (and as Samuel Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything else”) book reviews have played a much larger role in my career than I ever imagined.  Other peoples’ reviews of my books helped make me visible as a writer; my reviews of books by other people take up huge amounts of time.  For several years now I have contributed “capsule reviews” on books on the United States to Foreign Affairs.  That means that five times a year I write five mini-reviews of roughly 200 words each.  Additionally, I usually write a “review essay” — like the one on the Remnick book — once or twice a year for Foreign Affairs and from time to time I contribute book reviews to other journals and newspapers.

This turns out to be hard work.  The sheer amount of reading involved is daunting, to say the least.  Fortunately ‘books on the United States’ is a broad category; anything from Revolutionary and colonial history to the Obama administration’s national security strategy is fair game.  Over the years I’ve thrown in a novel or two as well as literary biographies that I feel cast light on issues of interest to Foreign Affairs readers.  One is always aware, too, that Foreign Affairs reaches a large international audience and so one looks for books that would help foreigners understand us better.  There is never a time when I don’t have some Foreign Affairs books in my ‘to read’ pile, and both my office and my home reading tables are always covered by the masses of books that come in to be considered for each issue.

Reviewing books on this scale is morally more complicated than I expected.  Does the eminent person who has written a forgettable book get the slot, or does it go to the promising unknown?  If someone has written a truly bad book, is it better to pass over it in silence or to tan its sorry hide pour encourager les autres?  Do you choose a mediocre book on a vital subject over a fresh and original book on a less important topic?  Capsule reviews are difficult to write at all, and even more difficult to write fairly.  200 words is not a lot of room to tell readers roughly what to expect in the book while also rendering judgment.

Review essays present another set of difficulties.  In my review of The Bridge, for example, I was confronted with alternatives that are familiar to many reviewers.  Did it make more sense to write an essay that was entirely centered on explicating and sometimes criticizing Remnick’s take on Obama, or should I use The Bridge as a springboard for offering the Mead take on Obama?  This was easier to resolve than it sometimes is; one of the chief merits of Remnick’s book is the way it stimulates readers to rethink their views of the president.

But the real difficulty that besets me every time I review a book is that as an author myself I know just how much blood and toil goes into every book.  I do my level best to read all these books with the appropriate attention and care, but it is incredibly difficult for a critic to do full justice to an author.  I’d rather give a bad grade to a student than write an unfavorable review of a book any day; even bad authors have put much more work into a book that the best of students pours into a course.  Also, as an author, I know just how annoying many of the standard book review tropes can be.  Most reviews are written by people much less knowledgeable than the author on the subject at hand; I for example do not know nearly as much about James Knox Polk as Robert Merry, author of the recent (and excellent) Polk biography titled A Country of Vast Designs.  Yet the tendency for the reviewer to chide an author for failing to attend sufficiently to this or that small point, or in some other way to suggest that the author has somehow failed to match the omniscient reviewer’s knowledge and perspective is almost irresistible.  I do my best to resist it, but I am sure that there are many authors who can show you exactly how I’ve failed.

We didn’t have a book review section in The Neighborhood Gazette.  We ran fiction; one of the paper’s main features were the back page serializations of my brother Chris’ adventure epics (“Eeney Meany and the Yo-ho-hos” as Chuckleena fought the forces of evil in, I think, Alaska, or the jungle thriller “Kimbu and Tonga”).  I suppose we might have run book reviews if more of our neighbors had been writing books, but even then book reports seemed more like homework and less like fun than the other things that went into journalism.  Writing about the annual kite flying contest (supported by one of our major advertisers, the Glen Lennox Pharmacy) was fun; writing a book report was work.

There are times when I still feel that way, but increasingly I’ve accepted my fate as a serial book review author.  You get a lot of free books this way and, when you find something that is really first rate, it can be very rewarding to share that discovery with the world.  Once or twice I’ve read something while preparing my capsules at Foreign Affairs that was so outstanding that I was able to persuade the editors to let me praise it at greater length in a review essay.  And sometimes you are able to give an interesting and talented young writer a boost.  Ron Steele’s review of my first book in The New Republic almost 25 years ago did that for me, and I’m always glad to have the chance to send that kind of good energy down the line.

But the best thing about being a serial reviewer turns out to be something unexpected but wonderful: you have two first class excuses for turning people down who ask you to blurb their new book.  First, you can legitimately plead that you are too busy — there is never a time when I’m not inundated with books or pressed by a review deadline.  And second, you can point out that if you blurb a book, you won’t be able to review it later, observing that the review will probably do the book more good.

One of the problems connected with the decline of newspapers today is the gradual disappearance of the space for book reviews.  Free standing book review sections used to be common; now they are rare.  As independent bookstores gradually fade away (Washington’s Politics and Prose is on the auction block), and as even the chain megastores face the onslaught of electronic book publishing, it’s getting harder and harder for readers to have chance encounters with books they have never heard of but might like to read.  At The American Interest Online we’ll be thinking about what we can do to bring good books to readers’ attention.  Your suggestions are welcome.

Generally, I’m a sucker for biography.  This isn’t because I believe in the ‘great man’ theory of history and think that the decisions and character of certain individuals determine the flow of history as a whole.  That’s not what I get from biography, even from the biography of great world historical figures like Winston Churchill.  As often as not, it is the flow of history as a whole that makes great individuals, or gives them the circumstances that make them more or less great.  If Churchill had died in 1938 he would be largely forgotten today, seen at best as a brilliant but erratic and fatally flawed politician much like his father.  If Abraham Lincoln had lived out his second term, it’s quite possible that history would remember him with less reverence than it does now.  The scandals, quarrels and failures of Reconstruction might well have tarnished his image, and Lincoln’s instincts to treat the defeated (white) south kindly might look less like charity and more like racist solidarity with fellow whites against newly freed slaves.   Had Mikhail Gorbachev been assassinated by some furious communist in 1990 he might be revered today all over the world, and people would still be saying that if Gorbachev the Great had only survived, Russia would never have descended into post-communist chaos and misery — and he would have steered the country into a bright, democratic future.

Charles II arriving in Rotterdam for his restoration in 1660.

In any case, I note that even the most fanatical adherents to the ‘Great Man’ theory (yes, Thomas Carlyle, I’m thinking of you), spend a lot of time writing about circumstances and forces that act on their heroes.  Carlyle might be right that the French Revolution would have proceeded differently if Mirabeau had lived longer or Lafayette been less of a blockhead, but the whole grandeur of his extraordinary history is his depiction (in terms often taken from classical epic) of the more-than-human forces that were shaking France to its foundations, dissolving the old order, and forcing people to grope blindly and frantically about in search of some new foundation on which they could build.

Biography isn’t about our mastery of history; it is about living in history, being shaped by as well as shaping culture and events, about charting paths through a wilderness, about living at the intersection of historical forces and trying to make do.  In that sense, Charles II is an excellent biographical subject.  Born heir to the English throne, his earliest years were lived in the luxury of the cavalier court of Charles I.  That paradise was lost as the royalists were defeated in the English Civil War; Charles received the news of his father’s execution when his chaplain entered the room, hesitated and addressed the exiled teenager as ‘Your Majesty.’  Invited to Scotland (where his grandfather and his great-grandmother Mary Queen of Scots had once reigned), Charles led an invasion of England to regain the throne; defeated in the Battle of Worcester, he climbed an oak tree to hide from pursuit, and then made his way across England in disguise until he found a ship that would take him to safety over the seas.

For most of the next decade, as Cromwell made England respected, Charles was an embarrassment to the sovereigns of Europe.  They needed to deal diplomatically with Cromwell, and his government seemed stable and lasting.  At the same time, the execution of anointed sovereigns and the exile of their heirs were not acts of which the guild of kings could approve.  Charles wandered, poor and restless and without prospects, among his cousins, claiming the kingship but often living on air — a kind of seventeenth century Willie Loman living on a shoeshine and a smile.

Cromwell died; his son was weak.  The English, weary of religious quarrels and unsettled institutions, called Charles back to the throne in 1660.  Many of those who recalled him were among Cromwell’s closest associates; men who connived at and profited from his father’s execution would never be far from Charles, and the thought that the mercurial nation could change its mind again and send him packing was never far from his thoughts.  Crowds of the sick crowded round him to receive the ‘king’s touch’ reputed to heal (especially in cases of scrofula); courtiers plotted with republicans and foreign ambassadors to subvert him, or to bar his controversial brother from the succession to the throne.  His cousin Louis XIV was busy constructing the elaborate court ceremonial that would make the French king the most admired and feared figure in Europe; as an impoverished royal hanger on and later as a sometimes ally and sometimes rival to Louis Charles would always keep one eye on the French court where his mother and his sister lived.

It is perhaps not surprising that Charles had a passion for the theater, and the period of his Restoration remains one of the most prolific (though not always the greatest) in the history of the English theater.  Charles’ interest was heightened by the newly introduced custom of having young women rather than boys play the female parts on stage.  Many of Charles’ long and short term amours, including the famous Nell Gwyn, got their start on the stage and he always had a soft spot in his heart for ‘bad boy’ courtiers who played their roles to the hilt.

His intellectual background was as interesting and varied as his life story.  Educated originally in the high Anglican atmosphere of his father’s court, he would later be powerfully affected by the Catholic faith of his French mother Henrietta Maria.  At the same time he knew and admired Thomas Hobbes — who served briefly as his tutor before Henrietta Maria figured out just what Hobbes believed; once on the throne Charles supported the foundation of the Royal Society, today the oldest and most prestigious scientific society in the world.

Charles was a sea king; not always successful in his wars, he had an extraordinary grasp of the role of sea power in his time.  It was under Charles that New York was taken from the Dutch; the diarist Samuel Pepys was one of his naval officials and thanks to Pepys we know more about the admiralty under Charles than about the inner workings of any great institution of the day.  But for Charles, there was no such thing as terra firma in politics.  He knew that his throne was no steadier than the deck of warship, and his intense feel for the subtle movement under the surface and for the possibility of violent storms rising up out of a calm sky helped him survive for twenty five years in a role which killed his father and from which his brother was expelled after three short years.

Uglow’s biography is one of those wonderful books that brings an era alive.  She helps you not only keep track of what the main characters are doing (no easy task when in that irritatingly English way the main characters keep changing their names; Edward Hyde becomes the Earl of Clarendon; Thomas Osborne becomes Viscount Latimer and then Earl of Danby en route to his full glory as the Duke of Leeds) but to help you understand what moved them.  Charles II, whose mask of easy geniality concealed deep distrust and many secret plans, is one of history’s enigmas.  Uglow does much to make him comprehensible.

But there are reasons to read A Gambling Man.  The Restoration was a vital time in English constitutional and political history.  The ‘tories’ and the ‘whigs’ both trace their roots back to the factions in Charles’ parliament and court; when the American founding fathers debated independence and the form of the constitution the events of Charles’ reign were much on their minds.  Names like the ‘whig martyrs’ Algernon Sidney and William Russell were on the lips of American Civil War orators as both sides in our Civil War sought to claim the mantle of liberty and legitimacy by ransacking English history for suitable examples and models.  The intellectual and political ferment of that era shaped American culture and our political battles today continue in patterns visible then.  The fight, for example, of an outraged and patriotic ‘country party’ of commonsensical English patriots against the dissolute, anti-national and out of touch court is the template for today’s populist revolt against the ‘inside-the-beltway’ elite.  The fights between the king and the House of Commons over budgets and foreign policy not only provided the context in which Americans learned to think about politics and constitutional law; they illustrate patterns of power and events that enable readers to look at politics today with fresh and sharper eyes.

Old books, or new books about old times: it’s hard to think of better, more useful ways to pass the time.