Schuster, 294 pp, £18.99.

            Post-Cold-War history began with two broken promises. The world's population eagerly anticipated a "peace dividend": the channeling of a large share of the vast resources formerly wasted on "defense" into domestic reconstruction, poverty alleviation, and humanitarian foreign aid. It didn't happen. When the international Communist conspiracy faded away, other spurious rationales were found for continuing advanced weapons development and maintaining hundreds of American military bases around the world. Defense spending has not missed a beat in the United States, which has few manufacturing industries left, a decaying transportation system, a colossal trade deficit, and an unhealthy, poorly-educated, economically insecure population, but which spends more money on "defense" than all other countries combined.

            Less explicitly, perhaps, but just as eagerly, many people also looked forward to a democratic dividend. "The natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy," proclaimed a Reagan-era bestseller by the American social theorist Michael Novak. The citizens of countries liberated from Communism would, with moral and material support from the Cold War's magnanimous victors, construct or restore democratic institutions and free markets. Third World societies, no longer caught between rival superpowers, would begin to receive primarily economic rather than security assistance from the US and could therefore develop without distorting military or ideological pressures. It seemed as though a yoke had been removed from the world's neck.

But not for long. The "Washington Consensus" replaced the Cold War as a constraint - a "straitjacket," as Thomas Friedman breezily acknowledged - on political development, more subtle but no less distorting than superpower rivalry. The IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization - agents, one might say, of an international capitalist conspiracy - have helped shape a new and troublingly limited form of democracy. In this fiercely brilliant essay on the global political landscape at the beginning of the new millennium, John Kampfner, a longtime foreign correspondent, former editor of the London magazine New Statesman, and now head of Index on Censorship, calls it variously "corrupted democracy," "authoritarian democracy," or "controlled democracy."

            Many, perhaps most, advanced societies today, Kampfner argues, operate on the basis of a "pact," an implicit bargain between government and society. In exchange for consumer goods and private freedoms - to travel; to marry whomever, live wherever, and read whatever they wish; to do business without interference from government regulations or labor unions; and to pay few or no taxes - the rich and the middle class have agreed to abdicate politics. The government keeps opposition parties, the mass media, and academic or journalistic muckrakers on a very short leash. Surveillance waxes; civil liberties wane. Transparency, accountability, and citizen initiative are sacrificed to order, security, and prosperity.

            The prototype and showcase of authoritarian democracy is Singapore. The tiny city-state has an extraordinarily high per capita income, without the pockets of destitution that disfigure the US and UK and without those countries' inequitable and underfunded education, pension, and health care systems. Government agencies are efficient and honest; violent crime and business fraud are rare. Travel is unhindered; technical and managerial innovations are welcomed; shopping is world-class. Streets and public buildings are clean as a whistle and neat as a pin. Just a month ago, the popular website New Geography placed Singapore at the top of its list of "The World's Smartest Cities."

            There is, naturally, a large "on the other hand." Nothing is allowed that the government fears might threaten public order or social stability; and the government's sensitivities on this score are very delicate indeed. Spitting, chewing gum, yelling, or failing to flush a toilet in a public place; overstaying your visa; depicting (never mind engaging in) oral or anal sex; rashly employing irony or sarcasm; and, most important, criticizing the government in ways the government deems not constructive - all these are swiftly and severely punished. Petty offenders are fined or caned; overzealous opposition politicians or trade unionists tend to be imprisoned for long stretches. Indiscreet newspapers or blogs are served with defamation suits, tried in government-friendly courts that generally oblige by assessing substantial damages. Indeed, so frequent are these suits and so substantial the awards that all the newspapers in Singapore are now government-controlled. International media like the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review have taken this lesson to heart and now watch their step very carefully. As Kampfner observes, Singapore "requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a very good material life."

            No other society, of course, has precisely reproduced this combination of economic dynamism and political/cultural paternalism. But many are trying, particularly China. Chinese officials and businessmen at every level declare to Kampfner that the "Singapore model" is more suitable for their country than Western liberal democracy, with the latter's wide scope for dissent and its panoply of individual rights against the state. Ties between the two countries are cordial and expanding. Singapore recruits young talent from China, and China sends hundreds of Party bureaucrats each year to learn public administration in Singapore.

            Kampfner, who was born in Singapore but has since reported from every continent, contends that more is in play here than shared East Asian or "Confucian" values. Even the Western businessmen and Western-educated returnees he spoke to agreed that "an authoritarian regime, as long as it was stable, provides an attractive proposition for the creation of wealth." Increasingly this trade-off - political freedom for economic growth - is being pursued in Russia, India, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States as well.

            The key to this development is the emergence of a cautious, disenchanted middle class. Political theorists in the West have generally assumed that democratic freedoms grow in tandem with a middle class strong enough to hold the state to account and diverse enough to require political competition, which in turn requires freedom of speech. But democracy has been getting a bad name among its purported bearers, taking the rap for political chaos and economic stagnation. In China, the Communist Party has largely succeeded in convincing the country's middle class that the freedoms demanded by students and dissident intellectuals at Tiananmen Square would have led to a welter of factional conflict, scaring away foreign investment and spiking economic growth. In Russia, democracy is associated with the Wild West atmosphere of the Yeltsin years, when market reforms created a cohort of billionaires as well as mass unemployment and a collapse of social services. India's middle class, revolted by the corruption and demagoguery of mass politics (though apparently not by the horrifying deprivations of the masses), has largely forsworn political engagement (apart from bribing politicians), hoping for a strongman who will maintain public order through a combination of patronage and Hindu nationalism - bread and circuses. In the United Arab Emirates, there is fabulous natural wealth and no desperate masses but no democratic tradition either, and no democratic prospects. Except for the country's savagely exploited immigrant laborers, the yoke sits lightly, but it is not, even in theory, self-government.

            The West too is undergoing what Kampfner calls a "democratic recession." In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi's popularity is due partly to his ownership of much of the country's mass media and his influence over the rest. But it's also partly an expression of public disillusionment with politics and a desire to be left alone by the state - above all by the tax collector. England under Thatcher and Blair has seen an exponential increase in technological surveillance and a steady decline in Parliamentary and judicial control of the executive branch, especially the police and intelligence agencies. Here the pretext was not growth but security: terrorist threats, first from the IRA and then from al-Qaeda. But London's centrality to international finance and its hospitality to rich foreigners with shady pasts have also helped to erode England's already weak traditions of free speech, journalistic muckraking, and official whistle-blowing. (Perhaps because of Kampfner's long residence in the UK, this chapter is particularly scathing.)

            As for the United States, the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties and the signal failure of Congress, the media, or the judiciary to resist it are already well-known. Kamfpner misses an opportunity here, discussing only the national security rationale and failing to bring out the deep-rooted hostility of the contemporary Republican Party, wholly devoted as it is to the interests of corporations and Wall Street, to openness in government. For Republicans, 9/11 was an opportunity to shield the tax and regulatory apparatuses, no less than the national security one, from media scrutiny and citizen challenge. They pursued that opportunity relentlessly, and with near-total success.

            Freedom for Sale convincingly describes the unwritten "pact" between the middle and upper classes of most countries and their governments: freedom to make, keep, and spend money in exchange for the freedom to question authority. Is this a good or bad bargain? Conscientious journalist that he is, Kampfner airs both sides. The proponents of the "Singapore model" (they are not all Singaporeans) admonish us that "understanding the limits on freedom is what makes freedom possible. The greater good is impossible without some constraint on individualism." The Founding Father himself, Lee Kuan Yew, is given space to expound his philosophy: "At the end of the day, we offer what every citizen wants - a good life, security, a good education, and a future for their children. That is good governance."

            But what is "a good life"? Lee clearly thinks that a life free of want and danger is good enough, and he is confident that most Asians will agree with him. Westerners may high-mindedly cite Aristotle: "Man is by nature a political animal"; or Pericles: "We Greeks do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is minding his own business. We say that he has no business." Stirring words, but as Kampfner shows, even Westerners pay them no more than lip service these days. Example is the best argument, so perhaps Westerners who wish to help those brave Asians struggling for a more participatory democracy should begin at home.

                                                            [END]

            As is well known, when Zhou En-lai was asked about the significance of the French Revolution, he replied: "It's too soon to say." It happened, after all, only two centuries ago. Is it too soon to grasp the significance of Communism, which expired two decades ago? No doubt it is, but that does not absolve us from trying. Success in historical interpretation, as in pretty much everything else, is merely the end of a long string of failures.

            The interpretation of any institution, movement, or practice must address certain questions: What problems did it come into being to solve? How did it propose to solve them? Did circumstances make for a fair trial? What can we learn from its success or failure? About Communism in particular, further questions arise: What is the relation, if any, between Marxist theory and Leninist practice? How much did national history and psychology shape the character of individual Communist regimes? What exactly about Communism did its opponents, especially the United States, oppose?

            David Priestland's The Red Flag does not try to give anything like a definitive answer to these questions. Priestland is a splendid storyteller with a fascinating story to tell - one might call it "the inner history of Communism." This is not to say that The Red Flag is, except in passing, insider history - i.e., an account of the concealed workings of the upper layers of Communist societies. It is not Kremlinology or Beijingology. It is, rather, a history of Communism as the alternating progress and retreat of each of the forms or incarnations of the Communist idea.

            According to Priestland's typology, there were three distinct strains within the vast body of Communist ideology. Romantic Communism emphasized solidarity, creativity, emancipation, and self-expression. This was the anarchist (or hippie) strain: visionary and utopian, interested in art, nature, sexual freedom - in a word, happiness; but also Promethean and rebellious. Rousseau, Shelley, Saint-Simon, the early Marx, William Morris, and Emma ("If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution") Goldman embodied the type, along with the soixante-huitards of Paris and Prague.

            Radical Communists were more concerned with righteousness than happiness. They were militant, disciplined, ascetic, egalitarian. Like the Romantics, they were anti-bureaucratic, but they prized virtue more than imagination, sacrifice more than fulfillment. Theirs was a politics of moral heroism, of which the Puritans, the Jacobins, the Paris Commune, the early Bolsheviks, and Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were examples.

            Modernist ("modernizing" might have been better, since no reference to aesthetic Modernism is intended) Communism emphasized neither happiness nor virtue but efficiency. It cultivated administrative and technical expertise, appealed to material incentives rather than ideological fervor, and preferred a stable, predictable environment to continual mass-mobilization and self-criticism. Since modernizing Communists were, by definition, faceless bureaucrats, we may leave individual members of this species in their anonymity.

            This is an extremely useful set of categories, and Priestland wields it skillfully, as in this capsule summary of Communism's twentieth-century vicissitudes:

     Once Communists were in power, Romantic ambitions were rapidly overshadowed by technocracy and revolutionary fervor, though in practice even these proved difficult to reconcile. ... Modernist Marxism was an ideology of technocratic economic development - of the educated expert, the central plan, and discipline. It offered a vision that appealed to the scores of technicians and bureaucrats educated by the new institutes and universities. Radical Marxism, in contrast, was a Marxism of the mobilized masses, of rapid "leaps forward" to modernity, of revolutionary enthusiasm, mass-meeting democracy, and a rough-and-ready equality. It could also be a Marxism of extreme violence - of struggles against "enemies," whether capitalists, so-called "kulaks" (rich peasants), intellectuals, and party bureaucrats. ...

     Each form of Marxism had its particular advantages and disadvantages for Communists. Radical Marxism could call forth deeds of self-sacrifice, inspiring heroic feats of productivity in the absence of markets and money incentives. However, by encouraging persecution of "class enemies," it could bring division, chaos and violence. ... Modernist Marxism, in contrast, established the stability necessary to embark on rational and planned economic modernization. But it could also be uninspiring and, more worryingly for an ostensibly revolutionary regime, it created bureaucracies ruled by experts.

            The progress of Communism within each country appears in this perspective as a series of vast oscillations sometimes slow and gradual, sometimes sudden and violent, among these three poles: the visionary, the ideological, and the pragmatic. Faced with the everyday problems of economic development and social control, the visionary impulse fades, and the other two predominate. Eventually, as Weber foresaw, the iron cage of bureaucracy entraps its radical antagonist. And then, under the dull crust of bureaucratic rationality, the seeds of a new vision begin to germinate.

            However suspicious one may be of neat schemes, this one does seem to fit the facts rather well. The apparently chaotic shifts of the Soviet and Chinese party line, and the factional struggles within their European, Asian, and African satellites, become more intelligible when related to each society's greater or lesser need at a given moment for stability or mobilization. Of course, one must qualify that formulation: it is not the society's real needs that are in question so much as the perception by ruling elites of what is needed to maintain social control. Even less than in capitalist countries were the population of Communist countries encouraged to voice their own needs.

            So, for example, Priestland plausibly sees the middle decades of the USSR ending in an uneasy truce, embodied in that strange hybrid, "high Stalinism." "Throughout the 1930s the regime had oscillated between the militant desire to transform society and a willingness to live with society as it was." That tension continued, but "the Terror was the last time the USSR experienced such an intrusive effort to force ideological unity on the party and society as a whole. It also marked the end of populist attacks on officialdom, [while] labour discipline laws restored the power of managers and technocrats." Thus did "the system known as 'high Stalinism' - highly repressive, xenophobic, and hierarchical" emerge from the tumultuous 1930s.

            We are now, in 1989, celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Communism's demise. Priestland has no very compelling explanation of why it ended when it did, but he is emphatic that "Communist rule imploded, not from pressure from without but as a result of an internal non-violent revolution, staged by the elite of the Communist Party itself." Just as one man - Lenin - launched Soviet Communism by wagering (unsuccessfully) that intensified ideological radicalism would produce economic modernity, so one man - Gorbachev - doomed Soviet Communism by wagering (unsuccessfully) that relaxing ideological radicalism would finally produce economic modernity. Russians and East Europeans owe Gorbachev their freedom; Americans owe him the end of the Cold War; and everyone everywhere owes him the satisfaction of seeing Jeane Kirkpatrick's celebrated theory of totalitarianism's permanent stasis shown up as utter nonsense.

            The Red Flag is by no means a thesis-ridden book. Priestland keeps national and regional stories from four continents running smoothly on parallel tracks. He is good at set-pieces, like Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin and Brezhnev's dithering over Prague Spring. The book is studded with colorful and revealing anecdotes and illustrations (including a marvelous collection of propaganda posters). Jokes get their due, mordantly subversive humor (subversive of Communism, that is) being one of Communism's most enduring legacies.

            Most rewarding is Priestland's deft use of cultural materials to set a scene or evoke an era. Every few pages a piquant, illuminating discussion of some obscure or famous novel, story, memoir, play, movie, or building propels the narrative forward. The range of these materials is enormous: the Nazi and Soviet pavilions glowering at each other across the "Avenue of Peace" in the Paris International Exhibition of 1937; the films of Pudovkin and Eisenstein; the little-known French Enlightenment drama The Last Judgment of Kings by Sylvain Maréchal and the 19^th-century Georgian novel Parricide, which inspired Stalin; pre-revolutionary classics by Chernyshevskii (What Is To Be Done?) and Lu Xun ("The Diary of a Madman") and socialist-realist bestsellers (Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered); the Constructivist sculpture of Tatlin and the "birthday-cake" architectural monstrosities of high Stalinism; a succession of Soviet box-office hits, from Circus to The Blonde Around the Corner to Repentance; Brezhnev-era satires like Kundera's The Joke and Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights; the memoirs of Milovan Djilas and Evgenia Ginzburg; Man of Iron, the Plastic People of the Universe, Red Dawn, and much else. It is quite a pageant.

            And what did it all mean? Priestland is right to frame his epic tale with the myth of Prometheus. The socialist impulse, like the Enlightenment, descends from the Titan's rebellion against the tyranny of Zeus, who wished to keep humankind in subjection and ignorance. The three elements of the Prometheus story - compassion, knowledge, and revolt against arbitrary authority - were communism's original inspiration.

            How, then, did this noblest of impulses produce a universally loathed tyranny? The neoliberal answer is that capitalism had already abolished arbitrary authority, at least in principle, and that the rebels, failing to understand this, invented a new kind, which they tried to impose on the Free World. They failed and are now themselves happily liberated, subject to nothing and no one except the sovereign market. Knowledge is available to anyone who can pay for it; compassion is an individual, non-political matter; and there is nothing to rebel against.

            In most of the world, and not only the more fortunate parts, this answer is accepted. If it is true - if capitalism has indeed solved the problems that communism came into being to address - then communism is truly dead, and one chapter of history, at least, is indeed at an end. But it is, perhaps, too soon to say.

                                                            [END]

Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err Is Human by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan. Bloomsbury Press, 294 pp, $26.

The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life by Len Fisher. Basic Books,

            246 pp, $22.95.

            All of us have asked ourselves: "Why do other people often make such odd decisions?" The more honest among us go on to ask: "Why do I often make such odd decisions?" Freud was once thought to have some answers, but Freudian theory is now in deep eclipse. Currently, three of the foremost contenders for success in explaining our species' folly and weirdness are game theory, complexity theory, and evolutionary psychology. Each of these three lively and well-written books offers an introduction to one of those new approaches to human strangeness.

            Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Predictioneer's Game is a profoundly irritating book. This, I hasten to say, has nothing to do with the book's quality. It is full of stimulating examples and clear explanations. Nor is it the author's personality: Bueno de Mesquita is genial and - even though most of the book's case studies tell of the triumphs of his consulting company - not at all self-important. But he has done the (to me) unforgivable: he has challenged one of my cherished beliefs. I am a moralist; and he suggests, with distressing plausibility, that moralists are superfluous.

            The author is an expert practitioner of game theory. Faced with any problem -  Bueno de Mesquita's assignments have included getting a corporate client off a legal hook; helping a retiring CEO engineer the selection of a successor; predicting the outcome of the Oslo negotiations between Israel and the PLO; picking the next Chinese or Pakistani head of state; persuading the North Koreans to eliminate their nuclear weapons; saving the earth from global warming - the game theorist asks four questions. Who has an interest in the decision? What outcome does each of these people want? How important is it to each of them? How much influence can each one exert? Each of these questions is given a numerical answer, the numbers are plugged into an algorithm, then fed into a computer, and the result, however counterintuitive, is what will happen.

The game theorist does not and must not ask: What should happen? The premise of game theory is that "people won't cooperate or coordinate with each other unless it is in their individual interest. No one in the game-theory world willingly takes a personal hit just to help someone out ... we're [all] looking out for numero uno." Generosity, solidarity, self-sacrifice - not to mention an overmastering passion for beauty - do not seem to exist in the "game-theory world." Presumably they would queer the algorithms.

The algorithms seem to work, though. Bueno de Mesquita claims an astonishing success rate for his predictions and negotiating strategies, and I believe him. Perhaps we idealists should bite the bullet, pool our pennies, and hire him to figure out how to give humanity's moral evolution a nudge.

Game theory fits neatly into classical economic theory, with its axioms of rational choice, utility maximization, and homo economicus. Evolutionary psychology has complicated this picture. "Classical economics," Michael and Ellen Kaplan write in Bozo Sapiens, "has left out the concept of the norm : the social constraints that keep us from acting any old how. Even in aggregate, people have assumptions about the right way to behave - assumptions not purely rational." In a "social enterprise" - and what isn't? - "notions like fairness and purpose can skew the calculations of utility." There is, it appears, something the Kaplans call "strong rationality: an intrinsic human willingness to sacrifice personal advantage in order to reward the kind and punish the unkind. It is, and probably always has been, the force that makes informal economic life possible." Hmm ... maybe we moralists aren't completely useless after all.

But although Bozo Sapiens gives us humans credit for at least some right feeling, it is pretty hard on our frequent failures of right thinking. "Error is pervasive: it seeps into thought, word, and deed," they observe; and in response they offer a compendium of common fallacies that picks up where Aristotle's celebrated handbook On Sophistical Refutations leaves off. Thanks to evolutionary theory, though, they can do more than scold and shake their heads over the perennial spectacle of "basic stupidity." They can, with tact and humor, go some way toward explaining it.

Len Fisher's The Perfect Swarm doesn't worry much about human selfishness or human stupidity. In fact, it doesn't seem at first to be much concerned with humans at all. But after reviewing some fascinating research about the group activities of ants, bees, and locusts, Fisher makes intriguing connections to the behavior of human crowds, using a new branch of mathematics called "complexity theory." A final chapter, "Simple Rules for a Complex World," demonstrates that statistics don't always lie, and sometimes even tell important truths.

                                                [END]

              "(Anti-)Imperialism" - Platypus Forum - Nov. 13, 2009

            I'm going to address a slightly different question from the ones proposed for tonight's discussion: namely, what is the purpose of American foreign policy? Immediately some of you will object: the purpose? Surely there's more than one? Isn't it more true, in fact, to say that there's a different purpose in every situation?

            Yes, of course. If the purpose of invading Iraq was to secure control of the region's vast energy resources, then the purpose of invading Vietnam must have been different, since Vietnam has no (or few) energy resources. But any useful explanation must have a certain level of generality. The point is to find the principle, or the story line, in light of which all or most of the facts make sense.

            The academic and journalistic mainstream has no trouble making sense of American foreign policy. All other nations, they tell us, act out of self-interest; America alone acts out of idealism. We may have made mistakes, but our purpose has always been to support freedom, democracy, and human rights wherever they are endangered. Here are a few typical specimens of this view, which is often called "American exceptionalism."

            First, a column in the New York Times from September 1974 by a liberal commentator, William Shannon, reflecting on the Vietnam War:

For a quarter century, the United States has been trying to do good, encourage political liberty, and promote social justice in the Third World. But in Latin America, where we have traditionally been a friend and protector, and in Asia, where we have made the most painful sacrifices of our young men and our wealth, our relationships have mostly proved to be a recurring source of sorrow, waste, and tragedy. ... Our benevolence, intelligence, and hard work have proved not to be enough.

            Here's a very influential columnist, Joseph Kraft, a few years later: "The debacle in Vietnam showed that the United States has broken with its traditional policy of selflessly supporting the good guys."

            For a more recent example, here is the first sentence of a scholarly article on the Bush Doctrine in the prestigious academic journal International Security: "The promotion of democracy is central to the George W. Bush administration's prosecution of both the war on terror and its overall grand strategy." The New Yorker writer George Packer characterizes the history of American foreign policy in these terms: "America has always swung feverishly between its individualism and its moralism - between periods of business dominance, when the rest of the world can go to hell, and bursts of reformist zeal, when America shines a light unto the nations." In other words, we sometimes ignore the rest of the world, but when we pay attention, we always try to do good.

            Given a few days, I could find - and so could you - a hundred more examples. Even when it's not stated explicitly, it's taken for granted that American intentions are always good, American purposes always idealistic. Sometimes we screw up, because we're so innocent and naïve, or maybe arrogant and incompetent.  But even when, as in Vietnam, we have to drop millions of tons of bombs on people for their own good, it's not a crime, it's a tragedy. It can't be a crime, because our intentions are so good.

            Well, before you dismiss any opinion, no matter how foolish it seems, you should ask, with an open mind: "What's the evidence for it?" Usually, if you ask this and people don't just call you anti-American or a cynic or a deluded leftist, they'll reply with one or more of the following examples. The first is Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was supposedly a noble, almost saintly idealist, who called for the self-determination of all peoples, though the crafty Europeans outmaneuvered him at Versailles, which doomed the world to another World War.

            But Wilson's idealism was highly selective. Where the United States had no territorial ambitions, as in Eastern and Southern Europe, Wilson could be generous, at least rhetorically. But over here in our own back yard, in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, when popular protests arose, Wilson sent in American troops, who devastated those countries and installed investor-friendly governments.

            The Marshall Plan is usually offered as evidence of American benevolence. After World War II, Europe and Japan were unable to finance their own economic recovery. Hunger and unemployment were widespread. So the United States, which emerged from the war incredibly wealthy, lent them the money. Was this idealism? It was enlightened self-interest - and not all that enlightened. The purposes of the Marshall Plan were to create  American export markets and investment opportunities in Europe and Japan, and to prevent the left in those countries from coming to power. Also, Marshall Plan loans had to be spent purchasing American goods.

            This is true of most foreign aid, another often-cited example of American idealism. That aid comes with many restrictions, and every country except one - Israel - is required to spend most aid funds on American goods, so that aid functions as a subsidy from American taxpayers to American businesses. And the amounts of non-military American aid are tiny. Most Americans think that foreign aid amounts to 5 or 10 percent of the federal budget. In fact, it has never, in any year, amounted to even ¾ of one percent of the Pentagon budget.

            What about humanitarian interventions and democracy promotion? Don't Kosovo and the overthrow of Saddam demonstrate American idealism? The American intervention in Kosovo may or may not have been justified - let's bracket that question. But at the same time the violence in the Balkans was unfolding, the US was strongly supporting several states - Indonesia and Turkey for example - where the levels of violence against innocent people far exceeded the Balkans. Not only did the US not intervene against those states, it gave them large amounts of military and diplomatic support.

            As for the invasion of Iraq: were the Cheney administration's - sorry, I mean the Bush administration's - intentions good? Let's try to imagine what would happened if everything had gone according to plan. First, the Iraqi exiles the US favored would have been installed in power, promising elections at some unspecified future date. Then they would have signed an oil-exploitation agreement giving American oil companies everything they wanted. Next, they would have approved a constitution turning Iraq into a completely deregulated state, an investors' paradise. Finally, they would have signed a status-of-forces agreement giving the US four or five enormous military bases in the Iraqi desert from which to control the Middle East militarily. Would the average Iraqi be better off than under Saddam? Probably, but that was hardly the point.

            So then, if American foreign policy isn't about spreading freedom, democracy, human rights, and material welfare to those that need them, what is it about? Well, what is any government policy about? As a matter of simple common sense - almost a truism - government policy is about serving the interests of those who control the government. Who controls the American government? In a weak, formal sense, the people control the government, by voting. But that's a very weak sense. In a strong sense, business controls the government: by financing parties and candidates, by controlling news media, by shaping public opinion, and ultimately, if all else fails, by moving capital out of the country.

            And how does business communicate its wishes to government? Do they micromanage it - hold a weekly meeting and then send over instructions to Congress and the President for the following week? Only during the Bush Administration. Usually it's more subtle. Quite often the US Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable or the Wall St. Journal or some right-wing think tank will advocate specific policies, or CEOs will meet with individual Congressmen or Presidential advisers. But more generally, both Democratic and Republican governments are expected to understand that there are certain constraints within which they must operate, certain fundamental unspoken goals which they must achieve.

            Business is not a monolith, of course; sometimes businesses have competing interests. But there's a large area of shared interests, of things all businesses favor. They all want weak labor unions, or none; they all want low taxes, especially on the rich; they all want weak or no environmental or consumer-safety or occupational-safety regulations; they all want no restrictions on foreign investment or resource ownership or capital flows; they all want a minimum of social spending, so that the population will be as insecure as possible; and they all want a political system that can be controlled by money, which is to say, controlled by them. This is what they want for the United States, and for most of American history, they've gotten it, except when they bankrupted the country with the Great Depression and there were a few reforms, called the New Deal. But business never accepted the New Deal. They fought back, and in 1980 they won and now they have all those things again.

            And that's what they want for the rest of the world: no organized labor, low taxes, weak regulation, no restrictions on investment or lending, no social safety net, and no popular sovereignty, that is, no real democracy. To make the world as much like this as possible: that's the purpose of American foreign policy:. You can call it imperialism; you can call it fighting Communism; you can call it neoliberalism or globalization or the Washington Consensus or creating a favorable business climate. You can call it anything you like. But if you look at the history of American foreign policy, you will find that the US government virtually never opposes a foreign government that supports those things or supports a foreign government that opposes those things.

            Now, how does this explain why the US dropped all those bombs on Vietnam? Well, even if a country isn't by itself very important economically or militarily to the United States, it may be important in another way. If a country is not dominated by business, if it has a government that declares its responsibility to be the welfare of its people rather than that of rich foreign and domestic investors, and if that country succeeds in developing economically and providing a better life for its citizens, that's very bad - it could give other developing countries, or even developed countries, the wrong idea. It could lead them to want to try to develop independently, their own way rather than the US way or the IMF way. This used to be called the "domino theory." Chomsky calls it the "threat of a good example." It's very dangerous.

            So US foreign policy has to eliminate the threat of a good example: it has to make sure that non-capitalist or non-business-friendly countries don't succeed. This explains the embargos on Cuba and Nicaragua - and for that matter, the embargo on the Soviet Union after 1917. And it explains the war on Vietnam. Throughout Southeast Asia - in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines - poor people were looking to see if the Vietnamese would succeed. They never got to find out; what they did learn was that if they tried to do it that way themselves, the US would destroy their countries too. And that was pretty discouraging. In that sense, the US won the war in Vietnam. It eliminated the threat of a good example.

            This is not to say that the US government always opposes the good guys and supports the bad guys. Solidarity and the other East European and Russian dissidents were all good guys. And Saddam and Milosevic, and for that matter, Lenin and Mao and Ho and Castro, were all bad guys, if being willing to kill and imprison your political enemies and eliminate free speech makes you a bad guy. But of course that's not why the US opposed them. There are so many examples of the US supporting bad guys or opposing good guys - Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, South Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, and Zaire, to name just a few - that it's obvious that being a good guy or a bad guy has nothing to do with whether or not the US supports you. If you want US support, be good to US business. If you can also have human rights, like Costa Rica, so much the better - you'll be less trouble. But first, take care of business. Then we can deal.

            Now, William Shannon, what can you and I do about all this? Well, unfortunately I'm out of time, but I'm sure you can figure it out. It's not quantum gravity theory. It's just democracy.

                                                            [END]

            Few books I know begin as winningly as D. H. Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious, a sequel to his not very well-received Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious:

I warn the generality of readers that the present book will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the wastepaper basket without more ado.

By and large, this is what the generality of critics have done since 1921, tossing also the rest of Lawrence's nonfiction, except the travel books and the essays on sex, pornography, and censorship. It is an understandable reaction: one is often hard put to believe that Lawrence means what he seems to be saying; it is more comfortable to mutter about the madness of genius, the striking intellectual eccentricity of so many great imaginative artists, etc. For the frail miner's son arraigned the whole proud edifice of modern thought.

            Lawrence's Unconscious is not Freud's. Freud's unconscious is a swamp, which psychoanalytic reason must drain and reclaim. Lawrence's Unconscious is a vital power: the ineffable source of life, a monarch ruling and subsuming the whole field of bodily planes, plexuses, and ganglions, completely individual but connected by quick, subtle threads to the entire cosmos. Fantasia is a pagan metaphysical psycho-physiology, at once primitive and post-modern, archaic and disillusioned, sardonic and incantatory. And though we scoff, Lawrence taunts us back: "Thin-minded [rationalists] cannot bear any appeal to their bowels of comprehension." To understand with our bowels and blood may be dangerous, but it is also, Lawrence argued more persuasively than anyone else, indispensable.

GEORGE  SCIALABBA is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good For?

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays by George Orwell. Compiled with an

            introduction by George Packer. Harcourt, 308 pp., $25.00.   

All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell. Compiled by George Packer

            with an introduction by Keith Gessen. Harcourt, 374 pp., $25.00.

           Is it time to stop asking "what would Orwell say?" Christopher Hitchens, an ardent admirer and astute interpreter of Orwell, thinks so. "I am no longer interested," he wrote a few years ago, "in whether or not Orwell would take my view or anyone else's if he were still with us ... We have to say goodbye to him as a contemporary." Few of us, though, are as strong-minded as Hitchens. And even he admitted that it would be nice to talk things over with Orwell now and then, to "find out what he thought and more importantly how he thought" about whatever vexes us, his stumbling successors. "It would be a pleasure to disagree with him," Hitch allowed - and, it goes without saying, an even keener pleasure to agree.

            A new two-volume reissue of Orwell's essays, selected by the New Yorker's George Packer and introduced by Packer and novelist Keith Gessen, is an opportunity to talk things over with Orwell. It's a well-judged selection, serviceably introduced and very helpfully annotated. All the great essays are here, and most of the near-great ones: "A Hanging," "Shooting an Elephant," "My Country Right or Left," "England Your England," "Looking Back on the Spanish War," "Why I Write," "How the Poor Die," "Such, Such Were the Joys," "Inside the Whale," "The Prevention of Literature," "Politics and the English Language," "Writers and Leviathan," "Reflections on Gandhi," and critical essays on Swift, Dickens, Tolstoy, Wells, Kipling, Eliot, Chaplin, Dali, boys' weeklies, and seaside postcards. To those who treasure every page of the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, with its innumerable Tribune columns, "London Letters" to Partisan Review, quotidian book reviews, and letters to friends, Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art Is Propaganda will probably not seem indispensable. But since (inexplicably) not everyone does own the more complete four-volume edition, these two elegantly produced newcomers are welcome.

            The emphasis in Facing Unpleasant Facts is on the personal essayist more than the polemicist. Packer, a reporter who has also written fiction and memoir, perceptively contrasts Orwell's extroverted, observant narratives with contemporary "creative nonfiction."

     The essays in this volume could not be farther from the kind of autobiographical writing that has been fashionable over the past ten or fifteen years, in which the writer puts the reader under the spell of pure novelistic storytelling, all emotional vibration without an insight anywhere. The narrator of this type of memoir drifts helplessly on the surface of events in an eternal present tense, which takes away the power and the responsibility of retrospection: It just happened - don't ask me what it means. Orwell's essays are the opposite - transparent and accountable. He is both character and narrator, and in the distance that comes with looking back at his own experience in the past tense he manages to raise it out of the narrow circle of private confession and into the sphere of universal revelation.

            Packer also pays some apt compliments to Orwell's inimitable directness of voice and "puritanical bias" toward simplicity. Whether or not it's true that "the soundness of Orwell's political judgment is of a piece with the clarity of his sentences," it's certainly worth thinking about the possible relation. (Unfortunately, Packer cites as evidence of Orwell's "soundness of judgment" what is perhaps his most notable misjudgment: his harsh criticism of Auden's "Spain.")

            Perhaps because neither is an academic, both Packer and Gessen give the back of their hand to Orwell's left-academic critics. Packer writes, a little gruffly: "A generation of students has gone to school on the banal truth that all literature is 'constructed,' and learned to scoff at the notion that words on the page might express something essentially authentic about the writer. The usefulness of this insight runs up against its limits when you pick up Orwell's essays." Gessen is a shade more genial. "You can tie yourself in knots - many leftists have done this over the years - proving that Orwell's style is a façade, an invention, a mask ... that by seeming to tell the whole story in plain and honest terms, it actually makes it more difficult to see, it obfuscates, the part of the story that's necessarily left out; that ultimately it rubber-stamps the status quo. In some sense, intellectually, all this is true enough; you can spend a day, a week, a semester proving it. There really are things in the world that Orwell's style would never be able to capture. But there are very few such things." Perhaps because I'm not an academic, I agree.

            Packer and Gessen are illuminating about Orwell the prose writer; neither is out to "steal" Orwell politically, in the way Orwell's essay on Dickens famously noted that Left, Right, and Center had all tried to "steal" that novelist. But I find myself unable to imitate their and Hitchens's restraint. What would Orwell say about ...oh, the last election?

            One clue: in 1938, explaining why he had joined the Independent Labour Party, Orwell affirmed, as he did from first to last, that he was a socialist, incorrigibly suspicious of "capitalist democracy," and that it was "vitally necessary that there should be in existence some body of people who can be depended on ... not to compromise their Socialist principles." In the 1970s and 80s he would likely have voted for Dave Dellinger, Jesse Jackson, and Barry Commoner in preference to even the most liberal Democratic Party candidate. Another clue: the ILP also recommended itself to Orwell because it "is not backed by any moneyed interest, and is systematically libeled from several quarters" - which sounds very much like Ralph Nader in 2008.

            But what about lesser-evilism? "I do not mean," Orwell assured his less radical readers, "that I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next General Election. But we know what the history of the Labour Party has been" - i.e., very disappointing. This is precisely the attitude of most Nader voters toward the Democratic Party: exasperation, mistrust, and earnest good wishes. Orwell, it is true, left the ILP two years later in disagreement about the war, which he strongly supported. But he also confidently hoped, and frequently predicted, that the war would put paid to capitalism and class society: that "the Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten," and much else not at all in the spirit of any Democratic Party platform. My own conclusion is that as long as America was not fighting for its life, as England had been in 1940, Orwell would probably not have voted for a Democrat, even an awfully winsome one.

            And whomever he voted for, he would surely not have joined in the widespread mindless disparagement of Nader since the 2000 election. That year, a corrupt and irrational electoral system inflicted the worst president in its history on the United States; yet for the following eight years, not a single prominent Democratic politician or liberal intellectual had the courage or imagination to champion thoroughgoing electoral reform. It was so much easier to revile Nader - for which reason alone (though there are plenty of others), Orwell would have refrained. Here as elsewhere, he was not only too intelligent to swallow the conventional wisdom; he also had too much self-respect to swell a chorus - any chorus.

            Orwell was not a contrarian; he simply tried to say what most needed saying. In the late 1930s, the Nazis were a far greater evil than England's Stalinist intelligentsia. But few of Orwell's readers had any illusions about the Nazis, while many did not know how untrustworthy most Stalinist publications were, so Orwell devoted considerable energy to telling them. In the 1950s and after, Soviet imperialism may have been as great an evil as American repression at home and support for repression abroad. All but a handful of Americans, however, firmly believed that because the "Free World" was menaced by a ruthless and implacable international Communist conspiracy, criticism of national-security policy (except for not being aggressive or expensive enough) was anti-American. An American Orwell would not have wasted his breath denouncing Communism to readers who (like me) already knew all about it from Reader's Digest, J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit, and the popular TV show I Led Three Lives - who had absorbed anti-Communism through their pores, as the vast majority of Americans did. Instead he would have recognized his primary obligation to the victims of American foreign policy in Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. He would have debunked Cold War mythology - that's what most needed saying in the decades when belief in America's virtue was seldom challenged at home and the CIA and IMF wrought havoc abroad.

            Conor Cruise O'Brien, introducing his own fine essay collection, Writers and Politics (1965), defined the responsibility of intellectuals in a way that I imagine Orwell would have endorsed - and practiced - if he had lived during the Cold War. It is a long paragraph; but then, it is a delicate subject.

         All criticism, all political analysis, involves a quest for truth, but few critics, few analysts, could give a philosophically respectable or coherent answer to the question: what is truth? Yet we can identify lies readily enough, and can reasonably hope that, when we have chipped away at these, what remains will be closer to the indefinable truth. A certain amount of chipping away goes on in the pages that follow. It will be seen that the chipping is mainly, though not exclusively, at the expense - or for the benefit - of Western cultural and political edifices. There are, I think, adequate reasons for this. The English-speaking critic and analyst is - or should be - led to criticize and analyze the phenomena of his own contemporary culture, which is increasingly dominated by values prevalent in the United States of America. The distortions and misleading façades which he will most often encounter ... are pro-American and anti-communist distortions and façades. He will, of course, be aware that in the communist world, and in the poor world of Asia and Africa, there are also distortions and façades, usually much more blatant, and therefore less insidious, than those prevalent in the West. As far as outside criticism can do something to demolish the mendacities of the communist world and the poor world, that effort is being vigorously made by many writers, and I have not felt any great need to add my amateur efforts to those of the numerous professional critics of communist practice. My own guess is that the liberation of the communist world, and of the poor world, from their crude forms of mendacity, will have to proceed from within and that the liberation of the Western world from its subtler and perhaps deadlier forms of mendacity will also have to proceed from within. Whether these liberations make much progress or not will obviously depend mainly on mighty economic and social forces, but also a little on the efforts of individuals. From the other side we can hear a few writers, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and others, busily chipping away. Our applause can neither encourage nor help them. What might help would be that, from our own side also, should be heard the sound of chipping.

                                                **********

            In 1967 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reluctantly concluded that American attempts to crush the Vietnamese resistance would probably not succeed at an acceptable cost to ourselves. He acknowledged, however, that he might well be wrong, in which case he and other "responsible" critics of the war "may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government." Likewise, if attempts to suppress the Iraqi resistance had not cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, liberals would very likely have joined conservatives in saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the Bush administration. Would Orwell?

            Keith Gessen is afraid he might. "It must have been clear to [Orwell] on some level that the world was going to use [Animal Farm and 1984] in a certain way" - that is, to discredit in advance all radical criticism of American society or policy. It was not entirely bad faith, not "devious propaganda by the right," that turned Orwell into a "bludgeon" against "the anti-war, anti-imperialist left" during the Cold War. And in our time, Gessen sorrowfully acknowledges, "it was under the banner of Orwell ... that some of the best intellectuals in Britain and the United States cheered on the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

            I think Gessen's concern about Orwell's possible complicity in his appropriation by contemporary prowar intellectuals is misplaced. To have supported the US invasion of Iraq was to fail, as Orwell would not have, to face several unpleasant facts. The first was the war's criminal nature. Unless authorized by the UN Security Council or in response to imminent armed attack, the use of force in international affairs is illegal. The United States has disregarded this most solemn of international obligations so often and so blatantly that foreign policy "realists" now only smile indulgently when this is pointed out. But Orwell was a genuine realist: he understood that it is from the behavior of the stronger that the weaker learn either respect or contempt for the law, and that a stable culture of law-abidingness is a greater contribution to international security than a new generation of space weapons.

            Other unpleasant facts Orwell would not have overlooked include enthusiastic US support for Saddam during the most oppressive periods of his rule, even to the extent of assisting his development of WMD, as well as contemporaneous US support for various Saddam-like crimes, including Turkish atrocities against the Kurds, Indonesian atrocities against the Timorese, and Salvadoran and Honduran atrocities against their own populations. Orwell would doubtless have pointed out that all of these lethal relationships were presided over by exactly the same freedom-loving, democracy-promoting defense and foreign policy officials who more recently assumed charge of liberating Iraq. Finally, Orwell would have marveled at prowar intellectuals' power of waving away such crucial unpleasant facts as the four mega-bases in the Iraqi desert on which construction began immediately post-invasion, bases capable of projecting full-spectrum military dominance of the Middle East's energy-producing regions. Sophisticated prowar intellectuals scoffed at such slogans as "No Blood for Oil"; but Orwell was not so sophisticated.

            On the contrary, he was, as we know, remarkably downright. For example, if a terrorist enemy declared emphatically that its antipathy to America was based on the enormous and threatening US military presence in the Middle East, on US manipulation of Middle Eastern politics to secure friendly clients at the head of resource-rich states, and on unstinting US support for the dislocation and dispossession of millions of people indigenous to the Middle East, it is unlikely that Orwell would have come up with a name for that antipathy that so effectively obscures these unpleasant facts as "Islamofascism" does.

            Orwell's "power of facing unpleasant facts" would have allowed him to see through the containment doctrine, nuclear deterrence, the myth of American exceptionalism, the clash of civilizations, and other rationalizations for American dominance that took in so many intellectual Cold Warriors, both liberal and conservative. And beneath the surface of British and American domestic politics, he would have discerned similar ugly facts: the unrelenting efforts of the business classes to roll back the meager protections of workers, consumers, and the environment won between the 1930s and the 1960s. Orwell would, beyond a doubt, have devoutly wished to hang the last capitalist in the entrails of the last commissar, while cursing flag-burners, postmodernists, libertarians, and identity-politics hustlers as irrelevant nuisances. If you want a picture of his likely political evolution from 1949, when he died, to 2009, imagine him pissing on a composite portrait of Norman Podhoretz and Tom DeLay - forever.

                                                ************

            If I could talk over one or two things with Orwell today, it would not be to pin him down on the left or right in respect of one issue or another. Instead I'd try to get at "how he thought," as Hitchens put it, in one or two curious and revealing instances.

            For example, Orwell defended the bombing of German civilians. He was not, of course, merely bloody-minded, like Churchill, who continually brayed about "killing Huns." Instead, Orwell sounds a little like D.H. Lawrence to anyone who has read the latter's remarkable essays in Phoenix.

Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them "Huns." Obviously one does not want to inflict death and wounds if it can be avoided, but I cannot feel that mere killing is all-important. We shall all be dead in less than a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known as "natural death." The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the world as a whole), nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty. By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.

This kind of moral reasoning, equally bewildering to the thuggish militarist, the sentimental humanitarian, and the academic philosopher, would be well worth getting Orwell to explain.

            One might also try to coax him - strictly off the record -- into saying a few encouraging words about the future. Orwell was a socialist with a distaste for utopias and a polemicist with a distaste for rhetoric. He wrote vividly about individual features of English landscape, national character, even cookery, but never tried to evoke the good society in persuasive detail. He seemed to think that was impossible in principle. Individual scenes of happiness - the Cratchit family Christmas, for example - could convince, but "all efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures, from earliest history onwards." Wells's high-tech utopias were "nightmares," and even William Morris's lovely pastoral News from Nowhere only managed to induce "a sort of watery melancholy." (I like to hope, though with no great confidence, that my own favorite, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975), would have gotten a rise out of him.)         I had assumed the problem was temperamental. Orwell was simply a stoic - a noble grouch. But All Art Is Propaganda includes an essay, "Can Socialists Be Happy?", not found in the four-volume collection, which points out that in the popular imagination, happiness has always been associated with a relief from effort or want or pain - a holiday from real life. "Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks that happiness consists in not having toothache." This is why utopian writers failed: "they wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary," and of course the palliatives they offer - leisure, food, sex, play, even political participation - eventually came to seem boring or oppressive to most people.

            Cold War heroes and liberal sages like Isaiah Berlin and Leszek Kolakowski - equating utopia with static perfection, as no utopian has ever done - regularly demonstrated the impossibility or perniciousness of all utopias. Orwell's verdict is wiser and more generous than theirs. Socialists "want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain."

            There's still more than enough swindling and murdering around to keep a contemporary Orwell too busy to think much about "where to go from there." All the same, it would be nice now and then to talk over the remoter prospects with him.

                                                            [END]

George Scialabba is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good For?

            University Press, 540 pages, $35.

Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language by Dean Falk.

            Basic Books, 240 pages, $26.95

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Basic Books,

            288 pages, $26.95.

By George Scialabba

            A few years ago the philosopher Daniel Dennett opined that the idea of natural selection - proposed exactly 150 years ago in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species - was "the best idea anybody ever had." The flood of books published this year to celebrate the sesquicentennial would seem to prove Dennett right.

            The "idea of natural selection" is that changes in any organism's makeup or  behavior will persist or not according to whether they make it more or less likely for that organism and its descendants to survive. What kind of changes, and where do they come from? Any kind, from anywhere. Chemical accidents or cosmic radiation may alter an organism's genes, and therefore its physiology, for better (ie, more survivable) or worse. Environmental change or social interaction may make one physical or behavioral trait more advantageous than another - meaning that those who inherit or learn that trait will survive and reproduce more abundantly. This is "Darwin's dangerous idea," from which all of evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology follow. It is, in the most general sense, why things happened the way they did during the three-billion-year history of life on earth.

            And not only in the most general sense.  Natural selection is increasingly being invoked to explain practices whose origins once seemed forever inaccessible, enshrouded in the mists of prehistory. Three fascinating new books offer bold hypotheses about the origins and evolutionary significance of storytelling, language, and cooking.

            Brian Boyd, an English professor, asks: how did fiction, and art in general, make humans more survivable and so become part of our behavioral repertoire? Art, he replies, grew out of play. Among animals with long, secure childhoods, like mammals and birds, play is universal. It is a form of anticipatory learning, sharpening skills and sensitivities that make for rapid, flexible responses to fight-or-flight and other critical situations. As humans grew more social and cooperative over the eons, interpersonal understanding became increasingly important. As a result, representations of events that had not, or not yet, occurred - ie, fictions - became useful as teaching and learning tools, as well as for creating a communal identity. These three effects - cognitive enhancement, social learning, and community cohesion - made storytelling adaptive.

            Elaborate hypotheses like this one are themselves a kind of story, and Boyd tells his on a grand scale. His central arguments are prefaced by a substantial reprise of basic evolutionary theory - very useful if you're unfamiliar with it - and followed by two case studies, of Homer's Odyssey and the tales of Dr. Seuss. It is expert, though highly idiosyncratic, literary criticism.

            Two other new books applying evolutionary theory to everyday life are more compact but no less original and full of implication. Dean Falk, a primate anthropologist and observant grandmother, has pondered long and deeply the fact that human infants cry. From that clue, she has constructed a theory about the origins of language called PTBD, for "Putting the Baby Down."

            No one knows exactly why hominids began walking upright around 7 million years ago and gradually refined this new skill for the next five million years. But whatever the causes, the consequences were fateful. Human anatomy was transformed: the pelvis narrowed, and so did women's birth canal. But at the same time our ancestors were learning to walk, they were learning to think. Since we think with our brains, brain size grew. But a bigger brain in a smaller birth canal posed a problem. The evolutionary solution: human babies were born less fully developed, and therefore more helpless, than those of other primates. This posed another problem: unlike other primate babies, human infants could not cling to foraging mothers, who had to put them down, which terrified them. The solution: motherese, or baby talk, which became language.

            Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, begins his five-million-year epic of human development from a different point: the difference between raw and cooked food. Leaving aside contemporary nutritional controversies, Wrangham focuses on cooking's evolutionary consequences. In brief, cooked food is more chemically efficient. The results: "smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies, reduced body hair; more running, more hunting; longer lives, calmer temperaments; and a new emphasis on bonding between males and females."

            "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," Wordsworth wrote of the first, intoxicating years of the French Revolution. Reading path-breaking books like these three, one feels something similar.

                                                            [END]

George Scialabba is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good For?

By George Scialabba

The Future of Liberalism

By Alan Wolfe.

Knopf. 335 pp. $25.95.

A Tolerable Anarchy

Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom.

By Jedediah Purdy.

Knopf. 294 pp. $23.95.

William F. Buckley Jr. once declared wearily that he was determined not to read another book vindicating liberalism or reflecting on its prospects "until my grandmother writes one." Old Billzebub may have been right, for once: liberals do seem peculiarly given to anxious self-examination and self-justification. Still, an uneasy conscience is better than no conscience, which has been the general rule among conservatives since 1980, at least. So let us attend, even if a little wearily, while Alan Wolfe and Jedediah Purdy examine contemporary liberalism's entrails and peer into its future.

            Wolfe is a sociologist of religion and a prolific commentator on American politics and society. His best-known books, including Moral Freedom and One Nation After All, argue convincingly for the existence of a core American morality, compounded of civic virtue and muted, nonsectarian religiosity. He interviewed a great many ordinary people, listened to them sympathetically and perceptively, and produced an account of contemporary American moral psychology that was at least as illuminating as the better-known Habits of the Heart.

            Wolfe is a public intellectual as well as a scholar, a preacher as well as a scribe. The Future of Liberalism is not a work of intellectual history or political theory, nor is it exactly a sermon, much less a manifesto. Admonitory, authoritative, benign and bland, it resembles a pastoral letter, an encyclical from one of the bishops of the Church of Liberalism, American Synod. "Dearly beloved," it exhorts us, "lift up your hearts. Our fathers have set our feet upon the path of moderate righteousness. Therefore let us shun extremism, straying neither to the left nor the right, but instead march together, at all deliberate speed, toward a better--though still necessarily imperfect--world."

            In one respect, at least, The Future of Liberalism is wholly successful. Wolfe has found the perfect epigraph, an austere but luminous passage from a 1934 address by John Dewey entitled "The Future of Liberalism." Because it expresses so well the fundamental premise of Wolfe's book, it is worth quoting in full:

[Liberalism] knows that an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. [Individuality] is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical - including in "cultural," economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art. Liberalism knows that social conditions may restrict, distort and almost prevent the development of individuality. It therefore takes an active interest in the working of social institutions that have a bearing, positive or negative, upon the growth of individuals who shall be rugged in fact and not merely in abstract theory. It is as much interested in the positive construction of favorable institutions, legal, political and economic, as it is in removing abuses and overt oppressions.

That liberalism is concerned with both positive and negative liberty, with development as well as freedom--that in fact the traditional distinction between them is oversimplified and misleading--is Wolfe's guiding conception.

            As he puts it in his first chapter, concerned with definitions: "The core substantive principle of liberalism is this: As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take." That means, on the one hand, open societies with no more than a necessary minimum of state coercion, and on the other hand, a guarantee of "sufficient economic security to individuals so that they are not dependent on the arbitrary will of others for the basic necessities of life." As this definition makes admirably clear, conservatives and libertarians are simply one-handed liberals, opposed to restraints on economic activity but unconcerned about those unable, for whatever reason, to take part in economic activity on equal terms.

            Liberalism is committed to both liberty and equality, Wolfe reminds us. When economic inequality is too great, the liberty of the less powerful is diminished. "The freedom to live your life on terms you establish does not mean very much if society is organized in such a way as to deny large numbers of people the possibility of ever realizing that objective." Freedom has material prerequisites. Liberals recognize this; laissez-faire conservatives don't, or don't care.

Wolfe's account of liberalism's substantive commitments is straightforward and persuasive--much the best part of the book. The conservative and libertarian enemies of liberalism have squandered so much wealth and welfare, blighted so many lives, that it is always satisfying to see them intellectually routed yet again. Unfortunately, Wolfe does not stop there. He sees liberalism's enemies, or unreliable friends, everywhere and feels bound to scold them all. Wolfe's spiritual home is The New Republic, and he manifests the same complacent centrism as most of its regular writers (though not--for better and worse--the snarky wit and verbal edge which make that magazine at once irresistible and insufferable). Half The Future of Liberalism is valuable affirmation; the other half is an ideological Syllabus of Errors.

            The first and most dangerous heresy that Wolfe rebukes from the pulpit--"the single most influential illiberal current of our time"--is evolutionary psychology. The attempt to view human behavior in Darwinian perspective amounts to "nothing short of a determined campaign to reduce human beings and their accomplishments to insignificance." According to these anti-humanists, humans "rarely accomplish very much independent of what nature has bequeathed to them"; culture is a "side effect," a "by-product," just "one more way in which nature imposes its designs upon us."  All this, Wolfe protests, radically undermines liberal morale. Liberalism is about choice and purpose, but the aim of evolutionary psychology "is to show that leading any kind of life we think we are choosing is impossible."

            If science really and truly discredited liberalism, then the only honest response would be: so much the worse for liberalism. But of course it does not. The distinction between nature and culture that Wolfe brandishes so menacingly is far more subtle and tenuous than he recognizes. His version, like the obsolete distinction between body and soul, implies that we cannot be both purely physical and meaningfully moral. And yet we are. Whatever "free will" means, it does not mean that choices are uncaused. Someday our descendents will emerge from the metaphysical mists, shaking their heads and wondering what all that philosophical fuss was about. Meanwhile, as Wolfe acknowledges, a majority of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are liberals who believe that "it is wrong ... to confuse a scientific theory such as evolutionary psychology with a moral and political agenda." Wolfe thinks he knows better. I cannot understand why.

            Easier to understand, even if no more persuasive, is Wolfe's antipathy to the "new atheists," that quartet of scoffing skeptics: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Though not overtly religious himself, Wolfe is a fellow-traveler. He recalls liberalism's debts to John Locke and John Leland, the Social Gospel movement and the civil rights movement. He repudiates fundamentalism but also complains that many contemporary believers feel beleaguered. "Nonbelief has historically taken both liberal and illiberal forms, and much of the resurgence of atheism we have been witnessing in recent years belongs in the latter category."

            It is, Bishop Wolfe admonishes these nonbelieving zealots, "a cornerstone of the liberal sensibility to extend rights to those who hold ideas with which you disagree." Well, yes. Don't Hitchens and Harris agree that citizens of a liberal democracy have a right to their beliefs? According to Wolfe, Hitchens "just barely" agrees, and Harris "not at all." They are "intolerant," "closed-minded," and do not believe in "the free exchange of ideas."

            As anyone who has read Hitchens's God Is Not Great and Harris's The End of Faith knows, Wolfe cannot mean this, and he does not. What he means is that they do not show their allegedly benighted fellow citizens sufficient respect. They raise their voices, make fun, jeer. This may be unwise; it is certainly uncharitable. But there is nothing illiberal about it. Liberal equality means (or will mean, if we ever get there) that we all have a chance to be heard during the discussion and all have one vote at the end. To be impatient of superstitious nonsense violates no one's rights--though if Hitchens and Harris are listening, I would personally recommend a little more patience.

[drop cap]

A Tolerable Anarchy is a kinder, gentler book, anxious and wistful where The Future of Liberalism is magisterially self-assured and smugly condescending. Jedediah Purdy, who introduced himself to the world a decade ago with For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, is preoccupied with "the divorce of our civic identity from government": the displacement of public virtue by personal virtue in American political life and language. The delicate, shifting interplay between public and private, individual and community, freedom and obligation, in our political rhetoric is, for Purdy, the best index of the condition of liberalism.

            A "tolerable anarchy" was Edmund Burke's bemused but approving description of American freedom in its earliest incarnation. Unlike that hidebound Tory Samuel Johnson, Burke thought the new polity struck a sensible balance between propertied authority and democratic equality. (Many debt-burdened Revolutionary War veterans, like Daniel Shays, came to disagree.) Johnson was scathing about the hypocrisy of slaveowners insisting on their rights and liberties, but Burke shrewdly saw that slavery was an essential part of the American "sensation of freedom," because it furnished a defining contrast.

In Purdy's telling, the prestige of individualism waxed during America's nineteenth century, notably in the writings of Emerson, Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman. In their expansive conception, habit and tradition--any impediments to forging and asserting one's uniqueness--was a kind of slavery. But then came the chief watershed in the history of American freedom: mass production. Economic self-sufficiency, the old basis of American individualism, vanished into our heroic past. Dependence on large, impersonal economic forces became the rule, as business and the state beat back efforts by Populists and the labor movement to regain a modest autonomy.

Woodrow Wilson, according to Purdy, was the first president to reckon with these momentous changes. Wilson "turned from old images of Americans as self-reliant pioneers to a new acknowledgment that personal fate depended on vast and impersonal forces, which could willy-nilly crush or elevate a vulnerable individual." In this new environment, only the national government could tame these forces and enable individual Americans to achieve meaningful freedom. Business again beat back the challenge, stymieing Wilsonian Progressivism. But two decades later, economic collapse called forth similar language from Franklin Roosevelt, who decried our "highly centralized economic system" as "the despot of the twentieth century" and promised that government would help solve the "ever-rising problems of a complex civilization." Governmental support would "not hamper individualism, but protect it."

This language of government/citizen partnership persisted for several decades, Purdy claims, until Ronald Reagan's "brilliant recasting" of partnership as paternalism. Reagan simply denied that "complex, impersonal systems" often "outstripped individual will and understanding." The essential conditions of social and economic life had not changed, he insisted; Americans could master them, as always, by "common sense and free choice," if government only got out of the way. This adroit rhetorical reversal has set the tone for his successors. Clinton reluctantly and Bush II enthusiastically agreed that government intervention eroded individual autonomy--or, turning Roosevelt on his head, did not protect individualism but hampered it.

This rapid survey does less than justice to Purdy's lovingly nuanced account of American political rhetoric. But perhaps Purdy does American political rhetoric more than justice. They're only words, after all. If you want to know what Ronald Reagan really stood for, read William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold the World If you want to know where he came from, read Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands To assess Reagan's legacy, pore over his works, not just the words of his First Inaugural Address, as Purdy does.

In fact, Purdy's near-exclusive focus on language sometimes has the effect--as with his attempt to fit the Iraq war into his story line--of raising serious doubts about his grasp of reality. He writes, for example:

Confident in their humane motives, the president and his more idealistic advisers scarcely considered the inhumane effects their acts might have: the heart, astonishingly, seemed to be enough. Trusting that what seemed clear to them must be equally clear to others, the war's supporters imagined themselves in a concert of freedom-promoting motives with Iraqis, an illusion that took months of growing chaos to unravel. Above all, the architects of the occupation were indifferent to the basic institutions of order, allowing the tasks of government to slip through their fingers. They waited for freedom to arise while squandering its preconditions.

Unlike Wolfe's pedestrian prose style, Purdy's has rhythm and lilt. A graceful style can be a mixed blessing, though. His précis of the Iraq war is piffle from beginning to end. The invasion of Iraq was initially portrayed as a response to threats to American security. When these were exposed as nonexistent (indeed, fabricated), a new marketing strategy, "democracy promotion," was devised by the government and eagerly swallowed by a docile intelligentsia. Meanwhile, the occupying forces moved immediately to accomplish the invasion's real goals: construction of permanent bases for future Middle East military interventions; exploitation of Iraq's energy resources; and conversion of the country into a wholly unregulated investors' paradise. It was a perfectly plausible, entirely cold-blooded imperialist project, though unexpectedly, it failed. There were no "humane" or "freedom-promoting" motives, no "idealistic" advisers, no "indifference to the basic institutions of order"--the order they really intended to create.

Liberalism has an honorable past, as Wolfe and Purdy are right to remind us. Its future must be more of the same--much more than either Wolfe or Purdy seems willing to advocate. Liberalism has always stood, at least in theory, for government accountability and citizen participation, for broadly-based prosperity and the absence of class hierarchy, for social solidarity and against exploitation, domestic or international. It has always, that is, been proto-socialist. It needs to affirm those values far more explicitly and emphatically, even if the word "socialism"--the victim of history's greatest terminological hijacking--is never heard again.

The problem with socialism--the real kind, not the totalitarian travesty--is, as everyone knows, that it would take too many evenings. The problem with contemporary liberalism is that it takes too few. How many Americans meet regularly with neighbors or co-workers to formulate questions or instructions for their elected representatives or evaluate their performance; to hear experts, activists, or officials criticize or defend governmental or corporate policy; to share information or discuss strategy with fellow citizens in other neighborhoods or workplaces? A nationwide participatory political culture has been perfectly feasible since radio was invented. With current technology--at least until the Internet is privatized and community cable TV is defunded--it's a piece of cake. Yes, it can be tedious. But if we don't meet before this or that local or national institution breaks down or crisis develops, we'll just wind up having to meet afterwards, in far less pleasant circumstances.

Eternal involvement is the price of democracy. Refuse to pay the price and you wind up with the catastrophe of Reagan/Gingrich/Bush -ism: the world's richest, freest country turned into a decaying, plutocratic, militarized rogue state. Marx warned that our alternatives were socialism or barbarism. Since we've agreed not to use the s-word, let's just say that our alternatives are a democratically energized liberalism or a banana republic.

George Scialabba is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good For?

     Press, 315 pages, $28.50.

Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own by David

     Bollier. The New Press, 344 pages, $26.95.

By George Scialabba

            Modern agriculture began around four hundred years ago. Traditionally the land of England had been owned and farmed in common. Over several centuries, it was converted into private property owned by the aristocracy, in a process called "enclosure." Much misery resulted, as farmers were pushed off the land into factories or urban slums. But much progress also resulted, since the new landowners could afford to invest in new technology. The rapid economic growth in agriculture and industry slowly trickled down, improving popular living standards.

            History is written by the victors, so the progress caused by the enclosure movement is much better remembered nowadays than the misery. The lesson usually drawn from this episode is that private ownership makes for economic efficiency. At any rate, this is the lesson drawn by the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, software, and entertainment industries and successfully peddled by them (with a little help from campaign contributions) to Congress. In the last several decades, Congress has drastically extended the term and broadened the scope of both patents and copyrights, on the premise that only monopoly control of the product will motivate companies to invest the large sums required for research and development. So computer programs, gene sequences, chemical compounds, musical tunes, and databases, or even tiny parts of all these things, are increasingly no longer available to other artists, scientists and programmers without payment of a stiff licensing fee.

            Some of the abuses resulting from this restrictive approach to intellectual property law have become notorious: Microsoft's effort to make every computer in the world run on Windows, for example; or the pharmaceutical industry's effort to stop developing countries from manufacturing cheap substitutes for expensive AIDS drugs. But there are myriad other examples, the cumulative effect of which is to enrich investors but seriously hamper the spread of ideas and information.

            A cadre of public-spirited law professors has formulated a powerful critique of this "second enclosure movement," a critique that has achieved considerable resonance among musicians, programmers, scientists, and other intellectual workers. The Ralph Nader of this movement is Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. Another leading light is Duke professor James Boyle, whose new book, The Public Domain, is a superb introduction to the subject.

            Underlying all property law is the question: How is wealth created? Obviously, every innovation has an individual component and a social component: inspiration plus tradition. Every original creation, Boyle observes, is "built from the resources of the public domain - language, culture, genre, scientific community, or what have you." Artists and inventors must eat, so they must have enough control over their creations to reap some financial reward. But unlimited control could make their work unavailable to future artists and inventors, diminishing everyone's welfare.

            The Founders recognized the need for balance, and until recently American copyright and patent protection was sensibly modest. But a combination of industry pressure and ideological antipathy to the very idea of a public domain has upset the balance. Patents have been granted for a non-leaking peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Copyrights have been granted for two musical notes in succession. Taking off from a masterly analysis of Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman," Boyle demonstrates that hardly any 20^th-century American popular culture could have come into being under today's copyright laws. He also shows that Internet is a lucky fluke, which barely escaped being turned into a one-way, access-controlled, pay-per-view medium like cable TV.

            What to do? Along with Lessig and others, Boyle has pioneered the Creative Commons license. This new form of copyright allows the author of a work to reserve fewer rights than usual - or none at all - over its subsequent use but keeps others from taking it out of the public domain or "commons." Though it was incorporated only seven years ago, tens of millions of books, articles, songs, photos, videos, and software upgrades now bear a Creative Commons license. The story of Creative Commons, Wikipedia, open source software, the Human Genome Project, and other heartening developments is told in journalist David Bollier's Viral Spiral, a lively history of the "public knowledge" movement.

            The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky warned the Western bourgeoisie that "you may not be interested in the Revolution, but the Revolution is interested in you." Likewise, you may not be interested in intellectual property law, but intellectual property law is interested in you, or at any rate in your children. Unless a determined public prevents free-market ideologues from fencing off our cultural and scientific commons and turning it into private property, available only for profit, our society will eventually be poorer, dumber, and less free.

                                                            [END]

             "Man was created a rebel," Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor admonished the silent Christ in his prison cell, "and how can rebels be happy?" The burden of freedom, the responsibility of finding - or creating - one's own purpose and meaning without the guidance of authoritative inherited creeds and values, is too heavy for all but a few. The rest of us cannot endure for long the tensions of uncertainty. We must, at some point, stop questioning, quiet our doubts, turn away from moral and metaphysical inquiry and toward life. Untrammeled skepticism ends in paralysis.

            That is true of societies as well as individuals. No purely rational justification can be offered for trust and self-sacrifice. But without them, social life is chaos, a war of all against all.

            Until a few hundred years ago, this problem scarcely existed. The authority of communities and traditions, though often enough evaded or defied, was rarely put in radical question. There were sinners, doubters, even heretics, but dogma and hierarchy, as the foundation of individual morality and social organization, were unchallenged.

            Then modernity happened. Beginning in fifteenth-century Europe, a critical, experimental, libertarian spirit began to flourish, which came to be known as "humanism." A crescendo of scientific discoveries, artistic innovations, geographical explorations, and political reforms ensued until, at the end of the eighteenth century, Kant hailed "humankind's emergence from its self-imposed minority" and baptized it "Enlightenment." At the same time, the prestige of the sacred and the supernatural, of what the Grand Inquisitor called "miracle, mystery, and authority" and declared indispensable to ordinary people's happiness, was correspondingly diminished.

            In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, humanism's luster was tarnished. First came the blight of early industrialization, then colonial brutality, totalitarian repression, and the technologies of extermination in concentration camps and global wars. Even after these horrors passed, in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, an epidemic of spiritual emptiness descended: alienation, consumerism, and the loneliness of mass society. Perhaps, as a minority of modern thinkers have always believed, we cannot live by reason alone. Perhaps modernity is a mistake.

            Criticism of modernity is a distinguished intellectual tradition. In the first half of the twentieth century, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer formulated such criticisms with great subtlety and learning, as have Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Gray more recently. The Australian sociologist John Carroll makes a small but significant addition to this tradition with The Wreck of Western Culture, published in 1993 but now revised and appearing for the first time in the United States.

            Carroll is a different kind of sociologist. Not only does he not make a fetish of data and method; he eschews them altogether. The Wreck of Western Culture is nothing so pedestrian as social theory; it is a (sometimes) inspired vaticination, a dramatic and portentous reading of the entrails of Western high culture from Homer to Hollywood. Proceeding from one representative masterwork to the next, Carroll meditates them intensely, laying siege to each one's inner meaning, pitting them against one another, and wresting from the sequence a hidden narrative of Western decline. It is an audacious performance, sometimes electrifying but just as often erratic and tendentious. It is hard not to be frequently impressed, but even harder not to be continually exasperated.

            Boldly (or rashly), Carroll begins with a proclamation of universal ruin. "Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble." [QUOTE FROM PAGE 1] In our depths, we "are desperate, yet don't care much anymore. We are timid, yet we cannot be shocked. We are inert underneath our busyness. We are destitute in our plenty. We are homeless in our own homes." [p. 1] If you do not recognize yourself in this desolate portrait, you will simply have to take Carroll's word for its accuracy; no attempt is made to substantiate, or even elaborate on, the book's initial, apocalyptic paragraph.

            Not diagnosis but etiology is Carroll's concern. How have we arrived at this civilizational cul de sac? It started five centuries ago, Carroll answers, with our adoption of the false myth of humanism. The ambition of humanism was "to found an order on earth in which freedom and happiness prevailed, without any transcendental or supernatural supports - an entirely human order." [p. 2] In humanism's glory days, the eras of Socrates, Leonardo, and Newton, this was a pardonable illusion. But now, in the wake of Auschwitz, the Gulag, Hiroshima, and 9/11, the bankruptcy of humanism is manifest. We need a new cultural myth. Since none is yet available, Carroll proposes to sift through the wreckage, retracing the path to catastrophe and prospecting for glimmers of a different future.

            Before Socrates, the Greeks were not humanists, they were fatalists. The gods - and behind them, a dimly discerned cosmic order - determined human destiny. Philosophical speculation about the good life and right action was irrelevant; culture rested on mythos, the "timeless archetypal narratives that carry the eternal truths," the "ancient currents of shape and form that move in the unconscious dreamtime of the people." [p.70] Myths and stories give a culture and its members "a place to stand" - an indispensable function, which mere human reason and will cannot fulfill.

            Likewise, reason and will cannot withstand the annihilating necessity of death. But Jesus's resurrection was "the death of death": that is, an end to death as the meaning, or negation, of life. For Carroll, Jesus's key affirmations are "Before Abraham came to be, I am" and "I am the way, the truth, and the life." With these, he offered himself as a place to stand, transcending the Law. His disciples Paul, Luther, and Calvin would become humanism's greatest opponents.  

            The first humanist masterpiece Carroll ponders is Donatello's 15^th-century sculpture of a Venetian general on horseback, the Gattamelata. The figure's ease, grace, and power "anticipate the Renaissance ideal, 'we can become what we will,' and project it in three-dimensional form." [p. 14]

            The virtu embodied in the Gattamelata also animates Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Brutus acts; Hamlet, famously, does not. The two plays are the day and night sides of "humanism's quintessential genius." [p. 15]

            In Hamlet and Hans Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors, a skull appears. This is the sort of detail from which Carroll conjures far-reaching interpretations of cultural health or malaise. The gravedigger scene in Hamlet is not merely a comic interlude; the trompe l'oeil skull in The Ambassadors is not merely a visual trick. On the contrary, Carroll claims, their significance is momentous. "When culture is reduced to the skull, death takes over.  ... Once faith is gone, fate is reduced to necessity - and the ultimate necessity is death." [p. 32] In Carroll's reading, the painting and the play acknowledge that "there is no humanist solution." [p. 33]

            The Protestant Reformation is usually seen as a religious parallel to the Renaissance, a movement of liberation from authority and tradition. Carroll sees it differently. Luther opposed faith and grace to reason and will; he and Calvin "preached darkness and suffering against the reasonable and the comfortable." Against the hope, common to secular and Catholic humanism, that a measure of wisdom and righteousness might be attained through human effort, Luther and Calvin insisted on our radical depravity, folly, and helplessness.

            Through lengthy commentaries on paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Poussin, and Velazquez, Carroll traces the achievements and failures of the Protestant Reformation and its less well-known Catholic counterpart. Descartes and Kant advanced the humanist project, undermining notions of cosmic order and setting reason in command of philosophy. Bach and Jane Austen founded their art on perceptions of human insufficiency and dependence. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche subjected themselves fully, heroically, to the spiritual tensions between humanist light and anti-humanist darkness. After them, the deluge: the frank "degradation of Western culture," illustrated by Edvard Munch's Madonna and Marcel Duchamp's Urinal. In its "death throes," the only vital works that Western culture yields are futile protests against modern homelessness, either ironic (the novels of Henry James) or wistful (the movies of John Ford).

                                                ***************

            To produce - in fewer than 300 pages - a passionate, imaginative, richly detailed interpretation of the spiritual history of the modern West is not a small achievement, even if that interpretation is, as I believe, profoundly wrong. At a time when cutting-edge cultural criticism is often about ephemeral effluvia, it apparently takes a maverick Aussie sociologist to don the prophet's mantle. Let him be praised, if only for forcing us to look once again at our cultural monuments, this time as harbingers of life or death.

             But is it true that "without God, without a transcendental law, there is only death"? [p. 32] And - and entirely separate question - even if that is true, does that make it any more likely that either God or a transcendental law actually does exist? Like virtually all other anti-modernists, Carroll does not even assert - much less attempt to prove - the existence of God or transcendental law. He merely deplores the consequences of not believing that they exist. This is not, it seems to me, a grown-up position.

            In any case, there are grounds for a truce between believers and unbelievers. Why not lay aside questions of ultimate meaning for as long as there is unnecessary suffering in the world? I don't mean necessary suffering, like disappointed love or the infirmities of age. I mean wholly unnecessary suffering, like undernourished, illiterate, or malarial children. When there are no more such, then let us begin asking again about the meaning of life and the existence of God.

                                                            ************

            Carroll's latest book, The Existential Jesus, is an anticlimax. It bears roughly the same relation to The Wreck of Western Culture as Finnegan's Wake does to Ulysses, or Norman Brown's Love's Body to his Life Against Death. In each of these pairs, the first book was rewardingly adventurous, the second frustratingly self-indulgent.

The Existential Jesus is an emotionally fervent but intellectually slack reading of Mark's "enigmatic" gospel. Here is Carroll's solution to the enigma:

Why is he the "existential" Jesus? Because the normal identifying markers of the self have been stripped away from him - family, friends, a past, an occupation, and even an anticipated life-path. In effect, all he can proclaim about himself is: "I exist." His story then becomes a quest for the I that exists. [p.2]

            Anyone who has read Geza Vermes or Hyam Maccoby or E.P. Sanders - virtually any New Testament scholarship, in fact - will have very little patience with the notion that Jesus came from nowhere and was concerned above all with the nature of his own being. Jesus was a devout Jew, probably a radical Pharisee. He was no more an existentialist than he was a Zoroastrian. If you're just getting to know him, read Garry Wills and leave John Carroll alone with his enigmas.

                                                            [END]

George Scialabba  is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good For?

            Basic Books, 270 pages, $27.95.

Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein by John W. Moffat.

            Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 272 pages, $27.95.

By George Scialabba

            To the reader (and writer) of poetry, Keats recommended "negative capability": the acceptance of "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." In other words, relax and let your imagination take over. This turns out to be good advice for reading about theoretical physics, too.

            Frank Wilczek is a particle physicist and John Moffat is a cosmologist, and so, in a sense, they work at opposite ends of the universe. But they are both on the track of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, which will harmonize the four basic forces - gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear - that account for all physical events everywhere.

            Newton's theory of gravity was a particle theory: one material body exerted a force on another through the medium of empty space. This "action at a distance" seemed occult to his successors, so, going back to ancient physics, they postulated an extremely fine-spun "ether" that filled space, through which gravity and electromagnetism propagated. But eventually the ether was shown not to exist. Einstein's relativity theory, which unified gravity and electromagnetism, was a field theory. Fields are self-renewing patterns that fill all of space and, when disturbed, throw off particles.

            After Einstein, physicists turned to the interior of the atom. Theory and experiment led to an explosion of new knowledge about the nature and number of subatomic particles. Among the discoveries was that, at a very small scale, precise measurement and predictive certainty are no longer possible, and some events seem to occur spontaneously, without a definite cause. This is the world of quantum mechanics.

            The fields that fill space turn out to be quantum fields, which spontaneously, unpredictably fluctuate. These quantum fluctuations are known as virtual particles. Along with virtual particles, space is filled with the residues of invisible interactions among elementary particles such as quarks, bosons, and leptons. The residues, called condensates, are "ethers in something closer to the original spirit of Aristotle and Descartes," Wilczek writes. These ethers "condense spontaneously out of empty space as the morning dew or an all-enveloping mist might condense out of moist, invisible air." Space is not empty after all; "the cosmos is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor," with weight and density. Its name is "Grid."

            In case all that sounds a bit daft, this may be the moment to mention that Wilczek, an MIT professor, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize.

            In Reinventing Gravity, John Moffat, another very distinguished scientist, comes at the Theory-of-Everything problem by way of astrophysics. As a young man, he corresponded with Einstein about the latter's lifelong effort to generalize his theory of gravity and combine it into a single theory with the other forces. Moffat has been pursuing Einstein's ambition ever since.

            The first problem Einstein encountered was internal to his original theory of general relativity. The theory predicted that some stars would develop infinite gravity and density, collapsing inward and becoming "black holes" from which no information could escape. The freakish character of black holes vexed Einstein, who never accepted their existence. The next obstacle was the discovery that many galaxies within galactic clusters are moving at a speed that should lead them to break away from the cluster. But they don't. The only explanation compatible with constant gravitational attraction (which both Newton and Einstein assumed) was the presence of a large amount of invisible, undetectable matter - "dark matter." Finally, ten years ago, several astronomers claimed to have discovered that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing rather than decreasing. The only explanation seemed to be a vast quantity of invisible, "dark" energy with negative pressure, which would counter the braking force of gravity. Together, dark matter and dark energy supposedly make up 96 percent of the universe. If they exist.

            Physicists have reluctantly accepted these anomalies for the sake of preserving Einstein's venerable theory of gravity, with its assumption of constant gravitational attraction. But neither black holes nor dark matter has ever been detected. Moffat cuts the Gordian knot, proposing a Modified Gravity Theory, or MOG. He postulates a new "fifth force," carried by a new particle, the "phion." MOG explains the varying strength of gravitational attraction without any need for black holes or dark stars. It also undermines string theory, most physicists' current candidate for a Theory of Everything. Finally, it suggests that the universe did not begin with a Big Bang but may be "eternal" and "dynamically evolving."

            It's a bold theory, and Moffat acknowledges that most physicists are skeptical. But data from the new Large Hadron Collider and ongoing galaxy surveys may soon settle the question. Stay tuned.

                                                            [END]

Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization by David Grewal. Yale   

            University Press, 405 pp, $30.

The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape

            by Harm de Blij. Oxford University Press, 280 pp, $27.95.

By George Scialabba

            Freedom is Americans' supreme value, but how well do we really understand it? Consider this proposition: "Your money or your life!" Strictly speaking, we are perfectly free not to give up our money. But most of us would agree that this isn't really much of a choice; and if the thief were caught, no judge or jury would accept as a defense that we had freely given him or her the money. Choices can be coerced: blatantly, as in this example, or more subtly.

            One of the subtle ways is through what David Grewal, in an ambitious and original new work of social theory, calls "network power." Every large-scale social activity requires networks: groups of people whose interaction is coordinated by some standard or practice. Language is a standard; so are systems of measurement, currencies, engineering and quality-control regulations, even dress codes and the Social Register. Some standards are more widespread than others; hence some networks are larger and more powerful than others. The network of English-speakers is larger than that of Swahili-speakers. The network of dollar-users is larger than that of cowrie-shell users. The metric standard is gradually overtaking the imperial (ie, Anglo-American, yards/feet/inches) standard - in fact, England is about to switch. Is America next?

            The answer depends on the network power of metric system users. Under certain  conditions - specifying them is one important contribution of Grewal's book - the choice of whether or not to join a network may not be coerced but will not be entirely free, either. Every time a country or manufacturer switches to the metric system, pressure increases on all others to switch too. The more programs are compatible only with Microsoft operating systems, the more inconvenient it will be to use any other kind.  The larger the network, the higher the costs of not joining.

            Arguably the most important standards in today's world are the ones driving globalization: multinational agreements on trade, investment, and intellectual property rights. Every developing nation desperately wants access to the markets of the developed nations, which means joining the World Trade Organization and other global or regional trading networks, like NAFTA. But the developed nations (above all the United States) insist that their poorer brethren first accept a standard: a whole framework of tax, regulatory, and other policies intended to give American banks and corporations free rein.  

            Of course, developing nations are perfectly free to demur and go their own way. But this, they protest, isn't really much of a choice. There's such a thing as (in Grewal's words) "the compulsion of having no viable alternative." Why should weak economies have to go without capital or else agree to remain mere adjuncts of stronger ones? It's not fair.

            But is it unjust? Are anyone's rights being violated? Grewal answers this question with an elegant philosophical analysis of justice. He deftly undermines the conventional distinction between positive and negative rights, demonstrating that to define basic rights - rights that trump even the most powerful network standards - is a matter for democratic decision. Or should be.

            Grewal wants to keep people and cultures from being flattened by the power of global networks. Harm de Blij, a noted geographer, believes there's no danger of that - unfortunately. Pace Thomas Friedman, the world is nowhere near flat, de Blij argues. Even as skyscrapers rise and McDonalds proliferate, globalization "creates a high-relief topography of privilege and privation." What isolates a majority of humans from the processes of globalization - language, religion, endemic disease, disaster-prone environments - is far more salient than anything that tends to integrate them. "For all the liberating changes that have already occurred, place of birth still has a powerful influence over the destinies of billions. ... For all the 'flattening' perceived and relished by globals, the world is still dauntingly rough terrain for many more locals."

            Familiar and unfamiliar statistics follow. Malaria, "driven out of the global core and left to fester in the periphery," kills as many people daily as died on 9/11, while "hundreds of millions of children live in housing without windows or screens." Diarrhea kills even more children than malaria, in part because more than a third of the world's population has no plumbing. Female literacy lags far behind males'. The new megacities - Lagos, Karachi, Bogota, Lima, Jakarta, Sao Paolo, and others - are enclaves of wealth surrounded by vast human wildernesses in which tens of millions swarm.

            Solutions are intractable. There is one, though, that de Blij overlooks. We could have the courage of our apparent convictions and simply declare the superfluous billions non-human. This would mean giving up Christianity and democracy, with their sentimental fiction that all human beings are equal before God and have certain fundamental rights. A pity; but then, we've never made much use of them.

                                                [END]

In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek. Verso, 504 pages, $34.95.

Reviewed by George Scialabba

            I'm going to hedge my bets about Slavoj Zizek, the avant-garde Slovenian intellectual wild man and theorist of everything who has taken Europe and, lately, America by storm. In Defense of Lost Causes, his new grand-theoretical manifesto, might be completely daft. On the other hand, it might be magnificent, revolutionary, a giant step toward unraveling the riddle of History. I'll wait to see what everyone else says before I decide.

            In Defense of Lost Causes is a staggeringly ambitious book, ranging - or reeling - recklessly over vast swaths of music and film, literature and psychoanalysis, history and contemporary politics. It is nearly impossible to follow if you don't have Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger at your fingertips. Actually, it's not much easier even if you do. Just when you think you're beginning to get the hang of Zizek's dense, allusive, paradox-laden argumentative style, you may run smack into a sentence like this:

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard "general" universality,  but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

In fact, the flicker of a suspicion occasionally crosses one's mind that this book and Zizek's entire oeuvre are a massive sequel to Alan Sokal's now-famous spoof of postmodernist theoretical jargon. If so, it's a brilliant success.

            Bypassing a few particulars, the "lost causes" Zizek is defending are revolutionary violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao may have gotten a few things wrong, Zizek acknowledges, but they were right about this. Against monarchical absolutism and capitalist exploitation, they affirmed radical egalitarianism - and they meant it. Whoever genuinely wills the end, wills also the means. "If you say A - equality, human rights, and freedom - you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert the A." No legalistic qualms, no liberal shilly-shallying, or the remorseless logic of domination will reassert itself, and the blood of all its victims will be on the hands of the faint-hearted revolutionaries. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs; you can't make a utopian smoothie without throwing a lot of everyday stuff into the blender.

The true task lies not in momentary democratic explosions which undermine the established "police" order, but in ... translating the democratic explosion into the positive "police" order, imposing on social reality a new lasting order. This is the properly "terroristic" dimension of every authentic democratic explosion: the brutal imposition of a new order.

            Well, all right. We all wish Obama had a stiffer backbone. And no right-thinking person could object to the public beheading of, say, Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson. But what is this "new order" we heroically ruthless revolutionaries are supposed to impose on our fellow-citizens and the rest of humanity. You know, we'd like to see the plans.

            Zizek is utterly, exasperatingly vague on this score. Jouissance (bliss) is the goal; capitalism is the obstacle; liberal democracy is a sham - that's all we get, along with many misty invocations of Heidegger and frequent hints that Mao's Cultural Revolution was perhaps only a little too much of a basically good thing. It sounds like the Sixties have just arrived in Slovenia.

                                                               [END]

George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For? will be published this fall.