When a genuine intellectual becomes a celebrity, there is usually some misunderstanding somewhere. The arbiters of celebrity - magazine and network executives, top editors and columnists, producers and talk show hosts, major grant-makers and prize-givers - are, by and large, as incapable of sponsoring difficulty and depth as they are of resisting glibness and facility. They may themselves appreciate intellectual distinction, but audiences must be reliably sold to advertisers, or investors will go elsewhere. Difficulty is, by definition, a hard sell.
Christopher Hitchens must often have reflected sardonically on his celebrity. Its main channels - Vanity Fair, the
What sort of thing would have brought a wince to the faces of Hitchens's patrons? In search of trademark provocations from the early Hitch, I took down two vintage collections, Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument. Pay dirt, immediately. The latter book fell open to a 1991 discussion of the
Today, the tilt is toward
Generally, it must be said that Realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been. ... [T]he forces of secularism, democracy and reform have been dealt appalling blows. And all these crimes and blunders will necessitate future wars. That is what
Implicit in these remarks is a view of American foreign policy as deeply, characteristically arrogant, callous, and deceitful. (And this only since 1972 - before that, in Indochina, it was genocidal.) Hitchens never repudiated this view, though he appeared to have forgotten that he'd once espoused it. Mightn't he have remembered one day, leafing though his old volumes, and felt a mischievous impulse to twit his new friends at the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations with a reminder that their adopted darling still despised them?
A second pass at the same collection. Again, immediate success. Savaging the Perot campaign, he asks:
And where did anyone get the brainless opinion that the super-rich are too wealthy to steal? Such naivete! This is an illusion even more silly than its more attractive opposite - that the abolition of poverty would diminish crime. Since nobody in this abundant plutocracy has ever really tried to abolish poverty, we have no empirical test of the idealist proposition. But from Ford to Hughes to Iacocca and Trump and the other tycoon redeemers, we have an exact demonstration that nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much.
Surely a contrarian who remembered once writing this, while now enjoying the lavish hospitality of Vanity Fair and the Hoover Institution, would feel irresistibly tempted to remind the latter that the society they are dedicated to protecting from radical criticism is a crass plutocracy, and the former that nobody is more covetous and greedy than the rich rabble whom they celebrate from month to month?
Much deeper than any principles was Hitchens's romantic temperament. He was an average reasoner, not very rigorous or original. But he felt intensely and vividly, and he had a keen, even if erratic, moral imagination. Most to the point, he was a stubborn fucker, who liked to contradict people. It's possible that, if he'd lived to a ripe old age, he would have gone to his grave without having disturbed the self-satisfaction of his admirers among the Very Serious People. I would have bet against it. But we'll never know.
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It has always been with me a test of the sense and candor of anyone belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Christopher Hitchens to be an ornament of Anglo-American literary journalism. Hundreds of novelists, historians, memoirists, and politicians have undergone Hitchens' critical attentions, to the frequent edification and unfailing entertainment of his readers. Few present-day journalists have a detectable, much less unmistakable, prose style; the suavity and piquancy of Hitchens' prose are unmatched among his critical peers.
Equally admirable is his breadth of reading; he has made an art of casual allusion. "Erudition" is not quite right; it suggests labor, and what is most impressive about the way Hitchens liberally sprinkles unfailingly apposite quotes from Auden and Larkin, Waugh and Wodehouse,
The essays collected in Prepared for the Worst (1988), For the Sake of Argument (1991), Unacknowledged Legislation (2000), Love, Poverty, and War (2004), and now Arguably, range almost inconceivably widely. A short gallery of personal favorites would begin with his portrait of Thomas Paine, whom he praises in terms that strikingly parallel Lionel Trilling on Orwell:
Everything he wrote was plain, obvious, and within the mental compass of the average. In that lay his genius. And, harnessed to his courage (which was exceptional) and his pen (which was at any rate out of the common), this faculty of the ordinary made him outstanding.
It would include his portrait of Conor Cruise O'Brien, to whose variegated political and intellectual career Hitchens renders difficult and delicate justice. His first embattled defense of Orwell (several others would follow) remarks penetratingly that "the essence of Orwell's work is a sustained criticism of servility. It is not what you think but how you think that matters." There are blistering takedowns of English politicians Reginald Maudling and Michael Foot and American neoconservatives Norman Podhoretz and Charles Krauthammer, which, brief though they are, deserve to outlive their subjects. There is a harrowing report from
A brief, tossed-off column from 25 years ago is virtually Hitchens' sole effort to formulate a political philosophy. It is so good that one is furious with him for never returning to the subject:
I bought an armful of socialist magazines in
One doesn't want or need to argue this with any relish. The idea of the individual should not be glibly counterposed to the idea of society. After all, what is society made up of, if not individuals? But there are two ways of facing collective responsibilities. One is to ignore them until it is too late, at which point things like rationing, conscription, and regimentation become the options, irrespective of whether the system is capitalist or socialist. The other is to recognize them in time and take the necessary measures freely and by consent. But there is no evading these responsibilities altogether, or of dismissing them as "One World sentimentality."
... The family, so often piously invoked by Tories, is in fact an elementary form of socialism. It operates, without undue repression, on the principle of "from each according to his/her ability and to each according to his/her need." ... The family core is the recognition that an injury to one is an injury to all - a precept that many people can recognize only when it is put to them in a self-interested way.
... there is an amazing persistence to the notion that everybody can, by his or her own efforts, become an autonomous proprietor. Surely this, rather than the socialist vision, is the real utopianism? At the moment, Wall Street is operating on the false promise, not of the usual well-worn casino metaphor, but of a casino where nobody loses. ... Increasingly, it is the partisans of the unfettered enterprise culture who have to answer that old trick question - who's going to do the hard work?
... So certain truisms are beginning to resound again. If we don't hang together, we will hang separately. The bell does toll for us all. It will not do to listen to the cheerleader business-politicians whose motto is "Only disconnect." The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.
Alas, these examples have only gotten us through Hitchens's first collection, Prepared for the Worst. There is no space left to mention his authoritative pieces on the New York intellectuals and Noel Annan's portrait of the British Establishment, or "Booze and Fags," a jolly paean to alcohol and tobacco, or an illuminating essay on Daniel Deronda (all in For the Sake of Argument); the pair of exquisite tributes to Oscar Wilde, the discerning essays on Conan Doyle, Kipling, and Anthony Powell, or the full-on considerations of Isaiah Berlin and Whittaker Chambers, Gore Vidal and Andy Warhol (in Unacknowledged Legislation); the magisterial assessments of Trotsky and Churchill, the wonderfully perceptive, V.S. Pritchett-like essays on Byron, Huxley, Waugh, Joyce, Proust, Borges, and Bellow, or the simultaneously rollicking and haunting record of a trip the length of Route 66 in a rented red Corvette (in Love, Poverty, and War).
And even this leaves out his books: No One Left to Lie To, a definitive account (or as near as possible) of Bill Clinton's mendacity; The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which has convinced hundreds of thousands of readers (some of them sitting magistrates in foreign countries) that President Obama's fellow Nobel laureate should be behind bars; and God Is Not Great, the first New York Times number one bestseller to advance that claim. It's clear, I'm afraid, that within the confines of a mere book review, any short gallery of personal favorites will be frustratingly incomplete. There's simply too much very good Hitchens.
Of course, not all of Hitchens was very good, even before 9/11 drove him mad. He was always too ready with abuse ("stupid" and "tenth-rate" were particular weaknesses). He is a compulsive name-dropper: in his very short Letters to a Young Contrarian, for example, the words "my friend," followed by a distinguished name, appear dozens of times, giving the reader's eyebrows a considerable workout. Some of the aforementioned allusions flow a little too readily: there is a subtle difference between relishing a fine phrase and relishing hearing oneself quote a fine phrase. And in recent years, he has occasionally fallen into what might be called the knightly style, where mellifluousness modulates into orotundity. "The disagreeable and surreptitious element of this story cannot indefinitely remain unexamined." "The masochistic British attitude to inevitable decline seems to have reversed itself, at least to some extent." All too many occurrences of "I think I may venture to say," "if I may make so bold as to observe," "I hope I may be forgiven for pointing out," and the like. Fortunately, Hitchens the staunch republican has so frequently and zestfully insulted the British monarchy that he is in no danger of becoming Sir Christopher.
More damagingly, his politics have always been a little too first-person. Some memorable portraits and descriptions have resulted from his many extensively reported trips to the world's trouble spots, but not much valuable insight. The tendency of one's first-hand experience - the testimony one has heard, the suffering one has witnessed, the bonds one has formed - to crowd other people's arguments to the margins of judgment is hard to resist. To hope for drama and analysis, passion and wisdom, from the same writer, at any rate on the same occasion, is usually vain. Hitchens' genuine, generous, longstanding hatred of oppression - a rare quantity among proponents of
I began this review by paraphrasing Hazlitt on Burke. When he passed from praising Burke to chastising him, Hazlitt observed sternly that "the poison of high example has by far the widest range of destruction." Hitchens' single-minded advocacy of unilateral American military intervention has been as destructive as any mere scribbler's efforts could be. "The very subtlety of his reasoning," Hazlitt wrote of Burke, "became a dangerous engine in the hands of power, which is always eager to make use of the most plausible pretexts to cover the most fatal designs." Hitchens' reasoning has been anything but subtle, but he has more than made up for the poverty of his arguments with rich stores of invective, anecdote, and - as a last refuge - rhetorical patriotism.
What changed Hitchens' mind about American foreign policy? Three things, it seems. The first was a growing identification, the longer he resided here, with American society and culture, a romance affectingly described in his autobiography, Hitch-22. The second was his increasingly militant anticlericalism, fed especially by the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Hitchens' friend Salman Rushdie. The third was a long-gathering disaffection with the Anglo-American left, which he saw as frozen in postures of multiculturalism and anti-Americanism. He refers in the introduction to Arguably to an "ongoing polemic ... between the anti-imperialist left and the anti-totalitarian left"; announcing his accession to the latter in Hitch-22, he described the former as those who "in the final instance believe that if the United States is doing something, then that thing cannot by definition be a moral or ethical action." Perhaps because of chronic deadline pressure, Hitchens has never plumbed this important question any deeper than that facile opposition and glib taunt.
Rumbling around inside Hitchens, these ingredients produced dyspepsia in the 1990s, when he eventually accepted NATO's rationale for its "humanitarian" bombing of
His reports from Kurdistan, southern
To prove that, after supporting dictatorial regimes in the Middle East for 70 years, the
Hitchens maintains that that "there is a close . . . fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American" in the
Hitchens' response to these and all other criticisms - including the fundamental one, that preventive war is a step toward international anarchy - has been sheer bluster, an entirely unconvincing insistence that he has been right all along, in every particular, with 20/20 foresight. Everything that has happened since the invasion - half a million deaths and several million refugees, not to mention the half-million deaths from sanctions that preceded it, and the wholesale and unnecessary aerial devastation of Iraqi infrastructure both in 1991 and 2003; in addition to deep inroads on civil liberties and constitutional government at home - is not our fault. But everything good that has happened is our doing - notably the Arab Spring, whose participants in fact repeatedly tell pollsters of their fear and mistrust of the
Arguably is much the longest of Hitchens' collections (and perhaps his last - he has advanced esophageal cancer). It is very rewarding, with book-length (or very nearly) sections on American writers, English writers, writers under totalitarian regimes, and "Offshore Accounts" - reports/profiles/capsule histories of two dozen countries or international episodes. The choicest delicacies on this groaning board are a dozen or so exquisite appreciations: of Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, John Buchan, Saki, Philip Larkin, Victor Serge, Victor Klemperer, W.G. Sebald, the novels of Fleet Street, the Flashman novels, and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. Two charming throwaways, one on "like," the other on the (soon-to-be-obsolete?) problem of not enough bookshelves, make one wish Hitchens had not given up to mankind what was meant for a few discriminating readers. But there is fine, mellow writing in each of the book's 107 pieces.
Arguably is low on provocations: most of Hitchens' worst writing appears in his Slate column, "Fighting Words," which is mercifully underrepresented here. But slender threads of belligerence and chauvinism run through the book. Some are comparatively inconsequential. An essay on "Jefferson and the Muslim Pirates" offers these reflections:
[T]he Barbary Wars gave Americans an inkling of the fact that they were, and always would be, bound up with global affairs.
Besides managing to suggest that an American global military presence, particularly in the
But other, more characteristic remarks are less forgivable. In "The Anglosphere Future," Hitchens again employs ideologically polarized lenses. This time he looks ahead, toward a worldwide commonwealth of English-speaking nations, based on America's indestructible prosperity (the essay was published a few months before the Great Recession began), on the solidarity of America's English-speaking allies against Islamic radicalism ("a barbarism that is no less menacing than its predecessors ... the Nazi-Fascist Axis ... and international Communism"), and on the English language itself ("uniquely hostile to euphemisms for tyranny").
The shape of the world since September 11 has, in fact, shown the outline of such an alliance in practice. Everybody knows of Tony Blair's solidarity with the
Leaving aside whether an Anglosphere is feasible or desirable, Hitchens here falls into the propagandist's habit of saying "the
In his great essay, Hazlitt summed up:
Burke was an acute and accomplished man of letters - an ingenious political essayist ... He had the power of throwing true or false weights into the scales of political casuistry, but not firmness of mind enough (or shall we say, honesty enough) to hold the balance. When he took a side, his vanity or his spleen more frequently gave the casting vote than his judgment; and the fieriness of his zeal was in exact proportion to the levity of his understanding, and the want of conscious sincerity.
Whether or not one finds this true of Burke, it is Hitchens to the life.
According to Kinsley's Law, first promulgated by New Republic editor and columnist Michael Kinsley: "The real scandal is what's legal." The Watergate scandal - a bungled espionage attempt against the Democratic Party - unseated an otherwise popular President whose bombing of Indochinese civilians was one of the 20th century's great barbarities. The Iran-Contra scandal, in which a not-yet-impotent Congress's prerogatives were flouted, embarrassed an even more popular President whose foreign policy had turned Central America into a graveyard. Occasional vote-buying or procurement scandals pale in comparison with the everyday inequities of campaign finance and the revolving door from Congress, the military, and the regulatory agencies into lucrative corporate sinecures. In the contest for public attention, individual misbehavior nearly always trumps structural injustice.
The wiretapping, bribery, and other criminal activities of News Corporation employees and their political patrons certainly deserve all the attention they're receiving. It's equally important, though, to take this opportunity to consider what Rupert Murdoch's vast power and influence reveal about the civic health of the societies in which he operates.
Already by 1998, as Robert McChesney notes in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, "Murdoch claimed to have TV networks and systems that reached more than 75 percent of the world's population," including twenty-two networks in the United States (reaching 40 percent of the nation's viewers), eight networks in India (reaching 45 percent of viewers), six networks in China, and large holdings in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Indonesia. News Corporation owns hundreds of newspapers and film companies in the English-speaking world. Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Tony Blair have personally intervened on Murdoch's behalf in legislative and trade negotiations. The Wall Street Journal (pre-Murdoch) called the commercial broadcasting lobby, including GE, Disney, Time Warner, and News Corporation, "the most powerful lobby in Washington." They get what they want, and what they want is exemption from rules limiting concentration of media ownership.
Is concentrated ownership compatible with editorial independence? The question needs reformulating. Except at Fox News (see "The Memo" in Kristina Borjesson's anthology Into the Buzzsaw), editors are not given explicit guidelines from corporate headquarters. But editors and publishers who are properly vetted by the home office before being hired will not need intrusive supervision, just as university presidents chosen by business-dominated boards of trustees can be relied on to appoint deans who will in turn make "responsible" appointments to the economics, political science, and other ideologically sensitive departments. Ownership invariably translates into editorial constraint, a process well described by McChesney and by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.
Rupert Murdoch may be exceptionally greedy and unscrupulous. But if it weren't him corrupting American democracy, it would be someone else. The incentives are too great, the laws and their enforcement too feeble, the ideological climate too favorable. The longstanding right-wing campaign against all things public has had exactly this purpose: to turn journalism, as well as education, health care, the criminal justice system, and national security, into mere profit centers. Murdoch's current misfortunes may slow this Great Degradation, but not by much.
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George Scialabba is an editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.
Reviewed by George Scialabba
History, observed Gibbon, is a record of the crimes and follies of humankind. The historiography of the twentieth century's two global wars is, accordingly, extremely rich. Adam Hochschild's vivid and poignant To End All Wars does not add any new crimes or follies to the already crowded annals of the First World War, but it is a welcome addition to the literature all the same.
Words like "watershed" or "turning point" are easy to deploy but hard to justify - except in the case of World War I. Like few other episodes - the fall of Rome, the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution - it really did leave a different world in its wake. The technology of mass destruction was perhaps the most obvious respect. Barbed wire, trench warfare, the machine gun, the tank, poison gas, artillery barrages, and aerial bombardment all meant that war would no longer evoke enthusiastic reactions like that of one characteristically brainless young aristocrat in the first weeks of the war: "It is all the best fun. I have never felt so well, or so happy, or enjoyed anything so much." Such upper-class twits were killed off even more rapidly than the plowboys and factory workers who followed them into the maw of the new industrial killing machines. War would no longer be noble sport; it was professionalized.
And so, more subtly but no less fatefully, was government. The technology of mass persuasion (otherwise known as propaganda or indoctrination) was first introduced not by the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period but by the democracies during World War I. As John Buchan, the British Empire's tireless propagandist-in-chief, put it: "So far as Britain is concerned, the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers." The same was true of Germany and France. The first total war imposed unprecedented burdens on the population and therefore required unprecedented lying and coercion on the part of governments to preempt or suppress dissent. They rose to this challenge brilliantly, cajoling newspaper owners, cultivating friendly journalists, subsidizing "patriotic" writers, speakers, and film-makers, prohibiting or sabotaging antiwar meetings and publications, and harassing or, when necessary, imprisoning critics. Government was no longer largely a hobby for the more earnest, non-fox-hunting members of the aristocracy. It became public administration, one of the social sciences.
Hochschild does not harp on these epochal changes, but his dense, beautifully integrated narrative illustrates them very effectively. He has embedded his themes - the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of propaganda, the transformation of war-making, the heroism of resistance - so skillfully in a dozen or so major characters and another dozen minor ones that To End All Wars reads like a lively group biography.
At the center of the story are three relationships and one rivalry. Sir John French was a genial cavalry officer who rose to become the first commander-in-chief of England's forces in World War I. His older sister, Charlotte Despard, was a socialist, feminist, and pacifist who was nevertheless unquenchably fond of her pleasure-loving, free-spending brother, whom she often rescued from debt and just as often embarrassed by going to prison for her antiwar activities. Alfred Milner was a wealthy and talented civil servant who rose rapidly to Lloyd George's right hand in the War Cabinet and, after the war, to colonial secretary. Violet Cecil, the dazzling wife of a colorless scion of one of England's great families, fell in love with Milner in South Africa and carried on a concealed affair with him for two decades, until they could marry. Keir Hardie worked in the coal mines as a boy, was fired for attempting to organize a union, and became one of Britain's greatest labor agitators and a member of Parliament. Hardie and Sylvia Pankhurst, one of England's leading feminists, also carried on a long secret (Hardie was married) love affair. The rivalry was between Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, a puritanical and pigheaded Scotsman who was nonetheless just as besotted with obsolete cavalry maneuvers as French. Haig was a ruthless bureaucratic infighter who managed to supplant the hapless French as commander-in-chief, whereupon he performed equally disastrously.
The blood-curdling callousness and incompetence of military commanders on both sides has always been a leading theme of World War I historiography. A few historians have recently disagreed, as historians inevitably will whenever there is a longstanding consensus to disagree with. But Haig's place in the military hall of infamy seems secure. Dining on foie gras and Chateau Lafitte supplied by his friend the banker Lord Rothschild, arranging favorable publicity for himself with his friend the newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, endlessly lobbying the King to keep his job over the objections of Lloyd George and Milner, Haig apparently had little concern left to spare for his troops, whom he regularly sent to their death by the thousands to gain a few hundred yards of shell-pocked, barbed-wire-strewn terrain. After the war, in grateful recognition of Haig's murderous bungling, Parliament awarded him a peerage and ten million dollars.
Many of the nearly 25 million soldiers and civilians who died in the course of the war died anonymously. But a few deaths gained a very high profile. Violet Cecil's son was missing in action, as was her good friend Rudyard Kipling's. The War Office spared no effort to find them, without success. Hochschild's extended portrayal of Violet's and Kipling's grief is affecting, even if their favored treatment was infuriating.
Just as infuriating was the harsh treatment meted out to conscientious objectors and antiwar activists, which frequently broke their health after only a few months in prison. But then, at least in wartime, the actions of nearly all governments are nearly always infuriating, as Hochschild liberally illustrates. For example, he reproduces a scathing letter to an English newspaper from a corporal, describing the outlandish numbers of men assigned as officers' servants and grooms - a colossal waste of manpower. Naturally, the writer was court-martialed. Class privileges were beyond discussion, even if they hampered the war effort.
Hochschild's dramatis personae are mainly English, but the focus becomes more international late in the book, as the specter of socialist revolution began to haunt the warring governments. In the weeks before the war, left-wing parties throughout Europe had vowed to refuse their support. They gave in to government pressure and the martial enthusiasm of their members, who believed, like everyone else, that the war would be short and glorious. But as the slaughter at the front and deprivation at home dragged on, talk of revolution began to be heard. When the Russian army disintegrated and the Bolsheviks took power in late 1917, the ruling classes of England, France, and Germany began to panic. The English formulated plans to send troops to fight in the Russian civil war. The French sent cavalry divisions home from the front for use against strikers. As soon as the Armistice was signed, the English and French allowed Germany to send thousands of soldiers and machine guns home to use against rebellious workers. Notwithstanding their wartime slogans, all governments recognized their paramount interest in preventing genuine democracy. In that, they succeeded, however abysmally they failed at everything else connected with the war (including the peace treaty that concluded it, which even Milner called "a Peace to end Peace").
The balance sheet of "this glorious delicious war," as that bloody-minded fool Winston Churchill pronounced it at its outset, was fantastically, incalculably negative, leading directly or indirectly to totalitarianism, genocide, and an even more insanely destructive war. From its bitterly ironic title to its somberly elegiac ending, To End All Wars tells this story powerfully and sensitively, forcing us to swallow its bitterness, as we all must do again and again if we are ever to learn wisdom.
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George Scialabba is an editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament, both from Pressed Wafer (Boston MA).
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Matisse said he wanted his art to have the effect of a
Born in Brooklyn in 1920, Kristol attended
At Commentary Kristol found himself in another stellar cohort, this time includin
Kristol had tried to write a book (on American democracy) but
*****
Every -ism has its truth. What was neoconservatism's? The Public Interest's critique of social policy had a dual thrust: assessment and dia
The explanation offered for the failures discovered was another matter. It boiled down to: underreliance on markets and their incentives; overreliance on efforts by a new, self-a
Kristol, however, was not a writer to look to for painstakin
Kristol's breezy certainty, moreover, is a thin
Indeed, as soon as Kristol announces something as obvious ("Obviously, socialism is an 'elitist' movement") or the plain truth ("The plain truth is that it is these [liberal, individualist] ideals themselves that are being rejected" by the dissident young) or the simple truth ("The simple truth is that the professional classes ... are engaged in a class struggle with the business community for status and power"), one immediately suspects that the matter is not obvious or plain or simple at all. As soon as he announces something as demonstrably the case - "the proposition (demonstrably true) that the salaries of professors compare favorably with the salaries of bank executives"; "It is a demonstrable fact that in all modern, bourgeois societies, the distribution of income is also along a bell-shaped curve" - one suspects that the matter is either undemonstrable or demonstrably false.
Kristol led the char
Thou
The Founders' stern admonition to popular self-restraint has
Dostoevsky predicted, in The Brothers Karamazov, that when the anti-Christ came, he would have inscribed on his banner: "First feed people, and then ask them to be virtuous." We have improved on that slo
Consider (as Kristol apparently did not) what this sally implies. If we are justified in demandin
"Human Nature and Social Reform" (1978) diagnosed the alleged failure of most social reform in the 1960s and 1970s. Kristol's diagnosis turns on the distinction between "opportunity reforms," like tuition subsidies for night school, which build on existing motivations for self-advancement or on proven traditional motivators like religion or family; and "environmental reforms," like welfare or prison reform, which "enable us (in theory) to change everyone's motivations for the better, through the practical exercise of our unadulterated compassion, our universal benevolence, our gentle paternalistic authority." The former always succeed; the latter always fail. The reason is obvious to everyone but liberal intellectuals: "Our reformers simply cannot bring themselves to think realistically about human nature. They believe it to be not only originally good, but also incorruptible; hence the liberal tolerance for pornography."
Does this analysis hold water? Kristol acknowled
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It is in forei
Himmelfarb bravely and usefully includes this essay in The Neoconservative Persuasion. It certainly deserves all the opprobrium it has attracted over the years. Kristol's
Kristol's view of the Cold War was about equally judicious and fair-minded. The
Europe and former European colonies whenever popular movements challen
Kristol's pronouncements about international law were likewise simultaneously self-assured and fact-free. As expressed in the United Nations Charter, international law was an absurdity, "one vast fiction"; a fiction, moreover, that has been "abused callously, or i
*****
Reared on Partisan Review, the neoconservatives naturally took a keen and pu
Unbelievin
*****
Kristol was not wron
He also, on rare occasions, hit the polemical bull's-eye, wittily skewerin
Everyone is concerned about youth unemployment in the ghetto, as I am, and I have been involved with various foundations and government as well, over the years, in trying to do something about it. It is astonishing how little has been accomplished. The reason so little has been accomplished is that no one was satisfied with doing a little; everyone wanted to do a lot. For instance, it is a scandal in this country that vocational education is in the condition it's in. It is absolutely absurd. Can you imagine a
Let's be reasonable. Not everyone can be a doctor or a surgeon. Some people are going to end up as automobile mechanics. Automobile mechanics have a pretty good life. They make a great deal of money, most of it honestly. But the fact is that it has been impossible to get the resources for so limited a goal.
If this is true, it is a far more valuable criticism of political correctness than all of Hilton Kramer's and Roger Kimball's endless fulminations on the subject.
But Kristol was wron
Kristol thought he had left Marxism behind with his youth. But his subsequent career perfectly illustrates Marx's apothegm: "In every era, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas."
[END]
Geor
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After 9/11, Noam Chomsky wrote that, from a historical point of view, what was new about the murder of 3000 civilians was that it was carried out against the
Chomsky was generally reviled for this suggestion. It was widely assumed - in an immemorial tradition of moral obtuseness - that to explain was to excuse. Notwithstanding the terrorists' frequent declarations that it was not America's secular culture or democratic ideals but rather its violence against Muslims and support for Middle Eastern dictators that prompted their attacks, to assign any motive except impotent envy, theological rancor, or eliminationist anti-Semitism to al-Qaeda and its allies was ruled "anti-American."
Christopher Hitchens joined this exercise. For Chomsky, Hitchens wrote in December 2001:
the September 11 crime is a mere bagatelle when set beside the offenses of the Empire. From this it's not a very big step to the conclusion that we must change the subject, and change it at once, to
A bagatelle is a trifle. To say or imply that a "horrifying atrocity" (Chomsky in 9/11, referring to 9/11) or a "colossal atrocity" (ibid.) or a "terrorist crime" (ibid.) or a "crime against humanity" (ibid.) is a trifle would be execrable. To falsely accuse a political opponent of saying such a thing would also, of course, be execrable. Did Chomsky imply - Hitchens was not brazen enough to claim he actually said - that 9/11 was a trifle? Consider this sentence: "The bombing of
"It's not a very big step," Hitchens continued, "to the conclusion that we must change the subject." If the subject is "What should
What did those in charge of protecting us actually do after 9/11? They did everything possible to prevent public discussion of the terrorists' declared motives and grievances. Hitchens helped, by ridiculing those who suggested that resentment against American actions, and not merely against American virtues, may have incited the terrorist attack. And then someone really did change the subject. Our leaders, once again with Hitchens' help, changed the subject to
Asked recently by the online magazine Guernica for a response to the killing of bin Laden, Chomsky made three points (http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/):
1) The US government appears to have behaved lawlessly in this episode, ordering an extrajudicial execution, as well as in earlier episodes involving bin Laden: for example, by not requesting extradition after 9/11, despite the professed willingness of the Afghan government to discuss the matter, but simply demanding that he be turned over and invading the country when he was not; and by never bothering to produce judiciable evidence of bin Laden's individual involvement in 9/11, however easy it may have been to do this.
2) American intellectuals and media have adhered to their usual double standard, criticizing Pakistan for its indignation over the raid while never considering their own and other Americans' likely reaction if Iraqi or Cuban or Nicaraguan or Vietnamese commandos had raided the United States and killed Kissinger, Reagan, or George W. Bush, all of whom have or had even more innocent blood on their hands than bin Laden does. (Chomsky has used this analogy frequently, usually adding for the benefit of his more obtuse and malicious critics that IT WOULD BE WRONG for the Cubans, Nicaraguans, et al to do any such thing.)
3) Other evidence of imperial hypocrisy and arrogance, likewise generally unremarked, include: unwillingness to apply to ourselves the "Bush doctrine" that "societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly" (the US has long harbored right-wing Cuban and Haitian terrorists), and the unfortunate naming of the Abbottabad raid "Operation Geronimo."
Hitchens now returns to the attack (http://www.slate.com/id/2293541/), as scrupulous as before. Alleging "9/11 denial," he reports Chomsky's position as: "we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama bin Laden that his group was the one responsible." Repeatedly in 9/11 - at least a dozen times in that very short book - Chomsky refers to "the bin Laden network" as the perpetrators of 9/11 and those "other related assaults." Also dozens of times in essays and interviews since then. Still, his oddly inconsistent denial in the Guernica interview that "we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda" (perhaps he meant, "by al-Qaeda with bin Laden's direct involvement") offered an opening to the panting polemicist.
But this slur about "9/11 denial" is only an hors-d'oeuvre. The main course is "moral equivalence." During the Cold War, whenever anyone pointed out that the
Hitchens' most contemptible gambit is this: Chomsky "doesn't trouble himself to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the
Suppose someone says that Pearl Harbor so inflamed American feeling that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though morally indefensible, were all but inevitable. Does saying this absolve the American officials who ordered the bombings or imply that the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who died as a result was "richly deserved"? By Hitchens' logic, yes.
Over the last decade, Hitchens has reenacted the drama of Dorian Gray: his prose style has waxed ever more elegant, while his political judgment and his polemical morality have decayed. Of course, Hitchens' inability to discuss Chomsky fairly and intelligently is a mere bagatelle, significant only as a symptom of a more widespread and troubling failure. Public understanding of the nature and consequences of American foreign policy, past and present, was even more urgently necessary - morally as well as prudentially necessary - after 9/11 than before. No such understanding has dawned. American intellectuals, whose responsibility it was to lead the national conversation beyond uncritical acceptance of the premises of state policy, failed entirely. If the American citizenry ever learn, in relation to their country's international behavior, Auden's simple yet difficult lesson that "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return" (or their benighted sympathizers do), it will be despite rather than because of the efforts of Hitchens and the large majority of American intellectuals who, about these matters at least, agree with him.
[END]
George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
In 1937, as part of its assault on
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939,
As John Dower observed in War Without Mercy (1986), his ma
By 1942 ... the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Forces became the apostles of strate
The toll of British and American "strate
Naturally, officials disliked that word. When the Associated Press reported that the Allies had decided "to adopt deliberate terror bombin
Why did Allied decision-makers disre
Perhaps the most salient feature of the culture of war is chauvinism, or irrational belief in the superiority of one's own group. War Without Mercy was a stark, graphically illustrated, often stomach-turning record of both American and Japanese race hatred during World War II. Apparently something was learned from that ugly history, and Muslim-hatred in the
Race prejudice had more subtle effects as well. The
What Dower calls "the 'little yellow men' mindset" operated before 9-11 as well. Despite nearly 40 warnings that an attack by al-Qaeda somewhere in the
Three generations; three humiliating and costly miscalculations; three waves of mass death inflicted in retribution on non-Western civilians, including - perhaps even mostly - women and children. There is evidently something distinctive about the American culture of war.
Inability to imagine the sufferings of others is not a uniquely American failing, however; and anyway, there was another dynamic at work in these cases. Dower calls it "the irresistible logic of mass destruction." In a riveting analysis of the decision to drop the atomic bomb, he shows how, whether militarily necessary or not (the official justification - that fanatical Japanese resistance would have forced an even more costly invasion - is widely contested), use of the bomb was bureaucratically inevitable. The arguments against - simple decency and setting an example of restraint for the postwar world - hardly counted against the powerful incentives in favor, such as:
fixation on deploying overwhelming force, as opposed to diplomatic or other less destructive alternatives including, most controversially, an unwillingness to back off from demanding Japan's unconditional surrender; power politics in the emerging Cold War, notably playing the new weapon as a "master card," as Stimson put it, to intimidate the Soviet Union in eastern Europe as well as Asia; domestic political considerations, in which using the bomb was deemed necessary to prevent partisan post-hostilities attacks on Truman and the Democratic administration he inherited from Roosevelt for wasting taxpayers' money on a useless project - and simultaneously to build support for postwar nuclear and military projects; scientific "sweetness" and technological imperatives, coupled with the technocratic kinetics of an enormous machinery of war, which combined to give both developing and deploying new weaponry a vigorous life of its own; the sheer exhilaration and aestheticism of unrestrained violence, phenomena not peculiar to modern times but peculiarly compelling in an age of spectacular destructiveness; revenge, in this instance exacted collectively on an entire population for Pearl Harbor and Japan's wartime atrocities; and "idealistic annihilation," whereby demonstrating the appalling destructiveness on real, human targets was rationalized as essential to preventing future war, or at the very least future nuclear war.
Similar pathologies of crackpot realism, partisan politics, bureaucratic inertia, technological fantasy, and rank greed appeared during the Bush administration's headlong war and stumbling occupation in
For another thing, people with fancy gadgets like to play with them. As Madeleine Albright complained to Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" They need to know whether the gadgets work; they need to justify having spent so much of other people's money on the gadgets; and the people who make the gadgets (and profit hugely from them) want to sell new gadgets and so offer enormous inducements - perfectly legal, alas - to military and civilian decision-makers who make the decisions that make those profits possible.
A universal feature of war culture is the pressure to conform, the drive toward unity of purpose and belief. In emergencies, all governments suppress dissent among their citizens and all bureaucracies discourage independent thinking among their members. This tendency toward groupthink is a leitmotif of Cultures of War.
The Japanese military could not, or at any rate did not, think realistically about the prospect of protracted war with the more powerful
On the last pa
It is a fine narrative stroke: to show in a few pages how the two apparently unrelated calamities that have brought this seemingly invincible superpower low were produced by the same dysfunction, and to have found a sentence that describes that dysfunction perfectly: The system filters out the thoughtful and replaces them with the faithful. It has to: in war and business, whenever conflict and competition are fierce, dissent is costly and inefficient.
And this, finally, allows for a tragic perspective on what had seemed only moral and intellectual disgrace. For it is virtually the nature of a "system" to isolate and disable challenges to its fundamental assumptions. When the machine is racing furiously, doubts are just so much sand in the gears. Faith and thought; fervor and detachment; loyalty and criticism; united hearts and independent minds: can any system accommodate both? And yet, wars must be won; and wars, like all other vast undertakings, require vast systems to carry them out.
It is, Dower concludes stoically, "highly uncertain" whether this paradox can be resolved, whether humankind can ever "truly control and transcend" its "deeper psychological and institutional pathologies." The truth will make us free, Jesus said. But what if, as Jack Nicholson's character informed the rest of us at the end of A Few Good Men, we can't handle the truth?
[END]
George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
]]> Great men (and women) are a pretty mixed lot, especially in politics. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were great men, each in his own monstrous way. Churchill was great, for both good and evil.
Gandhi is, to my mind, the gold standard of 20th-century political greatness. He produced tremendous effects, overwhelmingly good, and he achieved them not by luck, force, or guile but virtuously, by persuasion and example. Martin Luther King is perhaps his peer in these respects, but the scale of Gandhi's accomplishment was much greater.
When every publishing season seems to feature several new volumes on such lesser figures as Churchill or George Washington, there is plenty of room for a new book on Gandhi, even one that makes no grand claims. Joseph Lelyveld was executive editor of The New York Times, and before that was the Times's correspondent in
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ("Mahatma" is an honorific, meaning "Great Soul") was born in 1869 into a family of the merchant/administrative caste. He became a lawyer, studying for three years in
The young Gandhi's zeal and eloquence, together with a powerful little tract (immediately banned by the British) called Self-Rule for India, brought him into the front ranks of the Indian independence movement, even as an expatriate. When he returned to
Great Soul sensitively explores this paradox. Gandhi always insisted that mere political sovereignty was an unworthy goal. Genuine swaraj ("independence" or "liberation") for
Lelyveld's probing account of the visionary-as-politician reveals that, as one might expect, the politician often prevailed over the visionary. The Mahatma had a remarkable capacity for compromise, and even for nimble rationalization. But he was morally serious, a genuine "great soul," and thus lacked the true politician's talent for convenient self-deception. "By the end," Lelyveld writes, he was "forced to recognized that the great majority of his supposed followers hadn't followed him very far," spiritually speaking.
By the end of Great Soul, a generous reader's heart may be broken, no less than Gandhi's. But just as the Gandhian discipline of truth-telling could fortify the soul, so does Lelyveld's sympathetic yet unsparing look at Gandhi's uncertainty and anguish.
[END]
George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament (forthcoming), both from Pressed Wafer.
]]>
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life by Nicholas Phillipson. Yale University Press.
In the "Overture" to his grandly symphonic The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay describes the "international type" of the philosophe as a "facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters." On this definition, was Adam Smith a philosophe?
Yes and no. Unlike his French counterparts and even his bosom friend David Hume, he led a retired life, much of it in the small Scottish town where he was born, and he lived with his mother until she died at a very advanced age. He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving brilliant performances, either in print or in conversation. He never fell afoul of civil or religious authority, had no mistresses, and engaged in no public quarrels. (A semi-public one, though. Shortly after Hume's death, Smith met Samuel Johnson at a party. Johnson spoke slightingly of Hume, Smith defended him, and their exchanges grew increasingly heated until Johnson exclaimed, "Sir, you lie!" To which Smith retorted, "Sir, you are the son of a whore!" and stalked out.)
On the other hand, Smith was modestly sociable - he had warm relationships with Turgot, Quesnay, and Condorcet. Like most of the philosophes, he was prolific and versatile, publishing much-admired essays on law, literature, and the history of science as well as his masterpieces on moral philosophy and political economy. And although he was not openly irreligious like Hume and Voltaire, he had as little use for the Calvinist superstitions of Scotland as his French contemporaries had for Roman Catholic ones. Perhaps the main point of difference lies in that slightly ambiguous word "doctrinaire." Smith was a critic and reformer, and there are plenty of doctrines in his writings, some of them strikingly original. But he was detached and scholarly by temperament, rather than ardently polemical. If he was a philosophe, he was an exceptionally philosophical one.
Adam Smith was born in 1723 in
The academic job market was considerably brighter then than now. The 25-year-old was invited to give two series of lectures, on rhetoric and jurisprudence, at
As Nicholas Phillipson dryly observes at the beginning of his - unavoidably - rather dry biography: "There is a general lack of visibility in Smith's life." Smith burned his letters, notes, and unpublished manuscripts; we don't even have a likeness till he was past forty. Phillipson makes up for this by sketching - in sometimes gratifying and sometimes tiresome detail - the social and cultural background of the Scottish Enlightenment, the remarkable environment in which Smith's development thrived. Scotland's early-18th-century prosperity produced an eager audience for lecturers like the young Smith, and generous patrons for prominent public intellectuals like the mature Smith. Perhaps equally important, Phillipson suggests, the bustle of Kirkcaldy and Glasgow, growing market towns, may have first planted in Smith's mind the image of incessant activity, continually expanding needs, and harmonious haggling that lurks everywhere in the background of his writings.
Most important for Smith, and central to the Scottish Enlightenment, was David Hume. Smith discovered Hume while at
Hume figures prominently in Phillipson's biography. Smith's lifework, he writes, was essentially to "develop a science of man on Humean principles." Hume declined to derive claims about morality and justice from reason or from metaphysical notions about the nature of being. He looked instead to the way moral sentiments were acquired in the course of social life, to the refinement of passions by conversation and commerce, and to the growth and quickening of "sympathy" or moral imagination. Hume was an astute moral psychologist but, Phillipson writes, never went on to use those insights to formulate a theory of the social origins of morality. That was Smith's ambition.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was Smith's "account of the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from the experience of common life." This approach - a natural history of sociability - was both a response to and a continuation of Smith's predecessors, Hutcheson, Hume, and Rousseau. But Smith added something new: he replaced the solitary voice of conscience and the collective voice of mankind with a hybrid: the "man within the breast," an imaginary, impartial spectator whose judgments are not innate but formed by experience and whose sympathy is allocated with scrupulous, almost Stoic, fairness. There is perhaps a foreshadowing of Rawls's "veil of ignorance" in Smith's conception. Even this contemporary echo, however, cannot much enliven Smith's treatise, at least for this reader. It takes the literary genius of a Hume or Rousseau to make eighteenth-century moral psychology engaging. Equally, perhaps, it takes the scholarly flair of an Albert Hirschman or Deirdre McCloskey to make the intellectual history of moral theory absorbingly interesting. Phillipson, though amiable, is a bit pedestrian.
Even more disappointing is that, although Phillipson does an admirable job of recounting what is known of Smith's life, he refrains from offering opinions about Smith's afterlife, which is, after all, far more interesting. Smith has become, along with Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, one of the deities in the libertarian-conservative pantheon. I suspect Smith would have firmly declined this honor, even before his more zealous devotees, the proponents of the "efficient markets" hypothesis, nearly succeeded in wrecking the economies of the United States, Britain, and their unfortunate imitators.
The Wealth of Nations appeared in the eventful year 1776. The title page described the author as "formerly professor of Moral Philosophy in the
Everyone knows, of course, what Adam Smith stood for: free trade, the division of labor, the minimal state, the invisible hand, the illimitable growth of wants and needs. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." "Every individual ... intends only his own gain, and is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." Case closed.
What everyone knows is seldom altogether wrong; but remarkably often it is not altogether right, either. As Emma Rothschild notes at the outset of Economic Sentiments, her superb study of Smith and Condorcet: "They think and write about self-interest and competition, about institutions and corporations, about the 'market' and the 'state.' But the words mean different things to them, and their connotation is of a different, and sometimes of an opposite, politics." It is far from obvious that Smith would have entertained cordial feelings toward Alan Greenspan or Margaret Thatcher.
For one thing, Smith roundly mistrusted businessmen. In addition to the sallies already quoted, he insisted that businessmen, for all they may talk of freedom and fairness, "generally have an interest to deceive and even oppress the public." Two examples out of many from The Wealth of Nations:
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
Not infrequently merchants sought favorable changes in trade or currency policy using "sophistical" arguments.
Such as they were, however, those arguments convinced the people to whom they were addressed. They were addressed by merchants to parliaments, and the councils of princes, to nobles, and to country gentlemen; by those who were supposed to understand trade, to those who were conscious to themselves that they knew nothing about the matter. That foreign trade enriched the country, experience demonstrated to the nobles and country gentlemen, as well as to the merchants; but how, or in what manner, none of them well knew. The merchants knew perfectly well in what manner it enriched themselves. It was their business to know it. But to know in what manner it enriched the country, was no part of their business. The subject never came into their consideration ...
Smith did not by any means deny or gloss over class conflict. On the contrary, he was unflinchingly clear-eyed about the unscrupulousness of employers and the connivance of governments. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is invited to choke on the following passage:
What are the common wages of labour, depends every where upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. ...
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. .... We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of. Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of labour. ... But whether the workmen's combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. ... They are desperate, and act with the folly of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
Like Hume, Smith was firmly on the side of the workers, a robust partisan of full employment and high wages.
What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves well fed, clothed, and lodged.
And another sarcasm against early capitalist apologetics, which applies equally well to later
ones:
That a little more plenty than ordinary may render some workmen idle, cannot well be doubted; but that it should have that effect upon the greater part, or that men in general should work better when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits, when they are frequently sick than when they are in good health, seems not very probable.
Smith straightforwardly supported the principle underlying progressive
taxation:
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.
Nor was Smith a proponent of the minimal state. Government has the duty of "erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works which may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society," but which "are of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals." And as Emma Rothschild points out: "Of Smith's great diatribes in The Wealth of Nations, only one is concerned with what would later have been understood as a principally economic activity of national government."
Smith was, in short, a mensch. He would definitely not feel at home in the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation.
But although Smith's heart was in the right place, he was wrong about three large matters. Two of them have to do with the quality of life, and so are invisible to most contemporary economists. But one of them is central to their concerns: his advocacy of free trade, based on the theory of comparative advantage. No developing country, Smith asserts, should try to nurture particular "strategic" (as we now say) industries:
By means of such regulations, indeed, a particular manufacture may sometimes be acquired sooner than it could have been otherwise, and after a certain time may be made at home as cheap or cheaper than in the foreign country. But though the industry of the society may be thus carried with advantage into a particular channel sooner than it could have been otherwise, it will by no means follow that the sum total, either of its industry, or of its revenue, can ever be augmented by any such regulation. ... Though for want of any such regulations the society should never acquire the proposed manufacture, it would not, upon that account, necessarily be the poorer in any one period of its duration.
This is from perhaps the most influential section of The Wealth of Nations, the one containing the reference to the "invisible hand" and the now hoary old chestnut, "What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom."
But Smith was wrong. Every successful economy - without exception - has prospered by subsidizing key industries and protecting them from foreign competition. And nearly without exception, every developed society has then, with consummate hypocrisy, preached free trade to less-developed countries. Friedrich List first refuted Smith's development theory. For a thorough review of this issue, see the work of the contemporary
The other important - to humans, if not economists - matters about which Smith was wrong were, first, his notion of indefinite progress. Smith recognized that only economic growth could sustain high wages and widely diffused prosperity without society-wide planning and cooperation. Unsurprisingly, he failed to recognize that there are inescapable limits to growth.
Second, Smith acknowledged that work in a capitalist society was liable to be stultifying for most people.
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations. ... The man whose whole life is spent thus ... naturally loses the habit of exerting his understanding or invention, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become ... [hence] not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life [as well as] of the great and extensive interests of his country ... This is the state into which the great body of the people must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
Which is, of course, what a civilized and humane society would do. Ours has failed miserably, indeed scarcely tried. Education in
Still, these failures of vision are hardly Smith's fault. He at least had a moral and social imagination, unlike most of those who now claim his legacy. Perhaps the finest tribute to Smith came from his noblest successor, John Stuart Mill:
For practical purposes, political economy is inseparably intertwined with many other branches of social philosophy ... Smith never loses sight of this truth ... [A] work similar in its object and general conception to that of Adam Smith, but adapted to the more extended knowledge and improved ideas of the present age, is the kind of contribution which political economy at present requires.
It still is.
[END]
George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
In 1994 Christopher Lasch died at the a
The dwindlin
Almost but of course not quite. We may not need Lasch's historical erudition or analytical subtlety to reco
About Lasch's life, Miller is discreet. There is little about Lasch's wife and children, thou
Lasch's books (except for his first, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution, 1962, based on his dissertation) fall into three broad, overlappin
Lasch's most endurin
The trouble with
The Vietnam War appeared to Lasch an ille
The irresponsibility of intellectuals was a leitmotif of Lasch's writin
It was not these moral failin
The democratic revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries in the
They brou
The mechanisms of this far-reachin
The popular understandin
Fantasies are a kind of psychic specter, which must be vanquished or maturity will be inhibited - they will, after a fashion, imprison the self. In premodern times, what vanquished the child's fantasies -
In industrial society, by contrast, with the father stripped of his skills and removed from the home, and with various a
In its patholo
So say Lasch and Freud, at any rate. In recent decades, the presti
Lasch's career was, in one sense, a running argument with the Enlightenment and its modern representatives: "progressive" intellectuals. It was - let there be no mistake - a family quarrel. The authoritarian conservatism of, say, T.S. Eliot or Russell Kirk, who rejected the Enlightenment root and branch, held no appeal for Lasch. No theological dogma or aristocratic hierarchy ever won from him an expression of sympathy, or even a wistful glance. He was a skeptic and a democrat, first and last. Nevertheless, he set his face against what most of the Enlightenment's heirs have called, usually in reverential tones, Progress. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics was a monumental challenge to modern orthodoxy and a mighty summa of a neglected tradition: "producerist" populism.
From Condorcet through Marx and the Fabian socialists to contemporary liberals and social democrats, a certain form of social evolution has been understood as inevitable and desirable. Mass production, economies of scale, and large, centrally controlled organizations have superseded handicraft production, small proprietorship, and face-to-face self-government. Geographical, professional, and interpersonal mobility are the rule; local identification, neighborhood stability, and close-knit, long-term group relationships among kin, family, or friends are the exception. Marriage, child-rearing, and personal relations are no longer governed by instinct or traditional lore but by expert knowledge deployed in schools, courts, welfare agencies, and psychotherapists' offices. Economic output is to be maximized; consumption democratized; work specialized; education standardized; and the whole society mediated impersonally and efficiently by the market and administered transparently and accountably by the state.
This is not a wholly unattractive vision; and in any case, isn't it simply the way things must be? Of course we often chafe under these arrangements, but surely our discontents are over matters of detail - fairness, accountability, and so on - or the inevitable stresses and frictions of change? Given the size and scale of our society, our ever-growing needs and appetites, the sheer, unstoppable momentum of advancing technology, and the tendency of everything to become more complex and connected, what other form of life is possible to us? Even if industrialism is as productive of individual and social pathology as Lasch claims, is there any alternative?
In answer to this apparently irrefutable self-justification, Lasch called up in True and Only Heaven a long succession of prophets, some forgotten, others well-known but newly reinterpreted as opponents of the allegedly pre-ordained course of modernity: Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Paine, Cobbett, Emerson, Orestes Brownson, Carlyle, Morris, Henry George, Sorel, Mumford, Niebuhr, King, and the members of what Lasch regarded as the most hopeful and radical movement in American history, 19th-century Populism. Some of these thinkers preached virtue, some deplored ugliness, some sought after justice. But most of them were agreed, according to Lasch, in "defense of endangered handicrafts (including the craft of farming); opposition to the new class of public creditors and to the whole machinery of modern finance; opposition to wage labor" and support "of the principle, inherited from earlier political traditions, liberal as well as republican, that property ownership and the personal independence it confers are absolutely essential preconditions of citizenship." They mistrusted large accumulations of wealth and insisted, along with Ruskin, that "the reward of labor is not what one gets by it but what one becomes by it." They affirmed human and natural limits and were deeply skeptical of the modern religion of unlimited economic and personal growth.
It sounds hopeless, of course, if indeed it even sounds intelligible to many in our time. Perhaps Lasch will seem merely quaint some day, as the Sermon on the Mount would have seemed to Augustus, or William Morris's News from Nowhere to Margaret Thatcher. Eric Miller's intelligent and sympathetic biography is honest enough to settle for wistfulness in assessing Lasch's legacy. Miller succeeds, at any rate, in persuading us to join him in saluting Lasch's "unyielding attempt to force us to revisit our confident conclusions about our world and seize our one moment of responsibility for it."
[END]
George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion by Soren Kierkegaard. Introduction by Walter
Kaufmann. Harper Perennial, 87 pp, $10.
If all thinkers are either foxes or hedgehogs, then Kierkegaard was decidedly a hedgehog. By his own emphatic acknowledgment, everything he wrote had a single purpose: to arouse a certain state of mind, or soul, in each of his readers. He called this state of mind "the consciousness of sin." What he meant by that is something like what
The Present Age was written in 1846. Now, one might reasonably expect that a book so titled would offer some clue to the age in which it was written, yet there is nary a word or phrase in The Present Age by means of which we might infer with any confidence which century or continent it was composed in. It could have appeared anywhere in the
But only in the West, and only in the last two centuries. The Present Age is a stellar entry in the genre of anti-modern manifesto, an early landmark in the still far-from-exhausted intellectual backlash against democracy, science, and unbelief. Kierkegaard did not get around to railing at democracy or science very much - he died too young - but his hostility to secular rationalism was implacable, and far more subtle than that of most other defenders of religious faith.
So subtle, admittedly, that it can be difficult at times to understand exactly what K. is exercised about. "Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose," he begins promisingly. One awaits, at first eagerly and then with mounting impatience, some concrete development of this thesis, some penetrating analysis of a typical episode in the life of mid-19th-century
For Enlightenment is the culprit. Not the actual doctrines of the 17th-century scientists and 18th-century philosophers, or that period's historical and philological criticisms of Christianity. About these Kierkegaard had virtually nothing to say, here or elsewhere. It was the process of popular enlightenment and the institutions - above all, the Press - to which it gave rise, the new culture of discussion and publicity, and the effect of all this on the psychology of the individual Christian that obsessed him.
"Ours is the age of advertisement and publicity," he complains, as a result of which "there is no more action or decision." Awareness of too many viewpoints produces paralysis, and so does the habit of seeing oneself as part of "the public," an entity hitherto unknown. Cosmopolitanism is a distraction, since there is no point in forming opinions about matters one cannot hope to influence. Opinions (as opposed to convictions, which require decision and lead to action) are in any case frivolous things. The upshot of continual discussion - the "deliberation" prized by theorists of liberal democracy - is perpetual stalemate and universal shallowness. As he put it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: "If we wish to express in a single sentence the difference between ancient times and our own, we should doubtless have to say: 'In ancient times only an individual here and there knew the truth; now all know it, but the inwardness of its appropriation stands in an inverse relationship to the extent of its dissemination.'" Ultimately the individual himself disappears, swallowed up in the public. "The abstract leveling process, that self-combustion of the human race, produced by the friction which arises when the individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue, like a trade wind, and consume everything."
What is this "inwardness" whose fateful disappearance Kierkegaard is prophesying? It is, for him, the only true form of life. Neither the existence of God nor any other important truth can be known with absolute certainty - to this extent Kierkegaard has abandoned orthodox Christianity and traditional metaphysics. Yet we must act in matters of ultimate significance - love, belief, vocation, morality - or else ignore them. The latter, according to K, is what the present age has contrived to do:
When people's attention is no longer turned inwards, when they are no longer satisfied with their own inner religious lives, but turn to others and to things outside themselves, where the relation is intellectual, in search of that satisfaction, when nothing important ever happens to gather the threads of life together with the finality of a catastrophe: then instead we get talkativeness.
Obviously "talkativeness" includes celebrity journalism, self-help books, TV, Web-surfing, Facebook, and Twitter. Perhaps also, less obviously, psychotherapy, novel-reading, and most higher education.
Talkativeness keeps us connected and on the surface, while "silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life." If we go inside ourselves and remain there, we will eventually be confronted, out of our own depths, with choices, decisions, ultimate questions, which can only be resolved by an act, a leap of faith. "An objective uncertainty held fast [with] the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual." To grasp the necessity of this existential decision, or leap of faith, is to live in what Kierkegaard called "fear and trembling" and what he meant by the "consciousness of sin." The present age distracts us from this terrifying but soul-creating awareness. Getting and spending, texting and twitting, we lay waste our spirits. Amid this carnival of stimuli, the soul, that dense kernel of spiritual gravity, evaporates, leaving behind a light ontological froth. "I have discovered," Pascal wrote of his age, "that all our unhappiness comes from one thing: that we cannot bear to sit in our room, alone and silent." The lightness of modern being is seductive but finally unbearable.
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No to what? Why, exactly, did Eliot loathe modernity and what, exactly, did he hope to conserve against its advance? In After Strange Gods (which remains, notwithstanding the infamous remark about "freethinking Jews," an important statement of Eliot's beliefs), he refers to "the living death of modern material civilization" and declares "Liberalism, Progress, and Modern Civilization" self-evidently contemptible. (The latter, perhaps, was an echo of the mighty conclusion of Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors, which condemned the proposition that "the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself to, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.") Elsewhere in the same vein Eliot deplores "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" and lays it down that "one can assert with some confidence that our period is one of decline." He praised Baudelaire who, in an age of "programmes, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarianism, and revolutions," of "cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness," understood that "what really matters is Sin and Redemption" and perceived that "the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform, and dress reform ... that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation - of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it gives some significance to living."
At the root of this harsh condemnation of modernity lay the conviction of sin - Original Sin. Eliot believed that most people have very little intelligence or character. Without firm guidance from those who have more of both, the majority are bound to reason and behave badly. Eliot made this point frequently: sometimes gently, as in the well-known line from "Burnt Norton": "Humankind cannot bear very much reality"; sometimes harshly, as in "The Function of Criticism," where he derided those in whom democratic reformers place their hopes as a rabble who "ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust."
The obtuseness and unruliness of humankind in the mass meant that order, the prime requisite of social health, could only be secured by subordination to authority, both religious and political. "For the great mass of humanity ... their capacity for thinking about the objects of their faith is small" - hence the need for orthodoxy and an authoritative church rather than an illusory Inner Voice. Likewise, "in a healthily stratified society, public affairs would be a responsibility not equally borne" - hence the need for a hereditary governing class. Underlying these social hierarchies is a hierarchy of values. "
Order, long preserved, produces tradition: "all the actions, habits, and customs," from the most significant to the most conventional, that "represent the blood kinship of 'the same people living in the same place.'" Eliot's best-known discussions of tradition are found in his literary essays: "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "The Metaphysical Poets," and others. His poetry was, of course, revolutionary as well as conservative, and his criticism explains this apparent paradox. Artistic originality emerges only after a lengthy assimilation of many traditions. The artist surrenders his individuality, and it is returned to him enriched. The tradition too is enriched. "The whole existing order" is "if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. ... The past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."
A continually altering tradition is not an unchanging magisterium. In politics and religion as well as in poetry, Eliot's conception of tradition is surprisingly dynamic. Our "danger," he wrote, is "to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity." On the contrary, "tradition without intelligence is not worth having." We must "use our minds" to discover "what is the best life for us ... as a particular people in a particular place; what in the past is worth preserving and what should be rejected; and what conditions, within our power to bring about, would foster the society that we desire." This does not sound like Condorcet or Godwin; but neither does it sound much like Burke or de Maistre.
Eliot was too subtle not to recognize (and too honest not to acknowledge) that his more general pronouncements about political philosophy were unsatisfactory. Like all general pronouncements (in my William James-ian view, at least), they reduce to truisms. Continuity is best, except where change is necessary. Much tradition, some innovation. Firm principles, flexibly adapted. His often-cited remark (in praise of Aristotle) that "the only method is to be very intelligent" helps in estimating his own political criticism.
Concerning two matters of large contemporary relevance, Eliot was profoundly, though unsystematically, intelligent. Eliot's political utterances were, for the most part, fragmentary and occasional: occurring in essays, lectures, and the regular "Commentaries" in his great quarterly The Criterion. His compliment to Henry James - "he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it" - applied to Eliot as well, for better and worse. He was never doctrinaire; but on the other hand, he was rarely definite. As one commentator observes: "To gesture toward, but not to reveal; to pursue, but not to unravel, this is Eliot's procedure." But although he eschewed programs, there is much matter in his asides.
About economics, he repeatedly professed theoretical incomprehension. But just as often, he professed skepticism that any immutable laws of political economy proved that extremes of wealth and poverty were inevitable or that state action to counter disadvantage must be futile. Disarmingly, he acknowledged:
I am confirmed in my suspicion that conventional economic practice is all wrong, but I can never understand enough to form any opinion as to whether the particular prescription or nostrum proffered is right. I cannot but believe that there are a few simple ideas at bottom, upon which I and the rest of the unlearned are competent to decide according to our several complexions; but I cannot for the life of me ever get to the bottom.
Nevertheless, "about certain very serious facts no one can dissent." For "the present system does not work properly, and more and more are inclined to believe both that it never did and that it never will."
What were some of these "very serious facts"?
... the hypertrophy of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialized society.
Sometimes he wondered whether Western society was "assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends." On one occasion he sounded almost like a communist:
Certainly there is a sense in which
Indeed, Eliot was full of surprises on the subject of communism. Try to imagine his drearily predictable acolytes at The New Criterion saying something like this:
I have ... much sympathy with communists of the type with which I am here concerned [i.e. "those young people who would like to grow up and believe in something"]. I would even say that ... there are only a small number of people living who have achieved the right not to be communists.
Eliot did not think much of most anti-communists, who "abhor extreme socialism for motives in which a very little Christianity is blended with a great deal of self-interest and prejudice." For "no one is any more justified in a general condemnation of the principles of the extreme Left than he is in a general condemnation of those of the extreme Right. The principle of Justice affirmed by the intellectuals of the Left is at least analogous to Christian justice."
In fact, Eliot feared and despised unrestrained capitalism (something you would not gather from Russell Kirk's relentlessly one-dimensional Eliot and His Age). He associated himself with those who "object to the dictatorship of finance and the dictatorship of bureaucracy under whatever political name it is assembled." Try to imagine the words "dictatorship of finance" appearing in The New Criterion or Commentary or even First Things. Ditto for Eliot's tart verdict on the Masters of the Universe:
Unrestrained industrialism, then (with its attendant evils of over-production, excessive "wealth," an irrelevance and lack of relation of production to consumption which it attempts vainly to overcome by the nightmare expedient of "advertisement"), destroys the upper classes first. You cannot make an aristocrat out of a company chairman, though you can make him a peer.
The indictment continues. Capitalism "is imperfectly adapted to every purpose except that of making money; and even for money-making it does not work very well, for its rewards are neither conducive to social justice nor even proportioned to intellectual ability." It "tends to divide the community into classes based upon differences of wealth and to occasion a sense of injustice among the poorer members of society." During World War II he wrote a friend that he was willing to join a "revolution" whose "enemies" would include "popular demagogues and philosophes" on the one hand, and on the other "those who want after this war to revert to money hegemony, commercial rivalry between nations, etc."
Even when deploring the consequences of Original Sin, Eliot could not help acknowledging the social scaffolding of moral and cultural questions. He supported censorship of pornography, though not of "books possessing, or even laying claim to, literary merit." But, he went on, "what is more insidious than any censorship is the steady influence which operates silently in any mass society organized for profit, for the depression of standards of art and culture." He was no feminist and posed these scandalously sexist rhetorical questions: "Might one suggest that the kitchen, the children, and the church could be considered to have a claim upon the attention of married women? Or that no normal married woman would prefer to be a wage-earner if she could help it?" But at least he remembered to add: "What is miserable is a system that makes the dual wage necessary."
The incompatibility between untrammeled capitalism and Eliot's conception of the good society went deep. "Stability is obviously necessary," he insisted - indeed it would seem to be the alpha, if not the omega, of any intelligible conservatism. "You are hardly likely to develop tradition, except where the bulk of the population is so well off where it is that it has no incentive or pressure to move about." But without precisely that incentive, the labor market of neoclassical economic theory cannot function. Stable communities or "efficient" labor markets - one must choose.
Eliot was ready to choose. An Anglican committee report he co-authored in the late 1930s called for the "thorough reconstruction of the present economic and political system." Eliot was careful with words, so he probably meant this, bromidic as it sounds. A few years earlier he co-signed a letter to the Times arguing that there was enough wealth in the world "to give every individual a certainty of adequate provision," but that "there appears to be lacking some machinery of distribution" to accomplish this. Eliot was a redistributionist.
What kind of "system" did Eliot want? A Christian society, of course - his critique of capitalism strikingly parallels that of Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus, and other papal encyclicals. But like those venerable documents, Eliot's writings, though they could be pointedly negative, were not vividly affirmative. He thought there should be a lot more people living on the land. He thought people should have to spend fewer hours working for a living. He enthusiastically endorsed this description of the goal: a "new type of society, which would give fullest scope both to the individual - thus securing the utmost variety in human affairs - and to the social whole - thus stimulating the rich, collective activities which would surely come to life in a society free to express its invention, its mechanical skill, its sense of the earth in agriculture and crafts, its sense of play." This sounds much more like William Morris than like Margaret Thatcher. But beyond these, he offered virtually no details. He was neither a visionary nor an activist but a critic.
I said above that Eliot had much to teach us about two matters of contemporary relevance. About the first, distributive justice, he wrote much, directly if not programmatically. About the other, he wrote scarcely a word; not surprisingly, since it was hardly visible on the horizon before his death. I'm referring to the steady erosion of inwardness (Eliot would have said "spiritual depth") resulting from the omnipresence of commercial messages (the "nightmare" of "advertisement") and electronic media.
I have no doubt that Eliot would have reacted strongly and negatively to this development, so discordant with his sensibility and practice. As described in his critical essays, the gradual surrender of the artist's personality to tradition, which is at the same time the mastery and (however modest) transformation of the tradition, resembles the attitude of the narrator of the Four Quartets toward Being and history. In both cases, the prescribed motions of the spirit are inward and downward, the virtues prescribed are humility, gravity, receptiveness. The refrain of "Burnt Norton" has become a meme: "the still point of the turning world."
This capacity - as a valiant minority of contemporary critics keep insisting - is what advertising and the cyberworld are, with fearful rapidity, extinguishing. It simply cannot withstand the immediacy, volume, and near-instantaneous succession of stimuli to which all of us outside a monastery are incessantly subjected. The spirit has its rhythm and metabolism; it cannot survive in just any environment. Or, if you prefer: the brain is plastic and may be drastically reshaped. Our world is flat, as we have been (loudly) told. Will the same processes that flattened it also flatten our souls?
The most moving passage I have encountered in all of Eliot's writings occurs in a letter to his dear friend Paul Elmer More:
To me, religion has brought at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying; it has brought me not happiness, but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery; the very dark night and the desert. To me, the phrase "to be damned for the glory of God" is sense and not paradox; I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children's game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end. ... And I don't know whether this is to be labeled "Classicism" or "Romanticism"; I only think that I have hold of the tip of the tail of something quite real, more real than morals, or than sweetness and light and culture.
This revelation has not been vouchsafed to me, but I can recognize here a description of something supremely valuable. I would fight, as I believe Eliot would, to preserve the conditions of its possibility against the encroachment of the electronic Hive.
Even before Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, the ghost of I. F. Stone was weeping bitter tears. Asked on ABC News about the possible prosecution of Bush Administration officials for violating domestic and international laws on the surveillance of citizens and the treatment of prisoners, the President-elect replied that "what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past." Thus did our new Conciliator-in-Chief implicitly declare Stone's forty-five-year, 3.5-million-word effort to look at what our rulers got wrong irrelevant to forcing them to get things right in the future. All that is "in the past."
Mr. Obama could not be more wrong. In American politics, as elsewhere, the past is not dead; it isn't even past. The greed and callousness Stone exposed week after week behind
The facts of Stone's life have been told well and often, most recently by D.D. Guttenplan in American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).[3] He was born on Christmas Eve 1907, in
Neither Stone's inner nor his outer life seems to have been particularly complex or dramatic. He was a dutiful son: when his father's business suffered in the Depression, and his mother intermittently became mentally ill, Izzy, who was well-paid by then, helped. He met a lively, popular girl, not much given to reading but much taken with his ebullience; they stayed happily married for sixty years. He was an enthusiastic and good-humored but often distracted father. He had few but loyal friends, was close to his siblings and on good terms with his relatives and in-laws, and - especially during his years in
Stone was cursed all his life with interesting times, boiling over with war, depression, revolution, and totalitarianism. He covered these calamities not on the scene but behind the scenes, where policy was made. Some journalists could bring political action to life; Stone was one of the few who could bring political causation to life. He read official reports, studies, speeches, press conferences, Congressional testimony, and budget documents, voraciously, analytically, skeptically. He found the threads, connected the dots, brought the substructure of real causes and motives to light.
An early example, which made Stone's reputation in
Equally important were Stone's reports on how greed and incompetence retarded industry's conversion to wartime production. General Motors could not be induced to stop making cars in record numbers even after its factories and workforce were needed for tank, truck, and aircraft production. Alcoa Aluminum would not increase supply of this vital component for fear that an early end to the war would result in a surplus, hence lower prices. Major oil companies would not open their pipelines to independents; and in general, dominant companies would not cooperate with smaller rivals. All this profitable foot-dragging was aided and abetted by the "dollar-a-year men," the business executives and corporate lawyers "loaned" to the federal government in order to keep an eye out for the interests of their employers and clients. And these, of course, were precisely the "responsible" people, the men of substance - bankers, executives, and lawyers, along with professional diplomats and military officers - to whom Walter Lippmann proposed entrusting real power in a democracy, while the fickle public meekly registered its preferences every four years and hoped for the best.
Another high-profile demolition was Stone's reconstruction of the
As with the Korean War fourteen years earlier, Stone was virtually alone at the time in challenging a misleading official justification for an undeclared war. And once again, millions of lives were lost because Congress and the press were not equally conscientious.
Far more than a few million lives would have been lost in case of a nuclear war, and Stone was rightly obsessed with the arms race. It was plain to him that the
To expose corporate fraud, diplomatic obfuscation, budgetary sleight-of-hand, and wartime propaganda required the investigative enterprise for which Stone is renowned. To write about two other preoccupations, the internal security panic of the Truman era and the struggle for racial equality in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, required only common decency - as uncommon in these cases as in most others. Stone harried - there is no other word for it - Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. "Melodramatic bunk by a self-dramatizing dick" was his entirely typical comment on a speech by
Stone was an ardent Zionist in the 1940s and was the first American journalist to report on the Jewish exodus from Europe and the creation of the state of
It is true that Stone worked harder than most other reporters and hobnobbed less. But what set him apart was something else: that he applied to his own government the same moral standards we all unhesitatingly apply to others. No reporter would accept at face value a Communist or even non-Communist government's account of its own motives and intentions. Japan's insistence that it sought only to bring prosperity and order to the rest of East Asia in the 1930s, or the USSR's protestations that it invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan at the request of their legitimate governments to save those countries from subversion by the international capitalist conspiracy, were met with ridicule or simply ignored in favor of explanations based on Japanese or Soviet self-interest, and in particular on the interests of their ruling elites. But very few journalists were equally skeptical (in public, that is) about the motives of American intervention in Indochina, Central America, or the
... Haynes and Klehr conclude their case against Stone by insisting that "in the light of these revelations, Stone's entire legacy will have to be reassessed." One can see why neoconservatives would welcome such a reassessment, but is there any sense in this demand? Orwell's essays are no less admirable because on his deathbed he offered British intelligence some advice about the ideological soundness of some fellow writers; nor Silone's novels because he may have passed information about Communist activities to Fascist police. Gunter Grass's, Milan Kundera's, and Peter Handke's writings are no less impressive because Grass remained silent for so long about his youthful service in an SS fighting unit, Kundera may have informed the Czech secret police about a political refugee, and Handke defended Slobodan Milosevic. Our judgments of Heidegger's philosophy and Paul de Man's literary criticism are not (or should not be) affected by revelations about their various
degrees of sympathy with Nazism. Irving Kristol's critique of liberalism is no more or less valid because he concealed CIA sponsorship of Encounter. Arthur Schlesinger Jr's interpretations of Jacksonianism and the New Deal are no more or less valid because he lied to the press about the
Nevertheless, whatever their significance may be, what are the charges against Stone, and how valid are they? Stone's harshest critics are Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel in The Venona Secrets and Haynes and Klehr in Spies.[4] Based on the FBI's Venona transcripts of intercepted Soviet cable traffic, on the notebooks of Alexander Vassiliev, who had research access for some years to KGB archives, and on speeches and interviews by former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, these critics infer that Stone was a "spy": a "fully active Soviet agent" who "worked closely with the KGB" for several years during the 1930s and 40s and remained an occasional contact and source until 1968, that he was paid for his work, and that he "really produced." What this production consisted of is not specified, with three exceptions: 1) "A group of journalists, including Stone, provided Pravdin [an undercover KGB officer] with information about the plans of the US General Staff to cope with the German counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge and resume the Allied offensive. Though the other journalists identified, Walter Lippmann [!] and Raymond Gram Swing, did not know that Pravdin was an intelligence officer rather than a fellow journalist, Stone knew full well." 2) Stone reported that William Randolph Hearst had friendly relations, and perhaps even business dealings, with Nazis. 3) Stone was asked to tell an American in
This seems like a very meager haul for decades of "close" and "active" collaboration with the KGB. There had better be a great many more, and considerably more damning, revelations from the KGB archives, or else the charges against Stone will need to be taken down several pegs. In addition, some of his critics' descriptions of Stone's public career raise doubts about their judgment and fairness. Stone was alleged to be an "openly pro-Communist journalist" in the 1940s; he was "an enthusiastic fan of Stalin" until the Soviet invasion of
In fact, Stone was never a fan of Stalin or the
After 1939, in any case, he was sharply - though not, given the horrors already known, adequately - critical of the
· "The FBI is carrying out OGPU tactics." (1937)
· In "the
· Stalin has unleashed "an old-fashioned Russian orgy of suspicion of foreigners, intellectuals, and any kind of dissent." (1948)
· "No political dissident in the
· "To picture
· "I [have been] represented as saying there was more freedom in the Soviet Union than in the
· "What was wrong with Stalin's regime that such miscarriages of justice could occur under it? And how many unjustly accused or framed political prisoners may there be in the penal labor camps of the
· "[Many observers], friendly to socialism, with a great respect for the Russian people, have been shamed and antagonized by much that has occurred since the Revolution. Amid the gigantic achievements ... there has also been an indifference to mass suffering and individual injustice, a sycophancy and an iron-clad conformity, that has disgraced the socialist ideal." (1953)
· "[By World War II], communism in practice had become not a brotherly society working for the common good, but an authoritarian hierarchical system run by a bureaucratic caste, on the basis of unquestioning obedience by subordinates." (1957)
· "The snoopery that goes on in our own country is still a long way from the perpetual surveillance to which the Russian people are subjected by their own political police." (1958)
· I well remember thirty years ago how the Communists boasted that freedom of the press in
· "Fifty years after the Revolution, there is still neither free discussion nor free press in the
But perhaps all this criticism was merely an elaborate cover, so that Stone could serve the KGB more effectively.
As for the Korean War, six weeks after it began, Stone told a left-wing audience:
You won't like what I have to say, so better prepare your tomatoes. I'm sorry to report to you that I couldn't find any proof to justify the Communists claim that
Nowhere in The Hidden History of the Korean War does Stone claim to "prove that the South Koreans attacked
The book's deeper purpose was to serve as "a study in war propaganda, in how to read newspapers and official documents in wartime. Emphasis, omission, and distortion rather than outright lying are the tools of the war propagandists, and this book may help the reader learn how to examine their output - and sift out the facts - for himself." Which was, mutatis mutandis, Stone's purpose in everything he wrote.
The case against Stone reduces to: he did not see, or at any rate acknowledge, the full horror of Soviet totalitarianism in the 1930s. Robert Cottrell summarizes admirably:
[Stone] did not view the Soviet Union uncritically, acknowledged that there was a stench behind the judicial proceedings in place there, had little liking for the American Communist Party, was no celebrant of any brand of totalitarianism, and certainly did not genuflect toward Moscow. Nevertheless, there was something disingenuous in his unwillingness to criticize still more forcefully the terror that was being played out in Soviet Russia. ... Stone, like many of his political and intellectual counterparts, continued to afford
Stone's stance toward the
These premises were largely true and together justified Stone's criticism of American hostility toward
Stone did say this, in effect, but far too implicitly. His anxieties about authoritarianism at home and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany got the better of him, along with an undiscriminating sympathy for what he and many others who should have known better called "socialism." Like his ideological opponents, both Communists and capitalist, Stone seems to have identified socialism with state control of the economy. Hence his frequent insistence that "socialism" and "democracy" were both indispensable. But socialism - an ideal long predating the Russian Revolution - simply means popular, democratic control of social life, including economic life. The Bolsheviks were no socialists: immediately on taking power they destroyed all independent factory councils, local councils ("soviets"), and popular assemblies and remained as hostile to them as any plutocrat or archbishop. The Communist Party owned the economy; socialism was outlawed and persecuted even more fiercely in the Soviet Union than in the
Although not much of the right-wing attack on Stone stands up, it has succeeded nonetheless. Every word spent defending Stone against attacks on his character is one not spent drawing renewed attention to his powerful criticisms of American political economy, foreign policy, and civic culture. These criticisms are Stone's real legacy, which his attackers are understandably far from eager to reassess.
Above all, right-wing hostility to Stone betrays a shallow understanding of republican virtue and the nature of freedom. More than anything else, what makes totalitarianism possible is a people's submissiveness to authority: its slowness to perceive and unwillingness to resist injustices committed not by distant villains and official enemies but at home, by those with the power to make resistance dangerous. Niebuhr, Lippmann, Schlesinger, Hook, and Cold War liberals generally, whatever their other merits, did little to discourage such submissiveness in the American public. They were, instead, fierce in urging resistance to evils to which their readers would never have either occasion or inclination to submit, such as the advent of Communist rule in the
"I know," Stone joked, "that if the Communists come to power I'd soon find myself eating cold kasha in a concentration camp in
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[1] Edited by Neil Middleton, 1971.
[2] The War Years: 1939-1945; The Truman Era: 1945-1952; The Haunted Fifties: 1953-1963; In a Time of Torment: 1961-1967; and Polemics and Prophecies: 1967-1970. All published by Little, Brown.
[3]See also Robert Cottrell, Izzy: A Bio
[4] The Venona Secrets: Exposin
In Democratic Vistas (1867), his immortal paean to American promise, Walt Whitman celebrated an ideal to which, he claimed, the American West at least sometimes approximated:
I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, without noise, meet; say in some pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple of hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly and devout. I can conceive such a community organized in running order, powers judiciously delegated -- farming, building, trade, courts, mails, schools, elections, all attended to; and then the rest of life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each individual, and bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality, develop'd, exercised proportionately in body, mind, and spirit. I can imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or difficult, but in buoyant accordance with the municipal and general requirements of our times. And I can realize in it the culmination of something better than any stereotyped eclat of history or poems. Perhaps, unsung, undramatized, unput in essays or biographies -- perhaps even some such community already exists, in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, or somewhere, practically fulfilling itself, and thus outvying, in cheapest vulgar life, all that has been hitherto shown in best ideal pictures
In the middle of the next century, a son of one of those Western communities looked back on his boyhood and remembered something not unlike what Whitman had foreseen:
We were a true democracy in that huddled community of painted boards. ... There were, of course, differences in degree of material wealth. There were what was always referred to as the "well-to-do," and we had a few families "on the other side of the tracks." No doubt there was envy at times and small bitternesses here and there. But no man lived in fear of another. No man had the power to direct another to vote this way or that. No impenetrable combine could foist a candidate upon the people if they did not wish, and it would have been quite impossible to rig an election and get away with it. This was an agrarian democracy, which meant there was no concentration of capital goods, which meant in turn, since we had no all-powerful landlords, that no class society based on birth or privilege had a chance to develop. ... No virtue was made of poverty ... but to be poor was no disgrace.
Later I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a classless society ... It occurred to me then that what men wanted was Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways of all the West and
The rest of Eric Sevareid's splendid memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, bears the impress of this noble prairie populism. The incidents of his early life are set down with a wry but still glowing moral fervor: the abject poverty of the despoiled Cree Indians he encountered on his astonishing 2200-mile canoe trip with a high-school friend; the rough-and-ready egalitarianism of mine scavengers in the Sierra Nevada and hobos on the railroad boxcars he bummed back to the Midwest; his shocked discovery as a cub reporter that "nearly all men working in a large American concern did their daily work under the tyranny of fear"; the camaraderie of the undergraduate radicals in the "Jacobin Club" at the University of Minnesota; the young Sevareid's disillusion when administrators' machinations cost him the coveted editorship of the college newspaper. Later in the book, his indignation over the treatment of Southern Negroes and his anguish over victorious
Though the teeming memoir was dashed off in six months - by a mere thirty-three year-old - it did not lack literary qualities. The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling, whose war writings have been collected in a Library of America volume, is usually considered the most accomplished of World War II correspondents. But compared with Sevareid's taut narrative, pulsing with moral drama, psychological insight, and colorful incident, Liebling's prose seems mannered, too sly by half.
Which is not to say that Sevareid was incapable of lyricism or wit. En route to
They came as the light was dimming away. The mist was spread below us, and we seemed to be alone, on the summit of the world. A low chanting sound came from beneath the cloud layer, growing louder and louder until it seemed that a subterranean forest of voices was rising to engulf us. Dark, glistening bodies appeared from the ravine, more and more of them, flooding among us and surrounding our space of habitation. A tall, slim young man wearing a halo of shining fair hair, carrying the mystery of civilization in his casual posture and soft blue eyes, materialized from the void. He was standing at our gate, smiling gently, like a stranger in the countryside, out for a stroll and dropping in with an air almost of apology. He was garbed in a soft blue polo shirt, blue shorts, and low walking shoes. His legs were bronzed and firm. From his smiling lips drooped a long cigarette holder. He was Philip Adams, the Sahib of Mokokchung, king of these dark and savage hills.
After a short stay in
The great aim of freedom in security for the individual seemed to me universal and eternally right. As for the methods, however, it seemed clear that there was a time-space equation involved which could not be ignored. ... Half the human race was barefoot, filthy, sick, and worried from morning till night, from birth until death, over no other problem than simply finding food for their bellies. The truth was that, no matter how ruthless the effort might be, nothing could be worse than the present condition. And maybe in ten years, or twenty, or fifty, these hundreds of millions would be able to live, to be clean and whole, to rise above their animal state and walk as men. True, there was danger that the means would become the end. But it seemed to me that the risk was worth the taking.
In retrospect, a question occurs to anyone pondering 20th-century American history: why did such openness of mind and generosity of spirit as this so rarely find expression in the new mass media? Even Sevareid himself seldom if ever in his broadcasting career matched the admirable blend of discrimination and passion that makes Not So Wild a Dream an inspiration, even now. With honorable exceptions, he seemed in his broadcasts to have exchanged the searching critical spirit of his first mentor, Edward R. Murrow, for the bland centrism of Walter Lippmann and James Reston. Like the latter, he became an insider, his perspectives and values fatally shaped by what they all regularly, knowingly referred to as "the mood here in
The price of respectability in American public discourse has always been an unwillingness to question the good intentions of
Sevareid largely accepted this conventional wisdom. Like Lippmann and Reston, he was a Cold War liberal. He scoffed at "the mea culpa open letters one is asked to sign by high-minded American professors deploring the principle of the Cuban invasion attempt" - the principle, that is, that the
It is not what one would have expected from the former doyen of the Jacobin Club. What happened? Introducing his major collection, This Is Eric Sevareid, he faced this question. "For the present I find myself divided, not only between political liberalism and cultural conservatism, but I find myself politically liberal on domestic affairs and increasingly conservative on foreign affairs." He had, he suggested, been naïve. Time and travel had taught him that Communism was more dangerous and the
Another remark in that Introduction also revealed that he'd come a long way from Velva. "It has become harder to believe that if only the people are given the truth, they will do the right thing, that some kind of folk instinct is better than expertise and aristocracy of wisdom and taste." This is rank Lippmannism. Surely Sevareid had spent too much time in Washington, among the "experts" who managed to squander, in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, so much of this country's blood, wealth, and reputation.
In any case, whether "the people are given the truth" was not up to Sevareid, as he knew all too well. Raymond Schroth's biography tells of a confrontation between Sevareid and CBS chief William Paley in 1956 over a broadcast criticizing the State Department, which Paley ordered killed.
The two men sat there across from one another. ... Paley had, as usual, the upper hand. ... Despondent, Sevareid broke the silence. "Maybe I've been too long with CBS." Paley just sat there silently looking at him - a signal that, yes, it was time for Eric Sevareid to resign. But he didn't.
Two years later, Paley again demonstrated his unfitness for his position by terminating Edward R. Murrow's great series See It Now, telling Murrow: "I don't want this constant stomach-ache every time you do a controversial subject." "It goes with the job," protested Murrow, who apparently hadn't learned that the job of publishers and media executives is to please advertisers and shareholders, not to see that "the people are given the truth." It's a pity that Murrow and Sevareid, with their extraordinary talents, had to spend so much of their professional lives working for someone with a weak stomach. But that's journalism, then and now.
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As an American, I can't help but find the timing of Roger Scruton's The Uses of Pessimism a little curious. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the American Right continued its long march through the country's political institutions. Taxes on the rich were slashed and inequality reached Gilded Age proportions. Regulations on major industries were rolled back, while the regulatory agencies were underfunded and overseen by industry flacks. A relentless assault on the Social Security system, employing statistical falsifications, has given rise to a new attempt to cut benefits (under a Democratic president, no less).
The labor movement is prostrate, the victim of deindustrialization and a bipartisan determination not to enforce existing labor laws. Proposed legislative reforms of health care and finance have been rendered skeletal by locust-like swarms of industry lobbyists. The inheritance tax affects only the obscenely wealthy - the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans - yet every Republican in Congress and many Democrats are pledged to its abolition. There is not a single avowed socialist in Congress (well, one: a Senator from the not very large and powerful state of
Scruton is a philosopher and may perhaps be forgiven for not taking much notice of these purely phenomenal matters. Besides, he is English and very grumpy about the encroachment of the European Union and its rules upon merry, eccentric old
Scruton does indeed have a bee - several bees - in his bonnet. Each chapter in The Uses of Pessimism is devoted to chasing after and swatting at a different one of these pesky buzzing creatures, which have names like "The Best Case Fallacy," "The Utopian Fallacy," "The Zero Sum Fallacy," "The Planning Fallacy," and so on. Alas, they are immortal bees, he admonishes us; they swarm again in every generation, plaguing ordinary, sensible people who are just trying to get on with their lives and have no interest in utopia or revolution. Eternal pest control is the price of freedom.
The various fallacies that Scruton hunts down and vanquishes reduce to one prime delusion: "that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage." This is the belief of "unscrupulous optimists," who imagine that "the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment." Their "illusions of mastery" and "abstract schemes for human improvement" invariably come to nothing - or worse, lead straight to totalitarianism. (Lenin and Mao were the quintessential unscrupulous optimists.) Only "personal virtue" - patience, cheerfulness, humility - allows us to "play the small part that it is given to humans to play in bettering the lot of their fellows." Burke, Santayana, and other conservatives were right: "prejudice," the inherited wisdom of custom and tradition, is superior to theory; "piety and caution in worldly affairs" are always more salutary than rebelliousness and large ambitions.
By "pessimism" Scruton means - at least in his calmer moments - moderation, a sense of limits, and a preference for local, small-scale solutions wherever possible. Put that way, who could disagree? Stated carefully and fair-mindedly, Scruton's deep skepticism about radical innovation might indeed have been useful. In all societies, capitalist or non-capitalist, officials should be accountable to the public they allegedly serve and experts should be able to satisfy the ordinary people whose lives and money they propose to experiment with. This is non-partisan wisdom: it applies to all governments. And not only to governments but also to those more powerful institutions and individuals whom governments today in fact mainly serve: corporations and large investors.
Unfortunately, Scruton's exposition is not careful or fair-minded; it is exasperatingly careless and infuriatingly tendentious - a succession of right-wing talking points such as one might hear from Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh. For example, according to Scruton, the cause of the recent global financial crisis was government over-regulation: banks had been "pressured into ignoring the demands of prudence" and forced to issue mortgages to poor people who couldn't afford them. In reality, the regulations in question specifically required lenders to evaluate borrowers' creditworthiness by existing standards. Moreover, only a small fraction of financial institutions at risk were mortgage-issuers; most were large-scale purchasers of derivatives, CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and other financial gimmicks. The financial crisis - as even Alan Greenspan has acknowledged - was the result of not enough government regulation.
According to Scruton, "laws of bankruptcy have been weakened and credit made easier," another government-forced dereliction that contributed to our present woes. Every part of this claim is wrong. First, credit was made "easier" by the aggressive and often deceitful marketing of the credit-card and mortgage-lending industries. Then, to prevent their victims from escaping, these industries pressured Congress to strengthen the bankruptcy laws against borrowers and in favor of lenders.
Trade unions and consumer protection agencies are apparently superfluous. Dismissing the "zero sum" fallacy and the very possibility of "exploitation," Scruton writes blandly: "Consensual agreements benefit both parties: why else would they enter into them? And that is as true of the wage contract as it is of any contract of sale." Can Scruton truly believe that dealings between a politically well-connected, lawyer-heavy multi-billion-dollar company and each and every one of its employees or customers are fully consensual in any meaningful sense? If so, then he must believe in the neoclassical dogmas of perfect competition and symmetrical information, which are at least as implausible as the Marxist theory of "surplus value" that he derides.
And so on and on, one right-wing shibboleth after another. Scruton simply will not acknowledge that many contemporary problems - I would say the most urgent ones - are caused not by the utopian zeal of unscrupulous optimists but by the raw greed of investors and executives, who generally have federal, regional, and local governments securely under their thumb. When Scruton intones magisterially that the free market is an "exemplary manifestation of our collective rationality" and "the only peaceful solution to the problem of coordination in a society of strangers," one can only stammer incredulously in reply: "But ... Halliburton? ... Enron? ... Goldman Sachs? ... British Petroleum?"
Pace Scruton, there is another "peaceful solution to the problem of coordination in a society of strangers." It's called democracy. Not the ersatz kind we currently enjoy, which consists of choosing every few years among a narrow range of options determined by those who have power to set the political agenda and manufacture popular consent; but the real thing, in which an active, informed citizenry continually discusses the public business, demands access to all necessary information, regularly instructs its representatives, and monitors the government's performance more diligently than can be done by merely tuning in each night to the evening news.
I daresay Scruton would approve of real democracy. After all, he inveighs frequently against "top-down planning." This shows the right spirit: top-down anything is undemocratic. If only Scruton had the beginning of a clue about who's actually on top in the contemporary world, he might well have written a useful book.
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George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
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