My TLS editor on writing - an editor's email to an author

Ben Wittes and I were on a panel on Thursday at the meetings of the American Society of International Law, called writing for the mass media.  Advice to law professors on how to place things in the mass media; I'm a bit of a fraud on that, as I don't really write that much for mass venues.  Ben, on the other hand, is a real journalist.  However, I did read to the audience the following email, received from my TLS editor in the midst of editing something years ago.  I keep a copy up on my wall, although I can't really say I am good about following it.  It's very good advice:

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Ken, you really think this is short?  May I enjoin you further on the virtues of concision.  There are too many long quotes from the book, for a start.  And I fear you risk partaking of the book's clearly leisurely pace and alleviatedly theoretical tone.  Unalleviatedly theoretical!  You!  Que pasa?

Maybe you haven't quite come down from your sojourn in the jungle of tenure-grabbing, publish-or-perish academic vanity publishing.  This is journalism, albeit the higher journalism. People don't have too much time.

The piece reads airlessly for the first half.  Look, there's nothing here that can't be said in half - no, a third - the space.

(Email to Ken, June 2001.)

Thanks to Peter Spiro, David Zaring, and the folks at Temple University

I just wanted to take a moment publicly to thank everyone at Temple University for the lovely conversation about my early draft paper on politics and method in public international law, which I offered yesterday at an international law seminar there.  The redoubtable Peter Spiro, whose new book, Beyond Citizenship, is out from OUP and highly recommended even from a skeptic like me (I don't think you can really take part in that debate without reading Peter's book), organized things, and it was terrific.  David Zaring, from Wharton, commented and was very patient and generous with comments on a very early stage, development stage paper.  (You can see the gist of it in the post preceding this one.)  I prefer to present very early stage papers where possible - meaning the point is not to show off something already done, but to develop it - precisely because I prefer getting comments at a point when the ideas are still being shaped.  Once too far along, the ideas are a bit set in concrete and it feels like defending a completed paper, rather than getting help in developing a new one.  David's comments were extraordinarily useful.  Likewise comments from the rest of the international law faculty and numbers of very thoughtful students.  My thanks to everyone.

**

ps.  A quick note to myself, so I don't forget it when I get past the current crisis deadline and start working on this again.  The broad background for this discussion, at least in matters of method, is the general decline of the humanities and the rise of social science as the way of explaining things.  David was quite right to point to the method axis and suggest that it might better be labeled not prescriptivist and descriptivist, but humanities and social science.  The subtext for the discussion of international law method might be the decline of Kant and the rise of Bentham.  But it seems to me that a big part of this method issue in law is the role of quantitative modeling - and it is echoed across the academy as, for examples, business schools dump the marketing and motivational and leadership stuff and recast themselves as applied economics, etc.  The humanities have themselves to blame for their loss of status, having embraced postmodernist theories that deprived them of any claim to authority, much less truth.  No one looks to humanities, from novels to the essay to art to you-name-it, as a source of revelation.  Social sciences, preferably with a statistical edge, have taken pride of place.  The difficulty is that it is hard, at least in large swathes of law, to see that the new methods are as yet set to deliver.  Mathematics in many of the new fields appears to be less a means of revelation than of a way of establishing an intellectual pecking order: the more math, the smarter you must be:  but the relationship to truth in the real world appears murkier.  Maybe one day the methods will pay off in unambiguous ways - I am no postmodernist, and I would like to hold out for ways of coming at complex social truth, including statistically.  But much of it seems more promising as yet than able to deliver.  How much of the stuff that I see in political science, IR, and international law in these new fields depends, for example, on survey research that cannot be made better than it is by any amount of statistical massage.  Here is a moment for the humanities and its traditional emphasis on the interpretation of texts: consider the Pew survey questions for worldwide attitudes toward Americans, or about religions, etc., and consider the ambiguities that many of those polled might :  when American pollsters are able to show a vastly better track record just for exit polls for national elections, then we might turn to consider the same issues on a worldwide cross cultural basis.  But at the moment, it is more the promise of a method than a method.  In that sense, the new quantitative methods of social science in the traditional humanities and law appear to be more exercises in post modernism than science.  Sorry this is cryptic; it is really scattered notes to myself. 

Prudence and morality for a political community's trustees confronting war

A note on ethics and war and just war theory.  In class, we have been talking our way through Walzer's chapter on realism and his deservedly famous discussion of the Melian dialogue.  The positions that can be disambiguated from that discussion as statements of realism are:

• Amoral realism.  The view that morality has no role in war.  It is expressed by the Athenian generals when they say (paraphrase), because we have power, we will do what we will and you will do what you must.  And because morality has no role in war, there is no ground to speak on moral grounds of limits on war.
• Amoral realism, 'an argument upon your safety' from Thucidydes.  This prudential argument says, too, that morality does not have a place in the discussion, because it is simply about your safety.  You must do whatever you must do to secure your safety.  Put in this bare bones fashion, it is still an argument of pure prudence, although it rapidly shades over into the moral argument formalized by Hobbes:
• Moral realism, 'an argument upon your safety' but by a 'necessity of nature', from Hobbes.  The move that converts Thucidydes into a moral argument, by linking it to the moral claim that in the state of nature, you are entitled, morally entitled, to whatever you deem prudent for your safety, including war.  Again no limits on war.

All that - plus some more - appears in Walzer, chapter 1.  But I want to add something else, something that converts and amplifies the 'argument upon your safety' from a purely prudential argument into a moral one.  It is that when the subject of all this is not a person, but a community, then obligations to see to the safety of that community become more than merely prudential.  They become a moral requirement that entails prudential forms of action.  The leaders of the community are, in effect, trustees and fiduciaries entrusted with the safety of the community.  What they do as matters of prudence are also, and in the first place, acts of morality on behalf of the community for whom they act. 

An individual, that is, might choose to take greater risks for himself or herself than he or she would feel entitled to have the community take.  It is a familiar position for a fiduciary - you are obliged to act more prudently than you would for yourself alone, and in so doing you fulfil a moral duty to others that, with respect to yourself alone, would be merely prudential.

I have described this as "amplifying" the prudential 'argument upon your safety' because the trustee, as fiduciary, must be more cautious and more prudent because of moral obligations to the community.  It amplifies in some circumstances the possibility of conflict, including preemptive and preventive war.

(For a real life example of this, see Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency, a book premised in large part on the proposition that any US administration, keenly aware of its role as trustee of the safety of the American people, will believe it not just prudent but moral to do whatever it takes to ensure public safety.  Many people argue that this prudence is misplaced and excessive, and risks other kinds of things, such as damage to the long term constitutional order.  Goldsmith's observation is that it is not merely a sense of prudence - protecting ourselves - but morality - the president has the moral obligation to do whatever can prudently be done to keep the American people safe.  In that sense, the moral obligation of a trustee serves as an amplifier of prudential action.  See my TLS review of it, downloadable at SSRN, here.)

***

(PS.  Philip Bobbitt (I don't think he'd mind me identifying him), in an illuminating conversation (as they always are) with me today noted that this sentiment, the idea that what is prudence for an individual becomes a genuinely moral obligation for the ruler - and amplifies it -  is part of Machiavelli's thought in The Prince.  But it is not Machiavelli as caricatured, but part of his republican thought.  Philip has a new short biography on Machiavellli and The Prince for a general audience coming out soon.  Also, Philip's magnificent Terror and Consent will appear from Knopf on April 1 - don't miss it! 

I should add, too, that this was a conversation with my daughter Renee, who has been studying Western intellectual traditions in her 9th grade Sidwell history class.  Renee has the good fortune to have an outstanding teacher - scholar in her own right - who has the class reading Machiavelli, et al., in original selections.  Renee remarked how much she loves listening to Philip talk about ideas, he is very clear, she says.  Philip is remarkably patient in explaining these things, and Renee took away an important idea about Hegel today to use in her Marx paper.)

Short review of Stephen Hopgood's Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International

I was asked recently to review Stephen Hopgood's Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International for an academic journal.  The journal review must necessarily be a capsule, around 750 words.  So I thought I would post up here my original 1600 word draft, before it gets cut down to size and the more biting stuff toned down (by me, by the way). 

There are a couple of things I did not address in this draft review, knowing that the final product is 750 words.  One is the embrace by AI of a sort of multiculti-anti-imperialism ideology.  Another, following on the first, is AI's embrace of often crude anti-Israel biases that have led to what can only be called factual errors in its reporting and beyond-dubious legal standards and international law interpretations.  A third, finally, is the unsurprising inability of the organization to mediate the contradictions between its gender, gay, and other progressive Western agendas and its pro-Muslim sensitivities; try as it might to ignore them, the contradictions result in considerable, um, cognitive dissonance.  At best.  Then there is AI's anti-Americanism, on which I commented in the Weekly Standard piece footnoted below.  One might as well add just how helpful all the above are to fundraising.

This is still first draft, not cleaned up, and I might well make some copy editing changes in the text below.  The Hopgood book is excellent, strongly recommended for anyone trying to understand the cultural inside of a leading organization of what is sometimes called - though not by me! - 'global civil society'.

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Keepers of the Flame:

Understanding Amnesty International

Stephen Hopgood

(Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 249 pp., paper, 2006)

ISBN: 978-0-8014-7251-0

The opacity of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), their closetedness and disdain for opening up even a small window into their internal workings, and more broadly their lack of accountability, is remarkable considering how much of their activity is devoted to getting other kinds of organizations to do precisely what they won’t. The environment, human rights, development, gender, labor, it does not really matter what – the most powerful global civil society groups (and the foundations that fund them) display haughty aversion to the transparency and accountability that they demand of government, business, international organizations and, really, everyone else.

The international NGO sector, taken as a whole, controls large resources (even leaving aside the development organizations that act as outsourcers of government funds). Greenpeace, for example, has had a peak annual budget exceeding a hundred million dollars. Oxfam, too, is also financially considerable.  NGOs have an enormous economic and political footprint in the developing world especially; their leverageable moral capital even larger than their financial capital. Yet getting concrete information (even routine financial data of the kind every public corporation must publish quarterly) is cantankerous at best. Getting truly inside NGOs, inside the culture, the habits of thinking and decisionmaking, is, in many instances, simply impossible.

For these reasons, Stephen Hopgood’s quasi-historical, quasi-anthropological, quasi-organizational account of governance, decision-making, values, power, organization, staffing, and control of Amnesty International is an important, fascinating study of one of the leadership organizations of global civil society. Hopgood traces the development of the organization as a history of its internal arguments and fights over its fundamental mission and mandate, beginning with its origins in 1961 with a British lawyer, Peter Benenson, and his mission – one squarely in the grand tradition of British social reformers that includes the Utilitarian Bentham and the Evangelical Wilberforce – to document and advocate on behalf of “prisoners of conscience.” One dimension of the book is the history of the organization. But a second dimension, much more important, is a compelling and closely observed walk through the fundamental and sometimes contradictory mission questions that AI has faced over its approximately fifty years of existence.

What are those mission issues? Perhaps the most vexed is the question of how wide AI’s human rights mandate should reach. And, by implication, how much should AI interpret and understand “human rights” to be simply an ever lengthening laundry list of progressive social demands? Hopgood begins his account with a revealing incident from 2003 when many members of the secretariat staff signed an open letter to AI general secretary Irene Kahn and her senior staff calling on them to maintain, and indeed refocus, the mission of AI onto something much closer to its original mandate. It appears to have had little impact on the internal trajectory of AI’s mission. Ironically, in fact, if there is anything that has pushed AI (and also HRW) back towards its original mandate, at least temporarily and partially, it is the post-9/11 US detention facility at Guantanamo, and the arguments over torture and coercive interrogations and renditions that have accompanied it. Activities about which AI, under Kahn, seems to have been become somewhat – well, how to put it? of course, torture is bad, but we have all these other new activities concerning development and anti-imperialism and what-not that are just so exciting – when they occurred in the usual benighted places, suddenly become front burner issues when the US is involved. Hence AI’s controversial invocation of Guantanamo in its 2005 annual report as “an American gulag” – although, thoroughly in keeping with the “new” AI public relations, that particular charge appears only in the press release and executive summary to the press, and is nowhere argued for in the actual body of the report.[1]

The original 1960s AI brief was, well, brief – to see to prisoners of conscience, those imprisoned on political grounds rather than ordinary criminal grounds in the liberal sense, oppose torture and the death penalty. It gradually expanded to cover the political human rights found, particularly, in the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that came with the founding of the UN. A liberal understanding of these rights lent themselves to a certain prioritization – core rights that could be understood on Kantian, categorical terms. No tradeoffs accepted regarding torture, for example; categorical, admitting of no exceptions. Yet the difficulties were present from the beginning, given that the ICCPR was accompanied by the International Convention on Economic and Social Rights, and by the enunciation within both the United Nations and many declarations and documents of positive international law that aspirational economic rights – ones requiring resources, economic growth and, yes, tradeoffs – were as much “human rights” as anything else. The core human rights NGOs – AI and Human Rights Watch (HRW) – resisted for a long time. But gradually, with varying degrees of actual commitment, they concluded that the juridical status of those rights in international law prevented them from prioritizing them over civil and political rights; the most they could do, as HRW has long done, is plead rather weakly that organizationally, they are not very efficient at what we might call “tradeoff” rather than “Kantian-trump” human rights.

Hopgood shows how AI gradually has come to embrace the entire economic, social, and cultural canon of left-progressivism, preaching it as though it were required by the Categorical Imperative rather than simply being one politically contestable vision of the good even within an impeccably liberal paradigm. As a practical political matter, it especially moved this way because of the fact that, unlike most other leading international NGOs, its constituent national chapters are membership organizations. Members, voting members. One practically has to have worked in NGOs to understand just what it means to have an organization whose board of directors is not self-appointing and self-perpetuating, from the top down.

On the one hand, it means an organization that has accountability to its members for the positions it takes, and in that special sense, democracy. But that democratic accountability is entirely internal. It is not accountable to anyone outside the organization – which, in the case of demands for how development budgets should be spent, the economic tradeoffs involved in poor and developing countries facing AIDS, environmental problems, malaria, girls’ education, is far from a minor thing. On the other hand, non-membership organizations, the self-appointing board-controlled organizations, have advantages in ideological coherency (as exemplified by HRW), top-down governance not swayed by the diffuse political desires of a voting membership. HRW, to be sure, has followed the shifting winds of liberal internationalism, gradually converting its mandate from international liberalism to international multiculturalism, but by comparison to AI, it remains much more willing to say that not everything that is good is a matter of rights.

Hopgood is best – superb, even – on the internal culture of AI, and the secretariat in London especially. Anyone (this reviewer included) who has had dealings with the culture of AI on the inside will immediately recognize the enormous pressures of an organization that is both a big business, a professional commitment, but also what amounts to a religious vocation with all the intensity that entails. Burnout is common and even expected; even so, Hopgood’s interviews on the subject are startling. So is the sense that the world devolves into the space within AI itself. It is a place of religious fervor, but also of people who finally have no other place to go even if they wanted to, and few job skills deployable outside of AI itself; a place of many theological disputes over mandates and ideological categories, but at the same time, because of the democratizing pressures of the membership, a place prone to sometimes humiliating mistakes. Its embarrassing factually flawed reporting on Guatemala a few years ago, for example, or its general lack of sophistication (even by the standards of broadly sympathetic fellow organizations, HRW and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)), in matters of the laws of armed conflict – for an organization that pioneered human rights professionalism, it can sometimes remain remarkably amateur. Moreover, relations between the secretariat and wealthy and powerful national organizations such as AIUSA can be tense.

Finally, however, Keepers of the Flame documents (yet without entirely recognizing it) the ways in which an organization can exhaust the mobilizing discourse of rights. “Rights” in AI’s usage, in the relentless broadening of categories that Hopgood reveals chapter by chapter, perversely lose their sanctity, luster and status as trumps, and simultaneously their ability to mobilize, precisely because they become merely the language for describing every fashionable political desire. It has been a long time since AI was regarded by serious political actors as anything other than a political advocacy group, a long time since it was regarded as standing above ordinary politics in the way that, for example, the ICRC has carefully continued to do, even in its nastiest confrontations with the US. And yet AI, blinded by its own rhetoric, will likely never recognize the damage it has done to the language of rights in pursuit of its promiscuous political agendas. As Michael Walzer once put it, in a passage Hopgood might fruitfully have made his own, the “effort to produce a complete account of justice or a defense of equality by multiplying rights soon makes a farce of what it multiplies. To say of whatever we think people ought to have that they have a right to have it is not to say very much.”[2]

---

[1] I have written critically of AI in this regard; see Kenneth Anderson, “An American Gulag? Human Rights Groups Test the Limits of Moral Equivalency,” The Weekly Standard, Vol. 10, No. 37, June 13, 2005, available at SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=935770.

[2] Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (NY: Basic Books 1983), p. xv.

Thanks to Instapundit for linking to my Jack Goldsmith review in the TLS

My thanks to Glenn Reynolds here at Instapundit for linking to my review in the Times Literary Supplement (London) of Jack Goldsmith's superb The Terror Presidency.  (You can get directly to my Goldsmith review here.)

One of the things I listened to closely while writing that review was the Instapundit podcast interview with Jack Goldsmith, which I highly recommend and which you can reach at this link.

Glenn, thanks as ever! 

(And if any Instapundit readers come here after visiting the TLS, let me just say that I regard the TLS as the finest literary review in the world.  It covers a breathtaking range of subjects, its discussion of literature is unsurpassed anywhere, and if you are a student or, really, anyone looking to hone your own essay and prose style, read the TLS for models on how to write.)

Howdy to Josh Cohen!

In the comments below to my recollections of the great Rogers Albritton, Joshua Cohen adds his support. Josh, long of MIT and now of Stanford, is hardly an intellectual slouch ... one of the great political philosophers of our day, star of this country's humanist and humane Left, and broad gauge intellectual through his editorship of the Boston Review ... not to mention my teacher in Marx when he taught for a couple of terms visiting at UCLA. Josh was one of those standout teachers - he never sought to entertain the crowd, and yet he managed to reach out with his mind and utterly engage intellectually those who were listening. The broader intellectual community knows what a great scholar and thinker Josh is; you should know what a privilege it was for me and others at UCLA to have him as a teacher. Those students included me, the legal philosopher Larry Solum, and the great Hobbes scholar Sharon Lloyd.

True, I've moved right since those days - I would say my trajectory is probably close to that of my fellow Telos editor and Hoover Institution fellow Russell Berman, who teaches in comparative literature at Stanford. Alas, Josh would likely not approve, or at least not agree - one of Josh's great virtues being his willingness to engage with those who don't agree with him - but I suppose I fit one of the particular definition's of neo-conservative, in the special sense of someone who started out on the left and moved right. I didn't start by reading conservative philosophers; the only one I really read, and read about, I suppose, was Burke. I read liberals and the left, and Josh's classes in Marx were and are an important part of that. I still go back and read sections of the economic and philosophical manuscripts, Capital, On the Jewish Question, Critique of the Gotha Program, the Manifesto, etc. My intellectual formation owes more to Marx than to any conservative philosopher (Josh, as the person who taught me Marx, I hope this is not causing you regret!). Indeed, I think of myself as having "moved right" largely in the sense that the Left has moved a different direction itself - first, an embrace of rights discourse in ways disastrous to the liberal conception of rights; second, an embrace of multiculturalism via the discourse of rights that is disastrous to liberty; third, ... heck, if I go on, I'll shortly celebrate myself as Keeper of the True Flame.

Then there's also the general problem that mainstream economics has turned out to be much more intellectually powerful than I, for one, as a philosophy student in the early 1980s, would have thought possible. It's not the end of the story, of course; it operates within a certain frame from which an immanent critique is certainly possible and a jolly good idea. But most of life is not really lived in the immanence, but well within the frame of supply and demand. Critical theory, as law professors have found to their sorrow, isn't so good at the detailed on the ground stuff of doctrine. Microecon does a much better job at explaining that stuff. Again, it is not that critical theory has no place, but immanence is not where we live. (Consider how it does come back in - for example, Gregory Clark's new book on the Industrial Revolution, Malthusianism, and international economic development - A Farewell to Alms - it finally concludes that conventional economic theory cannot explain the wealth and poverty of nations, and, though starting from an economic historian's frame, opens the possibilities of critical theory, anthropology, sociology, and possibilities beyond economists' rationality.)

The Boston Review is one of the best book reviews and intellectual sounding boards going. And note that although it is not new anymore, it is still a relatively latecomer to the world of literary book reviews, the world of the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books. I suggested a couple of years ago in a rundown of places still interested in reviewing books that the Boston Review was parochial, based around the Cambridge crowd - Josh dropped me a note correcting me about that, and he was right. I went back and subscribed, and over the last couple of years of reading it, have come to quite agree - it is not parochial and one of the few things in the US that gives the NYRB any competition and, truth be told, I prefer it (the NYRB tone of God Addressing Eternity eventually loses me). In the midst of all the rest of what Josh does, it is quite amazing. Okay, in order of my reading preference, the leading (we might say, remaining) literary reviews are the TLS, LRB, Boston Review, back-of-book-Wieseltier-land TNR, NYRB. (Another day I'll update my sense of the reviewing world.)

I'm sitting here in a Caribou Coffee house in downtown DC writing this over Thanksgiving weekend. I'm sitting here thinking about Josh, Rogers, the really astounding teachers and professors I've had over the years. I haven't even mentioned law school. I wonder how many students, back then or now, have that kind of intellectual opportunity. I don't think I provide that to my students - I think I give them a very practical education in lawyering, business, finance, international development, nonprofits, philanthropy, nonprofit finance and tax law, etc. but it's not fundamentally intellectual. I think I gave that to my high school students at NCS in the ethics and war class, but somehow third year of law school seems different. I've been privileged and, really, blessed. Anyway, Josh, it was great to hear from you - I'll email you at Stanford - and happy thanksgiving to you and yours.

Originality in writing

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good."

(Attributed to Samuel Johnson.)

Remembrance day

A year ago, at a meeting in New York, I was slightly surprised to see my friend John, arriving from London, with a cotton-made orange poppy in his lapel. In my lifetime it has never been remembered here in the United States with anywhere near the same care as in Britain; in this time of war, one better recalls. But it is one of those holidays that cuts across various lines - it can be a symbol of the madness of war, the nobility of war, or both together. The poppy in John's lapel was just that - a symbol of remembrance, not of a political statement as such.

And so I'd prefer to leave it here, today. Any reader of this blog will have a sense of where I stand on war, war on terror, war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd rather register my remembrance of those who died who died in defense of freedom in these and earlier wars, to whom I and the rest of us owe gratitude. They are first; and then to the memory of those who died on all sides in all conflicts; God grant them peace.

Well, almost leave it here. For this must seem, to those for whom patriotism and nationalism are by definition the same thing, both sentimental and atavistic. John is an intellectual and a cosmopolitan, but he is also among the last of the generation who could be counted with Orwell as the English left-patriots. The ranks diminish apace. The intellectual worlds which I mostly inhabit have long since departed any concept of place, anything as parochial as nation and home, for versions of cosmopolitanism which, on the one hand, seem to demand everything in the way of commitment - for people one does not know and whom one has no particular idea even exist, save in the abstract - and nothing in particular, except some donations of cash over the internet. The idea of country is deliberately alien to them; likewise alien, however, are the particulars of the cosmopolitan jet-stream which they imagine themselves to inhabit; the invisible college of international law; the only-too visible college of the global new class. Which makes me think of this passage, perhaps the most honest and morally most compelling thing from Michael Ignatieff:

It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted. Though we have passed into the post-imperial age, we have not moved to a post-nationalist age, and I cannot see how we ever will. The cosmopolitan order of the great cities - London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris - depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state ... In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens. In that sense alone, I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives.

It is in this capacity, my dearest, careless, effortless, innocent, obligation-free cosmopolitan-children, the middle-aged, thickened, contented, sleep-walking academic flower-children of globalization, that Lt. Michael P. Murphy died for your lifestyle and its infinitely insouciant claims to be beyond the values he fought for, but which - collaterally - sustain you in the safe and secure embrace of the thing you disdain and mock, the passe democratic nation-state. Je tenais a ces etres par mille fils confiants dont pas un ne devait se rompre. J'ai aime fourchement mes semblables mette journee-la, bien au-dela du sacrifice. (Char). Even Ignatieff is wiser and more honest than you - and he is a politician and an intellectual. You would, I reckon, have sooner awarded Lt. Murphy your pity, not the Medal of Honor, and been well-pleased to think him the rich beneficiary of that, so highly do you regard your jet-stream lives above those who live merely on planet earth, and in particular and beloved and thereby parochial places upon the earth. But Murphy and those like him look not for your pity, which is based upon ignorance and condescension, but your respect and, dare one say it, honor. In Flanders fields, that is.

American Buddhism in decline?

Very elegant and lovely article in today's Wall Street Journal Taste page, by Clark Strand, an editor with the Buddhist review Tricycle, on the difficulties that American Buddhism has in reproducing itself. Here. This article made me recall a book that I found by complete accident in the used and remaindered section of the Stanford University bookstore a few years ago, Shoes Outside the Door, novelist Michael Downing's (nonfiction) account of how a Bay Area Buddhist community more or less fell apart around issues of integrating religious practice into the rest of life. I gave away my copy, but I am now going to Amazon to get another ... it was one of the most gently elegant and, in a way, intelligently elegaic books on religion I think I have ever read.

*** Excerpts:

When I suggested to my colleague that he might want to think of ways to integrate his Buddhist experience into the long-term life of his family, and that he might look to existing religious models, like his local synagogue, for ideas on how to do that (rather than to the out-of-state monastery where he goes alone on retreat twice yearly), he answered shortly, "When my kids get old enough, they can decide for themselves whether to meditate or not."

It's an argument I have heard before. Having left the religion of their birth, often with good reason, American converts tend to be wary of anything approaching religious indoctrination, even if that means failing to offer their children the basics of a religious education. This has the advantage of giving Buddhist children great freedom of religious expression, with the disadvantage of not giving them any actual religion to express. The result is a generation of children with a Buddhist parent or two but no Buddhist culture to grow up in.

What does this mean for the non-Buddhist culture at large? Why be concerned that so few Buddhist baptisms, weddings or funerals occur among Buddhist converts each year that most of them have no idea what such ceremonies even look like, or that years after their conversion, their extended families persist in thinking of them as basically Jewish or Catholic at heart? The answer is surprising all around.

In the contemporary discourse on religion, it is striking how often Buddhism is privileged over Judaism, Christianity or Islam as a scientifically based or inherently peaceful version of religion. Note that the Dalai Lama (rather than the pope) was asked to provide the inaugural address at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2005, even though, like Catholicism, Tibetan Buddhism includes beliefs (think reincarnation) that are anathema to medical science. Likewise, though Japanese Buddhists melted their temple bells to make bombs during World War II, the idea of Buddhism as a peace-loving religion persists as an enduring fantasy in Western people's minds. And yet, such fantasies are instructive nonetheless.

Though some of my more devout Buddhist associates may balk at the idea, these days I have increasingly come to see Buddhism in America as an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large--from the serious practitioner who meditates twice daily to the person who remarks in passing, "Well, if I had to be something, I guess I'd be a Buddhist." The object of that experiment is not to import some "authentic" version of Buddhism from Asia, as some believe, but to imagine a new model for religion altogether--one that is nondogmatic, practice-based and peaceful.

In that case, all the more reason to keep Buddhism in America alive. But to keep that experiment running (as it must if it is ever to yield practical results for the broader religious culture), it has to get itself grounded in the realities of American family life.

Recommended - Malise Ruthven's NYRB review essay on books on Islam

I finished reading today Malise Ruthven's excellent review essay in the New York Review of Books on books on Islam, particularly Islam and war and just war. Very fine essay. I have read one of the books in his review, Olivier Roy's new book, Secularism Confronts Islam, and thought it also well worth reading, although I think Roy uses "multiculturalism" in a way that is not exactly what it means in American or UK ideology (more on that later). I look forward especially to reading the books on Islam and war. The review essay itself is elegant as Ruthven's essays always are. Highly recommended. Here at the NYRB.

(Update. How to embarrass yourself! I've been reading Ruthven's essays in the TLS for years and never realized Malise is a man's name. Thank you Scott in the comments, and I've corrected it above.)

Politics and Prose bookstore on a Sunday afternoon

Where I just spent, um, 160 dollars on books. Most of them were supersale books, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok. Now I am sitting in the coffeeshop, looking around at my fellow aging boomers, on our laptops, feeling very coffeehouse like. Anyone with any sense and the functional hips and knees would be outside on a bike on a day as nice as this. We feel so gentle, genteel, birkesnstoccky and ... old. We're all people, one way or another, in the "helping professions." We're practicing for our French class in one corner, and drafting a document for the senior nursing staff of the nursing facility, describing how we're going to reduce falls and mistaken meds rates, in another. We're virtuous and we drink expensive coffee, dress schlumpy and badly, but in an understated way. I've fallen into a David Brooks' comic sociology! Upstairs in the bookstore, the Utne Reader (God, it still exists?!) had a cover article on how baby boomers, as elders, can save the world ... again! I myself wasn't aware we had saved it the first time around.

I came to pick up some books for my kid's 15th birthday at the end of the month. I'm not quite sure why - her old school, by dint of so much busywork due the next morning, pretty much drove out of her any desire to read anything not absolutely required. She doesn't read, she watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer - my goodness, how we've fallen from a family that for many years really didn't watch TV or DVDs to one that can't get by without them; and, truth, truth, truth, I'm happy to accompany her, because reading is even less social with your offspring than watching Buffy. But she does tend to read teen girl angst novels once in a while, so I thought I'd get her a novel reviewed in the New York Times, Jenny Downham's Before I Die. Sixteen year old girl dying of leukemia, review said it was pretty funny, and even if it's not, it should have the requisite adolescent girl angst. It could be good. Anyway, it's teen rather than adult fiction, so can't be that demanding a read. Naturally it wasn't yet in bookstores, so I overcompensated and bought things for ... me!

Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms; Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It; Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories, Olivier Roy's new book on Islam in Europe, and so much more!

Julien Sorel - an appreciation of Maurice Leiter's poem on Brian Leiter's blog

By happenstance, I ran across the following poem by Maurice Leiter, Julian Sorel, posted as the Friday poem on Brian Leiter's blog, here. The last bit of the poem is this:

It's a good story and if I told it
Then I'm glad I told it
Let someone more detached
Provide a fitting commentary

I felt too close to Julian
To judge him
Certainly not in public

Well, it's rare that anyone captures part of my feeling for The Red and the Black so well. I've never told the story to a class. But for several years, when on vacation and hiking in the Eastern Sierras, part of my obligation while hiking was to tell a story that would keep kid Renee's mind of her feet. Rules were simple - as long as we kept moving, I had to keep telling the story; if we stopped, I stopped. This tended to slow me down and speed Renee up.

One year I told Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, which she eventually read and has largely memorized. Another year I told a story from a book I only vaguely recollected from my childhood, Trouble at Timpetil (which my wife eventually found and got for Renee and me). And one year I told the Red and the Black. We hiked about ten miles that day, and spent about seven or eight hours on the trail - out of South Lake, up Bishop Pass trail, detour to the Chocolate Lakes, nestled below The Inconsolable Mountains. Renee was entranced by the story of Julien and Mathilde. Curiously, though, she has never read the novel itself. I still read the novel - I was even reading it last night, because I thought I might take a quote from the chapter called, Another Danton? But then I got distracted by the lovely chapter wherein Mathilde says (you see, it's sitting right here on my desk),

"Whatever are you dreaming of, Sir?" There was a note of intimacy in her question, and she had come back running and was quite out of breath in her eagerness to be with him. Julien was tired of self suppression. In a moment of pride, he told her frankly what he was thinking.

So as you can tell, I am entirely with Maurice Leiter in saying "I felt too close to judge Julian/ Certainly not in public." Quite.

Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency - Instapundit Podcast Interview

I have just finished Jack Goldsmith's very, very compelling new book, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. More to follow on the book, but I strongly recommend Jack's podcast interview on the Glenn and Helen Show over at Instapundit, here.

I regard the book as must reading for anyone trying to understand the Bush administration and the war on terror; I think it will be one of the few "insider" books that will be around as a permanent record of the Bush administration. It is a deceptively easy read - Jack turns out to have a genuine talent for narrative and wears his immense legal erudition lightly - rare among law professors, and I include myself in that - but underlying the narrative is a strong analytic core that is not, as Glenn Reynolds points out, exactly what the media coverage of the book suggests.

Steve Wasserman on book reviews in newspapers

Steve Wasserman, who for years was the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has a fabulous cover essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, here, on the decline of book reviews in American newspapers. It is a superb essay, well worth reading.

I have a particular interest in book reviews - I like to write book reviews, have done so in various publications for many years, and take the whole enterprise seriously. Steve is one of a small handful of genuinely gifted and wonderful editors I have been privileged to work with - John Ryle at the TLS, Tod Lindberg at Policy Review, Scott Malcomson at the NYT magazine, Luis Gago as editor and translator at the Madrid Revista de Libros, and a number of editors in various departments at the TLS under Ferdinand Mount and Peter Stothard over the years being the others - and the LA Times Book Review was an amazing thing under his leadership. I'll have more to say about this when I am slightly less pressed; I wrote about book reviews here on this blog a while back. But read Steve's article.

***
ps. Rereading with amusement Steve's account of the LAT editor's response to Steve prominently publishing a review of a new translation of The Charterhouse of Parma - "Stendhal, Steve? More dead, white European males?" or his decision to publish Octavio Paz on Sor Juana ... there are not a lot of book review editors at major newspapers, even when they existed, who would have the chutzpah to run a special section on ... dead classics - in translation. My own contribution to that was a major piece on the infamous Story of O. Here. Later, I wrote Steve a major review essay on pedagogies of reading, which was a very brave piece for someone, like Steve, who is a man of the left, and who was crossing a very large number of committed progressives by running a piece like that, like stepping into a minefield called "no child left behind" - true, the mayor of Los Angeles loved it and called me to say so, so did the state superintendent of schools, and so did the most important empirically based researcher in reading pedagogy in the United States (at NIH in Bethesda); Steve, however, got lots of hate mail for that one. Here.

And somewhere in there, Steve asked me to review a book about Mormonism - my childhood, long lapsed religion - in view of wanting to be fair, objective, not someone with an agenda one way or the other but an understanding of the religion and the culture - but knowing that his editor and publisher were both practicing Mormons and quite sensitive on the subject: not a moment, in other words, for the (very great) Christopher Hitchens. I think I did a fine job in that instance, thank you very much, something that was both personal and analytic. But Steve gave very shrewd editorial advice in shaping that piece to balance the personal parts and the parts that went to the whole culture and the book, advice that allowed that piece to work. Here.

So when I say that Steve is one of the great editors in America, I mean it, and that he knows in his CJR essay whereof he speaks.

"Did you think you could lose that much money and no one would notice?"

So. The bad African warlord made his $200 million in blood diamonds and entrusted it for laundering to the international bad investment guy Le Chifre who, instead of putting it into safe investments, has lost it all gambling on uncovered options. Le Chifre hopes to win it all back in a high stakes poker game at the Casino Royale. Blood diamond warlord shows up in Le Chifre's hotel room and snarls, "Did you think you could lose that much money and no one would notice?"

A slogan for the credit crisis? From Casino Royale!

(And when the British government's financial representative, Vesper Lynd, refuses to authorize another 5 million for Bond to buy back into the game after Bond loses 10 million, he is staked by none other than the CIA's Felix Leiter ... thus putting the US government in the familiar position of ... Moral Hazard!)

(Update. It occurs to me that Moral Hazard would be a pretty good name for a Bond Girl.)

What I'm reading, an irregular series ...

As you can tell, I am dodging work for a couple of hours this afternoon and idly posting ... I have my UN manuscript to complete (it is very far along, I'm delighted to say, although less sure about its readability), and a Simpsons Movie review for the TLS to complete. In theory, writing the Simpsons review should be a break from the harder work of writing the UN manuscript, but unfortunately, as my Simpsons review has - gulp, ultimate sin of a review of a summer comedy - got somewhat serious, it has got harder to finish. But here's what I am reading these days:

The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, by Stephen Holmes. I finished this a few days ago, then read Peter Berkowitz's review in Policy Review, here, "Vulgarizing the War Debate."

If anything, I think Peter is too nice about this book. In an earlier post on this blog, I remarked on my experience over the last year and a half of being a panelist at academic conferences in which the principal and largely unchallenged assumption was that terrorism was not really the issue, an overblown American response was; terrorism, according to one academic panelist, in a phrase I have made my own (by way of dispute, however), is merely a "second order" problem. Marty Lederman, in a comment on that post, said that he hangs out with a lot of critics of the administration but has never heard such sentiments. Well, perhaps we mean different things by such labels - but a couple of further commentators to that post weighed in with several examples of "terrorism is a second order problem" thinking. One is the recent (late 2006) Foreign Affairs article by political scientist John Mueller,"Is there still a terrorist threat?" and answering no. Indeed, answering that there never really was one as such, it was all overblown and mostly imagined.

To this canon we must add Professor Holmes' Matador's Cape. Let me be honest, I've never been a fan of Holmes's work - yes, of course, leading political theorist, all that, but the hatchet job he did in his 1993 The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism on thinkers ranging from Christopher Lasch to Roberto Unger was so egregious that I've never been able to take him seriously again. All wit, all the time; serious, accurate readings of his targets, something else again.

(It was also Peter Berkowitz, by the way, who most precisely and comprehensively revealed the level of selective quotation, contrived misreadings of key texts, etc., that made up the 1993 book, here - something that I don't suppose improved Peter's tenure prospects in Harvard's government department - although Peter liked somewhat more Holmes' later Passions and Constraints (1995), here. However, the one who had the most reason to be angered by the misreadings was, for my money, Unger who, however, has long tended to take such attacks in stride.)

My objections to the Matador book are essentially a somewhat more indignant version of Peter's. Holmes switches arguments as it suits him, depending on the target, with little attention to the intellectual inconsistencies - and worse, inconsistencies implied for actual policy - and an insouciant attitude that the real issue is not out there, it is in here; the issue is not terrorism, it is (the excesses of, the inherent illiberalism of) counterterrorism.

Capital Ideas Evolving, by Peter L. Bernstein. A decade ago I reviewed Bernstein's superb Against the Gods: The story of risk in the TLS, here. But Bernstein, that rare combination of a scholar-writer-practical investment banker (the one other outstanding example I can think of is James MacDonald, author of the wonderful A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy), had actually begun his writing on finance theory and history with a 1970s book on the new financial theories entering the capital markets - the theories of efficient markets, options pricing models, etc. This new book offers a new perspective on those theories and their successors, both as an intellectual matter and a practical matter in the markets. I have just started it, and am greatly enjoying it. Students - but not just students, by any means - I think, would get a great deal from this book. One of my criticisms of how economics is taught is not just its widely commented abstraction - the number of law students I teach who have had multiple classes in undergraduate economics where they drew many supply-demand curves but have not the faintest idea what any of it means in the real world, well, they are legion - but also its determined ahistoricism. To conceive of economics as having a genuine intellectual history is, apparently, to deprive it of claims to Truth and Science (analytic philosophy long had precisely such an attitude toward intellectual history). More when ... I have actually read the book.

Model Behavior, by Jay McInerney. A well known and justly very well regarded international law professor - which is to say, a serious intellectual who is the real deal, even when, as is frequently the case, we disagree - dropped me a note to say that he had read a book I had commented on earlier, AA Gill's Starcrossed, and rather enjoyed it. Hooray! But I'll let him remain nameless because my wife started into the book, and told me that I could talk all I wanted about Gill's take on Antigone and his infectious enthusiasm for poetry, about the book's wry insight into the nature of celebrity, fame, and money - at the end of the day this book was just another in the genre of male fantasy novels about models-actresses who take up relationships with men for whom in real life one can't possibly imagine it happening. Chick lit for guys, I think she put it. Well. Errr. Hmm. Surely not. Couldn't possibly be.

There being no good response to that, at least by a middle aged academic who can't afford a midlife crisis, let me instead offer another in the "chick lit for guys" category - Model Behavior by that now-out-of-fashion bad boy of lit, Jay McInerney. I found it by complete accident - our home bookshelves are crowded with books that somehow arrived, wound up there, drifted in with the spring pollen, somehow took up residence, even though I've never read or even noticed them. This was one of them - I noticed it while we were eating picnic style in front of a video a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea what it was. It's okay but not great; I read it all the way through mostly to find out if "they" got back together. And when that's the reason you're reading a novel - what did Jean-Marie call it? Chick lit for guys? Never.

Airplane reading on the long flights to and from Chile: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Book of the Dead, being the latest in the Special Agent Pendergrast series, and Lee Child, Bad Luck and Trouble, being the latest Jack Reacher novel. There are others, but I'll only embarrass myself further.

(There are two authors who require separate, serious discussions. One is Tod Lindberg and his new The Political Teachings of Jesus, and the other is Francisco Goldman, his new nonfiction account of the murder of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, but also his whole fiction canon. They are both old and dear friends.)

Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the market, and ecological scarcity

One side comment to the posts below celebrating the centenary of Robert Heinlein's birth. A number of the articles pointed to his The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a pivotal text in the libertarian movement (broad libertarianism, not merely its narrow electoral party). This is of course correct. A number of these essays likewise correctly point to the free market ideas of that novel - in particular, There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Does it bear pointing out, however, that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ultimately revolves around the failure of market mechanisms? That the revolution that the Professor urges is necessary not on account of markets but on account of a much more fundamental, deeply Malthusian ecological crisis? I read the thing a couple of years back, for the first time since childhood - out loud to my daughter, no less. What caught my attention especially was the Professor arguing that not only could Luna not afford to ship grain to Earth at a "fair" price - because of the increasing scarcity of water on the Moon, it could not afford to so at any price. Grain shipments in effect shipped fantastically scarce Lunar water to Earth, and it could not be shipped the other way. There could only be a short term market in grain=water. Mike confirmed the worst in a series of computer projections.

The central political premise of the book, in other words, the fact which above all argued for violent and bloody revolution, was an ecological premise, a premise of ecological scarcity, not the market as such. This is hardly to denigrate the book's market oriented libertarianism, but the central political fact, at least as far as the Professor was concerned, was not in order to promote a market but in order to end one that would end in ecological catastrophe. Which was, by the way, surely a reason why so many of my radical environmentalist friends of the 70s and early 80s - Amory and Hunter Lovins, for example - were fans of the book.

Update: Wtanksley in the comments makes a good point:

Free market and ecological preservation/conservation are not contradictory. Historically, the worst abuses of the environment have taken place in dictatorships of one stripe or another. When the people who profit or lose from the use of a resource own and control the resource, they tend to shepherd its use.

In the book, the environmental disaster was caused by a government that owned all the property, set all the laws, and ruled all the people without consent. That's pretty much the extreme version of communistic socialism.

The TLS of July 20, 2007

It won't mean very much, I suppose, unless you subscribe or have easy access to a copy, but this week's TLS of July 20, 2007 is a very fine issue on many different matters. Claude Rawson's cover essay on wit in the 18th century is terrific. Likewise Adrian Tahourdin's review of Pierre Bayard's slightly scandalous argument that it is okay to opine on books we haven't read. (Let me add, however, as a sometime TLS reviewer, that I have never reviewed a book for the TLS or anywhere else that I haven't read cover to cover - on the other hand, I've never been a weekly reviewer, "reading" and cranking out something every few days - I have always had the luxury of taking my own sweet time. This has sometimes led to abuse of the privilege of time - and I admit I am late on a couple of things for TLS now - but I can say I've read everything I've reviewed.) And Justin Belplate's essay on Milan Kundera's The Curtain is also very thoughtful. It's a terrific issue.

Thinking about book reviews ... I once received an invitation, which very regrettably I wasn't able to follow up, to join a very special book club - one in which you discussed books of which you had read only the reviews, not the actual book itself. A stunningly good idea - and honest, too!

The Rene Char photo that is on my Bibliotheque National centenary exhibit poster

Am I the only person in the US to have a framed poster of Rene Char on the wall?

(By the way, there is a useful short, straightforward biography and discussion of Char's key works at enotes, here.)

Diario: Winding up teaching in Santiago, Chile and coming home to DC

My finance seminar at the University of Chile law school wound up on Friday night, and it was time to get started home. It would have been perfect to stay the weekend and ski, if only I were a skier. But I also have a full writing schedule awaiting me at home, things that need to get completed at least in draft before classes begin again in August, so it is time to get back to DC. Saturday was a beautiful morning in Santiago - blue skies and not the smog that had been hanging over the city, as is only too normal in the winter. Then it started to pour rain. It rained hard and cold all afternoon. Finally, in the late afternoon it all cleared up, gloriously, with fresh snow very low on the hills and a beautiful sunset. (And if I hadn't managed to bust my camera, I would have pics to post.)

I try not to get too crazy doing tourist purchases - we have just been in London and Paris, with a certain amount of discretionary spending by my wife at Agnes B and Claudia Pierlot (?). Anyway, here in Chile I have limited things to some lapislazuli earrings and chains for wife and daughter. And I found some posters this morning at the Information Center that Jean-Marie might want to use in her classroom - tourist posters of Patagonia.

***

Jean-Marie asked me to be on the lookout for the tourist posters. Thinking it over, though, sitting in the Havana coffeeshop - open wi-fi - on Avenida Providencia, if I were decorating her classroom in an all boys school, St Alban's, I would skip the tourist posters and instead go after moderately sexy advertising posters with girls not-quite-decently-dressed saying important things in Spanish. It's probably a fine line between being sexy enough to make foreign language interesting and romantic, and merely distracting. I myself think it better to err on the side of sexy distraction - but then, unlike my wife, I don't have to teach the past subjunctive to hormonally-charged adolescent males.

On the subject of gender and foreign language study, I saw several large college semester abroad-study Spanish groups in Santiago in the past couple of days. I'm not sure I would pick Santiago as a place to learn Spanish, for the same reason I would not pick Sevilla - Santiago is a lovely city, and very safe as Latin American capitals go, with very, very wonderful people. On the other hand, Chileans, like Andalucians, speak very rapidly and swallow not just terminal syllables, but whole paragraphs. My students were very nice about carefully pronouncing things when speaking with me, but I was amazed at how difficult it was for me to understand people on the street and in shops - same problem as I had in Sevilla - enough to make me doubt that I understood the language, until we went to Madrid and it was a completely different story. Anyway - I noticed that the college semester abroad programs seemed to run about 75-80% women. Very few men. Why is that? Jean-Marie and I have repeatedly noticed this in Europe, too. As Jean-Marie said back then, she more or less expected this in France, because judging by Renee's schools, French is regarded as the language for girls who have trust funds and plan to study art history. But we don't see the guys in these programs anywhere we go. Where are the guys?

***

Next door to my hotel in Santiago is a very fine bookshop, La feria del libro chileno, I think it is called. Harry Potter? Well, this and seemingly every other bookshop in Santiago has Harry Potter in the window - stacks and stacks of them - in English, all 800 pages of it, I might add. It's a testament to reading power in a foreign language here in Chile. At several of the bookstores today there are Harry Potter look-alikes, with cape and glasses and wands. Very cool. I thought of this on seeing Instapundit's posts about reviews of Harry Potter. But I'm not one of the Harry Potter fans, alas; I've thought the whole thing derivative in extreme from the beginning, and a not very interesting pastiche. Fantasy writers often seem to think it enough to be able to invent a complete alternative world; there is more to literature than that, no es asi?

This morning I walked up to the Pablo Neruda house museum over near Bellavista here in Santiago. I have mixed views on Neruda. I have always loved the 20 poemas de amor. But I've never taken the political poetry seriously - even when I was genuinely on the left, I never took political poetry seriously. I tried, heaven knows, with Brecht and lots of others, but I guess I'm a rationalist in politics - in the sense of thinking it really must be about arguments, rationality and experience, not appeals to emotions.

***

I know this runs contrary to my general idolizing of Rene Char on this blog - Jean-Marie and Renee gave me a framed poster of Char from the Bibliotheque National exhibition in Paris on the centenary of Char's birth this summer, and seeing the exhibition was one of the high points of the June trip to Europe. (Am I possibly the only person in the whole US with a framed portrait of Rene Char on the wall? And possibly one of the very few even in France?) But for all that, in fact I don't take Char's concrete politics - as a communist or as anything else - politics as policy, as policies - very seriously when expressed in his poetry. A certain sensibility, yes; but an argument - the kinds of propositional arguments that, say, Brecht seemed to think were implicit in his poetry as well as plays - no. I have always been acutely aware, on the contrary, even back in the day when I was still over on the left, even as a teenager, of something that Stendhal said about romantic love in his eponymous essay On Love - the way in which it could sweep you along through the power of emotion alone into thinking you had discovered great sublime truths and that those emotions translated to true propositions. However, he added drily, one could achieve exactly the same effect, the same feeling of transcendental certainty, for pretty much any cause - merely by listening to great Italian opera or stirring martial music. And anyway, for all my deep and abiding respect and love of Char's wartime writings, he is something of a romantic about war.

That leaves the rest of Neruda's work - the stuff that is neither the romantic love poetry nor the agit-prop. It has powerful images, absolutely. I am rather less certain I find that those works hang together to create a whole thing and not merely a collection of images. Borges (according to that new memoir by his friend, reviewed in the TLS a couple of weeks ago, here, it is an open link, hooray!) rather cattily thought that one might easily delete whole sections of Neruda's works and Neruda himself would not notice that the sections were missing. That's mean but something about it seems right.

It may also be that I am put off by the effort, by Neruda himself and by his memorialists, to present the Heroic Man of Letters and Literature. This was the stance of all of them, Neruda, Char, Camus, Cendrars, pretty much everyone, the women included, writing was power and power was masculine (yet not, never Stendhal, strikingly). The period when literature was more self-consciously masculine, all those photos of Writers Writing, a distinctly masculine projection of power which has, however, largely come to an end. Meanwhile I, and quite possibly you, dear reader, have shifted in our sense of the power of literature along with the age and demoted it. I, like those of our age (and I don't mean this ironically) believe less in the redemptive power of literature than the redemptive power of economics and social science. I don't believe in the latter, economics and social science, very much, true - but, look, would I really consider John Updike's novel Terrorist: A Novel, to be very helpful in understanding, well, you know, terrorism? Of course not. Of course, the response might be, naturally not, but that is merely because Updike is out of his depth here. What about, instead, a novel about the rise of a jihadist and jihadist sensibility in, say, Hamburg or London by someone closer to the community, wouldn't that be better, and indeed better than what the also socially remote social scientists have to say about jihad, if the purpose is to understand its sensibility?

***

I used to think so, yet increasingly have doubts. Not because I think the social scientists necessarily have much to offer, but because I have grave doubts about what is to be learned from literature about society and even sensibility beyond the writer him- or herself. But the shift away from the heroic writer to the eminently practical social scientist can also be understand in a much longer intellectual historical context, and it is surely a large part of my unease. It is, in this sense, the shift from the heroic virtues chronicled by Walter Scott to the bourgeois and commercial, distinctly unheroic, virtues of, say, the Scottish enlightenment - the time of Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, pragmatists all (see the marvelous essay on this very subject by Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A privileged moment in the history of England, Scotland, and France (Indiana UP 1994).) It is the very long term cultural and social shift although, I suppose one might argue, as the faddish newspaper discussion of the so-called "New Victorians" and "YAWNS" suggests, it has a current cognate: the rising generation, by contrast to its baby boomer predecessors, today starts from and doesn't merely finish with distinctly pragmatic, not heroic, values. Still - rewinding to Neruda - I have an abiding fondness for the 20 poemas, and an abiding nostalgia for a song version of Poema XX sung by the Peruvian Tania Libertad, a 78 single from the 1970s whose flip side was the also very lovely Cancion para una sola voz, a piece which I have gradually learned to play on cello.

(That's what I thought in the Havana cafe on Avenida La Providencia in Santiago, after leaving the Neruda museum. I've now boarded the plane back to the US, where I have papers to grade, things to write, and my wife and daughter to see.)

(PS. I'm home. And exhausted. It's a long plane ride.)

(PPS. This was my imitation of a Spectator-style "Diary" column. Hmm.)