Why Obama's Message Resonates with Millions
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 9, 2008.
On the campaign trail with Barack Obama, four days before the Democratic convention. Another teeming high school gym in another halfway-to-somewhere town, decorated with still more banners proclaiming the heroic exploits of the Local Sports Team, in this case the football studs of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Virginia.
In the audience are the same characters you see everywhere on the campaign trail: the bare-armed cheerleaders congregating near the bleachers, the sullen-faced union workers dutifully decked out in matching T-shirts, the heavyset Soccer Moms cheering from the back rows with that weird overhand applause style they all seem to use, their fingers curled back so as not to ruin freshly painted nails. There are the same Secret Service agents waiting to herd the press into the same windowless concrete filing room, and the same exhausted, khaki-clad campaign staffers with the rapidly thickening backsides ready to queue up behind the journalists to fill their buffet plates with the same Regionally Appropriate Cuisine (pork ribs and hush puppies in the South; steak, corn and potatoes in the Midwest) made up with pride by the local caterers.
And to top it all off, there's even the same speech.
Four years ago, I listened first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry as they went through the motions of promising to support the middle class, to create jobs through investment in renewable energy, to punish companies that exploited tax loopholes by moving overseas and to find the real terrorists in Afghanistan. They trod the same ground as Gore and even Clinton, coughing out the same paeans to the same lost paradise of the middle-class lifestyle, to those same vanishing days of our history when hardworking, patriotic Americans could live with comfort and economic security on one decent manufacturing job. At stake, they insisted, was nothing less than the American Dream itself. For Dean, it was "time for a change in America." Kerry sometimes ended his speeches by presenting his campaign as a choice of "change versus more of the same" -- a phrase he actually borrowed from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.
Here in Chesapeake, Barack Obama offers up the same milky hodgepodge of middle-class tax cuts, investment in alternative fuels and consequences for job exporters and terrorists. And rhetorically, he uses the same old magic trick for his main theme, talking about how all Americans want is to leave a better world for their children.
"That's the essence of the American Dream," he tells the crowd, echoing his predecessors. He goes on to tell the already-famous story of John McCain's seven houses, then explains that someone who has seven houses can't possibly understand what the middle class is going through. "You need a president who's going to be fighting for you," Obama says, to thunderous applause. He concludes by declaring, "We are going to fundamentally bring about change in America" -- a message punctuated by the huge banner hanging behind him, emblazoned with his infuriatingly omnipresent campaign slogan: "Change We Can Believe In." Obama has even taken to borrowing some of his theme music from other candidates: I was mortified when his rallies began to feature the worst of the Hillary standbys, the excruciating "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. The painful predictability of it all was summed up by a front-page headline in The New York Times after the first day of the Democratic convention: "Appeals Evoking American Dream Rally Democrats."
All of this saccharine talk of "change" is so transparently a mechanical come-on that if it were anybody but Barack Obama uttering the word, you'd want to throw up at the very sound of it. And yet, as I watch Obama deliver the same hackneyed act I've seen hundreds of times before, I feel against my will that I am actually watching something different at work. After Kerry and Dean speeches, I often heard people say things like, "At least he's not as dumb as Bush." But after Obama speeches, I see audience members stumbling around in all directions with orgiastic smiles on their faces, as though they've been splashed with gallons of magic pixie paint. In Raleigh, North Carolina, where Obama knocked dead a massive town-hall crowd at a local fairgrounds with a speech that said almost nothing at all, I ask a woman named Melanie Threatt why she thinks her life would improve under an Obama presidency. "It just will," she says. When I press her for specifics, she says, "I just think doors are going to open." You hear stuff like this a lot on Planet Obama, and it makes you wonder just what it is you're encountering. Obama's followers implicitly believe in the things he says, and the fervor of their belief is more religious than intellectual, closer to faith than to reason. Watching him at work, you realize that Obama's remarkable success has almost nothing to do with the same-old product being marketed by the same-old political machine, and almost everything to do with the specific qualities of the individual who is selling it. The same stuff that sounded like hollow, invidious horseshit coming from Kerry and Gore sounds, as dispensed by Obama, like nothing less than a clarion call to collective action. And every time you feel his pitch working, you wonder: Is this some chat-room robot I'm falling in love with? Or is this an actual human being on the line, offering me an opportunity at last to fulfill my deepest desires?
Such, it seems, are the pitfalls of both love and politics in the Internet Age. Too many embarrassing false steps make it hard to take that leap one more time.
One thing that makes the cult of Obama difficult to dissect is the method of its dissemination. The technology of campaign propaganda has advanced to such a degree that the concept of campaign-trail "journalism" is now indistinguishable from corporate PR. The wall that once separated campaign staff from the press corps has broken down completely; those paid by the candidate and those covering him might as well be two different shifts on the same factory ship, working together to bring the world frozen fish patties by the ton. On the shimmering 757 that Obama uses to jet around the country, reporters have plastered the press section in the rear of the plane with cheery, offbeat photographs of themselves captured with campaign staffers in various goofy scenes (clowning with boom poles, quaffing beers, drooling while asleep on buses). The collage seems lifted straight from a high school yearbook; the press might as well have titled it "Our Cool Campaign."
Maybe it's natural that a certain camaraderie would develop between staffers and the press, given that the two groups are prisoners in the same campaign jail for months at a time. The constant Secret Service security protocol leaves everyone On the Bus roped off from all external human contact from morning till night; at the events in between, the press is often kept in windowless rooms behind closed doors or curtains, where reporters sit and listen to the candidate's speeches fed in via loudspeaker. This hilarious setup makes it possible for so-called "political journalists" to cover a candidate without (a) seeing him, (b) seeing his audiences and (c) receiving any information at all that is not fed to them directly by the campaign. On one recent swing through the South, I actually witness a reporter sitting in a concrete filing room during a town-hall session, checking his BlackBerry for an e-mail from the campaign staff to find out what town he is in.
Hemmed in by such restrictions, America's top political journalists have nothing better to do than flog their expensive college educations by playing games like Guess the Identity of Obama's Running Mate. At a VFW convention in Orlando, when Obama mentions "my friend, Senator Joe Biden," reporters -- we were all walled off in a basement room hundreds of yards from the actual speech, watching the candidate on a little TV -- actually break out in hysterical cries of "That's it! It's Biden! It's Biden!"
The rest of the time, reporters think about food. When's lunch? Will there be snacks in the filing room? Is there booze on the bus this time or no booze? When we roll into Richmond, Virginia, one night, I hear an older female reporter complain to another, "They didn't even have white wine on our bus!" Reporters on the campaign trail are like the migrant laborers I met on assignment years ago in an Orthodox monastery in central Russia. With every minute of every workday exactly the same, the laborers devoted themselves to guessing what would be served at lunch, the one slot in their schedule that was different every day. Would it be borscht or cabbage soup? Mayonnaise with their bread or no mayonnaise? I heard conversations an hour long on that theme.
This is what the journalists have been reduced to: the level of indentured field hands at a Russian monastery. With such a castrated press corps in tow, Obama doesn't have to work very hard to "sell" his message. The whole process has been streamlined, politically and culturally, to smooth the spread of the party's propaganda: The speech is already written, the press is already on board, and everybody's already working together to crank out those fish patties.
So here's the interesting part: It's surprising that there is an interesting part. Someone like me -- someone who has actually sailed on this factory ship long enough to get sick at the first whiff of fish -- is instantly dismissive of anyone who dirties himself by entering this world. If the second coming of Jesus Christ stepped on the bus to run on the Democratic ticket, I'd be wondering who paid for his robe and why his message cribbed so much from the New Testament. But even I find myself being seduced by Obama, despite everything I know about the party he represents, its record and where it gets its money. There's just something about the guy; he has that effect.
Obama manages to appeal somehow to that part of us that is tired of there always being another side of the story when it comes to our presidents. We don't want to live in a world where there's always a set of lurid secret tapes that will come out someday, or a mistress with a cigar in her twat hidden off-camera somewhere, or a backroom deal to juice a prewar intelligence report for a bunch of oil-fat-cat golf buddies.
We've become trained to look for the man behind the mask, for in real life there is no one whose emotional life is confined to a lifelong, passionate love for his high school sweetheart wife and their two children, an undying appreciation for the sacrifice of soldiers, awe before the flag and concern for the future of the middle class. Oh, and a burning passion for reducing dependence on foreign oil 30 percent by 2018 and for full federal funding for special education. Because that's the standard we set for our presidential candidates; anyone who reveals himself to have other things going on inside, to be more human than that, never makes it this far.
But I'm not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn't-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather's sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn't, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.
Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it's the same thing -- but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story -- putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now.
Obviously, Obama has some off-script moments of anger, and ill humor, and ego; his personality sometimes comes out looking well short of iconic. During his appearance in Chesapeake, a teacher gets up to complain about her long working hours since the passage of No Child Left Behind and starts to say something about how no one should have to work 13 hours a day, and --
"Not unless you're running for president!" Obama quips rosily, thinking the audience is with him. Instead, many in the crowd grow silent, drinking in the rock-star candidate's curious decision to compare his admittedly tiring-but-still-thrilling quest for ultimate earthly power with some dreary educator's slavish pursuit of a paycheck.
Obama also makes dumb jokes, and flirts with his audience ("Y'all are silly!" he told a group of girls who overdid the shrieking-Beatles-fan act when he took off his suit jacket), and overdoes it on the gooey poeticizing (his gushing over the beauty of America "from sea to shining sea" is particularly atrocious). But all in all, you never get a sense that there's a more interesting side of Obama lurking underneath somewhere. Oddly enough, the guy only really lights up when he starts delivering those same ham-handed lines about the American Dream that fell out of the mouths of Dean and Kerry like dead bullfrogs.
And maybe that's the difference. When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.
What's confusing about Obama is that he's so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery and onerous bullshit that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it's confusing is that we've grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don't even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents? As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I'm listening to the Same Old Shit, delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don't care. It's not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It's that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
IS THERE A RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11
September 14, 2008
Torture and Taking the Fifth
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Skip to next paragraph
IS THERE A RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT?
Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11
By Alan M. Dershowitz
212 pp. Oxford University Press. $19.95
This admittedly slender volume is the third — yes, third — book by Alan M. Dershowitz to appear in the past year. Between his graphomania, his penchant for high-profile cases and the frequency with which he can be seen on cable television news programs, it’s easy to forget that Dershowitz is a serious scholar of constitutional law. In “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” he tackles one of the trickiest legal questions of post-9/11 America: does the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of that right prohibit law-enforcement officials from torturing an individual to prevent a future crime, like an act of terrorism?
The simple answer, at least according to the Supreme Court, is no. In Chavez v. Martinez, a 2003 police coercion case, the justices ruled that an individual’s right to remain silent is violated only if the information is then used against that person in a criminal case. The mere fact that he or she has been coerced into talking does not, in itself, constitute a breach of the Fifth Amendment. To put a finer point on it, it’s not necessarily unconstitutional for the United States government to torture prisoners.
Dershowitz has weighed in on the subject of coercive interrogation before. In the aftermath of 9/11, he wrote a provocative op-ed article advocating the use of government-issued “torture warrants” that gave many of his fellow civil libertarians fits. They will doubtless be much happier with Dershowitz’s take on the Fifth Amendment as well as with his rough treatment of the court’s findings in Chavez.
The facts of the case are straightforward enough. The petitioner, Oliverio Martinez, was shot several times on a street in Southern California during an altercation with the police. On his way to the hospital and in the emergency room, another officer questioned Martinez about what had happened. At first, Martinez limited his answers to “I am choking” and “I am dying” and, at one point, “I am not telling you anything until they treat me.” But the officer continued to question him, and Martinez eventually said he had taken a gun from one of the officers and pointed it at them.
Left blind and partially paralyzed by the episode, Martinez sued the interrogating officer, claiming that the policeman had violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court issued six different opinions in the case, but Dershowitz focuses largely on Justice Clarence Thomas’s, which carried the day. Even though his colleague Justice John Paul Stevens had described Martinez’s treatment as “the functional equivalent of . . . torturous methods,” Thomas concluded that Martinez’s constitutional privilege against self-incrimination had not been violated because nothing he said was used against him in a criminal trial.
Dershowitz acknowledges that the precise language of the amendment — “No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” — doesn’t explicitly create a right to remain silent. But his generosity toward Thomas ends there. He attacks the justice’s opinion as narrow and overly literal, and accuses him of ignoring both the historical record and inconvenient case law to arrive at his desired outcome.
“Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” serves as a kind of primer in analyzing and interpreting constitutional law, the murky business of divining the framers’ intentions and of reconciling seemingly contradictory Supreme Court opinions. Dershowitz traces the origins of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, which (arguably) dates to the church’s use of inquisitorial oaths against political and religious dissidents in 13th-century England; runs through some of the relevant precedents, including the treason trial of Aaron Burr; and examines how our understanding of the Fifth Amendment has evolved since its passage.
All of this analysis is set against the familiar backdrop that frames any serious discussion of the Constitution: should we treat it as a “living” text designed to accommodate historical and societal change, or must we limit our reading to the actual words on the page and the original intent of their authors? Like many liberals, Dershowitz is wary of relying too heavily on our necessarily speculative efforts to understand precisely what our forefathers envisioned. Nevertheless, he makes a strong argument that the framers were, if nothing else, aware of the need to prevent coercive interrogation — even if the means by which they chose to prevent it was prohibiting the use of coerced testimony at criminal trials.
Reading this book, one is reminded why Dershowitz is one of the very few American law professors whose work has crossed over into the mainstream. He wears his erudition lightly. He has worked hard to make “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” accessible to nonlawyers, peppering it with references to Lewis Carroll, Stephen Jay Gould, Maimonides and Jerry Seinfeld. Despite his best efforts, though, this sort of detailed legal analysis inevitably gets technical. Those not already steeped in the issue of self-incrimination are likely to get bogged down.
It’s worth the effort to push ahead, though. Dershowitz calls the Chavez case a “bellwether” for a much broader shift in law enforcement after 9/11, the increasing focus on preventing future criminal acts rather than simply punishing the perpetrators of them. The emergence of this so-called preventive state will continue to present new and difficult questions concerning the rights of criminal defendants. Americans, he persuasively establishes, can’t afford not to participate in the debates over how these questions are answered.
Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Torture and Taking the Fifth
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Skip to next paragraph
IS THERE A RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT?
Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11
By Alan M. Dershowitz
212 pp. Oxford University Press. $19.95
This admittedly slender volume is the third — yes, third — book by Alan M. Dershowitz to appear in the past year. Between his graphomania, his penchant for high-profile cases and the frequency with which he can be seen on cable television news programs, it’s easy to forget that Dershowitz is a serious scholar of constitutional law. In “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” he tackles one of the trickiest legal questions of post-9/11 America: does the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of that right prohibit law-enforcement officials from torturing an individual to prevent a future crime, like an act of terrorism?
The simple answer, at least according to the Supreme Court, is no. In Chavez v. Martinez, a 2003 police coercion case, the justices ruled that an individual’s right to remain silent is violated only if the information is then used against that person in a criminal case. The mere fact that he or she has been coerced into talking does not, in itself, constitute a breach of the Fifth Amendment. To put a finer point on it, it’s not necessarily unconstitutional for the United States government to torture prisoners.
Dershowitz has weighed in on the subject of coercive interrogation before. In the aftermath of 9/11, he wrote a provocative op-ed article advocating the use of government-issued “torture warrants” that gave many of his fellow civil libertarians fits. They will doubtless be much happier with Dershowitz’s take on the Fifth Amendment as well as with his rough treatment of the court’s findings in Chavez.
The facts of the case are straightforward enough. The petitioner, Oliverio Martinez, was shot several times on a street in Southern California during an altercation with the police. On his way to the hospital and in the emergency room, another officer questioned Martinez about what had happened. At first, Martinez limited his answers to “I am choking” and “I am dying” and, at one point, “I am not telling you anything until they treat me.” But the officer continued to question him, and Martinez eventually said he had taken a gun from one of the officers and pointed it at them.
Left blind and partially paralyzed by the episode, Martinez sued the interrogating officer, claiming that the policeman had violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court issued six different opinions in the case, but Dershowitz focuses largely on Justice Clarence Thomas’s, which carried the day. Even though his colleague Justice John Paul Stevens had described Martinez’s treatment as “the functional equivalent of . . . torturous methods,” Thomas concluded that Martinez’s constitutional privilege against self-incrimination had not been violated because nothing he said was used against him in a criminal trial.
Dershowitz acknowledges that the precise language of the amendment — “No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” — doesn’t explicitly create a right to remain silent. But his generosity toward Thomas ends there. He attacks the justice’s opinion as narrow and overly literal, and accuses him of ignoring both the historical record and inconvenient case law to arrive at his desired outcome.
“Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” serves as a kind of primer in analyzing and interpreting constitutional law, the murky business of divining the framers’ intentions and of reconciling seemingly contradictory Supreme Court opinions. Dershowitz traces the origins of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, which (arguably) dates to the church’s use of inquisitorial oaths against political and religious dissidents in 13th-century England; runs through some of the relevant precedents, including the treason trial of Aaron Burr; and examines how our understanding of the Fifth Amendment has evolved since its passage.
All of this analysis is set against the familiar backdrop that frames any serious discussion of the Constitution: should we treat it as a “living” text designed to accommodate historical and societal change, or must we limit our reading to the actual words on the page and the original intent of their authors? Like many liberals, Dershowitz is wary of relying too heavily on our necessarily speculative efforts to understand precisely what our forefathers envisioned. Nevertheless, he makes a strong argument that the framers were, if nothing else, aware of the need to prevent coercive interrogation — even if the means by which they chose to prevent it was prohibiting the use of coerced testimony at criminal trials.
Reading this book, one is reminded why Dershowitz is one of the very few American law professors whose work has crossed over into the mainstream. He wears his erudition lightly. He has worked hard to make “Is There a Right to Remain Silent?” accessible to nonlawyers, peppering it with references to Lewis Carroll, Stephen Jay Gould, Maimonides and Jerry Seinfeld. Despite his best efforts, though, this sort of detailed legal analysis inevitably gets technical. Those not already steeped in the issue of self-incrimination are likely to get bogged down.
It’s worth the effort to push ahead, though. Dershowitz calls the Chavez case a “bellwether” for a much broader shift in law enforcement after 9/11, the increasing focus on preventing future criminal acts rather than simply punishing the perpetrators of them. The emergence of this so-called preventive state will continue to present new and difficult questions concerning the rights of criminal defendants. Americans, he persuasively establishes, can’t afford not to participate in the debates over how these questions are answered.
Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
New Literary Art Form Discovered! In praise of the praise of poetry.
the spectator: Scrutinizing culture.
New Literary Art Form Discovered!In praise of the praise of poetry.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, at 5:48 PM ET
I believe I've discovered a previously unrecognized genre of contemporary writing that deserves commendation for its distinctiveness and frequent excellence. It's practiced mainly by contemporary poets, but it's not poetry. In fact—at least for me—it's much better than most contemporary poetry, in the sense that it's much more readable, much better crafted, and often beautifully compressed in a dazzling haikulike way.
It's something that gives people like me who don't find themselves drawn to much contemporary poetry a sense of the verbal facility of contemporary poets—and contemporary poetry critics—when they're writing prose about contemporary poetry.
The past century has taught us that good writing can appear in unexpected forms: film scripts, Sopranos-type series, the storytelling of R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, for instance. And writing about poetry, particularly praising contemporary poetry, is a fine but extremely difficult art. It has to distill the presumed poetic genius of the writer being praised in a way that at the very least equals the supposed brilliance of the work itself. So in a way it's more elevated than prose; it's prose-poetry (remember that?) about poetry.
Recently, British poet laureate James Fenton cited something that the mandarin of poetic modernism, T.S. Eliot, wrote about the supremely difficult and delicate art of blurbing poetry:
"Everyone engaged in publishing," Eliot wrote when he was an editor at the august London house Faber & Faber, "knows what a difficult art blurb-writing is; every publisher who is also an author considers this form of composition more arduous than any other that he practises. But nobody knows the utmost difficulty until he has to write blurbs for poetry: especially when some are to appear in the same catalogue. If you praise highly, the reviewer may devote a paragraph to ridiculing the publisher's pretensions; if you try understatement, the reviewer may remark that even the publisher doesn't seem to think much of this book: I have had both experiences."
Let me explain the roundabout way it came to me, the discovery that the praise of contemporary poetry, either in blurbs or reviews, is itself a neglected form of poetry, meta-poetry. Even if it comes from the most corrupt and sordid favor-trading, grant-grubbing, academic back-scratching sources, it's clear that those who are good at it are so very good at it that their work rises above its origins and deserves special recognition. It is not some degraded adjunct of contemporary poetry but perhaps its very apotheosis. It would be a tragedy to lose the poetry, of course, but to lose the even more brilliant blurbs! Sometimes I wonder whether in fact the poetry being praised even exists or has been dreamed up to provide the rationale for the praise.
In any case, my recognition of this underappreciated genre began with my attempt to find a proper way to praise Keats' ode "To Autumn." A poem whose melancholy perfections I've had a lifelong obsession with.
With autumn—and specifically Sept. 19—coming upon us, I wanted to commemorate Sept. 19, the day in 1819 when a tubercular, slowly dying young Keats took a walk on the hills outside Winchester overlooking the just-harvested stubble fields and watched
... barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
as he would put it in the poem he wrote in the aftermath.
I wanted to write about the way I felt inextricably linked to the poem, even before I made a kind of pilgrimage to that very hill, overlooking those very stubble fields, and beheld the phenomenon of the "barred clouds" as the crimson sunset light that lit them turned those stubble fields a rosy, almost blood-red hue.
Being there made a difference: I felt I understood the shadow of death and dying, of death's final harvest and its grim reaper, a shadow that lies behind the poem's beautiful bucolic scene. And gives it its aura of approaching mortality.
I wanted to revisit a point of dispute I had with the great Helen Vendler, Harvard's poetry goddess (author of the incomparable study, The Odes of John Keats) over the sex of Autumn in the poem. I wanted to take issue with Jack Stillinger, editor of an important edition of Keats' works, who appears to believe that (despite "hinting of death") the ode is "unambiguously affirmative"—which I believe is unambiguously wrong.
But there was one problem: I wanted to find a way to praise the poem that would do justice to it after so many others had praised it to the point of exhaustion. I wanted to convey to others why I thought "To Autumn" was probably the greatest lyric poem in the language. I know others will leap to defend other poems' claims to that honor, and there are times when other poems come to my mind. ("Lycidas"? "Upon Appleton House"? "Winsdor Forest"? "At Melville's Tomb"? Do "Pale Fire" and "Venus and Adonis" qualify?)
So I was worrying over the problem of praise, realizing how difficult it is to breathe life into the exhausted form, when I happened to land on the bookmark of one of my favorite Web sites, The Page. No, political junkies, I'm not talking about Mark Halperin's site of the same name. This Page contains nothing but two-line excerpts from reviews of poetry. It was while reading The Page that I came across a link to James Fenton's piece in the Guardian that contained the Eliot quote about the difficulty of blurbing poetry.
And it was on The Page that I came across a thoughtful essay by one of my favorite critics, Adam Kirsch, which centered around an unusual new book of reflections on Keats, Posthumous Keats by poet Stanley Plumly. I got hold of the book and found that—though nothing compares with Helen Vendler's 50-page ode to the ode—Plumly does a pretty good job of describing what is remarkable about "Autumn," its burnished bucolic surface, and the Modernist shadows it harbors.
"Autumn" presents itself on the surface as a simple pastoral ode, reminiscent of Virgil's Georgics. And yet there is that "soft dying" in it, and it has a kind of completeness—the self-containment of a private universe—in the way it really resembles only itself. Hard to explain, but Plumly gives it a go:
Can a lyric poem of thirty-three lines achieve the awe and spaciousness of the sublime? "To Autumn" is ... a twilit symbolist masterpiece realized independently—it seems—of its implied author, as if it were an object, self-created. …
An object self-created. I don't like the anachronistic "symbolist" reference here, but there is something ineffably "self-created" about the poem, a melancholy Grecian urn of the psyche (in ode-speak) set down like the obelisk in 2001 and leaving us little to do but gather round and gibber at its flawless alien perfection.
He's onto something, Plumley, but his essay illustrates the difficulty of being precise in a realm of imprecision. It drew my attention to the current contents of The Page. Especially that essay by James Fenton that references Eliot on blurbs. Reminded me how difficult praise was to pull off, made me realize praise is underpraised. After so many centuries of poems and poets, it's difficult to be persuasive about some contemporary poet's place in the pantheon.
On the home page of The Page, there are about a hundred two-line entries, each linked to a longer review.
But if you forget about the review they link to and just read each two-liner as a kind of haiku, you can apprehend each as a beautifully distilled "object, self-created."
So many are so well-written! Almost all of them! They undertook what Eliot called the task of poetry, a "raid on the inarticulate," and came back with pure gold. Much have I traveled in realms of gold, in the Keatsian sense, and this was the real thing, almost every one of them a gem. (Credit here goes not only to the poets and critics doing the praising but to the editors of The Page for distilling them into two-line epigrams. Modestly, they only identify themselves at the very bottom of the page, this way: "The Page is edited by Andrew Johnston with occasional contributions by Stephen Burt.")
I became greedy for the felicity of the two-liners—Twitters of poetic genius—and found myself just reading them sequentially for the pleasure they gave. So many of the quotes were so thought-provoking and original, often offering what I usually fail to find in contemporary poetry. They seem to be suggesting seductively something I must be missing, something that I now will look for more attentively.
And so I'd like to present some of the best two-liners to you and hope you can find the same pleasure I do in them, the pleasure of heightened language well-used. The pleasure of poets blurbing each other. And the excellence of some of the critics specializing in a genre not widely read or appreciated.
What's remarkable is how variegated the pleasures offered by the two-line quotes are, some particularity felicitous turns of phrase, some epigrammatic nuggets of wisdom, some unexpected prospects and vantage points on words and the world.
Some are ingeniously inventive descriptions:
"James K. Baxter can be crabby, difficult, bombastic, tortuous and tricky. He is, in nearly equal measure, astonishing and heartbreaking."—Rebecca Porte, Contemporary Poetry Review
"Juan Felipe Herrera's worst poems seem disorganized, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free."—Stephen Burt, the New York Times
"Matthea Harvey has Stevie Smith's knack for writing throwaway lines that in the end seem less like Post-it notes than ransom letters."—David Orr, the New York Times
"Their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies—and these were O'Hara's virtues—give us as much of a life as poetry can."—William Logan, the New York Times
Some are intriguing, mysterious:
"Sometimes we live as if we know more about the experiences we don't have than about the experiences we do."—Adam Phillips on Larkin, The Threepenny Review,
"These poems have a permanence about them that belies their fragility. Some of them even approach that supposed impossibility: The tautology that contains knowledge."—Laurie Duggan on Gael Turnbull, blurb on book jacket
Some are witty and contrarian:
"If there is one lesson to be drawn from Shelley's life and work, it is that you can't trust a man who believes he is an angel."—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker
"If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No.' "—Brad Leithauser, the Wall Street Journal
"To test oneself, Oppen recognized, is to know failure. Oppen's victories are no less great for being small."—James Longenbach, The Nation
Some are casually thought-provoking:
"Hass's latest poems remind us that to be fully human is itself an act of political subversion."—Cynthia Haven, San Francisco magazine
"If we can give up on consolation, there may be room for something more promising."—Adam Phillips on John Burnside (and Henry Reed), the Observer
Some of them helped with capturing why I felt the way I did about Keats' "Autumn":
"In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in."—Clive Wilmer on Ted Hughes' translations, TLS
And I must admit I admired some of them, however over-the-top, for witnessing how much they cared about contemporary poetry:
"Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack." —David Orr, the New York Times
Since I've gone out on a limb and suggested Keats' "Autumn" is the greatest lyric poem in the language, I invite readers to post their choice—just one!—for this honor in "The Fray." Perhaps along with an approximately two-line description. Let's say, a Twitter-like 140-character limit. After all, almost prophetically, the last line of "To Autumn" somewhat ominously observed:
And gathering swallows twitter in the sky.
New Literary Art Form Discovered!In praise of the praise of poetry.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, at 5:48 PM ET
I believe I've discovered a previously unrecognized genre of contemporary writing that deserves commendation for its distinctiveness and frequent excellence. It's practiced mainly by contemporary poets, but it's not poetry. In fact—at least for me—it's much better than most contemporary poetry, in the sense that it's much more readable, much better crafted, and often beautifully compressed in a dazzling haikulike way.
It's something that gives people like me who don't find themselves drawn to much contemporary poetry a sense of the verbal facility of contemporary poets—and contemporary poetry critics—when they're writing prose about contemporary poetry.
The past century has taught us that good writing can appear in unexpected forms: film scripts, Sopranos-type series, the storytelling of R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, for instance. And writing about poetry, particularly praising contemporary poetry, is a fine but extremely difficult art. It has to distill the presumed poetic genius of the writer being praised in a way that at the very least equals the supposed brilliance of the work itself. So in a way it's more elevated than prose; it's prose-poetry (remember that?) about poetry.
Recently, British poet laureate James Fenton cited something that the mandarin of poetic modernism, T.S. Eliot, wrote about the supremely difficult and delicate art of blurbing poetry:
"Everyone engaged in publishing," Eliot wrote when he was an editor at the august London house Faber & Faber, "knows what a difficult art blurb-writing is; every publisher who is also an author considers this form of composition more arduous than any other that he practises. But nobody knows the utmost difficulty until he has to write blurbs for poetry: especially when some are to appear in the same catalogue. If you praise highly, the reviewer may devote a paragraph to ridiculing the publisher's pretensions; if you try understatement, the reviewer may remark that even the publisher doesn't seem to think much of this book: I have had both experiences."
Let me explain the roundabout way it came to me, the discovery that the praise of contemporary poetry, either in blurbs or reviews, is itself a neglected form of poetry, meta-poetry. Even if it comes from the most corrupt and sordid favor-trading, grant-grubbing, academic back-scratching sources, it's clear that those who are good at it are so very good at it that their work rises above its origins and deserves special recognition. It is not some degraded adjunct of contemporary poetry but perhaps its very apotheosis. It would be a tragedy to lose the poetry, of course, but to lose the even more brilliant blurbs! Sometimes I wonder whether in fact the poetry being praised even exists or has been dreamed up to provide the rationale for the praise.
In any case, my recognition of this underappreciated genre began with my attempt to find a proper way to praise Keats' ode "To Autumn." A poem whose melancholy perfections I've had a lifelong obsession with.
With autumn—and specifically Sept. 19—coming upon us, I wanted to commemorate Sept. 19, the day in 1819 when a tubercular, slowly dying young Keats took a walk on the hills outside Winchester overlooking the just-harvested stubble fields and watched
... barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
as he would put it in the poem he wrote in the aftermath.
I wanted to write about the way I felt inextricably linked to the poem, even before I made a kind of pilgrimage to that very hill, overlooking those very stubble fields, and beheld the phenomenon of the "barred clouds" as the crimson sunset light that lit them turned those stubble fields a rosy, almost blood-red hue.
Being there made a difference: I felt I understood the shadow of death and dying, of death's final harvest and its grim reaper, a shadow that lies behind the poem's beautiful bucolic scene. And gives it its aura of approaching mortality.
I wanted to revisit a point of dispute I had with the great Helen Vendler, Harvard's poetry goddess (author of the incomparable study, The Odes of John Keats) over the sex of Autumn in the poem. I wanted to take issue with Jack Stillinger, editor of an important edition of Keats' works, who appears to believe that (despite "hinting of death") the ode is "unambiguously affirmative"—which I believe is unambiguously wrong.
But there was one problem: I wanted to find a way to praise the poem that would do justice to it after so many others had praised it to the point of exhaustion. I wanted to convey to others why I thought "To Autumn" was probably the greatest lyric poem in the language. I know others will leap to defend other poems' claims to that honor, and there are times when other poems come to my mind. ("Lycidas"? "Upon Appleton House"? "Winsdor Forest"? "At Melville's Tomb"? Do "Pale Fire" and "Venus and Adonis" qualify?)
So I was worrying over the problem of praise, realizing how difficult it is to breathe life into the exhausted form, when I happened to land on the bookmark of one of my favorite Web sites, The Page. No, political junkies, I'm not talking about Mark Halperin's site of the same name. This Page contains nothing but two-line excerpts from reviews of poetry. It was while reading The Page that I came across a link to James Fenton's piece in the Guardian that contained the Eliot quote about the difficulty of blurbing poetry.
And it was on The Page that I came across a thoughtful essay by one of my favorite critics, Adam Kirsch, which centered around an unusual new book of reflections on Keats, Posthumous Keats by poet Stanley Plumly. I got hold of the book and found that—though nothing compares with Helen Vendler's 50-page ode to the ode—Plumly does a pretty good job of describing what is remarkable about "Autumn," its burnished bucolic surface, and the Modernist shadows it harbors.
"Autumn" presents itself on the surface as a simple pastoral ode, reminiscent of Virgil's Georgics. And yet there is that "soft dying" in it, and it has a kind of completeness—the self-containment of a private universe—in the way it really resembles only itself. Hard to explain, but Plumly gives it a go:
Can a lyric poem of thirty-three lines achieve the awe and spaciousness of the sublime? "To Autumn" is ... a twilit symbolist masterpiece realized independently—it seems—of its implied author, as if it were an object, self-created. …
An object self-created. I don't like the anachronistic "symbolist" reference here, but there is something ineffably "self-created" about the poem, a melancholy Grecian urn of the psyche (in ode-speak) set down like the obelisk in 2001 and leaving us little to do but gather round and gibber at its flawless alien perfection.
He's onto something, Plumley, but his essay illustrates the difficulty of being precise in a realm of imprecision. It drew my attention to the current contents of The Page. Especially that essay by James Fenton that references Eliot on blurbs. Reminded me how difficult praise was to pull off, made me realize praise is underpraised. After so many centuries of poems and poets, it's difficult to be persuasive about some contemporary poet's place in the pantheon.
On the home page of The Page, there are about a hundred two-line entries, each linked to a longer review.
But if you forget about the review they link to and just read each two-liner as a kind of haiku, you can apprehend each as a beautifully distilled "object, self-created."
So many are so well-written! Almost all of them! They undertook what Eliot called the task of poetry, a "raid on the inarticulate," and came back with pure gold. Much have I traveled in realms of gold, in the Keatsian sense, and this was the real thing, almost every one of them a gem. (Credit here goes not only to the poets and critics doing the praising but to the editors of The Page for distilling them into two-line epigrams. Modestly, they only identify themselves at the very bottom of the page, this way: "The Page is edited by Andrew Johnston with occasional contributions by Stephen Burt.")
I became greedy for the felicity of the two-liners—Twitters of poetic genius—and found myself just reading them sequentially for the pleasure they gave. So many of the quotes were so thought-provoking and original, often offering what I usually fail to find in contemporary poetry. They seem to be suggesting seductively something I must be missing, something that I now will look for more attentively.
And so I'd like to present some of the best two-liners to you and hope you can find the same pleasure I do in them, the pleasure of heightened language well-used. The pleasure of poets blurbing each other. And the excellence of some of the critics specializing in a genre not widely read or appreciated.
What's remarkable is how variegated the pleasures offered by the two-line quotes are, some particularity felicitous turns of phrase, some epigrammatic nuggets of wisdom, some unexpected prospects and vantage points on words and the world.
Some are ingeniously inventive descriptions:
"James K. Baxter can be crabby, difficult, bombastic, tortuous and tricky. He is, in nearly equal measure, astonishing and heartbreaking."—Rebecca Porte, Contemporary Poetry Review
"Juan Felipe Herrera's worst poems seem disorganized, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free."—Stephen Burt, the New York Times
"Matthea Harvey has Stevie Smith's knack for writing throwaway lines that in the end seem less like Post-it notes than ransom letters."—David Orr, the New York Times
"Their giddiness in the face of despair, their animal pleasure in gossip, their false bravado, their frantic posturing and guilelessness and petty snobberies—and these were O'Hara's virtues—give us as much of a life as poetry can."—William Logan, the New York Times
Some are intriguing, mysterious:
"Sometimes we live as if we know more about the experiences we don't have than about the experiences we do."—Adam Phillips on Larkin, The Threepenny Review,
"These poems have a permanence about them that belies their fragility. Some of them even approach that supposed impossibility: The tautology that contains knowledge."—Laurie Duggan on Gael Turnbull, blurb on book jacket
Some are witty and contrarian:
"If there is one lesson to be drawn from Shelley's life and work, it is that you can't trust a man who believes he is an angel."—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker
"If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No.' "—Brad Leithauser, the Wall Street Journal
"To test oneself, Oppen recognized, is to know failure. Oppen's victories are no less great for being small."—James Longenbach, The Nation
Some are casually thought-provoking:
"Hass's latest poems remind us that to be fully human is itself an act of political subversion."—Cynthia Haven, San Francisco magazine
"If we can give up on consolation, there may be room for something more promising."—Adam Phillips on John Burnside (and Henry Reed), the Observer
Some of them helped with capturing why I felt the way I did about Keats' "Autumn":
"In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in."—Clive Wilmer on Ted Hughes' translations, TLS
And I must admit I admired some of them, however over-the-top, for witnessing how much they cared about contemporary poetry:
"Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack." —David Orr, the New York Times
Since I've gone out on a limb and suggested Keats' "Autumn" is the greatest lyric poem in the language, I invite readers to post their choice—just one!—for this honor in "The Fray." Perhaps along with an approximately two-line description. Let's say, a Twitter-like 140-character limit. After all, almost prophetically, the last line of "To Autumn" somewhat ominously observed:
And gathering swallows twitter in the sky.
A quick fix for the soul
A quick fix for the soul
The government is promoting cognitive behavioural therapy as a cost-effective, no-nonsense remedy for our psychological ills. It's the triumph of a market-driven view of the human psyche, says Darian Leader
A woman convinced that she emits an unpleasant smell is persuaded to travel around on public transport with a portion of fish and chips to monitor how people react to her. This will allow her to assess the "evidence": she will realise that there is a difference between times when she is the bearer of a strong smell and when she is not, and this will help her to "correct" her beliefs.
Welcome to the world of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which has enjoyed a massive expansion over the past 10 years, not only in Britain but in much of the west. Where once a diversity of therapies flourished, today CBT is progressively replacing the older treatments. It's cheap, it shows results on paper and it chimes with a commonsense, problem-solving view of the world.
Developed by the American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s, CBT was based on the idea that our emotions and moods were influenced by our patterns of thinking. The aim of therapy was to "correct" these processes, "to think and act more realistically". It would allow the patient to avoid the misconstruction of reality that had led to their problems.
Rather than focus on the patient's history - say their childhood and early experiences - like most other psychotherapies, CBT is mostly directed to the here and now. Patient and therapist agree on targets and formulate ways to achieve these in each session. Patterns of negative thinking are pinpointed and alternatives discussed. Homework is set at the end of each session, which might include self-monitoring, record-keeping and other tools of self-inspection.
After her strange sojourn on the tube, the woman with the fish and chips would meet her therapist and discuss the events of the day. If she realised that people in fact reacted to her less when she didn't have the malodorous meal, then she might be able to change her thought pattern, to see her life in a more positive way. She would learn that her symptom was an incorrect interpretation of reality and hopefully come to see the world as everyone else does.
But why did she suffer from this olfactory symptom in the first place? What function did it have in her life? If she was certain about it, what role did certainty play for her? Could it have been a solution to some other, less obvious problem? And if so, what would be the consequences of trying to remove it?
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.
The popularity of CBT with government agencies is no surprise. This year has seen the launch of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), an initiative to train a "workforce" of mostly cognitive therapists to cure the nation's anxious and depressed inhabitants. Lord Layard, the so-called happiness tsar and one of the architects of this new project, is delighted. At last, everyone will have access to proven treatments that have the right scientific credentials. And we will save a lot of money into the bargain. Depression and anxiety cost the economy around £12bn a year - 1% of the total national income - yet the new therapies will be able to cure people for only £750 a head. The saving on drugs bills and incapacity benefits is staggering.
But what might the real costs of this initiative be? And what does the rise of CBT tell us about the world we live in today? The government also plans to regulate mediums and spiritualists. It will no longer be up to us to believe in them or not, but a higher power will tell us who is legitimate and who is not. Just as a new rhetoric of "science" tells us that CBT is the best treatment, so it will arbitrate the "other side" - and all government has to do is back up science with legislation.
These are extraordinary developments in our times. And they highlight a strange paradox of the modern self. We are told that we are responsible for our own lives, that we have the power to transform ourselves. Yet at the same time we are treated as minors who lack the faculty of critical judgment and must be protected against unscrupulous and dangerous predators.
Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through "work" on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher's dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative.
CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.
The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one's existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism.
This is a modern self for which depth has become surface. In soaps and reality shows characters share their innermost feelings and emotions, as if there were a perfect continuity between interior and exterior life. If there's any ambiguity, a panel of experts is there, as on Big Brother, to explain people's motivations. The self is no longer a dark cave; everything is laid bare. In effect, we have been robbed of our interior lives.
Many social theorists have seen this atomisation as a consequence of market-led economies. As the market governs all, it was only a matter of time before basic human attributes would come to be taken as commodities and relationships as transactions. Students became clients of educational services, children clients of their parents. And it was no surprise that the view of human beings as subjects competing in the marketplace for goods and services would need a psychology to underpin it.
This new psychology broke radically from traditional ideas. The self had once been understood as a place of conflict: between reason and passion, between the will and understanding, between repressed desires and their inhibition. But, as Nikolas Rose observed in his study Governing the Soul, the self is now no longer intrinsically fractured, it just needs to "actualise" itself.
The divided self dear to the 60s has vanished, along with the recognition that grief, despair and frustration strike at the heart of our image of self-possession and fulfilment. The psyche has become like a muscle that needs to be developed and trained. There is no place for complexity and contradiction here: the modern subject is represented as one-dimensional, searching for fulfilment. The possibility that human life is aimed at both success and failure and never simply at wealth, power or happiness no longer makes sense. Suddenly the world of human relations described by novelists, poets and playwrights for the past few centuries can just be written off. Self-sabotage, masochism and despair are now faults to be corrected, rather than forming the very core of the self.
The new psychology is thus in the service of the market. Symptoms become understood as deviations, pieces of learned conduct that can be undone by short courses in re-education. This is the soil in which CBT came to flourish. Its textbooks refer unashamedly to "belief modification" and to "selling the treatment" to the patient. It follows a market-led vision of the psyche in which a symptom, for example depression or insomnia, is not seen as a general problem in a person's existence - which, if unravelled, might lead to the unravelling of the self - but as a local disturbance that can be managed and put right.
This commodification of the psyche is reflected in the change in mental health diagnoses. In the early 20th century, there were between a dozen and two dozen discrete diagnostic categories - breaking down different aspects of mental health. By the early 90s there were more than 360. Easily observable surface symptoms, such as shyness, have been taken to define disorders. Many of these have been developed and advertised by drug companies in order to carve out market niches for new drugs. Social phobia, for example, was sold as a diagnosis by the makers of a drug - moclobemide - that claimed to cure it.
The new focus on surface behaviour makes cognitive-style therapies seem more scientific. As Ian Parker, professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, observes, if a disorder is defined by symptoms, get rid of the symptoms and you've got rid of the disorder. The therapist carries out a more or less mechanical procedure, a series of protocols formulated in advance, which have been approved by management and checked by inspectorate. On paper it looks good: symptoms appear reduced. But there is no tracking of so-called "alternative symptoms", the problems that will emerge in mind or body when the original symptom is removed. A woman troubled by a dog phobia may be able to overcome this with a behavioural treatment, but what of her relationship with her father, a concentration camp survivor who became terrified of German shepherds after the war? If her symptom articulated a certain identification with his anxiety, how would this find expression once she was deprived of the phobia?
These important complexities have little place in a society where depth has become surface. What matters are quick-fix cosmetic solutions, rubber-stamped by so-called experts. Where articles and books once used to develop concepts and ideas, today the expression "Research shows ..." encourages us to stop thinking. Not long ago the media excitedly carried the "news" that research had shown that depressed fathers had an effect on the wellbeing of their children. Well, who would seriously have thought otherwise? Was it really necessary to have a government grant to show this? And in fact, the methodology in most of these studies is deeply flawed.
This is a world in which nothing counts as knowledge unless it is sanctioned by experts. Advice on baby-rearing or nutrition may seem sensible, but can there really be a correct way to conduct a relationship, to fall in love or to maintain beliefs? Knowledge has become almost synonymous with a product: any new idea or discovery has to demonstrate how it can be practically put to use - which means sold. Researchers have to specify the "outcomes" they seek and how these will be beneficial. Even a public sculpture project has to explain what use each detail will have.
In today's outcome-obsessed society, people must become countable, quantifiable, transparent. And this leads to a grotesque new misunderstanding of psychotherapy. Therapy is now conceived as a set of techniques that can be applied to a human being. This makes sense if we see it as a business transaction with a buyer, a seller and a product. But it totally ignores the most basic fact: that therapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship. Therapy is about the encounter of two people, and the real work is done not by the therapist but by the patient. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, the therapist provides a space in which the patient can construct and create something. The therapist encourages and facilitates, but whether a therapy takes place or not depends entirely on the patient.
Unlike CBT, traditional therapies do not aim to give access to a common, scientific reality but to take the patient's own reality seriously: to explore it, to define it, to elaborate it and to see where it will go. No outcome can be predicted in advance: the patient may go back to work but equally they may give up a well-paid job to pursue another path.
Therapies such as CBT, which claim to deliver a product, can certainly be helpful for some people. But it is crucial to distinguish the question of whether a therapy works and how it works. For any therapy to get started, unconscious belief systems need to be mobilised. Human belief is a very powerful thing and no external authority can tell us what to believe in, although the persecution of religion groups shows that this is hardly self-evident.
Lord Layard stunned therapists earlier this year with the following vignette: "The most striking experience I've had in the last few years was when the chief executive of a mental health trust ... said his life had been saved by CBT ... He said he is a fully fledged bipolar case but he has not had a day off work for the last 15 years. He has a little book, which he carries around and whenever he has funny thoughts coming into his mind, he turns to the relevant page, according to what kind of thought it is or if he has a mood attack, and he does exactly what it says on the page. Now, you could say that's mechanical. I say that it's brilliant and not so different, you know, from what Jesus or any other great healer did for people."
Mao would perhaps have liked this story, and hoped that the little book was his own. And indeed, cognitive therapy was perhaps used most widely in the Cultural Revolution in China, where people were taught that depression was just wrong thinking. Separated from their families, unable to contact loved ones, subject to cruel punishments and witness to the murder or "vanishing" of those closest to them, millions of people were "taught" to devalue their reactions. The world should be thought about in a different way, and happiness and enthusiasm replace despair and despondency. Positive thinking should banish unhelpful negative attitudes.
This denial of the legitimacy of people's symptoms may have dangerous consequences. Diverting psychological processes from proper working through can result in both new symptoms and acts of violence. CBT's effort to ignore the effects of an individual's history in favour of a shallow analysis of the here and now sets a bleak example to those who believe that if the 20th century had any lesson, it was precisely not to deny the significance of human history and memory.
· Darian Leader's latest book The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, is published by Hamish Hamilton
books
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
The government is promoting cognitive behavioural therapy as a cost-effective, no-nonsense remedy for our psychological ills. It's the triumph of a market-driven view of the human psyche, says Darian Leader
A woman convinced that she emits an unpleasant smell is persuaded to travel around on public transport with a portion of fish and chips to monitor how people react to her. This will allow her to assess the "evidence": she will realise that there is a difference between times when she is the bearer of a strong smell and when she is not, and this will help her to "correct" her beliefs.
Welcome to the world of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which has enjoyed a massive expansion over the past 10 years, not only in Britain but in much of the west. Where once a diversity of therapies flourished, today CBT is progressively replacing the older treatments. It's cheap, it shows results on paper and it chimes with a commonsense, problem-solving view of the world.
Developed by the American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s, CBT was based on the idea that our emotions and moods were influenced by our patterns of thinking. The aim of therapy was to "correct" these processes, "to think and act more realistically". It would allow the patient to avoid the misconstruction of reality that had led to their problems.
Rather than focus on the patient's history - say their childhood and early experiences - like most other psychotherapies, CBT is mostly directed to the here and now. Patient and therapist agree on targets and formulate ways to achieve these in each session. Patterns of negative thinking are pinpointed and alternatives discussed. Homework is set at the end of each session, which might include self-monitoring, record-keeping and other tools of self-inspection.
After her strange sojourn on the tube, the woman with the fish and chips would meet her therapist and discuss the events of the day. If she realised that people in fact reacted to her less when she didn't have the malodorous meal, then she might be able to change her thought pattern, to see her life in a more positive way. She would learn that her symptom was an incorrect interpretation of reality and hopefully come to see the world as everyone else does.
But why did she suffer from this olfactory symptom in the first place? What function did it have in her life? If she was certain about it, what role did certainty play for her? Could it have been a solution to some other, less obvious problem? And if so, what would be the consequences of trying to remove it?
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.
The popularity of CBT with government agencies is no surprise. This year has seen the launch of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), an initiative to train a "workforce" of mostly cognitive therapists to cure the nation's anxious and depressed inhabitants. Lord Layard, the so-called happiness tsar and one of the architects of this new project, is delighted. At last, everyone will have access to proven treatments that have the right scientific credentials. And we will save a lot of money into the bargain. Depression and anxiety cost the economy around £12bn a year - 1% of the total national income - yet the new therapies will be able to cure people for only £750 a head. The saving on drugs bills and incapacity benefits is staggering.
But what might the real costs of this initiative be? And what does the rise of CBT tell us about the world we live in today? The government also plans to regulate mediums and spiritualists. It will no longer be up to us to believe in them or not, but a higher power will tell us who is legitimate and who is not. Just as a new rhetoric of "science" tells us that CBT is the best treatment, so it will arbitrate the "other side" - and all government has to do is back up science with legislation.
These are extraordinary developments in our times. And they highlight a strange paradox of the modern self. We are told that we are responsible for our own lives, that we have the power to transform ourselves. Yet at the same time we are treated as minors who lack the faculty of critical judgment and must be protected against unscrupulous and dangerous predators.
Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through "work" on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher's dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative.
CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.
The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one's existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism.
This is a modern self for which depth has become surface. In soaps and reality shows characters share their innermost feelings and emotions, as if there were a perfect continuity between interior and exterior life. If there's any ambiguity, a panel of experts is there, as on Big Brother, to explain people's motivations. The self is no longer a dark cave; everything is laid bare. In effect, we have been robbed of our interior lives.
Many social theorists have seen this atomisation as a consequence of market-led economies. As the market governs all, it was only a matter of time before basic human attributes would come to be taken as commodities and relationships as transactions. Students became clients of educational services, children clients of their parents. And it was no surprise that the view of human beings as subjects competing in the marketplace for goods and services would need a psychology to underpin it.
This new psychology broke radically from traditional ideas. The self had once been understood as a place of conflict: between reason and passion, between the will and understanding, between repressed desires and their inhibition. But, as Nikolas Rose observed in his study Governing the Soul, the self is now no longer intrinsically fractured, it just needs to "actualise" itself.
The divided self dear to the 60s has vanished, along with the recognition that grief, despair and frustration strike at the heart of our image of self-possession and fulfilment. The psyche has become like a muscle that needs to be developed and trained. There is no place for complexity and contradiction here: the modern subject is represented as one-dimensional, searching for fulfilment. The possibility that human life is aimed at both success and failure and never simply at wealth, power or happiness no longer makes sense. Suddenly the world of human relations described by novelists, poets and playwrights for the past few centuries can just be written off. Self-sabotage, masochism and despair are now faults to be corrected, rather than forming the very core of the self.
The new psychology is thus in the service of the market. Symptoms become understood as deviations, pieces of learned conduct that can be undone by short courses in re-education. This is the soil in which CBT came to flourish. Its textbooks refer unashamedly to "belief modification" and to "selling the treatment" to the patient. It follows a market-led vision of the psyche in which a symptom, for example depression or insomnia, is not seen as a general problem in a person's existence - which, if unravelled, might lead to the unravelling of the self - but as a local disturbance that can be managed and put right.
This commodification of the psyche is reflected in the change in mental health diagnoses. In the early 20th century, there were between a dozen and two dozen discrete diagnostic categories - breaking down different aspects of mental health. By the early 90s there were more than 360. Easily observable surface symptoms, such as shyness, have been taken to define disorders. Many of these have been developed and advertised by drug companies in order to carve out market niches for new drugs. Social phobia, for example, was sold as a diagnosis by the makers of a drug - moclobemide - that claimed to cure it.
The new focus on surface behaviour makes cognitive-style therapies seem more scientific. As Ian Parker, professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, observes, if a disorder is defined by symptoms, get rid of the symptoms and you've got rid of the disorder. The therapist carries out a more or less mechanical procedure, a series of protocols formulated in advance, which have been approved by management and checked by inspectorate. On paper it looks good: symptoms appear reduced. But there is no tracking of so-called "alternative symptoms", the problems that will emerge in mind or body when the original symptom is removed. A woman troubled by a dog phobia may be able to overcome this with a behavioural treatment, but what of her relationship with her father, a concentration camp survivor who became terrified of German shepherds after the war? If her symptom articulated a certain identification with his anxiety, how would this find expression once she was deprived of the phobia?
These important complexities have little place in a society where depth has become surface. What matters are quick-fix cosmetic solutions, rubber-stamped by so-called experts. Where articles and books once used to develop concepts and ideas, today the expression "Research shows ..." encourages us to stop thinking. Not long ago the media excitedly carried the "news" that research had shown that depressed fathers had an effect on the wellbeing of their children. Well, who would seriously have thought otherwise? Was it really necessary to have a government grant to show this? And in fact, the methodology in most of these studies is deeply flawed.
This is a world in which nothing counts as knowledge unless it is sanctioned by experts. Advice on baby-rearing or nutrition may seem sensible, but can there really be a correct way to conduct a relationship, to fall in love or to maintain beliefs? Knowledge has become almost synonymous with a product: any new idea or discovery has to demonstrate how it can be practically put to use - which means sold. Researchers have to specify the "outcomes" they seek and how these will be beneficial. Even a public sculpture project has to explain what use each detail will have.
In today's outcome-obsessed society, people must become countable, quantifiable, transparent. And this leads to a grotesque new misunderstanding of psychotherapy. Therapy is now conceived as a set of techniques that can be applied to a human being. This makes sense if we see it as a business transaction with a buyer, a seller and a product. But it totally ignores the most basic fact: that therapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship. Therapy is about the encounter of two people, and the real work is done not by the therapist but by the patient. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, the therapist provides a space in which the patient can construct and create something. The therapist encourages and facilitates, but whether a therapy takes place or not depends entirely on the patient.
Unlike CBT, traditional therapies do not aim to give access to a common, scientific reality but to take the patient's own reality seriously: to explore it, to define it, to elaborate it and to see where it will go. No outcome can be predicted in advance: the patient may go back to work but equally they may give up a well-paid job to pursue another path.
Therapies such as CBT, which claim to deliver a product, can certainly be helpful for some people. But it is crucial to distinguish the question of whether a therapy works and how it works. For any therapy to get started, unconscious belief systems need to be mobilised. Human belief is a very powerful thing and no external authority can tell us what to believe in, although the persecution of religion groups shows that this is hardly self-evident.
Lord Layard stunned therapists earlier this year with the following vignette: "The most striking experience I've had in the last few years was when the chief executive of a mental health trust ... said his life had been saved by CBT ... He said he is a fully fledged bipolar case but he has not had a day off work for the last 15 years. He has a little book, which he carries around and whenever he has funny thoughts coming into his mind, he turns to the relevant page, according to what kind of thought it is or if he has a mood attack, and he does exactly what it says on the page. Now, you could say that's mechanical. I say that it's brilliant and not so different, you know, from what Jesus or any other great healer did for people."
Mao would perhaps have liked this story, and hoped that the little book was his own. And indeed, cognitive therapy was perhaps used most widely in the Cultural Revolution in China, where people were taught that depression was just wrong thinking. Separated from their families, unable to contact loved ones, subject to cruel punishments and witness to the murder or "vanishing" of those closest to them, millions of people were "taught" to devalue their reactions. The world should be thought about in a different way, and happiness and enthusiasm replace despair and despondency. Positive thinking should banish unhelpful negative attitudes.
This denial of the legitimacy of people's symptoms may have dangerous consequences. Diverting psychological processes from proper working through can result in both new symptoms and acts of violence. CBT's effort to ignore the effects of an individual's history in favour of a shallow analysis of the here and now sets a bleak example to those who believe that if the 20th century had any lesson, it was precisely not to deny the significance of human history and memory.
· Darian Leader's latest book The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, is published by Hamish Hamilton
books
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
The Republican convention -- the maverick and the hockey mom
The Republican convention
The maverick and the hockey mom
Sep 4th 2008 | ST PAUL
From The Economist print edition
Republicans are more fired up than before, but less so than Democrats
BEFORE Barack Obama’s big open-air speech in Denver last week, some Christian conservatives prayed for rain. That was in poor taste. But this is a competitive election, and anything the right can do, the left can do better. When the news came that a hurricane might strike New Orleans during the Republican convention in St Paul, Minnesota this week, Michael Moore, a film-maker, said it was “proof that there is a God in heaven”. Another calamitous storm, you see, would remind people how ineptly George Bush dealt with Hurricane Katrina three years ago and spur them to vote Democratic.
The first day of the convention, September 1st, was all but cancelled—though, in the end, the hurricane was less destructive than had been feared (see article). That left three days for Republicans to achieve three goals. They needed to distance John McCain from Mr Bush, to introduce Sarah Palin (Mr McCain’s surprise vice-presidential pick) to voters and to denigrate Mr Obama. Strangely, Hurricane Gustav may have helped. The storm gave Mr Bush a good reason to stay away on the first day. During a brief video link-up, he generously stressed the times Mr McCain has disagreed with him.
To boost their nominee, Republicans played all the familiar tunes. Videos hinted at parallels with previous presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, the war hero, and Ronald Reagan, who faced down the Soviet Union. Fred Thompson, a gravel-voiced actor, former senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate, praised Mr McCain’s courage during two years of solitary confinement where the heat caused “boils the size of baseballs under his arms”. “It’s pretty clear,” said Mr Thompson, that “there are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves: ‘Who is this man?’ and ‘Can we trust this man with the presidency?’”
The highlight of the first full day was an independent Democrat who got the crowd cheering for Bill Clinton, of all people. Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running-mate in 2000, listed what happened when Mr Clinton stood up to his own party’s interest groups and worked with a Republican Congress: welfare reform, free-trade agreements and balanced budgets. Mr Obama, by contrast, “has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done”. John McCain had done it “over and over again”, said Mr Lieberman, citing his friend’s struggles with his own party over campaign-finance and immigration reform. This speech provoked howls of “traitor” from Democratic bloggers, but cheers from the floor.
The week’s biggest buzz surrounded Mr McCain’s little-known running-mate. Delegates waxed ecstatic about Mrs Palin, the governor of Alaska. Social conservatives, who have reservations about Mr McCain, immediately sensed that she is one of them. Christians applauded her piety, gun-lovers her love of guns and pro-lifers the Down’s syndrome baby she calls “perfect”. And nearly everyone warmed to her moose-skinning authenticity. “I give her extreme credit for being a mother of five and a governor. I’m a mother of five. And I can barely keep milk in the house,” said Kelley McDonald of New Jersey.
All week Democrats hammered Mrs Palin for her lack of experience of national or international politics. Republicans retorted that, as a governor and former mayor, she has more executive experience than Mr Obama and Joe Biden combined. Speaker after speaker contrasted Mr Obama’s record of rubbing along with machine politicians in Chicago with Mrs Palin’s record of confronting corruption within her own party. But everyone knew that picking her was a risk. “You’re not a [bomber] pilot if you don’t take risks,” said Mike Huebsch, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin assembly.
On September 3rd the “hottest VP from the coolest state,” as the badges put it, took the stage. She seemed a trifle nervous and unsure of the teleprompter. But the audience loved her. She spoke of her union-member, snowmobile-champion husband and her five children, including one who is about to deploy to Iraq.
She accused Democrats of looking down on small-town mayors. “Let me explain to them what the job involves,” she said. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organiser, except that you have actual responsibilities.” She boasted of vetoing half a billion dollars in wasteful spending as governor and selling the former governor’s jet on eBay. There was much to admire about Mr Obama, but she chided him for having written “two memoirs but not a single major law”.
Since voters say they care most about energy, and since she governs an oil state, she spoke about it at length. She scoffed at Democrats who oppose drilling for oil on the ground that it won’t solve all America’s energy problems—“as if we didn’t know that already”—and promised to promote nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal energy and clean coal, too. The crowd chanted “Drill, baby, drill!”
The Economist went to press before Mr McCain’s speech on September 4th. Both he and Mr Obama say they want to unite their country, but their two parties’ conventions showed a gaping cultural gulf. In Denver abortion-rights advocates handed out condoms with the logo “Protect yourself from John McCain”, while Obamaphiles wore badges that substituted “Obama” for “God” in the motto “In God We Trust”. Evangelicals in St Paul sighed that secular Democrats probably did not realise how offensive this was.
Outside the Republican convention, largely peaceful protests were marred by a few thugs who smashed windows. More violent disruptions were avoided, however, because police informants infiltrated a gang of anarchists who were allegedly planning them. Police seized weapons and buckets of urine, apparently intended for throwing at people. Lawyers for some of those arrested demanded the return of their possessions. “Who should we return the urine to?” asked the judge, according to the Star-Tribune, a local paper.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The maverick and the hockey mom
Sep 4th 2008 | ST PAUL
From The Economist print edition
Republicans are more fired up than before, but less so than Democrats
BEFORE Barack Obama’s big open-air speech in Denver last week, some Christian conservatives prayed for rain. That was in poor taste. But this is a competitive election, and anything the right can do, the left can do better. When the news came that a hurricane might strike New Orleans during the Republican convention in St Paul, Minnesota this week, Michael Moore, a film-maker, said it was “proof that there is a God in heaven”. Another calamitous storm, you see, would remind people how ineptly George Bush dealt with Hurricane Katrina three years ago and spur them to vote Democratic.
The first day of the convention, September 1st, was all but cancelled—though, in the end, the hurricane was less destructive than had been feared (see article). That left three days for Republicans to achieve three goals. They needed to distance John McCain from Mr Bush, to introduce Sarah Palin (Mr McCain’s surprise vice-presidential pick) to voters and to denigrate Mr Obama. Strangely, Hurricane Gustav may have helped. The storm gave Mr Bush a good reason to stay away on the first day. During a brief video link-up, he generously stressed the times Mr McCain has disagreed with him.
To boost their nominee, Republicans played all the familiar tunes. Videos hinted at parallels with previous presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, the war hero, and Ronald Reagan, who faced down the Soviet Union. Fred Thompson, a gravel-voiced actor, former senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate, praised Mr McCain’s courage during two years of solitary confinement where the heat caused “boils the size of baseballs under his arms”. “It’s pretty clear,” said Mr Thompson, that “there are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves: ‘Who is this man?’ and ‘Can we trust this man with the presidency?’”
The highlight of the first full day was an independent Democrat who got the crowd cheering for Bill Clinton, of all people. Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running-mate in 2000, listed what happened when Mr Clinton stood up to his own party’s interest groups and worked with a Republican Congress: welfare reform, free-trade agreements and balanced budgets. Mr Obama, by contrast, “has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done”. John McCain had done it “over and over again”, said Mr Lieberman, citing his friend’s struggles with his own party over campaign-finance and immigration reform. This speech provoked howls of “traitor” from Democratic bloggers, but cheers from the floor.
The week’s biggest buzz surrounded Mr McCain’s little-known running-mate. Delegates waxed ecstatic about Mrs Palin, the governor of Alaska. Social conservatives, who have reservations about Mr McCain, immediately sensed that she is one of them. Christians applauded her piety, gun-lovers her love of guns and pro-lifers the Down’s syndrome baby she calls “perfect”. And nearly everyone warmed to her moose-skinning authenticity. “I give her extreme credit for being a mother of five and a governor. I’m a mother of five. And I can barely keep milk in the house,” said Kelley McDonald of New Jersey.
All week Democrats hammered Mrs Palin for her lack of experience of national or international politics. Republicans retorted that, as a governor and former mayor, she has more executive experience than Mr Obama and Joe Biden combined. Speaker after speaker contrasted Mr Obama’s record of rubbing along with machine politicians in Chicago with Mrs Palin’s record of confronting corruption within her own party. But everyone knew that picking her was a risk. “You’re not a [bomber] pilot if you don’t take risks,” said Mike Huebsch, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin assembly.
On September 3rd the “hottest VP from the coolest state,” as the badges put it, took the stage. She seemed a trifle nervous and unsure of the teleprompter. But the audience loved her. She spoke of her union-member, snowmobile-champion husband and her five children, including one who is about to deploy to Iraq.
She accused Democrats of looking down on small-town mayors. “Let me explain to them what the job involves,” she said. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organiser, except that you have actual responsibilities.” She boasted of vetoing half a billion dollars in wasteful spending as governor and selling the former governor’s jet on eBay. There was much to admire about Mr Obama, but she chided him for having written “two memoirs but not a single major law”.
Since voters say they care most about energy, and since she governs an oil state, she spoke about it at length. She scoffed at Democrats who oppose drilling for oil on the ground that it won’t solve all America’s energy problems—“as if we didn’t know that already”—and promised to promote nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal energy and clean coal, too. The crowd chanted “Drill, baby, drill!”
The Economist went to press before Mr McCain’s speech on September 4th. Both he and Mr Obama say they want to unite their country, but their two parties’ conventions showed a gaping cultural gulf. In Denver abortion-rights advocates handed out condoms with the logo “Protect yourself from John McCain”, while Obamaphiles wore badges that substituted “Obama” for “God” in the motto “In God We Trust”. Evangelicals in St Paul sighed that secular Democrats probably did not realise how offensive this was.
Outside the Republican convention, largely peaceful protests were marred by a few thugs who smashed windows. More violent disruptions were avoided, however, because police informants infiltrated a gang of anarchists who were allegedly planning them. Police seized weapons and buckets of urine, apparently intended for throwing at people. Lawyers for some of those arrested demanded the return of their possessions. “Who should we return the urine to?” asked the judge, according to the Star-Tribune, a local paper.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The physics of mass -- A dialogue with nature
The physics of mass
A dialogue with nature
Sep 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition
AFP It's a patchwork of quantum fields
NATURE abhors a vacuum; physicists are none too keen on it either. However, conceptual attempts to fill it up, most famously with ether as a hypothetical medium, have regularly created more problems than they solved. This is because whatever occupies empty space would have to be somehow different from the tangible stuff the world is made of. Now, in a fascinating twist, modern physics challenges the ancient dichotomy between substance and void. What is perceived as empty space turns out to be a new kind of ether, a patchwork of quantum fields teeming with spontaneous activity, and the fundamental building block of nature. Subject to random disturbances, this “grid”, as Frank Wilczek names it, creates stable packets of energy which, by dint of Einstein’s most famous discovery, expressed in the equation E=mc2, account for the mass of ordinary matter.
Hence “The Lightness of Being”, the title of Mr Wilczek’s new book. In it the renowned physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engages in a riveting dialogue with nature, using experiments and hypotheses as questions. He draws on recent developments in the special theory of relativity, quantum field theory and quantum chromodynamics (which accounts for the behaviour of quarks and which won Mr Wilczek the Nobel prize in 2004) to arrive at a satisfactory answer about the origin of mass. In the process, he broaches some probing questions about the ultimate structure of physical reality, and about the prospects for a unified theory that would account for all its seemingly disparate aspects.
Click here to find out more!
The book offers not just some striking answers, but also a peek at the creative process that produces them. At its heart lies the continual tension between new consequences derived from existing mathematical formulae, their novel physical interpretations and the search for their discernible manifestations. The most recent monument to this quest is the Large Hadron Collider, a $9 billion machine due to be fired up on September 10th at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. There, Mr Wilczek’s own theories will be among the first to be tested.
The book is not without flaws. Mr Wilczek seems undecided as to his intended audience. True, he minimises the use of equations and has dreamt up some imaginative metaphors to help make complex notions more accessible. But this is still not a book for the novice. Those who cannot decipher Feynman diagrams or have never heard of gauge fields (undefined even in the glossary), are advised to bone up beforehand. In chapter seven, and in the index, colour charge (a property of fundamental particles similar to electric charge) is said to come in three hues—red, white and blue. But in chapter 17, Mr Wilczek suddenly talks of a green and purple charge, leaving the reader scratching his head. What is more, the conceptual shortcuts that pose as explanations will baffle most beginners.
“The Lightness of Being” began as a series of public lectures given by the author at different institutions. They needed to be better edited to work as a book. A quotation from a 19th-century German physicist, Heinrich Hertz, for instance, appears twice, while the notion of a coupling constant (in effect, the measure of a fundamental force’s strength) is explained only some 100 pages after it is first mentioned. The numerous extended comments in brackets are also a bit of an eyesore. Most would be better as footnotes, or dispensed with altogether.
Ultimately, however, these imperfections do not stop the book being a thrilling read. In an endnote Mr Wilczek warns that the nitty gritty of quantum field theory is not for sissies. Nor is this book. But readers who are both doughty and patient will be rewarded with a glimpse of physics at its quirkiest and most illuminating.
A dialogue with nature
Sep 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition
AFP It's a patchwork of quantum fields
NATURE abhors a vacuum; physicists are none too keen on it either. However, conceptual attempts to fill it up, most famously with ether as a hypothetical medium, have regularly created more problems than they solved. This is because whatever occupies empty space would have to be somehow different from the tangible stuff the world is made of. Now, in a fascinating twist, modern physics challenges the ancient dichotomy between substance and void. What is perceived as empty space turns out to be a new kind of ether, a patchwork of quantum fields teeming with spontaneous activity, and the fundamental building block of nature. Subject to random disturbances, this “grid”, as Frank Wilczek names it, creates stable packets of energy which, by dint of Einstein’s most famous discovery, expressed in the equation E=mc2, account for the mass of ordinary matter.
Hence “The Lightness of Being”, the title of Mr Wilczek’s new book. In it the renowned physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engages in a riveting dialogue with nature, using experiments and hypotheses as questions. He draws on recent developments in the special theory of relativity, quantum field theory and quantum chromodynamics (which accounts for the behaviour of quarks and which won Mr Wilczek the Nobel prize in 2004) to arrive at a satisfactory answer about the origin of mass. In the process, he broaches some probing questions about the ultimate structure of physical reality, and about the prospects for a unified theory that would account for all its seemingly disparate aspects.
Click here to find out more!
The book offers not just some striking answers, but also a peek at the creative process that produces them. At its heart lies the continual tension between new consequences derived from existing mathematical formulae, their novel physical interpretations and the search for their discernible manifestations. The most recent monument to this quest is the Large Hadron Collider, a $9 billion machine due to be fired up on September 10th at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. There, Mr Wilczek’s own theories will be among the first to be tested.
The book is not without flaws. Mr Wilczek seems undecided as to his intended audience. True, he minimises the use of equations and has dreamt up some imaginative metaphors to help make complex notions more accessible. But this is still not a book for the novice. Those who cannot decipher Feynman diagrams or have never heard of gauge fields (undefined even in the glossary), are advised to bone up beforehand. In chapter seven, and in the index, colour charge (a property of fundamental particles similar to electric charge) is said to come in three hues—red, white and blue. But in chapter 17, Mr Wilczek suddenly talks of a green and purple charge, leaving the reader scratching his head. What is more, the conceptual shortcuts that pose as explanations will baffle most beginners.
“The Lightness of Being” began as a series of public lectures given by the author at different institutions. They needed to be better edited to work as a book. A quotation from a 19th-century German physicist, Heinrich Hertz, for instance, appears twice, while the notion of a coupling constant (in effect, the measure of a fundamental force’s strength) is explained only some 100 pages after it is first mentioned. The numerous extended comments in brackets are also a bit of an eyesore. Most would be better as footnotes, or dispensed with altogether.
Ultimately, however, these imperfections do not stop the book being a thrilling read. In an endnote Mr Wilczek warns that the nitty gritty of quantum field theory is not for sissies. Nor is this book. But readers who are both doughty and patient will be rewarded with a glimpse of physics at its quirkiest and most illuminating.
Monday, September 8, 2008
India's imprisoned farmers
India's imprisoned farmers
by Salil Tripathi
By refusing to move on from its outdated approach to agriculture, India is condemning farmers to misery and impoverishing its own citizens
Salil Tripathi is an Indian-born author and journalist based in London. www.saliltripathi.com
Click here to discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect's blog
When the Doha global trade negotiations collapsed in July, many countries shared the blame. But one of the more surprising culprits was India. Indian consumers have suffered during the recent food crisis, with inflation over 12 per cent for some commodities. Removing agricultural trade barriers would surely have helped get cheaper food to India’s many millions of poor citizens.
Yet Indian trade minister Kamal Nath declined to open India further to farm imports, claiming he had to protect the "livelihood of millions of farmers" in India. What was behind this decision? Double-digit inflation often sounds the death knell for Indian governments. Elections are due by next May, and the governing coalition barely survived a recent confidence vote.
Essentially, India’s politicians fear that liberalising agriculture will expose their farmers to catastrophe if food prices collapse in the future. India has some efficient farmers who would gain from a boost in trade. But vast areas of the agricultural sector are hugely inefficient. Land holdings are small, productivity is low, mechanisation is minimal and big business faces restrictions in consolidating farming. And there is also a humanitarian problem. Over 100,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the past decade. Many reasons are cited for this: crop failure, bad monsoons, mounting debts and alcoholism. The government’s response has been to award 100,000 rupees compensation to the families of farmers who have taken their own lives.
In an effort to strengthen the agricultural sector earlier this year, India announced a major bailout for farmers, amounting to £7.5bn so far. The money will go towards granting fresh credit to farmers and writing off their old debts. But the bailout is a bad idea for several reasons. While a decade and a half of economic growth has created the illusion that India is a rich country, it is not and it cannot afford this package. And, as economists have argued, financial relief without strings will destroy India's emerging credit culture. It penalises those who repay loans on time and rewards those who do not.
It is already apparent that throwing money at the suicide problem has not solved the crisis. In fact, far from reducing suicides, the relatively high amount of compensation may have created a perverse incentive. Desperate farmers could calculate that their families would be financially better off if they commit suicide than if they live, and some may have taken their lives accordingly. Other reports in the media suggest that in some instances murders are being committed, then passed off as suicides to get the compensation.
But the fundamental problem is that many of India’s farmers will never make a proper living on the land that they have. Plots may be too small to be economically viable—even before they are divided up among each farmer’s sons with every successive generation. (Daughters have legal rights, but they have to fight to assert them in more traditional areas) The land may not be fertile enough to yield crops. Often it is poorly irrigated, if at all, and vulnerable to the monsoons. And, for any farmer to be able to sell his crop at the right price, he needs labour, transport, roads and a market. The small marginal farmer has access to none of these. Most farmers are hardworking. But not everyone can be the entrepreneur that he is presently required to be.
Indian agricultural policies fail to recognise this, assuming instead that farmers will always remain farmers. These policies serve to imprison people on their land, where they are unlikely to ever improve their prospects. A shift in policy thinking is urgently required.
India’s politicians forget that their economy is not static. Thanks to economic reforms, 100m Indians have been lifted out of absolute poverty since 1991. And their fortunes were not transformed by agriculture, which represents barely a fifth of India's GDP, even though two thirds of Indians call themselves farmers. It is urban India that is booming, with jobs in call centres and in manufacturing. According to surveys, some 40 per cent of India's farmers would prefer to earn their living doing something else. Why not devise policies to encourage that?
For those who will keep working on the land, there are other solutions. The technology, investment, capital and infrastructure that Indian farmers need cannot be provided on a small scale. Indian agriculture needs to embrace agribusiness—it is the only way to substantially increase farm productivity. This will mean farmers become employees of others, helping till the land and harvest, sort and package the crop. It will also mean some farmers become part of ancillary industries. The model to follow here is China’s town-and-village enterprises (TVEs), which offer better jobs to surplus labour from the farms. Yes, working for others will lose farmers some of their autonomy. But waged labour is a better guarantor of income than marginal farming.
Better agricultural policies could transform the lives of India's poorest farmers. Their sons and daughters could aspire to be software engineers, or join other white-collar professions. And the benefits could reach outside the country's borders. India already produces the largest volume of certain pulses and milk in the world. With the right approach, perhaps it could become a granary for the world too.
Copyright: Prospect Magazine, Issue 150, September 2008
by Salil Tripathi
By refusing to move on from its outdated approach to agriculture, India is condemning farmers to misery and impoverishing its own citizens
Salil Tripathi is an Indian-born author and journalist based in London. www.saliltripathi.com
Click here to discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect's blog
When the Doha global trade negotiations collapsed in July, many countries shared the blame. But one of the more surprising culprits was India. Indian consumers have suffered during the recent food crisis, with inflation over 12 per cent for some commodities. Removing agricultural trade barriers would surely have helped get cheaper food to India’s many millions of poor citizens.
Yet Indian trade minister Kamal Nath declined to open India further to farm imports, claiming he had to protect the "livelihood of millions of farmers" in India. What was behind this decision? Double-digit inflation often sounds the death knell for Indian governments. Elections are due by next May, and the governing coalition barely survived a recent confidence vote.
Essentially, India’s politicians fear that liberalising agriculture will expose their farmers to catastrophe if food prices collapse in the future. India has some efficient farmers who would gain from a boost in trade. But vast areas of the agricultural sector are hugely inefficient. Land holdings are small, productivity is low, mechanisation is minimal and big business faces restrictions in consolidating farming. And there is also a humanitarian problem. Over 100,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the past decade. Many reasons are cited for this: crop failure, bad monsoons, mounting debts and alcoholism. The government’s response has been to award 100,000 rupees compensation to the families of farmers who have taken their own lives.
In an effort to strengthen the agricultural sector earlier this year, India announced a major bailout for farmers, amounting to £7.5bn so far. The money will go towards granting fresh credit to farmers and writing off their old debts. But the bailout is a bad idea for several reasons. While a decade and a half of economic growth has created the illusion that India is a rich country, it is not and it cannot afford this package. And, as economists have argued, financial relief without strings will destroy India's emerging credit culture. It penalises those who repay loans on time and rewards those who do not.
It is already apparent that throwing money at the suicide problem has not solved the crisis. In fact, far from reducing suicides, the relatively high amount of compensation may have created a perverse incentive. Desperate farmers could calculate that their families would be financially better off if they commit suicide than if they live, and some may have taken their lives accordingly. Other reports in the media suggest that in some instances murders are being committed, then passed off as suicides to get the compensation.
But the fundamental problem is that many of India’s farmers will never make a proper living on the land that they have. Plots may be too small to be economically viable—even before they are divided up among each farmer’s sons with every successive generation. (Daughters have legal rights, but they have to fight to assert them in more traditional areas) The land may not be fertile enough to yield crops. Often it is poorly irrigated, if at all, and vulnerable to the monsoons. And, for any farmer to be able to sell his crop at the right price, he needs labour, transport, roads and a market. The small marginal farmer has access to none of these. Most farmers are hardworking. But not everyone can be the entrepreneur that he is presently required to be.
Indian agricultural policies fail to recognise this, assuming instead that farmers will always remain farmers. These policies serve to imprison people on their land, where they are unlikely to ever improve their prospects. A shift in policy thinking is urgently required.
India’s politicians forget that their economy is not static. Thanks to economic reforms, 100m Indians have been lifted out of absolute poverty since 1991. And their fortunes were not transformed by agriculture, which represents barely a fifth of India's GDP, even though two thirds of Indians call themselves farmers. It is urban India that is booming, with jobs in call centres and in manufacturing. According to surveys, some 40 per cent of India's farmers would prefer to earn their living doing something else. Why not devise policies to encourage that?
For those who will keep working on the land, there are other solutions. The technology, investment, capital and infrastructure that Indian farmers need cannot be provided on a small scale. Indian agriculture needs to embrace agribusiness—it is the only way to substantially increase farm productivity. This will mean farmers become employees of others, helping till the land and harvest, sort and package the crop. It will also mean some farmers become part of ancillary industries. The model to follow here is China’s town-and-village enterprises (TVEs), which offer better jobs to surplus labour from the farms. Yes, working for others will lose farmers some of their autonomy. But waged labour is a better guarantor of income than marginal farming.
Better agricultural policies could transform the lives of India's poorest farmers. Their sons and daughters could aspire to be software engineers, or join other white-collar professions. And the benefits could reach outside the country's borders. India already produces the largest volume of certain pulses and milk in the world. With the right approach, perhaps it could become a granary for the world too.
Copyright: Prospect Magazine, Issue 150, September 2008
America is dissatisfied - and that's good news for Obama
America is dissatisfied - and that's good news for Obama
Polls show most think their country is on the wrong track, and they won't be swayed by Palin's culture-war rhetoric
All comments ()
* Michael Tomasky
*
o Michael Tomasky in Washington
o The Guardian,
o Monday September 8 2008
o Article history
Last Friday, John McCain and Sarah Palin hit the campaign trail together for the first time as an official ticket, as Palin pledged her loyalty to "small-town America" in the Republican stronghold of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, population 11,000.
That same day, the federal government released its monthly jobs report. The unemployment rate stood at 6.1%, the highest it's been in nearly five years. The American economy has lost 605,000 jobs this year. It's an economy, it bears remembering, that needs to add about 150,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with the growing workforce.
McCain's addition of Palin to the Grand Old Party ticket has stoked up the conservative base, and her rhetoric will ensure that the campaign returns to familiar attack themes about Democrats being elitists and sneering at small-town values. Meanwhile, many actual small towns are losing jobs, and the party in power has done little about it.
The party in power, of course, usually pays the price for a lousy economy. But we know also that Republicans have used the above themes successfully in recent elections. Will they work again? They just might. After all, they pack quite an emotional punch. But there are reasons to think that this time they might not. To understand why, step with me into the wayback machine.
The American cultural divide has always existed, but in its present form it dates from the 1960s, when some conservative politicians figured out how to exploit liberalism's support for minorities and other contentious causes. George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, did it superbly. But no one was better at it than Richard Nixon.
As author Rick Perlstein argues in his book Nixonland, Nixon took all this personally. At his college, there was a society that dubbed itself the Franklins - well-heeled, urbane and mostly liberal. He started his own society called the Orthogonians (a Latin portmanteau meaning, basically, "straight shooters"). These were the unfashionable students, whose chief rallying tenet was resentment of the Franklins. When he attained power, Nixon did his best to divide the country into Franklins and Orthogonians. Our "blue" and "red" Americas are, in essence, these two groups.
But here's the crucial point. Not everyone is a Franklin or an Orthogonian. Indeed, most Americans aren't particularly political. They're more interested in Brangelina or the new NFL season. They vote on two bases: their instinct about the candidates and their immediate condition in life. Orthogonian rhetoric usually works well with these folks. They don't spend their lives hating liberals because they don't care enough to hate, but most of them can be persuaded that Democrats are going to raise their taxes and banish God from the public sphere, because, after all, Democrats have contempt for them and their values.
It worked for Ronald Reagan, who was running against a weak incumbent Democrat against whom a clear and comprehensive case could be made. It worked in 1988 for George HW Bush, who faced an opponent who didn't know how to stand up and fight for himself. It worked in 2000 and 2004 for George W Bush, whose opponents were easily tagged as elitist and who did nothing to fight the charge. The two times it didn't work? For Bush Sr in 1992, when he was the incumbent and the economy was bad. And for Bob Dole in 1996, when Bill Clinton was the incumbent and overseeing a strong economy.
What about this year? Something is true that has not been true in any election going all the way back to 1980. This year, 80% of Americans think the country is seriously on the wrong track. Four out of five adults. Excepting the most hardcore Bush supporters, that's pretty much every adult in the country. Sure, a smattering of that 80% thinks the country's on the wrong track because it isn't conservative enough. But the majority is concerned about the usual things: the economy, the lack of good healthcare, America's terrible standing in the world, and a host of other maladies.
The Democratic wager, then, is this: that most of the people in the vast uncommitted middle will not renew their Orthogonian membership cards. So far, the theory appears to hold water. McCain and Palin found a safely Republican town to visit in Wisconsin. But, as of today, Obama and Biden are eight points ahead in that state - a state John Kerry won by just 10,000 votes.
How will Palin, an uber-Orthogonian, play in such an atmosphere? Early polling returns are not encouraging for the GOP. In two focus groups, independents came away decidedly underwhelmed. One typical comment: "She is a cool, poised speaker, but her speech contained few statements about policy or the party platform ... I am not convinced that Palin's experience as a mayor or governor in Alaska meet the qualifications to be vice-president."
In normal times, Republicans win culture-war arguments. But these aren't normal times. The Democrats have to run a smart campaign: they must answer every attack and lodge several of their own, firmly tying McCain-Palin to the Bush-Cheney economic policy. If they do it well, a majority of independents should join the Franklin club this time.
· Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America michael.tomasky@guardian.co.uk
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Polls show most think their country is on the wrong track, and they won't be swayed by Palin's culture-war rhetoric
All comments ()
* Michael Tomasky
*
o Michael Tomasky in Washington
o The Guardian,
o Monday September 8 2008
o Article history
Last Friday, John McCain and Sarah Palin hit the campaign trail together for the first time as an official ticket, as Palin pledged her loyalty to "small-town America" in the Republican stronghold of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, population 11,000.
That same day, the federal government released its monthly jobs report. The unemployment rate stood at 6.1%, the highest it's been in nearly five years. The American economy has lost 605,000 jobs this year. It's an economy, it bears remembering, that needs to add about 150,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with the growing workforce.
McCain's addition of Palin to the Grand Old Party ticket has stoked up the conservative base, and her rhetoric will ensure that the campaign returns to familiar attack themes about Democrats being elitists and sneering at small-town values. Meanwhile, many actual small towns are losing jobs, and the party in power has done little about it.
The party in power, of course, usually pays the price for a lousy economy. But we know also that Republicans have used the above themes successfully in recent elections. Will they work again? They just might. After all, they pack quite an emotional punch. But there are reasons to think that this time they might not. To understand why, step with me into the wayback machine.
The American cultural divide has always existed, but in its present form it dates from the 1960s, when some conservative politicians figured out how to exploit liberalism's support for minorities and other contentious causes. George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, did it superbly. But no one was better at it than Richard Nixon.
As author Rick Perlstein argues in his book Nixonland, Nixon took all this personally. At his college, there was a society that dubbed itself the Franklins - well-heeled, urbane and mostly liberal. He started his own society called the Orthogonians (a Latin portmanteau meaning, basically, "straight shooters"). These were the unfashionable students, whose chief rallying tenet was resentment of the Franklins. When he attained power, Nixon did his best to divide the country into Franklins and Orthogonians. Our "blue" and "red" Americas are, in essence, these two groups.
But here's the crucial point. Not everyone is a Franklin or an Orthogonian. Indeed, most Americans aren't particularly political. They're more interested in Brangelina or the new NFL season. They vote on two bases: their instinct about the candidates and their immediate condition in life. Orthogonian rhetoric usually works well with these folks. They don't spend their lives hating liberals because they don't care enough to hate, but most of them can be persuaded that Democrats are going to raise their taxes and banish God from the public sphere, because, after all, Democrats have contempt for them and their values.
It worked for Ronald Reagan, who was running against a weak incumbent Democrat against whom a clear and comprehensive case could be made. It worked in 1988 for George HW Bush, who faced an opponent who didn't know how to stand up and fight for himself. It worked in 2000 and 2004 for George W Bush, whose opponents were easily tagged as elitist and who did nothing to fight the charge. The two times it didn't work? For Bush Sr in 1992, when he was the incumbent and the economy was bad. And for Bob Dole in 1996, when Bill Clinton was the incumbent and overseeing a strong economy.
What about this year? Something is true that has not been true in any election going all the way back to 1980. This year, 80% of Americans think the country is seriously on the wrong track. Four out of five adults. Excepting the most hardcore Bush supporters, that's pretty much every adult in the country. Sure, a smattering of that 80% thinks the country's on the wrong track because it isn't conservative enough. But the majority is concerned about the usual things: the economy, the lack of good healthcare, America's terrible standing in the world, and a host of other maladies.
The Democratic wager, then, is this: that most of the people in the vast uncommitted middle will not renew their Orthogonian membership cards. So far, the theory appears to hold water. McCain and Palin found a safely Republican town to visit in Wisconsin. But, as of today, Obama and Biden are eight points ahead in that state - a state John Kerry won by just 10,000 votes.
How will Palin, an uber-Orthogonian, play in such an atmosphere? Early polling returns are not encouraging for the GOP. In two focus groups, independents came away decidedly underwhelmed. One typical comment: "She is a cool, poised speaker, but her speech contained few statements about policy or the party platform ... I am not convinced that Palin's experience as a mayor or governor in Alaska meet the qualifications to be vice-president."
In normal times, Republicans win culture-war arguments. But these aren't normal times. The Democrats have to run a smart campaign: they must answer every attack and lodge several of their own, firmly tying McCain-Palin to the Bush-Cheney economic policy. If they do it well, a majority of independents should join the Franklin club this time.
· Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America michael.tomasky@guardian.co.uk
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Freedom and Neurobiology by John Searle
Freedom and Neurobiology by John Searle
Richard Corrigan freely ponders John Searle’s thoughts on free will.
This short book consists of two lectures: ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’, and ‘Social Ontology and Political Power’, accompanied by a comprehensive introduction entitled ‘Philosophy and the Basic Facts’. Searle admits that the two themes do not appear to have much in common, but he views them both as essential aspects of his research. The book is a testament to Searle’s capacity for innovative and challenging thought. The primary question addressed here is: how can humans reconcile a world composed entirely of “mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles” with our everyday conception of ourselves as “conscious, intentionalistic, rational, social, institutional, speech-act performing, ethical and free-will possessing agents”? (p5)
In his introduction Searle guides us through the history of philosophy, concisely explaining how we have progressed to our current state of understanding. He does this by exploring eight traditional philosophical questions and their connotations, including the nature of consciousness, free will and politics. He holds that at this point in our philosophical evolution we have the capacity to “advance very general accounts of mind, language, rationality, society, etc.” Searle believes that we can undertake such ‘large scale’ projects because of a fresh openness to the role of empirical evidence, and the union of philosophy of mind and biology.
Humans have long pondered our ‘cognitively privileged’ place in the world. We are therefore entitled to ask him why our current position is especially pregnant with the possibility of finding solutions to these age-old questions. Searle contends that we’ve only recently gained the capacity to deal scientifically with problems such as free will, consciousness, language, rationality and so forth. The answers we can now provide are a natural progression from the basic facts we have established about the world. The basic facts to which he refers are the findings of the sciences in the areas of evolutionary biology and quantum theory. These are taken by Searle to provide the basic building blocks of knowledge.
The first chapter focuses on the problem of free will and associated problems of the self, rationality and consciousness. Searle’s goal is to show how the scientific resolution of these problems could be achieved. He is convinced that the philosopher’s role in this task is to formulate the problem in a fashion precise enough to allow empirical methods of investigation. He believes he can do this by transforming the question from its traditional metaphysical form to a more exact question about the function of the human brain. Therefore, he addresses the question “How could we treat the problem of free will as a neurobiological problem?” (p8)
Searle does not adopt a compatibilist understanding of ‘free’ – instead asserting that “according to the definitions… that I am using, determinism and free will are not compatible” (p47). He contends that the free will problem has proved particularly difficult to resolve because it involves what appears to be two conflicting convictions. Firstly, we generally think that natural phenomena occur as a consequence of natural laws and prior physical states. However, there appears to be a special type of occurrence that we generally accept does not conform to such deterministic explanation. When we provide an account of the reasons upon which we acted, we do not believe we are providing a report of a sufficient set of determining factors – we do not believe that the reasons we had for acting were causally determinate for the action undertaken. We believe that, had we so chosen, we could have done otherwise. Searle calls our consciousness of such causal insufficiency ‘the gap’ (a term originally introduced in his book Rationality in Action (MIT Press, 2001). Thus, we believe that there is a significant sense in which our actions are under our control. He calls consciousness of this control ‘volitional consciousness’ (p41). Hence, Searle concludes, the problem of free will stems from volitional consciousness – our consciousness of the apparent gap between determining reasons and choices.
We experience the gap when we consider the following: (i) our reasons and the decision we make (ii) our decision and action that ensues (iii) our action and its continuation to completion (p42). Searle believes that, if we are to act freely then our experience of the gap cannot be illusory: it must be the case that the causation at play is non-deterministic.
The gap also becomes obvious when we consider the divergent nature of the explanations we offer for natural phenomena and our own actions. When we explain a natural event we state that ‘A caused B’. However when we explain an individual’s action we state “A Self S performed action A, and in the performance of A, S acted on Reason R” (p53). We can immediately appreciate that for free action explanations to have significant content, we must posit an irreducible self to do the acting.
Searle proceeds to ask, if there is such a self and if the gap is real, how can this be accounted for at the neurobiological level? (p59) He answers: “the lack of causally sufficient conditions at the psychological level is matched by an absence of causally sufficient conditions at the neurobiological level” and in a human “the brain is such that the conscious self is able to make and carry out decisions in the gap, where neither decision nor action is determined in advance, by causally sufficient conditions, yet both are rationally explained by the reasons the agent is acting on” (p73). However, Searle accepts that this gives rise to:
“the trickiest question: How could the gap be neurobiologically real…? Assume we have an account of how the brain produces mental causation, and an account of how it produces the experiences of rational agency, how could we get rational indeterminism into our account of brain function?” (p74)
To address this concern, Searle proposes that “Consciousness manifests quantum indeterminism” (p75) and that “randomness at the micro level does not by itself imply randomness at the system level.” (p76) In other words, if it is true that “the conscious self is able to carry out decisions in the gap, where neither decision nor action is determined in advance, yet both are rationally explained by reasons the agent is acting on,” it must be the case that decisions are indeterminate. Since quantum mechanics is the only form of indeterminism so far known to science, it must therefore be the case that consciousness displays quantum indeterminism. However, quantum indeterminism does not necessarily lead to randomness, as the properties of the whole may differ from those of the parts.
I think that Searle needs to provide a better explanation of how this process would work. Yet once again, he thinks that this further explanation is the responsibility of the neurobiologist.
Alternatively, it may the case that contrary to our experience of free will, we may indeed be determined agents, and all previous brain and environmental states and the laws of nature are sufficient to determine all subsequent brain states. It is up to neurobiology to provide the answer here too (for this is as far as Searle can justifiably reason). Searle accepts that there is not sufficient scientific data to prove or disprove the existence of free will, and that this fact is rather unsettling: he therefore cannot ultimately assume its reality. He briefly touches on some of the consequences of it being proven that free will is in fact an illusion, but does not deal with these consequences in any conclusive way.
One may justifiably question his assumption that the problem of free will is ultimately reducible to neurobiology. The problem appears to me to be more complex and tangled than Searle supposes. After all, even if the question whether prior states of affairs are sufficient to determine an agent’s actions is conclusively answered, the deepest philosophical aspects of the problem have still not been touched. Most of the literature on free will is devoted to whether freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. If it were shown that all our actions are casually determined by prior events, we’d still have to address the outstanding questions of whether this detracts from what it means to have ‘free will’ and whether our morally reactive attitudes are justified.
So even if the project suggested by Searle were carried through to completion, the central problem of free will would still persist in its usual troublesome form. Perhaps if the inverse were proven, and it was shown that our actions are not causally determined by prior states of affairs, compatibilism would lack substance. However, I am not convinced that neurobiology will provide the kind of answers that would lead to such a conviction, or that philosophers would stop pondering the nature of free will because of what science discovers.
The second chapter considers social ontology and political power, although Searle is careful to clarify that the theory outlined here “is very much provisional, and a work in progress.” This essay provides a brief introduction to Searle’s conception of the nature of political society and the structure of its power. His aim here is to “explore some of the relations between general ontology and social reality and the specific form of reality that is political power.” (p80) While fascinating in itself, it is difficult to critically evaluate what he says because of its provisional nature. It will be very interesting to see how he progresses his ideas and crafts them into a finished form.
Freedom and Neurobiology is interesting, well-formed and thought-provoking, and written in an accessible form. It’s a pity Searle does not give any attention to other contemporary books devoted to the question of free will. I do not doubt however that this book will give rise to plenty of intriguing debates.
© Dr Richard Corrigan
Richard Corrigan has a PhD in philosophy from University College Dublin, and has published numerous books and articles, mainly on the philosophy of religion.
• John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power, Columbia University Press, 2007, 113pp, $24.50 (hb), ISBN 0231137524. This book is at the Philosophy Now Bookstore.
© 2008 Philosophy Now. All rights reserved.
Richard Corrigan freely ponders John Searle’s thoughts on free will.
This short book consists of two lectures: ‘Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology’, and ‘Social Ontology and Political Power’, accompanied by a comprehensive introduction entitled ‘Philosophy and the Basic Facts’. Searle admits that the two themes do not appear to have much in common, but he views them both as essential aspects of his research. The book is a testament to Searle’s capacity for innovative and challenging thought. The primary question addressed here is: how can humans reconcile a world composed entirely of “mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles” with our everyday conception of ourselves as “conscious, intentionalistic, rational, social, institutional, speech-act performing, ethical and free-will possessing agents”? (p5)
In his introduction Searle guides us through the history of philosophy, concisely explaining how we have progressed to our current state of understanding. He does this by exploring eight traditional philosophical questions and their connotations, including the nature of consciousness, free will and politics. He holds that at this point in our philosophical evolution we have the capacity to “advance very general accounts of mind, language, rationality, society, etc.” Searle believes that we can undertake such ‘large scale’ projects because of a fresh openness to the role of empirical evidence, and the union of philosophy of mind and biology.
Humans have long pondered our ‘cognitively privileged’ place in the world. We are therefore entitled to ask him why our current position is especially pregnant with the possibility of finding solutions to these age-old questions. Searle contends that we’ve only recently gained the capacity to deal scientifically with problems such as free will, consciousness, language, rationality and so forth. The answers we can now provide are a natural progression from the basic facts we have established about the world. The basic facts to which he refers are the findings of the sciences in the areas of evolutionary biology and quantum theory. These are taken by Searle to provide the basic building blocks of knowledge.
The first chapter focuses on the problem of free will and associated problems of the self, rationality and consciousness. Searle’s goal is to show how the scientific resolution of these problems could be achieved. He is convinced that the philosopher’s role in this task is to formulate the problem in a fashion precise enough to allow empirical methods of investigation. He believes he can do this by transforming the question from its traditional metaphysical form to a more exact question about the function of the human brain. Therefore, he addresses the question “How could we treat the problem of free will as a neurobiological problem?” (p8)
Searle does not adopt a compatibilist understanding of ‘free’ – instead asserting that “according to the definitions… that I am using, determinism and free will are not compatible” (p47). He contends that the free will problem has proved particularly difficult to resolve because it involves what appears to be two conflicting convictions. Firstly, we generally think that natural phenomena occur as a consequence of natural laws and prior physical states. However, there appears to be a special type of occurrence that we generally accept does not conform to such deterministic explanation. When we provide an account of the reasons upon which we acted, we do not believe we are providing a report of a sufficient set of determining factors – we do not believe that the reasons we had for acting were causally determinate for the action undertaken. We believe that, had we so chosen, we could have done otherwise. Searle calls our consciousness of such causal insufficiency ‘the gap’ (a term originally introduced in his book Rationality in Action (MIT Press, 2001). Thus, we believe that there is a significant sense in which our actions are under our control. He calls consciousness of this control ‘volitional consciousness’ (p41). Hence, Searle concludes, the problem of free will stems from volitional consciousness – our consciousness of the apparent gap between determining reasons and choices.
We experience the gap when we consider the following: (i) our reasons and the decision we make (ii) our decision and action that ensues (iii) our action and its continuation to completion (p42). Searle believes that, if we are to act freely then our experience of the gap cannot be illusory: it must be the case that the causation at play is non-deterministic.
The gap also becomes obvious when we consider the divergent nature of the explanations we offer for natural phenomena and our own actions. When we explain a natural event we state that ‘A caused B’. However when we explain an individual’s action we state “A Self S performed action A, and in the performance of A, S acted on Reason R” (p53). We can immediately appreciate that for free action explanations to have significant content, we must posit an irreducible self to do the acting.
Searle proceeds to ask, if there is such a self and if the gap is real, how can this be accounted for at the neurobiological level? (p59) He answers: “the lack of causally sufficient conditions at the psychological level is matched by an absence of causally sufficient conditions at the neurobiological level” and in a human “the brain is such that the conscious self is able to make and carry out decisions in the gap, where neither decision nor action is determined in advance, by causally sufficient conditions, yet both are rationally explained by the reasons the agent is acting on” (p73). However, Searle accepts that this gives rise to:
“the trickiest question: How could the gap be neurobiologically real…? Assume we have an account of how the brain produces mental causation, and an account of how it produces the experiences of rational agency, how could we get rational indeterminism into our account of brain function?” (p74)
To address this concern, Searle proposes that “Consciousness manifests quantum indeterminism” (p75) and that “randomness at the micro level does not by itself imply randomness at the system level.” (p76) In other words, if it is true that “the conscious self is able to carry out decisions in the gap, where neither decision nor action is determined in advance, yet both are rationally explained by reasons the agent is acting on,” it must be the case that decisions are indeterminate. Since quantum mechanics is the only form of indeterminism so far known to science, it must therefore be the case that consciousness displays quantum indeterminism. However, quantum indeterminism does not necessarily lead to randomness, as the properties of the whole may differ from those of the parts.
I think that Searle needs to provide a better explanation of how this process would work. Yet once again, he thinks that this further explanation is the responsibility of the neurobiologist.
Alternatively, it may the case that contrary to our experience of free will, we may indeed be determined agents, and all previous brain and environmental states and the laws of nature are sufficient to determine all subsequent brain states. It is up to neurobiology to provide the answer here too (for this is as far as Searle can justifiably reason). Searle accepts that there is not sufficient scientific data to prove or disprove the existence of free will, and that this fact is rather unsettling: he therefore cannot ultimately assume its reality. He briefly touches on some of the consequences of it being proven that free will is in fact an illusion, but does not deal with these consequences in any conclusive way.
One may justifiably question his assumption that the problem of free will is ultimately reducible to neurobiology. The problem appears to me to be more complex and tangled than Searle supposes. After all, even if the question whether prior states of affairs are sufficient to determine an agent’s actions is conclusively answered, the deepest philosophical aspects of the problem have still not been touched. Most of the literature on free will is devoted to whether freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. If it were shown that all our actions are casually determined by prior events, we’d still have to address the outstanding questions of whether this detracts from what it means to have ‘free will’ and whether our morally reactive attitudes are justified.
So even if the project suggested by Searle were carried through to completion, the central problem of free will would still persist in its usual troublesome form. Perhaps if the inverse were proven, and it was shown that our actions are not causally determined by prior states of affairs, compatibilism would lack substance. However, I am not convinced that neurobiology will provide the kind of answers that would lead to such a conviction, or that philosophers would stop pondering the nature of free will because of what science discovers.
The second chapter considers social ontology and political power, although Searle is careful to clarify that the theory outlined here “is very much provisional, and a work in progress.” This essay provides a brief introduction to Searle’s conception of the nature of political society and the structure of its power. His aim here is to “explore some of the relations between general ontology and social reality and the specific form of reality that is political power.” (p80) While fascinating in itself, it is difficult to critically evaluate what he says because of its provisional nature. It will be very interesting to see how he progresses his ideas and crafts them into a finished form.
Freedom and Neurobiology is interesting, well-formed and thought-provoking, and written in an accessible form. It’s a pity Searle does not give any attention to other contemporary books devoted to the question of free will. I do not doubt however that this book will give rise to plenty of intriguing debates.
© Dr Richard Corrigan
Richard Corrigan has a PhD in philosophy from University College Dublin, and has published numerous books and articles, mainly on the philosophy of religion.
• John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power, Columbia University Press, 2007, 113pp, $24.50 (hb), ISBN 0231137524. This book is at the Philosophy Now Bookstore.
© 2008 Philosophy Now. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
A French Intellectual Star Considers What's Right About the Left
The Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle Review
From the issue dated September 5, 2008
CRITIC AT LARGE
A French Intellectual Star Considers What's Right About the Left
By CARLIN ROMANO
Leave it to Bernard-Henri Lévy, a Sartre in billowy, unbuttoned white shirt, to anticipate the gusts of the geopolitical zeitgeist as we slip into a frigid autumn, chilled by more reminders of 20th-century totalitarianism than seem fair in an age of global warming.
By his own description a "philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker," France's No. 1 media intellectual (unlike Federer, BHL keeps the top spot year after year even as his pecs soften) often draws sneers from more circumspect intellectuals and philosophers. It's the flamboyance of his movie-star appearance and dress, the celebrity aspects of his life (beautiful actress wife, millions of inherited dollars, castle in Morocco), and their unexamined faith that leads them to conclude that beneath such distracting superficialities, Lévy must be superficial.
But isn't it time that snobs in French departments, who'll schedule 20 Bataille, Blanchot, or Deleuze seminars before permitting even an invited chat on Lévy, admit that his impact on French intellectual history will far outlast that of their heroes?
Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism (Random House, September) — Lévy's blend of memoir, dissection of the 1970s New Philosophy movement that made him famous, and call for a leftism that's neither infantile nor robotic — demonstrates the acuity of his antennae, and his good fortune in reflecting current events.
Solzhenitsyn dies, unleashing a torrent of memorial journalism honoring his immense feat of baring the truth about Soviet brutality in The Gulag Archipelago, and Lévy offers a prescient section that salutes the Russian master's greatness, declaring that the "Communist dream dissolved in the furnace of a book." Vladimir Putin fulfills the prediction of close Kremlin watchers and moves toward re-Stalinizing Russia, and Lévy attributes to the Russian prime minister "the beastly scowl of the murderous KGB man he has always been." Nicolas Sarkozy takes center stage as the European Union's leader and chief negotiator between the United States and a resurgent Russia, and Lévy's new book functions as a sideways conversation with his new president, who enters and re-enters as prod, provocateur, and catalyst to rethinking.
Timeliness, however, is just one mark of Lévy's relevance as a global catalyst of ideological self-scrutiny. Another is his willingness, forged on a world stage where he interacts with both fellow thinkers and national leaders, to question commitments that other, wimpier but allegedly more rigorous intellectuals leave untouched.
In Barbarism With a Human Face (1977), the best seller that launched the young philosopher's career with its Solzhenitsyn-inspired attack on the French Left's indulgence toward the Soviet Union, Lévy displayed his signature independence. Now, 30 years on, Lévy, who turns 60 in November, muses on what it means to be a person "of the Left" (so he's always defined himself) after so much international rejection of Communism and Socialism over three decades. It's an especially pointed question for a writer whose country's parliamentary seating plan bequeathed us the blunt directional signals of right and left for political purposes.
Lévy's meditations arise from a predictable encounter at the heights of power. The concreteness with which Lévy tells the tale certifies him as an apt complement to the new leader French critics call "Sarkozy the American." Lévy is a kind of American Pragmatist in Paris whose philosophical urgencies arise from confrontation with conceptual problems in his chock-full activist life.
Left in Dark Times, BHL advises, grew out of a phone call he received from Sarkozy on January 23, 2007. The two men go back to Sarkozy's election in 1983 as mayor of Neuilly, the Parisian suburb in which Lévy votes. They'd lunched together many times over the years, developing, Lévy writes, "a kind of friendship." Lévy confesses himself alternately drawn to the brilliant, temperamental Sarkozy, a rightist eager to draw Socialists to his banner in last year's French presidential election, and put off at times by Sarkozy's "show-offy tone." (Lévy makes no mention of a primal underlying awkwardness — his novelist daughter, Justine Lévy, had her husband stolen a while back by none other than Sarkozy's new wife, Carla Bruni, a tale at the heart of Justine Lévy's novel, Nothing Serious.)
The immediate occasion of Sarkozy's call? André Glucksmann, Lévy's old "New Philosopher" peer, had just published a piece in Le Monde endorsing Sarkozy against his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal. Lévy puts Sarkozy's remarks between quotation marks: "Let's get to the point. What about you? When are you going to write your little article for me? Huh, when? Because Glucksmann is fine. But you, after all, are my friend."
Lévy resists. "Personal relationships are one thing," he replies. "Ideas are another. And no matter how much I like and respect you, the Left is my family."
Sarkozy interrupted him, Lévy recalls, in rough language. "These people who've spent 30 years telling you to go [expletive] yourself? … Do you really believe what you're saying, that these people are your family?"
Lévy stands his ground, replying, "I've always voted for the Left, and I'm voting for the Left this time, too."
Sarkozy eventually hangs up on him. Though not without, Lévy writes, a slightly "sleazy" insinuation that it's all "an unfortunate misunderstanding" they'll clear up down the line.
The phone call shook Lévy. It's that openness to being shaken in his beliefs — as when he ventured as a young man to Bangladesh, and later through the hellholes of Pakistan in search of Daniel Pearl's killers — that makes Lévy more appealing than many of his detractors.
"Had my thinking really become so Pavlovian," he writes, "that, as I'd just said to him, the Left was my family and you don't betray your family?" A week later, Lévy finds himself mouthing something similar to a French weekly embarked "on its umpteenth report" on the rightward drift of French intellectuals. He realizes afterward that his argument from the "family" metaphor is "frankly pathetic — and even goes against some of my basic convictions."
Thus he decided to speak in Left in Dark Times, with its many incisive observations on what it should mean to be "Left" in the 21st century. For Lévy "nothing good can come for the Left" without breaking with much of its history, especially softness on totalitarianism. He takes the widespread abandonment of revolutionary aspirations by most leftists — in the American context, he's talking about "liberals" or "progressives" — as one happy example of that. As he painstakingly explains, remaining on the Left involves a combination of impulses.
In part it's a commitment to images, from his father's engagement with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War to the 60s achievements of Americans such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Joan Baez. In part it's a mind-set that emerges out of epochal historical events — for him, the disgraces of Vichy France and the Algerian war, the consciousness-changing power of France's 1968, and the never-ending influence of the Dreyfus Affair. The last revealed the latent poisons of the French Republic and forever taught lessons about standing up for the individual targeted by powerful state interests.
In part it's also a combination of what he deems "reflexes," such as keeping freedom and equality united as aims, and never allowing another party's criminality or immorality to justify one's own.
Lévy convinces himself, and his reader, that his identification with the Left is no mere family loyalty, but a deep form of adherence to the freedom and dignity of the individual, antifascism, anticolonialism, and "the antitotalitarianism that is the legacy of May 68." All of that, he believes, should coalesce into "the Left we have to rebuild." In reaching that conclusion, Lévy also addresses many present and departed grand figures of French thought, such as Foucault and Deleuze, whom, foolish disparagers of Lévy should remember, he's known and debated personally. Lévy's engagement with the entire firmament of French thought, his focused attention on such conundrums as atheism and moral universalism, and his battles against knee-jerk anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism make Left in Dark Times the most accessible introduction to who he is today.
Without question, Lévy's style irritates philosophers fond of tight, impersonal sentences, and it always will. Not since William James has any philosopher of Lévy's prominence insisted on stream of consciousness as, well, a normal form of thinking. Almost every halting consideration, and twist in thought, is tucked in, leading to multiclaused sentences that at times seem translated into French (from Lévyese) by Nabokov, then translated back into American English by Tom Wolfe.
No matter. One doesn't become a world-class intellectual by exhibiting a tin ear in the face of history, or a pedestrian style that leaves one in the communal prose pot with everyone else. The press and Lévy's peers, if not academics, take Lévy seriously because he continues to pursue ideas and events that matter — morally, politically, philosophically.
Early on he mentions a well-known French formulation of the dividing line between Left and Right, Françoise Sagan's observation that "in the case of any given injustice, the man or woman of the Right will say it's inevitable. The man or woman of the Left will say it's intolerable." Lévy doesn't comment, possibly because Sagan's vision of the crusading leftist fits him too well, and he prefers, like most writers, to shape his own self-portrait.
But it is exactly that bent toward justice that Sagan sees as emblematic of the Left, that commitment to it throughout his work and across racial, class, and other borders, that makes Lévy not a "celebrity" to be mocked by more timorous types, but an admirable warrior of ideas who continues to take personal risks for truth as he sees it. He's never suffered like a Solzhenitsyn, but, then, Sarkozy is no Stalin.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 2, Page B6
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated September 5, 2008
CRITIC AT LARGE
A French Intellectual Star Considers What's Right About the Left
By CARLIN ROMANO
Leave it to Bernard-Henri Lévy, a Sartre in billowy, unbuttoned white shirt, to anticipate the gusts of the geopolitical zeitgeist as we slip into a frigid autumn, chilled by more reminders of 20th-century totalitarianism than seem fair in an age of global warming.
By his own description a "philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker," France's No. 1 media intellectual (unlike Federer, BHL keeps the top spot year after year even as his pecs soften) often draws sneers from more circumspect intellectuals and philosophers. It's the flamboyance of his movie-star appearance and dress, the celebrity aspects of his life (beautiful actress wife, millions of inherited dollars, castle in Morocco), and their unexamined faith that leads them to conclude that beneath such distracting superficialities, Lévy must be superficial.
But isn't it time that snobs in French departments, who'll schedule 20 Bataille, Blanchot, or Deleuze seminars before permitting even an invited chat on Lévy, admit that his impact on French intellectual history will far outlast that of their heroes?
Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism (Random House, September) — Lévy's blend of memoir, dissection of the 1970s New Philosophy movement that made him famous, and call for a leftism that's neither infantile nor robotic — demonstrates the acuity of his antennae, and his good fortune in reflecting current events.
Solzhenitsyn dies, unleashing a torrent of memorial journalism honoring his immense feat of baring the truth about Soviet brutality in The Gulag Archipelago, and Lévy offers a prescient section that salutes the Russian master's greatness, declaring that the "Communist dream dissolved in the furnace of a book." Vladimir Putin fulfills the prediction of close Kremlin watchers and moves toward re-Stalinizing Russia, and Lévy attributes to the Russian prime minister "the beastly scowl of the murderous KGB man he has always been." Nicolas Sarkozy takes center stage as the European Union's leader and chief negotiator between the United States and a resurgent Russia, and Lévy's new book functions as a sideways conversation with his new president, who enters and re-enters as prod, provocateur, and catalyst to rethinking.
Timeliness, however, is just one mark of Lévy's relevance as a global catalyst of ideological self-scrutiny. Another is his willingness, forged on a world stage where he interacts with both fellow thinkers and national leaders, to question commitments that other, wimpier but allegedly more rigorous intellectuals leave untouched.
In Barbarism With a Human Face (1977), the best seller that launched the young philosopher's career with its Solzhenitsyn-inspired attack on the French Left's indulgence toward the Soviet Union, Lévy displayed his signature independence. Now, 30 years on, Lévy, who turns 60 in November, muses on what it means to be a person "of the Left" (so he's always defined himself) after so much international rejection of Communism and Socialism over three decades. It's an especially pointed question for a writer whose country's parliamentary seating plan bequeathed us the blunt directional signals of right and left for political purposes.
Lévy's meditations arise from a predictable encounter at the heights of power. The concreteness with which Lévy tells the tale certifies him as an apt complement to the new leader French critics call "Sarkozy the American." Lévy is a kind of American Pragmatist in Paris whose philosophical urgencies arise from confrontation with conceptual problems in his chock-full activist life.
Left in Dark Times, BHL advises, grew out of a phone call he received from Sarkozy on January 23, 2007. The two men go back to Sarkozy's election in 1983 as mayor of Neuilly, the Parisian suburb in which Lévy votes. They'd lunched together many times over the years, developing, Lévy writes, "a kind of friendship." Lévy confesses himself alternately drawn to the brilliant, temperamental Sarkozy, a rightist eager to draw Socialists to his banner in last year's French presidential election, and put off at times by Sarkozy's "show-offy tone." (Lévy makes no mention of a primal underlying awkwardness — his novelist daughter, Justine Lévy, had her husband stolen a while back by none other than Sarkozy's new wife, Carla Bruni, a tale at the heart of Justine Lévy's novel, Nothing Serious.)
The immediate occasion of Sarkozy's call? André Glucksmann, Lévy's old "New Philosopher" peer, had just published a piece in Le Monde endorsing Sarkozy against his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal. Lévy puts Sarkozy's remarks between quotation marks: "Let's get to the point. What about you? When are you going to write your little article for me? Huh, when? Because Glucksmann is fine. But you, after all, are my friend."
Lévy resists. "Personal relationships are one thing," he replies. "Ideas are another. And no matter how much I like and respect you, the Left is my family."
Sarkozy interrupted him, Lévy recalls, in rough language. "These people who've spent 30 years telling you to go [expletive] yourself? … Do you really believe what you're saying, that these people are your family?"
Lévy stands his ground, replying, "I've always voted for the Left, and I'm voting for the Left this time, too."
Sarkozy eventually hangs up on him. Though not without, Lévy writes, a slightly "sleazy" insinuation that it's all "an unfortunate misunderstanding" they'll clear up down the line.
The phone call shook Lévy. It's that openness to being shaken in his beliefs — as when he ventured as a young man to Bangladesh, and later through the hellholes of Pakistan in search of Daniel Pearl's killers — that makes Lévy more appealing than many of his detractors.
"Had my thinking really become so Pavlovian," he writes, "that, as I'd just said to him, the Left was my family and you don't betray your family?" A week later, Lévy finds himself mouthing something similar to a French weekly embarked "on its umpteenth report" on the rightward drift of French intellectuals. He realizes afterward that his argument from the "family" metaphor is "frankly pathetic — and even goes against some of my basic convictions."
Thus he decided to speak in Left in Dark Times, with its many incisive observations on what it should mean to be "Left" in the 21st century. For Lévy "nothing good can come for the Left" without breaking with much of its history, especially softness on totalitarianism. He takes the widespread abandonment of revolutionary aspirations by most leftists — in the American context, he's talking about "liberals" or "progressives" — as one happy example of that. As he painstakingly explains, remaining on the Left involves a combination of impulses.
In part it's a commitment to images, from his father's engagement with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War to the 60s achievements of Americans such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Joan Baez. In part it's a mind-set that emerges out of epochal historical events — for him, the disgraces of Vichy France and the Algerian war, the consciousness-changing power of France's 1968, and the never-ending influence of the Dreyfus Affair. The last revealed the latent poisons of the French Republic and forever taught lessons about standing up for the individual targeted by powerful state interests.
In part it's also a combination of what he deems "reflexes," such as keeping freedom and equality united as aims, and never allowing another party's criminality or immorality to justify one's own.
Lévy convinces himself, and his reader, that his identification with the Left is no mere family loyalty, but a deep form of adherence to the freedom and dignity of the individual, antifascism, anticolonialism, and "the antitotalitarianism that is the legacy of May 68." All of that, he believes, should coalesce into "the Left we have to rebuild." In reaching that conclusion, Lévy also addresses many present and departed grand figures of French thought, such as Foucault and Deleuze, whom, foolish disparagers of Lévy should remember, he's known and debated personally. Lévy's engagement with the entire firmament of French thought, his focused attention on such conundrums as atheism and moral universalism, and his battles against knee-jerk anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism make Left in Dark Times the most accessible introduction to who he is today.
Without question, Lévy's style irritates philosophers fond of tight, impersonal sentences, and it always will. Not since William James has any philosopher of Lévy's prominence insisted on stream of consciousness as, well, a normal form of thinking. Almost every halting consideration, and twist in thought, is tucked in, leading to multiclaused sentences that at times seem translated into French (from Lévyese) by Nabokov, then translated back into American English by Tom Wolfe.
No matter. One doesn't become a world-class intellectual by exhibiting a tin ear in the face of history, or a pedestrian style that leaves one in the communal prose pot with everyone else. The press and Lévy's peers, if not academics, take Lévy seriously because he continues to pursue ideas and events that matter — morally, politically, philosophically.
Early on he mentions a well-known French formulation of the dividing line between Left and Right, Françoise Sagan's observation that "in the case of any given injustice, the man or woman of the Right will say it's inevitable. The man or woman of the Left will say it's intolerable." Lévy doesn't comment, possibly because Sagan's vision of the crusading leftist fits him too well, and he prefers, like most writers, to shape his own self-portrait.
But it is exactly that bent toward justice that Sagan sees as emblematic of the Left, that commitment to it throughout his work and across racial, class, and other borders, that makes Lévy not a "celebrity" to be mocked by more timorous types, but an admirable warrior of ideas who continues to take personal risks for truth as he sees it. He's never suffered like a Solzhenitsyn, but, then, Sarkozy is no Stalin.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 2, Page B6
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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