Conspiracy

CANADA DAY

Gigamesh

I read Gilgamesh as part of my "classics year" project, to read all those classics I've been meaning to. This work always gave me the impression of being an inaccessible epic, like the tome poems of Homer that go on for hundreds of pages. However, that is not the case. Like Beowulf (I highly recommend Seamus Heaney's translation), Gilgamesh is a short, quick read, with lots of rollicking battles and sex. Part of the shortness comes from the fact that the story is incomplete -- it is known that several books are missing from the original narrative. Hopefully one day those missing sections will surface.
Having only read Stephen Mitchell's version, I can't compare the salaciousness to other translations, but in Mitchell's the sex is right out there with nothing left to the imagination. The world of Gilgamesh is populated with people like the priestesses of the temple of Ishtar, who give their bodies to all comers (no pun intended) in honor of their goddess. Sex, rather than the shameful process our society has made it, was a natural and even sacred act.
When we meet Gilgamesh, he is king and loving it. Loving it a bit too much, as he has become something of a tyrant to his people. The gods see this and create a champion to balance him out: Enkidu. Enkidu is a wild man, running around in the woods with the animals, until Gilgamesh sends one of the priestesses of Ishtar to seduce him. Once Enkidu has had sex, the animals avoid him, so he must leave the forest. There are parallels to the (much later) story of the Fall from the Bible, but here sex is not a shaming act, rather a rite of passage. It is time for Enkidu to enter the world of men, and put away childish things. Sex meant enculturation to the author of Gilgamesh ; Enkidu has not lost a greater world, he has gained one. When Enkidu and Gilgamesh meet they wrestle, with Gilgamesh eventually winning. However, given the evenness of the match, the two become best friends (and there are hints that they may have been more than just friends).
For many people Book XI will be particularly interesting, as a man with the unfamiliar name of Utnapishtim tells a very familiar story. He was a king when the head god decided to send a flood to wipe out the world. The gods swore an oath to keep this secret, but one of the gods told Utnapishtim's fence to build a boat and take each type of animal on it, which of course Utnapishtim was intended to overhear. The boat Utnapishtim builds is much larger than Noah's ark, being a square with the deck an acre large, and having seven decks. It rains for a week, and finally the ship runs aground on Mount Nimush. Gilgamesh sends out a dove, which returns. Then he sends a swallow, which returns. Then he sends a raven, which finds a branch to land on and doesn't return. Gilgamesh then sacrifices a sheep to all the gods except the one who sent the flood, who in turn is mad because no one was intended to survive the flood. The gods then get into a very interesting (and very non-Biblical) debate over the wisdom of punishing the entire human race over the sins of a few. Written almost a thousand years before the story of Noah, the Gilgamesh version of the flood legend is much more nuanced. Like a Hollywood remake, the Bible version took the main plot elements but lost the subtleties of the original. The Gilgamesh version is itself a retelling of an already existing flood legend, but Gilgamesh first encoded it in a widely accessible form.
Gilgamesh is a quick read; in the Mitchell version, the text itself is only 130 pages long (and that's poem pages, which read fast). Most of the rest of the book is an introduction/analysis by Mitchell, and almost a hundred pages of endnotes. Mitchell did not directly translate the work himself; he relied on several different verbatim translations, and fleshed those out to make a readable version. In the end notes he often gives the strict literal translation of passages so the reader can compare. As with many stories that were originally orated, Gilgamesh incorporates much use of repetition. Someone will have four dreams, and each dream will begin the same way, or they will travel for seven days, and the story of each day is told using the same phrases. The whole story starts and ends with the walls of Gilgamesh's city Uruk, in bookend fashion. Gilgamesh is a classic that can be taken in without a large time commitment, and the original flood legend alone is worth the price of admission. As with Beowulf, this was not a story intended for marbled halls or the Academy; it was told around campfires and beer halls, where people want to hear about sex, monsters, and fighting. And Gilgamesh provides them all aplenty.

SEX: East and West

A Dutch-Japanese phrase book, compiled in 1770 for a trade legation from Holland -- the only Westerners permitted to reside on Japanese soil by the xenophobic shoguns -- had a mere 80 phrases. Its brevity suggests a paring down to the absolute essentials of speech needed to get by with the locals. Yet eight of the phrases -- an eye-catching 10% of the total -- pertained to hiring the services of female companions. These included a scripted exchange that would not be out of place in one of the more free- wheeling modern guidebooks for Western travelers to Thailand, say, or the Philippines: "Do you like that girl? / Yes, I like her a great deal. / Would you like me to make appropriate arrangements? / Yes, please do." One can almost picture bewhiskered Dutch lips smacking in a most un-burgher-like anticipation.

The Dutch legation was confined to a small island off the Nagasaki harbor. But the Japanese authorities -- sensitive to the basic needs even of hairy, barbarian Christian men -- allowed courtesans from the Maruyama pleasure quarter of Nagasaki to visit the Dutchmen. Occasionally the Dutch were taken on excursions to Maruyama itself, always with an official Japanese escort. "Imagine," Richard Bernstein writes, "a delegation of Japanese traders in France being escorted by Louis XIV's police to an elegant Parisian brothel." This, he observes, would have been inconceivable, even if there had been Japanese traders in Europe at the time, because Eastern sexuality "was a world apart from the sexual culture of Europe."


"The East, the West, and Sex" is the best sort of book about sex: It is replete with anecdotes from history that titillate as they inform and observations on human nature that amuse as they illuminate, all delivered in language and tone that is broadly moral without being moralizing and certainly far from prudish. To his credit, Mr. Bernstein strives hard to avoid prurience, or even the suggestion of it, although occasionally he does drop his guard, as when he writes of Western men being "powerfully drawn to the slim, small-boned, black-haired women of Asia, more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips."

Mr. Bernstein's survey of Westerners in the fleshpots of the East -- ranging from the 17th century to the present -- is actually cultural history with a point, an attempt to show that nonmonogamous sex in the Orient (at least for men in power) long carried no contingent connotation of sin and was, in fact, a natural part of the masculine condition. While Christian scolds of old viewed such easy sexual possibility as clinching proof of Eastern degeneracy, the more worldly among Western men saw in the East an opportunity for liberation -- for a breaking of the shackles they wore, perforce, in London, Lisbon or Rotterdam, before the West's own sexual revolution.

The East, the West, and Sex
By Richard Bernstein
(Knopf, 325 pages, $27.95)
Inevitably, "The East, the West, and Sex" contains plenty of what schoolboys of my generation would call "good bits" -- such as the irrepressible Gustave Flaubert's descriptions of the company he kept on what was essentially a sex tour to Egypt in 1850. His amorous companions included a prostitute "fat and lubricious . . . who smelled of rancid butter" and a catamite who was "excellent -- short, ugly, stocky."

Flaubert found Egypt "febrile and intoxicating," and these words sum up the sexual fantasy -- as well as the sexual experience -- that men of the West had of, and in, the East. Mr. Bernstein's "East" includes Morocco and Algeria -- both to the west of Italy and Sweden -- so his is very much a geography of the imagination. It is rooted in the concept of the Orient as comprising the lands and civilizations beyond Christendom, in which Christian sexual mores could be flouted with impunity and not a little self-aggrandizement.

Mr. Bernstein's text teems with men of flamboyant appetites: Ludovico de Varthema, a 16th-century Italian adventurer in the service of the king of Portugal who philandered his way from Arabia to the Indonesian archipelago; Richard Burton, explorer extraordinaire both outdoors and indoors, the first translator into English of the "Kama Sutra" and (as he called it) "A Thousand Nights and a Night"; David Ochterlony, the British Resident in Delhi in the early 1800s, who had 13 wives, one of whom was identified in his will as "Mahruttun Moobaruck ul Nissa Begume, alias Begum Ochterlony"; Henry de Montherlant, a great French novelist much neglected in English, for whom the young boys of North Africa "opened up a vast realm of sexual liberation and excitement"; and Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, legendary adviser to the South Vietnamese army in the 1960s, who, in addition to having a wife back home and two "wives" in Saigon, kept the girls on Tu Do street on very active duty.

Mr. Bernstein is right to characterize the West's historical relationship with the East as one, largely, of an assertion of political power. And with conquest and colonization (or with modern-day military interventions such as America's in Vietnam) the wielders of authority could satisfy their sexual desires in the East if they chose to do so. But Mr. Bernstein cautions against Manichaean conclusions that would have us condemn this behavior -- as well as the activities of today's Western men who go east, with their bulging wallets, for some casual "boom-boom" -- as a form of sexual colonization.

There may have been -- and may still be -- an inequality of bargaining power in many of the sexual transactions in question. But as distasteful as some Western arbiters may find such relations, seeing them as merely predatory and cruel, many Eastern women regard a few hours with a fat German tourist who'll pay them well as a perfectly reasonable professional option -- in the circumstances. And their circumstances, let us remember, are not the fault of the fat German tourist.

NEOLIBERALISM

A spectre is haunting the world, just as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This time, however, it is not the spectre of communism but that of neoliberalism.(1) Just as Marx and Engels reported of ‘a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre,’ there is once again an alliance, whether holy or unholy, that has formed to chase the ghost of neoliberalism from the world stage.

In any case, it is a curious alliance that has committed to fighting neoliberalism: Religious leaders and artists, environmental activists and globalisation critics, politicians of the left and the right as well as trade unionists, commentators and academics. They all share a passion to unmask neoliberalism as an inhuman, anti-social, and potentially misanthropic ideology or as a cynical exercise by strangely anonymous forces that wish to exploit the world to their own advantage.

The members of this colourful alliance against neoliberalism are as united in their opposition to neoliberalism as they are diverse. This suggests that neoliberalism cannot be too clearly defined as a concept. Rather, it is a broad umbrella under which very different groups with various points of view can meet. In the church of anti-neoliberalism, there is a place for anyone who believes that neoliberalism stands in the way of reaching his or her political goals. This may also explain the lack of any clear and coherent definition of neoliberalism among its dissenters.(2)

Yet the most curious characteristic of neoliberalism is the fact that these days hardly anyone self-identifies as a neoliberal. In former times, ideological debates were fought between, say, conservatives and socialists, collectivists and individualists. While there may not have been any other agreement between these opposing groups, at least they would have agreed about their respective identities. A socialist would not have felt offended by a conservative calling him a socialist and vice versa.

In present-day debates around neoliberalism, on the other hand, most accused of holding ‘neoliberal’ views would not accept being called ‘neoliberal.’ Either they would insist on being something else (whether it is ‘liberal,’ ‘classical liberal,’ or ‘libertarian’), or they would simply claim to be misunderstood by their opponents. In any case, scarcely anybody wants to be a ‘neoliberal’ any more. For example, in an online survey of the readers of Andrew Norton’s blog, out of more than 1,200 participants not a single person self-identified with the term, while ‘classical liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ and ‘libertarian’ were strong responses.(3) These are strange debates indeed when the enemy you are fighting claims he does not exist.

Maybe this is not so strange after all. If neoliberalism is hardly ever defined, if it can mean anything you wish to disagree with, then it is understandable that it results not from an attempt to gain theoretical knowledge but from the desire to defame your political opponents. In this way, the neoliberal label has become part of political rhetoric, albeit as an almost meaningless insult.

It was not always like this. At the beginning of neoliberalism, when the term was invented, it was quite the opposite of what we think of it today. The shallowness with which we use neoliberalism in a pejorative way corresponds inversely with the depth of thought by its original users. Even more surprisingly, the original ‘neoliberals’ have little in common with those who are nowadays called ‘neoliberal.’

Crisis and neoliberalism
Times of crisis naturally induce a wide-ranging critique of hitherto unchallenged concepts. So it is unsurprising that times of economic crisis, too, have provoked re-examinations of the way markets work. Two quotes may exemplify this.

There is one author who writes about the economic turmoil of his time: ‘[The crisis] has called into question the prevailing ... neo-liberal orthodoxy that has underpinned the national and global regulatory frameworks that have so spectacularly failed to prevent the economic mayhem which has now been visited upon us.’ He goes on to claim that ‘in the past year we have seen how unchecked market forces have brought capitalism to the precipice’ and concludes: ‘Neither governments nor the peoples they represent any longer have confidence in an unregulated system of extreme capitalism.’

Another commentator is equally clear. He diagnosed the ‘chaos of a pluralist, predatory economy’ and the ‘failure of economic liberalism.’ What was needed, he insisted, was ‘a strong state, a state above the economy, above the interest groups where it belongs.’

Although both commentators seem to come from similar points of view, they could not be more different. They are separated not only by some 70 years but also by their political persuasions, professional backgrounds, and nationalities. Furthermore, the first author claims to be a fierce critic of neoliberalism while the second one is the original inventor of the term neoliberalism.

To solve this riddle, let us lift the curtain and reveal their identities. The first quotes are taken from the essay ‘The Global Financial Crisis’ by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, which he published in the journal The Monthly in early 2009. It was seen as Rudd’s broad sweeping attack on neoliberalism.(4)

The second commentator is Alexander Rüstow, a German sociologist and economist, and the quotes are from a speech(5) he delivered to the Verein für Socialpolitik (Social Policy Association), a German economics association, in 1932 and the title of one of his books that was published in 1945.(6) It was the very same Alexander Rüstow who, in 1938, coined the term neoliberalism.

If Rudd and Rüstow sound so similar, yet one of them rejects the concept of neoliberalism while the other invented it, then either there must be some sort of misunderstanding or the term itself has undergone a transformation over the past decades.

In a way, one could argue that what happened in a small, far-away country almost a century ago (i.e. early twentieth century Germany) should hardly matter for contemporary Australian politics. The world has moved on and today’s debates are not the same as, say, those of the 1930s. On the other hand, it is more than just a vain exercise in intellectual archaeology when we are dealing with the birth of neoliberalism. We can see that early neoliberalism recognised both the power of markets and their limitations. Today’s critics of ‘neoliberalism’ are probably unaware that one of the defining features of early neoliberal conceptions was to put a check on unfettered markets and market power. This may well hold some ideas for policy makers today simply because neoliberals distinguished between areas in which the state could and should intervene and others in which it should not.

The invention of neoliberalism
The year in which the neoliberal program was first formulated was 1932. Germany’s leading economics association, the Verein für Socialpolitik, had invited the young economist Alexander Rüstow to its annual conference in Dresden. The Verein’s long-serving president was Werner Sombart, the leader of the so-called Kathedersozialisten (‘catheder socialists’) from the Historical School of Economics. Sombart, an open supporter of national-socialism, lacked any sympathies for liberalism. He had planned to make the Dresden meeting a rallying cry for his cause. But to his dismay, the relatively little known Rüstow delivered the most noticed speech at the conference, which was later published and republished many times. Until the present day, it is widely regarded as the founding document of neoliberalism.(7)

The speech was titled ‘Freie Wirtschaft, starker Staat’ (Free Economy, Strong State), and in these four words we can already see Rüstow’s basic economic creed. Far from supporting Sombart’s national-socialist visions, Rüstow blamed excessive interventionism for the economic crisis. He also warned of burdening the state with the task of correcting all sorts of economic problems. His speech was the clear rejection of a state that gets involved with economic processes. In its place, Rüstow wanted to see a state that set the rules for economic behaviour and enforced compliance with them. It was a limited role for the state, but it required a strong state nonetheless. Apart from this task, however, the state should refrain from getting too engaged in markets. This meant a clear ‘No’ to protectionism, subsidies, cartels—or what today we would call ‘crony capitalism,’ ‘regulatory capture,’ or ‘corporate welfare.’ However, Rüstow also saw a role for a limited interventionism as long as it went ‘in the direction of the market’s laws.’

Throughout his later life as an academic Rüstow further developed this vision of neoliberalism, as he himself called the idea, and published numerous books and essays in which he elaborated the system of a market economy under the rules of law and limited government. Many of them were written in exile: After the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police, had searched Rüstow’s home in 1933, he decided to leave Germany and accepted a teaching position in Istanbul. He remained in Turkey until he returned to (West) Germany in 1949 to lecture at the University of Heidelberg.

In his essay ‘Between Capitalism and Communism’, Rüstow explicitly argues for a ‘Third Way’ between the two ideologies.(8) He acknowledged that markets generally worked well under complete competition. However, he accused Adam Smith of holding a polemical grudge against the state that had made him neglect the necessary state-determined institutions of markets. This, so Rüstow claimed, caused the degeneration of the market economy into a system of untenable capitalism. In a long footnote, he went on to explain that he needed to insist on a differentiation between ‘the truly free market economy of complete competition’ and its ‘subventionist-monopolist-pluralist degeneration,’ which he thought of as a ‘pathologically degenerate variety’ of true market competition and for which he suggested the term ‘capitalism.’

If laissez faire and Adam Smith style liberalism were so bad according to Rüstow, would he then have preferred a planned economy? His answer was a resounding no. With the same rhetorical verve he used to condemn capitalism, he equally rejected the promises of socialism and communism. They were no viable economic systems, and they were also incompatible with democracy, freedom, and human dignity.

All of this led him to call for a middle way between laissez faire and socialism, a ‘Third Way.’ ‘We should be happy,’ Rüstow wrote, ‘that we do not have to make a difficult choice between “capitalism” and “communism”, but that there is a “Third Way”.’(9) Ironically, it is the very same logic that makes today’s critics of neoliberalism claim that one no longer had to choose between Hayek and Brezhnev, as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expressed it in an address to the Centre for Independent Studies in 2008.(10)

Although contemporary supporters of a ‘Third Way’ claim to be fighting neoliberalism, to Rüstow this very same ‘Third Way’ was neoliberalism. He called it neoliberalism to differentiate it from earlier liberalism, for which Rüstow frequently used derogatory terms such as ‘vulgar liberalism,’ ‘Manchester liberalism,’ or ‘paleo-liberalism.’ Rüstow wanted to break with this old liberal tradition to put a new liberalism in its place—hence the prefix ‘neo’.

Rediscovering neoliberalism
We should see the current attacks on neoliberalism in this wider historical context.

It seems to be a reflex to blame problems in the markets as problems of the markets. On closer inspection, some of the perceived market failures may well turn out to be failures of economic policy. Where Rüstow and the German neoliberals, for example, thought that cartelisation and monopolisation of the economy were the result of a degenerate market economy, historical analysis rather shows that they were the direct consequences of protectionism and interventionism—which Rüstow and his colleagues heavily criticised.

In a similar way, we ought to be careful when it comes to identifying the causes of the current crisis. Again, there are good reasons to look at both suspects, the government and the market. While there are good reasons to assume that there was indeed some market failure leading up to the crisis, there are at least as many reasons to think that they were preceded by government failures. Even where and when markets fail, however, this does not give governments a blank cheque to correct market results. First, it would need to be demonstrated that corrections can actually improve the situation.

It is a fine balance that needs to be found between the state and the economy. Although there are good reasons to be critical of the German neoliberals’ original historical analysis, their policy prescriptions nevertheless remain valuable discussion points. Rüstow’s differentiation between the state as the guarantor of economic order, as the rule-giver that stands above economic processes, and the failed interventionist state that meddles with economic processes and gets easily captured by special interests, are still valid. It would be worth to rediscover them, especially today.

The discussions about the proper political reactions to the global financial crisis are, sadly, not as nuanced as they could be. For example, when we read Kevin Rudd’s ‘anti-neoliberal’ essay we find some strong language right from the first paragraph where he blames ‘free-market fundamentalism,’ ‘extreme capitalism,’ and ‘excessive greed’ for our economic problems.

Nevertheless, if we look behind this rather shrill rhetoric, we can read in Rudd’s essay about his recognition of ‘the great strengths of open, competitive markets.’ In fact, Rudd explicitly warned not to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ as ‘the pressure will be great to retreat to some model of an all-providing state and to abandon altogether the cause of open, competitive markets both at home and abroad.’

Taken together, the criticism of laissez faire plus the recognition of the power of markets and scepticism of state power is the core of the neoliberal project as it was once formulated. This would almost make the Prime Minister a neoliberal in the original meaning of the word, although he would probably be surprised if he found out. However, Rudd’s policies suggest that he is less aware of the limits of government than he is aware of the limits of markets.

If there is one lesson that we could draw from dealing with the early history of neoliberalism for our political debates today, it is this: Neoliberalism is a far richer, more thoughtful concept than it is mostly perceived today. First and foremost, it emphasised the importance of sound institutions such as property rights, freedom of contract, open markets, rules of liability, and monetary stability as prerequisites for markets to prosper and thrive. It seems that the global financial crisis has once again demonstrated how important these core insights of neoliberalism are.

To those criticising neoliberalism today, the answer may well be just that: We need more of this kind of neoliberalism, not less. What we would need less of is only the rhetorical abuse of neoliberalism for political purposes

Writers

Ask a writer what she values most in her creative life, and she is likely to respond, "Time to write." Not many of us have the luxury of writing full- time; we have spouses, families, day jobs. To the people closest to the writer, "writing time" may seem like so much self-indulgence: Why should we get to sit around thinking all day? Normal people don't require hour after continuous hour of solitude and silence. Normal people can be flexible.

And yet, we writers tell our friends and children, there is nothing more sacrosanct, more vital to our intellectual and emotional well-being, than writing time. But we writers have a secret.

We don't spend much time writing.

There. It's out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is spent typing the words of a poem, essay or story into a computer or scribbling them onto a piece of paper.

Recently, I timed myself during a typical four-hour "writing" session, in order to determine how many minutes I spend writing. The answer: 33. That's how long it took to type four pages of narrative and dialogue for my novel-in-progress, much of which will eventually end up discarded.

Let's assume that this was an unusually brisk day. Let's estimate that, in general, I spend between 30 minutes and an hour writing, on days when I'm writing at all. What this means is that, even at my absolute peak of productivity, I am actively writing less than 5% of the time. Considering how many days of the year I don't write at all (most weekends, all holidays, teaching days, sick days, days of self-doubt, hangover days, bill-paying days), I could easily revise that figure down to 2%.

Should such a person, a person for whom writing consumes 2% of his life, even be called a "writer"? Given this logic, here are some of names by which I might more legitimately be referred:

eater

sleeper

bus rider

naked girl imaginer

child reprimander

internetist

cougher

But back to those four hours a day, during which, on those days when I do write, I am supposed to be writing. If I spend less than 25% of that time engaged in the act of writing, what do I do with the rest of it?

To answer this question, I surveilled myself during a recent writing session. The results are below.

8:04. Subject says goodbye to older son leaving for school.

8:05. Subject turns on laptop and sits on sofa in pajamas.

8:05-8:23. Internet.

8:23. Subject lets cat out.

8:23-9:07. Internet.

9:07. Subject lets cat in.

9:08-9:15. Really fast typing.

9:15-9:17. Subject makes toast.

9:17-9:30. Subject eats toast while rereading article in local paper about rural UFO cult.

9:30. Subject puts extra pair of socks on over extant pair of socks.

9:31-9:35. Deleting.

9:35-9:40. Re-creating deleted text almost verbatim from memory.

9:40-10:26. Internet, including 20 minutes spent writing, revising, and ultimately abandoning angry Internet message board post.

10:26-11:14. Intense self-doubt.

11:14-11:31. Subject showers, dresses (including two new pairs of socks).

11:31-11:49. Really fast typing.

11:49-12:01. Bathroom break.

12:01-12:05. Frenetic typing accompanied by quiet sinister chuckling.

12:05. Subject saves file, turns off computer, makes sandwich.

As you can see, writing makes only brief appearances in that chronology. Indeed, it would be easy to make a case for "non-writing time" as an alternative, perhaps superior, designation for what is presently called "writing time."

The truth, of course, is that writers are always working. When you ask a writer a direct question, and he smiles and nods and then says "Well!" and turns and walks away without saying goodbye, he is actually working.

If a writer is giving you a ride to the bus station and pulls up in front of the supermarket and turns to you and says, "Enjoy your trip!," she is actually working.

If you are a child, and your writer parent is scolding you for failing to do your homework, and then he or she suddenly stops, blinks twice, and tells you to go spend the rest of the afternoon playing video games and eating Pirate Booty, then he or she is actually working.

To allow our loved ones to know that we are working when we are supposed to be engaged in the responsibilities of ordinary life would mark us as the narcissists and social misfits we are. And so we have invented "writing time" as a normalizing concept, to shield ourselves from the critical scrutiny we deserve. Indeed, even writers who don't write fiction are engaged in the larger fiction of imitating normal humans whose professional activities are organized into discrete blocks of time.

If you have any questions, please write them on a postcard, slide the postcard between the pages of a library book, and return the book the library. I will get to them when I'm finished writing.

Lennon's most recent novel is "Castle." He teaches writing at Cornell University.

BEAUTY

Beauty and DesecrationWe must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness.Spring 2009
At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.
The value of abstract art, Greenberg claimed, lay not in beauty but in expression. This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms. We find this posture overtly adopted in the art of Austria and Germany between the wars—for example, in the paintings and drawings of Georg Grosz, in Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (a loving portrait of a woman whose only discernible goal is moral chaos), and in the seedy novels of Heinrich Mann. And the cult of transgression is a leading theme of the postwar literature of France—from the writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre to the bleak emptiness of the nouveau roman.
Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.
The great proof of this change is in the productions of opera, which give the denizens of postmodern culture an unparalleled opportunity to take revenge on the art of the past and to hide its beauty behind an obscene and sordid mask. We all assume that this will happen with Wagner, who “asked for it” by believing too strongly in the redemptive role of art. But it now regularly happens to the innocent purveyors of beauty, just as soon as a postmodernist producer gets his hands on one of their works.
An example that particularly struck me was a 2004 production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Komische Oper Berlin (see “The Abduction of Opera,” Summer 2007). Die Entführung tells the story of Konstanze—shipwrecked, separated from her fiancé Belmonte, and taken to serve in the harem of the Pasha Selim. After various intrigues, Belmonte rescues her, helped by the clemency of the Pasha—who, respecting Konstanze’s chastity and the couple’s faithful love, declines to take her by force. This implausible plot permits Mozart to express his Enlightenment conviction that charity is a universal virtue, as real in the Muslim empire of the Turks as in the Christian empire of the enlightened Joseph II. Even if Mozart’s innocent vision is without much historical basis, his belief in the reality of disinterested love is everywhere expressed and endorsed by the music. Die Entführung advances a moral idea, and its melodies share the beauty of that idea and persuasively present it to the listener.
In his production of Die Entführung, the Catalan stage director Calixto Bieito set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point, a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex.
That is an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody, harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos.
Those phenomena record a habit of desecration in which life is not celebrated by art but targeted by it. Artists can now make their reputations by constructing an original frame in which to display the human face and throw dung at it. What do we make of this, and how do we find our way back to the thing so many people long for, which is the vision of beauty? It may sound a little sentimental to speak of a “vision of beauty.” But what I mean is not some saccharine, Christmas-card image of human life but rather the elementary ways in which ideals and decencies enter our ordinary world and make themselves known, as love and charity make themselves known in Mozart’s music. There is a great hunger for beauty in our world, a hunger that our popular art fails to recognize and our serious art often defies.
I used the word “desecration” to describe the attitude conveyed by Bieito’s production of Die Entführung and by Serrano’s lame efforts at meaning something. What exactly does this word imply? It is connected, etymologically and semantically, with sacrilege, and therefore with the ideas of sanctity and the sacred. To desecrate is to spoil what might otherwise be set apart in the sphere of sacred things. We can desecrate a church, a graveyard, a tomb; and also a holy image, a holy book, or a holy ceremony. We can desecrate a corpse, a cherished image, even a living human being—insofar as these things contain (as they do) a portent of some original sanctity. The fear of desecration is a vital element in all religions. Indeed, that is what the word religio originally meant: a cult or ceremony designed to protect some sacred place from sacrilege.
In the eighteenth century, when organized religion and ceremonial kingship were losing their authority, when the democratic spirit was questioning inherited institutions, and when the idea was abroad that it was not God but man who made laws for the human world, the idea of the sacred suffered an eclipse. To the thinkers of the Enlightenment, it seemed little more than a superstition to believe that artifacts, buildings, places, and ceremonies could possess a sacred character, when all these things were the products of human design. The idea that the divine reveals itself in our world, and seeks our worship, seemed both implausible in itself and incompatible with science.
At the same time, philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke, Adam Smith, and Kant recognized that we do not look on the world only with the eyes of science. Another attitude exists—one not of scientific inquiry but of disinterested contemplation—that we direct toward our world in search of its meaning. When we take this attitude, we set our interests aside; we are no longer occupied with the goals and projects that propel us through time; we are no longer engaged in explaining things or enhancing our power. We are letting the world present itself and taking comfort in its presentation. This is the origin of the experience of beauty. There may be no way of accounting for that experience as part of our ordinary search for power and knowledge. It may be impossible to assimilate it to the day-to-day uses of our faculties. But it is an experience that self-evidently exists, and it is of the greatest value to those who receive it.
When does this experience occur, and what does it mean? Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.
Maybe such experiences are rarer now than they were in the eighteenth century, when the poets and philosophers lighted upon them as a new avenue to religion. The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry—these things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile, and more unpredictable thing for us. Still, we all know what it is to find ourselves suddenly transported, by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation. It happens often during childhood, though it is seldom interpreted then. It happens during adolescence, when it lends itself to our erotic longings. And it happens in a subdued way in adult life, secretly shaping our life projects, holding out to us an image of harmony that we pursue through holidays, through home-building, and through our private dreams.
Here is another example: it is a special occasion, when the family unites for a ceremonial dinner. You set the table with a clean embroidered cloth, arranging plates, glasses, bread in a basket, and some carafes of water and wine. You do this lovingly, delighting in the appearance, striving for an effect of cleanliness, simplicity, symmetry, and warmth. The table has become a symbol of homecoming, of the extended arms of the universal mother, inviting her children in. And all this abundance of meaning and good cheer is somehow contained in the appearance of the table. This, too, is an experience of beauty, one that we encounter, in some version or other, every day. We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home—the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right—through decorating, arranging, creating—are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.
This second example suggests that our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.
Look at any picture by one of the great landscape painters—Poussin, Guardi, Turner, Corot, Cézanne—and you will see that idea of beauty celebrated and fixed in images. The art of landscape painting, as it arose in the seventeenth century and endured into our time, is devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things. It is not that landscape painters turn a blind eye to suffering, or to the vastness and threateningness of the universe of which we occupy so small a corner. Far from it. Landscape painters show us death and decay in the very heart of things: the light on their hills is a fading light; the stucco walls of Guardi’s houses are patched and crumbling. But their images point to the joy that lies incipient in decay and to the eternal implied in the transient. They are images of home.
Not surprisingly, the idea of beauty has puzzled philosophers. The experience of beauty is so vivid, so immediate, so personal, that it seems hardly to belong to the natural order as science observes it. Yet beauty shines on us from ordinary things. Is it a feature of the world, or a figment of the imagination? Is it telling us something real and true that requires just this experience to be recognized? Or is it merely a heightened moment of sensation, of no significance beyond the delight of the person who experiences it? These questions are of great urgency for us, since we live at a time when beauty is in eclipse: a dark shadow of mockery and alienation has crept across the once-shining surface of our world, like the shadow of the Earth across the moon. Where we look for beauty, we too often find darkness and desecration.
The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.
Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being. But the experience of the sacred is not confined to Christians. It is, according to many philosophers and anthropologists, a human universal. For the most part, transitory purposes organize our lives: the day-to-day concerns of economic reasoning, the small-scale pursuit of power and comfort, the need for leisure and pleasure. Little of this is memorable or moving to us. Every now and then, however, we are jolted out of our complacency and feel ourselves to be in the presence of something vastly more significant than our present interests and desires. We sense the reality of something precious and mysterious, which reaches out to us with a claim that is, in some way, not of this world. This happens in the presence of death, especially the death of someone loved. We look with awe on the human body from which the life has fled. This is no longer a person but the “mortal remains” of a person. And this thought fills us with a sense of the uncanny. We are reluctant to touch the dead body; we see it as, in some way, not properly a part of our world, almost a visitor from some other sphere.
This experience, a paradigm of our encounter with the sacred, demands from us a kind of ceremonial recognition. The dead body is the object of rituals and acts of purification, designed not just to send its former occupant happily into the hereafter—for these practices are engaged in even by those who have no belief in the hereafter—but in order to overcome the eeriness, the supernatural quality, of the dead human form. The body is being reclaimed for this world by the rituals that acknowledge that it also stands apart from it. The rituals, to put it another way, consecrate the body, and so purify it of its miasma. By the same token, the body can be desecrated—and this is surely one of the primary acts of desecration, one to which people have been given from time immemorial, as when Achilles dragged Hector’s body in triumph around the walls of Troy.
The presence of a transcendental claim startles us out of our day-to-day preoccupations on other occasions, too. In particular, there is the experience of falling in love. This, too, is a human universal, and it is an experience of the strangest kind. The face and body of the beloved are imbued with the intensest life. But in one crucial respect, they are like the body of someone dead: they seem not to belong in the empirical world. The beloved looks on the lover as Beatrice looked on Dante, from a point outside the flow of temporal things. The beloved object demands that we cherish it, that we approach it with almost ritualistic reverence. And there radiates from those eyes and limbs and words a kind of fullness of spirit that makes everything anew.
Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words seem entirely to capture. It has fueled the sense of the sacred down the ages, reminding people as diverse as Plato and Calvino, Virgil and Baudelaire, that sexual desire is not the simple appetite that we witness in animals but the raw material of a longing that has no easy or worldly satisfaction, demanding of us nothing less than a change of life.
Many of the uglinesses cultivated in our world today refer back to the two experiences that I have singled out. The body in the throes of death; the body in the throes of sex—these things easily fascinate us. They fascinate us by desecrating the human form, by showing the human body as a mere object among objects, the human spirit as eclipsed and ineffectual, and the human being as overcome by external forces, rather than as a free subject bound by the moral law. And it is on these things that the art of our time seems to concentrate, offering us not only sexual pornography but a pornography of violence that reduces the human being to a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting.
All of us have a desire to flee from the demands of responsible existence, in which we treat one another as worthy of reverence and respect. All of us are tempted by the idea of flesh and by the desire to remake the human being as pure flesh—an automaton, obedient to mechanical desires. To yield to this temptation, however, we must first remove the chief obstacle to it: the consecrated nature of the human form. We must sully the experiences—such as death and sex—that otherwise call us away from temptations, toward the higher life of sacrifice. This willful desecration is also a denial of love—an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture: it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable. The modern stage director who ransacks the works of Mozart is trying to tear the love from the heart of them, so as to confirm his own vision of the world as a place where only pleasure and pain are real.
That suggests a simple remedy, which is to resist temptation. Instead of desecrating the human form, we should learn again to revere it. For there is absolutely nothing to gain from the insults hurled at beauty by those—like Calixto Bieito—who cannot bear to look it in the face. Yes, we can neutralize the high ideals of Mozart by pushing his music into the background so that it becomes the mere accompaniment to an inhuman carnival of sex and death. But what do we learn from this? What do we gain, in terms of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or moral development? Nothing, save anxiety. We should take a lesson from this kind of desecration: in attempting to show us that our human ideals are worthless, it shows itself to be worthless. And when something shows itself to be worthless, it is time to throw it away.
It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.
To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.
One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms—the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention—the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber—to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us—the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it.
Roger Scruton, a philosopher, is the author of many books, most recently Beauty.

Intelligence

The idea of intelligence — that human beings possess, to varying degrees, an innate and universal ability to learn — has taken a beating in recent decades. Ever since Stephen J. Gould's Mismeasurement of Man (Norton, 1981) and Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, 1983), the notion of a single intelligence entity, typically called "g," has come under assault. That is unfortunate.

A number of scholars, including L.L. Thurstone and more recently Robert J. Sternberg, have argued that intelligence has been defined too narrowly. But Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1981, has had enormous influence, particularly in our schools.

Briefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The appealing elements of the theory are numerous.

It's "cool," to start with: The list-like format has great attraction for introductory psychology and education classes. It also seems to jibe well with the common observation that individuals have particular talents. More important, especially for education, it implicitly (although perhaps unintentionally on Gardner's part) promises that each child has strengths as well as weaknesses. With eight separate intelligences, the odds seem good that every child will be intelligent in one of those realms. After all, it's not called the theory of multiple stupidities.

Multiple intelligences put every child on an equal footing, granting the hope of identical value in an ostensible meritocracy. The theory fits well with a number of the assumptions that have dominated educational philosophy for years. The movements that took flower in the mid-20th century have argued for the essential sameness of all healthy human beings and for a policy of social justice that treats all people the same. Above all, many educators have adhered to the social construction of reality — the idea that redefining the way we treat children will redefine their abilities and future successes. (Perhaps that's what leads some parents to put their faith in "Baby Einstein" videos: the hope that a little nurturing television will send their kids to Harvard.) It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Gardner's work, both in repudiating that elitist, unfair concept of "g" and in guiding thought in psychology as it applies to education.

The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks. To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not. To be sure, there is much debate about Gardner's theory in the literature, with contenders for and against. Nonetheless, empirical evidence has not been robust. While the theory sounds nice (perhaps because it sounds nice), it is more intuitive than empirical. In other words, the eight intelligences are based more on philosophy than on data.

Of course, nothing is ever cut and dried when it comes to the social sciences. Gardner and the psychologist Lynn Waterhouse engaged in a lively debate in the journal Educational Psychologist in 2006. While the exchange was informative, empirical evidence to support multiple intelligences was largely absent. As Waterhouse put it, the theory is "persisting without adequate evidence" — and was likely to continue to do so, she added, because of the "good news stories" it provides. By contrast, a wealth of evidence supports the existence of "g," which, contrary to the claims (or wishes) of some people, remains a strong predictor of academic performance, job performance — particularly in highly technical careers or those requiring decision making — and other markers of "success."

Another issue with the theory of multiple intelligences is that too many of the categories correlate too highly with one another to be separate intelligences. Cognitive performance on skills related to verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, and visual-spatial tasks, as well as many memory tasks, tends to be highly related. In other words, it goes back to "g."

The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music; naturalistic, an affinity for biology or geology) or personality traits (interpersonal or intrapersonal skills, which correspond best to the related concept of emotional intelligence). And even those interest areas may be enhanced by "g." Only bodily-kinesthetic — the ability to manipulate one's own body with dexterity — may truly represent a separate cognitive ability, probably stemming from cerebellar activity involved in fine motor control. It may be better represented as a neurophysiological trait than as intelligence. Even for related activities — dancing, for instance — having at least a modicum of "g" is still going to be necessary to learn, say, complex dance choreography.

Finally, as Waterhouse noted in her exchange with Gardner, the theory of multiple intelligences has little value for clinical testing of intelligence or the prediction of future performance. "G" alone is highly predictive of both academic and work success. The other intelligences, or whatever they are, add very little.

Part of the confusion that has allowed the theory to survive long past the stage of empirical disrepute is the irascible debate regarding what intelligence is in the first place. Intelligence is among the most stable of psychological constructs. It is as possible to define it both operationally and conceptually as it is for almost any other psychological variable, although that might not be saying much. At worst, intelligence is like pornography: I may not be able to define it to the satisfaction of all, but I sure know it when I see it (or, in the case of intelligence, when I come across its absence). At the optimistic extreme, a reasonable definition of intelligence is not hard to come by. Intelligence: an innate cognitive ability that powers learning. Perfect? No. But that's basically it.

Aren't there plenty of Ph.D.'s who can't fix their cars? Sure, but the majority of them could learn if they were so inclined. An individual with low "g" is going to struggle at both book learning and auto repair (although perhaps car mechanics would prove more manageable than literary theory or quantum physics). In other words, individuals high in "g" are going to be able to learn a wider range of activities with greater ease than individuals low in "g". The "g" that assisted our hominid forebears in learning the skills of hunting, gathering, and toolmaking is the same "g" that gives gifted/talented students an advantage in calculus. Of course, one person can't learn everything, so some folks pick, say, European history over Math Without Numbers (or whatever the rage is in mathematics these days). The theory of multiple intelligences fundamentally conflates intelligence and motivation. It's a fatal flaw. Motivation is certainly important, and it works alongside intelligence to produce results. However, having the raw biological machinery of intelligence is simply irreplaceable.

Perhaps in a naïve effort to deny that inconvenient truth, the debate about intelligence has become largely political, at times even facetious. Intelligence certainly is not the only predictor of success in work or in school, college, or scholarship, but it's as strong as any. Unfortunately, it's also largely genetic. Social justice, treating people the same, bringing out their best abilities are all worthy ideals. Yet we must be cautious when ideals conflict with reality. The world in which we live has no obligation to be politically correct. And it is not politically correct to say that one person is, well, simply more talented than another.

Despite some naysayers (think of Richard E. Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, published this year by Norton), evidence from behavioral-genetics studies has long shown that environment plays a much smaller role than inheritance in the development of intelligence. And that's defining "environment" so broadly that it includes head injuries, infections like encephalitis, malnourishment, and neglect. You've probably heard of those studies of twins raised separately who show similar intellectual abilities when reunited 50 years later. Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Multiple intelligences provides a kind of cover to preserve that fable. "OK, little Jimmie may not be a rocket scientist, but he can dance real well. Shouldn't that count equally in school and life?" No. The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger.

That is the root of the matter. Too many people have chosen to believe in what they wish to be true rather than in what is true. In the main, the motive is a pure one: to see every child as having equal potential, or at the very least some potential. Intelligence is a fundamentally meritocratic construct. There are winners and there are losers. A relative doofus may live a comfortable life so long as his or her parents are wealthy. However, clawing one's own way out of abject poverty is best achieved with a healthy dose of both motivation and "g."

Naturally, we must be careful to avoid the fallacy that some people deserve to live in poverty, or that entire groups of people are inherently inferior in regard to intelligence. In the past, those arguments have been used to support oppression, racism, and slavery, and we must not repeat those mistakes.

Yet the belief that intelligence does not exist as a single, reliable, important, genetically determined construct is an equal fallacy. Unfortunately, some children and adults are just unintelligent. It's not fair, it's not politically correct, but reality is under no obligation to be either of those.

A pedagogy designed to identify strong and weak areas of achievement is not a bad idea. But believing that such an approach rests on the existence of multiple intelligences has real risks. It could lead us down the path to intellectual relativism. Students encouraged to explore their talents in dance or socializing may find themselves slammed against a wall of reality when expected to actually know how to do algebra or read a book in college. I'm not opposed to exploring those talents (that's what recess and gym classes are for, and getting rid of them has been a horrible idea), but national and international tests indicate that we may be doing so to such an extent that we are overwhelming our curricula.

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences was a great idea and worth investigating. It's just not panning out. Hanging on to the theory for nostalgic or political value is not science. It's time that we begin to work with the reality that we have, not the one we wish we had. To do otherwise would be just plain stupid.

Christopher J. Ferguson has been promoted to associate professor in the department of behavioral and applied sciences, and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University.

Buckley

Hour by hour, day by day, Bill Buckley was just an exciting person to be around, especially when he was exhilarated by his love of sailing. He could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown. He loved risk. I saw him time after time rush his boat toward a harbor, sails flying, only to swerve and drop sail at the last moment. For some on the pier, looking up to see this large yacht bearing down on them, it was a heart-stopping moment. To add to the excitement, Bill was often standing on the helmsman’s seat, his hands clutching the shrouds above his head, turning the wheel with his foot, in a swashbuckling pose. (He claimed he saw the berth better from up there.)

I once saw the importance of his swift reflexes on the boat. We had set out for a night sail on the ocean, and Bill’s Yale friend Van Galbraith—later President Reagan’s ambassador to France—had got tipsy from repeated shots of Tia Maria in his coffee. He fell overboard while the boat was under full sail. In a flash, Bill threw overboard a life preserver with a bright light on it, and called for us to bring the boat about. We circled back toward Galbraith, found him in the darkness, and fished him out. It was a scary moment, one that only Bill’s cool rapidity kept from being a tragic one.

Bill wrote the way he sailed, taking chances. Once, he called me up to ask about some new papal pronouncement. He had got into trouble with fellow Catholics by criticizing papal encyclicals, and I had become a kind of informal adviser on Catholic matters. The statement at issue that day was obscure.

He wanted to launch an immediate attack on it. I asked why he did not wait to see what impact it would have. “Why not wait? Because I don’t have falsos testes.” He was referring to an earlier discussion, in which he asked whether even papal defenders admit the pontiff can err. I said that medieval commentators claimed that such an error could happen if the pope was given imperfect evidence (propter falsos testes). He asked, “Isn’t testis [testifier] the same word in Latin as testicle?” Yes. That was all the warrant he needed.

He was always ready to plunge in. Another time he called me and asked, “Have you ever heard of Joe Nuh-math?” This was when everybody had heard of the way Joe Nay-math won the 1969 Super Bowl as quarterback for the New York Jets. Bill had only just read the name in an editor’s letter asking him to write about the man. I told him how Namath had beat my hero, Johnny Unitas, in the Super Bowl. There were large gaps in Bill’s knowledge of popular culture, especially of popular sports. His father once wrote to Bill’s future father-in-law, complaining that he had tried for years, without success, to interest his son in the ordinary games—golf or tennis or team sports. But Bill had a relish only for solo performances—sailing, skiing, horseback riding, or flying an airplane. I asked if Bill was going to write about Namath. Yes. “That should be an interesting interview.” He said, “Oh, I don’t have time to learn enough about football to interview him.” He wrote the piece by comparing Namath’s career to something he did know—the record of a famous bullfighter.

Another time, I was on Bill’s boat racing to Bermuda. We saw on the horizon a huge shape like an island—it was a World War II battleship taken out of mothballs and put out for a shakedown cruise before being sent to the Vietnam War, a breathtaking sight from our lower vantage point on the water. Bill could not resist hailing it on the radio, though radioing was against racing rules except in an emergency. When we reached Bermuda, Bill was disqualified. One of the other boats had heard his conversation with the battleship and reported him. He said it was worth it. He reminded me of one of Wodehouse’s blithe young men—Psmith, say, or Piccadilly Jim—who act forever on impulse.

He took risks even in routine and mundane ways. One night, after dinner at his town house in Manhattan, he wanted to continue our conversation, so instead of calling me a cab to take me back to my hotel he gave me a ride on his motorbike. New York law required that bikers wear a helmet, so a policeman stopped us—neither of us was helmeted. When the cop recognized him, he let us go with just a warning, since Bill was popular with cops for opposing police review boards. Needless to say, the next time he gave me a ride, there were still no helmets.

It is amazing that Bill’s risks did not end his life. At Yale he secretly learned to fly, and bought a small plane with a couple of friends, without letting his father know about it. He landed the plane on his sister’s prep-school campus in a spectacular visit. On the day of his college tests, he took the plane out for a celebratory flight, all by himself. He had been up the night before cramming for the exams, and he fell asleep. Fortunately, he woke in time to land the plane. A great career might have ended before it began.

For a while I was Bill’s designated biographer. A shared friend of ours, Neil McCaffrey, commissioned the book for his new publishing venture, Arlington House. Bill approved the idea because, like many celebrities, he was constantly pestered by people wanting to interview him for books or magazines. With me as his chosen scribe, he could turn them down by saying he was already committed. I recorded many hours of tapes with him, his wife, his siblings, and his friends for the project, before giving it up over political disagreements. He was stunningly candid, so much so that I, like many people close to him, came to feel I should protect him from his own reckless truthfulness. He was too trusting of people he liked. He set up a former boat boy in a partnership to buy radio stations, and afterward found that his young partner had bilked him. He argued for the innocence of a prisoner who wrote him winning letters, and worked to have Edgar Smith released, only to see the man convicted again, this time of kidnapping and attempted murder.

Some of the things Bill told me on the tapes I have never repeated, except to my wife. One thing I can partly tell now that he is dead. When he entered the CIA, in 1951, he beat the polygraph test that all prospective agents have to take. (Always willing to risk.) He was determined to protect a family member from an embarrassing disclosure, and he did. I asked him how he accomplished that. “I guess that if you think you have a right to tell a lie, it will not register as one.” At least it did not with him. He told me what he lied about, though I promised then to keep the secret, and I have.

From what I have said so far, it might be thought that Bill was self-centered. That was far from the case. He was thoughtful of others, almost to a fault. When he found that a summer intern at National Review was a promising young pianist who missed his practice hours back in the Midwest, he gave him the key to his town house (which had been UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s) and told him he could use it, while his wife was away, to play on his splendid Bösendorfer piano.

His generosity was unfailing. He liked to do things for people, surprising them with unexpected gifts. When the writer Wilfrid Sheed was ill, Bill, who knew he was a deep student of popular song, sent him the latest books on the subject. One day in the early ’60s, a large package was brought to my front door. It was the 24 volumes of the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Another time I got a package containing framed copies of two charcoal portraits by the famous British newspaper artist David Low. These were studies of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, men Bill knew I admired. I asked where he had got the pictures. They were a gift to him from the British broadcaster Alistair Cooke. Bill said, “They will mean more to you than to me.”

He spent a lot of time thinking of what he could do for friends. When he heard that I needed a passport in a hurry, he pulled strings at the State Department to get it for me. On another occasion, when my new bride and I could not find a cheap sea liner to England for our honeymoon, he found a ship for us leaving from Canada. Bill ingeniously invented a way to institutionalize his love for giving special gifts. Because his family was so prolific, he had 49 of what he called “N and Ns” (nieces and nephews). He took care of the education of many of them. But supplying necessities was not enough for him. He set up a fund he called the Dear Uncle Bill Trust (DUBT, soon pronounced “Doubt”), whose administrators gave surprise treats to N and Ns—a valuable guitar to an aspiring musician, a vacation in a favorite spot—on a rotating basis.

His desire to do things for people made him an inveterate matchmaker. He did all he could to encourage his Yale friend Brent Bozell to marry his favorite sister, Patricia (Trish), which Bozell did in 1949. He hinted that another Yale undergraduate, Bill Coffin, should date another of his sisters. When I went to National Review in the summer of 1957, I was just two months out of a Jesuit seminary, where I had been starved for opera music, and I soon found the Sam Goody music store. But the apartment I was staying in had no phonograph. When I mentioned this to Bill’s younger sister Maureen, who was working part-time at National Review that summer, she gave me the key to her apartment and said I could use the phonograph there any afternoon while she was working. Bill noticed that Maureen and I got along well, and when we would all go out to dinner at the end of the day, he’d put us together in one cab and take another with the rest of the party. We laughed at his matchmaking attempts. It was a family trait. Trish had met Pat Taylor at Vassar and decided Bill should marry her—as he did.

Perhaps it was his matchmaking urge that made Bill want to connect people with his church. After he learned as a child that any Christian can baptize a person in need of salvation, he and Trish would unobtrusively rub water on visitors to their home while whispering the baptism formula. In the National Review circle, those who were not Catholics to begin with tended to enter the fold as converts—Bozell, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, William Rusher, Jeffrey Hart, M. Joseph Sobran, Marvin Liebman, Robert Novak, Richard John Neuhaus. The major holdouts were James Burnham, a born Catholic who left the faith and never went back, and Whittaker Chambers, who was drawn to Richard Nixon’s Quakerism. It was always easiest to be a Catholic around Bill. I believe Bill was so nice to me because I am what the Lutheran scholar Martin Marty called me, “incurably Catholic.” There were different concentrations of people at National Review—Yale alumni, ex-communists (Burnham, Meyer, Chambers), ex-CIA members (Bill, Burnham, Kendall, and Priscilla Buckley, another of Bill’s sisters)—but the Catholic contingent outnumbered all others.

Bill went to church on Sundays with the many Spanish-speaking house servants he had over the years. That did not fit his reputation as a snob. He was accused, at times, of being a social snob, an ideological snob, and an intellectual snob. None of these was the case in any but the most superficial sense.

Party Animals

Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.

A new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.

The research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.

"Our paper proposes a new model for why modern human behavior started at different times in different regions of the world, why it disappeared in some places before coming back, and why in all cases it occurred more than 100,000 years after modern humans first appeared," said study researcher Adam Powell of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London.

The idea that demography is linked to modern human behavior has been around for decades, but this is the first time scientists have run computer models and actually tested out different hypotheses, said Richard Potts, an anthropologist and director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Potts, who was not involved in the current study, applauded the team for not relying solely on computer models but also including genetic and archaeological data to make their argument.

Modern humans

Scientists have known that anatomically modern humans, or Home sapiens, (characterized by big brains and other features we sport today), were around at least 160,000 to 200,000 years ago. Some thought boosts in brain power or advances in language led to modern human behavior, which includes the crafting of abstract and realistic art, body decoration, musical instruments and hunting and trapping technologies.

But our big brains didn't seem to bear any cultural fruit until much later. In fact, archaeological evidence of art and technology beyond basic stone tools doesn't appear until about 90,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. There, remnants of modern human behavior disappeared around 65,000 years ago and then re-emerged about 40,000 years ago.

"In Europe and western Asia this advanced technology and behavior explodes around 45,000 years ago when humans arrive there, but doesn't appear in eastern and southern Asia and Australia until much later, despite a human presence," said study team member Stephen Shennan of the University College London's Institute of Archaeology.

Sharing ideas

The researchers ran computer simulations of different population densities, grouping humans into subpopulations that migrated. The model revealed that at a certain subpopulation density there was an accumulation of ideas and skills. To figure out whether this phenomenon of skill-sharing was real, the team used genetic data to estimate population sizes in different regions at different times. Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there was a certain degree of migration between subgroups there was also archaeological evidence of modern human behavior.

"As population density increases, people migrate between groups more," Thomas said during a telephone interview. "That increases the probability that any skill that's difficult to learn doesn’t get lost or decay."

For instance, population density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle East when modern behavior first appeared in these regions. Results also showed that population density would have dropped due to climate changes at the time when modern human behavior temporarily disappeared in sub-Saharan Africa.

"The basic idea conceptually is you can have individuals who are really great at inventing ideas and concepts and ways of approaching the world, but you need a certain population density to be able to have that stuff catch hold and spread," Potts told LiveScience.

He added, "You could imagine that there may have been very innovative individuals on occasion, but with very small population sizes and mobile foragers who didn’t run into other groups very often, those innovations were probably very short-lived and almost invisible in the archaeological record."

The research was supported by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Mid-Summer Day

Midsummer Day—June 24

Although Midsummer Day occurs near the summer solstice, or what we think of as the beginning of summer, to the farmer it is the midpoint of the growing season, halfway between planting and harvesting, and an occasion for celebration.

Midsummer Eve (June 23) is considered sacred to lovers. On this evening, pick seven different wildflowers and then walk home silently and backward. Place the flowers under your pillow and dream of your future husband or wife.

In the ancient Celtic calendar, Midsummer Day was a “Quarter Day,” one of the days that marked the four major divisions of the year. Read more about “Quarter Days.”

By tradition, today was the earliest day deemed safe for swimming, because of its connection with St. John the Baptist, who blessed Jesus in the Jordan River. Also, most lakes and swimming holes will have warmed up by now. Celebrate with a dip!

God & Maths

Novelist Alan Lightman tells a story of how he turned to fiction after being trained as a physicist. Preparing to submit an astronomy paper for publication, he was checking the references -- only to discover that he had been scooped by a Japanese astrophysicist who had found the same phenomenon that Lightman had, but who had gotten into print a little faster.

Something like that happened to me once, and after I got past my disappointment I found a related subject to research. For Lightman, the incident drove him into another field entirely. Scientists, he decided, were all looking for what was already out there, and the best that he could ever do as a physicist would be to discover something before other scientists did, something that was bound to be discovered eventually anyway. In fiction, Lightman reasoned, he could create something utterly individual, a work that no one else would ever be able to create. Thus began Lightman's award-winning career as a novelist.

But Lightman's certainty that the secrets of the world are sitting out there waiting to be discovered turns out not to be a settled notion at all. What if our discoveries instead turned out to be our own creative -- and inalterably human -- inventions? That is the question that lies at the center of Mario Livio's interesting new book, Is God a Mathematician?

Livio's title is something of a misnomer, since he barely talks about religion (and then only when discussing the persecution of Galileo) and even less about God. Instead, Livio starts with the observation that thinkers throughout history have made some amazing discoveries about how the world works, and that mathematics is the medium -- the language, he suggests -- in which they have worked. But is math a universal concept or a human invention?

Consider the example of numbers themselves. One mathematician argues that if four dinosaurs stand together in a prehistoric clearing, they number four even though no people are there to count them. In other words, numbers exist independent of human beings. But consider the counterexample (suggested by British mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah) that starts with the imaginary idea that intelligence resides not in people but in a "vast solitary and isolated jellyfish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean" with "no experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water." In this thought experiment, argues Atiyah, "there would be nothing to count." It follows from this second example that numbers -- and all math -- arise from the way that humans perceive the world.

Who's right? That's Livio's focus here. The question is mainly philosophical, but this book is mainly historical. That is, Livio traces the question of discovery versus invention by surveying the most fundamental and influential efforts in the Western tradition to understand the world mathematically. Is God a Mathematician? is a work of intellectual history -- the history of philosophy, logic, and especially math.

Livio talks about math with gratifying clarity, and in a way that doesn't require advanced training to understand it -- but that doesn't mean that it always goes down like chocolate pudding. Some of the concepts Livio introduces, such as the Golden Ratio (the subject of a previous book of his), do require the recollection of some of your high school math. But for the most part, Livio provides not only clear but also strikingly simple explanations, and he backs them up with lively everyday examples. His chapter entitled "Beyond Death and Taxes" showcases one of the more lucid explanations of basic probability theory that I've seen. (The chapter on statistics is likewise valuable, but its necessity to the larger argument is less clear.)

Livio's story of math in the world starts in ancient Greece, with Pythagoras and his followers and their search for "cosmic order" in numbers and ratios. They were the first Platonists, says Livio -- which is to say that they believed that numbers describe a world whose order exists apart from humans, who are privileged to be able to discover that order. From there he blazes through Archimedes, skips forward more than 1,000 years to Galileo, and then slows down. A chapter on Descartes describes beautifully how the Frenchman's work enabled the "systematic mathematicization of nearly everything." In other words, Descartes created ways for the language of mathematics to encompass more and more of the world around us. Livio describes the geometry developed by Descartes with the wonderful example of a subway map.

Isaac Newton was among those who took advantage of Descartes's insights to devise formulas that accounted for, among other things, the workings of gravity. The work of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, says Livio, created a nearly complete "fusion" between mathematics and scientific exploration. These thinkers believed that math could discover the world.

Then geometry thickened the plot. Euclidean geometry (the kind we learned in high school) works beautifully on its own terms. But not content to stop there, 19th-century mathematicians created other kinds of geometry that worked beautifully on their own terms, even if those terms are for us almost entirely theoretical. The development of non-Euclidean geometry raised the question of whether all geometry -- and with it all math -- might simply be a human construct.

From there it's been back and forth, with math cross-pollinating with logic in the collective effort to settle whether truth exists inside or outside the effort to express it (whether in mathematics or ordinary language). The last part of Livio's story gives a broad outline of the way that the argument between invention and discovery has grown both more heated and more complicated in the past 200 years or so. Finally, he weighs in himself on the question that occupies his book. His brief effort to split the difference between invention and discovery is, well, a bit wishy-washy. But it's no disgrace to be less trenchant than Isaac Newton or Bertrand Russell.

A mathematician I know offers another approach. He says that mathematics should be considered part of the humanities. After all, he argues, math has its own aesthetics, its own elegance, and its own examples of beauty. Maybe so, but it usually requires an advanced degree to see those virtues. Is God a Mathematician? makes some of the beauty of math visible to the layperson -- invented or discovered, no matter.

CALIFORNIA (Reading)

Say the word "summer" and what to comes to mind? For me, a jumble of California memories. Wendy and I were born and bred in the Golden State and spent most of our lives there before coming to the Midwest fifteen years ago. Fittingly enough in the week following the solstice, our Summer Reading is California-centric. Books & Culture contributing editor Preston Jones, of John Brown University, takes as his point of departure Kevin Starr's Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, just published by Oxford University Press, the latest volume in Starr's monumental history of the state. Touching on earlier installments in the series as well as other representative books, Jones shows how California reveals the dreams and follies of the nation, writ large. (Coming soon under the Summer Reading heading: naturalist Bernd Heinrich's Summer World: A Season of Bounty and Rick Bass' The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana. Plus children's books and much more.)

In articles from the May/June issue of Books & Culture, we have a pair of pieces that play off each other: Steven Ealy on James Fenimore Cooper, "The Founder of American Literature," and Richard Etulain on Wallace Stegner, "Wise Man of the American West." For starters, it's interesting to think about "frontier" and "wilderness" and "the land" in Cooper and in Stegner, the arc from the Early Republic to America at the end of the 20th century. (And since 2009 is Stegner's centenary, why not celebrate it by reading one of his books? Comments from readers about their Stegner favorites will be welcome.)

Last week, Wendy and I had dinner at the home of our friends Gary and Kathy Gnidovic and then watched a DVD of a splendid documentary, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist. I'm leery of the rhetoric surrounding a lot of artists outside the conventional art world—not because I am unresponsive to such work (much of it, like much of anything, isn't my cup of tea; some of it is intermittently interesting; some of it, like the work of James Castle, is wonderfully rich and strange), but because so much emphasis is placed on "the life" as a script of sorts that seeks to dictate our response. (Castle was born deaf and lived with his large extended family in Idaho. He didn't have formal training as an artist but he was a tireless maker of art, strong-willed and intensely purposeful.) Precisely because I love Castle's uncanny drawings made with soot and spit, his collages and constructions, I was hesitant to watch the documentary. Now I'm very glad I did. Yale University Press has published a handsome volume, James Castle: A Retrospective, loaded with examples of his work; also included are several essays and a very perceptive interview with painter Terry Winters. A DVD of the documentary comes with the book. If you haven't seen any of Castle's stuff, check out the book or the DVD or both. You may not be drawn into Castle's world, but if you are, there's a lot to explore.

I know that there is plenty of dysfunction in our health-care system, but I'm reminded now and then of how often we receive excellent care, perhaps taking it for granted. On the weekend I had to go to the Convenient Care Center in Wheaton (one of several in the area operated by Central DuPage Hospital). I want to thank the physician who saw me, Dr. Katie Rosenfeld, and the nurses and technicians who helped. Everyone was friendly, efficient, and thoughtful: a winsome combination.

On another front: The Sky Is Falling, chapter 53. A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune arrived with a wrap that emphasized the paper's commitment to investigative reporting. That was good news, of course, and not mere puffery. But these days we've learned to read between the lines. Whenever a newspaper or magazine issues a stirring affirmation of classic journalistic values, you know more cutbacks are imminent. Saturday's Trib came with the already shrunken Books section reduced to two pages. Half of the opening page was taken up by an uninspiring illustration. There were two short reviews on the bottom half of the page, and bio lines for the reviewers were omitted. On the flip side, half of the top half of the page was taken up with a list of best sellers; and next to that, mini-reviews of three Young Adult books (here the bio line of the reviewer was included). The bottom half of the page was given to a list of "Literary Events." That was it. Then came the Sunday magazine, with a note to readers explaining that beginning in July, the magazine "will be published as a series of special editions throughout the year and not as a weekly section." And on the same day, the New York Times arrived with a shrunken magazine, as previously announced.

Speaking of the Times, this week's Book Review adds a new chapter to the never-ending demonstration that Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction. This comes courtesy of two reviews: Katie Roiphe's review of Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love ("love" here has a different sense than you might suppose) and Toni Bentley's review of Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. I'd like to quote at length—only by great effort am I restraining myself—but if you are interested, and especially if you have a taste for wickedly absurd inadvertent comedy, you can read these complementary pieces yourself, so I'll stick to this one bit, from Roiphe: "If there is anything unsatisfying about this fierce and lively book, it is a slight evasiveness at its core. Nehring does not quite take on the vast continent of quietly married people who must be her target. She attacks the blandness of our current forms of love without directly describing or explaining that blandness."

1959

I have a new book out called 1959: The Year Everything Changed, which I suppose puts me in the ranks of authors lampooned in a story in the June 16 New York Times about books with "titles that make extravagant, impossible declarations." The piece pokes particular fun at titles with "exorbitant claims" about "things that changed the world"—and still more at writers who "claim to have found the single year that changed the world."

Times reporter Patricia Cohen doesn't mention my contribution to the genre—she singles out books about 1968, 1989, and A.D. 33 (the year of Jesus' crucifixion)—but she seems to have my number. Or does she?

I entered into my project with apprehensions of just this sort of eye-rolling. There are a lot of books out there that insist a specific year, or type of fish or grain or mathematical equation, altered the course of civilization. But I went ahead with it anyway, not because I figured I was cashing in on a trend (Cohen's article is headlined "Titlenomics, or Creating Best Sellers")—if I do, I'll be more stunned than anybody—but because, well, I was convinced that 1959 was the real deal.

It began with simple curiosity. Several years ago, it occurred to me that many of my favorite groundbreaking record albums, books, and movies—Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows—were all released in 1959.

Was this just coincidence, or was it part of a pattern? Was there something more broadly significant about that time? The more I looked into it, the more it struck me that 1959 really was a pivotal year—not only in culture but also in politics, society, science, sex: everything.

Consider: It was the year when the microchip was introduced, the Food and Drug Administration held hearings on the birth-control pill, IBM marketed the first business computer, a passenger jetliner took the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight, and America joined the Russians in the "space race." It saw the rise of free jazz, "sick comics," the New Journalism, and indie films; the birth of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap; the Lady Chatterley trial that overthrew the nation's obscenity laws; the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's first report, which sparked the overhaul of segregation laws—all this bursting against fears of a "missile gap," the fallout-shelter craze, and the first U.S. casualties in the war in Vietnam.

Something was going on here, but what? I couldn't quite grasp the common theme, the connecting thread.

At some point in my research—it was still a casual query at this point, almost a hobby—I learned about a long-forgotten event that took place near the beginning of the year. On Jan. 2, 1959, a Soviet rocket carrying the Lunik 1 space capsule—also known as Mechta, or "the dream"—blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, accelerated to 7 miles per second (the magical speed known as "escape velocity"), sailed past the moon, and pushed free of Earth's orbit, becoming the first man-made object to revolve around the sun among the celestial bodies.

Lunik has since been obscured by the rapid milestones in space that followed. But it was a big deal at the time, the subject of front-page headlines and frightful fears on the floor of Congress. The next issue of Time magazine hailed the feat as "a turning point in the multibillion-year history of the solar system," for "one of the sun's planets had at last evolved a living creature that could break the chains of its gravitational field."

Suddenly the light bulb clicked on; the connections lit up. Lunik was a metaphor for all the great events of 1959 that I'd been investigating. The thing they all had in common was that they broke the chains of various gravitational fields, metaphorical or literal.

But Lunik wasn't only a symbol; it, and the race to space that it triggered, helped create the climate in which all those other breakthroughs were possible or, at least, appealing to a broad population. The breakdown of barriers in space, speed, and time made other barriers ripe for transgressing.

Outer space and lightning speed animated the popular consciousness. Mass-circulation magazines and newspapers of the day suddenly ran lengthy articles explaining the "new geography" of solar orbits and galaxies. In the spring of 1959, NASA selected its first astronauts with great fanfare, and the space agency's lingo—blast off, countdown, A-OK—swooshed into the everyday lexicon. Madison Avenue touted new products—from cars to telephones to floor waxes—as "jet age," "space age," "the world of the future," "the countdown to tomorrow."

A young outsider named John F. Kennedy started running for president at the end of the year on a slogan of "Leadership for the '60s"—the first time that the future was defined in terms of a decade, which held out both menace and hope but in any case great change, which he beheld as a "New Frontier."

For the first time in a long time, flux and change were seen as the natural state of things; the enchantment with the new galvanized a generation of artists to crash through their own sets of barriers. And they attracted a vast audience—abetted by the rapid proliferation of televisions and pocket radios—that was suddenly, even giddily, receptive to their rebellion.

Yet the thrill of the new was at once intensified and tempered by an undercurrent of dread. Outer space loomed as a frontier not only for satellites and rockets but also for ICBMs and H-bombs. It was this twin precipice—the prospect of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation, both teetering on the edge of a new decade—that gave 1959 its distinct swoon and ignited its creative energies.

Now I saw a real book taking shape: not just a string of cool stuff that happened to occur in the course of one year but a coherent story about when the world changed and how—a book about what eras are, what important events mean, what historic personalities do.

Still, there was one question that all authors writing for commercial publishers have to face: So what? Let's say I manage to convince all comers that the signature phenomena of the '60s and beyond—sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, the computer revolution, the feminist revolution, the New Left, the walk on the moon, and all the rest—had their origins at the end of the '50s, and that the instigators weren't the baby boomers but those who came of age amid depression and war and who emerged dissatisfied with the false peace that followed. Why, the question could be asked, should anyone care?

Initially, I didn't want to deal with this question. If some people don't care, so it goes; I think it's interesting; some other people will, too. In the back of my head, though, I knew this was a cop-out. Very few people read histories that shed no light on contemporary life, and, really, why should they? At the same time, I didn't want to squeeze and stretch my narrative to fit some Procrustean bed of relevance.

But the more I thought about it, the more the parallels between 1959 and 2009 seemed clear. Most obvious (though also, in a sense, most superficial) was the parallel between John Kennedy and Barack Obama—young outsiders, speaking with magical eloquence of great change and challenge ("unknown opportunities and perils," in JFK's words), whose very ascension smashed cultural barriers.

Yet a deeper parallel lay in the nature of the changes going on around them. On the precipice of another new decade—our own countdown to tomorrow—we are seeing a similar tangle of breakthroughs and breakdowns that marked the end of the '50s: global power fissuring, cultures fracturing, the world shrinking, and science poised to spawn new dreams and nightmares. Once more, there's a palpable sense that we're treading on completely new terrain. How this terrain shifted in 1959—how people and institutions responded, their triumphs and disasters—holds lessons for the options that lie before us in 2009.

In the summer of 1959, Allen Ginsberg, the generation's visionary poet of exuberance and doom, wrote in the Village Voice: "No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown. … Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city."

He might as well have written that today.