'alloween

It's Halloween, one of the oldest holidays in the Western European tradition, invented by the Celts, who believed Halloween was the day of the year when spirits, ghosts, faeries, and goblins walked the earth. The tradition of dressing up and getting candy probably started with the Celts as well. Historians believe that they dressed up as ghost and goblins to scare away the spirits, and they would put food and wine on their doorstep for the spirits of family members who had come back to visit the home.
Pope Gregory III turned Halloween into a Christian holiday in the eighth century, and people were encouraged to dress up as saints and give food to the poor. But when Irish Catholics brought the Celtic traditions to the United States, Halloween became a holiday for them to let off steam by pulling pranks, hoisting wagons onto barn roofs, releasing cows from their pastures, and committing all kinds of mischief involving outhouses. Treats evolved as a way to bribe the vandals and protect homes.
It wasn't until the early 20th century that Halloween became a holiday for children. In 1920, the Ladies' Home Journal made the first known reference to children going door to door for candy, and by the 1950s it was a universal practice in this country. By the end of the 20th century, 92 percent of America's children were trick-or-treating. Tonight, about 70 percent of American households will open their doors and offer candy to children, and Halloween parties are becoming increasingly popular among adults. It's the one day a year that people can freely dress as the opposite gender, as criminals, superheroes, celebrities, animals, or even inanimate objects. But retailers report that the most popular costumes remain some variation on witches, ghosts, and devils.

Atheism & Western Civilization

What the New Atheists Don’t SeeTo regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

Theodore Dalrymple

Autumn 2007


The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”
Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signi-fies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.
Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.
The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).
I first doubted God’s existence at about the age of nine. It was at the school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to understand that if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart the assembly hall. I wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I opened my eyes suddenly, I would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw instead, it turned out, was the headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the prayer with one eye closed and the other open, with which he beadily surveyed the children below for transgressions. I quickly concluded that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he said about the need to keep our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that, why should I believe in his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs often originate, to be disciplined later in life (if we receive enough education) by elaborate rationalization.
Dennett’s Breaking the Spell is the least bad-tempered of the new atheist books, but it is deeply condescending to all religious people. Dennett argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms—for example, by our inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our survival on the African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to threatening events.
For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only evolutionary adaptations—and thus biologically contingent rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true.
One striking aspect of Dennett’s book is his failure to avoid the language of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation, despite his fierce opposition to teleological views of existence: the coyote’s “methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency.” Or: “The stinginess of Nature can be seen everywhere we look.” Or again: “This is a good example of Mother Nature’s stinginess in the final accounting combined with absurd profligacy in the methods.” I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. (And Dennett is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, so rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a book as long as his to correct them, says on its second page that religion prevents mankind from facing up to “reality in all its naked cruelty.” But how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose?)
No doubt Dennett would reply that he is writing in metaphors for the layman and that he could translate all his statements into a language without either moral evaluation or purpose included in it. Perhaps he would argue that his language is evidence that the spell still has a hold over even him, the breaker of the spell for the rest of humanity. But I am not sure that this response would be psychologically accurate. I think Dennett’s use of the language of evaluation and purpose is evidence of a deep-seated metaphysical belief (however caused) that Providence exists in the universe, a belief that few people, confronted by the mystery of beauty and of existence itself, escape entirely. At any rate, it ill behooves Dennett to condescend to those poor primitives who still have a religious or providential view of the world: a view that, at base, is no more refutable than Dennett’s metaphysical faith in evolution.
Dennett is not the only new atheist to employ religious language. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist’s Ten Commandments ends with the following: “Question everything.” Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?
Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George Washington died in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it and find myself still, at the end of my efforts, having to make a leap, or perhaps several leaps, of faith in order to believe the rather banal fact that I had set out to prove. Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right to question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.
This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.
Harris tells us, for example, that “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.” I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but not open to a generous interpretation.
It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”
Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to be: “Who is genociding whom?” To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted, could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
I recently had occasion to compare the writings of the neo-atheists with those of Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I was visiting some friends at their country house in England, which had a library of old volumes; since the family of the previous owners had a churchman in every generation, many of the books were religious. In my own neo-atheist days, I would have scorned these works as pertaining to a nonexistent entity and containing nothing of value. I would have considered the authors deluded men, who probably sought to delude others for reasons that Marx might have enumerated.
But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself moved: much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the books of the new atheists. Hall was bishop of Exeter and then of Norwich; though a moderate Puritan, he took the Royalist side in the English civil war and lost his see, dying in 1656 while Cromwell was still Lord Protector.
Except by specialists, Hall remains almost entirely forgotten today. I opened one of the volumes at random, his Contemplations Upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Story. Here was the contemplation on the sickness of Hezekiah:
Hezekiah was freed from the siege of the Assyrians, but he is surprised with a disease. He, that delivered him from the hand of his enemies, smites him with sickness. God doth not let us loose from all afflictions, when he redeems us from one.
To think that Hezekiah was either not thankful enough for his deliverance, or too much lifted up with the glory of so miraculous a favour, were an injurious misconstruction of the hand of God, and an uncharitable censure of a holy prince; for, though no flesh and blood can avoid the just desert of bodily punishment, yet God doth not always strike with an intuition of sin: sometimes he regards the benefit of our trial; sometimes, the glory of his mercy in our cure.
Hall surely means us to infer that whatever happens to us, however unpleasant, has a meaning and purpose; and this enables us to bear our sorrows with greater dignity and less suffering. And it is part of the existential reality of human life that we shall always need consolation, no matter what progress we make. Hall continues:
When, as yet, he had not so much as the comfort of a child to succeed him, thy prophet is sent to him, with the heavy message of his death: “Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.” It is no small mercy of God, that he gives us warning of our end. . . . No soul can want important affairs, to be ordered for a final dissolution.
This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something much deeper—a universal respect for the condition of being human.
For Hall, life is instinct with meaning: a meaning capable of controlling man’s pride at his good fortune and consoling him for his ill fortune. Here is an extract from Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices:
He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it: that knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and stands now equally armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at home; so as he can cross his will without a mutiny, and so please it that he makes it not a wanton: that, in earthly things, wishes no more than nature; in spiritual, is ever graciously ambitious: that, for his condition, stands on his own feet, not needing to lean upon the great; and can so frame his thoughts to his estate, that when he hath least, he cannot want, because he is as free from desire, as superfluity: that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of prosperity; and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller crosses light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship be tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he hath, but in the mind that values them.
Though eloquent, this appeal to moderation as the key to happiness is not original; but such moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.
In his Occasional Meditations, Hall takes perfectly ordinary scenes—ordinary, of course, for his times—and derives meaning from them. Here is his meditation “Upon the Flies Gathering to a Galled Horse”:
How these flies swarm to the galled part of this poor beast; and there sit, feeding upon that worst piece of his flesh, not meddling with the other sound parts of his skin! Even thus do malicious tongues of detractors: if a man have any infirmity in his person or actions, that they will be sure to gather unto, and dwell upon; whereas, his commendable parts and well-deservings are passed by, without mention, without regard. It is an envious self-love and base cruelty, that causeth this ill disposition in men: in the mean time, this only they have gained; it must needs be a filthy creature, that feeds upon nothing but corruption.
Surely Hall is not suggesting (unlike Dennett in his unguarded moments) that the biological purpose of flies is to feed off injured horses, but rather that a sight in nature can be the occasion for us to reflect imaginatively on our morality. He is not raising a biological theory about flies, in contradistinction to the theory of evolution, but thinking morally about human existence. It is true that he would say that everything is part of God’s providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.
Let us compare Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted” with Harris’s statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their beliefs:
With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.
Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?
No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well as the prose; and I prefer Hall’s charity to Harris’s intolerance.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Stanley Fish, the Kid & Old Blue Eyes

The Kid and Old Blue Eyes
Tags: frank sinatra, ted williams, the red sox
I once stood next to Ted Williams (I don’t recall if I actually said anything to him), and on another occasion Frank Sinatra came to my table carrying a chair for my mother-in-law. (Stay with me; these apparently random memories will be linked up.)
My father had taken me to a Masonic father-and-son night when I was perhaps 13 years old and Williams, dressed in his Red Sox uniform, was the guest of honor. What I remember is that he was very big.
I had my brief encounter with Sinatra much later. Along with my wife, her two sisters and her mother, I was eating dinner at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge in Tahoe. Our table was short a chair. Sinatra and a large party were at the next table. I leaned over and asked one of his party, a stunning blond, if I might borrow the empty chair next to her. She looked at me as if I were a presumptuous cockroach and said no. Sinatra had seen the exchange and immediately got up, grabbed the chair and held it while my mother-in-law sat down. I said, “Thank you.”
These small moments are on my mind these days for two reasons. The first is that Ted Williams and Frank Sinatra have been my heroes for as long as I can remember. For years I carried a newspaper picture of Williams (with the caption “Greatest American Since George Washington”) in my wallet until it finally disintegrated. As a teenager I played Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours” and “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” for hours and bored my friends with what I took to be intricate analyses of Nelson Riddle’s great arrangement of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
In my study at home there are two large pictures, one (a painting) of my father, the other a 1953 photograph of Sinatra singing at a concert in Wembley Stadium; one hand caresses a stand-up microphone, the other grabs onto it for dear life. Shadows and a dim spotlight make it seem that he is all alone (much like the album cover of “In the Wee Small Hours”), though there must have been thousands in the audience. Presiding over both these pictures and hanging above the doorway is a 1946 American League championship pennant signed by Williams. This boy has never grown up.
I know that naming Ted Williams and Frank Sinatra as your heroes might raise an eyebrow or two. Both were notorious for bad behavior. Sinatra punched out reporters, consorted with gangsters, cut old friends cold (see Mickey Rooney’s autobiography), cheated on his wife and held life-long grudges. Williams feuded with reporters (he called them the “knights of the keyboard”), hit an old lady with a thrown bat, spat at fans, refused to tip his hat, smashed water-coolers and was generally surly.
On the other hand, both were also known for good works. Sinatra used his clout to force Las Vegas hotels to integrate, donated large amounts to charity, helped people he barely knew, and was a favorite of the musicians he performed with. Williams spoke out early for the inclusion of Negro League players in the Hall of Fame, was a stalwart fund-raiser for the Jimmy Fund (a charity dedicated to helping cancer-stricken children), was a mentor to younger players and a loyal friend.
But it is neither their vices nor their virtues that appeal to me. It is their single-minded dedication to craft, Sinatra to saloon singing and the lyrics he articulated with such precision, Williams to the science of hitting (the title of his excellent book). They both wanted to be the best at what they did, and they were.
And then there is the drama of their lives.
In Sinatra’s case, early success and increasing fame followed by a rapid decline, a tempestuous, doomed and very public second marriage, and then the spectacular comeback leading to even greater success and the title Chairman of the Board.
In Williams’s case, even earlier success, an excess of expectations, followed by a failure to perform in the clutch, injuries, the loss of the best years of his professional life to war and, after apparent decline, a glorious exit. He batted 388 when he was 39, famously hit a home run in his last at bat and had the good luck to have John Updike in attendance. (Updike’s essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” is a classic.) What he didn’t do is bring Boston a World Series championship, and for this some never forgave him.
And that brings me to the second reason that Sinatra and Williams, indomitable spirits who endured and ultimately did it their way, are on my mind these days. The Red Sox are in the World Series, and by the time you read this they may have won it.
Not the same Red Sox who so reliably provided heartbreak when I was growing up in Providence, Rhode Island. Those were the teams that always looked good on paper, but never performed in the field. “Wait till next year” was the New England anthem. And then, in 2004, next year improbably arrived. The enormity of the event for those who lived and died (quite literally) with the team cannot be overestimated. Just take a look at the 2004 documentary “The Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino” and listen to celebrities and ordinary citizens, young and old, speak of what it meant to them. Eighty-six years is a long time, and some fans and their children lived out their lives in unrealized hope. In the film, younger generations go to the graves of their fathers and grandfathers and tell them the good news.
But it’s all different now.
Or is it? When the Red Sox fell behind 3-1 to the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship series, all the old feelings came back, and I thought, there they go again. But it turned out that I was displaying too little faith and forgetting that you have to believe.
O.K., I believe, but after so many decades of disappointment, it isn’t easy. Especially because for six years I lived on the north side of Chicago and, in a moment of apostasy and desperation, became a Cub fan.
Some people never learn.

Cultural Reletivism

IS the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?
A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.
How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? A group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has called for a boycott and asked faculty members and students around the country to pledge not to contribute to counterinsurgency efforts. Their logic is clear: America is engaged in a brutal war of occupation; if you don’t support the mission then you shouldn’t support the troops. Understandably these concerned scholars don’t want to make it easier for the American military to conquer or pacify people who once trusted anthropologists. Nevertheless, I believe the pledge campaign is a way of shooting oneself in the foot.
Part of my thinking stems from an interview with Ms. McFate on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” to which I tried to listen with an open mind. My first reaction was to feel let down. It turns out that the anthropologists are not really doing anthropology at all, but are basically hired as military tour guides to help counterinsurgency forces accomplish various nonlethal missions.
These anthropological “angels on the shoulder,” as Ms. McFate put it, offer global positioning advice as soldiers move through poorly understood human terrain — telling them when not to cross their legs at meetings, how to show respect to leaders, how to arrange a party. They use their degrees in cultural anthropology to play the part of Emily Post.
More worrisome, it was revealed that Tracy, the mystery anthropologist, wears a military uniform and carries a gun during her cultural sensitivity missions. This brought to my increasingly skeptical mind the unfortunate image of an angelic anthropologist perched on the shoulder of a member of an American counterinsurgency unit who is kicking in the door of someone’s home in Iraq, while exclaiming, “Hi, we’re here from the government; we’re here to understand you.”

Gladwell & the Ivies

Yanking (the Chains of) the Ivies
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By THOMAS BARTLETT
It's easy to hate the Ivy League. Also, it's fun.
Yet rarely do hundreds of people cheer wildly as some crazy-haired guy calls for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to be shut down. That's right: closed entirely. Their campuses turned into luxury condos. Their students distributed evenly throughout the colleges of the Big Ten. Their endowments donated to charity, or used to purchase Canada.
But cheering is exactly what happened on a recent Saturday night during a somewhat tongue-in-cheek debate on the abolition of the Ivy League. The guy with the crazy hair was Malcolm Gladwell, author of two best-selling works of counterintuitive nonfiction, The Tipping Point and Blink. His opponent, the essayist Adam Gopnik, took the opposite view, arguing that — whatever their faults — we shouldn't shutter those three prestigious institutions. Both men are staff writers for The New Yorker, and the event was part of the magazine's annual literary festival.
Mr. Gladwell (University of Toronto, '84) is a well-known Ivy hater. In a 2005 article, he argued that the admissions process for Ivy League colleges is odd, arbitrary, and more or less ridiculous. On this particular evening he pushed that view to its most extreme: that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton should be made extinct (the other five Ivies can, presumably, rest easy). The heart of his argument was that the Big Three do a lousy job of promoting social mobility. He also asserted that they have come to be valued as "consumption preferences" rather than places where people, you know, go to learn.
But more interesting than the debate itself was the audience reaction. Anti-Ivy proclamations were greeted with enthusiastic whoops. It was as if everyone had finally been given permission to voice their long-held antipathy toward the elite. It was a mob scene, or as close as you're likely to get at a wine-and-cheese gathering on the Upper West Side.
It's all part of a current Ivy backlash, according to Alexandra Robbins, author of The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids and Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Ms. Robbins thinks the mystique of the Ivy League is starting to wear thin — even though, as she acknowledges, it's harder than ever to get into those colleges. "Other schools have caught up and surpassed the Ivy League," she says.
An Ivy League degree can even be a hindrance. Ms. Robbins says she recently talked to the chief executive of a major company who has an unofficial policy against hiring Ivy grads. "There is an assumption that if you went to an Ivy League school, you have a sense of entitlement," she says.
Ms. Robbins, a Yale graduate herself, is sometimes sheepish about her pedigree, preferring to avoid the topic.
Jim Newell knows the feeling. He writes for IvyGate, a snarky Ivy League gossip blog. Mr. Newell attended the University of Pennsylvania, "one of the lesser Ivies" (his words). His alma mater often gets confused with Penn State, and he'd rather not correct people: "God forbid I'd say, 'That's the one in the Ivy League.' I'd rather run away than say that."
He thinks a lot of the resentment toward the Ivy League is based on an outdated image. "There is some foundation for the hatred," he says. "There are a lot of stereotypes about WASPs smoking cigars with stuffed moose heads by the fireplace."
Of course, it also has a lot to do with admissions. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton reject a lot of applicants, and that can create some hard feelings.
It's Michele Hernandez's job to get kids into Ivy League colleges. Ms. Hernandez is one of the most prominent college consultants around. Plenty of people are willing to pay a gulp-inducing $40,000 for her five-year package, which begins in the eighth grade. Ms. Hernandez made about a million dollars last year helping to craft applications.
Still, she tries to dissuade clients — frequently without success — from the idea that it's Ivy or nothing. "I don't find anything special about Harvard, Yale, or Princeton," she says.
But she would hardly celebrate their demise. "Other elite schools would spring up in their place, like a Hydra," she says, demonstrating a knack for entrance-essay allusions.
There is a "perception issue" when it comes to Ivy League colleges, says Robert Franek, author of The Best 366 Colleges, published by Princeton Review. "I think students and parents may be fed up with the hierarchy," he says. "They're starting to take a harder look at other colleges, even if they might be in a position to go to an Ivy."
But that doesn't explain where the hate comes from. James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, who writes about branding and popular culture, says it's simple: "Because so much of what most of us have at the mass-supplier level is interchangeable, we resent those who have something more or better or different."
Another word for that is envy. Sarah E. Hill, an assistant professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton, who studies envy, says The New Yorker debate was an opportunity to revel in that feeling. "The audience obviously perceives that these people in the Ivy League receive some kind of unfair advantage," she says. "The idea of removing them is exciting. It's like, 'Ha, ha, ha,' we took away your label!'"
Representatives of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton would not comment for this article. But, really, what did you expect?

Classical Music

Books: The Musical Mystique

Defending classical music against its devotees.

Richard Taruskin, The New Republic Published: Monday, October 22, 2007

Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value
By Julian Johnson

(Oxford University Press, 140 pp., $25)

Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears

By Joshua Fineberg
(Routledge, 162 pp., $21.95)

Why Classical Music Still Matters

By Lawrence Kramer
(University of California Press, 242 pp., $24.95)

As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it--and why not?--as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. (My favorite example right now is Gabriel Prokofiev, the British-born grandson of the Russian composer, who studied electronic music in school, has headed a successful disco-punk band, and is now writing string quartets.) Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. All three of our authors seem reluctant to acknowledge this ineluctable fact. But change is not always loss, and realizing this should not threaten but console.

Churchill & Bad News

................yes, madam. But in the morning, I shall be sober; you will still be ugly.

Nobody likes to give bad news, and most of us are leery of "shoot the messenger" syndrome. Yet giving bad news is an occasional part of the job for most lawyers in private practice, particularly litigators. Under Ethics Rule 1.4, lawyers must keep clients "reasonably informed about the status of a matter."
On June 18, 1940, in his "finest hour" speech, Winston Churchill gave what was probably the greatest example ever of conveying very bad news in an effective way. On that date, he addressed the House of Commons and -- through the BBC -- the free world, following the defeat of the French army by the Germans.
He did not mince words and did not waste time getting the worst out first. In his very first sentence, he acknowledged the "colossal military disaster." He flatly reported that "the Battle of France is over." Nor did he shrink from describing what was coming next: "The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be thrust upon us."
Finally, he did not overpromise as to the outcome, stating only that there were "good and reasonable hopes of final victory."
Having given the bad news without flinching, he was able to finish with the stirring and memorable call to "brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"

A New "Special Relationship"

According to most commentators on world power, China is the future, America is the present and Britain is the past. Inside our November issue, however, Walter Russell Mead argues that the history of Britain and America’s “special relationship” suggests something rather different: that immigration, social change and the financial muscles of the City may just be heralding an era of British revival on the world stage.
Mead takes the long perspective, looking across the 230 years since American independence and finding more trends and continuities than British commentators are wont to—including the central fact that, for roughly three centuries, “the English-speaking peoples have been more or less continuously organising, managing, expanding and defending a global system of power, finance, culture and trade.”
In the end, it’s perhaps surprising that the possibilities he raises sound quite so surprising. Then again, national pessimism has become such an engrained part of the British character that it would be almost impossible for us to take such claims seriously if they came in a speech by a British politician. Is it time for a change?

SatisFACTION!!!!!

Raising Sand Robert Plant & Alison KraussSummer. Dusk. An ancient Cadillac convertible, top down, cruises on Long Island back roads. On the radio, the Rolling Stones.“The world's greatest rock band?” I ask.The music mogul at the wheel doesn't have to ponder.“Led Zep,” he says.And so it may be. Which would put Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin's singer, a cut above Mick Jagger. And would make it even more unlikely that he would ever collaborate with a bluegrass singer and violinist from Nashville on anything --- especially something as crazy as a collection of cover songs from the moldy basement of country and rock.But here is “Raising Sand”, the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss CD, and you have only to hear it once to know that you will listen to it often. And, again, I have to invoke the most unlikely of reasons --- it confounds your every expectation.You expected Plant's want-you, need-you, got-to-have-you cry that starts somewhere in the mid-range and moves fast into the crack-glass zone? You'll find his signature scream here, but you'll have to listen closely.And Alison Krauss? Bluegrass is rigid, unforgiving music; it is, say I, more about expertise than imagination. Over the years, she's bent the bluegrass envelope, but she's never shredded it. You'll find her purity on display here; again, you'll have to listen closely.In these songs, Plant whispers and Krauss shrieks. Drums pound, but vocals are muted. The past is honored --- it turns out that Plant and Krauss share a love of bluegrass and '50s country-rock --- but it's filtered through processors that transform no-frills country into sophisticated urban ghost music. “Raising Sand” is, in short, the kind of music that sounds great in the car or when you're puttering, but sounds even greater when you sit down, plug in the headphones, and go to school on it. The key player here is T-Bone Burnett, who, on the strength of this CD alone, ought to abandon all dreams of performance and surrender to his genius as a producer. With his input, Plant and Krauss realized they didn't have to record a dozen duets. And so “Raising Sand” is a collaborative “project” --- some of him, some of her, and a generous helping of them. What's true of every song: originality. We're used to fervent being fervent; here the power of love or heartbreak or whatever is in the restraint. It's more than Plant, Krauss and Burnett throwing one head fake after another your way. It's about digging in and exploring, caring more about sound than about commerce. Only unknowns and megastars get the chance to make this kind of CD --- and these days most megastars prefer the safety of a victory lap. At the corner of quality and daring, we find a welcome novelty. Cover songs as cutting edge music? A rocker who looks 200 finding the kind of tenderness he used to sneer at? A bluegrass sweetheart who seemed to want to grow up to be Emmylou Harris discovering a wild side? All of the above. Miracles occur. Magic is afoot. And “Raising Sand” is the CD of the year.

Never Read Again?

I usually prefer to be selective with my ironies—I like to parcel them out tastefully, subtly, unpredictably, like a playful summer rain lightly nurturing the wildflowers of early June. When someone asks me for directions to the local school for the deaf, I don’t automatically pretend I can’t hear the question. But this time it’s out of my hands. Owing to laziness, busyness, and a bogus holiday that shut down all the city’s mailrooms at the worst possible moment, I have been forced, very much against my will, into the most blindingly obvious irony I’ve ever been obliged to arch my inner eyebrows at: I have to start writing my review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read without actually having read the book. I imagine that every other reviewer in America is, at this very moment, chortling into his tweed collar while pretending to do the same thing. But I’m telling you it’s really happening to me, and I’m unhappy about it.
Fortunately, the book’s absence from my life hasn’t prevented me, as a citizen of the United States of Amazonikipedia, from learning everything there is to know about it. I know, for instance, that Bayard, a respected literature professor, admits in the preface that he doesn’t enjoy reading, has little time for it, and lectures frequently on books he hasn’t read—scandalous revelations that helped make the book a sensation in Europe. I know, from a photo of the book, that it is small and blue. I know, from Bayard’s author photo, that he is fiftyish and improbably slim, and likes to dress entirely in black. In fact, in lieu of reading the actual book, I’ve spent a very long time scrutinizing this picture, which strikes me as a masterpiece of calculated faux-casual self-revelation: Bayard leans against a railing in front of a scenic spray of graffiti—a touch of vérité to anchor all the abstraction—and his eyes simmer like coq au vin, and his forehead bunches with a devastating whisper of wrinkle-cleavage (my God, he is about to think!), and he appears to be sucking on something, perhaps the word oeuvre. In short, he looks like a foot soldier in the vast army of impish popular intellectuals France has been training since the days of Roland Barthes, just in case the struggle for freedom should ever come down to the ability to wring paradoxes out of a stone or unriddle the world with Lacanian decoder rings.
I like to think of myself as a world-class literary faker. In second grade, in order to win some kind of certificate, I let everyone believe I had reached the end of an epic novel called The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, when in fact its heroes had barely even met their first sentient fungi. I solidified this reputation one day in high-school English class, when, in answer to our teacher’s impossible question about an Ibsen play we hadn’t been assigned to read, I shouted, in a voice of casual authority, “Ghosts!” When this turned out to be correct (I had picked a random title from the list on the back cover of A Doll’s House), my classmates looked at me as if I’d spoken the secret of the universe, and they assumed I was fluent in Norwegian, and started whispering when I passed in the hall. A decade of college and grad school—boot camps of strategic fakery—immeasurably deepened my arsenal: Today I’m proficient in such feints as the stretched truth (“It’s funny, I’ve never actually finished that,” I’ll volunteer about War and Peace, of which I’ve read only the first paragraph), the misdirection (“Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow?” “You know what’s always bothered me about Pynchon?”), and, on very rare occasions, the enthusiastic flat-out lie (“Did you finish Brideshead Revisited?” “Yes! Yes, I really did!”). My signature move is a mildly orgasmic “Mmmmm,” which manages to suggest several things simultaneously: agreement, disagreement, ambivalence, and above all that my familiarity with the book in question is so deep it’s become muscular and sub-verbal, less a literary opinion than the visceral appreciation of a jaguar for the dawn.
But Professeur Bayard, a practicing psychoanalyst, is not so interested in practical tips. His goal is more ambitious: He wants to cure us of the deep cultural neuroses that govern our reading. His main argument, synopsized identically in reviews from here to Berlin, runs roughly as follows. Western culture has fetishized books almost as much as it has breasts and cash. Our reading is governed by a corrosive idealism that fills us all with secret shame: We believe we should be doing it more and better, and that, until we do, we fully deserve to be sneered at by college dropouts at the Strand. To Bayard, however, this is unrealistic. The line-by-line, cover-to-cover experience of a text, he argues, is passé; true reading consists mainly of nonreading. By this he means not just an absence of reading but a positive set of shadow skills that we should honor and cultivate and teach to our children: browsing covers and spines, reading first sentences, skimming key passages, monitoring gossip, and b.s.-ing at cocktail parties. Deep knowledge of a particular book, Bayard contends, is almost always less important than an understanding of that book’s position in a “collective library”—the imagined cluster of books to which it’s related. You’ll probably never need to know, e.g., that Leopold Bloom eats a Gorgonzola sandwich for lunch, but it might help to know that Ulysses is a long twentieth-century experimental novel by James Joyce, patterned on The Odyssey, and that it uses stream of consciousness to describe a day in the life of a handful of Dubliners. Bayard is the opposite of old-school canon-boosters like E.D. Hirsch and Harold Bloom, who equate a lack of knowledge about Shakespeare to a lack of opposable thumbs. In fact, he argues that ignorance of the details of Hamlet ultimately allows us to respond more creatively to the text—and therefore to be more fully ourselves.
The success of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read has made the book, no doubt to Bayard’s utter ecstasy, a perfect mise en abyme of nonreading. The central question it raises about every other book now applies equally to itself: Once a text whistles off into the slipstream of international hype, does it still need to exist? Or has our society, in its advanced stages of info-fluency, finally managed to do away with the thing itself?
By the time Bayard’s book got to me, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was already halfway done with my piece, and reading it at this point felt like a surrender to the repressive bourgeois book fetish that I’d just been thoroughly indoctrinated against by all the other reviews I’d read, not to mention a clear betrayal of the conceit in my opening paragraph. I set it aside, unopened, and tried to keep working. But the tiny Lutheran pastor who lives in my heart wore me down with a series of stern sermons about the sacred trust of book reviewing, and (since I’ve always kind of been into repressive norms) eventually I gave in.
It turns out that Bayard’s book benefits significantly from not being read. Although it’s witty and charming and often fun, it seems to have been designed for abridgment—it’s best when condensed into bullet points. Its argument is, despite all the psychoanalytic bells and whistles, pretty familiar. Is it news to anyone that we forget most of what we read, or that all reading is subjective? So to sensationalize matters, he consistently leans on the counterintuitive: Because we can read only a fraction of all the books published, he writes, “all reading is a squandering of energy.” The book’s tone is stranded halfway between a real work of social theory and satire—it’s Derrida crossed with “A Modest Proposal”—and this tension makes it hard to decide what’s really at stake.
Even Bayard’s personal revelation that he’s “read relatively little” turns out to be untrue: He told an interviewer that the book “is told by a fictional personality who boasts about not reading and is obviously not me. This is not a book written by a nonreader.” Under the guise of revolutionary honesty, he’s actually being dishonest.
My biggest gripe is that Bayard’s conception of reading is entirely social— a way to rack up points at cocktail parties. At the risk of sounding like the fusty old crank everyone does impressions of in the faculty lounge, I still believe in the private ecstasy of reading. It’s one thing to jockey for social position by saying that Dostoyevsky introduced psychology into the novel, or that Chaucer had a fuller grasp of humanity than Shakespeare. It’s another thing to experience, with your full attention, Raskolnikov wandering feverishly around St. Petersburg, or the young scholar farting in the face of his romantic rival in “The Miller’s Tale.” Real reading is not just hoarding fodder for cocktail chatter, it’s crawling, phrase by phrase, through a text and finding yourself surprised or disappointed or ruined or bored with every other line. This direct connection—the voice that enters your brain and mingles with your own internal voice—is the only way books really matter, and experiencing it requires a kind of deep surprise at the words in front of you. If anything, we’re already too good at talking about books we haven’t read. The challenge now is to preserve our ignorance.
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t ReadBy Pierre Bayard. Bloomsbury USA. 208 pages. $19.95.

Coleridge

It's the birthday of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (books by this author) born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England (1772), who was an extremely ambitious young man, giving lectures on religion, writing journalism, and single-handedly trying to launch his own magazine. But he was exhausting himself and falling into a depression until he was introduced to the poet William Wordsworth. They met only briefly in 1795, but they struck up a correspondence and began exchanging poems. Wordsworth encouraged Coleridge to stop writing journalism and focus on poetry, and Coleridge took the advice. His poetry made him happier and happier, and one day in the summer of 1797, after finishing a long poem, he decided he needed to see Wordsworth in the flesh. So he set out to walk to Wordsworth's house, miles away. The walk took several days and when he approached Wordsworth's home, he got so excited that he jumped over the gate and ran down the field to Wordsworth's house.
That first year of their friendship was the most productive period of Coleridge's life. They both liked to compose their poetry while walking, so they took long walks together. That winter, they went for a hike along the coast, and to pass the time they made up a gothic ballad about a tragic sea voyage. Coleridge became obsessed with the poem when he got home, filling it with images from nightmares he'd had since he was a kid, and it became his masterpiece, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," (1798), the story of a sailor who brings a curse on his ship when he kills an albatross, and for the rest of his voyage he is tormented by sea monsters and the ghosts of his dead shipmates.
Wordsworth and Coleridge published a collection of poems together called Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which included "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and which helped inspire the Romantic Movement in poetry. But within a few years, Coleridge had become addicted to opium, which killed his creativity and ruined his friendship with Wordsworth. He wrote a great book of literary criticism called Biographia Literaria (1817), but he failed to complete most of his ambitious projects, including a 1,400-page work of geography, a two-volume history of English prose, a translation of Faust, a musical about Adam and Eve, a history of logic, a history of German metaphysics, a study of witchcraft, and an encyclopedia.
His friends hated the fact that he had wasted so much of his talent. They'd all considered him the most brilliant writer and thinker they'd ever known, but he'd accomplished so little. Near the end of his life, his friend Charles Lamb wrote of Coleridge, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."

ART

Two heads belong to traditions as far separated as any in world history. The stone carving is from ancient Mexico and the pen drawing from Renaissance Germany. Mexico was first peopled a good 15,000 years ago by migrations that entered the Americas from Siberia. There is scant evidence for any later contact between the civilisations that grew up there and those that grew up in Europe, Asia and Africa.
The stone head, carved by a Totonac living on Mexico's Gulf Coast, draws on shamanic thinking. Shamans can transmute from human to animal because they can reach back and tap the primal stuff of which everything is composed. For other mortals, such categories are fixed: but to gain wisdom is to understand that all opposites derive from unity. As cities and priesthoods developed in Mexico, an emblem for these doctrines was developed. From around 650 BCE, we start to encounter the image of a fleshly face that morphs into a grinning bare skull: the right side and the left side of Ometeotl, the "lord of duality".
The drawing is by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. It was done when he was a 20-year-old trying to make his way in print-making, Europe's new growth industry of the late 15th century. It's on the back of an unresolved trial design for a print of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus - and it seems likely that Dürer turned to look in his mirror initially because he wanted to work out a better pose for his Joseph figure. So his drawing started out in the context of a Christian art that was moving into a new technological era, in which identical, mass-produced, devotional images could pour from the presses into pious burghers' homes. Dürer was riding a further trend: during the 15th century, European artists had taken to sketching themselves, typically inserting the resulting self-portrait as a head in a crowd of worshippers.
These two artworks, then, were made in very different circumstances, and it has been the habit of art historians to respect this. They have tended to keep distinct traditions on separate shelves. In fact, art history has chiefly meant the study of just one of these traditions. The European art scene to which Dürer belonged is traced back to its earliest known ancestor, ancient Egypt - after which Africa, not to mention Asia, Oceania and the Americas, veers more or less out of sight. For very natural reasons: what we now call art history is a type of storytelling invented in Italy and Germany to tackle regional subject matter. The term Renaissance stems from Giorgio Vasari claiming in the mid-16th century that classical standards had lately been "reborn" in Italy thanks to the genius of his Tuscan fellow countrymen, from Giotto to Michelangelo. Centuries later, the Renaissance itself was set within a whole history-spanning scheme of styles and periods by German-language writers such as Heinrich Wölfflin, but the art these academics were rationalising remained principally European.
Ernst Gombrich did his best to shake off this period-plotting when he published The Story of Art in 1950. What kind of intellectual interest was his story left with? The title he chose for his chapter on early 15th-century Europe suggests the answer: "The Conquest of Reality." Gombrich's main yardstick for art was how it related to how things look. From that perspective, what happened first in ancient Greece and then in Renaissance Italy and Flanders became all the more crucial. Though Gombrich devoted a courtesy chapter or two to Asia, European art had to be pre-eminent because it was more concerned than any other tradition with naturalistic, factual observation. The warmhearted lucidity of The Story of Art secured it a firm niche in 20th-century art education. Yet its outlook ran counter to the grain of 20th-century art. The route from cubism to abstract expressionism and minimalism could only look like a detour, if "conquering reality" had really been art's grand project.
A larger problem for Gombrich's classic of exposition is that, since 1950, the world has drastically altered in shape. Television, migration and the internet have brought separate continents into far greater proximity. Cultural references ranging from Jamaica to Japan are instantly available anywhere, while the search for the historical roots behind each seems to head down a hundred different wormholes. How do you tell a story of art that addresses these new conditions? You don't. That has been the emerging consensus. You produce compendious historical surveys. The World History of Art that Hugh Honour and John Fleming published in 1982 is, for me, the finest of these. But a forward-moving tale, in the Gombrich sense, it is not. Each eloquent chapter is a world sufficient to itself: "what happened next" doesn't count. Some would now say that even such surveys are too presumptuous, imposing an intrusive western viewpoint on incompatible systems of belief and aesthetics. "The single story of art is too flawed to function as the repository for the current sense of art history," the Chicago art historian James Elkins claimed five years ago. Perhaps we should content ourselves with specialisms: perhaps there just is no big narrative when it comes to what humans have created to look at.
Perhaps. It's certainly true that every would-be historian is tied to a limited viewpoint. Mine is that of a painter who started lecturing on art history after 20 years of studio work, partly because I wanted to investigate the broad historical situation in which I found myself. (My own painting is often described as "panoramic".) The approach I took when I developed these lectures into a book was that of a painter hanging a show. I pasted photocopies of as much visual material as I could gather on my studio wall and asked: "Which of these images will speak for itself, when reproduced in a book? Which of them will speak to one another?" The resulting sequences became the initial basis for what I wrote. That is how the Totonac carver's head came to accompany the head of Dürer. Visual instinct led the way: that, plus a slight presumption to fellow feeling. I dared guess at what drove these artists because on some level I, too, have known the daily work that preoccupied them, of coordinating hand and eye to make something that for some hard-to-define reason looks right.
Instinct led, research followed, stories started to emerge. Each of these images stands revealed, the more one investigates, as a work of powerful originality. When the brilliant young print-maker turned to record that pose in the mirror, self-portraiture developed, for the first time in the historical record, into self-exploration. There he stares, a proud contender for fame, exulting in his own calligraphic prowess as the quill pen dances his features on to the paper. And yet that pride flips over unmistakably into disquiet. Are his ambitions not spiritual also? Has he yet achieved the true seriousness of soul demanded by 15th-century self-help books such as Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ? "If you desire peace of mind and true unity of purpose, put all things behind you, and look only upon yourself." That might be one plausible caption; but in effect, the little circle of ink that describes Dürer's left pupil opens up a tunnel of introspection with no end in sight. How strange, to be this consciousness, in this flesh! How strange to translate one's own being to a flat surface! Those thoughts, still alive in today's art culture, are activated for the first time here by the artist who would go on to become Europe's first mass-media celebrity, reaching with his prints into thousands of private homes where no frescoist or sculptor could go.
If Dürer's drawing seems a harbinger of modernity, the Totonac stone - carved with chisels of bronze, or of fire-toughened oak - might seem to embody art's more ancient conditions of fixed and sacred significance. That is exactly why many 20th-century artists (for instance, Henry Moore) liked to turn for inspiration to Mexican sculpture. But the carving here marked a departure from the region's old tradition of heads switching into skulls: its meditation on mortality had a novel accent. Here is the voice of Nezahualcoyotl, a near-contemporary Mexican poet:
Will I have to go like the flowers that perish? Will nothing remain of my name? Nothing of my fame on earth? At least my flowers, at least my songs! Earth is the region of the fleeting moment . . . Or is it only here on earth We come to know our faces?
What we see here could almost be a response to that elegy's final line. Death has become facelessness. And note what enacts the transition from that nothing to a something of life: the jagged hack of the sculptor's chisel. I would suggest that, like Nezahualcoyotl seeking consolation in the fame of his songs, the sculptor here was self-consciously creative. Tracing the edge between formlessness and form, this is a work of art that considers what art consists of.
These Mexican meditations on transience would prove fatefully apt. Needless to say, I paired this "ancient" sculpture with the Renaissance drawing not just for visual, but for good chronological reasons. They were probably made at the same time. Dürer was drawing within a year or so of Columbus's American landfall in 1492, and the Totonac sculpture has been assigned a similar date. Twenty-seven years later, when the Spanish launched their assault on Mexico, the Totonacs became their first allies, since for two generations this coastal people had been unwilling vassals of the bloodthirsty Aztec empire. That empire and the 2,500-year-old cultural system that underpinned it collapsed. By 1520, art from Spain's new conquest had been brought back to Europe, to the court of Charles V - to be admired by Dürer. "I have seen the things brought to the king from the new golden land," he wrote. "In all my life I have seen nothing which gladdened my heart so much. For I have seen among them wonders of art and have marvelled at the subtle inventiveness of people in foreign lands."
What Dürer inspected so openheartedly is unknown: it was probably goldsmithery, soon melted down to fill Charles V's coffers. By such reductions, art from the Americas helped swell the fortunes of a monarchy that would line the pockets of some of Europe's greatest painters. Working for the kings of Spain, Titian, Rubens and Velázquez became beneficiaries of a conquest that impoverished and decimated the descendants of the Totonac sculptor.
This is not a tale about artistic styles, or periods, or influences. It cuts across the meaning of terms like Renaissance. It is, however, exactly the type of tale that my forays into world art history have kept uncovering - brutal cultural collisions that were once relatively local in scale, more recently more global. Time habitually does brutal things, forcing what had been separate into proximity. In a sense, a book that coerces the world's major art traditions into a single interwoven story can only be another agent in that process. Yet, that way, I've found a story I can trust; and one that still allows me, like Dürer, to marvel at the subtle inventiveness of people in foreign lands.
· Julian Bell's Mirror of the World: A New History of Art is published by Thames and Hudson (£24.95)

Barbara Cook

So how come Barbara Cook doesn't act her age? Closing in on her 80th birthday (this Thursday), she scats and shimmies on a stage as if the clock had no claim on her.
"I'm as giddy as a baby on a swing," she sings near the start of "Barbara Cook's Spotlight," the dizzyingly enthralling cabaret act she performed over the weekend in the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. The lyric is from "It Might as Well Be Spring," a silky ballad Rodgers and Hammerstein spliced into "State Fair." And you know, when Cook is out there, soaking us all in a warm downpour of melody, it absolutely might as well be.
Singing an eclectic program Friday night that veered from Duke Ellington to Irving Berlin to her beloved Stephen Sondheim, Cook christened a series she is curating for the Kennedy Center that will, in the coming months, feature cabaret performances by Judy Kuhn, Lillias White, Brent Barrett, Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner, among others.
Like Cook, they're all Broadway-seasoned actors. It's clear she believes the ability to fully convey the story that each songwriter wants to tell is an essential tool for a great singer. Speaking on this topic in the Terrace, Cook invoked her old pal Sondheim and provided some insight into why she has become a pivotal figure in the interpretation of his work.
"He writes songs that are so actable," she said, before wading into a poignant rendition of "No One Is Alone" from Sondheim's "Into the Woods."
To Cook, emotional pitch must be as vitally projected as the notes, a task she seems to approach with both the tempered steel of an older artist and the humility of a young fan. Few stylists these days shape the contours of their personalities to words and music as successfully as she. When she wraps her rich and uncannily ageless sound around the pain-wracked voluptuousness of "I Wish I Could Forget You," from Sondheim and James Lapine's underrated "Passion," you feel as if she herself bears the scars of the character, the damaged, obsessive Fosca.
She sang the 90-minute show without a break (one sip of water was the sum total of her rest period), using what she said was a lot of material from a concert she did not long ago at Carnegie Hall. The loose connective thread was Sondheim and composers and lyricists he admired (Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern) or who were his mentors (Oscar Hammerstein II).
Her opening moment was redolent of old Broadway: From offstage, you heard the strains of "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " -- a homage to Rodgers and Hammerstein and a direct echo of the way the song was handled in the first scene of "Oklahoma!" on Broadway 64 years ago.
She's a champion of the Broadway tunesmith; the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart find expected places on her cabaret honor roll. But she also celebrates a novelty singer such as Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards. When she was growing up in Atlanta, he was a guest star with a burlesque troupe for which she was a teenage singer. Her version of Edwards's "My Dog Loves Your Dog" was a sweet reminder of those provincial roots.
Her accompaniment over the weekend consisted of pianist Lee Musiker, bassist Peter Donovan and drummer James Saporito. This suave combo helped to make the evening swing, although it must be said that some of the arrangements could have been more carefully modulated to Cook's lower register; when this woman is on a stage, you don't want to miss a note.
Speaking of missing something: In light of the fact that Cook is one of the important living interpreters of American songwriting -- and still doing it with vigor -- what in heaven's name are the Kennedy Center Honors waiting for?

Woody Allen

Stick FigureMere Anarchy

by Woody Allen

Random House

Thirty years ago, my parents bought tickets to Woody Allen’s brand-new movie Annie Hall, thinking that it might serve to distract my mother from her advanced pregnancy with me. But the plan backfired; in the middle of the movie their unborn child started to give frantic signs of wanting out—forcing them to get out, too. So I have been a critic of Allen’s from an early-enough age to accept philosophically the deficiencies of Mere Anarchy, his fourth collection of short stories and his first since 1980. Admirers of Allen’s earlier fiction, however, are in for a disappointment: only a couple of the book’s eighteen pieces, ten of which have already appeared in the New Yorker, rival his witty “Conversations with Helmholtz” (1971) or “The Whore of Mensa” (1974).
I revisited Annie Hall recently and found it somewhat improved. In it, Allen’s character Alvy Singer is a neurotic comedian far more interesting than Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall, who exists chiefly to take in Allen’s wisecracks. The characters’ names are no accident. Annie is the concert hall for Alvy’s comic singing, and her purpose, like the purpose of the movie named after her, is to reflect the sounds that he emits.
Something similar might be said about the purpose of many of these stories. But the difference—and it is an important difference—is that in Annie Hall the last word belongs to the screenwriter/director Woody Allen, who is wise enough to ridicule the unengaging Alvy. In Mere Anarchy, there is no ridicule, and the author’s voice sounds very much like Alvy’s own.
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This would not be a Woody Allen collection without at least a few deft parodies. Although Kaiser Lupowitz, the Raymond Chandleresque sleuth of earlier Allen stories, does not make an appearance, some readers might enjoy a takeoff of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon in which the trophy “MacGuffin” is not a large black bird but an expensive truffle. In one climactic line the fat man, a carbon copy of Gutman in Hammett’s novel, realizes with horror that the truffle he has pursued for so long is phony:
“My God, sir!” he screamed. “It’s a fake! And while it’s a brilliant fake, counterfeited to simulate some of the truffle’s nutlike flavor, I’m afraid what we have here is a large matzo ball.”
Taking the same tone is “Pin-chuck’s Law,” narrated by a hard-boiled NYPD detective who, setting out to solve a string of murders, trips lightly over a series of crime-story clichés along the way. “The Rejection,” another parody, zanily employs the style of a 19th-century Russian novel to tell the story of Boris Ivanovich, whose son has been spurned by an exclusive Manhattan nursery school. (“[Boris] pictured three-year-olds in Bonpoint outfits cutting and pasting and then having some comforting snack—a cup of juice and perhaps a Goldfish or a chocolate graham. If Mischa could be denied this, there was no meaning in life or in all of existence.”) “Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut” is a series of letters between a Wall Street blueblood, whose son has been offered $16 million by a Hollywood studio for a movie he has made at film camp, and the camp’s wily proprietor, Moe Varnishke, who threatens obliquely to destroy the film’s negative if he is denied a piece of the action.
Allen is at his best in the parodies, where he has a fixed literary model both to imitate and to depart from, and in the epistolary exchange, which resembles a screenplay in that it consists solely of dialogue. But when left to his own devices—when he is neither parodying someone else nor just writing dialogue—he gets into trouble.
In many of the stories in Mere Anarchy—they tend to be the ones that never appeared in the New Yorker—he tries repeatedly to milk laughs from the improbable words of both the characters and the narrator. Seldom, for example, does anyone in these stories say anything: instead, they parry, squeak, yelp, chirp, chuckle, pipe, bid, announce, and “fonfer.” In one story, an untalented actor who has found work as a lighting double is kidnapped by the inept followers of an Indian bandit:
“I send you out to snatch a cinema luminary, and this is what you bring me?” the hash-high CEO ranted, nostrils flaring like sails that had caught the wind.“Master, I beg you,” groveled the Dalit hailed as Abu.“A stand-in, a supernumerary not even—a lighting double,” the grand fromage bellowed.“But you will agree there’s a resemblance, master?” squeaked one trembling plaintiff.
And so on, as though the text had been run through some riotous Microsoft Word function that merged the Find-and-Replace and Thesaurus tools.
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A clue to what fills Allen’s own sails with wind may lie in “Strung Out,” a story that imports the language of particle physics into an office romance (“All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons”), and in “Sing, You Sacher Tortes,” a description of a musical about turn-of-the-century Vienna whose “opening number [has] Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Adolf Loos singing ‘Form Follows Function.’” Neither is very funny; their main purpose seems to be to impress us with how much Allen knows, with the jokes serving—unsuccessfully—to keep us from being put off by his bragging.
The obsession with outlandish words is a lexical version of the same tactic, undercut by the fact that Allen’s vocabulary is fairly limited and therefore annoyingly repetitive. He uses “myrmidons” in three different stories, “lagniappe” in three, “exaltation” (as in “an exaltation of larks”) in three, “sconce” (meaning “head”) more times than I could count. You do not have to be Flaubert to be unimpressed.
The same redundancy, finally, applies to characters and situations, and to even more unpleasant effect. Certain writers (Conrad and Hardy, for example) like to spring a character from a previous work on their readers, giving us the pleasure of running unexpectedly into an old friend. In Mere Anarchy, the feeling is more like running unexpectedly into a pointy stick. The main recurring character, or rather caricature, who goes by different names in different stories, is essentially the same person: a loud, vulgar Jew, spewing a mixture of absurd slang and Yiddish, always on the lookout for Number One, usually at the expense of the naïve and meeker narrator.
In the collection’s first story, the caricature is named Max Endorphine. “What can I tell you, boychick, I hit it big,” he gloats in describing a guru who has supposedly taught him to levitate; of course the gullible narrator gets into trouble when he tries to duplicate the feat. In the second story, he is Pontius Perry, the agent who unloads the role of lighting double on that talentless actor: “Let me level with you, boychick,” Perry says as he breaks the bad news. (Does any real-life Jew ever use the word “boychick”?) In the fourth story, a crass producer named E. Coli Biggs wants the narrator to write movie novelizations. “Here’s the scam, tatellah,” he begins. “I happen to own the rights to a cinema classic starring the Three Stooges . . . a real zany vehicle for our three most irrepressible meshoogs.” Of the eight new stories in the book, the same repellent character appears in four, and then pops up again two or three times later.
The charge of anti-Semitism has been leveled at Woody Allen so many times as to sound unoriginal. Without rehearsing all the evidence and counter-arguments, the very least one can say is that, when it comes to seizing on a tired stereotype and utterly exhausting it, Allen has shown himself a modern master of unoriginality.
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How then to explain the charm of his best movies? The answer is that they do not ask us to admire the character he himself most often plays: a pathetically neurotic, self-centered, wanly wisecracking intellectual or pseudo-intellectual. By contrast, the problem with most of the stories in Mere Anarchy is that they do not stand outside this character; instead, they are written by him. Their “implied author” (to use the terminology of the late critic Wayne Booth) is none other than that selfsame pseudo-intellectual—who to boot, and for no discernible reason, asks the reader to regard him as a superior human type.
As I noted earlier, two or three of the stories in Mere Anarchy—especially “The Rejection” and “Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut”—show that when Allen manages to speak in voices that are foreign to him, he is still capable of crafting good fiction. Readers interested in pursuing other examples should investigate The Insanity Defense, a one-volume edition of his three previous collections. But anyone looking to experience his best work should skip the prose altogether and sit down with a few of his classic movies.

Let Us Laugh

In August 1988, college junior Tim Keck borrowed $7,000 from his mom, rented a Mac Plus, and published a 12-page newspaper. His ambition was hardly the stuff of future journalism symposiums: He wanted to create a compelling way to deliver advertising to his fellow students. Part of the first issue’s front page was devoted to a story about a monster running amok at a local lake; the rest was reserved for beer and pizza coupons.
Almost 20 years later, The Onion stands as one of the newspaper industry’s few great success stories in the post-newspaper era. Currently, it prints 710,000 copies of each weekly edition, roughly 6,000 more than The Denver Post, the nation’s ninth-largest daily. Its syndicated radio dispatches reach a weekly audience of 1 million, and it recently started producing video clips too. Roughly 3,000 local advertisers keep The Onion afloat, and the paper plans to add 170 employees to its staff of 130 this year.
Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first.But type “best practices for newspapers” into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.
While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.
Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in their print circulation during the last three years? Yet as traditional newspapers fail to draw readers, only industry mavericks like The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and USA Today’s Jack Kelley have looked to The Onion for inspiration.
One reason The Onion isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s actually fun to read. In 1985 the cultural critic Neil Postman published the influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, which warned of the fate that would befall us if public discourse were allowed to become substantially more entertaining than, say, a Neil Postman book. Today newspapers are eager to entertain—in their Travel, Food, and Style sections, that is. But even as scope creep has made the average big-city tree killer less portable than a 10-year-old laptop, hard news invariably comes in a single flavor: Double Objectivity Sludge.
Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, it can’t be very good for you. But do The Onion and its more fact-based acolytes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, monitor current events and the way the news media report on them any less rigorously than, say, the Columbia Journalism Review or USA Today?
During the last few years, multiple surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are among America’s most informed citizens. Now, it may be that Jon Stewart isn’t making anyone smarter; perhaps America’s most informed citizens simply prefer comedy over the stentorian drivel the network anchormannequins dispense. But at the very least, such surveys suggest that news sharpened with satire doesn’t cause the intellectual coronaries Postman predicted. Instead, it seems to correlate with engagement.It’s easy to see why readers connect with The Onion, and it’s not just the jokes: Despite its “fake news” purview, it’s an extremely honest publication. Most dailies, especially those in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they’re focused more on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind.The Onion takes the opposite approach. It delights in crapping on pieties and regularly publishes stories guaranteed to upset someone: “Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven In Abortion-Clinic Attack.” “Heroic PETA Commandos Kill 49, Save Rabbit.” “Gay Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years.” There’s no predictable ideology running through those headlines, just a desire to express some rude, blunt truth about the world.
One common complaint about newspapers is that they’re too negative, too focused on bad news, too obsessed with the most unpleasant aspects of life. The Onion shows how wrong this characterization is, how gingerly most newspapers dance around the unrelenting awfulness of life and refuse to acknowledge the limits of our tolerance and compassion. The perfunctory coverage that traditional newspapers give disasters in countries cursed with relatability issues is reduced to its bare, dismal essence: “15,000 Brown People Dead Somewhere.” Beggars aren’t grist for Pulitzers, just punch lines: “Man Can’t Decide Whether to Give Sandwich to Homeless or Ducks.” Triumphs of the human spirit are as rare as vegans at an NRA barbecue: “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle With Cancer.”Such headlines come with a cost, of course. Outraged readers have convinced advertisers to pull ads. Ginger Rogers and Denzel Washington, among other celebrities, have objected to stories featuring their names, and former Onion editor Robert Siegel once told a lecture audience that the paper was “very nearly sued out of existence” after it ran a story with the headline “Dying Boy Gets Wish: To Pork Janet Jackson.”
But if this irreverence is sometimes economically inconvenient, it’s also a major reason for the publication’s popularity. It’s a refreshing antidote to the he-said/she-said balancing acts that leave so many dailies sounding mealy-mouthed. And while The Onion may not adhere to the facts too strictly, it would no doubt place high if the Pew Research Center ever included it in a survey ranking America’s most trusted news sources.
During the last few years, big-city dailies have begun to introduce “commuter” papers that function as lite versions of their original fare. These publications share some of The Onion’s attributes: They’re free, they’re tabloids, and most of their stories are bite-sized. But while they may be less filling, they still taste bland. You have to wonder: Why stop at price and paper size? Why not adopt the brutal frankness, the willingness to pierce orthodoxies of all political and cultural stripes, and apply these attributes to a genuinely reported daily newspaper?Today’s publishers give comics strips less and less space. Editorial cartoonists and folksy syndicated humorists have been nearly eradicated. Such changes have helped make newspapers more entertaining—or at least less dull—but they’re just a start. Until today’s front pages can amuse our staunchest defenders of journalistic integrity to severe dyspepsia, if not death, they’re not trying hard enough.

The Joke & Philosophy

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through JokesThomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein A snail was mugged by two turtles. When the police asked him what happened, he said, “I don't know. It all happened so fast.” Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein met at Harvard. One is six-foot-five, the other is five-foot-eight. They used to be known as “the Mutt and Jeff of post-Kantian idealism.” No, that's not a joke. Restaurant customer to waiter: "How do you prepare your chickens? Waiter: "Oh, nothing special. We just tell them they're gonna die."After graduation, Cathcart bounced around: probation officer, hospice director, philosophy instructor. Klein wrote jokes for Lily Tomlin and a great many books, including “The Half-Jewish Book" and “Where's Elvis?” They never stopped caring about philosophy --- which is also not a joke. Holmes and Watson are on a camping trip. In the middle of the night Holmes wakes up and gives Dr. Watson a nudge. “Watson,” he says, “look up in the sky and tell me what you see.” “I see millions of stars, Holmes,” says Watson. “And what do you conclude from that, Watson?” Watson thinks for a moment. “Well,” he says, “astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and we are small and insignificant. Uh, what does it tell you, Holmes?” “Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!”Getting the idea? There is a connection, Cathcart and Klein say, between the architecture and punchlines of jokes and their counterparts in philosophy. Both confound our sense of the world. Both screw with our heads. And, in the space they create, we are able to think new thoughts and see the world fresh. "Philosophy" is very broad for these guys. They include all the traditional Great Thinkers. They ask the Big Questions, from "Does life have a purpose?" to "Is the glass half-full?" They also deal with Feminism and Intelligent Design. In other words, they'll go anywhere to make a point --- and tell a joke. Cathcart and Klein have a remarkable knack for summary and compression. And a zest for rephrasing known truths in today's lingo. Tony Soprano's version of the Golden Rule: "Whack the next guy with the same respect you'd like to be whacked with, you know?" Here's their redefinition of a priori: “Known prior to experience. For example, one can know, prior to ever watching the show, that all 'American Idol' contestants believe they are singers because 'American Idol' is a singing contest for people who --- for reasons best known to themselves --- believe they are singers."And they ask great questions. A client pays a lawyer $400 when he only owes $300. Should the lawyer tell his partner? (That's an example of an ethical issue for Cathcart and Klein: situational ethics.) They point out the upside of the death penalty: "You never need to say: 'What --- you again?'" And they examine "From a Distance" to determine whether Bette Midler is a Hegelian.Well, is she? I'm still thinking about that one. And laughing at some of the jokes. And having the occasional bright thought. You know how that works: come for the humor, leave much smarter.

The East is Red --- and so may be the West

The glory of Our Empire shines on this universe with brilliance," a ruler once declared in a letter to courtiers in London. "Not one single person or country is excluded from Our kindness and benevolence." He had good reason to be pleased. His country sat astride the global economy. His army was large, his domains vast. He believed his country to be the center of the world, and a good chunk of the world agreed.
And yet, despite the fulsome satisfaction of this 1805 letter, its author, the head of the Manchu Qing dynasty and emperor of China, had cause for anxiety. Less than twenty years before, China had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam and continued to have difficulty besting the Burmese, Tibetans and Zunghars. Trade with Europe was still expanding rapidly. But the European powers were quickly getting the upper hand by controlling shipping and financial flows, and China was developing a dangerous dependency on silver and opium. Until the late nineteenth century, China's economy was the largest in the world, but then it headed precipitously downward. The Chinese knew practically nothing about the modern firearms with which Europe was taking over the world.
Did the advisers to the Jiaqing Emperor warn him of the coming conflict with Europe and the potential collapse of the Chinese Empire? Perhaps some courageous and far-seeing mandarin spoke of Europe's rise, of the dangerous trajectory of the terms of trade, of the military modernizations of Britain, of the equally pernicious soft power of missionaries and merchants. The documentary evidence makes no mention of such a pundit. In 1816, after dealing with barbarians from Britain who refused to kowtow to the emperor, the Chinese court sent another letter to London: "The Celestial Empire has little regard for foreign things." By the time China learned the value of foreign things and adopted the Japanese approach of "Eastern thought, Western machines," it would be too late. The Chinese Empire had been carved up like a crisp Peking duck.
Two hundred years later, the roles are reversed. As John Quincy Adams once accused the Chinese of "arrogant and insupportable pretensions," so now America is subjected to the slings and arrows of the world's disgruntled and disaffected. Yet the US President surveys his realm and sees only cause for satisfaction: America is God's country and Americans his chosen people. There are barbarians at the gate, of course, repudiators of American benevolence who must be crushed. A small clutch of imperial cheerleaders, the Max Boots and Niall Fergusons, thrill to the President's muscular stance. Pundits, meanwhile, play the latest intellectual parlor game: name that imperial analogy. Will the US empire end with a Roman bang or a British whimper? Or, blind to the desperate need for reform and a tempering of arrogance, will the United States suffer China's nineteenth-century fate? In place of opium, there are the distracting pleasures of Chinese goods for sale at Wal-Mart. Instead of the redoubtable Vietnamese, there are the recalcitrant Iraqis.
In contrast to the emperor's court, an army of advisers are scrambling to warn Washington of the only threat on the horizon that could displace the United States in the next few decades. Their books assess China's potential at the periphery and in the Eurasian heartland. China is using trade and no-strings-attached aid to inveigle its way into the hearts of Africans and Latin Americans. It is building up its military and risking a showdown with the United States, most likely over Taiwan. Internal weaknesses such as poverty and corruption threaten to undermine the current Chinese system and create international havoc. President Bush is certainly getting more advice than the Chinese emperor did 200 years ago. But the warnings of impending confrontation reflect less the realities of China's new global stance than the unrealities of the US foreign policy establishment, which believes that the laws of geopolitics require an equal but opposite fall on the other side of the globe.
The "yellow peril" was once feared for the damage it could do near home. Washington strategists stayed up late at night worrying about Mao knocking down dominoes the length of the Asian littoral. There was also the Chinese influence in South Asia, and the Kremlin's worries about the Soviet Union's borders and millions of land-poor Chinese swarming into Siberia. But although China inspired the leadership of Albania, some Maoist guerrillas in Peru and a handful of French and American students in the 1970s, Beijing's influence outside its neighborhood was marginal.
Now that the Big Red Checkbook has replaced the Little Red Book, China has expanded its reach into far-flung regions. Journalist Joshua Kurlantzick has been writing about the rise of China's soft power for several years, and in his recent book Charm Offensive he describes a chessboard world in which one side's advancing pawns grab power from the other side's retreating rooks. "As the United States remains unpopular in many parts of the world, China finds willing partners," Kurlantzick writes. "In the worst-case scenario, China eventually will use soft power to push countries to choose between closer ties to Washington and closer ties to Beijing."
China is simply doing what the United States did during the cold war: cozying up to the powerful, extracting resources and buying influence. Kurlantzick expands Joseph Nye's classic formulation of soft power to include formal diplomacy and economic leverage alongside the more informal export of cultural values and norms. He describes a China of deep pockets that provides more loans to Africa than the World Bank, has promised $100 billion of investments to Argentina and Brazil, snatched up factories the world over and replaced striking workers with compliant Chinese, and outmaneuvered Japan to conclude a recent free-trade agreement with Southeast Asia.
Economic influence is not even the half of it. Nearly three millennia of fearing the outside world, which stretched from the Great Wall to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, have abruptly ended. Multilateralism is the new watchword for China's 4,000 diplomats, half of whom are younger than 35, according to a 2005 study. China has become the great joiner--facilitating the six-party talks over the North Korean nuclear crisis, convening the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Central Asia, even becoming an observer in the Organization of American States. It has created its own version of the Peace Corps that sends Chinese youth to developing countries. With the Beijing Olympics set for next year, China is doing a credible imitation of a good sport.
Kurlantzick seems taken aback at times that China's advances are built on great-power realism rather than fortune-cookie idealism. Beijing wants stability in its immediate environs and raw materials from Africa and Latin America to fuel its growth. It will break strikes, support the Mugabes and Karimovs of the world and ignore environmental standards to achieve these goals. When Communist China first opened to the capitalist West in the early 1970s, the Chinese leaders imprinted on Henry Kissinger, the first Western mug they saw up close. Like love-blind chicks, Mao's heirs have been following Kissingerian realpolitik ever since.
And yet China is not a chess player making zero-sum calculations, particularly in its relations with Washington. In 2004 Colin Powell aptly described US-Chinese relations in the George W. Bush era as the best in thirty years. China and the United States are cooperating on containing North Korea, countering terrorists in Asia and expanding the global economy. Naturally, disagreements have arisen over intervention in Darfur and US military bases in Central Asia. The United States has been haranguing China to float its currency to raise the price of Chinese exports (and theoretically reduce Washington's massive trade deficit with Beijing). But spats are to be expected in any marriage, especially one of convenience. The relationship is sustained in part because of mutual economic interest. China is propping up the US economy with its purchase of Treasury bonds, and American consumers keep the Chinese economy humming with super-sized purchases of everything from cheap toys to high-end electronics.
When it comes to US-China relations, Washington's mandarin class is worried less about soft-power competition at the margins than military confrontation over Taiwan, head-to-head economic competition and the potential of China to implode politically. To achieve credibility in a Washington devoted to "congagement"--containing China militarily and engaging it economically--most China watchers try to stake out the middle ground between panda-hugging and China-bashing. Against the huggers they assert that China is indeed a potential military threat; against the bashers they qualify China as only a selective menace.
The issue of greatest controversy is China's increased military spending. Beijing argues that it is spending around $36 billion a year; some US estimates run double or even triple that amount. However you slice it, China wants a world-class army to match its world-class economy. But with its air and sea power still limited, China has an anemic ability to project force over distance. A mere twenty long-range nuclear missiles serve as a very slender deterrent force. And while the bean counters scrutinize China's arms purchases, the annual US military budget has sailed past $500 billion (not including the Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental spending). To match the United States, China would have to play Soviet-style catch-up, and it knows the endpoint of that strategy.
It's not China's arsenal but its military strategy that has undergone the more telling transformation, and here Bates Gill, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers some useful insights. "China is unlikely to seek aggressive territorial gains into areas of core American strategic interest, such as the heart of Europe, or seek to extend imperial dominion across vast areas of Pacific Asia, or attack American possessions to meet those aims," he writes in his dry but important new book Rising Star. "Beijing does not seek to spread Communist ideals, establish global networks of ideological client states, or foment revolution in the developing world." China has quietly become a major advocate of arms control, even undertaking several important unilateral nonproliferation initiatives, such as pledging to the United States to cut its nuclear ties to Iran. Its share of global arms exports fell from around 4 percent in the early 1990s to less than 2 percent between 2000 and 2004. It has placed a qualitative cap on its own nuclear modernization program and thrown open its military exercises to foreign observers from the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa.
At the same time, China has gradually altered what had previously been a strident position on sovereignty. Beijing still asserts the principles of noninterference and peaceful coexistence, repackaged as its "new security concept," particularly in the face of potential military interventions in Sudan, Iran and elsewhere. Beyond the rhetoric, however, Beijing has clearly compromised its previously literal understanding of sovereignty. Witness its power-sharing arrangement with Hong Kong and its support of US intervention in Afghanistan. It currently provides "more civilian police, military observers, and troops to UN peacekeeping operations than any of the other permanent five members of the UN Security Council--and more than any NATO country," Gill writes. Sovereignty in today's globalizing world is the refuge of the weak and the privilege of the strong. China, caught somewhere between the two poles, has taken a pragmatically flexible approach.
On the issue of Taiwan, however, Beijing retains an old-fashioned inflexibility. For Washington, the island is a foreign policy issue; Beijing, on the other hand, considers Taiwan a family problem, one that will eventually be resolved internally by persuasion or, if necessary, by force. Because foreign policy analysts inside the Beltway are essentially risk analysts, those who follow East Asia are drawn to likely flashpoints. Journalists Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro tried to make the case for a "coming conflict with China" in their 1997 book of the same name, pointing to Taiwan as the spark. A decade later, even as Taiwan has moved closer to formal independence, the "global war on terror" has eclipsed the presumed China threat.
Richard Bush and Michael O'Hanlon have tried to update this argument in A War Like No Other. They promise "the truth about China's challenge to America" but have to jump-start their argument by turning back the clock to 1995-96, the tensest moments in recent US-Chinese relations. At that time, the Clinton Administration reversed restrictions on US visits by high-level Taiwanese officials and let President Lee Teng-hui visit his alma mater, Cornell; Beijing retaliated by sending missiles in the direction of Taiwan and conducting large-scale military exercises. Bush and O'Hanlon imagine a repeat scenario in which "in a fog of miscommunication and politics, an enraged China prepares to attack the island" and the United States comes to Taiwan's defense: "No one backs down--each has too much at stake," they write, and then string together a series of maybes that lead to a "terrifying scenario." It reads like the kind of overstatement that foreign policy analysts resort to in order to pitch skeptical editors yet another article or book on China.
A conflict over Taiwan could indeed result from Taiwanese impatience, Chinese nationalism and US pigheadedness. Taiwan continues to make noises about shifting from de facto to de jure sovereign status. Although large majorities of Americans oppose war with China over Taiwan, more than 90 percent of the Chinese people support military action against Taiwan if it splits.
But Bush and O'Hanlon concede that the economies of China and Taiwan have grown inextricably linked, as have the Chinese and American economies. And despite several chapters devoted to an extended war-gaming scenario, they admit that "most hypothetical causes of war" between Washington and Beijing "turn out, upon inspection, to have little or no basis." Even if their premises are sensational, their advice is sensible: Washington should help Beijing and Taipei toward "a more benign, unification-friendly sovereignty" for Taiwan. After all, what would Beijing do with the island after military takeover? Taiwan is no Tibet. It is a powerful capitalist country that has developed a strong taste for democracy. Beijing beware: even a small bone, if swallowed the wrong way, can prove deadly.
Washington should pay less attention to the strength of China, some knowledgeable courtiers are whispering, and more to the great country's weakness. In this telling of the story, China is an elaborate pyramid scam, its prosperity resting on a foundation of sand. Only by continuing to generate unprecedented levels of growth--11 percent in 2006--can China continue to fool its domestic supporters and foreign investors into playing the game. Inside China, troubling stories appear every day. There is rampant corruption. Some grow impossibly rich while many remain impatiently poor. Tens of thousands of protests break out in the cities and the countryside every year. The AIDS and SARS scandals, the harrowing coal mine disasters, the ruthless suppression of dissidents--eloquently described by Chinese activists themselves in the new collection Challenging China, edited by Human Rights in China staffers Sharon Hom and Stacy Mosher--all have the potential of sapping the confidence of the population in the leadership's capacity to govern.
In the most poignant chapter in the collection, "The View Beneath the Bridge," writer Yi Ban describes a group of people who travel to Beijing from all over the country to petition the government to redress wrongs. They end up living under a bridge near a compound of government offices. They scavenge for food. They spend precious money to produce reports on the corruption and legal miscarriages with which they hope to impress the central authorities. And they get nowhere. One day, the police come through like a terrible wind and sweep the petitioners away as if they never existed. These workaday tyrannies, more so perhaps than the jailings of high-profile dissidents, may prove cancerous in the long run.
With all the talk of China's rise, it might seem perverse to cast the country as the sick man of Asia. Yet in China: Fragile Superpower, Susan Shirk argues that "the weak legitimacy of the Communist Party and its leaders' sense of vulnerability could cause China to behave rashly." Shirk, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, gives insightful summaries of China's relations with Taiwan and Japan. But her argument about China's potentially rash conduct, like Bush and O'Hanlon's, is based on some farfetched assumptions. Shirk sees China's nationalism as a double-edged sword, one the government wields against its adversaries and finds pressed against its own neck. In order to maintain their own position, Chinese leaders may launch a wag-the-dog invasion of Taiwan--or Hong Kong or Tibet or Xinjiang.
This is possible, but is it probable? Why would Chinese leaders risk the stability they need to maintain economic growth? Nationalism and the pride that comes with becoming once again a world power will more likely have a centripetal rather than centrifugal effect, bolstering the legitimacy of the Communist Party rather than pushing it to bet the house on a military adventure. China has ultimately borrowed a great deal from the West, and this notion of the nation-state, so alien to the Jiaqing Emperor in 1805, will prove the most influential import. Alongside its twenty-first-century economy and twentieth-century political structure, China has a very nineteenth-century sense of nationhood.
In China Road, his absorbing chronicle of traveling Route 312 from Shanghai across the expanse of China to the farthest reaches of the Gobi Desert, National Public Radio correspondent Rob Gifford meets a Tibetan who makes his living teaching Chinese to his compatriots. Gifford carefully broaches the subject of betrayal.
"No one blames me," the Tibetan tells him. "There is no other choice. The only way to say I'm not going to take part in this is not to learn Chinese and reject the whole Chinese system. But that would condemn me to poverty." He won't give up his Buddhism, and he will never marry a Han Chinese woman. But otherwise he has decided to trade in the nomadic life, which he says is nothing to romanticize, for the life of an upwardly mobile Chinese citizen. "That is simply today's world. The modern world. The globalized world. I'm not sure we can completely blame the Chinese for that."
Not everyone Gifford meets is so resignedly pragmatic. He talks with Chinese who have eaten more than their fair share of bitterness. Deng Xiaoming, who probably contracted AIDS in a government-sponsored blood-selling scheme gone awry, is so outraged at the failure of the local hospital to save his ailing daughter that he places her corpse in the hospital lobby for all to see. Lao Zhang, a cafe owner in a remote desert oasis, rails against local officials for capping the natural spring in order to profit from their own water sales. In a society that not long ago banned prostitution, Wu Yan sings, gambles and drinks with her clients but makes the most money with the "fourth accompaniment." And the Uighurs of northwest China lament the ongoing colonization of their culture.
Foreign policy analysts speak of various crunches that China will face. There's the demographic one, when China suddenly becomes a senior citizen society virtually overnight because of its one-child policy. There is the economic one, when rapid growth begins to sputter and an angry middle class joins hands with the disenfranchised to close down the party. There's the environmental one, when the poisons of industrial development choke the country to death.
Gifford adds one more to the mix. The central government is rushing against time to make Tibetans, Uighurs and other ethnic minorities into Chinese, much like the French government, as Eugen Weber described it, turned Breton and Provençal peasants into Frenchmen in the nineteenth century. Democracy, as it comes, means giving the vote not just to the 93 percent of the population that is Han Chinese but to the minorities as well. "That's why Beijing is pedaling so fast to try to make Uighurs and Tibetans more 'Chinese,' so that if the crunch comes (or even if it doesn't) they will be too well integrated into China to want to opt out," Gifford argues. Building the nation--not just dams, power plants, tanks and cooperation agreements with other countries--will be the make-or-break project for the next generation of Chinese leaders.
Predicting what will happen with China is a fool's errand. China is the exception that proves so many rules wrong. It is a Communist system that has managed a transition to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics." It has fostered market growth without much political reform. And it has pulled huge swaths of its population out of poverty and illiteracy faster than all the well-paid development professionals in the West. Yet as Gifford argues, "For every fact that is true about China, the opposite is almost always true as well, somewhere in the country." The data set is so large that it defies generalizations.
Will China overtake the United States as Europe once overtook China? Having spent so long at the top, China could teach America some lessons about imperial decline. China once believed itself the center of the world and the pivot of history. It tried to understand the rise of other great powers in its own terms rather than as a fundamentally new phenomenon. Most important, it waited too long to reform its foreign and domestic policies. Beijing could change tactics again, perhaps after the 2008 Olympics, and rely more on punch than politics. Yet, blinded by its own putative imperial glory and thinking of the world only in boxing-ring terms, Washington is the real wild card. In the contest for world leadership, the United States is the more likely one to come out swinging--and end up knocking itself out.