John Stuart Mill

A Man for All Seasons: 'John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand'

Review of: John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

By ADAM KIRSCH

If history, as Edward Gibbon said, is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind," it makes sense that the greatest criminals tend to receive the most attention from historians. Napoleon, a tyrant who was responsible for millions of deaths, is the most biographized figure in modern history, and it seems that new biographies of Stalin and Hitler crowd the bookstores every year. It is pleasant to be reminded, then, that good men can also make history from time to time — that humanity is not too fascinated by its destroyers to pay tribute to its benefactors.



CAROLINE FORBES

RICHARD REEVES

"John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand" (Overlook, 616 pages, $40), an accessible and admiring new biography by Richard Reeves, is such a tribute. Mr. Reeves — a British journalist, not the American biographer of presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan — works hard in this book to humanize Mill, to rescue him from his deadening fame as "a bone-dry, formal, humourless Victorian." At times, perhaps a little too hard: On the very first page, Mr. Reeves strains to shock the reader with a description of the dead baby Mill once found in St. James's Park, followed immediately by the detailed contraceptive instructions that this discovery spurred Mill to distribute to the London poor. ("A piece of soft sponge is tied by a bobbin or penny ribbon, and inserted just before the sexual intercourse takes place," and so on.)

Throughout the book, Mr. Reeves seizes every opportunity to "sex up" Mill's image, as the British say — whether the subject is sex itself, or the fierce political battles in which Mill participated, or even something as benign as his aesthetic appreciation of Italian churches. Anything to convince the reader that Mill was not what Thomas Carlyle called him after reading Mill's "Autobiography": a "logic-chopping engine," "a thing of mechanized iron."

The characterization was unfair but understandable, since Mill was, in fact, almost literally engineered to become a philosophic reformer. His father, James Mill, a close friend of Jeremy Bentham, believed that a perfect education would inevitably produce a perfect human being, and he tested his theories on his oldest son. John Stuart Mill's education has become legendary: He had no toys or friends, but he could read Plato in Greek by the age of 7, and by 12 he was attending chemistry lectures at the Royal Military College. This regimen, which appalled everyone who heard about it — "If anything could make intellectual culture odious and terrible, it is the example of that overstrained infant," wrote one friend — did manage to make Mill a genius. It also cost him a nervous breakdown in his 20s, and left him susceptible to depression throughout his life.

Nothing is more impressive in Mill's story than the way he overcame this potentially ruinous childhood. Thanks in large part to his love for Harriet Taylor — a married woman who was his close companion for decades, and then his wife — Mill turned himself into the rarest kind of reformer, one who is as genuinely humane as he is effective. If Mill was a "firebrand," as Mr. Reeves's subtitle suggests with a flourish, he was not the kind who wanted to burn down factories, or churches, or Parliament.

There were such men in England and Europe during Mill's lifetime (1806-73), and at moments he could even sympathize with them. He gloried in the French revolution of 1848 — "There never was a time when so great a drama was being played out in one generation," he wrote — and in his lifelong battle with British prejudice and complacency, he sometimes yearned for a similar upheaval at home. "England has never had any general break-up of old associations," he grumbled, "and hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head."

But "in truth," Mr. Reeves points out, "Mill was anti-revolutionary at home." His fire was not for burning, but for shedding light, and his society was unusually willing to have its dark corners illuminated. Far from suffering the usual fate of a prophet in his own country, Mill became a revered figure in Victorian England. The magazine he edited, the London and Westminster Review, was a must-read for radicals and intellectuals; his dense philosophical treatises, "A System of Logic" and "Principles of Political Economy," were best sellers; he was even elected to a term in Parliament, though he didn't accomplish much there.

Most telling of all, Mill spent most of his adult life working for that pillar of the establishment, the East India Company, which gave him a princely salary and frequent vacations to support his intellectual work. Socrates, when asked at his trial what punishment he thought he deserved, ironically suggested that the Athenians give him free room and board for the rest of his life. He ended up with the hemlock, but Mill actually did enjoy something like Socrates's ideal: a comfortable position, including a summer house in Provence, from which to chastise the society that sheltered him.

In its treatment of Mill, Victorian England approached the ideal that he set forth in "On Liberty," his most influential book, and the one discussed most penetratingly by Mr. Reeves. The first and most important kind of freedom, Mill argued, was intellectual — the freedom to argue and criticize, to hold unpopular opinions without being punished or silenced. The basis of his argument was not simply that all men have the right to free speech — though he did certainly believe this — but, more interestingly, that society injures itself when it curtails the free exchange of ideas. "The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion," Mill writes, "is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

What breathes in this passage, as in all of Mill's work, is a profound trust in human nature, and still more in human potential. Yet Mill was far from believing that all men are good. In fact, to the consternation of democrats then and since, he did not believe in universal suffrage, on the principle that the English working classes of his own day were too ignorant and degraded to be trusted with political power. (As Mr. Reeves shows, he was sobered by the example of France, where the universal suffrage won in 1848 was used to crown Napoleon III emperor a few years later.)

Mill did believe, however, that every man and woman had the capacity to govern his or her own life — to think and judge independently of authority and tradition. More, he believed that this freedom constituted the nobility of human nature, and the school of all the virtues. Freedom was not a merely negative state, an affair of being left alone; it was a positive estate, which human beings have to claim for themselves by thinking and working. Mill is never more inspiring than when he describes the elation of this freedom:

Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging from boyhood — from the tutelage and control of even loved and affectionate elders — and entering upon the responsibilities of manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight, or releasing him from obstructive, even if not otherwise painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a human being, as before?

As a philosophical tradition (as distinguished from its current use as a partisan political term), liberalism has often been derided as bloodless and unemotional. To its enemies, liberalism means a passionless neutrality, a focus on process rather than meaningful goals, and an impoverished view of human nature as driven strictly by fear and greed. Mill's life and work are most important today as a refutation of these slanders, a proof that the liberal tradition — which is the American tradition, going back to the Founding Fathers — rests on a rich and noble understanding of human possibility. Mill, who was himself raised in a benevolent but absolute paternal tyranny, knew the delights and burdens of freedom as intimately as any writer ever has. That is why he insisted that every human being deserved to experience freedom, even when the conventional wisdom of his day held that women, or workers, or Africans, were simply incapable of it.

As Mr. Reeves shows, Mill's specific political views do not map neatly onto today's categories of left and right. He was against state control of education, and proposed something very like a voucher system; he believed in a flat tax, on the principle that progressive taxation punished the hardest-working, and he feared for the fate of the individual under socialism. At the same time, he saw inherited wealth as a force for injustice, and advocated confiscatory inheritance taxes; he believed that the state should own all land, to prevent a narrow aristocracy from engrossing the gifts of nature, and he was a sharp critic of organized religion. What united all these opinions, as Mr. Reeves skillfully shows, was a constant dedication to liberty as he understood it: "the consciousness of working out [our] own destiny under [our] own moral responsibility."

Boris at Centre Court

It was round about halfway through the second set and things were hotting up on Centre Court when I noticed the mobile starting to flash silently in my breast pocket. Furtively I fished it out. There was no choice. You have to be on call. Even in the throes of the greatest tennis match ever played, you have to be ready to respond to events.


In the four-hour, 48-minute struggle between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal we saw the eternal conflict between time and talent


I saw that someone had sent me a text. Was it news of a burst main on the Marylebone Road? Had the police made some breakthrough?

It was my old mucker Steve Norris, and here was the message he had the effrontery to send me. "Shouldn't you be attending to civic duties," texted Nozza, "rather than swanning around in the Royal Box at Wimbledon?"

I am afraid I was simply too engrossed in the game to reply, and so here - belatedly - is the reason, Steve old horse, why I spent the bulk of Sunday watching tennis.

I was there because I had never been to Wimbledon before, and I discovered that it is just about the sublimest thing this country has to offer.

Oh it wasn't just the flummery of the Royal Box, though I must say that the quality of the entertainment was stratospheric. It was the game that was the thing. It was the theatre. It was a pageant that told you all you needed to know about the human condition.

In the four-hour, 48-minute struggle between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal we saw the eternal conflict between time and talent. Any human activity - sport, art, literature, politics, even journalism - will produce its dominating exponent.

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There always seems to be someone who possesses a God-gifted ability to command the stage; until the years go by, and nature starts to take her course, and the sap runs more thickly in the veins of the master, and the younger talents start to snap at his heels.

And slowly experience becomes no substitute for energy, and genius finally loses out to sheer hunger - and that is what happened on Centre Court on Sunday.

When I think of the great Wimbledon champions of my lifetime, I think of the pathetic moment when they were eventually tipped off the pedestal. Borg was mighty in his time, wielding his wooden racket two-fisted like a Viking Berserker; and yet even in the moment when he snogged that trophy for the fifth time, his tendons were becoming invisibly less full of snap, and his fabled monocular vision was getting imperceptibly foggier, and he was ripe to be displaced by the genius of McEnroe; and then McEnroe's magic was gone and everyone idolised Becker until Becker made his last leap and the era of Sampras was ushered in, Sampras who served like a bullet to win seven times until he was himself usurped by some gigantic Croat with a gigantic serve.

Now the amazing Federer, who has won five times in a row, has both depressed and consoled us with the fact of his professional mortality.

Of course I was on the side of Federer, especially since his opponent had a peculiar habit of bending forward before every point and tugging from behind at the gusset of his shorts. It was very rum indeed.

There we were in the Royal Box, with the President of Switzerland and assorted dukes, duchesses and the heir to the Spanish throne, and Rafael Nadal seemed to be unable to sort out what is known as a serious wedgie.

I pointed this out delicately to one of the tennis supremos, and he said that it was a well-known Nadal phenomenon.

This pant-twanging was a ritual, he said, like saying a Hail Mary, and the challenger had been doing it since he was eight. I suppose I might have forgiven him for that, because we all suffer from some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder, but sometimes there was also frankly too much Nadal soundtrack to the rally.

The Swiss champion was silent, and almost impassive, while Nadal would yelp with each shot like a loose fan-belt. And while both men played shots of extraordinary creativity, and while I found myself rubbing my palms and jiggling up and down at the suspense of the rallies, it struck me that Federer was the true merchant of style.

Nadal certainly carved huge quantities of topspin from the ball, and yet there was a rasping clunking noise as he hit it. Federer seemed to serve faster and more smoothly, with less effort, and, though he made a few unforced errors, there were some shots which seemed to approach the Platonic ideal.

The Greek philosopher said there were these things out there called the Forms, eternal perfect examples of worldly things.

Well, we don't need to look for the Form of the cross-court forehand zinger - it was forged on Sunday afternoon by the racket of Roger. And yet, somehow, we all knew that Nadal had the edge.

Every time the rally went beyond five or six shots, you felt the Spaniard was the more dangerous, and so the crowd did that wonderful British thing: they got behind the underdog. Ro-ger! clap, clap, clap, they went, and as the evening wore on, the passions rose.

The crowd started to gasp at every point like a huge vacuum cleaner. Roger recovered his energy, and the shades lengthened, and the pigeons started to swoop across the court as though they had no idea of the titanic battle taking place.

It was just magic, and it struck me that it could not happen anywhere else but the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

I feel grateful beyond words to have been there and, if you really want to know, the last incumbent of my present office didn't go once in eight years - and refused to visit this wonderful adornment of London, even when the tournament was not in progress.

How can we hope to produce a champion of our own, when some politicians are still so idiotic as to pretend it is an elitist sport?

So that's why I felt it necessary to watch the tennis on Sunday, Steve.

It was not only a joy to take the hospitality of the Royal Box. It was a civic duty.

Consensus Art

If you ask 100 people to guess the number of jelly beans in a big glass jar, few will come close. The average of their guesses, however, will be almost exactly right.

That, in a nutshell, is the lesson of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” the best-selling book by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker magazine’s business columnist. When it comes to quantifiable judgments and practical decision-making, the aggregate intelligence of a large, diverse group of people apparently is usually better than that of any given individual, even if the individual is an expert on the question at hand.

So what about art? If you could capture it in a manageable form, would the collective judgment of all visitors to a major art museum be better than that of the people with Ph.D.’s, the curators or, heaven forbid, the professional critics? That is what “Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition” at the Brooklyn Museum invites us to ponder. The results are inconclusive, at best, and the exhibition itself is not very interesting to look at, but the issues it raises are fascinating.

In consultation with Mr. Surowiecki, Shelley Bernstein, the project’s organizer and the museum’s manager of information systems, devised a selection process intended to be as objective as possible. (Derek Powazek, a founder of jpgmag.com, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, creator of threadless.com, were also consultants.)

Ms. Bernstein began by inviting people to submit photographs (one per person) electronically relating to the theme “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.” The 389 images received were displayed on the museum’s Web site without the photographers’ names attached. (There are some professionals included, but basically it is an amateur contest.) Members of the public then evaluated the images one by one on a scale from “most effective” to “least effective.” Judgments were cast by 3,344 people.

After the evaluation period, the top 20 percent, or 78, of the photographs were selected for the exhibition. They were printed in four sizes — from 20 by 30 inches to 5 by 7 — with the larger sizes for the higher rankings. Then all were put on display, unframed, in a random, salon-style distribution in a small gallery. Laptops are provided to explain it all to visitors.

What you see is an array of competent, traditional, magazine-style photography — mostly cityscapes, riverscapes and portraits. One of the top-ranked works, a shot by Donna Aceto of three girls in headscarves on a Coney Island roller coaster, is like a Life magazine photograph, and so are many others. One by Claudia Sohrens showing a vast, colorful field of trash filling a vacant lot is like an Andreas Gursky. Marcia Bricker Halperin’s richly complicated black-and-white picture of people in a cafeteria with reflections from the front window glass layered over them has the aura of mid-20th-century Modernist photography.

Conspicuously absent are photographs that aggressively challenge mainstream taste and ideas about photography. This may have to do with who will respond to the kind of open invitation put out by the Brooklyn Museum, which is to say, people who have yet to achieve significant fame or commercial success and, probably, people who have pretty conventional ideas about photography.

In any event, whether the show proves that the crowd is better than the individual at picking quality photography is hard to say because you don’t know what to compare it with. You could look at all 389 submissions yourself — they are still online — and judge whether you would have made a different selection. Or the museum could have an expert — a professional photographer, critic, curator or dealer — make another selection to compare with the crowd’s picks.

But then who’s to say whether the expert’s show is better? You could have another crowd vote, or you could have yet another expert judge the two shows. But those judgments would also be subject to further judgment. And then, after all, maybe picking 78 images at random could make as good a show as any.

The big question is, what are the appropriate criteria for determining whether judgments, by individuals or groups, are good or true? With jelly beans, there is an exact number against which to compare guesses. With art it is less clear. The popularity of exhibitions can be measured by ticket sales; auction sales can tell you what individual artworks are worth. But what if popularity or sales are not your immediate or ultimate measures of success? The artists who make the most money are not necessarily the best artists.

What if you favor exhibitions designed to appeal not to crowds but mainly to discerning, well-informed individuals? What if you go to museums to learn from experts who have devoted long, deep and careful study to certain subjects? What if one of the things you value most in contemporary art is its resistance to mainstream taste, its willingness to forgo popularity in pursuit of ideas and experiences that few have already had?

How people arrive at consensus in the art world is worth studying. So is the tension between experts and nonexperts, which can extend to the highest reaches of the culture industry. So it is possible that Mr. Surowiecki’s ideas might yet prove fruitful for the business of art. But it will take a lot more persuasive reasoning to convince anyone with a serious interest in artistic quality that “crowd-curating” is a good idea. The best you can say for “Click!” is that it’s a good conversation starter.

NEW BEIJING

The shape of things to come

Beijing has rebuilt itself faster than any city on earth, turning from a warren of alleys into a capital fit for a superpower. No wonder the world's top architects - from Foster to Koolhaas - have flocked to make their mark on it. Here, the director of the Design Museum judges the stand-out buildings of the new era

Deyan Sudjic



Very few architects say in public that they will not build in Beijing. The only notable dissident is Daniel Libeskind of Ground Zero fame, who has questioned the seemliness of building for an authoritarian and undemocratic regime, under which construction workers endure the most primitive of conditions, with minimal safety provisions and poor wages.
A few more, having experienced the minimal fees offered by most Chinese developers, have quietly refused to work there. But that has not stopped an unprecedented architectural stampede, led by Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, and Jacques Herzog.

Despite everything, there is a sense that building here is one of those rare chances architects get to make history, so how can they say no? This is a capital that has rebuilt itself faster than any other in the history of the world. In two decades it has moved from the middle ages, with an overlay of bicycles and Stalinism, to a shimmering surreal vision, two parts Las Vegas, two parts Dubai, and five parts the most brutally unequal capitalist society on earth.

Everybody with any pretensions to an architectural profile has looked at working there, from David Adjaye and Will Alsop at the more radical end of the spectrum, to the large scale plan factories exporting off-the-shelf designs for ready-made cities.

Whether they wanted to or not, they have created exactly what their Chinese clients were looking for: a new city that looks like the capital of an emergent superpower, in which the factories of the communist era have been swept aside, making way for showy vulgarity, the bizarre, the wilful, the inept, and the occasional masterpiece.

Despite the promises to shut every construction site and dismantle every crane in time to let the dust settle for the Olympics, Beijing still looks like a vast building site. Looming over the Olympic stadium is a highrise tower that more or less behaves itself for its first 20 floors and then suddenly erupts into a gigantic Elvis quiff, rearing up another 15 floors and taking a terrifying cantilevered leap into space.

Not far from Tiananmen Square, still presided over by Mao's effigy, you can find an army of labourers putting the finishing touches to what taxi drivers proudly declare is the city's first six-star hotel. It's designed in a florid late 19th-century Belle Epoque style, rising like a huge meringue over the surviving fragments of the hutongs, the traditional courtyard houses that once characterised the entire city which have been demolished to make way for the next highrise.

The first piece of genuinely western grade modern architecture in Beijing, Denton Corker Marshall's Australian embassy, was built remarkably slowly by a construction brigade of the People's Liberation Army. It was finished in 1992. Since then, an entire new city has been built around it.

Context is not something Beijing has done well since the days when the north-south axis that runs through the city was violated by Mao's creation of Tiananmen Square. This was adorned by the erection of a monument to the heroes of the People's War, an act that was followed by the still more damaging placing in the exact centre of the square, blocking the axis, of Mao's mausoleum in what, were it not for the revolutionary statuary, would look like the library for a moderately ambitious Midwestern campus.

While the Olympic venues are already complete, the city centre is not. The museum on the west side of Tiananmen, facing the Great Hall of the People, is still a shell. Behind the walls of the old legation district, a huge new shopping district is under construction. Its mainly elderly, or migrant, inhabitants have been cleared out to make way for what is aimed at becoming the city's answer to Covent Garden in London.

All that is finished in this part of the city is the Grand National Theatre, designed by Paul Andreu, the architect responsible for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. It is a monstrous gesture, a metal egg with the tedious inevitability of symmetry. To make matters worse, it is sunk into the middle of a circular lake - not so much a boiled, as a fried, egg. It's a moat that does nothing to relieve the barren monotony of Tiananmen Square. Equally troubling is American architect Steve Holl's project by the second ring road. Holl has designed an apartment complex: a cluster of a dozen towers, linked by two-storey walkways 20 storeys up.

Beijing's architectural evolution has gone from Stalin, who summoned Chinese architects to Moscow for fraternal lessons in authoritarian Art Deco classicism, to post-modernism, by way of a brief episode in revivalism that saw offices blocks topped by giant tiled roofs and lacquered dragons. Now it is a place where anything can happen.

· Deyan Sudjic is director of the Design Museum in London

The Olympic Stadium

Herzog & de Meuron's awe inspiring 91,000-seat stadium, known, because of its latticed surface, as the Bird's Nest, is the defining landmark, not just of the Olympics, but of the new China, the emergent superpower that is using the games to mark its breakneck transformation from Marxist-Leninist backwater to glittering metropolis. Its steel structure is of a complexity that tested Chinese technology and manufacturing to its limits. As a monument it has a richness and depth that take it far beyond the simplistic cult of the icon. Herzog & de Meuron have done nothing less than reinvent the athletic stadium. Instead of an isolated object, cut off from the city around it, the bird's nest is designed to create public spaces that come to life even when the stadium is not in use. As the most conspicuous of Beijing's new landmarks, it has also been sharply criticised by Chinese architects who have been angered by their exclusion from the most high-profile projects.

Aquatic Centre

The Olympic pool is sheathed in a huge plastic skin, patterned on the structure like a soap bubble. Designed by the Australian architects PTW, it looks best at night, glowing translucent blue, a quieter counterpart to the structural flamboyance of the stadium on the other side of the Olympic green. It's designed as a deliberately understated counterpoint to the stadium that adjoins it and which is given pride of place in the crush of much less interesting buildings that press in from all around.

The Grand National Theatre

Within sight of the courtyards of the Forbidden City, and on the edge of Tiananmen Square, the Grand National Theatre is impossible to ignore and perhaps the most questionable of the city's new structures. Designed by Paul Andreu, the architect for Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, it has a ruthless symmetry. Its titanium and glass shell is sunk into the middle of a circular lake that acts a moat, the most anti-urban gesture imaginable. Its three halls are reached by tunnel, ducking under the water, to take visitors into the most lavishly finished interiors in Beijing.

China Central Television/ Mandarin Hotel

The CCTV towers will not be ready for the Olympics. Nor, despite earlier claims to the contrary, will the Mandarin hotel adjoining it. Yet the complex is already one of the city's most conspicuous new structures. Both are designed by the same team, Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture. They have produced the most aggressive, and determinedly transgressive, landmark for Beijing. The earthquake-defying form - and huge structural overhangs which leave tens of thousands of square feet of office space supported, apparently, by nothing - look bizarre even in a city in which anything is possible. The hotel and offices can be read as a single, extraordinarily violent architectural composition, a wildly thrashing monster, its tail flapping up and down, trailing behind two giant elephant's legs. It has taken architects in China 20 years to get the hang of building sophisticated polished skins. With the CCTV headquarters, Koolhaas has decided that the mark of true sophistication for China is to look rough. To deal with all those extreme cantilevers in an earthquake zone takes a great deal of structural skill, here provided by Arup engineers. It also needs a fair bit of steel, which is applied, apparently at random in strange clusters, some stopping mid-flight, others going off at odd angles, creating the impression of a darned sock, or structural Band-Aid, applied retrospectively to patch up the cracks.

China World Trade Center 3

Beijing's tallest tower, the China World Trade Center 3, is the third instalment in a development that has become the heart of the city's business district, a thicket of towers that sprouted almost by accident between the first crop of international hotels and the diplomatic enclave.

As contemporary high-rises go, at only 1,083ft , it is relatively modest. Shanghai's World Financial Centre is half as high again and the Burj al Arab tower in Dubai, now reaching completion, will be more than 2,000ft, but Beijing knows how to impress with more than sheer size.

Designed by the American firm, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, it's a skyscraper that stands out for its quiet reticence. The tower, with its gently tapered form and carefully pleated metal and glass skin, is an elegantly cut Brooks Brothers suit, with curious echoes in its gothic base of Minoru Yamasaki's Twin Towers destroyed in the 11 September attacks in New York. When it's finally completed next year, the first 50 floors will be earmarked for office use, with 22 hotel floors on top.

Jianwai Soho

When I first saw this project in 2003, you could still find slogans from the Red Guard days on the walls of the few remaining factory compounds that were once China's pride and joy, in the process of being flattened to make way for a new capitalist city. Working for Soho China, run by Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, the most innovative developers in Beijing, the Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto has created a huge complex of flats, shops and cafes. There are 20 towers, containing 7 million sq ft of space, ranged in a careful grid.

Bejing Airport

Bejing's new terminal is essentially a new airport. Cross the threshold and you are dazzled by what feels like a landscape rather than an interior. A sparse collection of giant columns, white inside the glass walls, red outside, hold up its delicate, refined roof. Norman Foster has more experience than most of designing airports. Stansted, Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok and now Beijing have each moved a step further in perfecting lightweight structures. Beijing's sweeping roof, elegant as a sand dune, has been peeled open here and there to allow in flashes of daylight while the glass walls show the ranks of jumbos outside.

Summer

Handel Celebrates Peace

Unless you're a graduate student in 18th century European history, it's unlikely you know off the top of your head who the winners and losers were in War of the Spanish Succession. Suffice it to say, on today's date in 1713, to celebrate the successful resolution of that conflict (a settlement known as the "Peace of Utrecht") this festive choral "Te Deum" was performed at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

It was written by a very ambitious 28-year old German composer named George Friedrich Handel.

Handel had come to England for a 6-month visit in 1710, and then for good in the spring of 1712. We're not sure if Handel wrote his "Utrecht Te Deum" in response to an invitation from the British royal family, or wrote it "on spec" to win their favor. In any case, when performed by the Royal Musicians and the choir of the Chapel Royal on July 7, 1713*, it made a tremendous impression. Handel was commissioned to provide many more festive choral and instrumental works for British monarchy in the years the followed.

Handel's first royal employer was King George the First, and three years after Handel's death, King George the Third sat on the throne. Now, King George the Third may have suffered from madness and he may have lost the American colonies, but at least he did know a good composer when he heard one. He idolized Handel and saw to it that the composer was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Real California

California is laced with fabled roadways: Highway 1, the Golden State, El Camino Real, Route 66 and many others. Some follow the footpaths of padres, the trails of wagon trains. And some are monuments to the Freeway Age and California's bearhug embrace of Car Culture. ¶ State Highway 33 will not be confused with any of these asphalt icons. Nobody's likely to write a song about Highway 33, although in one stretch it does cut through Buck Owens country. Nor will a literary anthology be built around it, as was done not long ago with the Central Valley's Highway 99. ¶ Still, to travel this two-lane from top to bottom -- a 300-mile drive that begins just below the San Francisco Bay delta, passes through the San Joaquin Valley's west side, crosses steep coastal mountains and ends at Ventura, where Highway 33 disappears into the 101 -- is to tour what might be called the real California.

Through a bug-splattered windshield, it's all there to see:



California unvarnishedImprobably far-flung subdivisions, their outward march stalled only by the mortgage mess; rolling croplands crisscrossed by irrigation canals; a young patriot's grave, the four flags at his tombstone fluttering in a hot valley wind; a hulking new federal prison, rising from cantaloupe fields; West Hills oil rigs, pumping furiously in a new boom; panoramic views of unspoiled high country; and, finally, the Pacific at sunset, 5,000 feet below.

Comparatively few people drive Highway 33; even fewer make the run from end to end. Highway 1, dancing along the coast, offers better scenery, and Interstate 5, a more-or-less parallel route, greater speed and efficiency. No, this is a workaday road, a highway for short-haul truckers and agricultural sales reps, for convoys of harvesters, vans shuttling prisoners and even the occasional lone tractor.

It is a good road for someone seeking to reacquaint himself with a vexing old friend: California. Sometimes, the best way to make sense of this state is simply to get out into it, to take a look around and refresh the eyes. And, here and there, to make some stops along the way.

In Patterson, a tidy farm town set against the dry, rolling foothills that form the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley, land broker Shane P. Donlon stood before a color-coded map in his roadside office and pointed to a particular swath of property. Nearly 1,000 acres, it extended west from the town almost to Interstate 5.

"The last time you were here," he said, referring to a similar drive-by conversation about 10 years ago, "this was all farmland."

And now it's covered with houses, nearly 4,000 of them, built on streets with names like Placer Creek and Buckskin Way and Heartland and sold to long-haul Bay Area commuters heading west through the crowded Altamont Pass each day, defying what once was presumed to be a geographical barrier to sprawl.

Of course, the mortgage crisis and $4.50 gas have blindsided these newcomers, and now there are foreclosure signs, it seems, on almost every block. So it has always gone in California, where the historic pattern of growth is to lurch forward in boom, stagger backward in bust, then repeat.

In turn, there are tensions for those who lived in Patterson before the century-old farm town was sucked into the Bay Area orbit. At a downtown diner, an old guy the waitress called Charley was complaining to another local, a heavily tattooed younger man wearing shorts: "They build those big houses and bring their juvenile-delinquent kids with them. They bring their dope with them . . ."

On the counter sat a copy of the Patterson Irrigator. In a letter to the editor, a resident complained about the recent Patterson High graduation. Newer elements in town, it seemed, had blasted air horns throughout the ceremony.

"I was also appalled," the aggrieved correspondent went on, "by the remarks of the principal when he pointed out that graduates had come from many different places. . . . As San Jose and Oakland were named, the whoops and hollers from the audience grew progressively louder, and gang signs were flashed by several people in the audience around where I was sitting."

She concluded: "Some changes need to be made."

Back on the highway and across the valley floor, through apricot country, almond country, cantaloupe country. Crops are a way to measure both place and season here, as Ernest J. Finney observed in his novel "California Time": "The valley had no calendar. Time in California wasn't measured out in months; it was by crops. Spring meant strawberries, then the apricots, cherries, peaches, and it was summer. . . . Fall, still blazing hot, was cotton, persimmons, pomegranates . . ."

Near Santa Nella, at the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery, the flat tombstone that marks the grave of Joshua Daniel Pickard stands out. It is one of the few festooned with flags and flowers in this remote, starkly beautiful cemetery.

Many of the gravestones are unadorned, the markers barely visible in the grass. A cemetery official explained: Flowers by policy are cleared from the grave sites every other Wednesday, and it's difficult for families and friends of the dead to make it out regularly to replace them. It's a long drive from most California cities.

Pickard, though, grew up in nearby Merced, and his grave receives a lot of visitors. He was 20 years old when he was killed by sniper fire in 2006, one week before Christmas. He also happens to be one of only two Iraq war dead buried here. Although veterans are eligible to be buried in national cemeteries like this one, most of the 500 or so Californians killed in the war so far are interred in private graveyards close to their hometowns.

"When you bury a child," said Nancy Passarelli, the cemetery's budget analyst, "you want them a little closer to home. We understand that."

The highway cuts through scrappy little towns including Dos Palos, Firebaugh, Mendota, ag-dependent communities that always seem to be on the brink -- just one drought or crop calamity away from ruin -- but somehow manage to hang on. Even the road signage seems to project a stubborn resolve.

"Best Effort, No Excuses," insists the billboard at Firebaugh High School.

"Si Se Puede," vows a sign marking a used-car lot.

Highway 33 was born a century ago, in the time of Hiram Johnson and the Progressives. In a gubernatorial campaign devoted to running Southern Pacific Railroad out of California politics, Johnson pointedly stumped the state by auto, in a red Locomobile, often taking dirt trails to the next stop. The Progressive promise was to connect the county seats of California with paved roadways, and upon Johnson's victory in 1910 the work commenced.

The system has been renumbered and reconfigured over time. Today, in certain stretches, Highway 33 joins other routes: I-5, the 152, the 166. It also takes on different names: Derrick Avenue, Dos Palos Avenue, the Petroleum Highway, the West Side Highway, the Maricopa Highway. In Avenal, the street signs identify it as "Laneva," which is Avenal spelled backward.

Coming into Coalinga, a privately posted billboard proclaims that "Jesus is Lord of Coalinga." Religious sentiments aside, the town certainly is familiar with resurrection. Its downtown was shaken to the ground in a 1983 quake.

A quarter-century later, it has been completely rebuilt, though not in its original style: lovely but vulnerable brick.

"People in town were not going to let Coalinga die," said Stephanie McHaney, curator of a private museum on Elm Avenue, another of Highway 33's many fleeting aliases. "They had so many roots here. For a while, though," she conceded, "you had to wonder if we were going to make it."

The R.C. Baker Memorial Museum seemingly contains every implement and gadget known to 20th century America. Also on display are mastodon bones, a vintage firetruck, plastic dashboard hula dolls, an actual oil rig and a collection of well-worn shoes of the famous.

The shoes were gathered in the 1960s as part of a school project meant to inspire students to dream big as they walked a few steps in the actual footwear of their heroes. Columnist Art Buchwald sent a pair of loafers and Pat Boone donated white bucks. Football coach Tom Landry forwarded his cleats, black with white laces. President Nixon responded with black brogues, newly purchased and never worn.

After Coalinga, farms begin to give way to oil fields -- Elk Hills, Midway, Sunset -- with rigs pumping away miles from the highway, far into the western hills. There's a moonscape feel to the California oil patch, the dropping sun filtered through vapors and dust, the latticework of pipes stretched across parched land. Oil tankers and roughnecks' pickups boom along the highway.

Outside Taft, another roadside attraction: a rusted pipe, a pit coated with asphalt and a plaque marking where Lakeview No. 1 "blew in." Lakeview was the colossal strike in 1910 that, as one veteran of the oil fields explained, "pretty much started it all." He was one of five retired roughnecks gathered for a weekly coffee klatch at a diner on Highway 33 in Maricopa.

These men guessed their average age was 80 and for a visitor calculated their collective time in the California oil patch: 180 years. With an easy patience, they described how the booming global price of crude translated into changes on the ground.

"Basically," said Rod Napoleon, a week shy of his 80th birthday, "what you will see now is that every one of them that is able to pump is pumping." He had noticed, too, a proliferation of "work-over rigs," mobile contraptions brought in to coax older wells back into service. Meanwhile, wells that extract crude with steam have been shut down; the fuel to run them costs too much now.

Less easy for the men to explain is why gas costs more at the pump in oil towns like Taft and McKittrick than in the cities.

"It's higher here than anywhere else, even Bakersfield," Napoleon said.

"Everything is higher around here," someone else chipped in, "except the wages."

They spoke with affection about their particular corner of California, one not often described as scenic. Their places in the old fields had long since been taken by their children and grandchildren, just as they had followed their fathers and grandfathers. Still, they chose to stay.

"Look, we're in the middle of nowhere and it is as ugly as hell," said Phil Allmon, who at 58 was the youngster at the table. "But we're just two hours from everything!"

And so they are.

After Maricopa, it's a little less than two hours to Ventura. The highway jogs past the southern flank of the vast Carrizo Plain and then, running along the Cuyama River, begins to climb through a rolling landscape of hayfields and vines -- a stunning landscape and a reminder of California's enduring capacity to surprise: No matter how much of it you believe you've seen, there's always more.

Here Highway 33 becomes an almost forgotten road, carrying only a few hundred vehicles a day. It leads into Los Padres National Forest, which crests at 5,000 feet on Pine Mountain, with its woods, waterfalls and an abundance of white Matilija poppies. To the west, the roadside flowers compete for attention with the still-vivid scars of the vast Zaca fire of last summer.

After the crest, the descent into Ojai and Ventura begins. At certain bends, it's now possible to catch glimpses of the Santa Barbara Channel. The climb down doesn't take long. On a road sign 33 miles from the coast, a first splash of graffiti. The radio begins to pick up scratchy traffic bulletins from Los Angeles, and there's a haze on the horizon.

At the bottom, Highway 33 widens and then, after a few miles, disappears into the thrumming currents of U.S. 101, packed with evening traffic headed south to Los Angeles or north to Santa Barbara, San Francisco and beyond, to different pieces of the wonderfully strange puzzle that is California.

More than a Fortnight Ended

Midsummer Classic



Five Sets and Nearly Five Hours Later, Nadal Wins Wimbledon

By Liz Clarke

Quite difficult to recall a finer match.


WIMBLEDON, England, July 6 -- Rafael Nadal wasn't the first Wimbledon champion to climb through the stands and bury a tearful face in his parents' embrace.

But he was the first to scamper from there to the Royal Box and shake the hand of his country's Crown Prince. Nadal broke with tradition again by marching outside the All England club's entrance with the Wimbledon trophy in his arms to sign as many autographs as he could, triggering shrieks worthy of the Beatles before stepping back inside to fulfill the media obligations that awaited.

Only glimmers of light remained by the time Nadal completed the longest final in Wimbledon history Sunday, defeating five-time champion Roger Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (7-5), 6-7 (10-8), 9-7. And there wasn't a person Nadal didn't want to share his life's greatest moment with as darkness fell.

Federer fought off three match points before succumbing, sending a final forehand into the net to end the 4-hour 48-minute battle that was twice halted for rain. Nadal collapsed on Centre Court in relief, exhaustion and disbelief over dethroning Federer to win the game's most coveted title.

"It's impossible to describe," said Nadal, 22, who grew up on the clay courts of Mallorca. "It's a dream. When I was a kid I dreamed of playing here. But to win here? For any player -- but for the Spanish especially -- it is a dream."

Nadal had beaten Federer in 11 of their 17 previous matches. But he had never beaten him on grass, falling just short in last year's five-set Wimbledon final.

No player had beaten Federer on grass since 2002. And most predicted that his mastery would continue on Sunday, as the Swiss star sought to top Bjorn Borg's modern mark of five consecutive Wimbledon titles.

But it was Nadal who added the asterisk next to Borg's name instead, becoming the first man since Borg (in 1980) to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year.

It was a Wimbledon final made memorable by more than streaks and statistics.

Federer and Nadal are the best players in the world, miles above their challengers in shot-making and grit. And their rivalry, now in its fifth year, often has produced magic.

Sunday's match was their most riveting. It included every shot in the game's lexicon as the Swiss and Spaniard varied tactics and tempo, trying to coax mistakes out of each other. It proved that a clay-court master such as Nadal can adapt his game to grass. And it underscored the best qualities in athletes: resilience, courage, creativity and fair play.

If ever a Grand Slam final called for splitting the trophy, this was it.

Nadal acknowledged as much after accepting the silver gilt cup from the Duke of Kent. With the Centre Court crowd of 15,000 standing and cheering, Nadal spoke about the challenge of competing in the same era as Federer, whom he hailed as "the best player" in history.

"He's still number one," Nadal said, as the Swiss looked on. "He's still the best. He's still [a] five-time champion here. Right now, I have only one."

Nadal was on pace to win his first Wimbledon trophy in straight sets in the early going.

He broke Federer in the third game. And in 48 minutes, he accomplished what no player had done all tournament: win a set against Federer.

Nadal won the next set with similar tactics, hammering away at Federer's backhand at every opportunity. It wasn't that Federer played poorly. He was just shy of perfection, addled by the gusting wind and the wicked spin on Nadal's ball.

Federer changed tactics in the third set, coming to the net more readily to end the long rallies Nadal loves. But with neither able to break serve, a tiebreaker was needed. Federer fired four aces to force a fourth set.

A thrilling display of shot-making followed. In his four years as the world's No. 1 player, Federer has grown accustomed to wielding his racket like a magician's wand. His cross-court forehand is a wonder to behold, particularly when the ball skims the sideline just so and takes a sharp turn out of the court. Even Federer must marvel at his artistry.

But Nadal denied him that luxury so many times Sunday because he kept retrieving balls that would have been winners against lesser men and firing back winners in kind. Still, another tiebreaker was needed.

Nadal bolted to a 5-2 lead but played his worst two points of the match to give Federer a reprieve. After fending off a match point at 6-7, Federer soon found himself again in trouble when Nadal blasted a beautiful passing shot down the line.

Federer answered with a backhand passing shot even more beautiful than Nadal's and went on to win the tiebreak and pull even at two sets each.

Surely, Federer thought, Nadal would be disappointed after that. The momentum had swung his way, Federer thought to himself.

But Nadal's optimism proved as relentless as his athleticism. While Federer assumed he was brooding during the changeover that followed, Nadal was giving himself a pep talk, telling himself, as he sat on his chair, how well he was playing. Yes, he had made a few mistakes, he told himself. But Federer had hit some great shots. Why get down on himself for that? Why not play on, just as he had before, and see what happened?

The fifth set was played out against alternating chants of "Ra-fa!" and "Ro-ger!" The difference in their ability could have fit on the head of a pin. And it seemed impossible that either could manage the two-game advantage required to win the match, with fifth-set tiebreakers not allowed at Wimbledon.

Nadal got the critical break to take an 8-7 lead. And with the light fading, he blasted one last shot that Federer couldn't handle.

Satchmo

Born on the Fourth of July

On today's date in 1971, jazz great Louis Armstrong died in New York City, at the age of 69. He was born in New Orleans, and for years, all the standard reference books listed his birthday as the Fourth of July, 1900. Well, it turned out that wonderfully symbolic date was cooked up by Armstrong's manager Joe Glaser. Louis himself wasn't sure when he was born, so the 4th of July seemed as good a date as any, and was accepted as fact for many years. Eventually documents were discovered that proved Armstrong was actually born on August 4, 1901.

Armstrong earned the nickname "Satchmo" -- short for "Satchelmouth" -- and in later years he was affectionately dubbed "Pops." If the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is to be believed, Armstrong was the central figure in the development of jazz in the 20th century.

In the 1960s, radical blacks criticized Armstrong as an "Uncle Tom" too eager to please white audiences, forgetting that it was Armstrong, alone among his jazz peers, who courageously criticized President Eisenhower for not defending the black children attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The British music critic Norman Lebrecht offered this assessment: "Armstrong never bowed his head nor sang from anywhere but the heart. He was a figure of enormous dignity and a musical innovator of universal importance."

Acknowledging his influence in American concert music, composer Libby Larsen subtitled one of her works, a 1990 Piano Concerto "Since Armstrong."

The Humanities

The Burden of the Humanities

by Wilfred M. McClay

Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear.

Enter the eminent literary scholar Stanley Fish, author of a regular blog for The New York Times, who addressed the subject with a kicky piece entitled “Will the Humanities Save Us?” (Jan. 6, 2008). Where there is Fish there will always be bait, for nothing pleases this contrarian professor more than ­double-­crossing his readers’ expectations and enticing them into a heated debate, and he did not ­disappoint.

He took as his starting point Anthony Kronman’s passionate and ­high-­minded book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), in which Kronman argues that higher education has lost its soul, and can only recover it by re-emphasizing the building of character through the study of great literary and philosophical texts. Fish was having none of such “pretty ideas.” There is “no evidence,” he sniffed, that such study has the effect of “ennobling” us or spurring us on to noble actions. If it did, then the finest people on earth would be humanities professors, a contention for which the evidence is, alas, mostly on the other side.

Teachers of literature and philosophy possess specialized knowledge, Fish asserted, but they do not have a ministry. The humanities can’t save us, and in fact they don’t really “do” anything, other than give pleasure to “those who enjoy them.” Those of us involved with the humanities should reconcile ourselves to the futility of it all, and embrace our uselessness as a badge of honor. At least that way we can claim that we are engaged in “an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”


This sustained shrug elicited a blast of energetic and mostly negative response from the Times’ online readers. To read through the hundreds of comments is to be reminded that Americans do seem to have a strong and abiding respect for the humanities. For many of these readers, Fish’s remarks failed the test of moral seriousness, and failed to come to terms with exactly what it is that makes the humanities special, and places upon them a particular task, a particular burden, in the life of our civilization. That one of the humanities’ most famous, influential, and ­well-­paid elder statesmen would damn his own livelihood with such faint praise seems in itself a perfect indicator of where we now find ­ourselves.




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What does it mean to speak of the “burden” of the humanities? The phrase can be taken several ways. First, it can refer to the weight the humanities themselves have to bear, the things that they are supposed to accomplish on behalf of us, our nation, or our civilization. But it can also refer to the ­near ­opposite: the ways in which the humanities are a source of responsibility for us, and their recovery and cultivation and preservation our job, even our ­duty.

Both of these senses of ­burden—­the humanities as preceptor, and the humanities as ­task—­need to be included in our sense of the problem. The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life ­possible.

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities—­and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide—­is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in—­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.




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First, we should try to impart some clarity to the term “humanities.” It is astounding to discover how little attention is given to this task. More often than not, we fall back upon essentially bureaucratic definitions that reflect the ways in which the modern research university parcels out office space. The commonest definition in circulation is a long sentence from a congressional ­statute—­the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, the legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. As you might expect, this rendition is wanting in a certain grace. But here it is: “The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.”


In some respects, this provides a useful beginning. But doesn’t it tacitly assume that we already understand the thing being defined? Rather than answer the larger question, a long list merely evades it. One doesn’t capture the animating goals of a manufacturing firm merely by listing all of the firm’s discrete activities, from procurement of raw materials to collection of accounts receivable. The task of definition requires that some overarching purpose be taken into ­account.

It is a bad sign that defenders of the humanities become ­tongue-­tied so quickly when a layperson asks what the humanities are, and why we should value them. Sometimes the answers are downright silly. At a meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies two years ago in Philadelphia, the subject was “Reinvigorating the Humanities,” but the discussion was anything but vigorous. Consider this witticism from Don Randel, then the president of the University of Chicago and ­president-­elect of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “When the lights go out and our friends in science haven’t developed a national energy policy, they’ll be out of business. We, with a book of poems and a candle, will still be alive.” Well, we’ll see about that. This is the kind of ­airy-­fairy, self-congratulatory silliness that gives the humanities a bad name. And when Pauline Yu, president of the council, addressed herself to the big, obvious question—Just what will it take to reinvigorate the humanities?—the answer was stupefyingly predictable. What was needed was, in the immortal words of the great American labor leader Samuel Gompers, more: more money, more fundraising attention from university leaders, more support from Congress, more jobs for ­professors.

The fixation on a Gompers agenda suggests that many of those who speak for the humanities, especially within the organized scholarly disciplines (history, English, and the like), have not quite acknowledged the nature of the problem. The humanities reached unprecedented heights of prestige and funding in the post–World War II era. But their advocates can only dream of such status today. Now the humanities have become the Ottoman Empire of the academy, a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates. And the empire steadily erodes, as colleges and universities eliminate such core humanities departments as classics (or, at the University of Southern California, German), and enrollment figures for humanities courses continue to fall or stagnate. Even at Anthony Kronman’s Yale College, which has an unusually strong commitment to the humanities and many stellar humanities departments, the percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has fallen sharply since 1986, from half of all majors to just over a ­third.

The thing most needful is not more money, but a willingness to think back to first principles. What are the humanities, other than disciplines with “humanistic content”? What exactly are the humanities for, other than giving pleasure to people who enjoy playing inconsequential games with words and ­concepts?





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It is perhaps more helpful, if still somewhat abstract, to say that “the humanities” include those branches of human knowledge that concern themselves with human beings and their culture, and that do so in ways that show conversancy with the language of human values and respect for the dignity and expressive capacity of the human ­spirit.

But this can be stated more directly. The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.

Such means are not entirely dissimilar from the careful and disciplined methods of science. In fact, the humanities can benefit greatly from emulating the sciences in their careful formulation of problems and honest weighing of evidence. But the humanities are distinctive, for they begin (and end) with a willingness to ground themselves in the world as we find it and experience it, the world as it appears to ­us—­the thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and memories that make up our picture of reality. The genius of humanistic ­knowledge—­and it is a form of ­knowledge—­is its commensurability, even consanguinity, with the objects it helps us to know. Hence, the knowledge the humanities offer us is like no other, and cannot be replaced by scientific breakthroughs or superseded by advances in material knowledge. Science teaches us that the earth rotates on its axis while revolving around the sun. But in the domain of the humanities, the sun still also rises and sets, and still establishes in that diurnal rhythm one of the deepest and most universal expressive symbols of all the things that rise and fall, or live and ­die.

It utterly violates the spirit of literature, and robs it of its value, to reduce it to something else. Too often, there seems to be a presumption among scholars that the only interest in Dickens or Proust or Conrad derives from the extent to which they can be read to confirm the abstract propositions of Marx, Freud, Fanon, and the ­like—­or Smith and Hayek and Rand, for that ­matter—­and promote the right preordained political attitudes, or lend support to the identity politics du jour. Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to predetermined criteria. Meanwhile, the genuine, unfeigned love of literature is most faithfully represented not in the universities but among the intelligent general readers and devoted ­secondary-­school teachers scattered across the ­land.





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The chief point to make here is that the humanities do have a use, an important use—an essential use—in our lives. Not that we can’t get along without them. Certainly not in the same sense that we can’t get along without a steady supply of air, water, and nutrients to sustain organic life, and someone to make candles and books for the world’s poets. But we need the humanities in order to understand more fully what it means to be human, and to permit that knowledge to shape and nourish the way we ­live.

For many Americans, not just Stanley Fish, such a statement goes against the grain. After all, we like to think of ourselves as a practical people. We don’t spend our lives chasing fluffy abstractions. We don’t dwell on the past. We ask ­hard­headed questions such as Where does that get you? How can you solve this problem? What’s the payoff? If you’re so smart, we demand, why aren’t you ­rich?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with concentrating on the “uses” of something. The difficulty comes when we operate with too narrow a definition of “use.” At some point, we have to consider the ultimate goals toward which our life’s actions are directed. What makes for a genuinely meaningful human life? Of what “use” are things that fail to promote that end? If you’re so rich, we must ask, why aren’t you ­wise—­or ­happy?

And that brings me to a characteristically humanistic way to relate a truth: by telling a story. The tale begins with a tourist on holiday, wandering through the back alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he comes upon a little antique shop, filled with curious pieces of ­bric-­a-­brac and art objects. What especially catches his eye is a beautifully wrought, ­life-­size bronze statue of a rat. He asks the elderly shopkeeper the price. “The rat costs $12,” says the shopkeeper, “and it will be $1,000 more for the story behind it.” “Well, you can keep your story, old man,” responds the tourist, “But I’ll take the statue.”


The tourist leaves the store with the statue under his arm. As he crosses the street, he is surprised to see two rats emerge from a storm drain and fall into step behind him. He looks nervously over his shoulder and starts to walk faster. Soon more rats appear and begin to follow him. In a few minutes vermin are coming out of every sewer, basement, and vacant lot, forming themselves into swarms and packs and massing in step behind him. People on the street point and shout as the rodents force him into a trot, then a dead run. The rats, now squeaking and squealing grotesquely, stay right behind ­him.

By the time he reaches the water’s edge, the line of rats trailing him extends back for 12 city blocks. It’s a terrifying spectacle. In desperation, the tourist leaps as high as he can onto a lamppost and grasps it with one arm while, with the other, he flings the statue as far as he can into the waters of San Francisco Bay. To his amazement, the hordes of rats race right by him and follow the statue, surging over the breakwater and leaping into the bay . . . then promptly ­drowning.

Immediately, the tourist hurries back to the antique shop. When he appears at the door, the shopkeeper smiles knowingly and says, “Ah, yes, sir. So now you’ve seen what the statue can do, and you’ve come back to find out the story?” “No, no, no,” replies the tourist excitedly. “I don’t care about that. But can you sell me a bronze statue of a lawyer?”


The story is good for a laugh, but it also illustrates a point. The tourist in this story is interested only in the immediate uses of things. He couldn’t care less about “knowing the story,” the context in which the statue came to be, and which would explain the source of its special powers. This lack of curiosity is part of the joke. But doesn’t the punch line assume that we agree with him? If the statue can have such amazing effects, who cares how it works? A picture may be worth a thousand words, but no story is worth a thousand ­bucks.

This, I’m afraid, is the characteristic American attitude toward the past. “You can keep your story, old man; I’ll take the statue.” But our tourist friend also makes a serious error of judgment, assuming that all bronze statues from this shop will have the same effect. How can he possibly know that, until he has heard “the story?” His lack of interest in “the story” is not only crude, it is foolish. Hasn’t he learned that you get what you pay ­for?

Yet this attitude, or something like it, is all too common in our culture. One is particularly aware of the problem if one is a teacher of American history, at a time when the state of general knowledge of our past is abysmally low and sinking. It is profoundly important for us to resist this tendency. For you can’t really appreciate the statuary of our ­country—­our political and social and economic ­institutions—­or know the value of American liberty and prosperity, or intelligently assess America’s virtues and vices against the standard of human history and human possibility, unless you pay the price of learning the ­stories.


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If the humanities are the study of human things in human ways, then it follows that they function in culture as a kind of corrective or regulative mechanism, forcing upon our attention those features of our complex humanity that the given age may be neglecting or missing. It may be that the humanities are so hard to define because they have always defined themselves in opposition. That becomes clearer if we look back at the role played by the humanities (or by cultural activities that we can legitimately call by that name) in earlier ­times.

Some notion of the humanities first began to arise out of the Greek conception of paideia, a course of general education dating from the mid–fifth century bc that was designed to prepare young men for active citizenship. It was further developed in the Roman notion of humanitas, set forth in Cicero’s De Oratore (55 bc). Early Church Fathers, notably St. Augustine, would adapt the Greek and Roman ideas to a program of Christian education, built around the study of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. For classical and early Christian thinkers alike, these disciplines were thought to have value because they aided human beings in the fulfillment of their highest human nature, a rational nature that was assumed to be elevated above and distinct from that of mere ­animals.

By the Renaissance, though, the point of reference had changed somewhat. The studia humanitatis, as the “humanists” of ­15th-­century Italy called them, shifted emphasis toward subjects that were human, not as opposed to animal, but as opposed to divine. Hence, their object was notably more secular than religious in character, though partaking of both attributes. They were grounded in a recommitment to classical forms of learning that had been de-emphasized (though never entirely lost) during the Middle Ages. Such logic carried the day, perhaps even carried it too well—for the philosophes of the ­18th-­century Enlightenment later rejected the studia humanitatis precisely because of their heavy emphasis on Latin and Greek studies. Inspired by the success of burgeoning modern science and bored by the pedantic study of ancient classical texts, Denis Diderot and the other French Encyclopedists thought it long past time to move on to new ­things.

By the 19th century, the proper domain of the humanities had undergone another transformation. They now began to take their identity, not so much from the human distance from the realm of the divine, but instead from the human distance from ­nature—­specifically from nature as understood by the increasingly influential physical sciences. These ripening disciplines, such as mathematical physics, tended to picture the world and its phenomena “objectively” and mechanistically, without reference to human subjectivity and meaning. It was now the distinctive role of the humanities to counter this tendency, to picture the world differently from the sciences, and thereby to preserve the heart and spirit and affective properties of the human being in what seemed increasingly to be a soulless and materialistic age, dominated by large machines and larger social and economic mechanisms.

The humanities’ new picture took account of some of the same responses to industrialism and utilitarianism that gave rise to the Romantic movement in literature and art. But, as the writings of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold show with special force, the body of knowledge we call the humanities—or, to use his preferred term, “culture”—was increasingly looked to as a substitute for religion in the formation, education, and refinement of humanity’s sentiments and moral sensibilities.

The aims of religion and culture coincided, Arnold claimed, since both concerned themselves with “the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature.” Culture was, for him, the “study of perfection,” a force for balance and integration whose function was particularly vital to a civilization that was sadly becoming “mechanical and external,” and tending constantly to become more so. “Faith in machinery,” he insisted, was “our besetting danger.”





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We live in a different age, far less enamored of the machine, if far more dependent upon it. Which raises, in a different way, the question of the humanities’ past and future. Do any of these three previous understandings of the ­humanities—­the human as opposed to the animal, the divine, or the rational-mechanical—­have any meaning in our times? All three still do, and will continue to. Each has derived its power from its willingness to assert, and insist upon, some crucial aspect of what it means to be human, some aspect that the conditions of the day may have threatened to submerge. What we are as humans is, in some respects, best defined by what we are not: not gods, not angels, not devils, not machines, not merely animals (and ordinarily not rats). The humanities, too, have always defined themselves in opposition, and none of the tendencies they have opposed have ceased to exist, even if they are not as dominant as they once were. That is one of the many reasons why great works of the ­past—­from Aristotle to Dante to Shakespeare to ­Dostoevsky—­do not become obsolete, and have shown the power to endure, and to speak to us today, once we develop the ability to hear them. Indeed, one of the repeated themes of Western intellectual history is the revival of the present by the recovery of the past, a principle most brilliantly exemplified by the Italian Renaissance’s ­self-­conscious appropriation of classical ideals, but also illustrated in our own time by the sustained interest in the recovery of classical philosophy as the platform for a penetrating critique of ­modernity.

But there can be little doubt that the principal challenges to humanity’s humanness have always shifted over time. In our own age, the very category of “the human” itself is under attack, as philosophers decry the hierarchical distinction between humans and animals, or humans and nature, and postmodernists of various stripes proclaim the disappearance of the human “subject.” We also are far less clear about what we mean by the word “culture,” and about the standards by which it is judged, including most notably the clear distinction between “high” and “low,” let alone “excellence” and “mediocrity.” Matthew Arnold felt reasonably confident that we could agree upon what constituted “the best” examples of humanistic expression. But we are not so certain that such a category even makes sense ­anymore.

Still, if the past is any guide, what we call “the humanities” will survive and thrive, however we choose to define them. Indeed, it seems likely that they will experience yet another transformation in the years to ­come—­one that will be, as all the transformations of previous eras have been, an assertion, or reassertion, of some essential element in our humanity that is being neglected or debased or misunderstood. Just what form it will take is impossible to say with any certainty. But I think it possible that the transformation may already be taking its bearings from the problems and prospects now opening before us in the realms of biotechnology and medicine. These ­developments—­human cloning, genetic engineering, artificial wombs, ­species ­melding, ­body-­parts manufacture, bionic and pharmacological enhancements, and many ­others—­are not necessarily favorable to our human flourishing; nor are they necessarily threats to it. But they call into question precisely the inherent limitations that have always figured into what it means to be human, and throw open the windows of possibility, in ways both terrifying and ­exciting.

One of the ways that the humanities can indeed save ­us—­if they can recover their ­nerve—­is by reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages. In that world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless sex, endless consumer goods, endless youth, ­mood-­altering drugs, and ­all-­consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, who is named the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy,” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on display as if he were a rare zoo animal: the Nietzschean “Last Man.”


Huxley understood that there was something nobly incorrigible in the human spirit, a restlessness and conflictedness that is built into the constitution of our humanity, an unease that somehow comes with being what we are, and that could not be stilled by a regime of mere good feeling, or willingly be sacrificed for its sake. But he also teases and taunts us with the possibility that we might be willing to give up on our peculiarly ­betwixt-­and-­between status, and give up on the riddle that every serious thinker since the dawn of human history has tried to understand. Huxley was disturbing, but also prescient, in fearing that in the relentless search for happiness, it is entirely thinkable that human beings might endeavor to alter their very nature, tampering with the last bastion of fate: their genetic constitution. Should that happen, supreme irony of ironies, the search for human happiness would culminate in the end of the human race as we know it. We would have become something else. The subject, man, would have been devoured by its ­object.

This is, of course, not really so different from the ­self-­subverting pattern of the 20th century’s totalitarian ideologies, which sought to produce “happy” societies by abolishing the independence of the individual. Yet the lure of a pleasure-swaddled posthumanity may be the particular form of that temptation to which the Western liberal democracies of the 21st century are especially prone. Hence the thrust of Huxley’s work, to remind us that if we take such a step in our “quest to live as gods” we will be leaving much of our humanity behind. One of those things left behind may, ironically, be happiness itself, since the very possibility of human happiness is inseparable from the struggles and sufferings and displacements experienced by our restless, complex, and incomplete human natures. Our tradition teaches that very lesson in a hundred texts and a thousand ways, for those who have been shown how to see and hear it. It is not a lesson that is readily on offer in our increasingly distracted world. It is the work of the humanities to remind us of it, and of much else that we are ever-more disposed to ­forget.

Wilfred M. McClay, a former Wilson Center fellow, is SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.

ENJOY!

Islam & Democracy

There is a powerful rhetoric around today that claims Islam – not just fundamentalist or Wahhabist or Safalist Islam, but Islam itself is a religion hostile to democracy. Hostile not only to liberty, pluralism and the open society, but to modernity itself as it is defined by liberal values. The attitude evident in Samuel Huntington’s discredited notion of a “clash of civilizations” in which the West and the rest are locked in a struggle for survival, so foreign to discussions like our here in Istanbul, in fact remains ubiquitous in Western politics and media.

It is found not only in Bush’s zealous conduct of a disastrous war on the “axis of evil,” or Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that Islamic fundamentalism is a “new form of fascism;” or in right wing paranoiac events like David Horowitz’s “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” but is reflected also in writings of liberals like Paul Berman who talk about how the West is “beset with terrorists from the Muslim totalitarian movements who have already killed an astounding number of people;” or in scholars like Bernard Lewis who announce in hushed tones of sympathy that “the world of Islam has become poor, weak and ignorant;” or in Muslim apostates like Ali Hirsi who combine a seemingly liberal appeal to feminist values with a total rejection of not just fundamentalism but Islam itself.

These arguments may in their polemical zealotry beyond rational rebuttal, but Professor Habermas would I think prefer that they be rationally confronted and refuted. That is certainly my view if we wish to get on with the difficult work of crafting democracy in societies that take religion seriously – nearly all societies. I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical, some sociological, and some philosophical – all reasonable and commonsensical in the broader sense of rational – that suggest why it is absurd to think that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam.

FIRST: It is not Islam per se, but religion tout court that stands in some
tension with secularism and with democracy – a tension that is healthy rather than unhealthy in a free society. Augustine’s Two Cities and Pope Gelasius’s two swords speak to a world of the body and a world of the spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the ecclesiastic. These dualisms do not arise out of theology but inform theology with the deep logic of duality that defines our being. The opposition of morality and politics, and of divine or natural and positive law, is transferred to the opposition of church and state that produces troublesome but healthy tensions for societies everywhere.

SECOND: Sociologists from Tocqueville and Durkheim to that American sociologist of democracy Robert Bellah have insisted free societies have been constructed on a religious foundation that lends them stability and affords them the luxury of political disagreement. It is precisely religion that grounds democratic nations and bonds peoples who might otherwise be fatally divided by their economic and social differences and their political disagreements. As Tocqueville wrote in his Ancien Regime, “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot…. Religion is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is weakened?”. Civil society is vital to a pluralistic democracy but its bonds are often thin. Religion can be a powerful source of social capital, which is perhaps why Rousseau understood that in the absence of religion a society might require civil religion – what Habermas called Verfassungspatriotismus (the American’s “civic faith”) – to remain free.

THIRD: Like Christianity and other religions, Islam is a religion practiced in many cultures and societies, sectarian, stratified, schismatic and pluralistic. We Christians speak easily of Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Methodists, Mormons, Pentacostals, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Mennonites, Jehovah’s witnesses, Dutch Reformed, Greek Orthodox, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, Universalists, Evangelicals – 200 sects or more – while Thomas Jefferson said “I myself am a sect”! But we find it hard to comprehend that Muslims are also sectarians and schismatics whose religion looks different culture by culture and society by society. Only around 15% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are Arabs but it’s hard to tell how many Westerners know that by far the largest proportion of Muslims reside in India and Indoneia. Even Bernard Lewis writes his history of Islam’s “decline” through the lens of the Middle East, primarily the Ottamans.

FOURTH: While we like to pretend that religion in the modern era is and should be private, parochial and conventionalist, it remains public, universal and moralistic. It is a creature of the Nomos (the universal law) rather than of the Ethnos. It wishes to occupy the public square (though not necessarily City Hall) and its claims necessarily rival the claims of positive law. Even early societies pitted their conventional “sumptuary laws” regulating public behavior against the positive laws of the state, and there is no religion that does not yield a version of Sharia. Are the Ten Commandments that inform the Mosaic Law meant to be private or less than universal?

A seventeenth century Puritan preacher called Prynne wrote a tract instructing parishioners that among forbidden pursuits were “effeminate mixt dancing, Dicing (gambling), stage-playes, lascivious pictures, wanton fashions, face-painting, health drinking, long haire, love-locks, periwigs, womens curling, powdering and curtting of their hair, bon-fires, new year’s gifts, May-games, amorous pastorals, lascivious effeminiate musicke, excessive laughter, (and) luxurious disorderly Christmas keeping,” all of which are “wicked, unchristian past-times” of a kind that make men “adulterers, whore-masters, bawds, panderers, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, and cheaters… (that is) idle, infamous, base, profane and Godless perons who hat all grace and goodness and make a mock of piety.” Such were the Taliban of Puritan’s early years around the time they settled New England and set America on the road to a Puritan Commonwealth and in time a democratic republic – one in which today, in many states, it is still impossible to buy alcohol on Sunday.

FIFTH: To the degree Islam is fundamentalist, so is religion in many places, because in our secular age religion is under siege and fundamentalism is above all a reaction to religion under siege. As religion was once the air we breathed and the ether in which we moved, today commerce, secularism and materialism are the air we breathe and the ether in which we move. Indeed, there are many who insist democracy is little more than the triumph of commerce and the victory of scientistic materialism – which may be why fundamentalists seeking to secure their religions take aim not only at modernity but at democracy as well. American Protestant fundamentalists who school their children at home are little different than Muslim fundamentalists who oppose encroaching capitalist markets. Both see in Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the consumerist franchises that now encircle the world and dominate the media and the internet a two way sewer – one that carries away their own values even as it spews into their homes the violent, pornographic images of “wild capitalism” that compel consumers to drink from its sewers in order that its markets flourish.

In other words, fundamentalism, which is religion under siege, is to some considerable degree reactionary rather than proactive. It responds to exogenous forces that it perceives as weakening its mores, endangering its values, seducing its children, and destroying its communities. There is much hyperbole and misunderstanding in such reactions but there are also truths whose nature I have tried to divine in my Jihad vs. McWorld. The crucial conclusion of that analysis is that Jihad and McWorld both need and produce one another and are alike hostile to democracy. Fundamentalism, unlike ordinary religion, will not support democracy. But neither will the forces of McWorld that drive fundamentalists to the wall or over the precipice.

SIXTH AND LAST: We have seen that the conviction that Islam cannot accommodate democracy is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of Islam. But it is also true that the conviction that democracy cannot accommodate Islam is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of democracy – one that tends to assimilate democratization to Americanization or Westernization or marketization. It is tied to the false view that there is but one kind of democracy, one road to liberty, one formula for translating the theory of justice into just practices. But historically and philosophically, democracy is singular not plural. We would benefit enormously by simply talking about it in the plural rather than the singular: not “democracy” but “democracies.”

It would require a separate essay to suggest how deeply perverse the typical American understanding of democratization is when it comes to “helping” others achieve liberty. The problem begins with the illusion that others can be helped, that democracy can be “given” or liberty “gifted.” No people have ever by liberated from the outside at the point of a gun. An invader may overthrow a tyrant, but cannot create a democracy by doing so. Overthrowing tyranny produces not democracy but instability, disorder, anarchy, often civil war; it tends to lead over time not to democracy but to a new tyrant. President Bush alludes again and again to World War II, but the victory of the Allies over the Nazi regime did not produce democracy. It took re-education, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations and the European Community to do that.

Nor can freedom be given to others; it must be won by those who seek it from the inside. And for them to establish it, it must be constructed bottom up not top down. First educate citizens and do the hard slow work of making a civil society; then build a political infrastructure on top of it. The Americans had a hundred years of experience with municipal liberty and citizen competence before they declared independence. Democracy takes time. The Swiss began in 1291 and gave women the vote only in 1961. The British grounded rights in a Magna Carta in 1215 and fought a Glorious Revolution in 1688 and are still saddled with a House of Lords and a monarchy. The Americans spent the first 80 years of their young Republic trying to figure out how to separate it from slavery, which they ultimately achieved only by dint of a bloody civil war. Yet pessimists expect Iran to get it right in two or three years, while optimists think Iraq needs only another six months.

If patience is required and democracy is built bottom up, then elections come last not first. The rush to vote is generally a sign that the ground for democracy has not been prepared; and when voting occurs in the absence of educated and competent citizens, we can be sure that the prospects for liberty and justice are poor. First come schools, civic education, autonomous civic institutions, and plural civil associations. Then come elections. In helping to enrich and extend civil society, religion can help build a foundation for democratic governance.

Finally, if democracy is plural and distinctive from one society to another, that the road to democracy comes not from imitation and borrowing but from excavation and invention. Every society has democratic tendencies, proto-democratic habits, institutions that foster deliberation, debate and equality. In one place it may be a Loya Jirga that affords negotiation and partial consensus among rival tribes. In another it may be the fraternal and deliberative potentials of tribes themselves: remember how the Founders admired the Mohawk Indians. There are many forms of assembly and many levels of participation any one of which may under the right conditions produce self-government.

In the end, the plurality of democracy mandates that the indispensable condition of democracy is empowerment. And that those who would “help” others learn liberty, learn to leave them alone. As T. E. Lawrence wrote a long time ago, “better to let hem do it imperfectly than to do it yourself perfectly: for it is their country, their way and your time is short.” If democracy means anything it means the right for people to make their own mistakes. To practice their own religion. To purse their own forms of self-government. I know, I know. That takes time. It can compromise rights. It sometimes allows patriarchy to persist and affords religion the chance to subvert as well as support democracy. But that’s how it is, and history suggests the alternatives, however well intended, are usually far worse. Just ask George Bush.

Benjamin R. Barber is the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City.

John Adams

John Adams Survives

His famous last words may be a myth, but the nation he helped found is a triumphant reality

I’ve started to think it’s the wigs. That has to be why American movies so rarely render the astonishing story of the nation’s founding effectively or memorably. In an irony-soaked age, how do you walk around in breeches and face powder, expounding on the rights of man, knowing that your efforts will be ridiculed within 12 hours of release by Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart?

In fact, most people probably couldn’t name many films devoted to the American Revolution—at least, not before this year’s acclaimed HBO miniseries, John Adams. Based on the best-selling book by David McCullough, the seven-part series is a tour de force of period detail and character acting. And it doesn’t indulge in either of the two sins most common to historical filmmaking: presentism, in which the filmmaker judges the characters by today’s standards; and ironic debunking, in which the intrepid filmmaker reveals the history we thought we knew as one big sham. The worst one can say about John Adams is that it fudges some relatively minor details for narrative effect. But it gets the big facts right, with perhaps one exception: just what was it that John Adams said on his deathbed?

In the HBO series and in recent books on the founders—from McCullough’s to Joseph Ellis’s—the story is the same. On July 4, 1826, the jubilee year of American independence, two of the three surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died. They died on the 50th anniversary of the document and the event they did so much to shape—for while Jefferson was the Declaration’s author, it was Adams who, in Jefferson’s own words, was “the colossus of independence.” They were American demigods finally taking their leave of a nation already much changed. It was remarkable enough that the two men, who had been allies, close friends, political rivals, enemies, and finally friends again across half a century, had died on the same day. But to have died on that day of all days, and on that anniversary—if that doesn’t turn even the most devoted viewer of the Daily Show into a weepy American exceptionalist, probably nothing will.

The story doesn’t end there, though. While Jefferson’s precise last words are not well known, among them was some form of the question: “Is it the Fourth?” Adams’s final words were poetry itself: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Actually, Jefferson had died a few hours earlier, though of course Adams didn’t know that. The statement has echoed throughout the ages, carrying multiple levels of meaning that both men would no doubt have appreciated.

There’s only one problem: the evidence is that Adams didn’t quite get out all three words. According to historian Andrew Burstein, the “Thomas Jefferson survives” message was propagated by Adams memorialists in the weeks and months after the great man’s death, but they took some liberties. There was only one person known to have been with Adams when he died, Burstein tells us: Louisa Smith, the niece and adopted daughter of Adams’s late wife, Abigail. What she heard was “Thomas Jefferson” and then something unintelligible. Given the context, it’s quite possible that Adams was attempting to say “survives,” or something very like it, but we cannot know. Obviously his old comrade was on his mind, and that is remarkable enough. But “Thomas Jefferson survives” seems to be another of those tantalizing historical anecdotes based in truth and embellished by just a measure or two in the interest of creating a more perfect ending.

It seems difficult to avoid this tendency, then and now. We do it in our own lives, with our own stories. Some people so astonish us with their brilliance, courage, or goodness that paradoxically their deeds cannot be fully appreciated just as they are, but instead become absorbed into a broader canvas of composites and half-truths and flat-out tall tales. It’s almost as if we have to tell ourselves stories as a way of understanding the mere facts of their achievements.

Certainly, on top of all that they had already done, for Adams and Jefferson to have died in the way they did leaves mythology begging. As Ellis writes of their twin parting, “No serious novelist would ever dare to make this up. . . . Call it a miracle, an accident, or a case of two powerful personalities willing themselves to expire on schedule and according to script. But it happened.”

What’s continually remarkable about the American Revolution and the lives of the founders is how much is not made up, or even embellished. No great figures come without their cherry trees, and there’s no point in trying to chop them all down; they can serve their purposes. But we would do well to remember how much is documented fact, set down on paper for us to understand and to carry forward—starting with that message to the world announced in Philadelphia, 232 years ago. As Jefferson put it in a letter he wrote shortly before the jubilee celebration: “For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

Paul Beston is associate editor of City Journal.