The Free Thinker

Books

Thoughts on some books I've read recently:  

Paris 1919: Six months that changed the world.  The story of Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, and of the botched peace conference at the end of World War I.  Perhaps my chief reaction to this book was to think how nasty and wicked a sentiment nationalism is.  Just about every nation in eastern Europe-- Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, and Greece, to name a few-- was engaged in land-grabbing, manipulating history and demographic statistics and parroting Wilsonian ideals in efforts to make their case to the West and America.  It's interesting, too, what high hopes everyone had of America-- high hopes, but quite incompatible.  Michael Mandelbaum has argued in The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century that Woodrow Wilson failed as a politician but succeeded as a prophet, and that the ideals articulated by Wilson then have become worldwide norms in the decades since, especially after World War II.  That's true for better and for worse.  The principle of national self-determination has had dire consequences, and underlies many episodes of ethnic cleansing.  In that sense, 1919 seems modern in a way that 1913 does not.  Alien systems of values embodied in the ancient monarchies of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire still existed in 1913 but had vanished by 1919.  Yet the crude self-seeking and open imperialism of the peace conference still seem strange: today, nation-states would be more truthful and gracious than they were then.  What wicked times those were!  An element that is hardly the most important yet seems somehow to express the situation is the sexual corruption of the British and French leaders: Lloyd George had a mistress, and Clemenceau had had various liaisons.  Also, I couldn't help but share a feeling of anger on behalf of Germany at their treatment.  

An Edible History of Humanity and A Splendid Exchange.  These two books cover some of the same ground; in particular, both deal a good deal with the Age of Exploration and the voyages of Columbus, and a bit with the plague.  Some memories.  The Caribbean sugar islands in the 17th century sound truly hellish.  I hadn't appreciated before how much the Portuguese were the bad guys in the 16th-century Indian ocean.  They committed all kinds of crimes against the local people, and treated their own badly too, losing many soldiers.  Later, the Dutch East India Company behaved very wickedly in the spice islands of modern Indonesia, too.  Horticulture was a major source of national prestige in the 17th century: that the English could grow pineapples in British hothouses displayed their technological prowess rather like nuclear weapons do today.  I also noticed that for most of history it seems as if long-distance trade was mainly in natural resources, as opposed to reflecting specialization and division of labor.  Both these historians are a bit disdainful of the demand for spices, which are nutritionally superfluous, yet the exorbitant prices of which helped shape world history.  The Edible History also describes primitive tribes that shared food, and their strongly egalitarian norms, which require that successful hunters be disparaged in order to prevent them from becoming proud.  I thought that sounded horrible.  To me, being able to admire others, to recognize someone as having talents far exceeding one's own and to praise them for it, is one of the great innocent pleasures of life.

Anna Karenina.  "Hate the sin but love the sinner."  I think the remarkable thing about this book is how well Tolstoy does that.  Tolstoy is very good at describing characters, feelings, scenes, conversations, etc. with great realism, but he does not limit himself to that: he often steps in, as author, with his own value judgments.  In these, without drily or pedantically repeated traditional morality, Tolstoy is nonetheless firmly and consistently against the adulterous affair committed by the novel's heroine, Anna.  Certain scenes bring out especially poignantly how horrible and evil adultery is, of which perhaps the most poignant is when Dolly, the jilted wife of Anna's brother Stiva who forgave her husband, trusts completely in her beloved sister-in-law's innocence and pleads on her behalf to Anna's husband.  So Tolstoy hates the sin; yet he does not hate Anna, but engages the reader's sympathy with her throughout.  The reader continues to see the good, both in her, and in her lover Vronsky, throughout; good mixed with evil, yet enough good to make one wish the characters well.  That said, I am conscious of regarding Tolstoy's characters differently than I did when I first read Tolstoy, and with a little condescension.  There is no really good character in this novel, like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.  Perhaps Konstantin Levin is supposed to be good, but if so, that only shows the limitations of Tolstoy's conception of the good life, for Levin, though he has some good features and is always trying to improve, does many stupid things.  For example, he avoids the woman he loves, and who also wants to marry him, for a whole summer, when she came to live near him in the countryside for a summer, out of mere pig-headed pride, since sometime before she had refused his proposal when she was in love with another man.  Levin also aspires to be a sort of economist-agricultural-reformer, but he has a peculiarly Russian conceitedness that makes him ignore and disdain advice from the more advanced West.  I become impatient with such characters as Vronsky, Anna, and Levin.  "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness" says the Gospel.  That's how I feel.  I want a novel with characters I can look up to, admire, emulate.

Genghis: The Birth of an Empire.  This historical novel about the youth of Genghis Khan is one of the most suspenseful books I've read in some time, very exciting.  More than that, the portrayal of the ethos of the society of tribal Mongolia is fascinating-- the ethos, and also the economy, which is bound up with the ethos.  Crucial to the story and to the setting is the concept of a "khan," a tribal leader or strongman, whose "word is law" in the tribe, who "cannot be refused" by the tribe's women, who must always succeed.  The young man who will become Genghis Khan-- his name is Temujin; Genghis is a title acquired later-- is the second of the five sons of Yesugei, "the khan of the Wolves," the "wolves" being the name of one of the tribes.  But Yesugei is betrayed and murdered by Tartars when his sons are still boys.  Yesugei's bondsman-- a bondsman is a warrior bound by oath to a khan, a member of a khan's inner circle-- Eluk declares himself khan, and orders that Yesugei's wife and sons be expelled from the tribe, left with nothing on the Mongolian plain, not even a pony or a bow, the most basic necessities of life, doomed-- it is presumed-- to starve.  They manage to survive, first by hunting with makeshift bows-- but Temujin kills his older brother Bekhter, who "steals food" by eating what he catches secretly and then taking his share of the family's small meals-- then by killing two herdsmen and taking their bows, ponies, and flocks.  They manage to establish a homestead of sorts, but live in fear of the Wolves, who traveled south for a time but can be expected to return, and Eluk to seek to eliminate Yesugei's line, which will continue to be a threat to them.  Temujin and his brothers make preparations for this and fight the Wolf warriors who come after them, but Temujin is captured, sacrificing himself to help his brothers make their getaway.  Temujin is shamed and imprisoned in a latrine, and expects to be killed, but a swordsmith who years before had been invited to join the Wolves by Yesugei's father frees him, and he and his son Jelma become Temujin's bondsmen.  Temujin now goes north, establishes a base to raid the Tartars, accepts tribeless wanderers, and begins to organize a sort of small, makeshift tribe, among whom he is a "khan" of sorts.  He makes an alliance with another khan, Togrul of the Kerait, against the Tartars, and becomes their war leader.  The Tartars are provoked to the point where the whole Tartar nation marches against the Mongols.  Temujin is not merely an increasingly daring, desperate and successful war leader, but a visionary of sorts: he wants to unite the Mongols, "the Silver People," and put an end to a thousand years of war among the tribes.  His rise is rapid and bloody, and depends on his own prowess and cunning, and also a trait that I think must be called courage, in the sense of an indifference to physical pain and danger.

One thing that strikes me in the stories of these great conquerors-- Genghis Khan, Caesar, Alexander-- is that while superficially mere lust for power seems to be their motive, insecurity is at least as important.  Temujin's career, first fighting the Tartars, then murdering the khan of another tribe, the Olhunut, in his tent, then fighting Eluk, is all connected, as it turns out, to his duty to avenge his father's death and his mother and brothers' disinheritance and abandonment by the treacherous Eluk.  Julius Caesar, too, was betrayed by his friend Pompey, and had reason to fear for his life at the hands of the Nobiles party in Rome by the time he marched his armies across the Rubicon and ended the Roman Republic.  Indeed he was murdered by his political opponents in the end.  Alexander, too, was supposed to have been targeted for assassination by Darius of Persia, and cited this as part of his grounds for his invasion of Persia.  Later Alexander's wife and son were murdered by his generals after his early death.  Strangely but truly, all these conquerors were also victims, and their conquerorhood and their victimhood are linked together.  No one, perhaps, would have taken the risks that Temujin of the Wolves took, the risks that made him Genghis Khan, without a motive higher than mere personal ambition, for the simple reason that, ex ante, he was much likelier to be killed than to succeed.  Only because his life was already threatened, and because honor required him to avenge his father's death, did he set out on the course of desperate courage that made him the glorious but grim figure he became.

It would be false, and it would impoverish the soul, not to pay tribute to that glory, and Conn Iggledon, the author of Genghis, makes it very hard not to be exhilarated by the young Temujin's agony and redemption through victory.  Can we put that exhilaration to use, without condoning the aggression, the murder by stealth, the rape and even cannibalism which the Mongol tribes he portrays take for granted?  Yes, we can.  St. Steven and St. Lawrence were no less brave than Temujin of the Wolves, but they served a better King.  "We are more than conquerors," writes Paul (Romans 8:37).  And indeed, where is the empire of Genghis Khan today?  But that of the Prince of Peace lives on.

Insulting Our Allies

"America and eastern Europe: end of an affair?" (The Economist):

AFTER two decades of sometimes fervent Atlanticism in the ex-communist world, disillusionment (some would call it realism) is growing. At its height the bond between eastern Europe and America was based, like the best marriages, on a mixture of emotion and mutual support. The romance dates from the cold war: when western Europe was sometimes squishy in dealing with the Soviet empire, America was robust. When the Iron Curtain fell, ex-dissidents and retired cold warriors found they had plenty in common. America pushed for the expansion of NATO, guaranteeing the east Europeans’ security. In return, ex-communist countries loyally supported America, particularly in providing troops for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That relationship is now looking more wobbly. A new poll (see chart) by the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, shows that western Europe is now much more pro-American and pro-NATO than the ex-communist east. Until last year, the eastern countries swallowed their misgivings about George Bush, while the west of the continent writhed in distaste at what many saw as his administration’s incompetence and heavy-handedness.

The ascent of Barack Obama has boosted America’s image in most countries, but only modestly in places like Poland and Romania. Among policymakers in the east, the dismay is tangible. In July, 22 senior figures from the region, including Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, wrote a public letter bemoaning the decline in transatlantic ties.

One reason is that the Obama administration is rethinking a planned missile-defence system, which would have placed ten interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic, in order to guard against Iranian missile attacks on America and much of Europe. That infuriated Russia, which saw the bases as a blatant push into its front yard. Changing the scheme—probably using seaborne interceptors—risks looking like a climb-down to suit Russian interests.

Poland is also worried that a promised battery of Patriot air-defence missiles, originally to protect the interceptors, may now be only a temporary loan of dummy rockets for training purposes—“just a sales exercise”, says an official in Warsaw, crossly. America says it never intended to station real rockets there permanently.

The administration also botched its participation in Poland’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the start of the second world war on September 1st. Other countries, including Russia and Germany, sent top people. America, initially, offered only a retired Clinton-era official. William Perry, who was a notable sceptic about NATO expansion. After squawks of dismay, Jim Jones, the national security adviser, went too. But Poles sensed a snub.

Sorry, Eastern Europe!  How many allies does Obama think we can afford to throw away?  Russia is the #1 threat to international law and world peace right now.  A wise foreign policy would focus on strengthening trans-Atlantic ties and using all peaceful methods to make Russia withdraw from Georgia.  But Obama seems to think that helping the good guys and opposing the bad guys isn't nuanced enough for someone with his Ivy League credentials.

Book Review: Three Empires on the Nile

Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, by Dominic Green, is a very exciting book, yet I'm not sure I recommend it, because it's not edifying.  It describes the history of Egypt and the Sudan from the completion of the Suez Canal to the Fashoda affair and General Kitchener's victory of the Mahdist troops at Omdurman.  Major characters include Charles Gordon, the brave but gloomy "martyr" of the British Empire at Khartoum, Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, power-behind-the-throne in Egypt after 1882, Khedive Isma'il Pasha, the greedy and spendthrift hereditary monarch of Egypt (nominally subject to the sultan and turned into an instrument of the British and French), Ahmed Urabi, an army officer who led a sort of abortive revolution and was a forerunner of Nasser, British prime ministers Gladstone, Rosebury and Salisbury, Queen Victoria, Muhammad Ahmed "the Mahdi," his successor Khalifa Abdullahi, Arabophile British aristocrat Wilfrid Blunt, and General Kitchener.  Winston Churchill appears briefly near the end.  All these historical figures come to live in Green's book.  But none of them are represented as very wise or admirable.

One of these figures, Charles Gordon, was greatly admired by contemporaries, but his reputation was damaged by Lytton Strachey's biography of him and other heroes of the Victorian era, Eminent Victorians, and opinion has generally followed Strachey in disdaining Gordon ever since.  I found myself sympathizing with Gordon and the other Englishmen, especially Baring, who seems to have gotten the Egyptian economy on a sound footing after the depredations of the extravagant Khedive Isma'il.  Gordon was a little neurotic, and his conduct in failling to evacuate Khartoum as his superiors in London demanded was rank insurbordination-- a bit like MacArthur's in the Korean War.  Yet he was brave, holding out in besieged Khartoum for 300 days in his determination not to abandon its inhabitants to the barbarous religious fanatics of "the Mahdi," and finally dying in hand-to-hand combat with Mahdist troops defending the city he had tried to save.  Whatever his illusions and errors of judgments and oddities of character, he was disinterested, disdaining his own comfort and sacrificing his life for the sake of what he believed was his duty.  Baring/Cromer, Kitchener, Gladstone, Salisbury, Woolsley (another military man), Wilfrid Blunt, and most of the other English characters in the story exhibit a similar disinterestedness.  Sometimes they are thinking of their own careers, looking for praise and honor; rarely if ever of material gain; and never of the harems and slaves that seem to motivate Khedive Isma'il.  When Gladstone leaves Gordon to die at Khartoum, both of them seem somewhat devious and dishonorable, yet they are both acting in the service of high ideals at great risk and unpleasantness to themselves.  Gladstone, a fervent if inconsistent anti-imperialist, endures a storm of abuse and risks the destruction of his political career to avoid being drawn into an adventure in the Sudan, while Gordon's motives, though harder to read, seem to include opposition to the slave trade and a belief that the Mahdi's victory would be a humanitarian catastrophe for the Sudan, a belief which later events fully justified. 

By contrast, the two main Muslim characters in the drama, Khedive Isma'il and the Mahdi, while they have some ideals-- Khedive Isma'il wants to modernize Egypt, while the Mahdi wants to overthrow an Egyptian tyranny and restore Islamic justice-- are not above any cruelty or lust.  Khedive Isma'il is  incorrigibly extravagant and deceitful and ultimately accepts an Anglo-French bribe to go into exile.  He has a large harem, and while he passes laws against the slave trade to appease the English humanitarian lobby, his agents continue to practice it.  The Mahdi is a "holy man" who claims to be appointed by the Prophet Muhammad in a vision, and seems to believe it; and in his youth he practiced a certain renunciation of the sinful ways of the world for which one might feel a limited admiration.  But he too practices polygamy, first taking four wives as a means to various political alliances, later, after sacking Khartoum, taking hordes of concubines (and leaving women not taken as concubines by him and his warriors to starve), and gorging himself on sweets and meats, becoming fat.  In a sense, Khedive Isma'il and the Mahdi are easier to understand: when they get power, they use it to get the things their stomachs and their selfish genes make them want.  The Britons, with their clashing ideals and altruism, are more mysterious. 

Both similarities and differences between a Victorian foreign-policy crisis and a contemporary American one are striking.  On the one hand, modern human rights lobbies are direct heirs of the Victorian humanitarian lobby.  Then as now, humanitarianism could impel imperialism, as military intervention might be the only plausible way to stop horrors.  Then as now, the sovereign debt of an under-developed country was a major issue.  The fictional sovereignty of Egypt after 1882, in which the khedive, a nominal vassal of the Ottoman sultan, became a pawn of Anglo-French and then of British interests as a result of a debt default, is reminiscent of modern episodes in which the World Bank, the IMF, or other international agencies take charge of the policy of a country-- though never, I think, to quite the extent that Victorian Britain controlled Egypt.

One thing that is totally different, though, is that the Victorians seemed to see war as glorious and enjoy it.  The British public seems to have been enthusiastic for imperialism, and young men flocked to join the expedition of Kitchener, with Churchill's mother using all her social ties to get him a place in it.  Journalists and memoirists milked the imperial campaigns for bestsellers.  A certain attitude to war has, I think, been lost forever.  American elites today largely shun the military, while the public respects soldiers but regards them, if anything, as victims.  I think this is a response to World War I, which robbed war of its romance, for better or worse. 

There are important ways in which we definitely ought not to be like the Victorians.  In particular, they seem weirdly indifferent to the need to define states and political institutions in a manner that allows for liberty and self-government for the various peoples (e.g., Egyptian, Sudanese) whose destinies they came to dominate.  But I don't know that it would be a bad thing if American, Western European, and Japanese elites had a little more courage and love of adventure, and perhaps even of glory, provided it were mingled with a desire to help less fortunate peoples.

Book Review: Empires of Trust

I just finished Empires of Trust, by Thomas Madden. This is in the genre of Empire by Niall Ferguson, or Empire by Anatol Lieven earlier, or Colossus by Niall Ferguson, or Goliath by Michael Mandelbaum: it's a book with a world-historical perspective seeking to shed light on the nature of the American-led global system today. Ferguson's books tend to compare the United States to the British Empire. Madden's compared America to ancient Rome.

Madden argues that there are three kinds of empires: empires of conquest, empires of commerce, and empires of trust. There have been many of the first kind, including Napoleon's, Genghis Khan's, and Alexander the Great's; several of the second kind, including the British; and only two of the third kind, the ancient Roman empire and America's empire today. His analysis of the Roman empire goes strongly against the general perception of the Roman empire as a standard empire of conquest, with legions marching out to conquer and plunder the world. Madden shows how the Roman empire's expansion was based on a system of alliances, motivated ultimately by Rome's desire to "secure the horizon."  When the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 B.C., the Romans' reaction was: Never again.  They already had a network of alliances, which failed them against the Gauls; they now rebuilt it and strengthened it, and then kept expanding it. About a century and a half later the Roman confederation dominated Italy. In the course of two confrontations with the Carthaginian Empire, each of which they stumbled into somewhat accidentally, and the latter of which involved Hannibal coming over the Alps with elephants and marching up and down Italy for six years tearing the Roman confederation apart, the Romans came to dominate the western Mediterranean. About that time the Greeks appealed to them for aid. They fought Philip of Macedon (a descendant of the great Philip of Macedon) and declared all of Greece free. Strangely, that didn't work out too well, and Madden highlights the parallels between Rome/Greece and America/Europe: in each case the generosity of the younger culture protected the elder culture but was rewarded with sneers.  Madden's continuing theme is that the empire of trust is trusted by its allies to defend their security and not to oppress them or violate their rights.  This makes it durable because allies do not wish to gang up against it to destroy it.  Thus, with America today, the rest of the world shows no inclination to build a big military alliance against America, as big military alliances formed against Napoleon, Hitler, Charles V, the Soviet Union, etc., because America is trusted.  Polls may not say that, but actions tell the truth.

Madden's strongly pro-Roman stance is refreshing.  Modern historiography tends to be iconoclastic about "dead white men."  I think a history that evokes admiration for the heroes and virtues of the past is not only more edifying and enjoyable, but truer in a way than a history that buries the past in legends of vice and misery, because to feel admiration for the past's virtues and glories is a prerequisite for understanding it.  That said, a more balanced view of Rome would say more about evils like slavery.  At this time of the year (in the Orthodox calendar, tonight is Holy Thursday, the night when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane to be executed the next day) we can't forget that the Romans used crucifixion, a uniquely cruel form of execution.

The constitution of the Roman Republic is fascinating: an eerie anticipation of America's in some ways (actually America's copied it selectively), in other ways it was completely different.  No kings: that's an important commonality.  A senate and an assembly.  Except that their roles were quite different: the senate's deliberations had only an advisory character, making it seemingly less powerful than the assembly, except that the senate enjoyed so much respect that for centuries the assemblies usually followed the senate's lead.  That is almost unfathomable from the perspective of American politics, with its delicate balance of power-grabbing and credit-grabbing.  Again, there were two consuls, with brief term limits of one year, each of whom could veto any action of the other.  Wow !  Consuls were the executive of sorts, but that had different implications than now: that they could command troops outside, but not inside the city, was an important part of the job.  Later on there were proconsuls and other officers who served as generals.  What is fascinating than in its final years, the Republic seemed to produce a whole crop of great, ambitious military leaders.  Marius won victories in the Jugurthine War.  Sulla won victories against King Mithradates.  Julius Caesar won victories in Spain, then conquered Gaul and even went as far as Britain.  Pompey cleaned up the remnants of the Seleucid empire and consolidated Roman control of much of the eastern Mediterranean.  Crassus marched against the Parthians and was defeated and killed, but even that shows the extent of the military ambition of Roman elites.  None of these men were quite Alexander the Great, but it is fascinating how political competition in the late Republic gave rise to so many expansionist generals, who tended to leverage their success in the field into political power in Rome.  That competition breeds excellence is a secret of American success too, but it applies in business or academia or to some extent politics, not the military, which has a very top-down structure in America.  Caesar and Pompey etc. came during the downfall of the Republic.  The real golden age of the "empire of trust" Madden describes was earlier, especially in the second century B.C., when the Republic was in its full health and Roman legions were winning and winning (by the time Caesar took over the empire's expansion had mostly reached its limits).  And while that was brief, the empire for which it laid the foundations lasted six centuries before the fall of the west, and then another millennium in the Byzantine East.

Madden's thesis would tend to predict that America's "empire of trust," too, will last a very long time. That's also my intuition. Too much of the world has gotten used to the Pax Americana, has come to take it for granted, and in a way has become devoted to it even if they indulge in extravagant bigotry against certain American presidents or entertain the wild paranoias of Noam Chomsky and other compulsive demonizers of the powerful. But as Rome's empire was marred by slavery, America's is marred by migration restrictions.  And also, there is something tragic about the very success of both empires.  For while Rome mastered the world, that was never what she wanted.  In the beginning, the Romans overthrew the Etruscan kings, who had ruled over them-- so the legend goes-- to avenge the rape of a Roman matron, Lucretia, by an Etruscan prince.  The Republic was born in tragedy.  And then they began to develop their empire for security. That is, for peace. But empire got them involved in more and more wars, ever further away. By the time the Pax Romana was finally established throughout the Mediterranean, the Italian countryside had been transformed, with latifundia worked by slaves, as the Roman farmers had been turned into legionaries stationed far away. World empire was a consolation prize for the peaceful farming life that they never really got. Likewise, America's world-imperial initiative, imposed on us by Pearl Harbor, is a consolation prize for the lost dream of isolationism.

Thirteenth-Century Flower Child

It's a shame that in a review of G.K. Chesterton's gem of a book, St. Francis of Assisi, I am obliged to stop for a moment to answer a certain obscene passage in which he writes, slyly, underhandedly, euphemistically, a blank check to who knows what tortures and murders in the name of religion, which he calls "fighting for what you believe in."  He has to go rather out of his way to do it, since in neither the life of St. Francis nor in the life of his Model and Master is there the slightest hint of condoning such goings-on.  It would pleasanter to say nothing about it at all, but liberty requires vigilance, and if we are not to throw in jail men who let words slip from their pens which, if taken seriously, would amount to declarations of provisional war against free societies to compel the submission of heretics to the Church of Rome, war to be initiated, presumably, if and whenever they have enough power to do so, we must at least take a moment to condemn such notions whenever they appear, lest someone get the idea that they are not only legally tolerated, but socially and morally tolerable.  Chesterton is a clever writer and can be brilliant in making the just cause appear the unjust when he chooses to do so, yet in this case the truth is so plain that I suspect that here there are few readers whom even he manages to confuse.  For there is, of course, a difference between "fighting for what you believe in," in the sense of fighting for the right to profess what you believe, and fighting to compel someone else to deny what he believes and/or profess what he disbelieves.  The former is perhaps sometimes right, though it is worth noting that Jesus Christ did not even do that.  The latter is always, everywhere, and utterly wrong, and Chesterton, a 19th/20th-century Englishman living in a society that took tolerance for granted, probably knew that as well as you and me.  I doubt he really wanted to drive a sword through his atheist acquaintances.  His anti-modern bigotry is like an American suburban teenager wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt: he gets a contrarian buzz out of being on the other side.  That he was probably insincere is the best defense there can be of Chesterton on this point.  Most of the anti-modern bigotry in St. Francis of Assisi is silly but harmless, a small price to pay for the ecstasy of reading so much of the book, but the few passages in which he blusters in defense of inquisitions are really wicked, because it is such stumbling-blocks that make good men conclude sadly that Christianity, for all its beauty and noble aspirations, is in the end a bad thing that must be rejected and condemned.  Which would be exactly right and proper, if that really were Christianity.

Given that Chesterton can't seem to write a single book without condoning crimes, why do I bother to read him at all?  It was not, in this case, because of his prodigious talent, his delicious eloquence, his considerable erudition and imaginative sense for history, his ability to bring a theme to life a hundred times more inspiringly, more illuminatingly, more entertainingly, than the typical hagiographer, who more or less just recites the facts.  It was not because Chesterton is a sumptuous banquet next to the mere bread of most "Lives of the Saints."  It was simply because I wanted to read about St. Francis, and Chesterton's was the only biography I could find in audiobook.  I was, perhaps, a little glad that it gave me an excuse to read him.  Were any other biography available, I would have felt obliged to buy it in preference to Chesterton's, knowing that Chesterton is not quite appropriate for devotional reading.

Lives of the saints is the most fitting of themes, and was once one of the major genres of literature.  It ought to be still.  I've noticed that whereas reading the lives of the saints makes me feel joyful and inspired, other biographies-- of politicians, or economists, or artists-- usually sadden me.  The Christian doctrine that we all must end in either the beatific or the miserific state seems to have intimations even in this life. 

There are some lives that seem like gradual, sometimes tortuous, ascensions into light, lives punctuated by falls, failing, and failures which, however, are transformed by some twist of fate or some moment of enlightenment into jokes or joys, lives that may grow less comprehensible, more strange and remote near the end, perhaps merely because they have less time to tell us about the last things, yet as if the person is beginning a new journey, so that death is like the pages torn out of a novel one was desperate to read the end of, lives which leave behind a sadness, more poignant because alloyed with joy, and a wistful love that wishes to follow them, and one regrets that the waywardness of one's mind will prevent you from contemplating the life as long and as devoutly as you would like to, and it is easy to understand why people might treasure every relic or anecdote long afterwards.  There are other lives that seem to unravel in frustration and futility; lives animated by virtues, perhaps great virtues, with early promise and splendid possibilities, with schemes and dreams, the beginnings of adventures and quests and grand designs, yet where the mistakes loom with lengthening shadows, and the years become a shrinking, a narrowing into tedium and quiet desperation, as what in youth were real virtues become habits kept up from pride at an ever-increasing toll in effort; and at last, when they trail off irrelevantly into death, one must suppress a shudder. 

I am not saying that I know, merely from reading his biography, whether a man is saved or damned.  It is the story, not the man, which points one way or the other, and human biography might well miss the point of the real story of a man's life.  A life apparently of service and sanctity may mask a gnawing demon of pride that destroyed a man from within; or decades of frustration and failure may have been blown away like dust before the wind of an eleventh-hour rejuvenation and reawakening.  The proverbial "eleventh hour," of course, is an allusion to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: those who were hired at the eleventh hour received the same payment as those who worked from the first hour of the day.  Anyway, it is the happy, edifying stories, the stories that shine and not those that shudder, that are worth telling.  Actually, a lot of modern literature is a sort of fictional hagiography, an author showing, through a model or figure, what he thinks is the right way to live.  That is fine, I think, but it would be nice if a more deliberate and historically-minded hagiography were practiced, too.

St. Francis of Assisi is the most beautiful book by Chesterton that I have read, and I am almost inclined in the enthusiasm of the moment to say that in some passages it is the most beautiful prose I have ever read in my life, though in truth the feat of memory involved in supporting such a claim is far beyond my capacity.  St. Francis reminds me of the 1960s, for example of a song indirectly named after him: "Are you going to San Francisco? Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. In the streets of San Francisco, you're gonna meet some gentle people there..."  The term "flower child" is, indeed, very apt for a man who saw flowers and birds and fire and water as his sisters and brothers, who believed, in John Denver's words, that "the children and the flowers are my sisters and my brothers," and the Franciscans were like hippies, turning their backs on bourgeois values, wandering, happy, free.  St. Francis imitated the life of Jesus and there is perhaps no better example of living out the teachings of the Gospel, including the radical poverty-- do not worry about what you will wear, nor about what you will eat-- and the love of enemies.  Chesterton thinks that he was a dawn, a new childhood, of a world at last cleansed from the demons-- "this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"-- of paganism.  I was reminded of the historic role of the 1960s hippes, of the sublime forgetfulness of a generation that knew nothing of the titanic struggles that had scarred their parents and knew a joy of living that had been half-lost amidst the noble struggles against Nazism and communism.  St. Francis had all that was good in the hippies without the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and that is perhaps the best approach that I, no Chesterton, can give to the feelings of wonder and gratitude that flow from almost every page of Chesterton's book.

Pity about the bad parts.  I feel a vague regret that there isn't some body of wise, responsible, good men who would read books before they were published and blot out certain iniquitous passages which violate all norms of ordinary decency, to prevent them from marring otherwise worthy works.  I recognize the irony of the wish.

Thirteenth-Century Flower Child

It's a shame that in a review of G.K. Chesterton's gem of a book, St. Francis of Assisi, I am obliged to stop for a moment to answer a certain obscene passage in which he writes, slyly, underhandedly, euphemistically, a blank check to who knows what tortures and murders in the name of religion, which he calls "fighting for what you believe in."  He has to go rather out of his way to do it, since in neither the life of St. Francis nor in the life of his Model and Master is there the slightest hint of condoning such goings-on.  It would pleasanter to say nothing about it at all, but liberty requires vigilance, and if we are not to throw in jail men who let words slip from their pens which, if taken seriously, would amount to declarations of provisional war against free societies to compel the submission of heretics to the Church of Rome, war to be initiated, presumably, if and whenever they have enough power to do so, we must at least take a moment to condemn such notions whenever they appear, lest someone get the idea that they are not only legally tolerated, but socially and morally tolerable.  Chesterton is a clever writer and can be brilliant in making the just cause appear the unjust when he chooses to do so, yet in this case the truth is so plain that I suspect that here there are few readers whom even he manages to confuse.  For there is, of course, a difference between "fighting for what you believe in," in the sense of fighting for the right to profess what you believe, and fighting to compel someone else to deny what he believes and/or profess what he disbelieves.  The former is perhaps sometimes right, though it is worth noting that Jesus Christ did not even do that.  The latter is always, everywhere, and utterly wrong, and Chesterton, a 19th/20th-century Englishman living in a society that took tolerance for granted, probably knew that as well as you and me.  I doubt he really wanted to drive a sword through his atheist acquaintances.  His anti-modern bigotry is like an American suburban teenager wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt: he gets a contrarian buzz out of being on the other side.  That he was probably insincere is the best defense there can be of Chesterton on this point.  Most of the anti-modern bigotry in St. Francis of Assisi is silly but harmless, a small price to pay for the ecstasy of reading so much of the book, but the few passages in which he blusters in defense of inquisitions are really wicked, because it is such stumbling-blocks that make good men conclude sadly that Christianity, for all its beauty and noble aspirations, is in the end a bad thing that must be rejected and condemned.  Which would be exactly right and proper, if that really were Christianity.

Given that Chesterton can't seem to write a single book without condoning crimes, why do I bother to read him at all?  It was not, in this case, because of his prodigious talent, his delicious eloquence, his considerable erudition and imaginative sense for history, his ability to bring a theme to life a hundred times more inspiringly, more illuminatingly, more entertainingly, than the typical hagiographer, who more or less just recites the facts.  It was not because Chesterton is a sumptuous banquet next to the mere bread of most "Lives of the Saints."  It was simply because I wanted to read about St. Francis, and Chesterton's was the only biography I could find in audiobook.  I was, perhaps, a little glad that it gave me an excuse to read him.  Were any other biography available, I would have felt obliged to buy it in preference to Chesterton's, knowing that Chesterton is not quite appropriate for devotional reading.

Lives of the saints is the most fitting of themes, and was once one of the major genres of literature.  It ought to be still.  I've noticed that whereas reading the lives of the saints makes me feel joyful and inspired, other biographies-- of politicians, or economists, or artists-- usually sadden me.  The Christian doctrine that we all must end in either the beatific or the miserific state seems to have intimations even in this life. 

There are some lives that seem like gradual, sometimes tortuous, ascensions into light, lives punctuated by falls, failing, and failures which, however, are transformed by some twist of fate or some moment of enlightenment into jokes or joys, lives that may grow less comprehensible, more strange and remote near the end, perhaps merely because they have less time to tell us about the last things, yet as if the person is beginning a new journey, so that death is like the pages torn out of a novel one was desperate to read the end of, lives which leave behind a sadness, more poignant because alloyed with joy, and a wistful love that wishes to follow them, and one regrets that the waywardness of one's mind will prevent you from contemplating the life as long and as devoutly as you would like to, and it is easy to understand why people might treasure every relic or anecdote long afterwards.  There are other lives that seem to unravel in frustration and futility; lives animated by virtues, perhaps great virtues, with early promise and splendid possibilities, with schemes and dreams, the beginnings of adventures and quests and grand designs, yet where the mistakes loom with lengthening shadows, and the years become a shrinking, a narrowing into tedium and quiet desperation, as what in youth were real virtues become habits kept up from pride at an ever-increasing toll in effort; and at last, when they trail off irrelevantly into death, one must suppress a shudder. 

I am not saying that I know, merely from reading his biography, whether a man is saved or damned.  It is the story, not the man, which points one way or the other, and human biography might well miss the point of the real story of a man's life.  A life apparently of service and sanctity may mask a gnawing demon of pride that destroyed a man from within; or decades of frustration and failure may have been blown away like dust before the wind of an eleventh-hour rejuvenation and reawakening.  The proverbial "eleventh hour," of course, is an allusion to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: those who were hired at the eleventh hour received the same payment as those who worked from the first hour of the day.  Anyway, it is the happy, edifying stories, the stories that shine and not those that shudder, that are worth telling.  Actually, a lot of modern literature is a sort of fictional hagiography, an author showing, through a model or figure, what he thinks is the right way to live.  That is fine, I think, but it would be nice if a more deliberate and historically-minded hagiography were practiced, too.

St. Francis of Assisi is the most beautiful book by Chesterton that I have read, and I am almost inclined in the enthusiasm of the moment to say that in some passages it is the most beautiful prose I have ever read in my life, though in truth the feat of memory involved in supporting such a claim is far beyond my capacity.  St. Francis reminds me of the 1960s, for example of a song indirectly named after him: "Are you going to San Francisco? Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. In the streets of San Francisco, you're gonna meet some gentle people there..."  The term "flower child" is, indeed, very apt for a man who saw flowers and birds and fire and water as his sisters and brothers, who believed, in John Denver's words, that "the children and the flowers are my sisters and my brothers," and the Franciscans were like hippies, turning their backs on bourgeois values, wandering, happy, free.  St. Francis imitated the life of Jesus and there is perhaps no better example of living out the teachings of the Gospel, including the radical poverty-- do not worry about what you will wear, nor about what you will eat-- and the love of enemies.  Chesterton thinks that he was a dawn, a new childhood, of a world at last cleansed from the demons-- "this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"-- of paganism.  I was reminded of the historic role of the 1960s hippes, of the sublime forgetfulness of a generation that knew nothing of the titanic struggles that had scarred their parents and knew a joy of living that had been half-lost amidst the noble struggles against Nazism and communism.  St. Francis had all that was good in the hippies without the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and that is perhaps the best approach that I, no Chesterton, can give to the feelings of wonder and gratitude that flow from almost every page of Chesterton's book.

Pity about the bad parts.  I feel a vague regret that there isn't some body of wise, responsible, good men who would read books before they were published and blot out certain iniquitous passages which violate all norms of ordinary decency, to prevent them from marring otherwise worthy works.  I recognize the irony of the wish.

Milton Friedman, Class Warrior

Milton Friedman's 1980 book, Free to Choose, is a libertarian call to action. I was recommended the book by someone who told me Friedman went beyond being a "technical economist" and adopted a more philosophical libertarianism. That's true, for better or worse. If one bears in mind the historical context-- published after the 1960s and 1970s, on the verge of the Reagan Revolution-- the book is thunderingly powerful. It is a philippic against the welfare state, and at the same presents what feels like an appealing and comprehensive alternative political philosophy.  Feels like, but probably isn't.  Anyway, you can't tell, because Friedman is guilty of an error that people who strongly believe something and want to make the case for it sometimes fall into: rather than discriminating between good and bad arguments and avoiding the latter, he comes at you with all of them at the same time, or in quick succession, creating an overwhelming effect at first, but ultimately weakening his case.  If Friedman just wanted to roll back welfare-state liberalism at the time, maybe it was the right approach.  If he wanted to make a lasting contribution, he undermined it.  (G.K. Chesterton does the same thing.  One is sometimes incredulous... Can he really be making that argument? Can he possibly fail to see that it will persuade readers of the opposite of what he is saying if they give it a moment's thought?)

To cite one example, at one point Friedman is arguing against seeking equality of outcome on the grounds of "fairness," and in particular against inheritance laws.  He points out: if it's unfair for children to inherit their parents' money, how is it fair for them to inherit good looks, or talent?  What's fair about Muhammad Ali, for example, being able to earn millions as a great fighter?  And yet if he were constrained to earn the same as everyone else, he surely wouldn't have endured the training to become a great fighter, and we'd all be deprived of the enjoyment of watching his fights.  OK, first, we could tax Muhammad Ali's income quite heavily and still probably leave him better off than his next best opportunity.  Second, inheritances are easier to tax than talent.  One might conclude: This is the great Milton Friedman, famed free-market advocate, and that's the best he can do? I guess inheritance taxes are a better idea than I thought.  (A better argument against inheritance taxes is that they discourage saving and maybe intra-family social capital.)

I'd say about half of Friedman's agenda has been adopted, more or less, since 1980, while other causes have become still more quixotic.  A reader today alternates between nodding complacently as he advocates a policy innovation that has become business-as-usual, and shaking one's head thinking, A great idea, but politically impossible.  Yet it seems in 1980, the political feasibility outlook for, say, vouchers and welfare reform, wasn't so different.  If welfare reform seemed impossible in 1980, maybe vouchers aren't impossible after all.

A striking feature of Free to Choose is how often and how effectively Friedman shows that statist policies are favoring the middle class at the expense of the poor.  State subsidies to higher education are state subsidies to the middle class.  The public school system, too, works to the great disadvantage of urban minorities, who end up in the worst schools with no way out.  Friedman inspires just anger against the teachers' unions who have pursued their own class interests by strangling the market solution to education which, more effectively than any other policy move, could open the door to a brighter future for disadvntaged urban minorities.  It is not the case, as a Marxist would say and a liberal might suspect, that Friedman opportunistically argues on pro-poor grounds for policies that he really supports because they benefit the bourgeoisie, nor even that Friedman uses pro-poor arguments ad hoc when they happen to coincide with his libertarian ideology.  The government really is a bourgeois racket to a larger extent than almost anyone realizes, and Friedman has a genuine social justice crusader's indignation at this and wants to roll it back.  What has happened since then might be summarized: the middle class has cherry-picked the libertarian agenda and gotten the parts that benefit them enacted, while the liberals use the poor symbolically and rhetorically, and anyway less often than before, to support big-government programs that don't really help them.  The poor are without influential advocates, and Milton Friedman the class warrior seems more quixotic than ever.