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.
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