Bianca Steele

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant; Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is not the topic of this blog post.  My having finished the reading for the project I mentioned a little while back is.  I did start The Marriage Plot during a break in my reading when I couldn’t get the book I needed next from the library, and I wanted something new to read during an afternoon sick in bed.  I’m about halfway through it, but I put it down to finish the “project.”

I had picked up the first novel for the “project” in the library on a whim.  I thought it would be interesting to write about, but first I wanted to see what else the author wrote.  It turned out that while the first book was interesting (and brief), and the second was long and in a genre that was really not my kind of thing but a good read, the third was simply long.  The more I read it (and it took me a long time, since I could only read at most a chapter or two a day, which can’t have helped), the more I felt that (to paraphrase Wayne Booth) the implied author of this novel was someone I really did not want to spend time with. 

So when I finished, finally, the thought that passed through my head was, “I’m glad that’s over.”  That reminded me of the lines from T.S. Eliot (in the third section of “The Waste Land,” which he gave the title, “The Fire Sermon"):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

The title of the post is from the same poem, and does almost seem appropriate (surely goatees are over by now).  And while Jeffrey Eugenides and his narrators are probably as far from being the young man carbuncular as can be imagined, I don’t think the idea of the author of a book as a person who is in the room with a reader, for as long as the book’s being read, is a bad one.  The idea of an author being a seducer, much less a rapist, maybe not, though.

Again looking for something light to read, I picked up a fairly recent collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes, in the children’s section.  I like this passage, from the introductory story:

On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility.  In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape routes from hell.  These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats.

The passage is a good example of how Le Guin combines fiction that’s very interested in ideas with very precise, nearly pictorial descriptions.  She can sometimes be a little too abstract for my taste when she is narrating ordinary stories, but so far the pieces in this book are brief explorations of related ideas, for which her ability to describe people and places with pinpoint accuracy is very well suited.

Re-reading Madeleine L'Engle

Mari Ness at the Tor Books blog is reviewing Madeleine L'Engle's novels, in chronological order, beginning with her first young-adult book, published in 1949, And Both Were Young.  (UPDATE: Actually, she's not reading all of them, they won't be in strict chronological order, and And Both Were Young isn't L'Engle's first young-adult book.)  L’Engle is best known for her young-adult science fiction (somewhat in the C. S. Lewis vein), especially the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time.  But in addition to her more or less anglophilic young-adult novels, she wrote a handful of more or less anglophilic “women’s novels,” as well as a series of memoirs.  None of the adult novels have any science fiction elements, but the more interesting among them do verge on fantasy in the sense of depicting a real world on which things like ghosts and the occult have real effects.

I’ve enjoyed many of Ness’s posts discussing young-adult novels of yesteryear.  Her re-reads of Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow certainly brought back memories.

UPDATE: Here is the list of books that Ness will re-read.

Is Changing Rules by "Nudging" People Undemocratic?

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do.  For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default.  People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it.  It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish.  Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views.  I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.  Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to.  “Nudging” is nonverbal.  It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world.  Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits.  Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here.  But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels.  There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices.  But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop.  And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it.  So how this could possibly work is far from clear.  What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level.  If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all.  For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate.  Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale.  But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups.  “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions.  But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

A Long Way to Go to Get to a Post about Philip Roth

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time.  I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now.

(Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be:  More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle.  And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years.  There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.)

So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned all the clothes.  And how I wasted most of a day trying to research new washers and dryers online, figuring it might be time to replace the 1975-era washing machine too (which works perfectly well except that the “warm” water is better described as “cool,” and probably isn’t very efficient, and is so old and low-tech it just plain looks silly), only to discover that the question of the modern high-efficiency washer is a highly vexed one, and give up and decide to buy the simplest dryer I could find—only to learn that the online description of its dimensions was off by just enough that it wouldn’t fit through the door. 

Or I could blog about how, at just about this time last year, and the year before, right after my daughter’s birthday party, I got sick, and how I ended up being sick almost continually last year from November until almost May—though this time I got sick two weeks before the party, and since then so far I seem okay.  Or my attempts to determine whether the sore throat I’ve been waking up with every morning is from a cold, allergies, or acid reflux.  Though it does appear to be the last of these (it can be preempted using Pepcid), and so far I’m not sick, just tired from pre-party cleaning and from swimming in my daughter’s swim class to the deep end of the pool with her, for the first time in half a year and ve-e-ery slowly.

I could write about the movie Howl, and whether it is somehow cheating to have the original Ginsberg poem’s imagery displayed for you on a screen so you can understand the metaphors without doing the thinking for yourself—and whether it is actually possible to read all the words of the Neal Cassady section of the poem without having them read for you as a voiceover to a cartoon.

But I will blog, fairly briefly, about modern literature, and women in modern literature.

One of the novels I value most these days is American Pastoral, by Philip Roth.  The plot of the novel involves a successful Jewish-American businessman whose daughter, in the political turmoil of the 1960s, joins up with the Weathermen and bombs the local post office, killing the owner of the grocery store in which the PO’s located.  She disappears, and twenty years later, he finds her living a life of squalor in a slumland squat, doing a kind of penance and renunciation through a form of Jainism (involving the refusal to do violence to any living thing) which she has worked out for herself through reading and introspection.  Most of the novel consists of her father’s tortured attempts to work out what—in America, in his own parenting, in the belief systems of the other adults who helped her over the years—possibly could have resulted in both her crime and her unacceptable religious beliefs.  He rakes over her situation with the utmost of empathy of which he’s capable, but ultimately he fails to comprehend the path she chose.  He condemns her along with the society that made her that way, even as he is too much of a conformist to stand apart from society in any real way.

It’s the painstaking and thoughtful recreation of the emotional dilemmas faced by the girl and her father, the novelist’s willingness to implicate the father’s own beliefs and his way of life in actions he repudiates, and the selection of both male and female characters to illustrate various modes of being in the society he depicts, that I find appealing.  The moral, if there is any, isn’t on the surface, any more than it is in any other novel—there are some obvious “morals,” if a reader had to have them, like don’t commit murder, or don’t trust in wealth to preserve your family from misfortune, but the question of what could have helped these characters more isn’t answered—and I don’t assume that I would agree in full with Philip Roth’s take on their lives if I knew it.  (In fact, although I’ve been tempted to see these painstaking moments of empathy with female characters as a refutation of the broadly accepted notion of Roth’s general misogyny, I’ve ultimately concluded that they’re overwhelmed by the rest of his writing, that moments is all they are.)

But when I declared, on Internet discussion forums, that American Pastoral, along with The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, were my favorites among all Roth’s novels, I was told, by male participants, in no uncertain terms, that I was wrong.  Roth’s best novels are those, like Sabbath’s Theater, they said, that foreground the male id and the issues (in our society and given the realities of aging) that surround exuberant male sexuality.  There was no discussion, there was no admission that a preference for one novel over another may largely involve subjective factors, there was only a flat statement that I was wrong.  There was no explanation.  The idea may have been that those novels are more characteristic of Roth’s writing—maybe given the long view of his work as a whole, maybe given the idea of Roth as essentially a novelist of exuberantly aggressive sexuality and rebellion—and maybe because they took those apparently more characteristic novels as a condemnation of the author, or maybe because they equated characteristic with best.  The idea may have been that those themes always make for better literature, or the idea may have been that those novels are better because they are less political.  The idea may have been that those novels spoke well for the men making the claim, a subjective claim, if surreptitiously so.  Whatever the underlying reasons, if I tried to give reasons for my preference, their response was to insist that no possible reason could cause them to change their minds.

It seemed as if they were claiming that they could speak for the entire literary world, and that no alternative was possible.  They did not seem to envision the possibility of discussion about the merits of one novel over another, or of one way of writing novels over another.  They seemed, on the contrary, thoroughly invested in the concept of modern literature as the self-expression of a callow young man whose interests are eternally opposed to the needs of “the community”—entire shelves of novels the reader could take or leave depending on whether that character’s interests aligned with her own, but with which she could not dispute.

Maybe they were right.  Or maybe they just didn’t understand.

Roth, Pynchon, and Lethem as 9/11 Novelists

I was in New York City the week before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  There were some police on the streets, of course, but there always are police, and nobody thought anything of it.  The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium “evacuated” the stands, and the players returned to the safety of their locker rooms, for quite some time, but that was only because of the heavy rain, and the danger of lightning, and nobody thought anything of it.  Those days are over.  New York has changed, and the way tourists relate to the city when they visit it has changed.

D.G. Myers, now blogging for Commentary, has a long list of 9/11 novels.  Emily Rooney broadcast a shorter one including nonfiction books from Boston Steve Almond (video and a link to the text version of the list).  Most of them are ordinary “social novels,” about people who lived in New York in 2001 or are otherwise affected, in one way or another, by the events of that day.  Adam Kirsch, in the newish Jewish magazine The Tablet, has a different list of novels.  He argues, along with some of Myers’s Twitter followers, that The Plot against America should be considered among them, though Myers begs to differ.

I think Kirsch has a point.  What is most memorable about The Plot against America is, in part, the fear of the adults, and the way that a horrible political event seemed to license behavior that, under normal conditions, those adults would barely consider acceptable even from their children: the panic that event inspired.  And the fascist elements of the alternate society Roth imagines—which so scare the adult characters in the book—are, arguably, only an extension of the armed soldiers that appeared in airports and on city streets, and of the vigilance (and lessened concern for civil liberties) that seemed threatened by the emphasis on security implied by the words “after 9/11, everything is different.”  The novel just isn’t a plausible one in a world where 9/11 has not taken place.

Similarly, I would argue that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a 9/11 novel, at least in one chapter (the one that begins on page 149): in which the boy adventurers of the zeppelin Inconvenience fail to prevent a dangerous monster-enfolding meteorite from being brought into an unnamed city.  The details are different, but the reader’s knowledge of what’s being described will derive from the news stories about that day.

“This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety.  Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that ‘there would always be time,’ as citizens liked to put it.  But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed.  That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. . . .

“On the night in question, Hunter Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back, had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so overbright that his orbits and cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.”

Pynchon’s vision here is a kind of anti-9/11: what could have been and maybe should have been, in a Manhattan of the imagination, a nightmare worst case, differing in idiosyncratic but important particulars from reality.  And if there's a sense in which Against the Day might be a 9/11 novel, Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, surely is.  In Lethem’s novel, all of downtown is enveloped by a mysterious dark fog, which simply appeared one day and never left; and later, one of the characters becomes unreachable after his apartment building collapses, with no warning, leaving behind it only a deep pit and a police cordon.  Both Lethem and Pynchon foreground the emotionality and weirdness of living under a threat that is nearly incomprehensible, not only in its vastness and in the unforeseenness of what motivated it, but in its vagueness, though neither of them says anything that might unambiguously refer to a real historical event.

Picture Books: Hippo Goes Bananas

My daughter is two and doesn’t really understand lying yet, but she is enjoying this book by Marjorie Dennis Murray (illustrated by Kevin O’Malley) that illustrates the danger of rumor and jumping to conclusions.  Hippo wakes up with a toothache and crashes around wordlessly, causing minor havoc and waking up Cuckoo Bird.  Cuckoo Bird tells Monkey, in the process vastly overstating the extent of the damage.  Each animal in turn adds something to the story, accumulating “This Is the House that Jack Built”-style.  In the end, they end up curing Hippo’s toothache, but they also nearly risk causing the very environmental damage they’d baselessly imagined Hippo would have caused if they didn’t intervene: Hippo did not throw anything into the river, flooding the savanna, but that’s just what they do to him.

Another cool thing about the story is that surprisingly, it seems to be a variant on the Trolley Problem!  Instead of tipping a Fat Man over a bridge onto a railroad track, so as to save the lives of the people on a different siding, the animals tip Hippo over a cliff into a river, so as to prevent the spread of his supposed case of “skeeter fever.”  (Compare the illustration of their pushing him over to the illustration at the third of three links, above.)  Were their actions, in bumping Hippo down a cliff (illustrated in comic-book format), justifiable?  Was it okay to give Hippo a knock on the head and consequent headache in order to preserve the rest of them from the risk of catching skeeter fever?  If so, what if he had been big enough, or the river had been small enough, for him to have blocked its flow entirely—would it then still have been okay to dam the river and flood the savanna, so as to save themselves?  Or am I just thinking too much?

Framingham Reads The Killer Angels and Three Cups of Tea

The Killer Angels, the subject of my last post but one (with a few others begun in the interim but this not done) and the main subject of this one, was my town’s “One Book” selection for 2011.  Three Cups of Tea, which I’m going to mention briefly, has been in the news lately because it turns out not to be true—how much is false is, as yet, unknown, though it seems pretty certain that on top of the book’s being false there are a few financial improprieties involving the charity the book’s author, Greg Mortenson, founded and described (and promoted) in his memoir.  Aaron Bady has useful roundups here and here.

(Side point: Is there a comma missing in this title?  In other words, did I mean to say “This post is about the program, ‘Framingham Reads The Killer Angels,’ and also about Three Cups of Tea”—which is true?  It is true, but as it happens Three Cups of Tea was the Framingham Reads selection a few years back.  Children’s versions and even picture books broadened the scope of the “One Book” project to the high schools and elementary schools, and there were cross-cultural programs, as well.  Improving understanding of other cultures can’t hurt, so I hope the book is not inaccurate in that regard, too.  For example, the title of the book, Mortenson says in interviews, comes from an Afghan custom of making a stranger almost a part of the family, though he has to drink three cups of tea with them, and the process takes time.  Something to think about.)

More on The Killer Angels: Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in an otherwise unexplained post titled “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” linked a little while ago to a scene from Gettysburg, the not very well reviewed movie that was based on The Killer Angels.  The scene is of the point at which Chamberlain (played Jeff Bridges) tells his officers, “Fix bayonets.”  He has been ordered to hold the left flank, maintaining the Union Army’s position on the series of hills called Cemetery Ridge, and not under any circumstances to withdraw.  Now his men are entirely out of ammunition, and the enemy is still coming.  If they fix bayonets and charge downhill, they may at least prevent the enemy from circling around behind the Union line.

The film shows Chamberlain surrounded by his staff as they react to the command.  They all are stunned by what seems a foolhardy charge, nearly unprotected, into certain death.  Chamberlain himself appears to be perfectly aware of the unusual nature of his own order.  His mood, as much as his decision, seems to illustrate something dangerous in his character.  In the book, however, it is different.

In the novel, Chamberlain is described as making the obvious choice.  His options are limited.  His men are out of ammunition, and his requests for more bullets haven’t been answered.  If he retreats—as he has been ordered not to do, under any circumstances—shifting to the right, towards the rest of the Union line, the enemy will not only take the hill, but will sweep behind the Union line and attack them from behind.  If he stands pat, he and his men will likely be slaughtered.

His only option is to tell the men to fix bayonets.  They will be armed only with those, against an infantry armed with guns (and possibly also a cavalry armed with swords), but this would be their situation in any event.  What he does that is unusual is order them to take the offensive (unplanned by his own superiors), and charge down the hill.  He tells them to sweep to the right, pushing the enemy across the front of the remaining Union guns.  He has heard of the maneuver in his training to be an officer but has never seen it done.  His troops end up sweeping well across the front of the line, taking large numbers prisoners.  They may well have startled the enemy as much as they did their own side. 

It’s only after the battle is over that Chamberlain realizes that what he did was unusual.  He knew the battle could not be won unless he ordered his men to charge downhill, so he ordered his men to charge downhill.  Most experienced officers, though, as he discovers, would probably not have done the same.  His reason for acting as he did, in giving such a risky order, is not so much that he was a college professor as that he was inexperienced.  He probably acted more as a young man would, just out of officer training school, than as a professor of military science (which wasn’t his field in the first place).  Of course, in most wars, twenty-somethings have not been given command of so many men as Chamberlain was given.  He happened to combine the confidence of an experienced professional with the inadequate, untried school-learning of a recently graduated student.  That doesn’t have much to do with his being a professor—it wasn’t Chamberlain’s thinking like a professor that led him to take such a foolhardy action—so much as with his being an older, respected professional man whose high position in society was seen as transferring easily to another sphere.  As it happens, that worked out well at Gettysburg, but it might have been otherwise.

And Shaara illustrates well that, though social hierarchies operated slightly differently in the South than they do in the North, every social interaction that happens in the Army is necessarily hierarchical.  The visible double-takes the characters allow themselves in the film version of Gettysburg are unthinkable in the world of Shaara’s novel.  Nearly everything in the novel is described from the point of view of a high-ranking officer: in most cases, the highest-ranking officer possible, given the situation as prescribed by the plot.  There are few exceptions.  The book starts off in the point of view of a sometime-Shakespearean actor turned Rebel spy who is well aware of the fact that the real Army is more than a little suspicious of him.  The second section begins with the point of view of John Buford, a cavalry officer who has never really reacclimated to life in the East, and who stakes out a Union position in Gettysburg, not entirely trusting that additional troops will arrive in time for his efforts to do any good, and—again—well aware that he will get little credit from history or from Washington.  After that, however, the novel shifts to the regular Army officers who have taken over the battlefield.  The only conflict we see between officers in which the commander is not always the one in the right is that between Longstreet and Lee, the former arguing that they are sure to lose the battle if they engage again the following day.

The scene from the movie is damning for Chamberlain’s case.  At this point, in Chamberlain’s chapters of the book, the reader seems to be humming under his breath, “Another victory like that and we are done for.”  In Longstreet’s chapters, however, what we hear is most likely worse: “We were hip deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool said to move on.”

Gettysburg and the Modern Military (The Killer Angels and Game Theory)

In The Killer Angels, a novel about the battle of Gettysburg, General James Longstreet—generally, the hero of the book—is enormously struck by the changes in military tactics that he is in the middle of.  Longstreet is, himself, a protagonist of these changes.  He has seen, in the battles of the Indian Wars in the North American West, that traditional methods of combat are bound to result in unnecessary deaths, and ultimately in the loss of the war.  A single artillery gun in a good location, or even a single rifle wielded from behind a tree, will simply massacre any army that tries to capture it.  Longstreet’s solution is to emphasize defense, and to deemphasize honor.  He prefers to abandon a hard-won battleground rather than defend it at the expense of a more likely victory elsewhere; to withdraw in the face of greater force rather than attack simply in order to be first to strike; to cut off the enemy’s supply lines rather than confront them face to face in battle.  And he prefers to find a defensible location and dig in rather than lead a glorious charge.

Robert E. Lee, who happens to be Longstreet’s commanding officer, is a soldier of the old-fashioned school.  It may well be that Lee is losing the war because the needs of the age are for mechanism, not for honor, but Lee will not change.  Shaara presents his determination as a kind of virtue, in line with the (now usually poorly thought of) view that the South deserved to win the Civil War in some kind of “higher” or actually moral sense, regardless of the immorality of slave-ownership and racism.  And Longstreet does come to doubt himself.  He is fighting the war because he is a soldier and his commanders have ordered him to do so, not because he believes in the cause, and he recognizes the advantage of having the kind of cause he lacks.  Regardless, the predictions and views which Shaara presents as Longstreet’s are more correct than those he presents as Lee’s.  And even so, Shaara describes the old-fashioned kind of battle as more “human,” in some way, than an artillery charge, or even a careful trench-based defense.

It isn’t surprising to see a Rebel cavalry charge complete with Rebel yell (the “inhuman screaming of the onrushing dead”) depicted as glorious, if also primitive, even as those troops ride straight into the face of modern artillery and hidden riflemen.  What is more surprising is to see the advance of a mile-long line of infantry described as beautiful and as noble.  The sight of thousands of men in brightly-colored uniforms marching slowly forward under constant artillery fire must surely be impressive in some way, even sublime, but it is hardly one of the greatest expressions of the human spirit.  Yet Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Yankee college professor turned officer, with little combat experience, immediately thinks in just those terms.  Chamberlain has been learning to see battle as his fellow soldiers do, to see it in its gritty details as it really is, and what this classicist and professor of theology discovers about the dying art of Napoleonic battle array is that it was a triumph of human will.  The horror of so many men bound to die does not appear to enter his mind.  By contrast, Chamberlain’s reaction on experiencing his first artillery barrage from behind his own line is to dive to the ground, stunned, and fall into unconsciousness (having failed to give his troops any orders).  The repeated violent shaking of the earth under the impact of machinery is, for him, is what registers as true horror. 

Does Shaara—in this book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975—intend to make a comment about modern military practice?  What, exactly, does he have in mind when he mentions the modern, mechanized military?  I’ve been reading about game theory and wonder if it might provide some hints.

On page 64 of Luce and Raiffa, Games and Decisions, a military strategist named Haywood is quoted on the “American” decision theory for battle.  It is striking.  He says that the US military commander bases his strategy not on the intentions of the enemy, but on the capabilities of the enemy.  This is a little chilling.  It calls, logically, for building up capacity even in the face of the fact that the enemy has no plan to attack, on every possible battleground even when the enemy cannot possibly attack on all of them at once.  This kind of talk rightly gave Cold War hawkish thinking a bad name, and tarred much of the field of game theory along with it.  (The result, in part, was an emphasis by doves on the limitations imposed on game theory’s having restricted itself to the narrowest range of human motivations, those associated with the purest self-interest.  An example is research, publicized by Douglas Hofstadter and others, on the absurdities that result whenever a game-theoretical example is brought down to earth and put into effect.)

Less dramatically, however, it also calls for a rather mechanistic view of the army itself (both ours and that of the enemy), as questions of intention are set aside.  All that matters is a tallying up of the numbers of weapons of various sorts, of their capacities (probably expressed in numerical terms), of their geographic placement, and of the numbers of soldiers deployed to make use of them.  Old-fashioned strategical thinking—trying to get into the mind of the commanders on the other side—goes by the board.

Thus, all opportunities for finesse have dissipated.  The military strategist is no longer a strategist in the old sense; he no longer needs the skills of a chess master.  Instead of pitting himself against an enemy who is human and his equal, he submits troop numbers to a computer.  A concern about the potential replacement of human decision-makers by computers would explain Longstreet’s regret more plausibly than would a simple distaste for prudence and defensive strategy.  It doesn’t make the idea that the South was some kind of glorious lost cause any more persuasive.  It does, however, turn Longstreet into a character with whom late twentieth-century audiences may be more likely to sympathize.

The Secret Philosophy of the Postmodern Novelist

The New Republic has given Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, one of its first negative reviews (behind firewall, I haven’t read it or the novel, only the New Yorker excerpts).  Not that there’s any reason to give Franzen the utmost in kid-glove treatment—though I’m increasingly fond of The Corrections, it is not perfect by any means, and is often very annoying.  The interesting thing is that, a few days later, Adam Kirsch, TNR’s poetry critic, chimed in to defend neoconservatism from Franzen’s insulting portrayal.  Of course, The New Republic has long leant towards neoconservatism itself on many issues.  Not content to defend the politics of his own magazine, however, Kirsch goes on to defend the late philosopher Leo Strauss from charges, more or less, that he agreed with Plato:

“Not many of the millions of readers of Freedom will also have been readers of The Nation or the London Review of Books during the Bush years. But those who were will immediately recognize this passage as an allusion to Leo Strauss—who was alleged, in these circles, to be the secret mastermind of belligerent neoconservatism.

It was Strauss who allegedly taught that “the philosopher” had the right and duty to lie to the public in the service of a greater good, and who used Platonic myths to undermine democracy. It’s not necessary to reargue here the falsity of this understanding of Strauss—who, in fact, wrote about the way free-thinking and rationalist philosophers throughout history used occult writing to outwit the religious taboos of their time.”

Kirsch is wrong.  Strauss (like his disciple, Allan Bloom) held that philosophers have both an esoteric and an exoteric teaching.  The esoteric teaching is specifically hidden from everyone other than philosophers.  The esoteric teaching is different from the exoteric teaching, and the exoteric teaching is, in turn, deliberately intended by the writer as the message that’s to be conveyed to laypeople who read the book.  The purpose of the dual meaning is to keep most people from knowing what the philosophers are saying, because most people—not to mention the authorities—would not want the philosophers’ real beliefs to be widely shared.  (In fact, in the places and times Strauss was most interested in, the authorities might arrest a philosopher who was too clear about his message.)

Strauss wanted to insist that moral truth is always and everywhere the same, yet philosophers in different times and places have disagreed about the nature of moral truth.  To defuse relativism, Strauss developed a theory that explained away the appearance that philosophers have always been relativists (or “historicists”): “Plato and Aristotle (and their medieval followers as well) often concealed their own thought by accommodating themselves to the opinions of their contemporaries....  Thus was born Strauss’s famous doctrine of ‘esoteric teaching,’ his conviction that philosophical texts can contain hidden meanings reserved for an elite readership that knows truly how to read.” *

In other words: The contents of a philosophy text are not reliable evidence of what the author believed.  What the writer believed is, it follows, the esoteric teaching understood by the true philosopher, who has been educated in a philosophical way.  Only philosophers and scholars of philosophy understand what the texts that constitute the history of philosophy really mean.  People who have read only the primary texts—unless they are themselves philosophers, or at least scholars of philosophy—cannot know.  As Larmore says, Strauss’s aim here is to deny that we should take seriously things like Aristotle’s defense of the morality of slavery, because truth doesn’t change, and we know that slavery is wrong.

The same thing presumably applies to books published today.  That is, if a philosopher named Lenny Ostrich writes a book, he will have the intention that philosophers will use his book as evidence of the truth, and everybody else will use his book as evidence of a lie.  If this isn’t lying, I don’t know what would count.  (Obviously, other thinkers have held a similar idea.  For example, Marxism possesses a variety of theories about social and psychological mechanisms that almost make it impossible not to lie to one group of people or another.)  This is something entirely different from writing a book that is simply “difficult,” an evaluation that includes nonphilosophical works like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as Werner Heisenberg’s Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.

This doesn’t mean that philosophers should write propaganda.**  A philosophy text is not a political act, and its intended audience is philosophers and students of philosophy.  The Straussian idea, on this view, is simply that what philosophers do is nobody’s business but their own (in a way, it’s a kind of hypertrophied zeal for academic freedom).  It isn’t that philosophers ought to have a political project in which they enlist nonphilosophers by misleading them about the nature of philosophy.  But it does include the project of misleading nonphilosophers (not least about the nature of philosophy), and the possibility of someone having a this project like this one should seem at least a little troubling now that education is so widely available (and not least to a journalist like Kirsch).  Five hundred years ago, a writer might want to mislead a few priests and university dons, who wouldn’t want even philosophers to read potentially subversive books: a few people, who had the learning and the time to study deeply, could learn the truth—the others would remain as they were.  These days, the same writer would be misleading large numbers of people (many of whom already nominally agree with him) who had been led to believe what he wrote was important, and who might mistake his untruths for useful information.

And worse: Strauss was a scholar of political philosophy, and his neoconservative disciples have not been scholars but rather practitioners of politics.  They seem to have taken the lesson that philosophy hides, specifically, truths about the world of government and politics.  Moreover, they mostly seem committed to the idea that they themselves belong to the elite that knows all the secrets about this world (if not that they themselves are “philosophers”).  Such a person might well conclude that part of their job is to lie to everybody else about what’s “really going on” behind the scenes.  (Admittedly, their beliefs may have no effect on their actions; most liars don’t need a fancy theory to tell them it’s all right to lie.)

It’s not an uninteresting theory.  And if true, it would make some of TNR’s own writers quite a bit more interesting than they would ordinarily be.  It might even be helpful for interpreting the postmodern novel.

* My quotation is from Charles Larmore’s 1989 essay on Strauss, which was published in The New Republic and reprinted in The Morals of Modernity.

** And it obviously doesn’t turn propagandists into philosophers, either.

Forster, Trilling, Kazin, and Draper

In the course of reviewing a new biography of E.M. Forster, Colm Toibin answers a question I’d wondered about: Did Lionel Trilling know Forster was gay?  As Toibin points out, it doesn’t matter:

"Trilling had enough to write about, including the drama in Forster’s work between freedom and restriction, between the spiritual and the material, between England and its empire, and between one class and another in Forster’s own world. These conflicts were substantial enough for Trilling not to need to know that they also operated as metaphors and systems of disguise, that their power in Forster’s fiction was nourished by his secret sexuality.”

But he says the answer is no.

Trilling is one of a triumvirate of mid-century American critics recommended, in Walking Out in the Evening, by the Frank Langella character.  He assumes that the graduate student writing a dissertation on his novels has never heard of either Trilling, or Edmund Wilson, or Alfred Kazin.  This sounded implausible to me.  Maybe not, since my local library has only two books by Kazin, one of them a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories that he edited (and the other on religion).  Anyway, Andrew Seal has a brief review of Kazin’s On Native Grounds here.

Season premiere of Mad Men was last night, and Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, is on today’s Fresh Air.  He confirmed that Don Draper is, in a sense, pretending to be someone he's not: to be the kind of executive Dick Whitman thinks Draper would be.  We’ll see how that plays out in the fourth season.  Draper has gone from being a rising star, but a protégé, of a second-rate firm, to being a principal at a firm that right now is still just struggling to get out of the basement.  He’s losing the false uprightness of the white-shoe executive he probably could never have succeeded in appearing to be, and letting his inner maverick out.  From now on, if the first episode of the season is any guide, his campaigns will be honest about what the companies he represents really are selling, even if the results are crude.  And he intends to be recognized as the genius he is.  He is breaking the barriers that constricted what was permitted to be said.

It’s always difficult for me to avoid seeing Don through Peggy’s eyes, and to ask what it would be like to work for him.  He gave her a break, but now she seems to have come into her own.  It isn’t obvious that anyone will allude to her origins as a secretary from Queens, and her lack of a college degree, ever again.  And she may be beginning to become annoyed with Don.  The saying, “no man is a hero to his valet,” may apply here.  We, the audience, know that Don Draper really is the real thing: his campaigns are groundbreaking, and Peggy of all people knows that they are his.  In previous seasons, Don has been teased for being a “gray flannel suit man”: a managerial, executive type, not really creative.  His willingness to stick with Sterling, Cooper, rather than moving on to a more high-powered, business-oriented firm, suggested that he really identified with that old-fashioned idea of the firm, and so did the way he kept his copywriting staff in line.  Maybe now that his name is on the door he’s willing to show his true colors.

It's 1900, and Our Future's So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades

On the second page of his history of the first five decades of the twentieth century (The Big Change), Frederick Lewis Allen quotes from a biography of J.P. Morgan written by his son-in-law, Herbert Livingston Satterlee, presumably lamenting the end of the age of “good society”: on the first day of 1900, “New York was still a friendly, neighborly city and was a pleasant place in which to live.”

As Allen points out, the biographer’s definition of “people” must have included only the very well off, people like him, people with whom he and his family might have socialized.  He does not include the poor, for whom life in New York City was not especially “pleasant” at all: whose children might die without “society” ever noticing.  Allen explains why.  The publishing world of the time, including the higher class of magazines (by which Allen himself had been employed for about forty years by the time he wrote this book), was interested only in the doings of the very, very rich—men like J.P. Morgan—and in a culture suited to them.  A leftish or postmodern English professor might tell you that has always been the case, equally in 1900, in 1950, and 2010.  Publishing, like any cultural entity in a society, serves the interests of the ruling class: in other words, the rich (in Allen’s words, “the elect”): an extreme oversimplification that needs many caveats and special cases in order to be accurate, but a useful overarching theory for many critical purposes.  The age was, in Allen’s words, “complacent,” so its literature and its journalism followed rules designed to ensure they would appeal to a complacent audience.

But it would not be fair to describe those poor immigrants (doubly victimized by “European tyranny” and “American indifference,” Van Wyck Brooks wrote in The Confident Years, which Allen quotes further down on the same page) whose children accidentally drowned in the ditch behind their tenement as themselves “complacent.”  The failure of the Populist and farmers’ movements did not reflect on them in any way.  No more could the word be used in an accurate description of the muckraking journalists and naturalist novelists who were beginning to do their work around the same time.  Or of a union activist like Eugene Debs (“[a] friendly and merciful man with an insecure grasp of logic”), whom Allen describes next.  Elaborating on these counterexamples to his own argument, Allen sticks to those very same rules, restricting journalistic interest in “humanity” to the upper class, except when enumerating the results of that class’s failures of compassion.

(The pattern is continued in succeeding chapters.  We learn that the big cities as well as the tiny villages were smaller in 1900 than they would be about fifty years later, and we learn that Los Angeles then had a population of about 100,000, Dallas and Houston both less than 45,000.  We learn that the tallest building in Manhattan had a total of twenty-nine stories.  But no data is given for any smaller towns, which indeed did change in size during the period—though in a way that would be difficult to characterize without statistical analysis and a fair degree of work.  Chelmsford, Massachusetts, for example, a small town outside of Lowell—and probably very much the kind of place Allen had in mind when he promised his readers an explanation the changes in “the American way of life” that had occurred since their childhoods—had a population of less than 4000 in 1900, of just under 10,000 in 1950, and of about 34,000 in 2000.  The change that had already taken place in towns like Chelmsford would have affected many more readers of a book like this than the building of the Empire State Building or the change in character of the big western cities.  But the picture Allen paints of then-present day 1952 is as idealized and lacking in important detail as the image of 1900 he takes to be the starting point of the majority of his readers.)

Yet, by “complacent,” Frederick Lewis Allen means to imply that nobody at all anticipated what the United States would look like fifty years later, and this is certainly correct.  Both Debs, contemplating his presidential run, or Morgan, actually not yet contemplating the formation of U.S. Steel, would have been shocked and astonished by the America actually brought into being by “a combination of varied and often warring forces” neither was able to anticipate.  Morgan “contemplated . . . a bright future” with the rest of “the well born and well endowed”; Debs contemplated something different; yet both (in this respect) were wrong—presumably, because both failed to see something that would turn out to have been important.

Recent Reading

Some weeks I don’t find a lot that interests me in the New Yorker, but that certainly isn’t true of the April 26 edition.  There is a short story by E.L. Doctorow about a suburban couple haunted by the homeless man who used to live at their address, stripped down and minimalistic in a Barthelmeesque way, and a selection of letters written by the late Saul Bellow.  The following is from a letter to Lionel Trilling in 1953, shortly after The Adventures of Augie March was published:

“It isn’t that Augie resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it, Augie is something different.  I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known.  Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie.  The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse, lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose.  They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities.  I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my ‘propaganda.’  To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say.  I suppose I didn’t quite make it convincingly.”

This is beautiful.  We should have had more of Bellow’s criticism as he laid it out in these letters, the novelist talking about the novel.  Instead, unfortunately, what we got is, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

In the same issue, Hilton Als has a feature about Tyler Perry.  He compares Perry’s Madea films in passing to movies about white men and women in similar situations, living it up in the single life but ultimately deciding it’s better to settle down and get married.  “The heroes of Perry’s movies bear no resemblance to the young white men in search of a sense of purpose in the comedies of, say, Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. . . .  The white-boy comedies of the past two decades are about the grating, strained emo charm of never growing up, while Perry’s films are about the necessity of growing up in a largely segregated world.”  Als might have added Kevin Smith to that list without detracting from its accuracy—or, for that matter, Craig Brewer.  Perry also seems to be a data point for Ehrenreich’s account of the prosperity gospel: “[S]peaking of his sixteen-thousand-square-foot mansion, which he named Avec Chateau, Perry said, ‘. . . I realized this house was a testament to my religious faith.”  (A video about Perry, narrated by Hilton Als, is here.)

On politics: Last week TPM Café’s Book Club discussed Jeff Shesol’s book on FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court with justices who would not overturn the New Deal, by adding to the size of the court.  The spring issue of Democracy Journal has a series of responses by various liberal and progressive thinkers and writers to the question where liberalism is today, a little over a year after Barack Obama’s inauguration.  John Quiggin, an Australian professor of economics who I read at Crooked Timber, has been raising similar questions here, here, and here.  Quiggin says, “Practitioners of this kind of managerialist quasi-social democracy have found themselves unable to handle the challenge posed by the irrationalist right . . .”  By “social democracy” he means, more or less, welfare-state liberalism.  I don’t see much difference at the moment between that kind of center-left liberalism and what in America is usually called “neoliberal.”  (That is, I don’t see neoliberalism as a center-right position, or equivalent to “classical liberalism.)  We are all neoliberals now, but pretending the managerialists are the same as the irrationalist right—as I think John Quiggin might like to do—is a waste of time.

Finally, Stephen Holden reviews Stephen Sondheim’s career to date, while discussing the new revue, Sondheim on Sondheim:

“In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

“. . .

“For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted.”

I’ve actually finished reading Bright-Sided and will post my notes slowly, as I clean them up and copy over some of them from my spiral notebook.  Non-magazine reading currently includes The Happiest Toddler on the Block.  I’ve also just gotten Michael Bérubé’s book on the campus culture wars, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts, from interlibrary loan.  Other than the fact that the plastic-enclosed jacket is unfortunately quite shiny, unread looking, and toddler-attractive, all I can say of it so far is that Professor Bérubé’s published prose style is quite a bit more staid than his blogging style.

Equal Temperament—Threat Or Menace?

You are about to enter the Twilight Zone. I submit for your consideration an oddly named book lying on an ordinary desk: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by professor Ross W. Duffin. This book was written by a madman. Or is he? You should understand: If Duffin is mad, he's not alone. And the spaces between the lines of his book are filled with the silent laughter of the gods.

The gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature drops a giant hairball in our path.

From a review by Jan Swafford at Slate (Matt Yglesias gives the short version for non-musicians).  I wonder whether Duffin writes about the normalization of jazz harmonies by English performers in Broadway-derived musicals, which can be very strange if you know the originals well.

You can play a keyboard instrument that isn’t tuned in equal temperament.  What you usually can’t do easily is choose your tuning on the spur of the moment (which is possible playing string instruments like violins, and even playing wind instruments, but not the standard piano).  An English musician named Geoff Smith, however, has invented a piano with “fluid tuning,” which you can see and listen to here.  It’s expected to be very useful especially for non-Western genres, and certainly looks pretty neat.

Brief Links About Literature

Who would have thought that if you want to do journalism, there’s a book to tell you how to do it . . . unless the kind of journalism you want to do is reporting on the arts.  (Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes)

This seems absurd to me. If a theater catches fire in the middle of a performance and kills everybody inside, there is no shortage of guidance on how to write the news brief covering the fire for the next day’s paper; how to write the extended story about the investigation a few days later; how to write an obituary about an individual victim on deadline, and how to write on the victims collectively for a Sunday-magazine thumbsucker a few months later; how to write a formal editorial condemning the lax building codes that helped accelerate the fire, and how to write the emotional column or op-ed piece demanding more out of our neglectful civic leaders; how to use public records and the Freedom of Information Act to background the parties responsible; how not to libel any of those people; how to decide where to place the story; how to photograph the story and how best to visualize data related to it; how to blog, video, podcast, tweet, Facebook, and SEO the bejesus out of the story; and, after all that’s done, how to have a tedious discussion about the ethics of handling every last one of those things. But nothing on how to write a review that might have persuaded people to do something better with their time that fateful evening.

This sounds so familiar.  Don’t we have a word for it by now?  (Jonathan Raban, LRB)

Red Tory is like a 300-page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelves are stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modern psychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson (in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the key to the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds. We have sunk, Parson Blond says, into a condition of ‘rootless cultural relativism’, godless and cynical, in which there is ‘a pervading lack of daily joy’. He blames the Bloomsbury Group, especially Lytton Strachey; the disillusioned war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I watched on the internet) and the pernicious laissez-faire doctrines of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is said to examine “the riddle of atavism”: the racist fear of biologically inferior human specimens living among us.  But, arguably, it’s actually about cocaine addiction, as this suggests (h/t Andrew Sullivan).  If so, the argument that late Victorian horror fiction like Jekyll/Hyde, Dracula, The Time Machine, and Dorian Gray expressed society’s ingrown and irrational racism falls apart.  Could this fiction instead be expressing an entirely rational wish to suppress drug abuse and fight addiction?  And, then, why did the scientifically minded (such as Galton and Lombroso) believe the issue was race?

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, Ch. 2

Here is part two on Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided.  (Part one is here.)

Chapter two is a discussion of motivational literature and ideas, especially of those famous enough to be on Oprah.

A convention for motivational speakers: Ehrenreich is surprised by the mix of technical, commercial help and theoretical information that are offered, though it seems rather typical, and useful.  Her real concern is for the people at the convention, because they mostly are wannabes who will presumably be taken for a ride.  They lack experience addressing large audiences of the type they presumably will need to do, in order to become motivational speakers; they are not prepared to address audiences “of the size of” the convention.  They are hero-worshipping the people who run the convention and don’t realize that they aren’t really capable of reaching the top of the pyramid.  This is not the kind of place where people can attend seminars where they will learn things from teachers or purchase books from which they can learn.  It is a certain kind of emotional experience mixed with crass commerce.

Ehrenreich has to admit that there are advantages to being nice, and having a positive attitude, rather than being grumpy.  She seems to be ambivalent.  She’s trying to show why she dislikes it, why it’s troubling, why it can be pragmatically counterproductive. Still, this part of the book doesn’t really work for me.  Ehrenreich concedes that a workplace filled with happy people is more enjoyable for most people: we are one another’s “emotional wallpaper,” in her words, creating the environment within which each individual moves and acts.  But she has to work very hard to find a way to describe this that will not undermine her point, and she doesn’t always succeed.  She asks whether most people would prefer to work with “critical and challenging people or smiling yes-sayers”; but this is awfully close to “critical nay-sayers or people who smile at you”; and how much more persuasive would this have been if she’d written “people who challenge your assumptions or yes-men who, in Hamlet’s words, ‘smile and smile’”?

Her most vivid examples of the evils of the positive thinking mindset involve coercion imposed by employers—not unnaturally, given her leftist politics—she is appalled by the treatment people who work for others, especially for corporations, are compelled to put up with.  In Dale Carnegie’s day, a telephone operator could be compelled to behave as if she were really interested in the people she helped.  In our own time, one of her sources was never even able to discover what he’d said that had been so sarcastic he’d had to be let go.  William Whyte’s “Organization Man” was managed in industrial conditions similarly oppressive to those in the Soviet Union.  “What has changed, in the last few years, is that the advice to at least act in a positive way has taken on a harsher edge.  The penalty for nonconformity is going up, from the possibility of job loss and failure to social shunning and complete isolation.”

Here, again, I think she is going off-track: nobody has said that what’s criticized as “negativity” in the workplace has anything to do with getting rid of people who bring up bad news or who “provide unwelcome reality checks.”  This plays well into the example, which she brings up here, of the subprime mortgage fiasco (which was indeed caused in part by groupthink and reluctance to listen to the objections of naysayers to improbably optimistic plans), but there is no reason to believe problems of the laid-off workers she quoted on the previous few pages had anything to do with that kind of thing—with the idea that workers “are there only to nourish, praise, and affirm.”  She gives no reason to believe that this is a widespread or an increasing problem, only three widely separated data points of different categories (individual firings, current events, and motivational literature): this argument can have no practical or direct effect on the people she appears to be most concerned about (the workers), and can at best give people a reason (the recent financial disasters) to change the way they think (giving less credence to “positive thinking” literature).

Positive thinking writers advise people not to watch the news, because news stories are invariably “negative,” being about war and crime.  Ehrenreich notes that this may make people feel better about the world by giving them a false idea about how few problems there are in it.  Positive thinking drives the new media in which people are given “positive” news instead: happy-ending human-interest stories.  The refusal to pay attention to the news is “suggestive of a deep helplessness at the core of positive thinking.”  Is Ehrenreich thinking of “learned helplessness,” the theory that explains high rates of female depression by comparison with the lab mice who were shocked so frequently that they stopped trying to escape?  It doesn’t seem entirely apropos, though the psychologizing fits, for example with the idea that positive thinkers cannot handle the “terrifying” fact “that there may, in fact, be a ‘real world’ out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes,” which causes them to “withdraw” into a fantasy world. 

Ehrenreich would prefer they join a social or political movement, which I agree would be better than pretending problems don’t exist, and if they do, it is better for people on the other side of the world to suffer, because “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”  But the writers who remind people that they can’t prevent wars or earthquakes, even by sending money, joining a movement to persuade the public of the need for change, or lobbying their political representatives (the alternatives Ehrenreich offers) do have a point; the way these stories are covered really are disproportionate to their connection to most people’s lives.

The idea of people setting themselves up as life and career coaches originates in corporations hiring sports coaches as motivational speakers.

At the convention, the career coaches’ convention include pseudoscientific explanations of why their techniques work, and a claim that quantum mechanics supports the theory.  Ehrenreich’s motivation and her animus against these people shows through too transparently here; the quantum mechanics stuff is very silly and can have been included only in order to make them look ridiculous.  She tries to show the difference between the truly scientific (if popular) accounts of Murray Gell-man and Michael Shermer, and the self-help writers who pretend their free ranging speculations are based on real science, but the only point her material really supports is the mistakenness of applying ideas outside the boundaries within which they apply, and she tries to go farther than that.  I don't see what purpose is served by emphasizing so frequently that the connections positive thinking writers claim, between their theories and science, are not only slight but non-existent--most people with an interest in science already knew that, most people with an interest in positive thinking don't care about science, and the few who do are not going to be persuaded by her calling them "silly."