Noted: Walter Benjamin

From Walter Benjamin's "A Berlin Chronicle", collected in Reflections:

It must have been in the afternoon that a difference of opinion arose between myself and my mother. Something was to be done that I did not like. Finally, my mother had recourse to coercion. She threatened that unless I did her bidding I should be left at home in the evening. I obeyed. But the feeling with which I did so, or rather, with which, the threat hardly uttered, I measured the two opposed forces and instantaneously perceived how enormous was the preponderance of the other side, and thus my silent indignation at so crude and brutal a procedure, which put at stake something totally disproportionate to the end--for the end was momentary whereas the stake, the gratitude for the evening that my mother was about to give me, as I know today and anticipated then, was deep and permanent--this feeling of violated trust has outlived in me all that succeeded it that day. (pp. 46-47)

Reflections-preface postscript

The other day I complained about Leon Wieseltier's preface to the new edition of Walter Benjamin's Reflections. Reflections is published by Schocken, which is a Random House imprint. In that post I almost expressed disappointment in Schocken for including the preface from Wieseltier. It seemed odd that anyone would see it as appropriate. André Schiffrin, founder of The New Press, and former head of Pantheon and Schocken, provides a little background. In a letter to the editor in the April issue of Harper's, responding to Ursula K. Le Guin's essay from the February issue on the decline of reading ("Staying Awake") (I didn't read Le Guin's piece: these semi-regular laments about reading rarely say anything new and thus tend to bore me), Schiffrin's says the following:

Le Guin is also correct in spotting the hostility of the conglomerates to the books themselves. One of the first signs that warned me of Random House's agenda when I was directing Pantheon and Schocken Books, both of which were once independent presses, was a memo warning that any backlist paperback selling under 2,000 copies a year would be pulped. This would have destroyed our backlist sales, sales on which any serious publisher must depend in order to survive. When my colleagues and I left in protest of this and other diktats, most of the books we had published by Cortázar, Duras, de Beauvoir and many others were eliminated--presumably on the fallacious assumption that all energies should be focused on the very few titles that might become bestsellers. This policy led, in part, to Random's losing unprecedented sums and eventually being sold by S. I. Newhouse, who had approved these maneuvers, to Bertelsmann.

This is familiar stuff, and as Schiffrin implies, Schocken is not quite the Schocken of old, though it may indeed maintain the same general array of titles, the same general focus on Judaica. . .

More Interesting Questions

The other day at Ready Steady Book, Mark Thwaite posted about James Wood's new book of criticism, How Fiction Works. Admitting that his problem with the book is arguably beside the point, since Wood does fairly well what he sets out to do, Mark concludes thus:

My problem with How Fiction Works is that how fiction works is not a very interesting question (hence Wood's perfectly adequate answer becomes a not particularly interesting book).

When faced with a novel, I'm not reading as a practitioner or would-be practitioner. Close reading, for me, isn't an attempt to unlock a code, it isn't about seeing how it has all been done, so I can then go away, tooled-up, and create a version of it myself.

I'm not interested in such unpicking, but not because I don't want to "ruin the magic" or some such: I'm not interested because I think far more interesting questions about the novel need to be asked. It seems to me that asking how fiction works is a very dull question indeed next to the existential one that really matters: why fiction is.

I've become increasingly interested in Mark's question, or questions surrounding his question, as regular readers of this blog will have noticed. Both from a specific sense of the question--why is this particular book here?--and the more general, existential sense--why write fiction at all?

Mark's admission that his problem with Wood's book may not be quite fair is part of an interesting, related issue for me. I wrote the following in a comment to Mark's post, which I include here as a reminder to myself that I want to explore this topic some more:

while it's certainly appropriate to say that a critic of a history of rugby shouldn't complain about its lack of coverage of football, in a broader sense, I nevertheless think that a critic ought to be wondering why a certain book exists. Ironically, I think this was Wood's tack in his negative review of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Why is McCarthy doing this genre exercize, he seemed to be asking, and got roundly attacked in many quarters for not properly attending to or evaluating how well he does what he does in that book (which I have not read). At the time, I agreed with those attacking Wood, but lately, having read Josipovici and others, I'm inclined to ask your question, and other related questions. It seems like a limited role for critics to confine them to merely evaluating how well something is done. (It seems to me that lots of things are done "well", but don't do much to justify their existence.) Granted, it might help if a critic were first able to recognize what is attempted before criticizing the attempt (and I think Wood does this well enough at times, though seems to miss the point at other times).

(Incidentally, here is Wood's review of No Country For Old Men, which I've re-read. I found it a lot more interesting than I remembered, so I may have more to say about it in particular in connection with the question of the critic's responsibility and larger role.)

"I sort of can't believe it exists"

Tom Breihan's review of Snoop Dogg's new cd, Ego Trippin', appeared yesterday at Pitchfork. In his opening paragraph, Tom writes that Snoop has "somehow managed to evolve into a model of gangsta consistency, a sort of rap version of Tom Petty or Alan Jackson. He cranks out lazy, effortless hits at a scary clip, slightly tweaking his formula as the musical climate changes without ever leaving his comfort zone." I find this comparison both entertaining and spot on, but it's not the reason I'm linking to the review. It's this:

And then there's the utterly inexplicable country-fried "My Medicine" [which Tom later calls "batshit awesome" and I have to admit really makes me want to hear], which Snoop dedicates to "my main man Johnny Cash, a real American gangster" before intoning "Grand Ole Opry, here we come" and sing-rapping about weed over Everlast's respectable Tennessee Three pastiche. It's the closest thing we've ever had to a straight-up country song from one of the world's most recognizable rappers, and it's also a celebration of drugs dedicated to a beloved figure whose pill habit almost killed him more than once; I sort of can't believe it exists.

"I sort of can't believe it exists." Tom has used this phrase at least once before. In January, at his blog Status Ain't Hood, Tom posted about a couple of metal bands. That post ends with this, about the Swedish band Disfear:

And so Live the Storm brings just about everything I could possibly want from a metal album: pick-slides, dense and rumbling riffs, Ted Nugent caveman-solos, youth-crew call-and-response chants, epic pseudo-tribal drumming, vein-popping screams, incomprehensible lyrics that seem to be about staying true to yourself, song-lengths that generally stay in the three-minute range. Hooks. This thing absolutely slays, and I sort of can't believe it exists.

I like the phrase. I think we get so caught up in evaluation and assessment and moving on to the next big thing (or the next small thing) that we too rarely stop to consider how amazing artistic creation is. I commented to Tom's post that "the line between something awesome being created and not is that vanishingly thin." This is probably true to the point of banality, but at times I ponder it, in something like astonishment. When listening to a song, one that seems just so, and yet comprised, perhaps, of what might have otherwise seemed like incongruous elements, I sometimes become forcefully aware of how easily it could have been otherwise.

The same is true of writing, and the audacity of creation in general. Isn't there something astonishing about the mere existence of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu? Can you believe that someone undertook such a massive project? Along with the great pleasure I'm experiencing reading that novel, this brute fact of its existence still manages to boggle my mind. . .

Chris Hedges in Salon

There was an interesting interview in Salon yesterday with Chris Hedges, in support of his new book I Don't Believe in Atheists. A sample:

The Enlightenment was both a curse and a blessing, because it was really a reaction to the kind of superstition, intolerance, bigotry, anti-intellectualism of the clerics, of the church. But it also ended up with the Jacobins, [who said] well, if we can't make certain segments of the society "civilized," as we define civilization, then they must be eradicated, in the same way that you eradicate a virus.

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

And a couple of digs at our man Christopher Hitchens:

Do you think the new atheists are similarly uninterested in their impact? It seems that what the New Atheists write and say is somewhat a performance.

Well, not Harris. Harris is just intellectually shallow. Harris doesn't know anything about religion or the Middle East. For Hitchens, it's about a performance, and that was true when he was on the left. He hasn't changed. It's all about him. It's all about being a contrarian. He reminds me of Ann Coulter, he's that kind of a figure. He's witty, and he's funny and insulting. You know I debated him, and in the middle of the debate he starts shouting, "Shame on you for defending suicide bombers!" Of course, unlike him, I've actually stood at the edge of a suicide bombing attack. That kind of stuff is just ... it's the epistemology of television. They make a lot of money off it, but it's gross and disgusting and anti-intellectual and not at all about real discussion.

Do you think Hitchens really believes what he writes?

I think he's completely amoral. I think he doesn't have a moral core. I think he doesn't believe anything. What's good for Christopher Hitchens is about as moral as he gets.

I like Chris Hedges. His book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is a worthy read, though I think he's wrong on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (about which, incidentally, see this excellent recent post at Lenin's Tomb on humanitarian intervention). The interview is worth looking at, though I found the interviewer a little painful. Of course, I agree with much of what Hedges says (his use of the "fundamentalism" trope is more persuasive than I usually see). His point about the Enlightenment is a good one, and he's certainly right to observe that the so-called "New Atheists" argue and behave as if the Enlightenment were an unequivocally positive development. . .

Pre-empting Reflections

Yesterday I bought a copy of Reflections, the Walter Benjamin collection. I'm happy to have the book, but now I sort of wish I'd held off and perhaps tried to find an older, used edition. See, I bought a copy of the new edition, issued in 2007. The cover is uglier than the old one was, for one thing. Far worse, it's saddled with a new, worthless, three-page preface from one Leon Wieseltier. Has a preface or introduction ever made you want to unload a book you're otherwise happy with having? Is it wrong that I want to take a blade to these pages? Wieseltier isn't around for long and doesn't say much, but characteristically, he does have time to irritate. After a relatively innocuous opening page, we get this:

In his temperament and in his method, Benjamin was an esotericist. He was modernity's kabbalist. In his turgidly enchanted world there were only mysteries, locked and unlocked. His infatuation with Marxism, the most embarrassing episode of his mental wanderings, the only time that he acquiesced in the regimentation of his own mind, may be understood as merely the most desperate of his exercises in arcane reading. . .

[. . .]

. . . Benjamin's work was scarred by a high ideological nastiness, as when he mocked "the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom" (as if Europe in his day was suffering from a surfeit of this), and speculated acidly about the belief in "the sacredness of life" (or from a surfeit of this), and responded with perfect diffidence to the censorship and persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, which he coldly described as "the transfer of the mental means of production into public ownership." The pioneering explorer of memory worshipped history too much. He also wrote too much: he advised writers to "never stop writing because you have run out of ideas," and often he acted on his own advice. I confess that there are many pages of Benjamin that I do not understand, in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself, and no direction is clear. Like many esotericists, he abuses the privilege of obscurity.

What is the purpose of such a preface? The book still has the original, 35-page introduction by Peter Demetz (who, to be sure, does criticize Benjamin in certain ways, including aspects of his relationship with Marxism, but who isn't dismissive or obnoxious about it), which should do a well enough job by itself introducing the new reader to Benjamin (especially when combined with Hannah Arendt's introduction to Illuminations). Why is Wieseltier here? What purpose can he serve, other than as an attempt to pre-empt the novice reader's own readings? This Benjamin character is an interesting read, when it comes to literature, sure, but be sure to not take him all that seriously otherwise! (But, you know, thanks for buying our book!)

Rehabilitate the notion of truth

The thrust of my recent posts has reminded me of an essay by Christina Nehring from last November, at Truthdig. In it, she discusses the state of the essay, decrying the entrenched personal essay, with its fixation on the autobiographical, the small. She argues that we need a return to the truth-seeking essay, as exemplified by Seneca, Montaigne, Emerson:

Today's essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be.

I agree with her, though one could be forgiven for thinking that my unclear earlier post might imply that I do not. With respect to the focus on the personal, she writes:

. . . here lies the problem with essayists today: not that they speak of themselves, but that they do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalizeable insight into the human condition. It is as though they were unthinking stenographers—"recording secretaries," as indeed the most self-conscious 20th-century essayist, E.B. White, called them—pedantically taking down their own experience simply because it is their own.

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it's our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. "Where I have least knowledge," said the blithe Montaigne, "there do I use my judgment most readily." And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne's by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

I think she's quite right to observe that we have a problem with big claims. It is only through making big claims that we can get anywhere, but any such attempt is openly attacked as in itself suspect, as too ambitious (the same is true in literature and music). We want to know the writer's credentials for making any claim. Is he or she a trained expert in the field? If not, why should we listen? Certainly there is valuable training that can be brought to bear, and there are cranks eager to expound on any subject. But surely the writer's credentials should be found in the writing? Perhaps, collectively, we've lost the ability to discern. At the same time, we feel strongly that we are each entitled to our own opinion, no matter how ridiculous. What has gone into forming this opinion, mind you, is of no consequence; one's considered, informed opinion is equivalent to another's ignorant, spittle-flecked reaction.

As an aside to finish up: I quoted from Jodi Dean in my last post, and here I wanted to make reference to some of her earlier posts about this idea, that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, that all opinions are made equal, but I couldn't find the posts I had in mind. . . there was this post from last month, which engages with Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. There she refers to "a decreasing ability to distinguish between truth and lies, a decline in a politics wherein truth matters" and later, where Debord says "the spectator is supposed to know nothing", she says that now "the opposite is the case: everyone has a right to her own opinion." (Jodi is always blogging about writers and thinkers with whom I have little to no contact--mostly no--but in ways that make the ideas seem accessible and relevant. And yet I am still all too often overwhelmed into silence, given my ignorance of the actual texts in question.) There was also this post from December about the stupidity of student papers, though it seems to me that her remarks are broadly applicable. Her students refuse to discern differences:

Their mindset is something like this: what is important is what any individual truly feels is important; that's all that matters, the intensity and authenticity of a certain affective attachment. This intensity means that individuals can define words, issues, concepts, etc, any way they want, as long as they "truly believe it." But, and here is the catch, the students tend to combine this intense subjectivism (or subjectivism of intensity) with an underlying universalism: if everyone truly believes in something that they affectively feel and know, then there is peace, harmony, and social justice. It's like they are committed to an underlying ontology of unity that renders all affective difference and discord into rapturous accord.

Neither of these posts are quite the ones I had in mind, but they're well worth checking out anyway. . .

(A final aside: I note that my second references above to Nehring and Debord are to their last names, yet I refer to Jodi Dean as "Jodi". In an earlier draft of the previous post, I noted that I wrote "Hitchens" and "Jodi" and I worried about seeming to "respect" the former more than the latter, especially in that case, with the gender difference. But I do not respect Christopher Hitchens at all, and I do respect Jodi Dean. This post tells me that the difference is that Jodi Dean writes a blog, and I know her primarily through that blog. For example, it's always weird for me to see myself referred to as "Crary" rather than "Richard" when others link to me. The blog implies some sort of personal relationship, perhaps, an informality of expression, certainly. So even if I had read one of Jodi Dean's books prior to having encountered the excellent I Cite, the blog nevertheless invites me to call her "Jodi", though I've never met her.)

Something like the Truth

Last week, I expressed some concern about what I called the "depressingly utilitarian" nature of much of the writing I see, using Christopher Hitchens and his favored forms, the short column or polemic (and his reputation as "polemicist") as my jumping off point. By coincidence, the very next day at I Cite, Jodi Dean took issue with what Foucault says in this short extract from an interview conducted in 1984 ("Polemics, Politics and Problematisation"). The following, from Foucault, sounds like the kind of thing I was attempting to say in my post:

The polemicist . . . proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

This sounds a lot like what I might have been saying about Hitchens. He certainly does proceed as if he is setting out to destroy an adversary, an adversary he would often not recognize as even worthy of the name. But Jodi Dean points out that Foucault's formulation is itself highly polemical. And she reminds me that polemics are merely "disputations, arguments against another position defended by apologists". She goes on to say:

Together, the positions engaged in an argumentative practice designed to get to something like truth. The polemicist pushes a side, but against another side, in an agonistic practice that is itself dialogic. As a practice of speech, it is not the same as war and annihilation.

In this way, polemics, as argumentation, can be essays into a topic, explorations in words, in writing, though in opposition to another set of ideas or positions. I think that the word "polemic" has, for me, been so tied up with someone like Hitchens--whose particular mode, I still claim, is not argumentation, but in fact attempted destruction--that I rolled that word into my question about the "utilitarian". So I'm happy to unroll them, so to speak. However, the question itself still nags at me.

With my Hitchens example, of course, the problem could simply be, not that polemics are a problem, but that he has long since abandoned any kind of rigor he once held, in favor of bullshit; that the things he says, the big points he makes, are all too often simply and demonstrably wrong, relying as they do on truth-claims about factual matters, truth-claims that can be researched and shown to be factually incorrect (as he would say of his religious enemies). My general point was not about Hitchens but about what I perceive as, again, a depressingly utilitarian approach to writing and public discourse (I'm sticking with those words until better words occur to me and until I do a better job of explaining what I mean). And I can see that I'm merely back where I began, only with the word "polemic" removed from the equation.

While I'm here, I'm going to make a related observation, one that, I hope, will allow me to refrain from mentioning Christopher Hitchens again in connection with this line of argument. One complaint that has been commonly thrown at people like Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that they are "fundamentalist atheists". I find this formulation unhelpful (and a little irritating), not least because it allows them easy space for further dismissal and ridicule, but also because it doesn't do much to gain access to what's amiss in their arguments (politics aside). Another complaint is that they have not read enough theology. This complaint is more interesting, though unfortunately it seems to be made with the expectation that immersion in theology will somehow make the non-believer realize what he or she is missing in their lives (the odds are against it.) What these writers, I think, are caught up in is the idea that there is a "right" and a "wrong" to everything, and that they can necessarily identify it and that they can tell us about it. I think this idea lies behind the tendency to see fundamentalists as representatives of "true" religion. Possibly, theology could help disabuse them of this notion (I don't actually know). In his book, Hitchens has all the answers. He feints in the direction of acknowledging that science does not have all the answers, but he has an answer for that too (science just hasn't discovered the answers yet, or they're not worth knowing). He has written god is not Great not in order to enter a discussion, because for him there is no discussion. There is nothing in the book that evinces the slightest doubt about anything. This in itself might not be a huge problem, were it not for the subject and the audience (and those pesky facts that might get in the way). He accuses religious people of having certainty, when it seems to me, in my limited engagement as an outsider, that religious people are full of doubts about their faith, about their relationship to God, about the Bible as this massive compendium of contradictory stories and lessons and all kinds of weird stuff. For those of us who are not only atheists but have never felt any twinge of religious faith, I think we are attracted to the idea that the Bible must make sense, so we are in turn attracted to (and repelled by) those religious people, generally fundamentalists, who treat, or claim to treat, the Bible as the literal truth, as the literal Word of God. These people, on some level, we understand, though we strenuously disagree. But we fail to understand the experience of religion and faith for others, for the vast majority, and this failure is almost total, and potentially dangerous.

The disappearance and reappearance of the moment

From Carl Wilson's great meditation on the glorious Deerhoof and their use of silence in their music:

My guess is that the power of silence also has to do with the character of consciousness and experience. Consciousness is not a continuous process, but a chain of discrete moments forever vanishing before we can get hold of them - in a sense, of experiences slipping away before they are truly experienced. It's always now, and now and now and now, and as the bulk of Eastern thought and religion informs us, one of the basic dilemmas of life is that we seldom feel "in" that now: its elusiveness is its essence. It doesn't disappear by dwindling away, by cresting and falling, but always all of a sudden: This instant, this second, this hour, this day is "now" but in the time it takes to note that fact, the instant is now "then." As a survival mechanism, our minds create a continuity out of it, the way our optical processes narrate the discrete frames of cinema, stillness becoming an illusion of movement, but this is a constant, perhaps exhausting subconscious effort. Experience is as much made of total breaks, of gaps and aporias, as it is of content. Music, like (almost) all art, takes the chaos of experience and makes something more coherent of it because it has form - even the most abstract art has greater structure than the experience of consciousness. (Although it also might have more freedom than social experience, with its daily routines, etc. - a combination that helps account for its pleasure.) So perhaps this meta-genre of "stop-start" art feels especially elevating because it returns the fragmented experience of life to us, magnified and exaggerated, so that what feels day to day as a frustrating limitation of the mind can be transformed into a hosannah of glorious affirmation: "Praise be to the gap, to the disappearance and reappearance of the moment! What a miracle that time annihilates itself, because, behold, it also spontaneously regenerates in the very moment of its demise! What a happy universe in which a black hole becomes a big bang every instant! Let us observe it in slow-motion replay, and dance!"

Biological Limits of Reason

There was a fascinating article on certainty--how we become "convinced"--and the limits of reason in Salon last week by Robert A. Burton (actually, it appears to be an excerpt from his book On Being Certain; link via the first comment to this post at The Valve). Here's a sample:

It's not easy, of course, but somehow we must incorporate what neuroscience is telling us about the limits of knowing into our everyday lives. We must accept that how we think isn't entirely within our control. Perhaps the easiest solution would be to substitute the word "believe" for "know." A physician faced with an unsubstantiated gut feeling might say, "I believe there's an effect despite the lack of evidence," not, "I'm sure there's an effect." And yes, scientists would be better served by saying, "I believe that evolution is correct because of the overwhelming evidence."

I realize that this last sentence runs against the grain of those who have fought the hardest to establish science as the method for determining the facts of the external world. It is particularly loathsome when you feel that you are playing into the hands of religious fanatics, medical quacks and word-twisting politicians. But in pointing out the biological limits of reason, including scientific thought, I'm not making the case that all ideas are equal or that scientific method is mere illusion. My purpose is not to destroy the foundations of science, but only to point out the inherent limitations of the questions that science asks and the answers it provides.

A peculiar tension between precision and disorder

Incidentally, speaking of Open Letters Monthly, as a few others have pointed out, Garth Risk Hallberg has a nice piece there about Helen DeWitt's excellent novel, The Last Samurai, one of my favorite novels. A brief sample:

Beneath the simple surface of DeWitt’s propositions . . . lurks a vast ambition: an ambition that privileges form over fact and inquiry over knowledge. Like the early Wittgenstein, DeWitt wants to clear away the confusions that arise from the sloppy use of language, and like the later Wittgenstein, she wants to run against the boundaries of language and to gesture at what lies beyond them. The result is a peculiar tension between precision and disorder. That DeWitt sustains it for more than 500 pages is as much an ethical statement as an aesthetic one.

Writing is Easy

In the interview that I linked to in my post about god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens was asked about his "prolific output"; he replied as follows:

Well, I find writing recreational. I used to do it to relax when I was a kid. I realized early on that there were a few things that I can do with any skill: write an essay and give a speech. I can do both of those very easily. Nothing to boast about, but I also have an extremely good memory. [. . .] to be absolutely frank, I don't find writing hard at all. I could in a course of a day perfectly easily write a column that's 1,000 words for Slate and a book review for the Sunday Times of London, for example.

This response strikes me as telling. He finds writing easy; he has a good memory. The problem, I think, is that Hitchens' typical form is the short column, and these tend to be disposable, polemical. An essay, on the other hand, should be about the writer making an inquiry, about trying to discover something in the writing, and a book, about such a weighty topic, should be as well. Hitchens doesn't need to discover things in his writing. He is here to tell you things, things that he doesn't have to look up or support, because he has a good memory. For him, this is writing. For me, this is decidedly not writing; it is, in fact, hackwork.

In her review of the book, Amanda Bragg writes that "there is no private compositional magic to be invoked here - we all know what his serious, considered work reads like." I don't mean to suggest that I can't recall much better written work from Hitchens, but even at its best, "private compositional magic" doesn't seem to describe it. That is, there isn't anything private about it, by which I mean, again, he isn't "essaying" a topic or an idea. He is informing or attacking or, perhaps, defending.

But I'm not here to dump on Christopher Hitchens again (or at least that's not the only reason for this post). And I don't mean to suggest that we don't ever need polemics. I wonder, though, if the short column, the newspaper op-ed, the opinion piece, certain kinds of blogging, if there isn't something depressingly utilitarian about these, as a form. Writing in this sense must be useful. I will only write something because I have something to tell you (and possibly because there's a paycheck in it). You will only bother to read it if you can make use of it. This seems to be the standard equation. No doubt I am simplifying matters enormously, but I wonder, too, if this isn't an Anglo-American tendency. If the tendency under capitalism is to reduce everything to commodity, writing is reduced to the bottom line (even if it's actually unpaid): what does this do? My reaction to the so-called atheist writers has been in part to what I sense as an overly empirical, overly utilitarian take on things.

In a sense, this post is also a placeholder. I want to explore this idea of what writing is and what essays are . . . a couple of posts back, I quote from Benjamin and Barthes; I'm thinking of them as examples of a something else I'm trying to access . . .

Hitchens redux

After posting my response to Christopher Hitchens' awful god is not Great, I re-read this excellent review of the book by Amanda Bragg at Open Letters Monthly, which appeared a few months back. I'd forgotten that she made some of the same observations that I ended up making; for example, as she puts it, "Hitchens claims he’s been writing his book for years, but the work belies the claim: it’s everywhere botched, sloppy, and adolescent."

Later, Bragg writes: "In every chapter, virtually on every page, Hitchens accidentally demonstrates that this is not, in fact, the considered, lifelong intellectual tract he alludes it to be". A large portion of my post was focused on politics, in large part because it strikes me that it's the political situation that informs the sense of urgency behind Hitchens' book, along with the other recent anti-religion volumes. (A point lost on some readers, it seems.) But, in fact, Bragg is exactly right. I could have ignored politics altogether and spent my time on the numerous other problems with the book, and my assessment would not improve in the least. Anyway, do check out Bragg's review if you're still interested.

Restless, unnameable discomfort

In Marina Warner's TLS article on Beckett, much excited my interest, but there was one thing in particular which I didn't feel I could usefully explore in the last post, and for which this post is meant to only be a placeholder of sorts. Warner draws a connection between Baudelaire's writings on the "childhood imagination" and Beckett's work:

His essay-memoir is called "Morale du joujou" (Moral of the Plaything) – where joujou (not the usual word for toy, jouet) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a "teddy" or a "dolly". Baudelaire recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play, and wonders at children’s ability to play without props or models, through fantasy alone. "All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings." Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to say children also want "to see the soul" of a toy, and remembers how they will turn it about, shake it and hurl it to the ground, baffled, even enraged, by its stubborn inanimateness. His meditation hints that the primal loss brings with it an understanding of mortality, and that this takes place when make-believe fails and the vitality of toys vanishes: "But where is the soul? It’s here that vacancy sets in – and bewilderment". Around sixty years after Baudelaire, in his essay on playing with dolls, Rilke meditated in similar terms on the passions aroused by this relationship, on his fury when confronted by the doll’s mute obstinate solidity, and the onrush of compensatory fantasy.

This ambiguity about the soul of the toy – the doll or other object – haunts the psychology of play, and through play, the theory of language’s relation to the world, and the impact of imagination. Beckett’s work probes the puzzling boundary of consciousness, of animation and inanimateness, with ceaseless, patient, forensic curiosity.

Inevitably, this makes me think of Walter Benjamin. There is his Berlin Childhood around 1900, of course, but also, fresher in my mind, his Moscow Diary, in which he talks about his excitement at seeing collections of certain toys, but which also includes his short essay, "Russian Toys". Here he is on the spirit of those "primitive" toys produced by peasants and artisans:

The spirit from which these products emanate--the entire process of their productions and not merely its result--is alive for the child in the toy, and he naturally understands a primitively produced object much better than one deriving from a complicated industrial process.

And in Mythologies, in the piece "Toys", Roland Barthes writes of modern toys, "made of a graceless material, a product of chemistry, not of nature." That "the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch." Worse, toys "are supplied to [the child] ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish. [...] French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators."

Returning to Warner's article, Beckett's "babble" links the emergence of language with its falling away, and "[i]nfancy meets decrepitude in his meditations on existence" (Warner); and, for Beckett, "the physical presence of things requires that we listen to their voices somewhat like a child animating a roomful of toys through sighs, whispers, groans and burblings" and "nursery nonsense joins sound music through the noises of the body".

I want to tie all these threads together with my thinking on the Modernist project, but I'm struggling. In Proust, the narrator's memories recreate, condensed in a moment, a whole world, forever lost, but which in his reveries seem more real than reality. And Beckett, too:

The angle of view in so many of his works opens on to elusive glimpses of the past, a past that belongs to Beckett’s childhood, to his mother, his father, their parents and their sisters (Beckett’s beloved aunts): their customs, clothes, diction and doings haunt his works. As the title Rockaby evokes, the pain and plangency and occasional bliss of these echoes rising from the obscurity of forgetting return their declining, impaired subjects to a time of lullaby, while the rocking chair in which they sit or even the boat that moves from side to side in Krapp’s Last Tape recalls another motion that seeks to soothe restless, unnameable discomfort: the rocking of the cradle that settles the anguish of the baby.

When I've mentioned in passing about how the Modernist themes, as discussed by Josipovici, resonate with me in my project that is living my life, I'm thinking, in part, of this sense of discomfort. I think about modern life, the inexorable pressures of the capitalist system, the world that we bring babies into--where so little of, say, American life is amenable to children--and how all of this affects our perception of the options available to us as adults, stunted adults barely able to escape from a prolonged adolescence.

So much for a placeholder. More to come on this in the future, I hope.

There is something to the fizzle itself

Marina Walker has a fascinating piece in the Times Literary Supplement about Samuel Beckett ("Babble with Beckett"; link via Light Reading). She begins by discussing Beckett's decision to write in French rather than English, which "illuminates his particular music and his turn towards silence". He "was finding his way out of fine words", wanted to write "without style". Yet he would have his simple characters utter rare and bizarre words, sending readers to dictionaries:

Beckett also sends his characters to the dictionary: in Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp himself bundles a huge tome on to the stage to look up the word "viduity", another unfamiliar usage and one that allows Krapp to linger and savour it, turning the syllables round his tongue, assaying their precise weight and the associations that arise, and then finding, with a surprise that perhaps takes us into Beckett's own when he found this for the first time: "Also of an animal, especially a bird . . . the vidua or weaver-bird . . . . Black plumage of the male . . . . The vidua-bird!". Krapp recognizes himself, names himself by another name and so edges towards becoming that little bit more present to himself. Making a detour through French, Beckett was refreshing language itself, including his native Irish English, and effectively sharpening its sensory powers of precise naming.

As it happens, last Saturday we attended a performance of Krapp's Last Tape, at nearby Johns Hopkins University. Krapp was portrayed by John Astin, a Visiting Professor of theatre (and probably best known for his role as Gomez in the tv show "The Addams Family"). Krapp is an old man, alone. He spends part of the time listening to tapes he recorded at an earlier age. He was alone then too. We learn of paths not taken. There are, perhaps, regrets, though at the same time, he wouldn't undo what he's done, so he says. In the discussion after the play, one audience member in particular seemed fixated on the idea that Beckett didn't seem capable of "happiness". But there's happiness and then there's happiness. Krapp is alone, but he is alive. He has his pleasures. He delights in the word "viduity", as Warner points out, but earlier he lingers on the word "spool"--theatrically savoring, to himself, the sound of "ooool"--and he enjoys his bananas, taking pleasure in their shape, color, smell. As Warner puts it:

For not everything is fizzling out, and wind is not mere wind, at least not quite, or otherwise we would not feel the tragicomic involvement that Beckett inspires. There is something to the fizzle itself.

The proportions of this work

In Search of Lost Time is, of course, famously long; our Narrator does not skimp on the space needed to elaborate on a particular point, nor does he shy away from lengthy digressions from the apparent narrative thrust. But, in fact, for Proust's needs, the narrative is only as long as it has to be, and no longer (I say confidently, having not yet finished reading it). Still, I'd like to think that Proust wrote the following line, from early in Sodom and Gomorrah, with a knowing smile:

"The proportions of this work do not permit me to explain here. . . "

god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens

I've written here before about my own atheism and about how, in recent years, I've felt I've had to acknowledge a tone-deafness in my previous arguments against religion. Where previously I took an avowedly antagonistic attitude towards religion (though, in truth, this attitude was not terribly important to me; mostly I just wanted the topic to go away), sweeping all sorts of beliefs aside in my disdain, now I see this kind of antagonism as an unproductive distraction. In the last few years, there have been several books by writers urgently seeking to not only discredit religion, but also to advance the atheistic viewpoint and to defend "reason", or rationality, from the forces of darkness. Though I often agree with many of the basic points these authors tend to make, my essential position is that the focus on religion by these writers is misplaced. Indeed, if the elimination of religion or, more realistically, the lessening of its influence, especially the influence of its more extreme manifestations, is the goal, then they are taking exactly the wrong approach. But to these writers and others the matter is urgent: they are worried about the survival of the species. Well, let me tell you: in my view, there are numerous good reasons to be worried. But such concern, if genuine, should focus attention on our disastrous political and economic situation, yet it rarely does.

Everything else being equal, I’d like to have the time to read all of these recent books, pursuant to a lengthy essay on the topic. But everything else isn't equal, and I don't have that kind of time. Other, more intellectually substantial books are more important. However, against all expectations, I did recently read Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. My in-laws have a copy, so it was easily available, and I admit to having had a sort of mordant curiosity about it. I also admit I came into it not expecting much by way of argument, but in fact it's much worse than I imagined it would be. The book is quite terrible, for a variety of reasons. But the things that make it bad (and to my mind, virtually unpublishable) are not necessarily those elements that make up my main problems with it and with the popular so-called “atheist books” it exemplifies. It's bad not least because it's hard to figure what Hitchens really thinks he's doing with the book. He's said that, in effect, he's been writing the book his whole life (the link is to an interview, but he also says as much in the acknowledgments). You'd think he'd have taken more care with it. It's full of sloppy thinking, awkward writing, adolescent point-making, and of course, his stylistic trademarks: withering, sometimes glib scorn, and ostentatious displays of erudition (not to mention outright errors: he has Saddam Hussein invading Iran in 1979, rather than 1980). Occasionally he gets out of his own way long enough to tell us about an interesting historical event or figure, but these passages are the exception.

Who does Hitchens think his audience is? Through the first half of the book, I was inclined to think that his intended readership must be, aside from his fanboys and other rabid atheists, those secular people, such as perhaps myself, who he might view as apologists for religion (as with his familiar accusation that the Left is "soft on fascism"). This seems to be the only way to take the sneering tone of the first few chapters, including the silly repetition of the book's childish sub-title (in italics, naturally) and the overall sloppiness of the writing in those pages. And yet, in Chapter Eleven ("The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell"), he attempts to suggest that he might have some sense of what it might be like for one to "lose faith". He writes about how he'd once been a Marxist and now is not:

For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might be perhaps retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope—I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through.

A few comments. First, it is not an original observation to make, that Marxism became something of its own religion, with warring sects and so on. Though, of course, not all Marxists had such religious fervor, or felt the need to see Marx's (or Lenin's, or whoever's) writings as gospel, foretelling history. I find it interesting that Hitchens essentially says he did. Second, the sentence about those "who had sought a rational alternative to religion" is a problem. It implies that it is primarily religion itself, rather than economic and political conditions, that those who followed Marx were trying to escape or change. Third, the reference to "close cousins of chimpanzees"--the book is packed full of phrases like this: asides, parenthetical or otherwise, in which Hitchens lamely drums home one of his favorite points. In this case, the point that humans are products of evolution and not godly design. I certainly do not object to this point; I agree with it. But this is rhetorical overkill and limp writing, and seems designed to provoke, not convince. (He does this constantly: I can't tell you the number of times he derisively uses the word "mammal" to refer to some King or religious figure.) He says, "if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope. . .": Is there any chance he believes that such a "confession", with such a reference to "chimpanzees", will persuade anyone who is a believer? Finally, is there really any chance he believes that anyone's faith might be undermined by this book? I find it hard to credit. He can't be that delusional.

You may note that the passage I've excerpted has nothing to do with either "the miraculous" or "the decline of Hell". This is another, in this case relatively minor, problem with the book. It appears to be organized according to topics (like, "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion"), and he does address the ideas that seem advertised by the chapter headings within the relevant chapter. But many passages, such as the one featuring this confession, have little to do with the immediate subject and feel tacked on as a result, as if he had a body of anecdotes and points he felt he had to include, but couldn't fit anywhere else.

Turning to the book's main argument, on page four, he lists for us the "four irreducible objections to religious faith" (numerals are supplied by me):

1. that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos,
2. that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism,
3. that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and
4. that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

This is sort of an odd list. It's weird, structurally, that he provides this list, but then rarely returns to it (I believe he only refers to it one other time), instead choosing to harp on the fact that religion is "man-made" (which, of course, it is). That is, he doesn't bother to make his book, the book he's been writing his whole life, achieve any sort of structural coherence. The four points themselves seem to simultaneously say too much and too little. For example, I have no trouble with the first point on the face of it, but Hitchens assumes that this surface meaning trumps everything else. He appears to imagine that religions are constructed from the origin myth on down, and that people who have faith, who choose faith, and who maintain their faith, have that faith based on how much they believe in the factual truth of their religion's origin myth and other claims. That is, Hitchens, just like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and so many others, is fixated on the factual truth-claims of religion, whereas it seems to me that faith resides elsewhere, outside of the realm of factual claims, and that religious practice has more to do with faith communities and tradition than with factual truth-claims. There is no denying that plenty of religious people and groups do try to make factual truth-claims, claims that often have no validity whatsoever. But the use of these claims is political. The people making them no doubt seriously believe in their content, but they are resorting to such arguments for political reasons.

Personally, I agree with plenty of Hitchens' local points, but many of these points are barely worth making, or are often quite beside the putative larger point. He pretends to be arguing against faith, when instead he spends the bulk of his book showing the crimes of the church, of organized religion. So, if we look at his second point, that the original errant origin myths have led to "the maximum of servility" and "the maximum of solipsism", we can see he overshoots his claim again. As if it's religion only that leads to the "maximum" of either servility or solipsism, and as if these in turn depend on the belief in inaccurate origin myths. He gives examples in the book of this servility and solipsism, but he seems to believe that simply making the observation and providing examples is enough. It's not. He is presumably trying to persuade people who do not see things his preferred way. His task, one would think, is to actually attempt to make an argument that could conceivably persuade. He does not undertake this task. The other two points are handled similarly.

Now I want to address, at length, my real problem with the book, over and above my assessment of its tone or its sloppiness, though, to be sure, they both come into play here. This problem is of course political. In chapter one, Hitchens quotes Marx against the idea that religion offers true "consolation" to those in need, and as a common example where believers have misunderstood or misrepresented what non-believers think (in this case, Marx's view of religion, which is often reduced to the dismissive "religion is the opium of the people", or "opiate of the masses" in the version I'm familiar with). Here is the quote, from Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, as supplied by Hitchens:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.

If Hitchens wants to show that Marx took religion seriously, this is fine. However, the quote is interesting for another reason, one that I doubt is intended by Hitchens. It gets at part of what I think is misguided about his book and the entire project of his sort of anti-religion argument (and indeed his shrill warmongering in recent years). These are the two key sentences for me: "The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion." Hitchens wants Marx to be saying, simply, that the removal of the illusion of happiness provided by religion is necessary in order for real happiness to be attained. It seems clear to me that Marx here is saying that the conditions of existence ("the vale of woe") themselves prevent "real happiness"--which is why people resort to "illusory happiness", in this case religion (though one might include drugs, art, video games, etc). Thus, it is first the conditions that must be changed. As always, this points to solutions in the political-economic realm.

In fact, current politics is a major problem with this book, though Hitchens pretends that it's not. This becomes apparent as early as chapter two ("Religion Kills"). In this chapter, he tells us of a panel discussion he participated in, just before 9/11, during which Dennis Prager challenged him to "imagine [himself] in a strange city" near twilight, in which he sees coming toward him "a large group of men". Would he "feel safer, or less safe" if he learned "that they were just coming from a prayer meeting?" This is supposed to be a yes/no question, and I agree with Hitchens that it clearly isn't. The question is stupid. Hitchens' answer is that he doesn't need to be hypothetical, since he can draw from his personal experience in "Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad" and say why he "would feel immediately threatened" if a group of men so approached him, coming from some kind of religious meeting. And then he describes such an experience that he's had in each of these cities. (There is something about the manner in which Hitchens draws from his personal experience that has always irritated me--in a sense, it points to one of the things wrong with him as a public figure. Everything is personal, how ever much he rails against "personal politics".) After his Bethlehem anecdote, he squeezes in this paragraph:

I once heard the late Abba Eban, one of Israel's more polished and thoughtful diplomats and statesmen, give a talk in New York. The first thing to strike the eye about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he said, was the ease of its solubility. From this arresting start he went on to say, with the authority of a former foreign minister and UN representative, that the essential point was a simple one. Two peoples of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land. The solution was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass? And so it would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been kept out of it. But the exclusive claims to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it had become a threat to human survival.

This paragraph is remarkably ignorant, or cynical, I can't decide which. I'm not going to try to tell you that religion plays no role whatsoever in the conflict over Palestine/Israel. It does play a role. But this conflict is fundamentally not about religion. It's about land, it's about water, it's about dispossession, it's about racism, it's about nationalism, it's about Zionism, it's about colonialism. It's about Israel as a U.S. client state and its regional role in the global maintenance of capitalism. It's about oil. In short, it's about politics. The idea that, if religion were removed from the occasion, all other considerations would magically cease to exist is absurd. (And if religion were no factor, and the political differences disappeared, how is it that the "two-state solution" is still the preferred one? Presumably without either religion or politics, everyone would be free to exist in one state, no?) It's disturbing that a figure in the position of Eban would say such thing, though I realize it's unfortunately a fairly commonplace view. It's more disturbing that Christopher Hitchens would buy into it, though I'm not sure why I continue to expect him to know better.

Then he comes to Baghdad. He tells us that he is not "going to elaborate a position on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003". And then proceeds to make a number of assertions (as usual, unsupported--Christopher Hitchens doesn't need to cite evidence for anything; he simply knows what's going on), assertions that depend on a certain ridiculous, long discredited position on what he benignly calls the "overthrow of Saddam Hussein" (some of us refer to this as the invasion of Iraq). Throughout the book, as noted, he conflates the uses of religion by the powerful, with the practices and beliefs of those who are religious. Here, he seeks to disabuse those who would refer to Hussein's regime as "secular" by listing the numerous ways in which the regime was religiously inclined. He writes: "at least since his calamitous invasion of Iran in 1979 [sic], which led to furious accusations from the Iranian theocracy that he was an 'infidel,' Saddam Hussein had decked out his whole rule [...] as one of piety and jihad." And so on. Does it really not occur to Hitchens that Hussein, one of the more cynical rulers in recent history, might have been using religion for his own powerful ends? I'm not a student of Hussein's regime, but Hitchens needs to make an argument, and, again, he simply doesn't bother. He doesn't notice this cynical possibility: he simply makes an assertion, one that is not backed up by anything other than a list of facts, which he assumes can have played no other role than the one he assigns them. No citations of any kind are offered.

From here, he moves on to the invasion of Iraq itself. The next few pages are simply astonishing displays of a writer framing a story to suit his own needs, the implications of actual facts notwithstanding. Here is an excerpt:

At a minimum, it can be agreed by all that the Iraqi people had endured much in the preceding thirty-five years of war and dictatorship, that the Saddam regime could not have gone on forever as an outlaw system within international law, and therefore that--whatever objections there might be to the actual means of "regime change"--the whole society deserved a breathing space in which to consider reconstruction and reconciliation. Not one single minute of breathing space was allowed.

Everybody knows the sequel. The supporters of al-Qaeda, led by a Jordanian jailbird named Abu Musub al-Zarqawi, launced a frenzied campaign of murder and sabotage. [...] They directed the most toxic part of their campaign of terror at fellow Muslims. The mosques and funeral processions of the long-oppressed Shiite majority were blown up. [...] Before long, Shia death squads, often garbed in police uniforms, were killing and torturing random members of the Sunni Arab faith. The surreptitious influence of the neighboring "Islamic Republic" of Iran was not difficult to detect, and in some Shia areas also it became dangerous to be an unveiled woman or a secular person. Iraq boasts quite a long history of intermarriage and intercommunal cooperation. But a few years of this hateful dialectic soon succeeded in creating an atmosphere of misery, distrust, hostility, and sect-based politics. Once again, religion had poisoned everything.

Note, again, that Hitchens is now employing "regime change" as the accepted reason for the invasion; apparently he is no longer interested in defending the many other rationales that were used at different times as justification, by himself included. He observes that Iraqis have "endured much"--something we can indeed all agree on--but he has no apparent interest in other facts, beyond the nature of Hussein's regime, which have some bearing on the matter. He calls the regime "an outlaw system within international law", with no apparent irony, given his embrace of his new American citizenship, but also with no acknowledgment of the shifting requirements Iraq was forced to meet during the 12 years of UN sanctions, murderously manipulated by the United States and Great Britain. Nowhere in his account of "the sequel" does he mention the U.S. attack, the subsequent occupation, or the continued presence of American soldiers, which presence has been consistently cited by a huge majority of Iraqis as the chief reason for the continuing violence. No, it was for Hitchens simply a matter of sectarian fanatics refusing to allow the proper period of breathing space necessary for other Iraqis to . . . to what? Build an independent, pluralistic, liberal democracy? Does Hitchens actually believe that the United States was going to let anything like this happen? Or does Hitchens think that the Iraqis should be thankful for the removal of Saddam Hussein and simply welcome their new U.S.-appointed, U.S.-subservient government? He doesn't say. Granted, his book is not about the War, but his overall claims depend to a large extent on the truth-value of what he says. If he is hung up on the truth-claims of religion, he cannot expect to get away with making such assertions as if they are facts that are self-evident. (Incidentally, in one of the passages I've elided above, Hitchens refers to a letter Zarqawi sent to Osama bin Laden. He gives a State Department url for this letter in the back of the book. This is the only citation supplied for his account of the war on Iraq.)

In the final chapter of the book ("The Need for a New Enlightenment"), we learn of the source of Hitchens' fear for the survival of the species and thus his sense of urgency in writing this book at this time. "[T]he confrontation between faith and civilization" is now "on a whole new footing", since "a version of the Inquisition is about to lay hands on a nuclear weapon". He is, of course, referring to Iran. It is perhaps appropriate that this book should end with such an assertion as part of its concluding remarks. Of Iran, he writes that with "the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse". He recites a brief litany of ills: exiled and censored artists and intellectuals; sexual repression; poorly educated youth. "After a quarter century of theocracy . . . [m]odernity and technology have passed it by, save for the one achievement of nuclearization." Do I need to tell you that Hitchens provides no evidence for any of this? It used to be, writes Hitchens, that

those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would be consistently outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot. . .

All that changed, of course, with 9/11, and now with Iran's alleged "nuclearization". As with his description of the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hitchens displays no interest in, or even awareness of, the role of the West in any of this. Of course he knows about the U.S./British overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and the subsequent role of the Shah as regional enforcer; he knows about the U.S. funding and training of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the subsequent blowback. He knows these facts, but he refuses to address them, or to even mention anything else that takes away from his grand narrative of theocratic evil, operating in irrational isolation, against the forces of light and reason. Though he is prepared to eagerly accept the existence of ancient hatreds (as between the Sunni and Shia), he consistently refuses to consider that the extensive activities, over at least 60 years, of the United States in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Iraq (and before them, the British, and other Western powers), have had any effect whatsoever on these places, have had any effect on the options that are available to the people living in them. With Iran and "nuclearization" he continues his embarrassing tendency in recent years to believe almost anything about his declared enemy. Of course, Hitchens' book was published before the NIE findings made public in December, which reported that Iran had "halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003". I'm skeptical about the existence of such a program even in 2003, but I certainly cannot hold Hitchens responsible for knowing about these findings. However, I can hold him responsible for his willingness to jump to conclusions and his credulity in the face of highly dubious official claims. Well before the NIE report, there were countless pieces of evidence that pointed to the fact that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. But Hitchens, it seems, wants to believe that it is, wants to have justification for his hate. Do I need to point out the irony?

Towards the beginning of this post, I wrote that god is not Great is not just a bad book, but "virtually unpublishable". Why do I say this? Certainly I disagree with a large amount of the book, but my disagreement does not make a book bad or make it unpublishable. I've tried to show why I think that the arguments presented by Christopher Hitchens in god is Not Great are at best inadequate and where I think the book exemplifies many of the problems with the anti-religion argument. I hope I've been able to demonstrate the flaws in some of his arguments, such as they are. On the litblogs we see a lot of hand-wringing about the current state of publishing. And it's not uncommon to see laments about the quality of our public discourse; I've certainly made my share of such comments here. Books are published all the time that add nothing but fear and bile to this discourse (feel free to supply the title of your favorite right-wing screed). Hitchens' book is not quite as bad as all that. But what does the book add to any discussion? There is nothing in god is not Great that can't be found elsewhere, other than the ubiquitous presence of Christopher Hitchens himself, with his rhetorical winks and nudges. The book is poorly argued, tonally inconsistent, and frankly childish, from the title and sub-title on down. The inconsistency in tone--as if he intended to destroy religion once and for all with the power of his scorn, but then occasionally realized that he needed to make a feint in the direction of persuasion, with disingenuous displays of humility thrown in for good measure--is part of what I mean when I say the book is sloppily written. For me, these qualities ought to mean that the book should have been sent back for considerable re-tooling before it got anywhere near being published. And yet it was not only a best-seller, but was nominated for a National Book Award. The latter in particular is another tiny sign of an intellectual culture in poor health. Hitchens may say that he'd been effectively writing the book his whole life, but it has the feel of something slapped together quickly in order to cash in on a trend.

Noted: Marcel Proust

From The Guermantes Way:

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the "world," from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is infinitely variable and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned from experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated [...] has at once, often because of our very anxiety, been hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word which we ourselves have forgotten, which may not even have been uttered by us but formed along its way by the imperfect refraction of a different word, could be transported, without ever being halted in its progress, infinite distances [...] and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods! What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and demeanor no more resembles our own than an inaccurate tracing, on which for the black line we find an empty space and for a blank area an inexplicable contour, resembles the original drawing. It may happen however that what has not been transcribed is a non-existent feature which only our purblind self-esteem reveals to us, and what seems to us to have been added does indeed belong to us, but so quintessentially that it escapes us. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to us bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, unflattering, certainly, but profound and useful, as an X-ray photograph. Not that that is any reason why we should recognize ourselves in it. (pp. 368-369)

Support ZNet

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Noted: Marcel Proust

From The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust (translation by Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright):

. . . I realised the impossibility of obtaining any direct and certain knowledge of whether Françoise loved or hated me. And thus it was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information--a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love. (pp. 81-82)

Notes on the Israel Lobby

I've been meaning to post something about the "Israel Lobby" for months. Instead of simply writing the thing and being done with it, I got ambitious, envisioning a huge, magisterial, all-encompassing post. Meanwhile, however, it's not as if the topic has lost any of its relevance. And then last week, Lenin at Lenin's Tomb posted exactly the kind of entry I had in mind, saying much of what I had intended to say. You should read it. I've tried to organize my own remaining notes as follows.

Israel is a perversely difficult topic of conversation in the United States. It is even more difficult to talk about Israel's role as an ally of the United States or about the role played by the "Israel Lobby" in shaping public debate or public policy. Nobody wants to be accused of anti-Semitism. My take on the Israel Lobby is that of course it is a powerful interest group lobbying members of Congress. I think the Lobby does have undue influence on aspects of American policy, and especially on the quality and content of American public debate. My view is that its lobbying achievements, such as they are, are largely at the level of stifling debate within Congress--as Lenin points out, this is a key reason why the right wing courted the Lobby in the first place. And it might just be possible that if debate in Congress could ever rise to the level of common sense or decency, then that august body might be able to put pressure on the executive. But the fact is that very few members of Congress question the basic aims of American foreign policy. (I wonder how many of them even understand it.) The few that occasionally make some noise about our role in the Middle East, or our relationship with Israel, have indeed run into problems. (Cynthia McKinney is but one example.)

But to leap from this limited exercise of influence to the larger point, that the Lobby determines American foreign policy, to the detriment of both Israel and American so-called "national interests", is to seriously misunderstand the purposes behind the policy (or even to not grasp the facts themselves). The argument presented by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, first in their hugely controversial article nearly two years ago in the London Review of Books, now expanded into book-length with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (which I have not read), does just that. Such is the debased nature of our public discourse that Mearsheimer and Walt have been subjected to the customary accusations of anti-Semitism, even in normally level-headed places. It somehow never occurred to many people that such a conclusion could be reached without the presence of anti-Semitism. Nor did it seem to occur to these sorts critics that the thesis might simply be wrong for other reasons. (Though of course the accusation of anti-Semitism is so often merely a rhetorical ploy anyway, so it's likely that such critics simply don't care.)

It was on the occasion of Leslie H. Gelb's review of the book in The New York Times Book Review in September of last year, that I began to assemble my notes on the Lobby. To his credit, Gelb does not accuse the authors of anti-Semitism. He disagrees with the book’s premise, but he takes it seriously. He makes some good points, but he also operates under some questionable assumptions. Since Gelb is a former Times columnist and President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, his long review can be seen as an official response, of sorts, to the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis, as well as an official attempt to reinforce the preferred view of things. In his review, Gelb observes that, after an opening in which they explain that the Lobby is "certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that 'controls' U.S. foreign policy", Mearsheimer and Walt offer what Gelb says are largely unsubstantiated claims of the Lobby’s dominance. From there, Gelb proceeds to explain what he sees as the correct view. He begins fairly well:

At one level, this argument is obviously correct. Of course, America's close ties with Israel compund its problems with Arabs and Muslims. But at a deeper level, one ignored by Mearsheimer and Walt, these problems would not disappear or seriously lessen if Washington abandoned Israel. The main source of anti-Americansism and anti-American terrorism is America's deep ties with highly unpopular regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not to mention the war in Iraq.

So far, so good. But he goes on to make several demonstrably false statements, and reveals various working assumptions. Before I get to those, let me excerpt from Lenin's post now, on the purposes of the Israel alliance, and the problems that the war against Iraq poses for the thesis:

The American Right has latched onto Israel precisely because it helps them regulate discourse and win hegemonic battles. It facilitates the repackaging of an aggressive programme of imperial domination and extreme global violence as the defense of the ideals of democracy against - what do you know? - anti-Semites. [...] people who are primarily concerned with stifling internal left-wing dissent, and critical analysis of US policy, have used Israel as a crucial alibi in that struggle. And these lobbies and think-tanks, like the Hoover Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, are recipients of huge amounts of corporate cash. When it comes to corporate America, Israel can't compete in terms either of dollars or ideological reproduction. And this is a problem for Mearsheimer and Walt throughout their book. They list people and institutions as belonging to an 'Israel Lobby', even where their activity isn't really lobbying, even where they aren't funded by Israel, even where their motive has rather little to do with Israel. The neoconservatives support Israel, but the key institutions in which they work are auxiliaries of US capital, not of the Knesset. They are unable to explain anywhere why these pro-Israel neoconservatives have the weight that they do (and why being pro-Israel matters to US capital). This is because they have no conception of class power, a reductionist conception of the 'national interest' and a flimsy account of ideology.

Perhaps the least persuasive of all examples is that of Iraq. Although, Mearsheimer and Walt concede that the US had powerful motives to invade Iraq, they insist that the Israel Lobby was the element without which it would not have happened. It is undoubtedly true that supporters of Israel were also strong supporters of the invasion of Iraq. It is true that Israel has also regarded Iraq as an enemy. It is true that Israeli interests were involved here. It is true that pro-Israel organisations 'lobbied' or simply vocalised hard on behalf of war with Iraq. Yet, if this is supposed to trump - not merely complement - US 'national interests', it is necessary for Mearsheimer and Walt to minimise the benefits of war. Their dismissal of the reasoning that holds control of the oil spigot to be a key goal is roughly as follows: if they wanted oil, they could have invaded Saudi Arabia, and anyway the oil companies would rather have traded with Saddam than overthrow him. This part of the argument is dealt with in a rather perfunctory fashion, but it demands considerably more attention than they are prepared to allot it. For example, it would appear as if the authors did not realise that Saudi Arabia is already subordinate. There is no need for an invasion force to trundle across the Nejd. Actually, one of the problems that Iraq solved was to enable America's troops to move out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence caused some trouble. Saddam Hussein represented, by contrast, the last outpost of Arab nationalism. Successfully conquering Iraq and installing a pro-American client state with a thin veneer of democratic rule, which must have looked incredibly easy after the initial cake-walk in Afghanistan, would have decisively altered the regional balance of power in America's interests. It would also have provided a model for further expansion. The aggressive right-wingers who contrived this policy explained their rationale: in the absence of a serious superpower rival, there was a brief window in which the US could powerfully assert itself as the next century's sole power, demonstrate its ability to fight and win multiple wars, and secure its dominance for the long-term.

In light of sensible, acute analysis like this, it increasingly appears that those "experts", like Gelb, who the press turns to for insight into these matters, either themselves don't understand American foreign policy, including the nature of the close relationship between the United States and Israel (recall Chomsky's many sarcastic comments over the years about how clueless Kissinger always seemed to be), or else they simply see it as necessary to reinforce widely held misconceptions. I'm focusing on Gelb, though his review is by now out of date, because his response is symptomatic of typical mainstream discourse--at least that discourse that has some claim to respectability (alas, truly typical mainstream discourse rarely rises to this level). In his review, Gelb repeats nonsense about Saddam Hussein's "quest" for nuclear arms and claims that "the more we know, the clearer it is" that Bush went to war to correct his father's "blunder" in allowing Hussein to remain in power in 1991. It doesn't seem to occur to him--or, more likely, perhaps, he is unwilling to admit--that it was at that time in the ruling class's interests ("national interests" as they are more generally known) to keep Hussein there. He says that "the greatest strategic bond between" the United States and Israel is that the latter is "one of the few nations in the world that share American values and interests, a true democracy." This sort of garbage is only true if, again, you correctly read the phrase "American values and interests" as those interests of the ruling class we continue to call "national interests". Gelb asserts that the U.S. has no choice but to ally itself not only with Israel, but also with the repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. This is because, he tells us, the alternative is far worse; there is, he says, no source of "moderate" views in the Middle East (no "center"). This sort of assertion is typical. And, typically, it elides an entire half-century and more of American political activity in the Middle East. Indeed, Gelb and the establishment he represents have no interest in anyone knowing or remembering this history. For example, he writes:

It's important to remember that the shah of Iran was overthrown not because he enjoyed good relations with Israel, which he did, but because a majority of his own people came to hate his regime and also his ties to the United States. There was no sustainable moderate center between the shah and the fanatical mullahs. And the lack of such a center is precisely what Washington needs to worry about now in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Of course, much of this paragraph is true. But it intentionally leaves out a lot (and there are numerous other similar paragraphs in the review).  Gelb doesn't address why the shah's people hated his regime, or why he had good relations with Israel, or what variety of purposes the shah's regime, combined with Israel, served for American interests in the Middle East (for some details on this, see Mahmood Mamdani's excellent book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror). "There was no sustainable moderate center between the shah and the fanatical mullahs." "Sustainable" is an interesting word, and the words "moderate center" are nearly devoid of content (these kinds of words only ever refer to politicians or movements which are amenable to U.S. demands). What there was, in fact, was a left-wing revolutionary movement--a movement, to be sure, that finally ended up being destroyed by the "fanatical mullahs"--but what might have been the role of the U.S. in all of this? How does a democratic movement "sustain" itself under continuous threat of destruction from abroad?

The Mearsheimer/Walt Israel Lobby thesis suffers from a lot of the same problems that seem to face most Americans--especially educated Americans--in trying to make sense of U.S. foreign policy.  As Lenin puts it, they have a "reductionist conception of the 'national interest'".  This means, essentially, that they buy the basic rhetoric used by the ruling class to gain support for its actions and policies.  It is impossible to fully grasp the purposes behind American foreign (and, really, domestic) policy, if you persist in believing that the United States is a functioning democracy (and that, in general, it seeks to inculcate democratic values abroad); that the so-called "national interests" resemble what might actually be in the interests of the people of the nation, as opposed to simply those interests of the ruling class; that capitalist and neoliberal twaddle about free trade has anything to do with ideas of "freedom" as understood by actual people; etc.  It is belief in these kinds of ideas that allows many to accept notions of "humanitarian intervention" without investigating too deeply into other reasons that exist behind a given action.  These other beliefs are necessary to sustain the illusion that American foreign policy is intended to serve the interests of the American people, which then forces one to look to other causes which prevent these interests from being successfully served--in this case, the Israel Lobby.  So, for example, if you identify one such "interest" as "security from acts of terrorism", and you observe that the alliance with Israel, and the war against Iraq, has clearly only made matters worse, it is then all too easy to conclude that the alliance does not "serve" American "interests".  From this basic error, Mearsheimer and Walt then notice the very real impact of the Israel Lobby in such areas as the stifling of public debate, and leap to the conclusion that the Lobby determines that unsuccessful policy, and then are able to locate piles of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence in support of that conclusion. These kinds of errors are common, and themselves only serve to mystify and deflect and ultimately to aid the ruling class in its endless class war against the rest of us.