Modern Society Archives - Page 5 of 21

When Civilization Cracks

“And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.”

Not exactly a subtle metaphor.

King Rat, by James Clavell.

This was Clavell’s first novel and if you have read Clavell’s other, more famous novels (e.g. Shogun), you will be surprised that it is absolutely nothing like them. All his other novels are Big—big in both page count and scope. They are novels that take in the wide scope of Japan in the 1600s and then in the 1860s, Hong Kong in the 1840s and then the 1960s, Iran in 1979. All societies in the midst of massive change.

Then there is King Rat, set in a POW camp in Singapore during the Second World War. It is a claustrophobic novel in comparison, fitting because living in a POW camp is, to put it mildly, claustrophobic. It is also a semi-autobiographical novel; Clavell drops a version of himself into the novel and minutely conveys what life was like in a semi-barbaric world where finding ways to get more food is the primary intellectual activity.

Clavell’s prose is that type that just flows along, never too flashy but never cringe-inducing. There is never that moment of literary flair that will make you think you are reading a Great Book; but there is also never that moment when you want to just toss the book aside because you cannot stand how ham-handed the last paragraph was.

Clavell was one of the first grown-up novelists I discovered back in high school. I loved his books, but King Rat was far and away my least favorite. As noted above, not what I was expecting. I wanted another Shogun, and instead I got the British Clavell stand-in Peter Marlowe and the scrappy American known only as the King and the British MP Grey who deeply resents both of the other two. All three of them are fixed in an intricate dance about a fundamental moral question. Suffice it to say that my high school self had nothing even remotely resembling the awareness necessary to grasp what was going on in this novel.

To get at the question, think about your own life for a moment. You live in civilized society and you have all manner of rules of conduct which you would never think about breaking. Indeed, you are proud of yourself for the way you never break any of these cultural rules. You are not a barbarian, after all. Perhaps you also hold your fork in your right hand or always wear shoes at work or never swear out loud or bathe regularly. Perhaps you never tell a lie, never steal, follow the law, or never deliberately cheat anyone. There is a whole list of things like that. You do them instinctually because they are the right thing to do. You never sit around and wonder if you should brush your teeth, you just brush them because you are not, and never will be, a barbarian.

Now place yourself in a POW camp in Singapore in WWII. How many of those cultural rules do you break? Some of them you will have to break whether you like it or not; you won’t get to regularly bathe or brush your teeth, for example. But, do you still always use the proper hand for eating? Probably. Or at least you will most of the time.

What about the higher order moral habits? This is where King Rat comes in. Marlowe is faced with a crisis. On the one hand, he is a cultured member of the British upper class. There are rules, you see. You follow the rules. On the other hand, he starts to build a relationship with the King. What is the King like? Imagine every stereotype about Americans which a member of the British Upper Class would have, and there you have the King. A crass, money-grubbing, swindling, con-man who breaks every rule in sight to make a quick buck in the black market. Then on the other side, you have Grey, the epitome of a resentful member of the British lower class who cannot stand seeing the King get away with having nice things.

Marlowe’s problem: how involved should he become in the King’s underground enterprise? How many rules of civilized behavior is it OK to break? Once you cross the line, can you go back to being respectable? As Marlowe ruminates: “A man’s life is always at a crossroads. And not his life alone, not if he’s a man. Always others in the balance.”

The “others” add to the complexity. In the camp, if you want to survive, you form a pod, a small group of three which shares everything. If someone in your pod is sick or needs food or whatever, do you break all your moral rules to get it? That is the crossroads. It is not a pleasant place to be.

He found a small promontory overlooking the wire and wished himself into his Spitfire soaring the sky alone, up, up, up in the sky, where all is clean and pure, where there are no lousy people—like me—where life is simple and you can talk to God and be of God, without shame.

Why is it worth thinking about things like this? Why is King Rat more than just a pleasant way to spend a few hours reading a war story? When you are in your nice little cultured world following all your nice cultured rules it is easy to forget that you have such rules at all. King Rat puts you in a place where you realize a lot of those rules will go whether you like it or not. But, what are the cultural codes of conduct to which you would cling no matter what? You (presumably) don’t have plans to swindle someone tomorrow, but if you are living in a desperate situation, does it become OK to break that rule? Is stealing OK in a POW camp? Do you have any obligation to follow the rules? Does it matter if the rules are the implicit rules made by the people living in the camp or the ones made by the Japanese guards?

As you read King Rat it becomes obvious that Civilization is a very fragile thing. It doesn’t take much to imagine breaking all sorts of rules. And once those rules are gone, what is life like? Well, it is like being a rat. Kill or be killed. Cunning and Luck and Strength are the only rules left. Are you just a glorified rat?

There is the choice: Civilization or the Kingdom of Rats? Maybe this civilization thing is worth preserving after all. Maybe it is worth doing everything we can to teach children the norms of civilized behavior. Maybe if we see the culture crumbling, we ought to do something about it.

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Avoiding the Fire Next Time

“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time!”

That is the conclusion of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, which you will note is not only nearly 60 years ago, but before I and many (most?) of the readers of these ruminations were born. There are two things which are immediately striking when reading James Baldwin. First, he was an incredible prose stylist; it is impossible to read him and not be impressed with the way the words seem so viscerally alive. The second thing which is immediately striking is that the world is a lot different than it was in 1963. It is hard to see how anyone could read Baldwin and think that nothing has changed.

The disturbing part of this particular essay shows up when you step back and ask whether we have avoided the fire next time. Consider this passage, quoted at length because, well, it is a bit troublesome that Baldwin was so prophetic.

In any case, during a recent Muslim rally, George Lincoln Rockwell, the chief of the American Nazi party, made a point of contributing about twenty dollars to the cause, and he and Malcolm X decided that, racially speaking, anyway, they were in complete agreement. The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

Can we all agree about that? Is there anything controversial in that statement? Does it make any difference which group is debasing another group? Can we agree that it is wrong to “treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin” no matter which racial group we select? Is it OK to agree with Baldwin that George Lincoln Rockwell and Malcolm X are both wrong?

How do we avoid the fire next time? Baldwin points the way to the solution as he explains why he left the Christian church in which he was raised:

But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all. I was told by a minister, for example, that I should never, on any public conveyance, under any circumstances, rise and give my seat to a white woman. White men never rose for Negro women. Well, that was true enough, in the main—I saw his point. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too…

It no longer sounds sophisticated to say this in elite society; it is a quick means of getting yourself labeled as an ignorant rube (or worse); it will not be viewed as a positive contribution to the discussion, but, even still, isn’t the real solution to our societal ills, isn’t the thing we want every child to learn, isn’t the message which we should be proclaiming a every opportunity simply this:

Love your neighbor as yourself

If people did that, if people faltering and incompletely, but genuinely and earnestly, did that, if people set out in every interaction to show love, exactly which problems remain? If you see an injustice and your first response was simply to note that the person committing the injustice is not showing love to the person who is being treated unjustly, if whether we are showing love is the first question we ask about ourselves, if that is the bedrock principle on which we build, what else would we need?

Baldwin hits the nail right on the head in the middle of his “A Talk to Teachers”:

My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very clearly that this was not a Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was as simple as that.

Indeed, it is as simple as that.

In our collective rush to throw more fuel onto the fire next time, perhaps it is worth pausing and asking: are we showing love right now? Or even better: Am I showing love right now? “But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too…”

That’s it. Nothing more to be said. That’s the blog post. That’s the admonition. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Rebuilding the Moral-Cultural Order

Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is a curiously neglected work these days. While it was published in 1982 and has much that is specific to the debates of that era, the underling argument is curiously relevant to a contemporary debate about the nature of a Good Society.

How important was the book in its day? The Dean of Studies of the History of American Conservatism, George Nash, listed it as one of the 12 most influential books of the 1970s and 1980s. Once upon a time, it was big, really big.

Why? The 1970s were a time when all the Respectable People knew one thing: Christianity and Capitalism were irreconcilable. Within the Roman Catholic Church, for example, Liberation Theology, with its blurring of lines between Christianity and Marxism, was becoming ever more influential. Enter Michael Novak, who argued not simply that it was possible to be a devout Christian and think capitalism was OK, but that Democratic Capitalism was fully in accord with Christian Orthodoxy.

The “Democratic Capitalism” phrase needs to be defined. As Novak rightly noted, the word “capitalism” has no universal definition; it is a vague term that people use to describe all sorts of economic systems. Novak instead wants to point to what he dubbed “Democratic Capitalism,” which is a description of an entire societal order and one that describes, not coincidentally, the American Experiment.

In a Democratic Capitalist society power is deliberately divided into three distinct realms; there is no unitary order, but rather a constant and very messy interaction of three different sets of leaders. First there is a political system, marked by its own internal division of power, composed of leaders who are elected, directly or indirectly, through a democratic process. Second, there is an economic order marked by the existence of competition between firms in free markets. Third, there is a moral-cultural order, composed of religious and cultural leaders establishing the moral underpinnings of our lives. In a well-functioning Democratic Capitalist society, none of these three groups has the ascendancy; instead there is a constant jostling for influence as the realms rub against each other.

Back in 1982, the primary target of Novak’s work was those who believed that the moral cultural system needed to control the economic system via something akin to or exactly like a socialist or Marxist order. Novak argues that the socialist ideas are antithetical to Christian theology because they suppress individuality. In a striking imagine, Novak describes the system as having an empty shrine at the center:

In a genuine pluralistic society, there is no one sacred canopy. By intention, there is not. At its spiritual core, there is an empty shrine. That shrine is left empty in the knowledge that no one word, image, or symbol is worthy of what all seek there. Its emptiness, therefore, represents the transcendence which is approached by free consciences from a virtually infinite number of directions. (Aquinas once wrote that humans are made in the image of God but that since God is infinite He may be mirrored only through a virtually infinite number of humans. No concept of Him is adequate.) Believer and unbeliever, selfless and selfish, frightened and bold, naive and jaded, all participate in an order whose center is not socially imposed.

With no order imposed on people, it leaves individuals free to muddle along, with both good and bad effects. It creates both alienation and loneliness, which then creates the desire and need to create new organic communities. By refraining from imposing an order from above, Democratic Capitalism allows each individual to flourish in a constantly shifting set of communities.

As a description of the idea of American Experiment, Novak’s argument is really good. However as a description of the actual workings of the American Experiment in the last half-century, it runs into a bit of trouble. The Democratic Capitalist ideal hinges on having all three parts of the societal structure being robust. What happens when one of the parts collapses?

Another way of asking the question: Novak describes the center of the three parts of society as being empty with each of the three legs jostling for position around that center. But, what if the empty center at the heart of Democratic Capitalism ends up hollowing out one of the legs? Does the whole thing collapse?

What happens, for example, if the moral cultural order itself get hollowed out? What if there is no longer a robust moral-cultural order because internal debate has removed the ability even to articulate a shared set of values? Can Democratic Capitalism survive, using Richard John Neuhaus’ phrase, a naked public square? The question is not whether there should be debate within the moral-cultural order; for the system to work, the moral-cultural order should have every bit as much competition as the political and the economic orders. The question is whether society can survive if it loses the idea that there should be a robust moral-cultural order of any sort?

This is an intriguing way to describe what has happened in the decades since Novak wrote. In 1982, the problem was an assault on free markets and Novak was trying to convince people that a pluralistic society which respected markets was better than a unitary order which did not. Since then, while the socialist temptation has lingered, it is no longer the most obvious battle line. The battle line has shifted from being between the moral-cultural order and the economic order and into a civil war within the moral cultural order itself.

Christians are now faced with a rather stark choice. One the one hand, they could declare the American Experiment with its pluralistic democratic capitalism to be a failure. There is no lack of people making arguments like this these days. There are plenty of people counseling that the culture war is lost and that the only path forward is a retreat to a Christian enclave.

More surprising perhaps is the increasing number or arguments in favor of an even more vigorous war to build a more perfect society from the wreckage of the American Experiment. The surprising part is that if you replaced “Liberation Theology” with “Integralism,” Novak’s 1982 argument suddenly reads like it was written in 2021. The economic arguments of the 2021 “Common Good Capitalism” sound surprisingly like the 1970s “Liberation Theology” arguments. In both cases, evil corporations run by capitalists are not acting in ways which benefit the poor among us. In both cases, the government should develop policies to construct a more virtuous economic order. It both cases, it is the responsibility of Christians to advocate for these government polices to rid society of the baleful influences of unfettered capitalists. It is not hard to imagine Novak recoiling in horror.

If Novak is right, though, a messy pluralistic society in better than a Theocracy, whether the theocrats align themselves with the left or the right. The challenge is to avoid the counsels of despair. Yes, the moral-cultural order has collapsed; the challenge is finding ways to rebuild it. If Novak is right, it is well worth our time to try to build anew in the naked public square, to find a language to appeal across the divides of society in rediscovering a robust moral-cultural realm which can once again take its place as a robust leg in the Democratic Capitalist system.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss Novak’s book with the interns in the Acton Institute’s Emerging Leaders program. They were a rather impressive set of thoughtful college students and recent graduates. If you want a reason to be optimistic that the moral cultural order can be rebuilt, if you want a reason to avoid the counsels of despair, then you need look no further than these 14 young men and women.

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Do We Need Shane?

“He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back when he had come and he was Shane.”

In the category of final sentences which perfectly capture a book, that one is about as good as it gets.

The book is (presumably rather obviously) Shane by Jack Schaefer. You know it is good because the Library of America included it in their volume The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.

Want another sign of how good it is? I read it in a reading group with a set of students; they thoroughly enjoyed it. Who knew the Western still had that something that appeals?

The tale is told by Bob, a young boy living with his parents, Joe and Marian Starrett. Everyone in the book towers over Bob; everything and everyone in this story is larger than life. Joe and Marian are quintessential salt of the earth types, the sort of people around whom you build a civilization. You want Joe and Marian Starrett living in your town, or even better, in your family. Hard-working, determined, and good. They know right from wrong, that nothing comes for free, and that showing kindness to a stranger is just a thing you do.

But, Joe and Marian are no match for Evil. Luke Fletcher is Evil; a rancher who is perfectly willing to resort to cruel ways to drive the good and noble settlers away from his territory. You want Joe and Marian to win, but you know that they are no match for the Fletchers of this world. You want good to triumph, but good just is not as strong as evil.

Enter Shane, literally riding into the story from nowhere. (The original title of the story: Rider from Nowhere.) No background, no history, no origin story. He is just there one day. In the Clint Eastwood movie Pale Rider, a rather loose retelling of Shane, the man form nowhere is a literal ghost, the pale rider from Revelation. Shane is a real man but Eastwood captured an ineffable quality of Shane; he is real and unreal at the same time.

By the end of the first chapter of the novel, we get this description of Shane:

“I like him.” Mother’s voice was serious. “He’s so nice and polite and sort of gentle. Not like most men I’ve met out here. But there’s something about him. Something underneath the gentleness…Something…” Her voice trailed away.
“Mysterious?” suggested father.
“Yes, of course. Mysterious. But more than that. Dangerous.”
“He’s dangerous all right.” Father said it in a musing way. Then he chuckled. “But not to us, my dear.” And then he said what seemed to be a curious thing. “In fact, I don’t think you ever had a safer man in your house.”

There we have the central tension of the novel. To build civilization on the frontier, do we need Shane, the most dangerous and the most safe man you could ever find? We like to think that the Joes and Marians are the foundation of civil society. We like to think that all Bob needs to grow up in a civilized world is to have it filled with Joes and Marians. But what if the forces of anarchy are more powerful than the forces of civilization?

Do we need Shane? Shane will never be a part of civilization. He rides in, beats back evil, and rides out. He doesn’t stay to reap the rewards of gratitude. You know he will never settle down with a wife and child of his own; he is forever on the move, arriving with the sunrise, doing what needs to be done, and riding off into the sunset. What is the reward to Shane for doing what he does? What motivates someone like Shane? We have absolutely no idea. He has his code; he does what is right; he moves on.

Do we need Shane? We obviously need Joe and Marian. We want Bob raised by Joe and Marian, not by Shane. We want Bob to grow up to be like his parents. Bob is fascinated, as only a child can be, with the idea of Shane. The ending of the Alan Ladd move version nails this fact with Bob screaming into the vast open lands at the back of Shane riding into the distance, “Shane, come back.” (As an aside, the comparable scene in Eastwood’s Pale Rider is painful beyond belief. Eastwood really whiffed there.) Yet despite the allure of Shane to Bob, Joe, Marian and the Reader, we all know that Shane has to ride on, that civilization is not built on the back of Shane.

Do we need Shane? Is it important to raise up a new generation of Shanes? Should we teach children that while we want most of them to grow up to be Joe and Marian, we hope a few of them become Shane? Do we teach them to ride through the land, taking on the tasks of beating back the forces of anarchy and evil and then riding on without waiting for gratitude or rewards, to never settle down and enjoy the benefits of what has been done? Do we need to train up people to be dangerous to evil, but completely safe to the good? How do we raise people to be like that?

Do we need Shane? Oddly, we probably do. But I cannot see any way to guarantee that Shane will be there when he is needed. Maybe that is the point. When the need arises, Shane will arrive. Or at least we hope that Shane will arrive. The Shanes of the world do not announce their existence or even their arrival. They don’t stick around afterwards for the party. Maybe you never even notice they were there.

Curiously, now that I am writing this, it reminds me of this:

“And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious about how you should defend yourself or what you should say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.” (ESV)

The Holy Spirit as Shane. Hmm. “’He’s dangerous all right.’ Father said it in a musing way. Then he chuckled. ‘But not to us, my dear.’ And then he said what seemed to be a curious thing. ‘In fact, I don’t think you ever had a safer man in your house.’” Hmm. I guess we do need Shane.

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Commerce and Culture

Consider the Introduction to Economics class. One of the intriguing challenges in teaching that class is that you can neatly divide the room into two camps. These two sets of students are not only taking the course for very different reasons, they are rather suspicions of the other group, wondering a bit why those others are even in college at all.

The first group is heading for an MBA and a career in “business.” (One of my many amusements is pointing out to such students that all jobs, by definition, are in business.) They are taking Introduction to Economics because they are sure it is the first step in unlocking the mysteries of the business world, keys which they need to have in order to land that first job which will enable them to get that MBA and amass much wealth.

The second group is dutiful fulfilling the need to take some social science distribution class, and either because it fit into their schedule or because of parental pressure to take a “useful” class like economics, they wander into the introductory course. (Another one of my amusements is pointing out to students that introduction to economics, as a part of the liberal arts, is, by definition, useless.) These students know there is a moral stench surrounding capitalism and hence economics, and have braced themselves to make sure they are not duped into thinking markets might serve a useful societal function.

Both types of students are a joy to teach. It is the fact that they do not understand one another than interests me.

I was recently at a conference at the Acton Institute, and one of the readings was a chapter from William Ropke’s book, A Humane Economy. The book was first published in 1960. One might think a few things have changed in the last sixty years, but in this respect, it was eerily contemporary.

Ropke is concerned that few people understand the cultural aspects of the economic realm. “The feeling for the meaning and dignity of one’s profession and for the place of work in society, whatever work it be, is today lost to a shockingly large number of people.” We all know work is important to pay the bills, but how often do we talk about the place of work in a society? Indeed, who even talks about such things? As Ropke notes:

This is the place, too, to note that the hard-boiled business world, which ignores such questions or leaves them, with contempt, to the “unbusinesslike” intellectuals, and these same intellectuals’ distrust of the business world match and mutually exacerbate each other. If the business world loses its contact with culture and the intellectuals resentfully keep their distance from economic matters, then the two spheres become irretrievably alienated from each other. We can observe this in America in the anti-intellectualism of wide circles of businessman and the anti-capitalism of equally wide circles of intellectuals.

That is a perfect description of my Introduction to Economics classes. One set of students needs to be persuaded that that thinking about economics is not simply thinking about how to get a job on Wall Street. The other set of students needs to be persuaded that thinking about economics is not just marshaling a list of critiques of capitalism.

This is more than simply an interesting pedagogical challenge, however. It is very much a cultural challenge in an age of specialization. Ropke was very concerned that if the two segments of society remained alienated from one another, the results would inevitably be “a vicious circle of mutually intensifying resentment which threatens to end up in catastrophe.”

Is there a solution? Ropke has one:

One has to break out of this vicious circle by making the world of the mind as respectable to the business world as, conversely, the business world to the world of the mind.

Ropke is certainly right. On the one side, the world of commerce is littered with philistines, who have zero appreciation for the cultural triumphs that allowed the creation of the economy in which they participate. If your only experience with Shakespeare was your 10^th grade English class, your only experience with Mozart was background music in a commercial, your only experience with Michelangelo was kitschy parodies, then your world is truly impoverished no matter how large your bank account is. Any rising business leader would benefit immensely from reading Macbeth or All the King’s Men and reflecting on the lessons therein. The trick is finding a way to convince people that they will enjoy doing this.

On the other side, the disdain for economics among the cultural mandarins is truly astonishing. Every time I hear a tenured faculty member making a six figure salary arguing about the evils of a capitalist system, I truly wonder if they have ever paused to wonder why they have such a high salary and a nice house and a job in which they can bite the hand that feeds them without once worrying about losing their job. The trick is finding a way to convince people that they should pause and think about such questions.

Thinking about both the world of commerce and the world of culture is not as odd as many people believe it to be. After all, Adam Smith wrote two books in his life, one exploring the wealth of nations and one exploring moral sentiments. He certainly did not think of these things as belonging to two different realms of thought.

There is one way that things have changed a bit since Ropke penned A Human Economy. The warring camps which view each other with intensifying resentment have themselves split into many factions. An interesting thought experiment: what is the book or movie or TV show or cultural event which spans the largest number of these groups?

The most obvious answer would be the most watched television event every year: the Super Bowl. What percentage of the American population watches the most watched event of the year? Less than one-third. Think about that for a moment. There is no show or event on television which even half of Americans watch. The highest grossing movie of the 21^st century (Avengers: Endgame) was seen by about 10% of Americans. The bestselling book (the first Harry Potter, obviously) has only been read by about a third of American children. And, believe it or not, less than a third of Americans read this here blog.

So, while you may think there are things that unite people across the spectrum, that is only because you live in a small little bubble. No matter what you read or watch, over two-thirds of Americans have not read or watched that. So, the problem has gone far beyond the fact that those in the world of commerce and those in the world of culture have no-overlapping interests, even within those worlds there are many subgroups with non-overlapping knowledge and belief sets.

Is this a new phenomenon? Not even remotely. What percentage of Elizabethan England do you suppose saw a Shakespeare play? What percentage of late 18^th century France had read Voltaire? Societies have always been broken up into small subgroups.

So, what is new? The vitriol? Again, the fact that one tribe hated another tribe is built into the fabric of human history.

I think what concerns Ropke, and what concerns us today, is not the existence of these mutually exclusive groups, but rather that those at the highest levels of a society are locked in “a vicious circle of mutually intensifying resentment.” It is one thing when the Hatfields do not like the McCoys, and quite another thing when the upper echelons of commerce and the cultural elites have utter disdain for one another. And when the resentment is mutually intensifying, sooner or later soothing must give.

What can fix this? Ropke’s solution is, to say the least, impressively simple:

The chain reaction between the business world’s distrust of intellectuals and the intellectuals’ retaliating resentment should be broken by both sides: the intellectuals should abandon untenable ideologies and theories, and the “capitalists” should adopt a philosophy which, while rendering unto the market the things that belong to the market, also renders unto the spirit what belongs to it. Both movements together should merge into a new humanism in which the market and the spirit are reconciled in common service to the highest values.

Let us all imagine the halcyon days of 1960 when such a statement would not cause an amused smile.

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Vonnegut Hits Rock Bottom

As I have noted in this space before, one of the (many) great things about the Library of America is that owning their volumes enables one to easily read an author’s work in the order of publication.

Read that way, Kurt Vonnegut has been an amazing surprise.

Many authors have written books that are all part of a longer storyline. Vonnegut’s books seem like they are all on different topics, but they are surprisingly the parts of a longer argument. Every book reads like a reaction to the previous book. It is uncanny. Each book stands on its own and you would never know that the book is the logical extension of the book Vonnegut finished before starting the one you are reading. But the linkage is there.

The installment of this ongoing saga which I just read was Slapstick. Not good. Not good at all. Indeed, it was a mess, rescued only by the fact that Vonnegut’s style of short chapters and brief paragraphs kept the book moving along at a brisk pace. The biggest question raised by Slapstick: Why is this book so awful?

The answer comes in Vonnegut’s previous book, Breakfast of Champions. Here is what I wrote about that book when I read it not too long ago: “What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page….Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.”

Now imagine that summary of Breakfast of Champions is correct. What comes next? If you have just hurled what remains of your broken self onto the page in a supreme act of nihilism, what do you have left to use for material for your next novel? Absolutely nothing.

And interestingly, starting with absolutely nothing is exactly what Slapstick does. The plot is beyond idiotic, neither believable as reality nor as an alternate reality or as an imaginary reality; it is just an incoherent mash-up of bits of flotsam.

Wilbur is born and he is really ugly and he has a twin sister who is also really ugly and they are both not intelligent at all but when they are physically close together they form a telepathic link and are geniuses so they spend lots of time in super-close and super-uncomfortable-for-the-reader-who-doesn’t-like-incest physical contact until they are separated permanently and Wilbur goes to Harvard and then becomes President of the United States but then the Chinese, who have made themselves superminiature people, start messing around with the gravitational force of the planet by making it variable on a day-to-day basis which destroys just about everything in the world except New York City which was instead depopulated by a plague which has an antidote contained in fish guts and, after communicating with his sister who died a few years previously when she was on Mars after having been taken there by the a miniature Chinese emissary who traded transport to Mars for the ability to read some of the works that Wilbur and his sister wrote when they were very young, Wilbur goes there (the largely uninhabited New York City) and lives in the Empire State Building with his granddaughter who for reasons unexplained just showed up one day and does absolutely nothing afterwards to explain why she is even in this novel.

If that sounds like a book you might like to read I have done a terrible job relating the plot. Maybe I should have included the pointless stuff about the King of Michigan and his wars against the great lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.

The plot (to use the word loosely), however, is totally irrelevant to the message of the book. I suppose this is one of the things that happens when you are a novelist. You have a message that could be summarized in a four word sentence, but instead of just publishing the sentence, you write a whole novel to say what could have been said in four words, but even the novel version of the four word sentence would have only been about 5 (or maybe 10 if you use a lot of adjectives) pages long, so you add another 150 pages of filler.

The Message: We all need friends.

The 10 page story written to say ‘We all need friends”: When Wilbur ran for President of the United States, his campaign slogan was “Lonesome No More.” The plan: everyone in the country will be assigned a new middle name which is a word followed by a number between 1 and 20. Wilbur ended up Daffodil-11, for example. Then, by law, everyone with the same middle name as yours is your brother or sister. Everyone with the same word, but a different number is your cousin. After the plan goes into effect, you suddenly have 10,000 siblings and 190,000 cousins. Presto! You are Lonely No More! You have Friends! You may not like all 10,000 of your new siblings, but surely you will like some of them and since they are your siblings, they will have to interact with you whether they like you or not.

That, let me be clear, is the most philosophically deep part of this whole novel and, yes, it sounds like something a lonely 8 year old would dream up.

Why? Why did this novel happen? As a stand alone book, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder that. The book was savagely criticized everywhere when it came out, so you don’t have to take my word about the quality of this book.

However as a follow up to what has come before, the book makes perfect sense. Vonnegut has nothing left. The increasing nihilism of all his previous books has left him with nothing. In the midst of that nothingness, a small lonely voice cries out. The small voice wants to be lonesome no more; that small voice wants to find community again, someone to love. Vonnegut hears that small voice and tries desperately to construct a structure which might allow that small voice to climb out of the abyss. That structure, shaky and horribly put together (how could it be otherwise?) is this novel. The novel fails as a novel, but does it work in giving Vonnegut a path forward? I have no idea yet. The next novel is entitled Jailbird.