James E Hartley

Bearing Life

A question I have long enjoyed posing to anyone who is willing to listen to me pose unanswerable questions is: Why does everyone consider Shakespeare’s tragedies to be more realistic and deep than his comedies?

A related question: why doesn’t everyone realize P. G. Wodehouse is a Great Books author?

Milan Kundera points the way to an unusual answer in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

It is a bit hard to classify the book. It is most certainly one part novel; it is also one part philosophical musing. Does the book belong in the fiction section because there is a story which has a lot of philosophical musings in it? Or does it belong in the non-fiction section because the story is clearly just a framework for the philosophical musings? On such questions hangs the fate of my library. But, I digress.

We all know about the burden of life. Life is full of heaviness, those things which weigh on us, which we spend our days figuring out how to endure. Life is a serious matter. What we decide to do has consequences, and those consequences matter. We are often faced with decisions and we don’t know which path to choose, but choose we must and then we must face the consequences of our choices. This is hard. Life is heavy.

There is an alternative way to go through life:

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina—what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

That is the alternative. Don’t treat life as heavy at all. Treat it as light. There are no weighty concerns in life; just do what you will and float though your life never being weighed down by the things of this world. As another character in the story muses:

She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

So, here you are faced with the burdens of life. Do you too yearn for lightness? Before you answer, remember this: if you shed the burden of heaviness, you will forever be tormented by the unbearable lightness of being.

Why is lightness unbearable? It is obviously an odd notion; by definition, light things are easy to bear. But lightness of being is not easy to bear. Why not?

Imagine you are living your newfound life of lightness, unburdened by the weight of the world. You are faced with a decision. You then realize this:

We can never know what to want. Because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives….There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

That is the unbearable lightness of being. What is your life worth? “What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.” If your life is light, ephemeral, if nothing you do really matters, if no choice has any real consequences, then what exactly is the point? You flit through life and people are born and people die and things happen and none of it really matters at all.

And then you wake up at 4 AM and realize that nothing you do or ever will do has any meaning and the cold terror grips your soul that you are utterly irrelevant, that everyone you meet is utterly irrelevant, that everything you do is impermanent and you can do neither good nor ill in the world, and stripped of all meaning you face another soulless, meaningless day. And tomorrow will be the same.

At that moment, something inside you rebels, insisting that surely everything is not pointless. Surely caring for those you love means something. Surely there are tragedies in life that have meaning, that cause pain. Surely it is not a matter of total indifference whether the box someone hands to an 8 year old kid contains a toy or a bomb.

At that realization, we are trapped back in the heaviness of life. The burden of living returns. Lightness is more unbearable than heaviness. At least with heaviness, there is some importance to the struggle with the decisions of life, some reason that what you do might matter, some hope that you may be able to do something good in this world.

Heaviness or lightness? It’s not a great set of options.

There was, however, a reviewer of this book who offered an interesting third option:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Knightian Unhappiness

Given the choice, would you rather have happiness or knowledge?

Seems like an easy question to answer. But, it is not so obvious.

I first ran into this question decades ago when I was reading a collection of Voltaire. “The Good Brahmin” tells the story of a learned intellectual in India who is absolutely miserable; nothing in all his learning has brought him joy and he is miserable at the thought of not knowing the secret of happiness. The story then tells of a poor old woman who was supremely happy as long as she could bathe in the waters of the Ganges. Voltaire notes he asked all of his friends whether they would prefer to be the miserable Brahmin or the happy old lady. Every single person chose the Brahmin. ‘Tis better to know than to be happy.

That seems like the wrong answer. Surely happiness is better than knowledge. But, I too would rather know than be happy.

I was reminded of this essay in a conversation with a student about The Bluest Eye. In that novel the girl with zero prospects in life ends up insane, but happy. The student claimed the book had a happy ending. I was, to put it mildly, incredulous. Surely having the little girl end up insane was a tragedy. Obviously, right?

But, this student insisted, what better ending was possible for her? Short of an absurd deus ex machina, there was no possible happy ending for this little girl. At least being insane, she was happy. So, the novel ends on a happy note because the best possible thing happened and the little girl is, after all, happy. Would I prefer she was knowledgeable and miserable? Would that be a happier ending?

I didn’t have a decent answer. Well, truth be told, I didn’t have an answer at all. It’s my Voltaire problem—I say being happy is important, but I would pick knowledge over happiness even if the knowledge made me unhappy. The little girl is certainly happier than she would be if she had stayed sane, but even still, her insanity does not strike me as an occasion for celebration.

Since I have been pondering this problem for three decades, it is not really all that surprising that it didn’t get solved by a conversation with a student about Toni Morrison.

What was as surprise was Frank Knight.

I was going to a conference on Knight, which required me to read a decent chunk of his writings. Don’t feel bad that you have never heard of Frank Knight; unless you have had a very unusual education, there is no reason his name would have ever shown up on your reading list.

Knight was an economist at the University of Chicago in the mid-20^th century. His primary contribution to economic thought was the idea of Knightian Uncertainty. You don’t know what will happen in the future. Sometimes you have an idea about the probability of possible future outcomes. If you don’t even know the probability of possible outcomes, then you have Knightian Uncertainty. Like I said, that is his most important contribution to knowledge and you are thinking, “Uh, it is obvious that sometimes people don’t know the probability of future events; how did he get the idea named after him?”

But, it is not Knightian Uncertainty which is relevant here. Instead, in the midst of an essay about Ethics and Economics, Knight considered the idea that we all want to be happy. Obviously coming upon this passage shortly after the conversation with my student, I was suddenly quite alert.

This argument of economists and other pragmatists that men work and think to get themselves out of trouble is at least half an inversion of the facts. The things we work for are “annoyers” as often as “satisfiers”; we spend as much ingenuity in getting into trouble as in getting out, and in any case enough to keep in effectively.

Well, then I started to go back into my lull. Saying things I want to do are “annoyers” seems like just a verbal trick. Nothing to see here…but then Knight goes on

It is our nature to “travel afar to seek disquietude,” and “’tis distance lends enchantment to the view.” It cannot be maintained that civilization itself makes men “happier” than they are in savagery. The purpose of education is certainly not to make anyone happy; its aim is rather to raise problems rather than solve them; the association of sadness and wisdom is proverbial, and the most famous of wise men observed that “in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Thus the pursuit of the “higher things” and the crasser indulgences are alike failures if the test is happiness.

Oh my. The pursuit of higher things…all those Great Books…is a miserable failure if the test is happiness. Knight continues:

But the test is not happiness. And by this we do not mean that it ought not to be but the simple fact that that is not what men want. It is a stock and conclusive objection to utopias that men simply will not live in a world where everything runs smoothly and life is free from care. We all recall William James’ relief at getting away from Chatauqua. A man who has nothing worry about immediately busies himself in creating something, gets into some absorbing game, falls in love, prepares to conquer some enemy or hunt lions or the North Pole or what not. We recall also the case of Faust, that the Devil himself could not invent escapades and adventures fast enough to give his soul one moment’s peace. So he died, seeking and striving, and the Angel pronounced him thereby “saved”…

Can this possibly be right? If you found yourself happy, would you really immediately invent a problem just to give yourself a better life than the one of being happy? If you lived in Eden, would you eat the fruit just to get out of the place?

The pleasure philosophy is a false theory of life; there abide pain, grief and boredom: these three; and the greatest of these is boredom.

Would we all really prefer pain and grief to the boredom of happiness? I want to say the answer is obviously not….but….but….well…

I can rescue all this by simply asserting that I derive happiness from my futile struggle to read (and read again) every book worth reading. The problem is easily solved by simply asserting the happiness is your goal by definition, so whatever you do is by definition aimed at bringing you happiness. So, creating problems for myself, striving to be better, learning new things do indeed bring me pleasure.

However, no matter how much I try to define things this way, the problem still remains. I know that while I would like to finish the collected works of Wodehouse, while I enjoy steadily plugging away at this, I will not be happy when I finally do so. After all, as soon as Wodehouse is done, the collected works of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott beckon. The more I read, the more I discover I want to read. So does the continual striving after an unattainable goal make me happy? Why? Shouldn’t reaching the goal make me happy?

Would I prefer to be insane and happy? Not in the least. Is Knight correct that we do not want to be happy? I don’t think that is right, but I cannot figure out where he is in error.

Twelve Reasons You Should Not Read This Book

Jared Diamond was once all the rage. His book, Guns, Gems and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies was one of those books about which everyone was once talking. Provocative thesis, well written (though the “word to intriguing idea” ratio was a bit too high), much discussed.

But, that was almost a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent books were not quite the rage. In his latest, Diamond plaintively complains about a review of one of his books casting about for lessons which we can draw from prehistory; the reviewer was unimpressed, ending his review: “We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.”

Pity Jared Diamond.

But, Diamond, at the age of 82, tries one more time to regain his celebrity status with Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.

The Table of Contents reveals the theme. Individuals have crises; we can think about how they respond. Here is a chapter on that. Nations also have crises. Here are six case studies of past crises. Some crises are still underway. Here are four more chapters on current crises.

You now have some expectation about what you will find in this book. You imagine what you will discover when reading it. You may even be intrigued to find out what Jared Diamond (the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel!!) can show us about the nature of crises.

But, while you now know what this book is about, you are wrong. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. On page 11, Diamond tells us, “Readers and reviewers of a book often gradually discover, as they read, that the book’s coverage and approach aren’t what they expected or wanted.” A book really means this book. Yeah, Diamond wrote that about his own book.

That sentence in in the midst of the most defensive prologue I have ever read. You can hear Diamond screaming on every page at those “readers and reviewers” who said, “Uh, Jared…what exactly are you trying to accomplish in this mess of a manuscript?”

“You fools,” Diamond indirectly screams:

This book is: a comparative, narrative, exploratory study of crisis and selective change operating over many decades in seven modern nations, all of which I have much personal experience, and viewed from the perspective of selective change in personal crises.

That sentence comes on page 12. I read that and the following 10 pages of defensive explanation of the “comparative, narrative, exploratory” method and I was still surprised that the book’s coverage and approach were not what I expected.

Take the historical case studies. There are six of them. Finland in the 20^th century; Japan in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Chile in the late 20^th century, Indonesia in the late 20^th century, Germany in the second half of the 20^th century, Australia in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Notice a pattern in that set of case studies? They are all modern, but that seems a weak connection. They aren’t even all countries that had an obvious crisis. As Diamond notes: “While Australians themselves may not apply the word ‘crisis’ to Australia, I find it useful to think of Australia as having undergone a slowly unfolding crisis…” A crisis that slowly unfolds over centuries?

So, what does unite these crisis? Fortunately Diamond tells us the secret: these are the countries he has visited in his lifetime. He has lived for extended periods of time in six of them, and he has relatives and colleagues and students from Japan! So, obviously these countries are the best choices for a study of crises!

OK, so the selection criterion is weak (to put it mildly). How are the chapters themselves? For the six historical studies, as long as you set aside the question of why this history is in this book, they are pleasant reading. The less you know about the 20^th century history of the country, the more you will learn. The prose style flows reasonably well, though an editor could have come in handy to eliminate the times when content was repeated within the same chapter.

But, by the end, it is hard to see much meaningful connection between reading about how Finland fought the Soviet Union in World War II, the Meiji Era in Japan, how Allende and Pinochet battled over Chile, the Sukarno and Suharto years of Indonesia, Germany after World War II, and how Australia weaned itself of the British Empire. All interesting stories to be sure…but even still, you are left scratching your head a bit.

Then the head scratching gets much worse when Diamond move to the current crises. Four chapters: one on Japan, two on the United States, one on the whole world.

Start with Japan. What is their ongoing crisis? They have a giant demographic problem, not enough kids. It isn’t clear why Diamond singles out Japan to talk about this crisis. Oh, but wait. The problem is that Japan should really want population decline. And they should have more immigration otherwise they will have that population decline that Diamond thinks they should have, so…I have no idea what Diamond is arguing. Japan also doesn’t treat women like equals. And they really should apologize to China and South Korea. And…what is the crisis here?

Moving along to the United States. Two chapters of problems. Political polarization is really bad… because if we don’t fix that we are going to have a coup like in Chile or Indonesia. Yes, he really wants us to seriously consider a military takeover of the US. Oh, except he then backs off the military takeover to give us the scenario where “one political party” (zero points for guessing which one he means) using “the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or even army itself to suppress political opposition.” See, not a military takeover!

But wait, there’s more. A whole chapter of other things Diamond thinks are crises in the US. And then we get to the world problems and…well, you are not going to believe this. The number one problem facing the world is…drum roll, please…the threat of nuclear winter after a massive worldwide exchange of nuclear bomb attacks. Yep. Nuclear Winter is back, baby! Then we get the obligatory climate change, running out of fossil fuels (wouldn’t that help with the climate change thing??), and global inequality which is going to cause riots near Diamond’s nice home in LA (his example).

All four of the chapters about the current crises can be summed up in one sentence. There is a crisis because countries in the world are not all doing what Jared Diamond wants them to do.

What is the glue that holds this whole book together? It is back in chapter 2 where Diamond tells us there are 12 “Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises.” I won’t torment you with the list because Diamond doesn’t really care about his list. He then takes that list and morphs it into 12 “Factors related to the outcome of national crises.” And, he keep talking about those 12 factors over and over.

No need to bother with a discussion of the factors, though. It turns out these factors don’t explain anything at all. They are just there to be a faux linking device. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. For example, from Diamond’s conclusion “core values of nations [Factor 11] can make it either easier or harder for a nation to adopt selective change.” “I expect that it usually won’t be profitable for social scientists to generalize about a nation as being uniformly either fixed or rigid [Factor 10].” And so on. The factors never really rise to the level of having any explanatory value.

So, why are they there? The clue comes in the number 12. Diamond is adamant that 12 factors is the right number. He says so in the introduction. If a book has fewer factors, “throw it away without reading any further.” (Yes, that is an actual quotation.) If a book has more factors, “throw that book away also.” (Yep. Also a quotation.) You see, Diamond has found that a dozen factors is the right number.

Which makes one wonder: what is the source of Diamond’s fixation on 12 things? Is there some other book which has 12 factors? Some other book written by a public intellectual who is currently getting all the fame and glory and party invitations that Jared Diamond used to get? A book with 12 factors about how to manage life, maybe?

Oh yeah. Jordan Peterson: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Suddenly this whole book makes total sense. Imagine a guy who used to be in the limelight. He is aging. He may only have one book left in him. But, he really wants that limelight one last time. How to get it? He sees Jordan Peterson and his 12 rules for life. Suddenly the idea is born. Peterson has cornered the market on helping individuals with their crises. Jared Diamond can go one step better and help whole nations with their crises! Sure Peterson gets to talk to crowds of adoring individuals. But, Diamond can top that, he can talk to crowds of adoring nations! He will be the Jordan Peterson for the nation state. Diamond can help you with your national crisis!

Who is going to break the news to Jared Diamond that he is not going to displace Jordan Peterson on the talk-show circuit?

How Blue are Your Eyes?

One of the first lessons of school: you are not one of the cool kids. You aren’t as beautiful or as charming as those other kids. People like those other kids; they don’t really like you.

The Beautiful Kids grow up to be the beautiful teenagers. And you learn that lesson all over again in high school. You just aren’t that beautiful. You really are not all that popular.

Sure, you watch endless movies where the kids like you end up being popular. Yes, you see the stories where the ugly kid puts on some new clothes or does some moderately good thing and suddenly the most popular guy or girl in school falls madly in love with the protagonist.

But, you always knew those stories weren’t really true. You knew the most popular kid in school was never going to fall in love with you.

Toni Morrison wrote a novel about you. The Bluest Eye. Blue eyes are all the rage; everyone loves blue eyes. You will never have the Bluest eyes. You will never be the popular kid.

Now obviously there are a few people out there for whom none of the above is accurate. But very few. Even among the relatively popular kids, there is still that sense of being not quite popular enough. But, those relatively popular kids do alright. After all, they are at least not those really ugly kids.

School, for all its virtues (and there are obvious virtues) is a brutal place for most kids. It is the place where you realize just how much you are not like those other kids. School is where most of us learn our place in society. It is where you learn not only that your eyes are not the bluest, they aren’t even blue.

After such knowledge…what? How do we cope? That is the question which Morrison wants to explore.

This is a novel about the ugly people. The Beautiful People hang around the fringes of the novel as the malevolent forces which drive the characters in the story to despair. Then we watch how assorted people try to make their way in the world.

Here we find the American Dreamers. They aren’t rich or beautiful. They were not born to good families. But, they will do everything they can to fit into the world of the rich and the beautiful. They strive to mask their origins, find work in the homes of the rich and beautiful, constantly strive to impress. Externally, it works. But, at night, they still go back to their own homes and their own despair.

We also find the American Hustlers. They are on the lookout for an angle, constantly trying to figure out a way to make this day just a little bit better. Their dreams are bigger than realistic possibilities. They are doomed to failure. When they fail, what then?

Then there are the Loners. They retreat into themselves, crafting a world divorced from the one in which the rest of humanity lives. They lead secret lives, filled with illicit desires and impotent rage.

All of the above are the success stories in this novel. Morrison deftly creates these characters to draw attention to the last set. The ones who lose.

The child who slowly descends into madness. Impregnated by her drunken father, abandoned by her family, shunned by the world. She was an ugly kid made even uglier by the society around her. She never descends into evil, just more and more ugliness.

Morrison is marvelously relentless. You want to pity this poor kid. But pity is so cheap and condescending.

There really is only one choice here. You have to decide. Is this kid a child of God worthy of being loved or not? If you want to love her, you’ll have to love her not for anything she presents to the world. You just have to love her because she is who she is. You have to love her with the perfect love of God, not with your weak, violent, wicked, stupid or selfish love which really just rebounds onto yourself.

Oh, by the way, there is a cute blue eyed girl standing next to her.

Now be honest with yourself. Which kid do you notice?

That is our plight. As much as we would like to say that we love everyone, as much as we want to say that we care about the downtrodden and the ugly, we notice the blonde, blue eyed girls. They even make the cover of TIME.

In our self-righteous moments, we pride ourselves for noticing the miscreants, the depraved, the violent. We notice the hard-working poor and the indignant poor. We notice the victims.

But we do not notice those people over there about whom there is nothing particularly noticeable. They aren’t vocal, they aren’t in trouble, they don’t raise a fuss. They are just lonely and scared and ugly.

And the world just passes them by. So do you. So do we all.

Looking For Love after the Apocalypse

Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars is one of those books I really want to like more than I did. I really want to say it is a novel you should rush out to read. The praise for it on the back cover is over-the-top.

I would like to join the chorus.

Sigh.

The Dog Stars is the tale of Hig (Big Hig if you want two names), living in a post-Apocalyptic world. The chief virtue of the book is the style.

In his former life, Hig was a contractor who really loved poetry. The contractor bit comes in handy in a post-Apocalyptic world. The poetry bit comes in handy in writing the novel.

Open up any page, and you see the style. The paragraphs are all separated by double spacing. Why? Each paragraph is like a miniature poem. Not rhyming or scanning poems (this is no Paradise Lost), just prose written with poetic sensibilities, or at least pseudo-poetic sensibilities.

Picking a paragraph at random (literally opening the book to see the first paragraph that pops off the page):
(It’s a rumination of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her companion when her plane vanished:)

Starvation. Slowly burning through time like a fire in wet wood. Attenuating to bone, to walking bones, then one dies, then the other. Or attacked by passing islanders maybe better.

That is a pretty good example of the style. Staccato sentences, ignoring rules of grammar and punctuation. A mix of paragraphs advancing the plot and pausing to ruminate. Lots of rumination. Easy to read. Flows along. Writing like this. Annoying. Could be. But not always.

At a minimum, the style has potential to be the backbone of a really good novel.

But, what about the plot?

Post-Apocalyptic literature is a genre unto itself. And, a popular genre at that. It’s worth thinking about why. Suppose you are writing a post-Apocalyptic book. What do you need to do?

First, obviously, the world as we know has to come to an end. It never really matters much how. In The Dog Stars the culprit is Lawrence Livermore Lab…a nice safe organization to blame in our politically charged age. (You can date post-Apocalyptic books by looking at the cause of the Apocalypse.) So, no need to think much about how the world ended.

Now that the world has ended, you decide on The Problem. The hero, usually someone like an idealized version of the author, has to navigate the landscape. There is no lack of problems to overcome in this new world. So, you’ll have to choose which problems you want your hero to overcome.

Figuring out how to overcome The Problem is exactly the appeal of post-Apocalyptic literature. The Reader gets placed in the position of seeing the problem along with the protagonist and then imagining how to solve the puzzle. The Reader gets to cheer the protagonist for doing the right thing and wince when the protagonist fails.

Your novel can either be hopeful or terrifying, depending on which problems your hero has to solve. You can have a whole story about overcoming the problems of survival, how to get food and shelter. You can spend the whole novel solving technological problems. You can rebuild a whole civilization. You can, on the other had have roving bands of evil—wild animals, depraved gangs of young men, zombies—which your hero can never quite completely defeat, but must find a way to overcome. Lots of options here.

What option does Heller pick? By the start of the novel we are nine years after the Apocalypse. Hig has already solved all the problems of survival. He lives at a rural airport with a dog, Jasper. He has a neighbor, Bangley, with whom he regularly interacts. Fortunately Bangley is one of those omnipotent action heroes straight out of every Rambo-like movie you ever watched. Lots of food, water, electricity and an airplane which Hig uses to fly around to check out the surrounding area.

So, what is Hig’s problem? He needs companionship. Jasper is great and all, but he is, well, a dog. Bangley is useful and all—he has a godlike ability to kill off all those marauding bands of rovers—but he is, well, curmudgeonly and hard to like. There is a local Mennonite family which Hig stops in to see on occasion, but (alas) they have the deadly disease which seems to have been fatal for everyone other than this family, and, well, that puts a damper on the relationship.

Hig desperately wants human contact. He misses his wife and unborn child, but mostly tries to ignore that fact. It’s not that there are no other people in this world; it’s just that everyone who ever wanders into the airport or the surrounding area has to be shot. I guess nice people never wander around the country looking for love.

After half the novel has passed, Hig finally gets around to doing what it was pretty obvious he would do at some point—why it took half the novel, I have no idea—he finds some other nice people. Insert sounds of Joy.

A novel like this could work. A novel like this written in the style it was written could work really well. But, it fails. Why?

None of the people in this novel even rise to the level of two-dimensional. This is not a fatal flaw for a post-Apocalyptic novel, by the way. If the novel is about solving technological problems, the people can be completely devoid of depth and the novel can still be quite good.

But, if the puzzle the novel is trying to frame is how to find companionship in the world, then you really need to have people in it that are actually three-dimensional. Instead we get a few stock characters who Hig somehow instantly knows are good people and then a bunch of soon-to-die evil people who live a couple of pages before being shot.

The development of Hig’s relationships with his new found friends is truly ham-handed. Cringe-inducing, to be honest. Similarly, even Bangley gets his moment of utterly painful to read “character development.”

Thus a novel with potential because of its style dies due to the fact that Heller apparently has no idea how to craft people. Oddly, if Heller had set out to solve a different problem in his post-Apocalyptic world, this novel could have been vastly better. The unwritten prequel to this novel would surely have been better.

What about the larger puzzle? In the post-Apocalyptic world, how great is the need for companionship?

It will surprise precisely nobody when I say that I think I could be quite content living in an abandoned town with a large library. (There is a Twilight Zone episode about a guy like that. Not Exactly a Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t end well.) Yes, I would terribly miss all the people I currently know and love. But, I am not at all sure I would feel compelled to seek out replacement friends and family.

That, I suppose, is the greatest disappointment of The Dog Stars. It tries to convince me of the need to find a family in a post-Apocalyptic world, but it fails to even make me wonder about the idea.

Financial Crisis Memoirs 2.0

The financial crisis, like any major crisis, of 2007-2008 has a built-in interest in insider memoirs. What were the people at the heart of the crisis thinking?

We have had many such memoirs.

Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote a memoir, The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath.
Tim Geithner, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York also wrote a memoir: Stress Test: Reflections of Financial Crises.
Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury also wrote a memoir: On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.

So, after three separate memoirs, what next? How about a jointly written book!
Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson: Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons

It is a surprisingly slim volume for covering such an important and complicated event. The authors sell the story as the event of the century, so is this slim volume all there is to say? Obviously, not. The goal is to be a one-stop shop. You can hear the advertisement: Everything you need to know straight from the guys who were there!

While a short version of the insider memoir is not an inherently bad idea, this particular book is even shorter than it looks.

It has 129 pages of text. That is followed by…I kid you not…74 pages of Power Point slides. Why? Because you know you want to read 74 pages of Power Point Slides. Because you know Power Point Presentations are so incredibly exciting.

How did this book happen? Three guys who have already written their own individual memoirs get together and think, “The world needs a joint memoir”? It is genuinely odd.

OK, so maybe there is a market for a quick overview of the financial crisis. Not everyone is going to slog through three different memoirs. How does this book do? Hard to say for sure. My students liked it, but they know some economic theory. I suspect it does not work as an introduction to the crisis for someone who does not already know the basic story or have a working knowledge of money and banking.

What then is the real virtue in this book? Well, at least, it surely can help explain the strangest moment of 2008:
Monday, September 15: Lehman Brother fails
Tuesday, September 16: AIG is bailed out

What happened in between Monday and Tuesday? Monday itself was surprising. A few months earlier, the Powers that Be had arranged a bailout of Bear Stearns. So, why let Lehman fail? And once you have let Lehman fail, why bail out AIG the next day?

It is a curious tale. Lots of speculation about why. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson offer what has to be the most incredible (literally not credible) explanation I have yet seen.

You see, they didn’t want to let Lehman fail. Really, cross their hearts and hope to die they did not want Lehman to fail. They really, really wanted to bail out Lehman. All three of them, see. They just, you know, couldn’t legally do it. Sure, they bailed out Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sure they had bailed out Long Term Capital Management and the entire Savings and Loan industry. Sure they had bailed out Southeast Asia and Mexico. Sure, the very next day they would bail out AIG. But, gosh darn it, there was just no way to bail out Lehman.

Of course to even have a hope to sell that story, they have to explain the troubling fact that the Secretary of the Treasury had actually announced in advance that they had no intention of bailing out Lehman. If you really want to do something and have every intention of doing something if only you can figure out how, why would you announce to the world you will never do it? (And, let’s not forget, they didn’t bail out Lehman, so the claim they wouldn’t do it was right.)

As Lehman entered its endgame, Hank and his team put out the word that taxpayers would not subsidize a Lehman deal. This was a negotiating tactic, not a policy decision. He was trying to motivate the private sector to assume as much of Lehman’s bad assets as possible, to increase the likelihood that a Bear Stearns-like rescue would be possible. But this was one of the few moments during the crisis when we were not all on the same page. Tim thought that telling the private sector it was on its own would intensify the run, and he was concerned that a “no government money” proclamation would hurt our credibility if the Fed did get the opportunity to assist a buyer with a Bear Stearns-type loan.
But Hank said he would gladly reverse his position if we got an opportunity to save Lehman. We all knew that if the government needed to take some risk to get Lehman sold through a Bear-type deal, we would do it even if we didn’t like it, because a Lehman collapse would be far costlier in terms of financial and economic stability that a Lehman bailout. We were determined to avoid disruptive failures of major institutions until we could draw a circle of protection around the system’s core, and at that point we didn’t have the power to build that kind a firewall. Our disagreement was about negotiating and messaging tactics, not our ultimate determination to do whatever we could to prevent a destabilizing collapse of a systemic firm.

Uh…

What exactly are we supposed to make of that? Here we have the Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury, signing off on a book where he says, “Yeah, I didn’t mean what I said. I was just haggling.” Yeah. Right.

Those two paragraphs undermine the entire book. The rest of the book tries to paint a portrait of three guys who understand the stakes, working hard behind the scenes to save the world. And then they drop in those two paragraphs which make you sit up and realize, this is all ex post rationalization. The world is melting down, they know the world is melting down, they are terrified of what will happen if Lehman fails, they want to bail out Leman…and the Secretary of the Treasury decides it is a good time to haggle by announcing Lehman will not be bailed out…which causes the whole thing to come crashing down? That is a little hard to believe.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson did amazing work in 2007 and 2008. It isn’t clear that anyone could have done a better job. But, that is not the same thing as saying they were these calm, steady hands in the midst of a storm. They weren’t. They were scared. They didn’t know what to do. They made some good decisions and some bad decisions along the way. That is enough to praise them for the work they did.

Books like this are attempts to polish reputations. Perhaps it is inevitable that the authors would try to polish their reputations. But, it would sure be nice if they could just come out and say, “Faced with a massive crisis which had the danger of turning into a catastrophe, here were the mistakes we made.” I think we could all forgive them for those mistakes and genuinely thank them for their service.

But maybe I am just being naïve here. Maybe in the current world there really is only room for perfect heroes and dastardly villains. Maybe there is no longer room for the guys who just do good but imperfect work in a very hard situation.