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COVER STORY THEMORMONS PROGRESS 22 In the 19th century they were pariahs who turned American values up- side-down: The Mormons substituted communalism for individualism, theocracy for democracy, and polygamy for monogamy. In the 20th century, they became champions of capitalism and the American Dream-and one of the most prosperous and fastest-growing religions in the world. Malise Ruthven charts the Mormons' amazing metamor- phosis. Now that they have survived every adversity, he asks, will suc- cess prove the Mormons' undoing?

RETHINKINGTHE ENVIRONMENT 60 We're all environmentalists now, according to the pollsters. Yet Ameri- cans are profoundly confused about the environment. Ancient myths about nature hamper our thinking, writes Daniel B. Botkin; all-too- modern alarmism distorts our policies, says Stephen &idman.

IDEAS THE'HOT HAND'AND OTHERILLUSIONS OF 52 EVERYDAYLIFE The human mind's ceaseless quest for order frequently leads us to erro- neous beliefs: in ES< in streak shooting, and in other, far less amusing things. Thomas D. Gilovich explains.

REFLECTIONS DEPARTMENTS MR, KUNDERA,THE EUROPEAN 102 From the Center Eastern Europe's most celebrated novelist is expected to do the unexpected, says Ivan Periodicals Sanders, and Milan Kundera's new novel, Immortality, holds true to form. Current Books THEDECAY OF IDLENESS 110 Research Reports Oh, for the good old days, says George Wat- son, when doing nothing really counted for Commentary something!

DEATHSENTENCES 117 Cover: The Manti Temple (1889), an oil painting by Mormon artist C. C. A. Christensen (1831-1912). The temple is located Anthony Burgess recalls the curious event in Manti, Utah, about 120 miles south of Salt Lake City. Lent that made him a professional writer. by the Church Office of History and Art, Salt Lake City.

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THE STATE OF THE UNION:Essays in Social Criticism By Albert Jay Nock Edited with a Foreword by Charles H. Hamilton "Albei-t Jay Noclc has lolng had a rep~ltation,in certain circles, of being one of America's shrewdest social critics. In these days of b~irea~~craticgiganticism, foreign interve~~tion- ism, mass semi-literacy and y~~ppieethics, it comes as sometl~ingof a shock to find that he saw the future and lcnew it wo~~ldn'tworlc." -Robert M. Ct-zindcn, Uni~crsi~of Texas Albert Jay Neck (1870-1 945) is widely regarded as one of the finest writers and critics in American letters. This is the first collection chosen froin his entire worlc and the first new collection in nearly thil~y-fiveyears. It shows again that his likes and dislilws contain a remarlcable freshness and presciel~ce. 3443 + m pages. Foreword, selected bibliography, acknowledgments, index. Hardcover $20.00 0-86597-092-0 Paperback $7.50 0-86597-093-9 Libei-tyPrcss, 1991

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Every now and then a single sentence generally opportunistic indigenous peo- compresses so many facts, and evokes re- ples, in defiance of tribal, economic, lin- flection upon such a wide circle of related guistic, geographical, or any other rational topics, that it deserves more than fleeting criteria. More ironic, given the victors' attention. Such a sentence appeared in a Wilsonian dedication to national self- recent New York Times editorial: determination when they were created at the conclusion of World War I, are the Following the collapse of the Ottoman cases of the multinational states of Yugo- Empire after World War I, British impe- slavia and Czechoslovakia. The former rial strategists uprooted the Hashemite now seems more than likely to fragment dynasty from its native Arabian soil and transplanted it to Jordan, an entity carved into its ethnic and linguistic parts, and the out of Britain's original Palestine Man- latter is by no means secure. date. Nor did all such cases follow on the heels of World War I. An exhausted Britain This sentence tells us most of what we withdrew in 1947 from both the Indian need to know to understand the high-wire subcontinent and its Palestine Mandate. In act that Jordan's King Hussein has been Asia, two new states, India and Pakistan, performing for nearly 40 years. The de- were created, joined by a third in 1971 scendant of an alien dynasty, ruling over a when East Pakistan won its independence country invented by a European power as Bangladesh. In the Middle East, Israel and inhabited by a population (now pre- was established-by the British, by the dominantly Palestinian) that owes him United Nations, and finally, following re- none of the traditional allegiance monar- jection by its Arab neighbors, by the force chies are built upon, the king has some- of its own arms. In both regions.-, the re- how managed to survive in per- suits were the same: the creation haps the most dangerous region of essentially artificial states con- on Earth. One cannot under- taining significant hostile (or po- stand his precarious situation- tentially hostile) ethnic and reli- and his choice to side with Iraq gious- minorities. in the Gulf War-without first To some extent the tensions understanding the historical circum- and bloodshed that might have been ex- stances that created it. pected in these areas were tempered dur- Jordan's dilemma, significant though it ing the Cold War by client relationships mav be for the Middle East. is onlv one of with the superpowers. As we have learned theproducts of a vastly broader phenome- in the Persian Gulf, will soon learn in Cen- non: the arbitrary creation of states in ar- tral Europe, and may possibly even learn eas ruled by defeated or depleted empires on the subcontinent, those days are over. in the aftermath of decisive wars. Indeed, it even seems reasonable to wager Only the Western Hemisphere seems to that fragmentation is the fate that awaits have been spared this phenomenon in re- one of the superpowers, as many if not all cent decades, which may help explain our of the Soviet Union's national minorities lack of adequate attention to it. Almost ev- go their own way. erywhere else one looks, "successor We are now witnessing what might be states," as they are called, abound. And called the "return of the suppressedH-the they share with Jordan and all of its neigh- complex amalgam of nationalism, tribal- bors save Egypt several salient characteris- ism, language, and self-identification that tics: geographical arbitrariness, economic we think of as ethnicity. It is a phenome- incoherence. and. most menacing" of all. non that we must learn to understand if explosive mixtures of religions, traditional we are to cope with a new world-to say beliefs, and ethnic groups. nothing of a New World Order. Perhavs least noticed but most dra- matic is the checkerboard of states in sub- L- d d /+lL Saharan Africa created by departing colo- -Charles Blither nial powers, by their conquerors, or by Director Securing Europe Richard H. Ullman What should be the security arrangements for the new Europe of the 1990s now that the world is no longer afraid a significant "hot war" might begin there? Who needs to be secure against what kinds of threats? What roles will be played by the United States and the Soviet Union? What place will nuclear weapons occupy-not only the weapons of the superpowers but those of the two European nuclear "middle powers," the United The Juggler Kingdom and France? And how will the task of Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman making Europe secure be affected by the proc- Warren E Kimball esses of economic integration? Warren Kimball, a leading historian of World Richard H. Ullman maintains that the era Europe War II diplomacy, explores Roosevelt's vision of is now entering will be qualitatively different from the postwar world by laying out the nature and any it has known before. Questioning those who development of FDR's "war aimsn-the longer- believe that future European international politics range political goals he thought practical and will be reminiscent of the turbulent decades desirable for the nation. before the two World Wars, he shows how and Cloth: $19.95 ISBN 0-691-04787-1 why tomorrow's patterns will radically depart from Not available from Princeton in the United Kingdom yesterday's. A Twentieth Century Fund Book PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Cloth: $19.95 ISBN 0-691-07891-2 41 WILLIAM ST. PRINCETON, NJ 08540 (609) 258-4900 ORDERS: 800-PRS-ISBN (777-4726) OR FROM YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE

WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS Smithsonian Institution Building Washington, D.C. Charles Blitzer, Director Samuel F. Wells, Jr., Deputy Director Dean W. Anderson, Deputy Director for Planning and Management BOARD OF TRUSTEES William J. Baroody, Jr., Chairman Dwayne 0. Andreas, Vice Chairman Robert McC. Adams J. Burchenal Ault James A. Baker I11 Theodore C. Barreaux James H. Billington Lynne V. Cheney Bruce S. Gelb Gertrude Himmelfarb Eli Jacobs John S. Reed William L. Saltonstall Louis W. Sullivan Gov. John H. Sununu Robert H. Tuttle Don W. Wilson

THE WILSON COUNCIL Stanley R. Klion, Chairman Charles E Barber Conrad Cafritz Edward W. Carter Peter B. Clark William T. Coleman, Jr. Kenneth W. Dam Michael DiGiacomo Robert R. Harlin William A. Hewitt James H. Higgins Eric Hotung Donald M. Kendall Christopher Kennan Franklin A. Lindsay Sol M. Linowitz Minoru Makihara Plato Malozemoff Edwin S. Marks C. Peter McColough Martha T. Muse David Packard L. Richardson Preyer Robert L. Raclin Raja W. Sidawi Robert R. Slaughter S. Bruce Smart, Jr.

The Wilson Center has published the Quarterly since 1976. It also publishes Wilson Center Press books, special reports, and a series of "scholars' guides" designed to help researchers find their way through the vast archival riches of the nation's capital. All this is part of the Wilson Center's special mission as the nation's unusual "living memorial" to the 28th president of the United States. Congress established the Center in 1968 as an international institute for advanced study, "symbolizing and strength- ening the fruitful relation between the world of learning and the world of public affairs." The Center opened in 1970 under its own presidentially appointed board of trustees, headed by former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey. Chosen in open annual worldwide competitions, some 50 Fellows at the Center carry out advanced research, write books, and join in discussions with other scholars, public officials, journalists, and business and labor leaders. The Center is housed in the original Smithsonian "castle" on the Mall. Financing comes from both private sources and an annual congressional appropriation. "The definitive biogsaplly, as scholasly as it is ei~tertai~~ii~g." - The Economist THE NOBLE GE JEAN- JACQUES ROUSSEAU,1754-1 762 Maurice Cranston Continuing the unparalleled critical exposition of Rousseau's life and works launched in Jenn-Jncqi~cs,The Noble Saiw~ccompletes and corrects the story told in Rousseau's Cmfisswrzs, and offers a vivid, entirely new history of Rousseau's most eventful and productive years. Clot11 $29.95 424 pages Illustrated

Now in Paper JEAN- JACQUES THEEARLY LIFE AND WORKOF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU,1712-1754 Maurice Cranston "Exceptionally kesh. . . . [Cranston] makes the first part of Rousseau's life as absorbing as a picaresque novel. His fidelity to Rousseau's ideas and to his life as it was lives is a triumpli of poise."-Naomi Bliven, The Nm Xrker Paper $17.95 382 pages Illustrated

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imited Quantities AUTUMN 1977 Strategic Arms Control/Sweden/Money and the Pursuit of Plenty in America SPRING 1979 Public Opinion/Religion and Society/Race and Education/Amencan Military SPRING 1980 Health and AmericalFernand Braudel/Puerto Rico/J. D. Salinger NEW YEAR'S 1983 Israel/Immigration/History/Rousseau/Images AUTUMN 1986 Ferninism/Aquinas/Finland/le Cam6 AUTUMN 1987 Environment/William James/Britain/Josh Donoso/Aksyonov (I) WINTER 1987 Social Mobility/Malaysia/John Stuart Mill/Japan/Aksyonov (11) SUMMER 1988 Music/Berlin/Victorians/Moscow/Piracy AUTUMN 1989 Islam/Dewey/Reading/China/Barnum SPRING 1989 Russia/Sa~re/T~es/Mencken/Soccer SUMMER 1990 Latin American Indians/Race/The West/Russia/Donoghue WINTER 1990 New City/World's EndlEurope 1992/Boorstin

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Reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 7 RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY 125 FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE 10 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 128 ECONOMICS, LAJ3OR & BUSINESS 12 RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT 132 SOCIETY 14 ARTS & LETTERS 133 PRESS & TELEVISION 20 OTHER NATIONS 137

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

Presidentia~Gyeatness "'Greatness' Revisited: Evaluating The Performance of Early American Presidents in Terms of Cultural Dilemmas" by Rich- ard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsb, in Presidential Studies ~iarterl~ (Winter 1991), Center for the Study of the Presidency, 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

Historians have been playing the game of chical ethos. Operating in a society in grading the presidents ever since 1948, which individualism predominated, Wash- when Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., asked a ington faced "severe limits on the sub- pane1 of colleagues to award them all A's stance of power," and so had to make do (great), B's (near-great), and so on, down with the appearance of power. To enhance to the ignominious E's (failure). No stand- the government's image, he used a mili- ards of evaluation were specified, how- tary force far larger than necessary to put ever, and the criteria of later surveys often down the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, a force favored activist presidents. But now which, behind the impressive faqade, was Berkeley political scientists Ellis and just "a disorganized conglomeration of Wildavslq think they've come up with an state militias." improved game board and set of rules. Washington was so successful at this A11 presidents, they argue, face various sort of deception that his successor, John dilemmas arising from the fact that Amer- Adams. was left with the false im~ression ica has what in reality are three competing that he was in a hierarchical political sys- political cultures, each with a different tem. He consulted no one before announc- outlook toward leadership. The relatively ing his decision early in 1799 to reopen strong individualist culture wants leaders negotiations with France in the ho~eof only when they are really needed. The avgiding war, and so threw his par$ into egalitarian culture, whose strength in an uproar. Adams has often been rated America waxes and wanes, does not want "near-great" in past surveys, but he fares leaders at all, since leadership implies in- less well in the new game. Ellis and equality. And the relatively weak hierarchi- Wildavsky say that like his son, John cal culture expects leaders to lead, and Quincy Adams, and, indeed, like President shores up authority at every opportunity. Jimmy Carter, Adams w& a "hierarchi- How well presidents do in resolving the cally disposed [leader] unable or unwilling cultural dilemmas society presents them, to make allowances for the anti-leadership Ellis and Wildavsb say, provides a stand- nature of the American political system." ard for judging their performance. Thus, All three served but a single term. presidents in the "hierarchica~"mold such In contrast with the hierarchs' sort of as George Washington and Abraham Lin- conflict is the type faced by presidents coln-who both still get A's, under the such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew new rules-had to reconcile their own Jackson (who both also still get A's). These preferences with the dominant anti-hierar- presidents, harboring individualist and

WQ SPRING 1991 PERIODICALS

egalitarian propensities, have had "to Although Ellis and Wildavsb give the square their own and their followers' anti- modern presidents no formal grades, they authority principles with the exercise of do note that the performances by chief ex- executive authority." Jefferson used the ecutives in recent decades have provided llhidden-hand'' style of leadership later grounds for praise as well as criticism. employed by Dwight Eisenhower. Jackson "Reports of failed presidencies have risen solved the dilemma by justifymg presiden- along with egalitarian movements (civil tial activism "in the name of limiting the rights, feminism, environmentalism, chil- activities of hierarchical institutions," such dren's rights, and the like) because dedica- as the "monster" National Bank of the tion to reducing differences among people United States. leads to rejection of leadership."

Limitation's Limits "The Uncharted Realm of Term Limitationpsby Jefiey L. ~atz, in Governing (Jan. 1991), Congressional Quarterly, 1414 22nd St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037. Launched last year, the movement to limit state capitals and legislatures will at last the number of terms congressmen and behave rationally. Legislative leaders will state legislators can serve has already be chosen on the basis of ability, not se- scored successes in citizen initiatives in niority, and the lawmakers will keep lob- three states: California, Colorado, and byists and bureaucrats where they should Oklahoma. But the reality of term limita- be kept-at arm's length. tion in the states may not turn out to be all Not everyone finds this idealistic vision that its proponents hope, warns Katz, a plausible. "This notion that you're going to Governing staff writer. get citizen-legislators is silly," Gary C. Reformers such as Lloyd Noble 11, a Jacobson, a University of California politi- Tulsa oilman who led the fight for Oklaho- cal scientist, told Katz. "You're going to ma's new law, contend that term limita- get those people who can afFord to inter- tion is needed because incumbents' fund- rupt their careers for a few years, and that raising ability and other advantages make precludes people who have a normal job them almost invulnerable at the polls, with or family life." the result being row upon row of lifetime It's also possible, Katz points out, that legislators badly out of touch with the pub- instead of more turnover in the term-lim- lic. With term limitation, reformers prom- ited legislatures, there will be less. Over ise, fresh citizen-legislatorswill sweep into the 12-year period from 1977 to 1989, ac- cording to a study by the National Confer- ence of State Legislatures, the lower houses of California, Colorado, and Okla- homa all experienced membership turn- over of 89 percent or more. With term limitation, however, much of the compe- tition for legislative seats within the pre- scribed period of terms could dry up, as potential challengers simply wait for the seat to open up automatically Nor will selection of legislative leaders necessarily be as "rational" as reformers imagine, with more competition and peo- ple chosen for their abilities and stands on In the 1990 election, 97 percent of incumbent issues. With nobody having much senior- U.S. senators seeking new tenns and 96 percent ity, Katz says, it might become more pre- of inc~~fnbentcongressmen were reelected. cious. "Awarding key positions on an auto- PERIODICALS

matic basis to the least inexperienced In the end, reformers may be pursuing people might be hard to avoid." the wrong remedy. "It isn't just a swarm of Moreover, with so many unseasoned special interests that block[s] the enact- members, legislatures may well find them- ment of sound public policy," Katz writes. selves more dependent on lobbyists for in- "[It is] also the absence of any public con- formation and less able to deal with state sensus on major issues. Term limitations bureaucrats, not to mention governors. wouldn't change that."

"The Rise and Fall of Special Interest Politicst1by Paul E. Peter- Isn't That Special? son, in Polirical Science Quarterly (Winter 1990-911, Academy of Political Science, 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 10115-0012.

The Tax Reform Act of 1986, which elimi- years of the Bush administration, these nated a host of valuable tax loopholes, rep- groups lost much of [their] clout." resented a defeat of the special interests Peterson has his own rather special defi- that many analysts thought would never nition of a special interest: It "consists of happen. Can it be that special interests or is represented by a fairly small number have lost much of their renowned influ- of intense supporters who cannot expect ence in Washington? Exactly, argues Pe- that their cause will receive strong terson, a Harvard political scientist. "Spe- support. . . except under unusual circum- cial interests may have been steadily stances." Peterson names no names, but gaining in influence throughout the 1960s examples might be the Consumer Bankers and 1970~~"he writes, "but both during Association or the National Tire Dealers the Reagan years and during the initial and Retreaders Association. Excluded

WQ SPRING 1991 PERIODICALS

from Peterson's definition are those pow- whole budget. "It was a great time to be a erful groups-no matter how self-serving special interest,'' Peterson says. During or undeserving they may be-"that can those decades, inflation kept bumping tax- command the attention of major political payers into higher income brackets; there figures and help shape the main political was a "peace dividend" after the Vietnam strategies of the two political parties.'' By war ended, and Congress became "more this standard, for example, retirees are not decentralized, fragmented, policy-minded, a special interest. and sensitive to constituent concerns." To estimate the influence of special in- But then President Ronald Reagan in his terests, Peterson measures the percentage first year in office so altered "the terms of of the gross national product (GNP) spent the debate that the power of special inter- by the federal government on activities ests was transformed overnight." In 1980, "not of paramount interest'' to the two ma- special interest spending peaked at 5.6 per- jor political parties. That means a11 federal cent of GNP; by 1989, it had fallen to 3.7 outlays not spent on the public debt, de- percent, about what it had been in 1962. fense, benefits for the elderly, "safety net" (Total federal spending in 1989 claimed 23 programs for the poor, and agricultural percent of GNP.) The chief factors in the subsidies important to the farm states (and decline were: a major tax cut, made per- so to the political parties battling for con- manent by indexation of tax rates; the de- trol of the U.S. Senate). fense build-up and the increasing cen- By this carefully defined measure, Peter- tralization of power over the budget, both son finds that the power of special inter- within the executive branch and on Capi- ests grew substantially between 1962 and tol Hill. When political debate revolves 1980, as they increased their slice of GNP around retrenchment rather than expan- from 3.6 to 5.6 percent. That increase rep- sion, Peterson says, "the special interests resented three-fourths of the growth in the do not stand much of a chance."

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE

Chairman in Chief "All Rise for Chairman Powell" by Kurt M. Campbell, in The National Interest (Spring 1991), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 540, Washington, D.C. 20036. General Colin L. Powell's catapult into na- operations, the commandant of the Marine tional prominence during the Persian Gulf Corps, and the chairman-made decisions War was not just a result of his impressive by committee and could act only by con- personal abilities. It was at least equally as sensus. "The result was often the worst much the product of a relatively obscure kind of military decision and advice," militaq reform measure that dramatically Campbell says, with conflicting interests strengthened the position of chairman of and interservice rivalries producing joint the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). This advice so broad as to be useless. The rival- measure, the Goldwater-Nichols Defense ries also 1'seriously handicapped" military Reorganization Act of 1986, "stands as one planning. That was especially apparent, of the most important, yet unheralded, Campbell says, in the failed attempt in military reforms in U.S. history,'' says 1980 to rescue the American hostages in Campbell, a former special assistant on the Iran. There was no single military com- Joint Staff who now teaches at Harvard's mander in charge of the overall mission, Kennedy School of Government. but instead an Army commander for the Before the 1986 reform, the Joint Chiefs ground portion, a Marine in charge of heli- of Staff-consisting of the chiefs of st& of copter operations, and a separate Air the Army and Air Force, the chief of naval Force commander.

WQ SPRING 1991 10 PERIODICALS

WQ SPRING 1991 11 PERIODICALS

The flaws evident in that disaster--and jections of other administration officials." in the 1983 Marine barracks explosion in He also designed the 1987 mission in Lebanon,as well as in the "fiasco of unco- which U.S. vessels reflagged Kuwaiti oil ordinated brute force" used in the U.S. in- tankers in the Persian Gulf to protect vasion of Grenada that year--led to the Iraq's supply line from attack during the 1986reform. Sponsored by Senator Barry Iran-Iraq war. Powell, formerly President Goldwater (R.-Ariz.),and Representative Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, Bill Nichols (D.-Ala.),the measure was en- took over in 1989 and raised the office to acted over oppositionfrom the services.It "a new and higher level." made the JCS chairman the "principal mil- As chairman, Campbell writes, Powell itary adviser" to the president, the Na- "has played a crucial role in reshaping tional Security Council, and the secretary U.S. military commitments to [the North of defense. The other service chiefs were Atlantic Treaty Organization] and in devel- relegatedto secondaryroles and put di- opingfledgling contacts with the reformed rectly under the chairman. The military national militariesof Eastern Europe." He chain of command now runs from the sec- also was intimately involved in the deci- retary of defense through the chairman sion to invade Panama in 1989,and, of and then out to the commanders in the course, in overseeing Operation Desert field, "completely eliminating the other Shield/Storm. chiefs in the chain." In the past, Campbell writes, the chair- Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr, the JCS manship usually provided a "quiet end to a chairman when the office was beefed up, distinguished military career." Now, he used his new powers to good effect. He says,the chairman of the Joint Chiefsmust "pioneered military-to-militarycontacts be viewedas one of a president'smost im- with the Soviet Union, often over the ob- portant appointments.

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Disaster Guaranteed "Understandingthe S&LMess" by JohnSteele Gordon, in Amen'can Heritage (Feb.-Mar. 1991), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y 10011. "We do not wish to make the United States ings banks, and S&Ls "carved up the bank- governmentliable for the mistakesand er- ing businessamong themselves." Without rors of individual banks, and put a pre- the protection from competition this ar- mium on unsound banking in the future." rangement afforded, the S&L industry So said President Franklin D. Roosevelt in could not have survived that time of up- 1933 in explaining his opposition to fed- heaval. eral bank deposit insurance. FDR eventu- But the "cartel" eventuallybroke down. ally gave in on the issue, and the reform Depositorsstruggling to keep up with soar- turned out to be among the most signifi- ing inflation in the 1970s began taking cant of the New Deal era. But Gordon, au- their money out of banks' low-paying sav- thor of The Scarlet Womanof Wall Street ings accounts and putting it into Wall (1989),contends that the savings-and-loan Street'shigh-paying money market funds. (S&L)disaster of the 1980sshowed that The commercialbanks could tolerate this, Roosevelt's fears were well founded. but the savings banks and S&Ls--which From the banking reforms of the 1930s, held mainly long-term real-estate loans at Gordon says, there emerged what low, fixed interest rates--could not. They amounted to "a government-sponsored sought government help--and got it. bankingcartel." Commercialbanks, sav- Washington'smain concern, Gordon

wa SPRLNG 1991 PERIODICALS

contends, was not "the integrity of the thus able to offer "every capitalist's dream: American banking system as a whole." a high-interest, zero-risk investment." Had it been, he says, the weaker savings The trouble was that as S&Ls competed banks and S&Ls would have been merged among themselves for the new "hot with commercial banks, and the stronger money," they had to offer higher and ones would have become commercial higher interest rates--and they had no way banks on their own. Instead, the govern- to earn the money to pay the promised ment gave the interest of the bankers rates. "They were still stuck with their old themselves priority. "The presidents of the loan portfolios of low-paying, fixed-interest 4,613 S&Ls in business in 1980 wanted to single-family home mortgages." Still more continue being bank presidents," Gordon quick fixes followed. Congress in 1982 per- notes. "The Chevy dealers and shoe-store mitted S&Ls to make many high-risk com- owners on the boards of those S&Ls mercial real-estate and consumer loans--- wanted to go on being bank directors." without being restricted by most of the The government obliged with quick fixes. capital and reserve requirements to which Congress in 1980 not only removed the commercial banks were subject. States fol- ceiling on the interest rates that S&Ls lowed the federal government's lead. Cali- could pay, but also raised the federal guar- fornia, with the largest system of S&Ls, antee on deposits from $40,000 to went even further, letting its thrifts "invest $100,000. In addition, the government in whatever they pleased, from junk bonds dropped a restriction on Wall Street's so- to alternative energy schemes." Those called brokered deposits in thrift institu- thrifts thus became de facto venture cap- tions, which allowed "the rich to have as italists--with the only difference being much of their savings under [the federal] that any losses were guaranteed by the guarantee as they wished." S&Ls were government. Disaster was unavoidable.

Groz/vth Factors "FreeLand and Federalism: ASynoptic View of American Eco- nomic History" by Peter Temin, in The Journal of Interdisciplin- ary History (Winter 1991), Tufts Univ., 26 Winthrop St., Med- ford, Mass. 02155. From the mid-19th century to the mid- served as a model for other nations. But 20th, U.S. economic growth was among now, says Temin, an economist at the the wonders of the world. The modern Massachusetts Institute of Technology, business enterprises that emerged here "the special quality of American economic life is fast disappearing." ~: The country'seconomic experience was shaped by two "uniquely American" factors, he contends. The first was the abundance of rich farmland, located in fa- ;::::::·:: vorable climates and rela- tively accessible to overseas markets. The second--an outgrowth of America's fed- era.l system of govern- ment-was the limitation _ on large landholders' politi Congress,opening two ,nillioMacres of Indian Territoryto settlers cal power. in 1889, brought on the Oklahonza land rush. The abundance and When land is abundant availability of land was a key factor in U.S. economic growth. and freely available, Temin

wa SPRING 1991 pERIODICALS

maintains, a land-owningaristocracy can ing transformed into mass production sustain itself only by turning other people were "an Americanphenomenon," Temin into serfs or slaves. That happened in the says. Large companies in Europe were American South, but not in the North. limited to a much narrower range of in- There,free land led insteadto free labor, dustries.The American firms flourished in which, in turn, led to the rise of manufac- a favorable legal setting. Court decisions, turing land to the developmentafter the for instance,blunted the impact of the mid-19thcentury of the "AmericanSys- ShermanAnti-Trust Act of 1890.The Su- tem," a productionprocess based on the premeCourt in 1895in effectleft much of use of interchangeableparts). the antitrust policy to the states, which Thanks to a protective tariff against for- then were busily competing for the char- eign competition, American industry was ters of new firms. Federalism thus played a ableto payboth interestrates high enough role in guttingthe antitrustpolicy. to attract investorsand wageshigh enough Today, however, federalism "is ever to draw laborers away from farming. more tenuous in its economic effects," American manufacturing, Temin says, Temin writes. With economic problems "owed its vigor partly...to the structure national, rather than regional, in scope, it of the federal government which could is chiefly Washingtonthat now regulates support a favorablecommercial policy," and supportsbusiness activities. Other key despitethe influenceof Southernplanta- elementsin America'sextraordinary eco- tion owners. The differenteconomic paths nomic growth also are much diminished takenby Northand Southhad led to a di- now,he says.Free land, of course,disap- vergenceof interests.Whereas Northern pearedlong ago. "And,although the mod- congressmenfavored tariffs to encourage ern businessenterprises that grew from industrial growth, Southern represen- this fertile soil are still dominant eco- tatives wanted free trade to encourage ex- nomic institutions,there is a suspicionthat port of raw cotton, they are becomingobsolete," with other The showdown between the agricultural sorts of organization and management and the industrialregions came with the now having the advantage.He believes CivilWar. The North's victory "showedthe that the future lies not with hierarchical dominance of the societybased on free la- Big Business but with flexible specializa- bor," Temin notes. It also resulted in a na- tion and "matrix management." The con- tional government"strongly sympathetic ditionsthat enabled the industrialbehe- to the growthof industry." moths to flourish--and to produce The big industrial corporations that America'sunrivaled economic growth-- emergedas the AmericanSystem was be- nowbelong, in Temin'sview, to the past.

_ ------I ::i::::: : - :::. :;::,::: : :~I::;; :i: :~:-;;;;- ;::~;~~:::·:!~~~:::~:: i SOCIETY :::I::.:.:::: ::::::::::::li;i:::::::::::i i:::::~l::: :

Canon FocZder "TheStorm Over the University" byJohn Searle, in Tl?eNew York Review of Books (Dec. 6. 1990), 250 W. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10107. Much ink has been spilled in the debate traditional liberal education are seldom over the status of the "canon" of the great brought out into the open. books of Western civilization. But Searle, a Cultural leftists such as Mary Louise professorof philosophyat the Universityof Pratt, a comparativeliterature professor at California,Berkeley, contends that the un- Stanford,argue that the canon is unrepre- derlyingissues that dividethe membersof sentative,inherently elitist, and covertly the "cultural Left" and the defenders of political. But their underlying objection,

wa SPRING 1991 PERIODICALS

Searle says, is that the canon consists of forts to teach the humanities should be as- the "official publications" of the "system sessed primarily by political standards. of oppression" known as Western civiliza- Yet the defenders of tradition have their tion. As they see it, this civilization subju- own failings, in Searle's view. Roger gated women and ethnic and cultural mi- Kimball, author of last year's TentrredRad- norities, and fostered imperialism and icals, for instance, "simply takes it for colonialism. These critics won't be satis- granted that there is a single, unified, co- fled by the addition of a few works by herent tradition, just as his opponents do, blacks or women to the canon. Many of and he differs from them in supposing that them believe that the primary purpose of all we need to do to rescue higher educa- teaching the humanities should be to help tion is to return to the standards of that transform or revolutionize society. tradition." But, Searle says, there never Unless their underlying assumptions are really was a fixed canon, just "a certain set accepted, Searle says, the cultural leftists' of tentative judgments about what had im- explicit arguments seem weak. "From the portance and quality. Such judg- point of view of the tradition, the answers ments...were constantly being revised." to each argument are fairly obvious," he The debate over the canon, Searle ob- observes. Thus, "it is not the aim of educa- serves, is mainly concerned with what is tion to provide a representation or sample usually just "a single required freshman of everything that has been thought and course in the humanities, together with written, but to give students access to other courses in literature which the works of high quality. [Education there- scholars who describe themselves as the fore] is by its very nature 'elitist' and'hi- 'cultural Left' may seek to control, and erarchical' because it is designed to enable which may (or may not) therefore be vehi- and encourage the student to discriminate cles for promoting ideologies of 'social between what is good and what is bad, transformation.' Most undergraduate what is intelligent and what is stupid, what education...is largely untouched by this is true and what is false." And the fact that discussion. Neither side has much to say the humanities, like everything else, have a about what actually happens in most col- political dimension, doesn't mean that ef- lege classrooms."

The Rat Race "ThePace of Life"by RobertV. Levine, in AmericanScientist (Sept.-Oct. 1990), P. O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, N.C. 27709.

Everyone knows about Type-A individuals, people in the Northeast walk faster, make but are there Type-A cities, too? Appar- change faster, talk faster, and are more entry so, according to Levine, a California likely to wear a watch than people in other State University psychologist. parts of the country. A little surprisingly, Levine and his colleagues examined the perhaps, New York City did not head the "pace of life" in 36 U.S. cities--nine in list of fast-paced urbs; Boston held that each of four regions--by taking careful honor, followed by Buffalo, N.Y. (!), and note of: how fast folks walked along a then Gotham. The slowest urban pace was main downtown street on a clear summer on the West Coast, with mellow Los Ange- day; how long bank clerks took to change les taking slowest city honors. L.A.'s laid- two $20 bills; how long postal clerks took back denizens ranked 24th of the 36 cities to explain the differences among regular, in walking speed, next to last in quickness certified, and insured mail; and what pro- of tongue, and dead last in making change. portion of men and women observed in Their "only concession to the clock was to downtown areas during business hours wear one," Levine observes. (The city was were wearing a wristwatch. 13th highest in the proportion wearing a As expected, the researchers found that timepiece.)

wa SPRING 1991 ANIERICAN QUARIERLV ·:~·i' ··'.·· ~''·::·.··i~'':l' Asthe official publication ofthe American Studies Association, the Americaneuorterly serves asa guide tothe culture ofthe United States.The journal promotes a broad humanistic understanding of .:·;··.·::·· :·~· .: · ·' j'~i.·; Americanculture, encourages scholars from diversedisciplines to ; :···:~ ".: I; exchange ideas on America, and examines the ways American life i relatesto world society. Recent issues have explored war, theory and ~'r·I~I'~I,··.··sa~!l;·,: practiceof materialculture, and Americanmodernism, :~IEha~CsryKulik,Editor ;i: Smithsonian Institution Bernard Mergen, Associate Editor George Washington University OFderingInformation: Individuals must be membersof the AmericanStudies Associationto subscribeto Americnneuarterly. Write Johns HopkinsUniversity Press for membershipinformation. Institutional subscriptions are ~52.50per year. Subscribers in Canada and Mexico, add $4.20 for postage; outside North America, add$9.00 for postage. Payments must be madeby checks drawn on U.S. banks, inter- nationalmoney orders, or UNESCOcoupons. We will accept purchase orders from U. S. institutions. Send payment or order to: The Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Publishing Division .~· 701 W, 401h St., Suite 275 Baltimore, MD 21211-2190 (301)338-6964 EA1

Russia and the Negro Black.s in Rllssian Histo~·vand Tl~olrghl by Allison Blakely Rllssia and tlze Neg~.oprovides an intriguing look at native Russians of African descent and black immigrants and visitors against the cul- tural and social background of Russian history, from antiquity to the present. Abram Hannibal, the ingeniousmilitary engineer;his descendant, nineteenth-century writer Alexander Pushkin; Fine thespian Ira Aldridge; writers Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, performing artist Paul Reading Robeson, and political activists George Pad- more and Angela Davisare included among the Classes accounts of celebrated Negro inhabitants or visitors to Russia and the Soviet Union. Send for your FREE 16-page Catalog today. Russia and Ilze NEg~·o,winner of the 1988 Featuring 40 styles of magnifiers, magnified American Book Award, is an outstanding com- sunglasses and fishermanglasses. In addi- parative study that reveals insights for the tion, our catalog provides a guide to lense scholar and general reader alike. strengths (diopter) to aid in your selection. ?i, o~·clc~·SPlld $]2. 95 10.

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In the 1959 study in which Meyer pears to be "heart-attackcity." Indeed, the Friedman and Ray Rosenman introduced correlation was greater than that usually the Type-Aman to the world, they re- foundbetween heart disease and measures portedthat menwho have a senseof ur- of Type-Abehavior in individuals. gencyabout time and who are inclinedto It may be, Levinespeculates, that fast- be competitiveand hostile,are twice as paced cities attract Type-Aindividuals, likelyto havea heart attack.Following up who then sustainand promotetheir pre- on that, Levine and his colleagues exam- ferred way of life. Many of the slower, ined the rates of death from ischemic Type-Bpeople probably recoil from the rat heart disease (a decreased flow of blood to race and move to more congenialsettings. the heart) for their 36 cities.After adjusting But the Type-B'swho remain in the fast- for the median age of each city's popula- paced cities are compelled to act more tion, they found "a significantcorrelation" like Type-A's.And the real Type-A's,mean- between the rates and the cities' pace-of- while, keep striving "to accelerate the life scores. New York, for instance, ap- pace still more."

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"Inside the White House: Pecking Orders, Pack Journalism, Watching the and Other Stories of the People Who Cover the President" by White House OwenUllmann, in TheWashingtonian (Jan. 1991), Ste. 200, 1828 L St. N.W, Washington, D.C. 20036. The White House is still among the most Tom DeFrank, told Ullmann. prestigiousbeats in journalism.But for re- Heightenedsecurity measures also keep porters intent upon ferretingout the "in- the press awayfrom "what'sreally going side" story, it now can also be among the on." Once White House reporters were most frustrating. Ullmann, after six years free to roam the halls of the Old Executive at the White House for Knight-Ridder OfficeBuilding, in which many presiden- Newspapers,says that in recent decadesit tial assistantshave their offices;now jour- has becomevery hard for reportersthere nalists can enter the buildingonly after to find out "what's really going on and making an appointment,and then they are what makes the president tick." escorted to their source's office. Part of the new difficulty is a result of "Because White House reporters are the increased size of the White House forced to work in a pack, they tend to pro- press corps.When there is a major news ducepack-mentality journalism," Ullmann event involvingthe president, several hun- says. "Peer influence and second-guessing dred reporters and photographerscram by editors,who can decidea storyline by themselvesinto a press room built for 50. watching TV or reading the wire services, The correspondents all have access to [encourage] confonnity." daily briefings,written announcements, After"a small group of influentialcol- and presidentialpress conferencesand umnists and reporters" decides what to speeches,but reportersin searchof the in- think about a political figure, everyone sidestory need to be ableto talkmore inti- else pretty much falls into line. "Going matelywith the presidentor his keyaides. againstthe consensuscan be dangerous," "Thereare so manymore reportersclam- Ullmannsays, "becauseeditors and col- oring for the attentionof [the] relatively leaguesbegin to questionyour judgment." few stafferswho know anythingthat it is a For instance, the orthodox (albeit not nec- constant battle for meaningful access," essarily truly informed) opinion among Newsweek'sWhite House correspondent, White House reporters about Vice Presi-

wa SPRING 1991 PERIODICALS

dent Dan Quayle is that he is "a fool." As a Even some reporters who travel overseas result, Ullmann says, nearly every story to cover a presidential trip do not see the about Quayle highlights his gaffes. "To president in person. But gazing directly treat him seriously is to invite charges that upon the presidential person is simply not you are either crazy or in the tank with a necessity any more--not when reporters Quayle. I wrote what I thought to be a bal- can glean just as much from watching him anced article on Quayle in 1989, but a fel- on television. Indeed, thanks to Cable low reporter castigated me for a major News Network and the availability of elec- lapse in judgment." tronic transcripts of official briefings, "re- Few members of the huge White House porters can now cover the White House in pack get to see the president on a regular absentia," Ullmann observes. He does not basis. Most rely on a rotating pool of re- recommend the practice, but it would ap- porters for their knowledge of what goes parently make all too little difference in on at "photo opportunities" and the like. the press's coverage of the presidency.

RacZio Wars "TheBattle for the U.S. Airwaves, 1928-1935" by RobertW. McChesney, in Journal of Communication (Autumn 1990), Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut St.. Philadelphia, Pa. 19104-6220.

In retrospect, commercial broadcasters' broadcast licenses. The commission was near-monopoly over the radio airwaves told only to favor applicants that best seems to have been almost inevitable. But served the "public interest, convenience it did not seem that way back in the 1920s or necessity." and early '30s, says McChesney, a journal- When the FRC's allocation plan ism professor at the University of Wiscon- emerged in 1928, however, the networks sin, Madison. Although scholars have not were the big winners. The commission set stressed the fact, there was opposition to aside 40 channels nationwide for use by the network-dominated, advertising-subsi- powerful 50,000-watt stations, and left the dized system of radio broadcasting that other 50 available channels for simulta- was then emerging. neous use by some 600 weaker stations During much of the 1920s, most radio across the country. Broadcasters in the stations were owned and run by newspa- same region had to share land fight over) pers, department stores, or other busi- the frequencies. In 1927, NBC and CBS nesses, and were used mainly just to gen- held less than seven percent of all broad- erate favorable publicity. But there were cast stations; by 1931, the networks, after also nonprofit broadcasters--most of the number of hours broadcast and the them affiliated with colleges or universi- level of power used are taken into consid- ties. By 1925, there were more than 200 eration, accounted for almost 70 percent nonprofit stations--about two-fifths of all of U.S. broadcasting. And by 1934, radio the radio stations in the country, commercial advertising had mushroomed Few people at the time foresaw the rapid to $72 million a year. rise of the commercial networks--the Na- The immediate losers in all this were the tional Broadcasting Company was estab- indigent nonprofit broadcasters. The FRC lished in 1926 and the Columbia Broad- has "taken away all of the [broadcast] casting System a year later--or the hours that are worth anything," com- expanded role of commercial advertising. plained the director of a station at the Uni- The Radio Act of 1927, hurriedly passed by versity of Arkansas. Between 1927-34, the Congress after a federal judge ruled the number of nonprofit stations fell by two- Commerce Department's licensing of sta- thirds. tions unconstitutional, created the Federal As this was happening, the "displaced Radio Commission (FRC) to allocate and harassed" nonprofit broadcasters, par- Periodicals continues on page 124 ~t~H~Bsli~l~ 1DIE~, ~~~Cs~~

·~a~g

~· ,::::i i 1 t a·' P. i ·Id"r i: 3 r,

In the 1890s, the Mormons renotlnced polygamy and took the road to AII-Amer`canism,

WQ SPRING 1991

22 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

Unlike other religions, whose origins are half lost in remote cen- turies, Mormonism is relatively young. The Mormons began building their Kingdom of God on Earth little more than 150 years ago, and their history--so relatively brief, so fully documented--has scarcely known a moment free from contro- versy. From their espousal of polygamy in the 19th century to their advocacy today of conservative politics, the Mormons have lived at the center of disputes. Yet Mormonism has always seemed, as Tolstoy observed, the particularly A~nerican faith. Here Malise Ruthven charts the Mormons' remarkable progress from outsiders of the 19th century to "super-Americans" today, and explains why this American church is now the fastest-growing religion in the Third World.

by MaZise Ruthven

ate one evening in May United States, with investments amounting 1989, in the narrow, cob- to billions. Its clean-cut, youthful mission- bled streets of La Pat, Bo- aries in their white shirts and black ties livia, two Mormon mission- seem as representative of American values L aries were shot and killed as the executives of Citibank and other by three terrorists in a yel- American institutions that have been at- low Volkswagen. In a handwritten state- tacked by guerrillas. Nor is this simply a ment delivered to local newspapers, a little- matter of arbitrary association. Mormon known group inspired by a 19th-century In- missionaries are widely suspected of having dian hero claimed responsibility for the connections to right-wing, authoritarian murders. There had already been more governments in Latin America. Returned than 60 attacks on the Mormon church by missionaries, with their knowledge of for revolutionary bands in Latin America. This, eign languages and experience of living however, was the first--but not the last--- abroad, are known to be preferred material time that missionaries were singled out for for recruiters of the U.S. Central Intelli- assassination. gence Agency. In their rare public pro- That Mormons should find themselves nouncements on political questions, LDS targeted as agents of "Yankee imperialism" leaders invariably speak the language of is hardly surprising in light of the church's conservative patriotism. recent past. The Church of Jesus Christ of It was not always so. Despite their Latter-day Saints (LDS)is one of the wealth- present-day image as archetypal Yankees, lest and most powerfUl institutions in the the Mormons were long perceived as un-

wa SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

leaders have been wont so earnestly to de- nounce. Indeed the word "church" in the usual sense of abody of believers that meets on Sundays for common worship seems wholly inadequate to convey the re- ality of this vast corporate enterprise em- bracing both the living and the dead. Throughout its history, wrote the Catho- lic sociologist Thomas O'Dea three decades ago, Mormonismhas been "both typicalof the larger American setting in which it ex- isted and at the same time peculiarly itself." The Mormons' bland, super-American im- age covers, but does not quite conceal, an astonishing story of mystery and persecu- tion, violence and deceit, license and ec- stasy that links the Mormons of today to their founder, Joseph Smith (1805-44). To understand the Mormons of the present, it is necessary to open again the pages of that JosephSmith receives the golden plates from the peculiarand fascinatinghistory. Angel Moroni in September 1827. Smith later translated the plates into the Book of Mormon. istory is a problem for all reli- American in their clannishness, in their gions. The canonized account of a utopiansocialism, and in the hard battle H religion'sorigins is frequentlyat theyfought, and eventuallylost, to preserve oddswith versionsobtained from alterna- the sacredprinciple of polygamyor plural tive sources or inferred through textual marriage.It is ironicthat this 19th-century analysis.In the case of the Mormons,the folk religionof primitiveChristian "seek- problemsof originsare unusuallyacute, ers" should now be practicedby people sincethe religionemerged in the thirddec- whoby virtueof their educationand pros- ade of the 19thcentury, during the age of peritybelong to the Americanelite. print.The controversies surrounding its or- Todaythe Mormonsare regarded--and igins thereforeare not safelylost in the regard themselves--asbearers of classic myths of antiquity.From the beginning, American values: thrift, self-help,industri- there were opposing Mormon and anti- ousness,sobriety. "Super-capitalists'' and Mormonviews about the foundingof the proselytizersfor free enterprisethat they church and the career of the founding are, theynevertheless seem to rejectthe in- prophet,Joseph Smith. Today, through the dividualismupon whichAmerican capital- work of scholarsboth insideand outside ismis predicated.If the Mormonchurch is the church,the two linesof historicalnar- as American as McDonald's or Disneyland, rative have come closer together. it is also as un-American in its collectivist The authorized History of the Chuuch instinctsas the very communistmenace its that Joseph Smith dictatedin 1839when he IMaliseRuthven was a visitingprofessor of religionat DartmotlthCollege dttr'ng 1989-90 and now teachesreligion and historyat the Universityof California,San Diego.He is the atlthor of The Divine Supermarket:Shopping for God in America(1990) and Islam in the World (1984).

WQ SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

had established himself as the leader of a most of them poor farmers who had mi- thriving religious community differs on sig- grated from New England in search of nificant points of chronology and detail cheaper, more productive land. Among from earlier writings of Smith, his mother them was the Smith family. The Smiths be- Lucy, and his contemporaries, both Mor- longed to a class of religious seekers whose mon and anti-Mormon. (Mormons, inci- search for the gifts of the spirit included dentally, retain a familiar relationship to Jo- treasure digging and various occult activi- seph Smith, still today referring to him as ties. The folk religion of New England, Joseph or the Prophet Joseph, never as transplanted to New York, had roots that Smith.) In the canonized history, the 14- extended back to the 16th century and the year-old Joseph, a virtuous seeker after reli- age of radical Puritan dissent, when many gious truth, prays for guidance in a wood people held that all existing churches were near his upstate New York home in 1820 irredeemably corrupt. Unlike the 19th-cen- and is rewarded by a vision of the Father tury followers of Alexander Campbell and and the Son. After being told that his sins Barton Stone, two leading "restorationists" are forgiven, he is warned against joining whose followers eventually merged to form any of the existing sects, "for all are the Disciples of Christ, these seekers re- wrong." In a subsequent theophany, on mained attached to noninstitutionalized re- September 21, 1823, Joseph claimed to ligion in which magic, condemned by the have been visited by an angel named Mo- clergy, was a major element. Although Lucy roni (a name that Mormons tactfully refrain Mack Smith, Joseph's mother, briefly flirted from rendering in its adjectival form). with Presbyterianism, the family remained Moroni, Joseph would learn, was the attached to its occult practices. Joseph had last of a great race of Nephites, descendants a seerstone that he used to divine buried of the ancient Hebrews who had crossed treasure; he could pronounce spells which the ocean and landed in the Americas in invoked spirits las distinct from angels), in- biblical times. In due course Moroni led eluding one that led him to the golden the young man to a nearby hill where he plates that duly appeared as the Book of found a book "written upon golden plates, Monnon. The date of Moroni's visitation-- giving an account of the former inhabitants the night of the autumnal equinox--was of of this continent and the source from crucial occult significance. whence they sprang." After some setbacks Whatever the provenance of the plates due to his own disobedience, Joseph was land Joseph sensibly returned them to their permitted to take the plates home, where in angelic custodian before any antiquarians the spring of 1829 he "translated" them us- could examine them), there are scholars ing a pair of sacred stones called the Urim within the Mormon community who no and Thummim. The "translation" eventu- longer believe that Joseph Smith translated ally appeared as the Book of Mormon, them according to the normal meaning of which Joseph, with financial assistance the word. It is now widely accepted that from a local farmer, arranged to have Joseph sat, his face buried in a hat with his printed by a local press in 1830. "peepstone" inside it, while his scribes sat The account emerging from the labors on the other side of a blanket draped across of revisionist historians reveals a picture the room so they would not be able to see that is at once more complex and more the plates. plausible. Mormonism had its origins The Book, when published, was among settlers in western New York State, equipped with two lots of testimonials--

wa SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

that of the Three Witnesses (Oliver were not present in the Americas prior to Cowdery,David Whitmer, and Martin Har- the Spanish conquest. A number of schol ris), who claimed to have seen the plates ars inside the Mormon community now through the "grace of God the Father,"and concede that Joseph's "translation"reveals that of the EightWitnesses tall members of a variety of contemporary influences.The the Smith and Whitmer families), who account of American origins reflects the claimed not just to have seen but to have widelyheld view among 17th-centuryProt- "hefted" them as well. Of the Eight Wit- estants that Native Americans must be de nesses, Mark Twain remarked: "I could not scended at some point from peoples men- feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire tioned in the Bible. The legend of Christ's Whitmer familyhad testified." visitto the Americasgoes back to the Span- ish conquistadors. the reader who encounters it Yet for all its borrowings and obvious without benefit of faith, the Book of infelicities, the Book of Mormon is a re- ToMormon appears to be a rather in- markable work. Couched in the language expert attempt at biblical pastiche, with of the King James Bible,it places the West- characters modeled on the kings, judges, ern Hemisphereat the center of the plan of and prophets of the Old Testamentengaged divine redemption and emancipates the in moral and physical battles in the New UnitedStates from the sacred historyof the World.These struggles reach their apotheo- Old World. Althoughthere are vestigesof sis in Christ's visit to the Americas, where Calvinist notions of depravity, the theology he preaches, performs miracles, and lays is optimistic.In almost Manichaeanterms, the foundations for the church. The Book the Book of Mormon suggests that evil is foretellsa new prophet whose coming will only the necessarycorollary of good, exist- herald the Millennium: The whole human ing independently of God. The notion that race will then be redeemed and the Native the fall from the Garden of Eden (which American "Lamanites," whose dark skins Mormons believe was located in Missouri) are the mark of sin, will be rendered a was a tragic event is alien to Mormonism, "whiteand delightsome"people again.(Re- as is the notion of originalsin. If Adamhad cent editions of the Book of Mormon sub- not transgressed, there would have been no stitute the less offensive word "pure" for human race: "Adam fell that men might be; "white.") The Book contains large portions and men are, that they might have joy." of the KingJames Bible,including 12 chap- To Smith's immediatefamily and some ters from Isaiah and three from Matthew. of his contemporaries, the Book itself--and The style is extremely repetitious and the the speed with which it was dictated (75 command of 17th-century English style is working days)-was proof enough of its di- decidedlyweak in places. ("Andit came to vine provenance.It was not just the Book, pass that I did make tools of the ore which I however, that persuaded numerous con- did molten out of the rock," records the temporaries that Smith was the "restorer" Prophet Nephi in one of the books bearing of the true church of Christafter a lapse of his name.) Mark Twain, taking his cue from 18 centuries. America's Jacksonian Age, the Book of Ether, called the whole produc- when a "common man" could become tion "chloroformin print." president, saw in the religious revivals a For an ancient book there are some movement directed against the professional embarrassinganachronisms, such as refer clergy. Popular, emotional preaching re- ences to horses, sheep, cattle, and pigs that sponded to, and abetted, changes in work-

WQ SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

ing patterns, especially in western New ders of priesthood, the Aaronic and Mel- York, which was opening up to industry af- chizedek, which were bestowed upon them ter the completion of the Erie Canal in by heavenly messengers who identified 1825. There were so many revivals in this themselves as John the Baptist, Peter, area that the Methodist circuit riders, de- James, and John. The following spring spairing of new conversions, named it the Smith officially launched the Church of Burned-Over District. Expectations of the Christ, which later changed its name to the Millennium--an abiding theme since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, first Puritan settlers had landed in Massa- underscoring the imminence of the Second chusetts, confident that God was about to Coming. Shortly thereafter, a divine revela- destroy the Babylons of England and tion commanded him to move tin 1831) to Rome-were growing. William Miller, who Kirtland, Ohio, where a dissident Camp- carefully correlated all the begettings in the bellite preacher, Sidney Rigdon, was bap- Bible to Archbishop Ussher's date of Cre- tized along with his group of Christian ation (9 A.M.,October 26, 4004 B.c.), con- communitarians. The conversion gave the eluded that the Second Coming would take Saints a much-needed boost, bringing their place between March 1843 and March number to more than 2,000. The first mis- 1844. Thousands of Christians put on their sionaries were soon sent to England, where ascension robes and gathered outside the prospect of a new Zion in America had Rochester and other cities, awaiting the a special appeal for distressed millworkers Rapture. The failure of Jesus to meet this in Lancashire, Wales, and the West Country. rendezvous with the faithful became known By 1850, the Mormon community in Brit- as the Great Disappointment. ain had grown to 30,000. Unlike Miller, Smith was sensibly impre- To convert the "Lamanites" (Indians) a cise about dates. He articulated the prevail- number of Saints moved to Jackson ing millennial anxieties while taking practi- County, Missouri, where Joseph dedicated cal steps to assuage them. Like his the site for the restored Temple of Zion in forebears in Massachusetts, he prepared for 1831. Here, however, the Saints encoun- Kingdom Come by building Kingdom Now. tered serious and systematic persecution: Joseph Smith, observes his- torian Klaus Hansen, "out- Jacksoned the Jacksonians by proclaiming that the common man could be- come a god." Paramount in Smith's thinking was a concern with authority. In 1829, he in- quired of God who had the ~~ authority to baptize--a question that concerned many other primitive Chris- tians at the time. As an an- swer to his prayers, he and IBCIatB=f~eXs Oliver Cowdery claim to A persecuted people: Joseph Smith tin white) and his brother were have received the two or- murderedby a mob in Carthage,Illinois, on June 27, 1844.

WQ SPRLNG 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

Other settlers despisedtheir weird theology temple rituals that lead to life in the hereaf- and feared their collectivist social ideals ter. (Nowadays, the temple recommend (whichthey expressed by votingfor candi- takesthe formof a card that one mustpro- dates en bloc). In 1838,Joseph and his fel- duce to be admitted to a temple.) low elders were arrested and charged with At Nauvoo, the Prophet built a neoclas- treason,Mormon property was confiscated, sical temple high on the bluffsoverlooking and a number of Mormons were massa- the river. He also became Nauvoo's largest cred. After compliant jailers allowed the individualproprietor: the owner of its hotel Prophetand his companionsto escape,he and store,treasurer and trustee-in-trustfor rejoinedthe Saintsat the cityof Commerce the church,as wellas mayorand lieutenant on the Illinoisshore of the Mississippi,near general of the Nauvoo Legion--a rank he the confluence with the Des Moines River. celebrated by wearing resplendent gold- This second Zion, which Joseph re- and-blue uniforms. At Nauvoo, as the named Nauvoo, became a thriving city of Prophet, he perfected the esoteric temple rites, adapted in part from freemasonry, that linked the living with generations of the dead in a vast contin- uum that stretched from be- foreCreation into a timeless futurein which men would become gods. Ancestors !j/l were baptized by prolcy so i?C that the living could be :i: joined to them in the after- life. This practice is still con- ducted by the Mormon church, aided by a fully computerized genealogical Dtlring the exodtls from Nauvoo in Febrtlary 1846, the Mississippi Riverfroze over solidIy enough to allow wagons to cross. Momzons data bank--the world's larg- liken the event to the Israelites' crossing of the Red Sea. est. About 350 million dead people are believed to have 12,000that rivaled Chicago in population been posthumously baptized, including and prosperity.A weak Illinois legislature kings and emperors, all the signatoriesto granted Joseph almost plenipotentiary the U.S.Constitution, all the presidentsof powers.The city's 2,000-manmilitia, the the UnitedStates, not to mentionsome of NauvooLegion, became the largestmilitary the denizensof Hollywood. force in the state of Illinois. The form of At Nauvoo, Joseph also codified the socialismpracticed in Missouri,known as theocraticchurch organizationthat per- the Law of Consecration and Stewardship, sists, with modifications, to this day. The was replacedby the "lesser"--but more Mormonchurch is a lay church, which practical--law of tithing,which still stands combinesthe Catholicgradations of hierar- today.Only Saintsof good standingwho chy with the Protestantidea of the priest- regularlypay their tithes, normally 10 per- hood of all (male)believers. Boys make up cent of pretax income, are granted the the lesser Aaronic priesthood, men the "recommends" that ensure access to the higher Melchizedek priesthood. A bishop is wa SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

in charge of the ward or congregation; the bines, which thing was abominable before larger unit, equivalent to a Catholic dio- me, saith the Lord"-the principle of celes- cese, is the stake-a term taken from the tial or plural marriage seems to have been Book of Isaiah, which likens Zion to a tent practiced by Joseph himself even before he and its people to stakes. Presiding over the moved to Nauvoo. The recollections of church are the General Authorities, consist- Saints who later left the church, as well as ing of the Quorum of the Seventies, the of some women who became his plural Twelve Apostles, and the president. As wives, leave little doubt that the tall, young, "Prophet, Seer and Revelator," the presi- good-looking, charismatic leader had a rov- dent is entitled to receive revelation. The ing eye. This tendency was bitterly fought church's structure reflected a shift in Jo- by his wife Emma, who would never accept seph Smith's vision from that of a restored that "the principle" came from God. Jo- apostolic church toward the notion of a re- seph, however, was not simply exploiting stored People of Israel. his prophetic charisma for personal gratifi- There was never much chance that cation. Like more recent cult leaders, he 19th-century American society would toler- used sexuality to bind his followers to him. ate a polity so inimical to its institutions. For women who entered "the principle," Small utopian religious experiments--such there could be no turning back in Victorian as John Humphrey Noyes's free-love com- America; likewise for the select group of munity in Oneida, New York, where all leaders who took plural wives, loyalty was were saved and hence unable to sin--could virtually guaranteed. Rumors of polygamy be left alone since they threatened nobody. that began in the anti-Mormon press culmi- But during Joseph Smith's lifetime Mor- nated in a major exposC within Nauvoo it- monism was becoming a power in the land. self. Smith was taken into custody in 1844 Aware of this, Smith began to cast around for ordering destruction of the press on for uninhabited territories where the Saints which this exposi: had been printed. might build their Kingdom unmolested by From the first, it was remarkable how the "Gentiles"--a term that Mormons have Joseph Smith managed to incorporate the only recently dropped from their lexicon. "celestial order of marriage" into his theo- He tried to maintain his autonomy by sell- logical design. The justification of polygamy ing Mormon votes to the highest bidder: involved the Mormons in a theology rad- This worked for a time but ultimately ically unlike any other Christian sect's--in- antagonized both Whigs and Democrats. deed, so different that many outsiders, from Joseph then launched his own bid for the the 19th century to the present day, have presidency of the United States. His cam- charged the Mormons with not being Chris- paign was cut short by his assassination in tians at all. Even the Mormon conception 1844 at the hands of a lynch mob in Car- of divinity is radically different from the thage, Illinois, where he and his brother God of the New Testament. Joseph Smith Hyrum (who was also killed) were being spoke of God as having once been a person held on charges of treason. with "a body of flesh and bones as tangible as a man's." The most famous Mormon t was not just politics, however, that aphorism says, "As man is, God once was; brought Joseph down, but polygamy. as God now is, man may become." I Although the Book of Mormon de- God too, so Joseph taught, had been nounces polygamy--"Behold David and polygamous and had had carnal relations Solomon truly had many wives and concu- with virtuous women and together they had

wa SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

MORIMONISM AND FEMINISM?

At the naming ceremony for my infant with men to sustain the leaders. Outside the daughter, I called myself a "feminist" and church, they attended medical school and was chastised by my family and other con- were among the first to join the National gregants. I mention my Mormon faith to Council of Women. I recall stories of my feminist friends and am met with scoffs of great-great-grandmother, Rachel Ivins "Isn't that the church that defeated the Grant, who converted to Mormonism, left Equal Rights Amendment?" Both camps, her wealthy New Jersey family,and made then, agree: "Mormon feminist" is an oxy- the trek west on her own. She became the moron. But is it? sixth wife of Jedediah Grant, raised her son Mormon women today seem in many Heber J. Grant (a future church president) wayslike their conservativecounterparts in by herself,and later was president of her lo- evangelical Christianity. We are encouraged cal Relief Society for 40 years while almost to marry young, to honor husbands and fa- entirely deaf. thers as the head of the household, to devote To be sure, 19th-century Mormonism our lives primarily to the task of childbear- had its patriarchal doctrines and practices. A ing and childrearing. We are not encour- man's religious standing was measured by aged to develop a career (except as a safety the number of his wives and children, as if net against widowhood) and are positively they were his possessions. Nonetheless the discouraged from working outside the combination of absent or shared husbands home, and the many practical necessities of pio- But historically, socially, and theologi- neering life freed these polygamous wives cally, we are fundamentally different from, from the stultifying roles of typical Victorian even antithetical to, evangelical Christians. women. Nineteenth-century Mormonism was a radi- A subservient role for women was, in cal critique of Christianity, just as it was of fact, not native to Mormonism but was American culture: My ancestors rejected in- grafted on from outside. After the Great Ac- dividualistic enterprise for communalism, commodation beginning in 1890, Mormon- democracy for theocracy, monogamy for po- ism was transformed (slowly but dramati- lygamy. cally) from a prophetic condemnation of Ironically, although polygamy was fallen society into a self-preserving embrace viewed with profound disgust or pity tone of American society in all its conventions. In East Coast observer remarked that a polyga- the 20th century, Mormon women--now in mist's wife was "either an oriental doll or a the typical monogamous marriage--were domestic drudge, with neither impulse nor encouraged to retreat into the domestic impetus towards an individualized exis- sphere. The ecclesiasticalleadership tread: tence"), it actually helped produce some of men) began reducing all independent opera- America's earliest feminists. Mormon tions of female churchmembers. Women women in Utah published their own newspa- could no longer give blessings, and the Re- per, the Wol?2an'sExponent, and they ran lief Societywas placed under the authority their own independentorganization, the Fe- of the priesthood's leadership. Those ele- male Relief Society, without interference, ments of Mormon theology were stressed Utah women were the first women in the that emphasized an eternal division of roles. United States to vote in a public election. During the 1970s, when the feminist Inside the church, they preached, gaveheal- movement reemerged in earnest, young fe- ing blessings, led organizations,and voted male Latter-daySaints began to look to their

procreated "spirit children." The Supreme who, for all his compassionand suffering,is Being,the Codhead,in Mormontheology is insufficientby himselfto ensure human sal- thus a kind of divine man, rather resem- vation--which is why Mormon temples are bling Jesus in Christianity--amore connu- not adorned with crosses but with angelic bial and carnal Jesus. Jesus himself, in Mor- trumpeters. (Later Mormon theologians mon theology,is more like an elder brother have also suggestedthat Jesus was polyga-

wa SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

foremothers for role models. A group of fastest in the Third World, where, as LDS Boston women launched Exponent II, con- sociologist Marie Cornwall noted, "The pa- sciously modelled after the 19th-century triarchy of Mormonism is a gentler, kinder women's journal, to comment on political form of [already existing patterns of] male and theological questions. And in 1978 dominance." Indeed, the traditional Mor- when blacks were given the priesthood, mon roles, which have the husband success- women began to ask the next logical ques- ful at work and the wife raising children at tion: Why not us? home, seem quite desirable to Third World So what does the future hold? There is an women--a reason for joining the church. increasingly vocal minority of educated I struggle to balance competing ideas American women urging more leadership and impulses in myself. There are days when roles for women. Unlike other Christian I sit in adult Sunday school class seething women, Mormon feminists have a theologi- while a teacher compares marriage to a cal rallying point in the Mormon belief that smoothly In corporation. ("Every good or- God has a cocreator, a Mother ganization must have a presi- God. As it is in heaven, we dent, and that would be the ask, why not on Earth? And, husband, and a vice-presi- finally, simple economics dent, and you know who may accomplish what fem- ~ that would be.") I rankle inism and theology fail to ~B~q~g~ie~ ,h,, I h,,, the regional do. Childrearingin Amer- representative(parallel to ica is expensive today, a Catholic bishop) suggest and Mormons generally .X~L~i~i~~ 1.~ over the pulpit that our have more than the aver- e~i~i~g~5~i~~ drug addiction problems age number of children. ~s~ ":~ are caused by the exis- In addition, Mormons tence of day care. At such tithe to the church, and r times I daydream how they support their chil- very pleasant it must be to dren on proselytizing mis- j~ be a Quaker. But then I sions. Such realities are ~~j~ hearthevoices ofsixgen- requiring that many ~~~~ erations of Mormon fore- women work outside the mothers whispering to me of home just to survive. The num- `1-- ~"0~~ -~ theirstruggles and theirendur- ber of Mormon women in the workforce is ance, and I know I will never leave. How rapidly approaching the national norm of 50 ironic all this is: It is precisely my Mormon percent. desire to reform the world into a "kingdom" In response to these pressures, there that makes me chafe at the typical Mormon have been some significant changes. In view of women; it is my Mormon optimism 1990, the temple ceremony was changed so that makes me believe that change, even he- that women can now pray at services. There roic change, is possible. Indeed, it is my is an annual all-church women's meeting; Mormonness that makes me a feminist and there are more professional women among makes it hurt to be one. the Relief Society leaders. The church lead- -Peggy Fletcher Stack ership urges men to recognize the needs of their wives, including intellectual and emo- tional needs. Peggy Fletcher Stack is Associate Editor of On the other hand, the church is growing Books and Religion. mous, "united" with Martha and the two M. McMurrin in The Theological Founda- Marys.) Salvation and entry into heaven de- tions of the Mormon Religion (1965), "ex- pend less upon Jesus' martyrdom, or upon hibits the affirmative qualities relating to God's grace, than upon how man uses his the capacity of human reason and the pos- free will while on Earth. This belief in free sibility of free moral endeavor that charac- will, writes the University of Utah's Sterling terized Enlightenment thought in the early

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partof the 19thcentury [and] that today lie amy.Joseph's assassination probably saved at the foundationsof the typicalsecular hu- the movement. A martyred Prophet was manism that has issued from American much more valuable than a living impostor, intellectuallife." whichwas what a growingnumber of apos- Mormontheology was thus in tune with tates had come to consider him. The mar- the music of 19th-centuryAmerica. A popu- tyrdom, however, brought a struggle for lar idea of the time portrayed a "New leadershipin its train, in which the issue of Adam," a new American free of Old World polygamy was decisive. sin and born to fresh chances. Likewise the Mormons, in this same optimistic spirit, en- o escape the increasing hostility of visioned a race of "spirit children" who anti-Mormons, a majority of the would be born not depraved and sinful but T Nauvoo Saints followed Brigham free and good. The Jacksonian common Youngon his epic hegira across the Great man was beginning to feel in himself a Plains during 1846 and '47 to found an- manifestdestiny, the powerto conquerthe other Zion in the GreatSalt LakeValley. entire continent. Mormon theology went Unreconciledto polygamy,Joseph's widow one better: Its spirit children would not Emma remained with her children in simplymaster a new continentbut could Nauvoo,and her son JosephSmith III be- becomegods too. To do so, however,it was camepresident of the ReorganizedChurch first necessary to get born, that is, for the of Jesus Christof Latter DaySaints (RLDS). spiritchildren to acquiremortal bodies. TheRLDS church has remained a relatively For this reason, polygamywas a virtue, small group; today it has a membershipof and virtuous were the men who practiced about 250,000, based in Independence, it. Havingmore wivesmeant siringmore Missouri.Like the Shiites of Islam, the children and bringing more spirit children Reorganites are legitimistswho feel that into this world, thus earning greater "exal- their Prophet'sprogeny were cheated of the tation" in the afterlife. There, in the Mor- leadership. Still led by a member of Jo- monscheme of things,humans retain their seph'sfamily, Wallace Smith III, theysay of personalities and, reunited with their their Utahrivals: "They have the Kingdom, spouses, continue to grow in knowledge but we have the King." and purity until they achieve godhood, or- Brigham Young (1801-77) was a very ganizingnew planetsand spawningspirit different character from Joseph Smith. children of their own. This bit of theology Stern, authoritarian, and patriarchal, he also helps to explain the heavy Mormon had little of the Prophet's captivating emphasison traditionalfamily values today. charm or charismaticwit. When ordered Mormonismmay today resemble a con- by Josephto take a secondwife, he vehe- servativeChristian sect, but its 19th-century mentlyobjected, saying that he "desiredthe theologysmuggled into Christianitysome grave."One of his daughters,who became strange notions indeed:a materialisticGod, a prominent suffragette,described him as a a carnal Christ,and, of course, polygamy.It "Puritan of the Puritans." Nevertheless,he was to rebut the century-old charge that quickly recognizedthe value of polygamy Mormontheology hardly constitutes a form in bindingthe Saintsto him politically.Be- of Christianitythat the church, in 1985, fore he left Nauvoohe had married 12 added to the Book of Mormon the subtitle women, including several previously "AnotherTestimony of JesusChrist." "sealed"to Joseph Smith. Eventuallyhe Giventhe turmoil engenderedby polyg- would many 16 "connubial" wives who

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bore him a total of 57 children and nine from federal officials, and leaders began to "nonconnubial" wives whom he took into preach "the principle" openly for the first his household; in addition, he had about 30 time. Yet once it was out in the open, any women "sealed" to him. Apart from his for hope for autonomy within the Union was midable administrative and practical skills, doomed. In 1856, the new Republican he appears to have had a talent for mim- Party demanded the abolition of polygamy icry. During the struggle over the succes- along with slavery as "twin relies of barba- sion, before a meeting of 5,000 Saints, he rism." The Democrats, not wishing to im- used the accents and mannerisms of Jo- ply that their support for slavery meant sup- seph to such effect that many testified they port for polygamy, became equally shrill in saw the Prophet's mantle fall upon him. their denunciations of Mormon marriage Under Brigham Young's leadership practices. In 1857, convinced that the Mor- (1844-77), the Utah Mormons rebuilt the mons were in rebellion, President James Kingdom. Young adopted Joseph Smith's Buchanan appointed a new governor of imaginative priestly system to colonize the Utah, whom he sent out with an escort of desert. Through the Perpetual Emigration 2,500 troops. Brigham Young called up the Fund he brought new Saints from Europe Mormon militia, and for several weeks the up the Mississippi and across the Plains to so-called Mormon War was a stalemate. the Great Basin. There were serious set- The whole community began moving by backs when hundreds perished through wagon train toward southern Utah until a hunger, disease, and the onset of winter. compromise was reached. The soldiers Young also had to abandon his plan for a were posted away from Salt Lake City. Mormon State of Deseret comprising all of While the U.S. Civil War took the pres- present-day Utah and Nevada and parts of sure to abandon polygamy off the Mor- Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and southern mons, its outcome ensured that the Repub- California. But in general the Mormon he- licans would eventually address the second gira proved the most successful attempt at of barbarism's "twin relies." As early as centrally organized settlement since the July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: signed the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act into law. By the end of the 19th century it had In Reynolds v. The United States (1879) the brought in about 90,000 immigrants, Supreme Court stated that religious belief mainly from Scandinavia and Britain. Dur- did not allow disobedience of the law. ing the Mexican-American War of 1848, When the Mormon leaders defiantly re- Young shrewdly offered Washington the fused to abandon the practice, Congress services of Mormon volunteers. In 1850, af- passed the Edmunds Act (1882), providing ter Mexico ceded Utah and other lands to severe penalties for polygamy and "unlaw- the United States, he was named governor ful cohabitation." Though only a minority of the new Utah territory. His generosity (about 20 percent) practiced "the princi- was no small factor in the appointment. pie," and some even hated it, the Saints This halcyon period of complete auton- were unanimous in upholding it. To have om3' under Young's governorship was not done otherwise would have been tanta- to last. The Prophet's introduction of polyg- mount to declaring Joseph Smith a false amy had placed his followers in an impossi- prophet. And when nearly 1,000 men, and ble dilemma. By 1852, the church was no some women, were jailed for "unlawful co- longer able to conceal polygamy from the habitation," the Saints' memories were monogamous majority of the faithful nor stirred, recalling the old anti-Mormon cru-

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~G~~~~M

In 1896,a htlgeflag was draped across the Salt Lake Templeto celebrateUtah's statehood. BrighamYoung, who led the Saints to Utah,is shown in 1876,a year beforehis death.

sades in Missouri and Illinois. It was Zion's worldly wealth that made Yet the church was becoming wealthy. it vulnerable. In 1887 the antipolygamists The California Gold Rush and the construc- in Congress seized the church by the finan- tion of the Union Pacific Railroad brought cial and economic jugular: They passed the thousands of Gentiles into the Great Salt Edmunds-Tucker Act which, in addition to Lake Valley.The Mormons' highly restric- harsh civiland criminalpenalties for polyg- tive economy,combining the advantagesof amists,ordered the dissolutionof the Mor- privateenterprise with those of communal mon churchas a legalcorporation and the solidarity, fostered community cooper- confiscationof most of its property. The atives, cooperative railroads, textile mills, leadershipcapitulated. In September 1890 clothing factories, tanneries, ironworks, PresidentWilford Woodruff issued the fam- furniture factories, and wholesaling and re- ous Manifesto, in which he stated that the tailingestablishments such as ZCMI(Zion's church had stopped teaching plural mar- Cooperative Mercantile Institution)--a riage and would not allow anyone to enter name that survivesin Salt Lake City'sbest- into the practice any more. The Manifesto, known department store. In many of these which Woodruffprivately stated to be a rev- enterprisesthe church was a corporate in- elationfrom God,was reluctantlyendorsed vester. The main source of its wealth, how- by the church's General Conference a few ever, was tithing:By the mid-1880s,tithing days later.The Manifestofinally opened the receipts from the faithfulhad reached an way to Utah's achievingstatehood in 1896. impressive $500,000 a year. The surrender was for some years in-

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complete: Church leaders continued to This volte face on polygamy was not the practice polygamy in secret, and a number only accommodation the Mormons made. of Mormon colonies were established in On the economic front the socialist, co- Mexico to keep polygamy alive. But the operative enterprises that had been such a Manifesto marked the beginning of a radi- major feature of Zion were gradually aban- cal shift in Mormon self-identification dur- doned. Former objections to the selfishness ing which the Mormons remade them- encouraged by the capitalist system were selves into archetypal Americans. In 1904, forgotten. Thus while the 1899 edition of in order to quell rumors that were threat- James E. Talmage's authoritative Articles of ening to unseat Utah's Senator Reed Faith could still describe the church's plan Smoot, the president of the church, Joseph to establish "without force or violence... a E Smith, announced that any member of natural equality, to take the weapons of des- the church who continued to practice po- potism from the rich, to aid the lowly and lygamy would be excommunicated. The the poor," in later editions these passages principle of polygamy was preserved in were watered down to vague references Mormon theology, but it was reserved for about "the misuse of wealth." heaven, where all faithful men may enjoy By abandoning socialism as well as po- several wives. But state authorities in Utah lygamy--the two shibboleths that had de- took the lead in prosecuting earthly polyga- fined the church--the Mormons were able mists. The campaign reached its climax in to change from a millennial experiment 1953, when Arizona officials, allegedly into a model of the American Dream. The bribed by a $100,000 payment from the pariahs of the 19th century, after the Great Utah church, raided a polygamous commu- Accommodation of 1890, steadily and by nity in southern Utah just across the state degrees turned themselves into the super- line. Fathers were jailed; children were Americans of today. torn from their mothers and placed in fos- k*X ter homes. Most of the nation's press was century further on, the Mormon outraged--except for the church-owned to All-Americanism is Deseret News, which insisted that interven- Aconversionvirtually complete and is perhaps tion was justified "both for the welfare of best symbolized by the fact that Brigham the children and society." This was an Young University (BW) is a perennial con astonishing comment on a divine principle tender in that most American of all pur that had been taught by the Prophet and his suits, college football. The Cougars appear successor, and for which two generations of to the public at large as perhaps a bit unnat- Mormons had paid with blood and anguish, urally squeaky-clean, but no stigma atta- In recent times, the more relaxed sexual ches to the school's Mormon character, and climate prevailing in the United States has indeed one might say that it is barely re- rendered the prosecution of polygamists marked. To think of the Cougars as, say, the much more difficult. There are now said to Fighting Mormons, would be absurd. be at least 20,000 Mormon "fundamental- As the experience of countless other ists" who practice polygamy in Utah, with a faiths and sects attests, the achievement of smaller number in the neighboring states affluence and a degree of comfort and ac- of Idaho, Arizona, and Montana. The ceptance is often achieved at the price of church still excommunicates them and diminishing zeal among the believers and takes steps to ensure that plural marriages even a marked falling away from the faith. are not contracted in the temples. The Mormons have not been immune to

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PORTRAITS OF ZION

In its promotionalliterature, the Church of Je- the pressure to procreate and bring "spirit chil- sus Christof Latter-daySaints carefully projects dren" into the world places economicburdens a clean-cutimage of its members:Mormons are on home life. There are indicationsthat Mor- presentedas hard-working,middle-class folk, monsmay be resistingthe church'scall to have with motherswho stay at home to care for their large families.Since 1980,Brad Barber,Utah's children and youngsterswho shun drugs and state director of data, resources, and demo- premaritaisex. They lead a lifeof "quietcom- graphics,told the New YorkTilnes, Utah has petence and self-assurance...envied for its experienceda "dramaticdecline in fertility," closeness," as one Mormon ad put it. Everyone from 3.2 to 2.5 births per woman. (The average is "alwayssmiling, always happy." for all U.S. women remained steady at 1.8.) Certainly there is much that is appealing Mormons are also delaying starting families. about this vision,promulgated over the years in Duringthe same period, the mean age of a Utah the church's regular Reader'sDigest advertising woman at the birth of her first child increased campaign.Converts are streamingto Mormon- by more than a full year,to 23.3.But Mormons ism--at an averagerate of about a quarter of a still tend to have large families:The average million annually during the 1980s.(However, Mormon family size is 4.61, more than twice researchers believe that up to one-half of all the national average. new members become inactive within five Part of the reason for the fertility decline is years of joining.)The post-WorldWar II era that Mormonwomen are joiningthe general has witnessed a sevenfold increase in member- march into the workplace. In 1987, Church ship. The church now claims more than seven President Ezra Taft Benson cautioned women million adherents worldwide, four million in against postponing motherhood, saying that the United States alone, where Mormons now "material possessions, social convenience, and outnumber the mainline Episcopalians and so-called professional advantage are nothing Presbyterians.Almost one-third (1.3 million)of compared to righteous posterity." But the the American Saints live in Utah, with other church also urges its members to tithe (10 per- concentrations in California (716,000), Idaho cent of pretax income) and to foot the bill for (293,000), Arizona (236,000), Washington their children'stwo-year mission service (about (184,000),and Texas(148,000). The largest for- $350 monthlyper child). As Universityof Utah eign groups are in Brazil (302,000), Chile business professor Karen Shepard puts it, (266,000),Peru (159,000),and the Philippines "When economic imperativessay,'You work,' (213,000). you work." Today,about half of all married Some of Mormonism's superior qualities Mormonwomen (comparedwith 57 percent of are unambiguous.The Word of Wisdom, the their non-Mormoncounterparts) work at least official church guidelines governing the behav- part-time outside the home. ior of members, contains strictures against al- The Mormons are, by and large, a prosper- cohol, tobacco, and caffeine that clearly im- ous people. Their loyalty and strong work ethic, prove quality of life. Studies show that the their "team-piayer"attitude instilled by long average Mormon male lives six years longer, years of experience in church organizations, and the average Mormon female three years make Mormonsgood employees.But the many longer, than their Gentile counterparts. The hours a week devoted to church duties can state of Utah (whichis at least 70 percent Mor- limit the amount of extra time that can be de mon) ranks 49th in rates of death from cancer voted to a job, thus limitingprospects for pro- and heart disease and dead last in deaths due to motion. The church does not disclose much cirrhosis of the liver. data on members' income, but a survey was But some of the same facets of Mormonism conducted in the early 1980s and summarized that provideits strength--the obligationsto the in the Mormon AMCAPJournal in 1986 by church, the rigid framework of morality,the KristenL. Goodmanand Tim B. Heaton, of the strong sense of community--can also be LDS Correlation department and Brigham sources of frustration for Saints. Young University (BYU), respectively. It At home, the dual demands of career and showed that almost 47 percent of Mormon church are sometimes a cause of strain. In ad- households had incomes over $25,000, and dition to the many hours of church service more than nine percent brought in over each family member is expected to perform, $50,000. In the United States as a whole, only

WQ SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

39.5 percent of all households made over ages of 19 and 21. We set these young people ~25,000, and just six percent were in the over- apart as missionaries and they learn that they $50,000 bracket. Thus, while it may not be the can control these drives." The mission also norm for a Mormon to achieve the break- helps to instill Mormon values. LDS statistics through success of Kay Whitmore, president, indicate that 97 percent of returned missionar- chairman, and CEO of Eastman-Kodak, or U.S. ies pay tithes and conform to the church's high National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, it is standards of moral purity. Moreover, 95 per- certainly common for individuals to at least cent go on to seal their marriages in temple gain the quiet respectability of the middle class. ceremonies. (Mormons who many in temple As Goodman and Heaton point out, the ceremonies tend to be older and better-edu- Mormons have not been entirely spared pov- cated than those who do not, another factor erty: Like the rest of the nation, they have ex- that contributes to the strength of these mar- perienced the "feminization of poverty." Fe- riages.) Mormon women don't always see for- male-headed families, about one-third of them mer missionaries as ideal mates. "For two years poverty-stricken, are not as rare as one might they have been mouthing canned sentences expect. They comprised five percent of ail Mor- like programmed mannequins," complained mon households in the early 1980s, compared one female BYU graduate student in with about 10 percent of all households nation- Newsweek, and J. Bonner Ritchie, a psycholo- ally. The church does not condone divorce, but gist at the university, agrees that many "have a it does not excommunicate members if they hard time analyzing complex issues or coping split up. Utah's divorce with intellectual ambi- rate (4.6 per 1,000 guity." Nevertheless, 64 population) is about percent of the men the same as the na- marry within three tionalaverage (4.8). Ac- years of completing cording to the Good- ~(t*T their mission, nearly man-Heaton survey, sa~B~ D i: one-third within 12 however, about one- -;·t~ months. Many of them third of all Mormon find mates at BYU, marriages will end in ·g-:~ ·i·i~'~~ :RB where half the upper- divorce; the national classmen are returned average is 50 percent. ~la~l missionaries. Not sur- Another study, by re- E~"i3llr"llll"LClli~s~P~B~~I prisingly, about 45 per tired Purdue University I cent of BYU's freshman sociologist Harold T. Pioneer Park, in Salt Lake City. women don't return for Christensen, suggests sophomore year, many that the level of devotion to church practices is because they have married and begun having closely tied to a given maniage's chances of children. survival. Christensen found that among couples How close to reality the ideal promoted in who married "for time and eternity" in a Mor- Reader's Digest finally seems largely depends mon temple, the divorce rate was only two per on which group of Mormons one looks at. Rob- 1,000 couples. By contrast, 13 of every 1,000 ert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, in their 1984 book marriages performed in civil ceremonies ended America's Saints, identified at least eight dis- in divorce. Christensen believes that puritanicai tinct segments of Mormon society, ranging upbringings and the emphasis on early mar from Iron Rodders, who "see God's hand, riage and large families are to blame for many through the Prophet, in everything and search of these failed marriages, for the right way to enter the Celestial King- The church devotes a great deal of effort to dom," to "ex-Mormons, not necessarily excom- encouraging the faithful to follow the proper municated Mormons, but all those who have course. From the time they are children, for made their break in one form or another, both example, Mormon males are taught to antici- with the church and with their cultural birth- pate their mission, usually undertaken at the right." In between lies a vast group of adher- age of 19. As then-president of the Missionary ents who "maintain a delicate balance between Training Center in Prove, Utah, Joseph J. the church and the outside world, between Christensen, explained in 1981, "Attraction be- faith and knowledge, change and compromise, tween the sexes is as strong as ever between the expectation and reality."

WQ SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

cept perhaps that it is a little more formal: suits for men, with button-down collars ,~5~~:~j~j/i./:jl//jii/;i:j;'iiiiii and ties; print dresses for .utsro women with short sleeves s,lllrtfl- and high necklines designed to cover the mysterious tem- ple garments--a kind of body stocking stretching from below the neck to above the knee and embroi- dered with cabalistic sym- bols-that both genders The Salt Lake Cityskyline: The tower at left hotlses the chtlrch's must wear to protect them administrativeheadquarters; at right is theSalt Lake Temple. from evil. The antiseptic look one encounters in Mor- thistendency, yet it is remarkablehow suc- mon homes,with everything just rightand cessfullythe church has sustained itself and fewobjects suggestive of personalidiosyn- grown. Now, however,its very strength is crasy or supererogatorypleasure, is not far stirringup problemsof a differentkind. fromthe "sparklinglinoleum and perfect Thechurch's phenomenal success in find- teeth"that journalistFrances FitzGerald ingnew converts to the faithin the Third foundin Lynchburg,Virginia, the power Worldmay eventually threaten its effortsto base of TVpreacher Jerry Falwell. sustain itself at home. The values of Mormons and Christian All of this, however, seems far away fundamentalistsare virtuallyidentical. Mor- from the clean,well-tended streets of Salt monssupport the family,hard work,sobri- LakeCity. Here in the Mormonheartland, ety, and patriotism.They are againstany- the All Mormon--Utah is perhaps 70 per thing that smacks of "permissiveness" cent Mormon--and the All American seem such as abortion, homosexuality, premar- to coexistcomfortably. Yet there are just ital sex,alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and gam- enoughpieces that do not fitto remindone bling. Dress and honor codes at BYU, thatthe mergeris notquite complete--the Mormondom'sintellectual bastion, would, oddlyfuturistic neo-Gothic and neo-Ba- withminor changes, fit Jeny Falwell'sLib- roguemi~lange of the SaltLake City Tem- ertyUniversity: short hair for men, modest pie, the recordedbird songsthat accom- garbfor women, no drink,drugs, homosex- pany the WALKsigns at pedestrian uality,or sex outsidemarriage. crossingsto informthe blind that they may BW'sstudents, however, appear a good proceedin safety,and the almost Swiss tidi- dealmore chic and confidentthan Liber- ness of the downtownarea. ty's: Smart shirts, designer jeans, and ele- It is instructiveto comparethe Latter- gant midilength dresses fall within the daySaints with members of otherconserva- code.About 30 percent of BW's 27,000un- tive Americansects or denominations.Su- dergraduates are married, which helps perficially,there doesnot seemto be much solve the problem of sex. In fact, many to distinguishthem. The style of dress is not Mormonsfrom the diasporaattend BYU verydifferent from what one mightfind primarilyto choosethe matesto whom amongSouthern Baptists, for example,ex- theyshall be sealedunto eternity.The BYU

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undergraduates receive a much better aca- within the United States in which the ties of demic education than their counterparts at culture and faith were reinforced by inter- Liberty University. "A man is saved no marriage. Most of the General Authorities faster than he gets knowledge," the Prophet were the sons or grandsons of pioneer Joseph said, and Mormons want to be stock. Families of pioneering stock tend to saved. The nation of farmers Brigham be interrelated, constituting an elite that Young created in the intermountain West runs the church and dominates the wider is now one of the most highly educated de- community. One may almost speak of a nominations in the United States, along Mormon patrician class that regards Zion with Jews and Episcopalians. This is one of as its fiefdom. the larger reasons for the Mormons' nota- In this patriarchal society, family au- ble material success in this world. In the thority is contained within and buttressed race to join the ranks of the middle class, by the church. Other churches are conser- they are well ahead of the fundamentalists. vative in their attitude toward male-female It is here, in fact, that a second crucial relations: Christian fundamentalists every- difference between Latter-day Saints and where cite St. Paul's directive to the Ephe- conservative Christians lies. When mem- sians (5:22,23) that wives must submit to bers of other conservative churches move their husbands "for the husband is the head up the social and economic ladder, they of of the wife even as Christ is the head of the ten switch denominations in a liberal direc- church." But Mormon theology takes fe- tion: Southern Baptists now living in the af- male subordination a step further by deny- fluent parts of Dallas become Methodists or ing women the priesthood of all believers Presbyterians; middle-class Catholics in and by insisting that Mormons gain "exalta- Massachusetts suburbs forsake their Irish tion" primarily from their roles as parents. priests for Congregationalist ministers. "Unsealed" or childless men and women Some middle-class, educated Mormons do have an inferior status in the afterlife, drift away from the church, but they rarely where they will act as ministering angels to apostasize to the extent of joining another their more fortunate brethren and sisters. denomination. A person who ceases to at- The stress on homemaking is compounded tend sacrament meetings or to visit the by the perfectionism into which funda- temple may still remain a "cultural" Mor- mentalists, secure in God's grace, may mon, just as a nonobservant Jew will confi- sometimes lapse: Homes must be super- dently continue to regard himself as a Jew. clean, meals must always be wholesome This distinctive Mormon cultural iden- and regular, children well-behaved and tity is partly sustained by kinship. Between perfectly turned out. Not surprisingly, as 1880 and 1960, after the first wave of con- occasional newspaper and television stories vert-immigrants had settled down in Utah, attest, for some Mormon women the Mormonism grew less by conversion than stresses endured at home finally become by natural increase. By 1960, there were intolerable. still only 1.7 million Mormons, an increase The church's authority is maintained by of slightly more than tenfold stretched over a strong set of obligations imposed upon 80 years. (The Mormons now number 7.3 the Saints. Until recently, the average Mor- million thanks to an energetic global pros- mon household had duties that would en- elytizing effort.) Bounded by geography and gage at least one family member every day the sense of being a persecuted people of the week: the Women's Relief Society, apart, the Saints created a kind of nation the Young Women's or Young Men's Mu-

wa SPRZNG 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

tual Improvement Association, ward, to the suburbs where most Mormons now priesthood,Sunday School, and sacrament live. The averageward consistsof about meetings.In addition to these regular du- 250 people--a small enough group for ties adult Mormons are required to make members to know each other by name. In "home teaching"visits to other LDShouse- the Utah heartland, most members are holds at least once a month; by these fourth- or fifth-generation Mormons, all means "weaker brethren" who are lagging from the same vicinity. Ward houses serve in the faith have every possibilityof being as community centers. They are equipped led back into the fold by their peers. All with basketball courts and other recre- told, an observant Mormon family may still ational facilities for the young. The ward devote about 14 hours a week to church- bishops have their offices there, where they related activities, hear confessions; counsel parents, chil- Mormons are expected not only to par- dren, divorcees, and singles; and conduct ticipate,but to administerand lead. "If any- the annual interviewsfor temple "recom- one gets to be 35 and hasn't been president mends." Many social and leisure activities of something, there's something wrong are built around the ward: fundraisers, with him," observes Sterling McMurrin. scouting expeditions for the boys, high "The church puts a great deal of stress on school graduation parties. The ward is an standardizationand organization.... The extended family;through it, people share administrative ability of the average Mor- their triumphs, their anxieties, and their as- mon is very strong because a Mormon kid pirations. starts to be an administrator when he is six At a ward Sunday sacrament meeting an or seven years old." outsider can taste Mormonismin both its The communal, village traditions of the blandest and most bizarre manifestations. 19th-centurySaints survivein the Mormon The chapel or meeting house is usually ward, which has been successfully adapted plain, clean, and somewhat Scandinavian

THE WORLD BEYOND SALT LAKE CITY Mormon missionaries, as seen by James Fallows, in U.S. News & World Report (May 2, 1988). The most forlorn-looking foreigners in Ja- sion experience does for the young Mor- pan are the Mormon missionaries. Apart mons. Soon after their 19th birthday, most from sumo wrestlers, they're the easiest peo- Mormon young men spend two years as mis- pie in the country to pick out. Shorthaired sionaries.(Very few young women went on and typicallyblond young American men, missionsuntil the 1970s;now they make up dressed in dark pants and plain white shirts, about one-eighth of the total.) About two- usually pushing a bicycle with one hand thirds go to other countries, while the rest while holding religious books in the other, work in the UnitedStates. Nearly all live on can't exactlymelt into the Asianmass. familysavings---in addition to savingfor col- At first I was inclined to view the Mor- lege, Mormon families put money away for mons the way the Japanese seem to: as well- their sons' mission years. meaning young people whose perseverance Manyof the missionariesare from small was admirable, but who should stop trying towns in the most inward-looking parts of to convert the natives since the natives were the United States; they are plunked into a plainly uninterested. I would still lay heavy foreign society and, unlike most American odds againstMormonism's ever becoming a businessmen or soldiers, are expected to force in Japan. deal with foreignersin the local languageall But I've come to respect what the mis- day, every day. Language skill is the most

WQ SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

(in marked contrast to the temples, where a faith and collective cultural identity that blend of more ornate styles of futurism make Mormon networks so effective also hold sway). The pews are filled with chil- separate the Saints from even their neigh- dren, neatly dressed, the girls in frocks, the bors. The formal boundaries between Mor- boys in shorts and socks. There are hymns mon and Gentile are drawn by the Word of and prayers, of course, but individuals also Wisdom, an advisory revelation from Jo- address the meeting: A music student plays seph Smith that counsels the Saints not her instrument; a leader from a Mormon only against alcohol and tobacco but also Boy Scout troop gives a halting account of tea and coffee. Saintly indulgences tend to a weekend camp; a visitor from the capital focus on ice cream and other sweet things. says how happy he is to be back among kin. At Christmastime the windows of ZCMI, the It all seems strangely unspiritual, yet typi- church-owned department store in Salt cally American in the celebration of suc- Lake City, are filled with displays of Utah's cess and achievement, in the open, some- canyons and mountains done in sugar and times sentimental, expression of feeling in sweets. public. But suddenly Mormon peculiarity The Word of Wisdom may inhibit close appears. A bereaved parent expresses, with- social contacts between Mormon and Gen- out apparent signs of grief, the certainty tile, but it allows Mormon communities to that a lost child is happily ensconced in the flourish in the most unlikely places. Thus a Celestial Kingdom; a man testifies that he substantial community of Saints thrives in "saw" and "spoke with" his deceased great- the midst of the Babylonian glitter of Las grandfather. Saints speak of the dead as if Vegas. On the other hand, the church's they were living, in a way that reveals the evangelical agenda encourages friendship Mormon worldview in all its concreteness with the unsaved. Mormons are urged to and materiality. use their social contacts with Gentiles to Of necessity, the extraordinary bonds of proselytize, by doing such favors as baby-

obvious result of their foreign exposure. Of true-believer religions, former Mormon mis- the Americans I've met in Asia who can op- sionaries are in my experience more toler- erate deftly and successfully in the local lan- ant, less preachy, more willing to listen and guage, a disproportionate number have gently persuade. It would be hard to be been Mormons. The country's highest den- preachy after living among Chinese or Indi- sity of foreign-language skills is not in Cam- ans who have "sotten bridge or Berkeley but on the BYU campus. along for thousands Brigham Young University, where 95 per- of years before cent of the students are Mormon, teaches 46 ~hristwith their languages. Of the 27,000 students, an aston- own gods and see no ishing 1,000 can speak Chinese, Korean, or reason to change some other Asian language. If the U.S. is now. worrying about how to cope with a confus- The former mis- ing, multilingual, Asian-ascendant world, sionaries also seem the Mormons are well equipped to help. deepened simply be- But the missionaries learn something cause they've had to more than language. Like most Peace Corps give two years of their lives to a cause other veterans, returned missionaries often seem than advancing their own careers. I think to have changed when they come home. that their missions make America a wiser, Mormonism is of course an evangelical more competitive country and certain faith. But compared with members of other Americans stronger, better people.

WQ SPRING 1991 4 1 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

sitting, running errands, and lending fective in business (see box, p. 43) and poli- lawnmowers. tics. In Washington, D.C., Saints have been Mormons are inclined to speak two lan- prominent since one of Utah's first sena- guages, one for Saints, the other for Gen- tors, Reed Smoot, became the trusted tiles. Insider discourse may indirectly ques- friend of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoo- tion dogma while celebrating it with a ver. The Saints in the nation's capital may common fund of jest and allusion; outsider be less numerous than members of other discourse tends toward affirmation and denominations, but they are more tightly apology. When argument is exhausted, organized. Using the jargon of their profes- even Mormon intellectuals will startle out- sion, CIA officers speak of a "sisterhood of siders by stating that the Book of Mormon personal connections among the 50,000 is true because they have received a per- Latter-day Saints in the Washington area sonal testimony to that effect. The ramparts with links in all branches of the administra- of Zion may be invisible, but they still form tion. The network came to attention during a barrier between Mormon and Gentile. the Watergate scandal, when it was found Few non-Mormons are aware of the extent that E. Howard Hunt, one of President to which, behind the glass walls that sepa- Richard Nixon's "plumbers," had recruited rate them from Gentiles, sacred nostrums some young BYU graduates as spies. Three may be questioned by the Saints or ironi- Mormons have held influential posts in the cally celebrated. Cartoonists such as Calvin Bush administration: National Security Ad- Grondahl of the Ogden Standard-Examiner viser Brent Scowcroft, Roger Porter, presi- and Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune (see dential assistant for domestic and eco- p. 45) mercilessly satirize Mormon life in nomic policy, and the president's former books that sell thousands of copies. Noth- scheduler, Steve Studdert. All three are re- ing is treated as sacred, from the flour that puted to be workaholics. Mormon housewives store in their cellars As one would expect, Mormon influ- in preparation for Armageddon to the eter- ence is generally exercised on the right. On nal destiny awaiting overweight sundae Capitol Hill the voting records of Jake Garn guzzlers in the Cholesterol Kingdom. and Orrin Hatch, Utah's two Mormon (and As fulcrums of authority and personal Republican) senators, testify to a consistent ties, the wards and stakes of Zion support support for conservative causes, though formidable human networks. In 1977 and Hatch has recently begun to concern him- '78, for example, Mormon Relief Society la- self with child-care issues. But when a con- dies were bused in droves to states all over flict arises between the clarion calls of the Union to help defeat the Equal Rights Mormondom and patriotism, Zion may Amendment. When a sudden thaw in the prevail. A classic example occurred during spring of 1983 caused massive flooding the early 1980s when the U.S. Air Force (and $200 million in damages) in Utah, wanted to place 200 MX nuclear missiles Mormon volunteers rushed forward to fill on underground railroad tracks in the sandbags, build makeshift barriers, and re- Utah-Nevada desert. Normally hawkish move mud. Governor Scott M. Matheson Mormons rebelled. President Spencer boasted: "The Mormon church has the best Kimball complained that "one segment of grapevine in the world. One phone call to the population would bear a highly dispro- the church. . . [and] the people come out portionate share of the burden. . . in the in droves." case of attack." President Ronald Reagan The church's grapevine is also highly ef- appointed a special committee to study the

WQ SPRING 1991 42 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

LDS, INC. In Salt Lake City, the church headquarters building towers over the temple. It is a bit of symbolism that few have missed. The church publishes no annual budget, but it is clearly a massive economic enterprise. John Heinerman and Anson Shupe estimate in The Mormon Corporate Empire (1985) that the church had total assets of $7.9 billion in 1983 and income of $2 billion. That would put it on a par (in terms of income) with the likes of DuPont and Mobil Oil. Yet Mormon leaders draw salaries more like those of Japanese corporate executives than American ones: Then-Presi- dent Spencer W. Kimball was paid perhaps $75,000. The church's assets include temples and lesser meetinghouses around the globe; Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and other educational facilities; historical properties such as the original Joseph Smith farm in Manchester, N.Y.; a large portfolio of stocks and bonds; massive cattle ranches and other agribusiness enterprises in Utah and other states; commer- cial real estate; and various media properties. Besides the Salt Lake City Deseret News, which serves as a "house" newspaper, the church owns two major television stations in the West, KSL-TV in Salt Lake City and KIRO-TV in Seattle, and profitable radio stations in Salt Lake City, Seattle, New York City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco. But by far the largest source of income for the church is still the tithes and offerings of the faithful. These accounted for about 75 percent of the church's income in 1983, according to Heinerman and Shupe. Despite an apparent decline in the proportion of Mormons who pay the full 10 percent tithe, giving still "amounts to a large share of church revenues because many [Mormons] give beyond their tithe share. Such dedicated members believe that if they give more, the Lord will be more generous in return." The church can also count on the generosity of a number of wealthy members, such as hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott. The church's prosperity helped fuel the past decade's enormous growth in membership, and some believe that the impoverished converts of Latin America will strain the church's financial resources, especially if they rely upon the church's generous charities. But Mormon values may also do for the converts what they did for the founders. "Among the Mormons," scholar Leonard J. Arrington writes, "things temporal have always been important along with things eternal, for salvation in this world and the next is seen as one and the same continuing process of endless growth. Building Zion, a literal Kingdom of God on Earth, has therefore meant an identity of religious and economic values."

matter, and it was decided that Wyoming from the obligations of Mormon worship- would be a more suitable site. The commit- it is said (though this is difficult to confirm) tee's chairman was Brent Scowcroft. that fewer than half of the Mormons in Salt In Utah, the church's political influence Lake City are tithing-while others ques- is so pervasive that it does not even need to tion the lore and legends upon which the take a public stand on certain issues. The faith is built. Utah state legislature, which is virtually all Official church history, for example, has male and Mormon, recently passed the come under increasingly skeptical scrutiny. most restrictive antiabortion law in the In 1966, a group of Mormon scholars estab- United States. The church said nothing: The lished the Mormon History Association and legislators knew where it stood. sought access to the thousands of historical documents that the church had placed off- ne should not imagine, however, limits. In 1972, the hierarchy appointed that Mormonism remains mono- Leonard J. Arrington, a Utah State Univer- lithic and unchanging. Affluence sity economist and one of the founders of and education have taken a certain toll of the association, as church historian. With a Mormon certitude, as some Saints retreat team of historians, Arrington set out to pro-

WQ SPRING 1991 43 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

duce a detailed, 16-volume history of the intermediaries with letter bombs. He mur- church, using all the documents that had dered two people and seriously injured been hidden away in the church's archives. himself. Before many years had elapsed, as Robert Lindsey writes in A Gathering of Saints et the church has also continued (1988), "Word was passed to Arrington's to accept, and, at arm's length, to historians that they were going too far, that endorse, the New Mormon His- some of their research was bordering on tory, which still flourishes, though it is betrayal of the church. . . . [Tlhe General more restricted than in the past. The Authorities complained directly to the his- church seems to prefer to have it both torians that their scholarship too often de- ways. After all, the combined circulation of picted early leaders of the church in ways Sunstone and Dialogue, the principal maga- that they said would diminish their stature zines of the Mormon intelligentsia, is only in the eyes of contemporary Mormons." In some 10,000; the church puts the number 1980, the General Authorities canceled the of converts entering the church each year plans for the multivolume history. The at more than 300,000. The church's evan- church's history department was trans- gelical organs are inclined to treat potential ferred to BYU, where it could be more converts to a version of the Mormon saga closely controlled, and important archives that overlooks the more complex historical were closed. "Those of you who are em- facts. Visitors to Hill Cumorah, where Jo- ployed by the church have a special respon- seph claimed to have found the golden sibility to build faith, not destroy it," con- plates, are treated to the "world's largest servative Apostle Boyd K. Packer told the pageant" where a thousand Mormon volun- historians. "If you do not do that, but in fact teers re-enact a Disneyland version of the accommodate the enemy, who is a de- Joseph Smith story using a battery of spe- stroyer of faith, you become in that sense a cial effects, including an audio system that traitor to the cause you have made cove- digitally processes the voice of God to nants to protect." 15,000 megawatts. The depth of the hierarchy's anxiety In Protestant churches where the de- over historical matters was revealed later in mands of the liberal elite conflict with the the 1980s, when church leaders became more populist, evangelical agenda, the ten- entangled in an embarrassing case involv- sions have usually led to denominational ing forged documents. One of these docu- splits. Such problems are now dividing the ments was a letter purportedly written by a Southern Baptist Convention. The Mormon close friend of Joseph Smith's indicating church, however, is much stronger institu- that magic (in the form of a white salaman- tionally than any Protestant church of com- der) rather than revelation had led Joseph parable size. Ecclesiastically, it combines to the golden plates that he translated into the congregational ballast of Protestant- the Book of Mormon. Church officials ac- ism-the priesthood of all (male) believ- quired the so-called salamander letter and ers-with the elasticity that Catholicism de- other documents, apparently fearing that rives from tradition and hierarchy. they might be real and intending to conceal Priesthood in Mormonism is not confined them from the inquiring eyes of scholars. to a sacerdotal class somehow independent The incident came to light when Mark Hof- of society, like the celibate Catholic priest- mann, the man who sold the letters, began hood. It is distributed through the whole trying to cover his tracks by killing off the active male membership. Power in

WQ SPRING 1991 44 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

Mormondom is both authoritarian and demo- cratic, elitist and populist. Faced with the competing claims of the liberal intelli- gentsia and the evangelical wing represented by the missionary program, the church has a strategy of try- ing to honor both. Thus in response to a low-key cam- paign by Mormon women and a desire to gain more ecumenical acceptance "Oh no! The road to apostacy!" from Inside humor: Mormons frequently have a few laughs at their own churches (many of which re- expense thanks to Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley. gard Mormonism as a non- Christian "cult"), the church recently "To me," she said, "going to the temple amended the temple ceremonies. Women is one of those things I do because I believe are no longer required to pledge obedience in the church-maybe not understand it to their husbands. A ritual in which non- completely-but believe in it." Mormon clergy are portrayed as the hire- Typical of the church hierarchy's lings of Satan has been eliminated. These shrewd handling of change was the "cor- measures have been welcomed by liberals, relation" drive of the 1970s. Partly in defer- without seeming to cause too much dis- ence to the increasing number of Mormons quiet among conservatives. living in the diaspora who found it hard to The strategy seems, by and large, to meet their commitments, correlation re- work. In an article some years ago, the duced the demands on Mormon leisure Denver Post quoted a Salt Lake City Mor- time. Activities formerly spread over the mon named Kathy Vernon, who said, "The week were consolidated into a three-hour problems of history and doctrine are inter- "block" session on Sundays. A Monday esting and amusing, but they are not earth- Family Home Evening, in which parents shaking and they do not affect the fact that and children gather for prescribed prayer my Young Women's girls are making deci- and family activities, was instituted to en- sions in high school on whether or not to sure that Mormon men, who devote much go to college, or on how to be a good per- of their free time to church-related activi- son, or on how to make a contribution in ties, spend time with their families. But cor- society. And that is the level that my reli- relation also reduced the autonomy of the gion takes in my life." wards and the scope of their activities, lim- Yet her approach was not one of pure iting, in the eyes of many, freedom of action pragmatism. Every month, the Post re- for women as well as the range and diver- ported, Vernon went to the Salt Lake City sity of the "cultural Mormonism" that some Temple, showed her identity card, changed of the elite lean on to reinforce their faith. in a basement locker room to clothes of Sunday school lessons from the scriptures purest white, and took part in Mormon were coordinated for the whole church. ceremonies for the dead. More recently, the changes have been fol-

WQ SPRING 1991 45 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

lowed up by a turning of the financial vided by income from investments. The screws: Wards no longer raise part of their shift of focus toward the newly converted own budgets but instead receive a fixed per also has theological consequences. As the capita subsidy from Salt Lake City. young Mormon missionaries compete for souls in the religious marketplace with ronically, the church's successful navi- evangelists from other churches, the gation through the perils of its material uniqueness of the Mormon tradition-its success in this country may be most primitivist heterodoxy, its 19th-centurypro- jeopardized by its spiritual success abroad. gressive humanism dressed in biblical Since the 1970s, the church has aggres- arb-seems likely to come under increas- sively sought converts in the Third World. ing strain. Already, faced with hostile reli- Unlike missionaries from other churches, gious propaganda from evangelical Protes- career professionals who devote as much tants, the church is de-emphasizing the money and energy to caring for the needy more heterodox aspects of Mormon theol- as to the saving of souls, Mormon mission- ogy, such as the progress toward godhood aries are all volunteers, mostly young men and the carnality of Jesus. Emphasis is aged 19 or 20. For them the two years of placed on the Book of Mormon, which be- missionary work, with the rigorous boot- longs to the earlier more "Christian" phase camp-style training preceding it, is a rite of of Joseph Smith's career, before his inven- passage between graduation and marriage, tiveness, and that of his more imaginative adolescence and adult life. Their remit is followers, took Mormon theology into conversion, not the elimination of suffer- more exotic realms. ing. The number of missionaries continues As it approaches the Christian to grow-about one-third of the eligible bimillennial, the LDS church can expect to males volunteer. There are now some face tensions in several areas. The most 40,000 in the field, and they produce re- pressing is likely to be the conflict between sults, especially in Latin America. ethnic Mormons and the nonwhite con- The astonishing revelation that was verts, especially in Latin America. Some vouchsafed to President Spencer Kimball ethnic Mormons, secure in an identity but- in 1978, admitting blacks to the priesthood tressed by culture and kinship, are begin- after years of bitter controversy, opened the ning to demand liberalization of practice way toward a radical shift in the church's and doctrine. As in other American composition. In 1970,82 percent of church churches, the issues of women in the priest- members resided in the United States or hood, the rights of gay people, and the Canada; by 1989, the proportion had de- needs of the growing number of singles in clined to 59 percent. At the current rate of the church are coming to prominence. It growth, only 43 percent of Mormons will cannot be long before awkward questions live in North America by the turn of the about marriage, sexuality, and even social century. More than half will reside in the justice are raised in sacrament meetings Third World, 40 percent of them in Latin and Sunday school. America. Like the conservatives in Rome around The "browning" of the church has seri- Pope John Paul 11, the white-haired Mor- ous financial implications. Because of the mon leaders around 91-year-old President decline of tithing in the heartland, more of Ezra Taft Benson know that theological lib- the money for the church's growing evan- eralism, especially in sexual matters, must gelical efforts abroad will have to be pro- weaken the moral hold that bishops have

WQ SPRING 1991 46 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

over their wards. And liberalization in these steeped in machismo. To relinquish these areas would run counter to the require- distinctions would make Mormonism more ments of an expanding Third World liberal than the Catholicism from which church. While a sizable proportion of the most of the Latin converts are refugees. It is ethnic Mormon elite may want a Mormon- not liberalism-with its ethic of individual ism that no longer seems stuck in the choice in politics, lifestyle, or destiny-that 1950s, the Latin converts want something converts in Latin America seek when they closer to the version in the church's Read- join the LDS or other evangelical churches. er's Digest advertisements. They are, to con- What they want, like the new fundamental- tinue the Catholic analogy, more Catholic ists everywhere, is certainty and the sense than the pope. of community that certainty brings. Nor are The Mormons' Yankee image may invite the new converts, as they grow in the the distrust and enmity of some Latins, but church, likely to be interested in recover- it is also a source of attraction: For every ing the socialist legacy of Mormonism that Mexican or Bolivian who hates America, intrigues some of the faith's intellectuals. there is someone who wants to make it The supercapitalist image of Mormonism, across the fence to El Norte. Although the the hope it offers of wealth and worldly bet- church can no longer offer the benefits of terment, is precisely its appeal. physical transportation to Zion through the Will the ethnic Mormons loosen their Perpetual Emigration Fund, it can appeal leverage on power, allowing the newly con- to these sentiments vicariously-offering verted to rise to the top? Short of a major clean, American-looking meeting houses, institutional upheaval, this seems unlikely, exotic futurist temples equipped with high- at least for the foreseeable future. In a new tech video displays, and a theology that spiritualized version of the church's teach- above all else canonizes the family, provid- ing, "Zion is wherever there are Saints." ing the convert with a sense of kinship. But for the gerontocrats and corporation The sexual differentiation at the heart of men who run the church, Zion is still as the temple ceremonies and the exclusion of concrete and tangible as the church offices women from the priesthood are far from that rise above the Salt Lake Temple, dwarf- being obstacles to conversion in a culture ing its granite pinnacles.

WQ SPRING 1991 47 BACKGROUND BOOKS

THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

or Latter-day Saints, "once upon a time" University of Chicago. Her beautifully written was yesterday. Perhaps a majority of to- biography of the prophet was published in 1945 day's adult Saints grew up in a different uni- when she was only 25, but it was the work of a verse, one insulated from the larger culture, a mature scholar and represented the first genu- world that was divided between "them" and ine effort to come to grips with the contradic- "us." Young Saints learned how to recognize tory evidence about Smith's early life. The can- "the other" before they learned their ABCs. To- onized history of LDS beginnings is contained day much of this has changed: "By 1980," in the first six volumes of the Documentary writes religious historian Martin Marty, "the History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat- Mormons had grown to be. . . like everyone ter-day Saints (edited by B. H. Roberts, 1907- else in America." 1930). Brodie used non-Mormon sources as That earlier Mormon-Gentile dichotomy well as the evidence in the Documentary His- dominated the literature of Mormonism until tory to reach a noncanonical conclusion: Smith the middle of this century. Works about the was a gifted young farmer who dabbled in folk Saints could be conveniently divided into pro- magic and made up a story about golden plates and anti-Mormon categories. Joseph Smith, the that he himself later came to believe. The founder of the faith, was either a prophet or a Saints were exceedingly offended by this inter- profiteer-a religious genius, divinely called to pretation, and Brodie was excommunicated. lead a new dispensation, or a humbug, an out- But the influence of her book could not be ex- right fraud. Those who responded to his call punged. were either progenitors of a new chosen peo- Mormonism, unlike other modern religions, ple, called out from among the nations, or sim- is a faith cast in the form of history. Thus, at one ply followers of a compelling charismatic fig- time, any "profane" (i.e. secular) investigation ure whose message was nothing but a Christian of that history was like trespassing on forbidden heresy. ground. Causing nearly as much stir as Brodie After World War 11, a new type of Mormon was Juanita Brooks in her investigation of The literature came into existence: Well-trained Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950). In 1857, Mormon scholars started examining critically during the Utah Mormon War, a group of Mor- their own history and culture, and non-Mor- mons and Indians had murdered every adult in mon scholars began investigating Mormonism a California-bound wagon train as it tried to without preconceptions. This new age in Mor- pass through southern Utah. Brooks came to mon studies was ushered in by the publication distrust the official LDS accounts, which denied between 1945 and 1958 of four remarkable complicity in the terrible tragedy. She retrieved books: No Man Knows My History: The Life the story piecemeal from pioneer letters and of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet by diaries and interviews with Saints whose ances- Fawn McKay Brodie, The Mountain Meadows tors had participated in the tragedy. She ex- Massacre by Juanita Brooks, The Great Basin plained the actions of both victims and perpe- Kingdom: An Economic History of the Lat- trators in terms of wartime hysteria, which ter-day Saints, 1830-1900 by Leonard J. vividly evoked the intensity of the "them" and Arrington, and The Mormons by Thomas F. "us" mindset on both sides. O'Dea. Taken together, they illustrate the Unlike Brodie, Brooks continued to affirm change that occurred in Mormon studies as the her faith in public and, perhaps for that reason, "olden days" slowly started to pass away. managed to maintain her standing in the Fawn Brodie was reared in Utah. As a niece church. She became living proof that a Mor- of David 0. McKay, who became president of mon historian need not ignore evidence that the LDS Church in 1951, she had grown up placed individual Mormons and their church in among the LDS elite. But she departed from a bad light. Zion when she went to study literature at the Leonard Arrington's The Great Basin King-

WQ SPRING 1991 48 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

dom (1958) explained much of Mormon history tural inquiry. O'Dea, a Roman Catholic sociolo- up to 1900 in terms of the marketplace. The gist, analyzed the Mormon belief system, argu- Saints were able to make "the desert blossom ing that, as Tolstoy had asserted years before, as the rose" not because "the Lord caused his Mormonism is "the American religion," impos- face to shine on them," nor even because they sible to understand apart from the culture of its were worthy and hardworking, but because time. "Mormonism represents a theological Salt Lake City became an entrepot for would-be version of the American attitude of practical ac- miners traveling to the California gold rush. tivism," O'Dea wrote. It "elaborated an Ameri- Arrington's interpretation sounds hardly shock- can theology of self-deification through effort, ing to non-Mormons now, but Church Apostle an active transcendentalism of achievement." Boyd K. Packer even today instructs Mormon The new era in Mormon studies was thriv- students to "see the hand of the Lord in every ing by the mid-1960s when Dialogue: A Journal hour and every moment of the church from its of Mormon Thought was launched. This inde- beginning till now." Despite being an active pendent periodical treated controversial topics churchman, Arrington told the Mormon story and welcomed Mormon and non-Mormon using the kind of explanations that would have points of view. Church officials were obviously described ordinary human beings just as well uncomfortable when Dialogue intellectuals as they did chosen people living in the prom- confronted issues such as the prohibition ised land. against black priests, but they did not interfere. Brooks and Arrington thus set the pattern Their policy of toleration was further tested for "the New Mormon History," which has now when a group of Brigham Young University stu- become the standard academic approach to the dents started the more radical Sunstone, which Mormon past. The independent university was willing to publish articles about the subser- presses-particularly the University of Illinois vient role of Mormon women and the murky Press-became the usual publishers for this ap- origins of the Book of Mormon. proach that did not question the legitimacy of Today, one of the controversial areas in Mor- Mormonism but required scholars to place the mon studies follows in the tradition started by movement in context and to use Thomas O'Dea, trying to fit Mormon history the full range of available re- into the context of American culture. Lawrence sources and analytical tech- Foster's Religion and Sexuality (Oxford Univ., niques. Two outstanding 1981), for example, shows that in 19th-century general histories writ- America the Mormons were far from alone in ten in this new objec- sexual experimentation. From the Shakers, tive vein were who tried to give up sex altogether, to the James B. Allen and Oneida community, which practiced a complex Glen M. Leon- free-love system, there was in the new democ- ard's The Story racy a general search for alternatives to tradi- of the Latter- tional family structures. day Saints (Deseret Foster's (and O'Dea's) question-where do Books, 1976) and Mormons fit in the spectrum of American cul- Leonard J. Ar- ture and history?-is one of the great con- rington and Davis troversies among the historians of Mormonism Bitton's The Mor- today. At one end of the debate is Mark Leone's mon Experience The Roots of Modem Mormonism (Harvard, (Knopf, 1979). 1983), which makes the Marxist argument that The remaining Mormonism is "a religion for subordinates work in the original which serves to maintain their condition in- quartet of studies, tact." At the other end is Kenneth H. Winn's Thomas F. O'Dea's Exiles in a Land of Liberty (Univ. of N.C., The Mormons (1957), 1989), which sees the Saints and their oppo- was not history so nents as siblings in a new republic, both claim- much as it was a cul- ing to embody republican ideology, both decry-

WQ SPRING 1991 THE MORMONS' PROGRESS

ing "the growing economic inegalitarianism of if St. Paul had not challenged the Jewish Apos- Jacksonian society." tle Peter for leadership of the Christian commu- Klaus J. Hansen's Mormonism and the nity. My own Mormonism: The Story of A American Experience (Univ. of Chicago, 1984) New Religious Tradition (Univ. of Ill., 1985) makes the interesting and important point that argues that Mormonism is related to existing Mormonism was merely temporally "out of forms of Christianity (and Judaism) in much step with [American] social reality." Although the way that early Christianity was related to the early Mormons were "building their the Hebrew tradition of its day. antimodern kingdom of God," Hansen says, When we compare Mormonism to other re- even in the 19th century they were already ligions we can see why the historical transfor- developing "those modern habits of initiative mations within the church were not the "fault" and self-discipline that helped dig the grave of of the U.S. government or any other agency. the kingdom and ushered in a new breed of Those transformations are changes that take Mormon thoroughly at home in the corporate place in every religion as it learns to live "in the economy of America." Hansen concludes that world but not of it." The Saints are no longer it is "nothing less than a modern miracle" that all gathered into their own kingdom in the "within a generation a people that had been the West. They are everywhere and, like the early very epitome of an antibourgeois mentality be- Christians, they have had to learn to live in the came one of the mainstays of the American world. As late as midcentury, being born a Mor- middle-class culture." mon was analogous, in relation to the larger American society, to being born Jewish; today it final important category of Mormon stud- is perhaps not much more different than being A ies is that which considers Mormonism born into any Protestant sect. Within the sacred first and foremost as a religion. Sterling M. space of the Mormon temple rituals, the Saints McMurrin's Theological Foundations of the remain a chosen people. Outside, in everyday Mormon Religion (Univ. of Utah, 1965) com- life, they are simply members of a church, the pares Mormonism to other religious move- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ments in the Western world. McMurrin de- rest of us are no longer even Gentiles. We are scribes Mormonism as a form of Christianity merely nonmembers. that could well have emerged in ancient times -Jan Shipps

Jan Shipps is professor of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. She is now completing Being Mormon: The Latter-day Saints in the Past Fifty Years (to be published by Indiana University Press).

WQ SPRING 1991 50 Brookings

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THE D9 AND OTHER ONS OF

Who among us does not scoff at UFOs, astrology, and ESP? But the fact is that most of us also embrace dozens of other illusions with scarcely a second thought. These illusions, says psychologist Thomas Gilovich, are a product of the human mind's ceaseless quest to find order and meaning in the world-even where there is no order, even if the mind gets the meaning wrong. Many of these erroneous beliefs are harmless; others can lead to bias, prej- udice, error, or, in the case of wrongly perceived threats to health or the environment, panic. Here Gilovich explores some com- monly held illusions and suggests some antidotes.

by Thomas D.Gilovich

If I'm on, I find that confidence just builds.. . . You feel nobody can stop you. It's important to hit that first one, especially if it's a swish. Then you hit another, and. . .you feel like you can do any- thing. -World B. Free

nown as Lloyd Free before next few attempts. he legally changed his first The belief in the hot hand is really just name, World B. Free was a another version of the common conviction professional basketball in our daily lives that "success breeds suc- player during the 1970s cess" and "failure breeds failure." In cer- and '80s. His statement re- tain areas this is certainly true. Financial flects a belief held by nearly everyone who success, for instance, usually promotes plays or watches the sport, a belief in the more of the same because initial good for- "hot hand." After making a couple of shots, tune provides more capital for wheeling players are thought to "get the hot hand" and dealing. However, there are other ar- and to be more likely to hit their next few eas-roulette and other forms of gambling shots. But if a player misses several shots immediately come to mind-where the be- people say that he has "gone cold" and lief is just as strongly held, but where the conclude that he is less likely to make his phenomenon simply does not exist. What

WQ SPRING 1991 ILLUSIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

The Familiar Objects (1928), by Belgian surrealist Renk Mugritte (1898-1967). about basketball? after making their previous shot, compared My colleagues Amos Tversky, Bob to 54 percent after missing it. They also had Vallone, and I have conducted a series of a better chance of making a basket if they studies to answer this question. First we missed their previous two or three shots. translated the idea of the hot hand into a These and other more detailed analyses testable hypothesis. If a player is subject to flatly contradict the notion that basketball periods of hot and cold shooting, then he players shoot in streaks. should be more likely to make a shot after But when we interviewed that year's making his previous shot (or previous sev- team, Julius "Dr. J" Erving and other 76ers eral shots) than after missing it. This im- were firmly convinced that they shot in plies, in turn, that a player's hits (and streaks. (When confronted with our find- misses) should cluster together more than ings, in fact, most people continue to insist one would expect by chance. that the hot hand exists.) Dr. J and his col- To find out whether this is so, we ob- leagues suggested that perhaps a hot player tained the shooting records of the Philadel- cools off because opponents begin guard- phia 76ers during the 1980-8 1 season. (The ing him more closely, or because he be- 76ers are the only team that keeps records comes overconfident and takes harder of the order in which a player's hits and shots. The easiest way to test this idea is to misses occurred.) Contrary to the hot hand look at players' "free throw" records-pen- hypothesis, players were not more likely to alty shots taken from the same distance and make a basket after making their last shot. without defensive pressure. Our analysis of In fact, there was a slight tendency for play- two seasons of free throw statistics from the ers to shoot better after missing their last Boston Celtics showed that, on average, the shot. They made 51 percent of their shots players made 75 percent of their second

WQ SPRING 1991 ILLUSIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

free throws after making their first, and 75 had this to say upon hearing about our re- percent after missingtheir first. suits: "Who is this guy? So he makes a Why do people continue to believe in study. I couldn't care less." Another promi- the hot hand? The best explanation involves nent coach, Bobby Knight of the 1987 a very basic psychological phenomenon. NCAA champion Indiana Hoosiers, re- Research psychologists have discovered sponded by saying "there are so many vari- that people have faulty intuitions about ables involved in shooting the basketball what chance sequences look like. People that a paper like this really doesn't mean expect sequences of coin flips, for example, anything." Disheartening reactions, per- to alternate between heads and tails more haps, but not surprising. We would expect than they actuallydo. Becausechance pro- the belief in the hot hand to be held most duces less alternation than our intuition strongly by those closest to the game. Be- leads us to expect, truly random sequences cause random sequencesof hits and misses look too ordered. Streaks of four or five look like streak shooting, a gargantuan ef- heads in a row clash with our expectations, fort would be required to convince players, even though in a series of 20 tosses there is coaches, or fans that it is an illusion. a 50 percent chance of getting four heads In the grand scheme of things, of in a row, and a 25 percent chance of a course, whether or not basketball players streak of five. The law of averages tin fact, shoot in streaks is not particularly impor- statisticians call it the "law of large num- tant. What is important is that people bers") ensures the expectedeven split only chronically misconstrue random events, after a large number of tosses. and that there may be other cases in which It is not uncommon for a player to truly random phenomena are erroneously make 50 percent of his shots and to take thought to be ordered and "real." However, nearly 20 shots per game, so he stands a the story of our research on the hot hand is decent chance of making four or five shots only partly about the misperception of ran- in a row, and thus looking like he has a hot dom events. It is also about how tena- hand. With this in mind, we showed basket- ciously people cling to their beliefs even in ball fans a sequence of X's and O's- the face of hostile evidence. Our re OXXXOXXXOXXO OOXO OXXOO-that search--and the reaction to it--has impli- we told them represented a player's hits cations for phenomena that affect our lives and misses in a basketball game. We also far from the parquet floors of the Boston asked them to indicate whether this se- Garden. Most broadly conceived, it touches quence constituted an example of streak on processes that have to do with the per- shooting.Even though the order of hits and sistence of racial prejudice, with the as- misses in this sequence is perfectly ran- sumptionsof workers that their workplace dom, 62 percent of our subjects thought is safe, with the blind adherence some peo- that it constituted streak shooting. pie have to dangerous cults. It is easy to see why they thought this. The sequence above does look like streak It ain't so much the things we don't shooting.Six of the first eight shots were know that get us into trouble. It's the hits, as were eight of the first ii! Basketball things we know that just ain't so. players do shoot in streaks, but the streaks Autemus Wavd donot exceed the laws of chance. They have nothing to do with "hot hands." The mistake made by players and fans lies in is an article of faith for some people how they interpret what they see. It that infertile couples who adopt a child Red Auerbach, the brains behind what will later be more likely to conceive. The is arguablythe most successfulfranchise in usual explanationis that the couple stops Americansports history,the Boston Celtics, tryingso hard and their new-foundpeace of

Thomas D. Gilovich, associate professor of psychology at Comel2 University, teaches courses on statistics, social psychology, and beliefs. This essay is adapted fi.o172his forthcoming book How We Know What Isn't So. Copyright O ~991 by Tl~omasD. GiIovich.Reprinted by pen7zissionof The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

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mind boosts their chances of success. On important psychological need, but because closer inspection, however, it becomes they seem to be the most sensible conclu- clear that the question is not why adoption sions consistent with the evidence before increases a couple's fertility; clinical re- them. They are the products, not of irratio- search has shown that it does not. What nality, but of flawed rationality. Such flawed needs explanation is why so many people thinking might never surface under ideal hold this belief when it is not true. conditions, but the world does not play fair. The officials who oversee admissions to Instead of providing us with the clear in- distinguished undergraduate institutions, formation that would enable us to "know" prestigious graduate schools, and select ex- better, life presents us with messy data that ecutive training programs all think they can are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, make more effective admissions decisions ambiguous, inconsistent, or secondhand. It if each candidate is seen in a personal inter- is our imperfect attempts to deal with pre- view. They cannot. Research shows that de- cisely these difficulties that cause us to be- cisions based solely on objective criteria- lieve things that just ain't so. such as academic credentials-are at least So it is with the notion that infertile cou- as effective in predicting future perfor- ples who adopt are more likely to conceive. mance as those aided by subjective impres- We've all heard about couples who con- sions formed during an interview. Why ceive after adopting, because their good then do these people believe that interviews luck grabs our attention. The fate of cou- are so important? ples who adopt but do not conceive, or Maternity ward nurses swear that the those who conceive without adopting does number of deliveries jumps during a full not jump out from the backdrop of every- moon. They are mistaken. Again, why do day life. Thus, the fertility of couples who they believe it if it "just ain't so?" adopt a child becomes a "fact" that follows Today, more people believe in ESP than naturally and inexorably from the available in evolution; there are 20 times as many information. As we shall see, however, astrologers as astronomers. Opinion polls there are inherent biases in the way people reveal widespread acceptance of astral pro- absorb and interpret data, biases that must jection, "channeling," and the spiritual and be recognized and overcome if we are to psychic value of crystals. arrive at sound judgments and valid beliefs. How can such dubious beliefs be so widely and passionately held? Several eople seem compelled to see order, pat- things are clear at the outset. First, people P tern, and meaning in the world, and do not hold these beliefs simply because they find randomness, chaos, and meaning- they have not been exposed to the relevant lessness unsatisfying. We tend to "detect" evidence. Erroneous beliefs are found order where there is none, and to spot among experienced professionals and meaningful patterns where only the vaga- laypeople alike. The admissions officials ries of chance are operating. This tendency and maternity ward nurses should "know to organize the things we see may have better," since they are in regular contact been bred into us through evolution: Not- with the pertinent data. Nor do people hold ing patterns and making connections is dubious beliefs simply because they are stu- what leads to discovery and advance. The pid or gullible. Quite the contrary. Humans problem, however, is that the tendency is sb possess powerful intellectual tools for pro- strong and so automatic that coherence is cessing information with accuracy and dis- sometimes detected even when it does not uatch: the uroblem is that we sometimes exist. So it is with the example of the hot misapply or misuse these tools in charac- hand. And even in instances where some teristic ways. Just as the extraordinary per- statistical regularity exists, we may still read ceptual capacities of human beings occa- too much meaning into what we observe. sionally give rise to optical illusions, so can One of the most telling examples of this our powerful intellectual abilities some- concerns what statisticians call the "regres- times lead to erroneous beliefs. sion effect." When any two variables are re- People cling to many dubious beliefs, in lated, but imperfectly so, extreme values of other words, not because they satisfy some one tend to be matched by somewhat less

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extreme values of the other. As a result, may be responsible for the so-called jinx. very tall parents tend to have tall children, Athletes appear on the cover of Sports Illus- but not as tall (on average) as they are trated when their performance has been ex- themselves; a company's disastrous years traordinary. But due to regression alone, tend to be followed by more profitable we would expect an athlete's stellar perfor- ones. The heights of parents and children mance to be followed by somewhat poorer are related, but the relationship is not per- performances. Those who believe in the fect-it is subject to variability and fluctua- jinx, therefore, like those who believe in the tion. The same is true of a student's grades hot hand, are not mistaken in what they ob- in high school and in college, a company's serve, but in how they interpret what they profits in consecutive years, a musician's see. [See box, p. 57.1 performance from concert to concert, etc. Most students in a statistics course can ith characteristic insight, John Stuart learn to answer correctly questions about w Mill once remarked that "every erro- the heights of fathers and sons, the IQ's of neous inference involves the intellectual mothers and daughters, and the SAT scores operation of admitting insufficient evidence of college students. People encounter two as sufficient." One pervasive example of problems, however, when they venture out this is that people tend to be more im- in the world and deal with less familiar in- pressed by evidence that seems to confirm stances of regression. some relationship than by that which is First, they tend to be insufficiently con- contrary to it. Thus many people are con- servative or "regressive" when making pre- vinced that their dreams are prophetic be- dictions. Parents expect a child who excels cause a few have come true; they fail to no- in school one year to do as well or better tice or disregard the many that have not. the following year; shareholders expect a "Confirmatory events" often seem suffi- company that has had a banner year to cient to establish a relationship in part be- earn as much or more the next. Some man- cause we tend to explain away any excep- agement specialists have suggested that this tions: A dream that did not come true tendency to ignore regression effects may never felt like a "real" premonition. But contribute to the high rate of business fail- quite apart from these mental sanitizing op- ures, as optimistic executives, thinking that erations, supporting evidence may have dis- good times will continue, expand too fast proportionate impact because it is gener- and overextend their companies. ally easier for the human mind to grasp A second difficulty, known as the regres- than disconfirmatory information. Discon- sion fallacy, occurs when people fail to rec- firmations are often expressed negatively, ognize statistical regression, and instead and negatives simply are harder for the hu- concoct superfluous theories to explain man brain to process. We have less trouble what they are seeing. An illuminating ex- with "All Greeks are mortal" than "All non- ample is the famous "Sports Illustrated mortals are non-Greeks." This tendency to jinx." Many pro and amateur athletes firmly focus on the positive is more pronounced, believe that it is bad luck to be on the cover of course, when someone prefers or ex- of Sports Illustrated: they view an invitation pects the belief to be true. Theists justify to appear with a mixture of eagerness and their faith by pointing to the number of dread. Olympic swimmer Shirley times people have prayed for things that Babashoff, for example, reportedly balked later came true; atheists cite the number of at getting her picture taken for Sports Illus- prayers that have gone unanswered. trated before the 1976 Olympics because of the jinx. (She was eventually persuaded to t would make no sense, of course, to go pose when reminded that a cover story on I through life weighing all facts equally Mark Spitz did not prevent him from win- and reconsidering one's beliefs anew each ning seven gold medals in 1972. Babashoff time an opposing fact was encountered. If a went on to win a gold medal as part of a belief has received a lifetime of support, relay team, as well as silver medals in four one is justified in being skeptical of an ob- other events.) servation or report that calls the belief into It is easy to see how regression effects question. It made sense for scientists to be

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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The regression fallacy plays a role in shaping student to arrive for school on time. A com- parents' and teachers' beliefs about the puter displayed the hypothetical student's value of reward and punishment in arrival time, which varied from 8:20 to 8:40, childrearing. All adults like to hand out re- for each of 15 consecutive days, one at a wards for good behavior, courtesy, and time. School was supposed to start at 8:30. promptness. However, regression guaran- On each day, the participants were allowed tees that on average, such extraordinary per- to praise, reprimand, or issue no comment formances will be followed by deterioration. to the student. Predictably, the participants The reward will thus appear ineffective or elected to praise the student whenever he counter-productive. In contrast, regression was early or on time and to reprimand him also tends to ensure that bad performances when he was late. The student's arrival time, will be followed by improvement, so any however, was pre-programmed and thus punishment meted out after a disappointing was not connected to the subject's response. performance will appear to have been bene- Nevertheless, due to regression alone the ficial. As psychologists Amos Tversky and student's arrival time tended to improve af- Daniel Kahneman put it, regression effects ter he was punished for being late, and to serve "to punish the administration of re- deteriorate after being praised for arriving ward and reward the administration of pun- early. As a result, 70 percent of the subjects ishment." incorrectly concluded that reprimands were This phenomenon was demonstrated by more effective than praise. an experiment in which the subjects played the role of a teacher trying to encourage a skeptical of the reports of cold fusion at the Scientists, of course, are not always in- University of Utah in 1989 because they nocent of groundless biases. The French possessed a theoretical knowledge that sug- craniologist Paul Broca (1824-1880) could gested the reports were unlikely. Each of us not accept that the German brains he ex- is equally justified in looking askance at amined were on average 100 grams heavier claims about UFOs, levitations, and miracle than his sample of French brains. So he ad- cancer cures. justed the weights of the two brain samples But how do we distinguish between the to take account of extraneous factors that legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed are known to influence brain weight, such at cold fusion and the stifling dogma of the as body size. However, Broca never made 17th-century clergymen who, doubting the same adjustment in his much-discussed Galileo's claim that the Earth was not the comparison of the brain sizes of men and center of the solar system, put him under women. house arrest for the last eight years of his Scientists' most serious biases tend to life? In part, the answer lies in the distinc- be overcome by the discipline's insistence tion between skepticism and closed-mind- on replicability and the public presentation edness. Many scientists who were skeptical of results. Findings that rest on shakv about cold fusion nevertheless tried to rep- ground do not usually survive in the intef- licate the experiment in their own labs; lectual marketplace. To a lesser extent, the Galileo's critics refused to examine the evi- same is true with regard to beliefs formed dence. Equally important, however, is the in everyday life: Our wackiest beliefs are foundation upon which a person's pre-ex- probably weeded out on the playground or, isting beliefs and theories rests. Well-sup- as we get older, by the corrective influence ported beliefs and theories have earned a of society at large. The biggest difference bit of inertia, and should not quickly be between science and everyday life is that modified or abandoned because of a few scientists use formal procedures to guard hostile "facts." But ethnic and gender ste- against bias and error-a set of procedures reotypes rest on flimsy or non-existent in- of which the average person is little aware. formation, and should quickly be cast off. They use statistical tools to guard against

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the misperception of random sequences; view ourselves so favorably is that each of control groups and random sampling avoid us uses different criteria to evaluate our the dangers of drawing inferences from in- standing on a given trait-criteria that complete and unrepresentative data. And work to our own advantage. As economist they use "blind" observers to eliminate the Thomas Schelling explains, "Everybody biasing effects of their preferences or ranks himself high in qualities he values: expectations. careful drivers give weight to care, skillful But perhaps the most fundamental safe- drivers give weight to skill, and those who guard of scientific inquiry is the require- think that, whatever else they are not, at ment that the meaning of various outcomes least they are polite, give weight to cour- be precisely specified and objectively deter- tesy, and come out high on their own scale. mined. This is something we rarely do in This is the way that every child has the best everyday life. Instead, we often allow our dog on the block." expectations to be confirmed by any of a set Another reason we hold such favorable of "multiple endpoints" after the fact.* views of ourselves is that we are prone to When a psychic predicts that "a famous self-serving assessments when it comes to politician will die this year," it is important apportioning responsibility for our suc- to specify then and there the range of cesses and failures. Athletes attribute their events that will constitute a success. Other- victories to themselves, but blame their wise, we may be overly impressed by tenu- losses on bad officiating and bad luck. Stu- ous connections between the prediction dents who perform well on an examination and a "confirming" event. Is a Supreme generally think of the test as a valid mea- Court justice a politician? Should an unsuc- sure of their knowledge; those who fail tend cessful assassination attempt count as a to think of it as arbitrary and unfair. successful prediction? This is the stuff that But our desire to believe comforting sustains belief in horoscopes, fortune cook- things about ourselves and about the world ies, and the prophesies of Nostradamus. does not mean that we willy-nilly believe what we want to believe; such flights of fan- e tend to believe what we want to be- tasy are reined in by the existence of a real w lieve. That old saw, at least, is true, world and the need to perceive it accu- and considerable evidence has been gath- rately. Rather, our motivations have their ered to support it. Much of the evidence effects more subtly, through the way we comes from research on people's assess- process information. What evidence do we ments of their own abilities. For example, a consider? How much of it do we consider? majority of Americans think that they are What criteria do we use as sufficient evi- more intelligent, more fair-minded, less dence for a belief? For things we want to prejudiced, and more skilled behind the believe, we ask only that the evidence not wheel of an automobile than the average force us to believe otherwise-a rather easy man in the street. This phenomenon is so standard to meet given the equivocal na- reliable and ubiquitous that it has come to ture of much information. For propositions be known as the "Lake Wobegon effect," we want to resist, however, we ask whether after Garrison Keillor's fictional commu- the evidence compels such a distasteful nity, where "the women are strong, the conclusion-a much more difficult stand- men are good-looking, and all the children ard to achieve. For desired conclusions, in are above average." Part of the reason we other words, it is as if we ask "Can I believe this?" but for unpalatable conclusions we 'An interesting analogue of the problem of multiple end- points is seen in the common belief that things like plane ask "Must I believe this?" The evidence re- crashes, serial-killing sprees, or birth announcements "hap- quired for affirmative answers to these two pen in threes." Such beliefs stem from the tendency for peo- questions are enormously different. By ple to allow the occurrence of the third event in the triplet to framing the question in such ways, we can define the period of time that constitutes their "happening together." If three plane crashes occur in a month, then the often believe what we prefer to believe and period of time that counts as their happening together is one satisfy ourselves that we have an objective month. If three plane crashes occur in a year, then the rele- basis for doing so. vant period of time is stretched. By allowing the window of opportunity to be sufficiently flexible, such beliefs can only There are times when our mistaken be- be confirmed. liefs about ourselves or about the world

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around us cost us little or nothing. For yield clearcut answers to many of our most most people, a belief in the curse of the pressing problems. In a world which bom- Bermuda Triangle has no immediate conse- bards us daily with conflicting reports quences. It is not so much that they hold about a variety of issues-the destructive such a belief, but that they entertain it- effects of acid rain, the cancer risk from and are entertained by it. Other, more seri- inhaling "secondary" cigarette smoke, the ous beliefs can also be without negative re- threat of AIDS to the heterosexual popula- percussions. Some people believe in one tion-we must increasingly grapple with god, some in many, and others in none; all probabilities rather than certainties. Clear of them can't be right, yet many derive thinking about issues with "messy" evi- comfort from their beliefs. But these iso- dence becomes more important even as it lated examples aside, there are often real becomes more difficult. costs of failing to perceive the world accu- We are battling against the tendency of rately. One hears from time to time of cases the human brain to impute structure and in which someone dies because an effective coherence to random patterns, to be more medical treatment was ignored in favor of impressed by confirming evidence than by some quack therapy. Can there be anything contradiction, and to be overly influenced more pitiful than a life lost in the service of by our preferences and preconceptions. some unsound belief? There may be strategies we can develop to Tolerating the occasional eccentric no- compensate for these tendencies, strategies tion is harmless enough, but by attempting not to be found in the "deterministic" sci- to turn our critical intelligence off and on ences such as chemistry, but rather in the at will, we risk losing it altogether. "When more "probabilistic" sciences such as eco- people learn no tools of judgment and nomics, psychology, and statistics. Wider merely follow their hopes," observes Har- education in these fields surely can help vard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, check the worst excesses of wrong think- "the seeds of political manipulation are ing. But the mind's quest for order does sown." seem to condemn us, ironically, to a certain The complexity of modem life does not degree of folly.

WQ SPRING 1991 59 The state of nature: Scientists are now revising old notions of natural 11c1n1101zyand order.

WQ SPRING 1991 60 The United States stands on the threshold of its third great era of environmental- ism. The new age lacks heroes like the conservationists who put their stamp on the first, or a signal event like Earth Day 1970, which defined the second. It may be a pivotal moment in history. Today's opportunity to forge a genuine environmental ethic could well be wasted, for Americans are as confused about the environment as they are eager to protect it. As Stephen Klaidman writes here, they are alarmed by exaggerated crises such as Love Canal and distracted by minor environmental threats, even as larger ones go unattended. At a deeper level, biologist Daniel Botkin says, they hold ancient and sentimental misconceptions of nature, and of man's place in it, that could stifle the emerging new environmentalism. ATURE by Daniel B. Botkin

ast June, California voters is free to live.. . . Mountain lion hunting is tried to strike a blow for the cruel and unnecessary." state's endangered moun- Americans at the end of the 20th cen- tain lions when they passed tury seem to believe that they have finally Proposition 117, protecting learned to confront environmental prob- all but the most aggressive lems such as the threat to the mountain cats from human beings. Anybody caught lion rationally, that only a lack of inforrna- killing, trapping, or transporting a moun- tion and political consensus limits their tain lion in the state now faces one year in ability to solve problems. The logic of Prop- jail and a $10,000 fine. The Wilderness So- osition 117 seems self-evident: Mountain li- ciety, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra ons will do best if left completely alone. Club all lined up behind the measure, and Their population will grow to an optimum there was nothing in the debate (such as it size, then stabilize, threatening neither their was) to suggest that Proposition 117 was own existence nor that of other species. anything but the epitome of the "good But the general view on Proposition 117, cause." State Attorney General John Van de like much of our thinking about the envi- Kamp invoked an emotional roll call of ronment today, is based on a myth, the vanished species in support of the proposi- myth that nature left to itself will find a per- tion, writing, "Although our state symbol, fect balance, that "nature knows best." It is the grizzly bear, no longer roams the wild a myth that has led to unfortunate, some- lands of California and the condor no times even disastrous, results. longer soars over our mountains, we still A classic example of the failure of the have areas where one remaining symbol of balance-of-nature myth is Kenya's Tsavo our wilderness heritage, the mountain lion, National Park. Landsat satellite images

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taken over Kenya in the late 1970s show a "natural ecological climax" meant nature curious geometric feature-two straight in a mature condition, which, once at- lines stretching 50 miles or more and con- tained, persists indefinitely without change. verging at an obtuse angle. To the east, in- Sheldrick and other specialists regarded side the 5,000 square miles of the park, a the "climax" condition as the truly natural dull brown signifies vegetation so thin that and most desirable state of wilderness. It is most of the light detected by Landsat is re- much the same idea that underlies Califor- flecting off bare soil. Outside the park, a nia's Proposition 117: Left to itself, nature garish red signifies dense vegetation. A visi- will achieve a balance. tor at Tsavo would have seen that the park But Tsavo was struck by a severe was indeed desert-like, a thin scattering of drought in 1969 and '70, and as some 6,000 live and dead shrubs and trees surrounded elephants starved to death, they destroyed by dense thickets of vegetation beyond its many of the park's remaining trees and borders. Tsavo was a photographic negative shrubs, producing the devastation still pain- of one's expectation of a park: barren in- fully visible from space many years later. side, green outside. (Lately, the park has enjoyed the beginnings After Tsavo became a park in 1948, its of a recovery.) Elephants and human be- first warden, David Sheldrick, spent years ings together had drafted the lines on the building roads, providing year-round water Landsat image. for wildlife, and eradicating poaching. The elephants at Tsavo, like California's Sheldrick apparently was convinced that he mountain lions and virtually all wildlife to- was only giving nature a benign helping day, live in a fragment of what used to be hand. Indeed, the elephants flourished. So large, often continuous habitats. In today's much so that they began consuming leaves, "ecological islands," a species can easily in- fruits, and twigs so quickly that the trees crease rapidly, exhaust its food supply, and shrubs started to die off. By 1959, starve, and suffer a rapid decline, mean- much of the park began to resemble a "lu- while causing many kinds of harm, some- nar landscape," Sheldrick's wife Daphne times even endangering the survival of later wrote in The Tsavo Story (1973). other species. In the mid-1960s, a Ford Foundation study concluded that some 3,000 elephants he final act of the tragedy at Tsavo should be shot to keep the population was being played out even as the within limits of its food supply. Sheldrick at first Earth Day in 1970 was bolster- first agreed, but then reversed himself. He ing the comforting illusion that there are decided, as his wife put it, that "the con- only two sides to any environmental issue, servation policy for Tsavo should be di- pitting environmentalists against their pro- rected towards the attainment of a natural development foes. But the disagreement at ecological climax, and that our participa- Tsavo was among conservationists who tion towards this aim should be restricted shared basic goals. to such measures as the control of fires, Sheldrick's views were consistent with poaching, and other forms of human inter- contemporary theories about population ference." To conservationists, the phrase growth and the development of forests and

Daniel B. Botkin, a fon-ner Wilson Center Fellow, is professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He recently published Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century (1990), and is the 1991 recipient of the Mitchell Prize for Sus- tamable Development.

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other communities of or- ganisms. From these theo- ries come such concepts as "carrying capacity" and "maximum sustainable yield," terms that are now regularly bruited about in newspapers and popular magazines. The theories have their origins in the mid-19th century, when the new science of ecology was born amid-and influenced by-the flowering of the A photographic negative of our expectations: A view from the air in machine age. Until recently, 1977 of Kenya's Tsavo National Park (at right), a virtual desert population theory relied al- after nearly 30 years of careful conservation efforts. most exclusively on two for- ma1 models that were heavily influenced by It also relied upon assumptions that machine-age thinking. One, called "the lo- have proved to be false. The logistic as- gistic," which was first proposed in 1849 by sumes that all flies or elephants or moun- a Belgian scientist named Pierre-Francois tain lions are identical, each contributing Verhulst, described the growth of a single equally to reproduction, mortality, growth, population; the other, called the Lotka-Vol- and reduction in available resources. And terra equations, cast predator-prey relation- although the logistic is supposed to be an ships in terms of predictable oscillations of ecological formula, it does not explicitly population. take account of changes in environment, The logistic was explained by Alfred such as variations in the availability of food Lotka in his 1925 book, Elements of Physi- and water. According to the logistic, the ele- cal Biology: Keep a population of flies in a phant population at Tsavo should have cage with a constant food supply, he said, grown smoothly to an equilibrium. and a predictable pattern will be followed. It is one thing to err in the management When there are few flies, food is not a limit- of African elephants or California mountain ing factor and the flies will reproduce rap- lions. But the logic of the S-shaped curve idly. But eventually they begin to exceed has also been taken literally by, among oth- their food supply; deaths gradually rise to ers, the specialists who manage the world's equal births and the population arrives at a fisheries directly, such as those at the U.S. steady size, its "carrying capacity." These National Marine Fisheries Service, and ideas can be expressed with a simple equa- through international treaties. From the lo- tion in calculus that produces an elegant, S- gistic comes the concept that wildlife biolo- shaped growth curve. gists call the "maximum sustainable yield The logistic had another elegant quality: population," which says that a population If a population at carrying capacity strayed grows fastest when it is at exactly one-half from that balance, it would smoothly re- of its carrying capacity. So fisheries manag- turn to it. In short, the logistic seemed to ers the world over have made it their goal show once again that there is a balance of to allow just a large enough catch every nature. year to maintain this ideal population.

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The S-Shaped Curve even in the laboratory. Yet these flawed models are still used by a surprising num- ber of fish and wildlife conservation au- thorities throughout the world. They are not products simply of flawed mathematics or incorrect calculations but of a funda- mentally mistaken view of how nature works, a view that, as we shall see, is in- DOP creasingly being undercut by new findings. Then, they believe, the fish population will Forestry is a very different field, but the grow at its maximum rate every year, like a underlying mythology is the same. George jet engine at "best power" cruising speed. Perkins Marsh (1801-82), the intellectual A classic example of the failure of this father of conservation in America, was idea is the Peruvian anchovy fishery, once struck while serving as U.S. Ambassador to the world's largest commercial fishery. In Egypt and Italy by the impact of man on the 1970, fishermen caught eight million tons environment in these ancient countries. of anchovies off Peru, but two years later "Nature, left undisturbed," he wrote in the catch plummeted to only two million Man and Nature (1864), perhaps with his tons, and it continued to shrink. Yet this native Vermont in mind, "so fashions her fishery was actively managed according to territory as to give it almost unchanging international agreement for a maximum permanence of form, outline, and propor- sustainable yield. This failure has been re- tion, except when shattered by geologic peated over and over again.* When Con- convulsions; and in these comparatively gress enacted a forward-looking piece of rare cases of derangement, she sets herself legislation to "save the whales" in 1972, the at once to repair the superficial damage, Marine Mammal Protection Act, the effort and to restore, as nearly as practicable, the fell victim to the same faulty concepts dur- former aspect of her dominion." ing international negotiations to determine From Marsh and others came the idea the permissible whale catch. Gradually, of "ecological succession": A clearing in a however, administrators have since reme- forest would grow back through a series of died that mistake. regular and predictable stages to a final, I have searched the scientific literature constant, stable "climax" forest. The climax for 10 years and found no cases where a forest was believed to have the greatest population outside a laboratory followed amount of organic matter, the greatest di- the S-shaped curve. Only microbes or flies versity of species. Although forest biologists or bees grown in a laboratory do that. And have rarely relied upon mathematical for- the regular oscillations predicted for preda- mulas, the climax forest had the elegant tor and prey by the companion btka-Vol- qualities of a logistic population: undis- terra model have never been sustained, turbed it was constant, and when disturbed it grew back to its prior constant condition. likewise, Pacific sardines, once a major species off the Cali- The climax forest represented the balance fornia coast, suffered a catastrophic decline in the 1950s that continued through the 1970s. The Atlantic menhaden catch of nature. peaked at 785,000 tons in 1956, and dropped to 178,000 tons It was, in a sense, a walk in the woods as in 1969. Atlantic herring and Norwegian cod experienced the same kind of decline. The North Atlantic haddock catch, a graduate student during the 1960s that which had averaged 50,000 tons for many years, increased to led me to question this idea of a climax for- 155,000 tons in 1965 but then crashed, reaching a mere 12,000 tons by the early 1970s. est and all that it implied. The woods was

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New Jersey's Hutcheson Memorial Forest, theories to write laws, set policies, and established as a natural preserve in 1954 manage natural resources. when Rutgers University was given a 65- acre tract of woodland known to have been ne reason for our reluctance to intact-not clearcut or burned-since part with these theories is that they 1701. The creation of the preserve became 0grow out of very deeply rooted no- a minor media event. Sinclair Oil, which tions about nature. "Everything in the had helped purchase it for Rutgers, placed world is marvelously ordered by divine a major national magazine advertisement providence and wisdom for the safety and that made much of the conventional wis- protection of us all. . . . Who cannot won- dom, referring to the woods as a place der at this harmony of things, at this sym- where "nature has been working for thou- phony of nature which seems to will the sands of years to perfect this 'climax' com- well-being of the world?" wrote Cicero in munity in which trees, plants, animals, and The Nature of the Gods (44 B.c.). The idea is all the creatures of the forest have reached repeated throughout Western history. Na- a state of harmonious balance with their ture was perceived as perfectly ordered and environment. Left undisturbed, this stabi- stable, constant unless disturbed, and tend- lized society will continue to perpetuate it- ing to recover from disturbance by return- self century after century." Life and Audu- ing to its former condition. This perfect or- ban also took note of the remarkable der was also a primary argument for the "climax forest." existence of God, for only a Supreme Being But like the Peruvian anchovy fishery could create a perfectly ordered nature. and Tsavo National Park, Hutcheson Me- How, then, could one explain the occa- morial Forest did not remain constant. sional absence of order? Western culture Originally filled with oaks, hickories, and traditionally has given two answers, both chestnuts, it was by the 1970s becoming a pointing at human beings. The first blames forest of sugar and Norway maples in the human beings for what they have done; the mature stands, with Japanese honeysuckles second blames them for what they have not and Asian trees of heaven in the gaps. It done. Although casting humans as the de- now appears that the sugar maple was arti- spoilers of nature may have seemed like a ficially suppressed in the climax forest new idea to the environmentalists of the prior to 1701 by frequent fires, which were 1960s, who were prone to see in the West probably started by Indians. Two hundred only a tradition of exploitation of the envi- years after these outbreaks of fire ceased, ronment, it is actually quite ancient. Pliny the woodlands began to change. Modem the Elder (A.D. 23-79) long ago contrasted human influences, of course, contributed: the beauty and bountifulness of the Earth The Norway maple, for example, was intro- without human interference with the im- duced into North America by Europeans. perfections of people who abused the Hutcheson Forest is not unique. Written Earth. He speculated that there was a di- histories, fire scars in trees, and fossil pol- vine purpose for beasts of the wilderness: len deposited in lakes provided evidence in They guarded the Earth, protecting it from the 1960s and '70s to show that all forests human actions. are continually changing, and have done so The second explanation for the absence since the ice ages. But ecologists and con- of order-blaming humans for what they servationists continued-and, to a surpris- have not done-emphasizes human stew- ing extent, still continue-to use the old ardship of nature. ~odput us here to com-

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THE FIRST ENVIRONMENTALISTS Most histori(~~7.fsee edyenvironmentalism as a reaction to Western industrialisation. Britain's Richard Grove, in an essay adapted from Nature (May 3, 1990), proposes a new view. Anxieties about soil erosion and deforesta- well as mental terms, an allegory of a whole tion are to be found in the literature of clas- world, and observations of their ecological sical Greece, imperial Rome, and Mauryan demise were easily converted into premo- India, and in a sporadic fashion in the annals nitions of environmental destruction on a of the early Spanish and Portuguese em- wider scale. pires. But it was not until the mid-17th cen- It was on the French island colony of tury that awareness of the ecological price of Mauritius that the early environmental de- capitalism started to grow into a fully bate came to a head. Between 1768 and fledged theory about the limits of the natural 18 10, the island was the location for some of resources of the Earth. the earliest experiments in systematic forest Some historians have argued that Euro- conservation, pollution control, and fisher- pean colonialism was not only highly de- ies protection. These initiatives were carried structive in environmental terms but that its out by scientists who, characteristically, very destructiveness stemmed from "imperi- were both followers of Jean-Jacques Rous- alist" attitudes toward nature. But that hy- seau and adherents of the kind of rigorous pothesis does not stand up. Ironically, a new empiricism associated with mid-18th-cen- sensitivity to the environment developed as tury French Enlightenment botany. Their a product of the specific, and ecologically conservation measures stemmed from an destructive, conditions of the commercial awareness of the potentially global impact of expansion of the Dutch and English East In- modern economic activity, from a fear of dia Companies and, a little later, of the the climatic consequences of deforestation Compagnie des Indes. and, not least, from concern over species ex- Colonial expansion also promoted the tinctions. The "Romantic" scientists of Mau- rapid diffusion of new scientific ideas by a ritius, and above all Pierre Poivre, Philibert coterie of committed professional scientists Comerson, and Bernardin de St. Pierre can, and environmental commentators. In India, in hindsight, be seen as the pioneers of mod- for example, in 1838, there were over 800 ern environmentalism. surgeons. During the early 18th century the After the British annexed Mauritius in need to understand unfamiliar floras, fau- 18 10, these environmental prescriptions nas, and geologies, both for commercial were transferred to St. Helena and eventu- purposes and to counter environmental and ally to India itself. From 1820, they were health risks, propelled many erstwhile physi- strongly reinforced by the writings of Al- cians and surgeons into consulting positions exander von Humboldt, who strove in and employment with the trading compa- successive books to promulgate a new view nies as fully fledged professional and state of the relations between man and the natu- scientists long before such a phenomenon ral world which was drawn almost entirely existed in Europe. By the end of the 18th from the holist and unitary thinking of century their new environmental theories, Hindu philosophers. His subordination of along with an ever-growing flood of in- man to other forces in the cosmos formed formation about the natural history and eth- the basis for a wide-ranging and scientifi- nology of the colonies, quickly diffused cally reasoned interpretation of the ecologi- through the meetings and publications of a cal threat posed by the unrestrained activi- whole set of academies and scientific soci- ties of man. eties throughout the colonial world. This interpretation became especially in- The first of these societies appeared in fluential among the Scottish scientists em- the island colonies. This was no accident. In ployed by the East India Company. Several many respects, the isolated oceanic islands of them, in particular Alexander Gibson, Ed- stimulated a detached self-consciousness ward Balfour, and Hugh Cleghorn, became and a critical view of European origins and enthusiastic proselytizers of a conservation- behavior, of the kind dramatically prefig- ist message which provided the basis for the ured by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe pioneering of a forest conservancy system in (1719). Such islands became, in practical as India. For example, in 1847 the directors of

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the East India Company indicated their con- ter of human extinction as a consequence of version to the need for conservation with a climatic change was clearly a shocking psy- remarkable circular on the dangers of artifi- chological development. But it was consis- cially induced climate change. The subject, tent with fears that had been growing within they said, "is one having strong practical the scientific community. Awareness of spe- bearing on the welfare of mankind, and we cies rarity and the possibility of extinction are anxious to obtain extensive and accurate had existed since the mid-17th century as information in regard to it." Western biological knowledge started to em- Time and again, from the mid-18th cen- brace the whole tropical world. The extinc- tury onward, scientists discovered that the tion of the auroch in 1627 in Poland and the threat of artificially induced climatic dodo by 1670 in Mauritius had attracted change, with all it implied, was one of the considerable attention. few really effective instruments that could The appearance in 1859 of Darwin's Ori- be employed in persuading governments of gin of Species, with its emphasis on the place the seriousness of environmental change. of extinction in the dynamics of natural se- The argument that rapid deforestation might lection, helped make species protection a cause rainfall decline and, eventually, fam- ine, was one that was quickly grasped by the East India Company, fearful as it always was of agrarian economic failure and social un- rest. Unfortunately, the argument often re- quired an initial famine to lend credibility to scientists. In India, for example, serious droughts in 1835-39, the early 1860s, and 1877-78 were all followed by the renewal of state programs designed to strengthen forest protection. The question of climatic change had thus become international in scope by the mid- 1860s. It was reinforced by more detailed re- search that raised the possibility that the very constitution of the atmosphere might be changing. Such views found an early sup- porter in J. Spotswood Wilson, who pre- sented a paper in 1858 to the British Associa- tion for the Advancement of Science on "The General and Gradual Desiccation of the Earth and Atmosphere." Wilson stated New Guinea, 1776. that upheaval of the land, "destruction of forests and waste by irrigation" were not suf- more valid concept in the eyes of govern- ficient to explain the available facts on cli- ment, and the period 1860-70 produced a mate change, and that the cause lay in the flurry of attempts to legislate for the protec- changing proportions of oxygen and car- tion of threatened species. Once more, the bonic acid in the atmosphere. Their respec- initial locale was an island colony, Tasma- tive ratios, he believed, were connected to nia, where a comprehensive body of laws, the relative rates of their production and ab- designed mainly to protect the indigenous sorption by the "animal and vegetable king- birds, was introduced in 1860. dom." The author of this precocious paper So, by the early 1860s, anxieties about ar- concluded with a dismal set of remarks. "As tificially induced climatic change and spe- inferior races preceded man and enjoyed ex- cies extinctions had reached a climax. The istence before the earth had arrived at a subsequent evolution of the awareness of a state suitable to his constitution," he global environmental threat has, to date, warned, "it is more probable that others will consisted almost entirely of a reiteration of a succeed him when the conditions necessary set of ideas that had reached full maturity for his existence have passed away." over a century ago. The pity is that it has The raising, as early as 1858, of the spec- taken so long for them to be taken seriously.

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plete the perfect harmony of nature. If Flood created "the ruins of a broken there was disharmony, we had failed to world" where before had existed perfect or- carry out God's work. "For whom then der and harmony, a world "smooth, regular shall we say the world was made?" asked and uniform; without Mountains and with- Cicero. Why would the gods labor for trees out a Sea." or plants, which are "devoid of sense or Beginning in the 17th century, the rise feeling," or for animals, "dumb creatures of Newtonian mechanics and the work of who have no understanding"? Stewardship scientists such as Johannes Kepler (1571- is the main idea that animates such older 1630), along with the invention of such mainstream conservation groups as the Na- marvelous devices as the steam engine, cre- tional Wildlife Federation (founded in ated a new understanding of the universe. 1936) and the Conservation Foundation They also bred new metaphors, fostering (founded in 1948, and since merged with the idea that the Earth and the solar system the World Wildlife Fund). operate like clockwork, like a machine. Sci- entific discoveries, such as the recognition efore the rise of modem science in that the planets do not orbit in perfect cir- the 17th century, people explained cles around the sun, overwhelmed argu- B the structure of nature in terms of ments that there was a perfect order in the divine order, but they had only organic observable architecture of the universe. No metaphors, derived from plants and ani- longer was the existence of God proved by mals and especially the human body, to de- the perfect and fixed structure of the world. scribe its workings. The first person to de- Now, the dynamism of nature came to be scend into an active volcano and return to seen as a demonstration of God's power. write about it, a 17th-century Jesuit priest The visible physical order of old was re- named Athanasius Kircher, began his analy- placed by a new conceptual order. A per- sis by citing Virgil, who believed that the fectly working, idealized machine could be "belching rocks" of volcanoes were the seen as the product of a perfect God. torn entrails of the mountains. Water mixed "These Motions of Generations and Corrup- with ashes, Kircher wrote in M~indusSub- tions," wrote Sir Anthony Hale in 1677, terraneus (1638), produced a continual "are so wisely and admirably ordered and "conception and birth" of fires in Vesuvius contempered, and so continually managed and Aetna. The fires grew and matured un- and ordered by the wise Providence of the til, becoming ripe, they erupted. To Rector of all things," that "things are kept Kircher, a volcano was like a rose growing in a certain due stay and equability." into flower. The idea of order survived but the or- The organic view suggested that the im- ganic view of nature did not fare as well. perfections of the environment were mani- True, in all of the arts, scientific discoveries festations of the aging of Mother Earth. bred a new aesthetic appreciation of the ir- Mountains were her warts, infertile farm- regular and the asymmetric. English essay- land her wasted skin. Christians tended to ist Joseph Addison (1672- 17 19), for exam- believe that these organic processes, the ple, now found an "agreeable horror" in chaos of nature itself, had been set in mo- ocean storms. Later, William Wordsworth tion by the expulsion of man from the Gar- and the other 19th-century romanticists den of Eden and the Flood. One of took custody of the organic metaphor. Kircher's contemporaries, a theologian But it was the mechanistic view that named Thomas Burnet, wrote that the prevailed after the 17th century. A mecha-

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The public's fascination with the natural world during the machine age made Mr. Wyld's Giant Globe, or Model of the Earth, a noted London tourist attraction from 1851-61. nistic nature-except in our own age, an management of natural resources and the oxymoron-would have the attributes of a environment during the 20th century. It is well-oiled machine, including the capacity reflected in the approach of the lumber to keep operating, replaceable parts, and company that clearcuts a diverse tropical the ability to maintain a steady state, and forest and replants it with a single species thus to be in balance. Births and deaths, of tree, and in a U.S. Army Corps of Engi- immigration and emigration, the input of neers project that makes a meandering sunlight and the loss of energy as heat, the river into a straight canal. The ultimate intake and loss of nutrients, would always irony is that the mechanistic view unites maintain life in a constant state of abun- the most extreme preservationists, who be- dance and activity. This is the view re- lieve that the machinery of nature hnc- flected in the writings of George Perkins tions perfectly without human intervention, Marsh, in the elegance of the S-shaped and nature's most extreme exploiters. population curve, and in the management of Tsavo National Park. believe that we are living through a But if nature is a machine, then the flip- time of change, a transition from the side is that human beings ought to be able mechanical age to a new era that ap- to re-engineer nature and improve it. This pears to us as the space and computer age. is the side that has dominated much of our We are gradually moving away from the

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mechanical view of nature, toward a differ- by the life-plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, ent set of perceptions and assumptions that and protists-that it hosts. After all, the to- will blend the organic and the inorganic. tal mass of all living things on Earth is a But we have not yet settled on the right tiny fraction-two-tenths of one part in one metaphors, images, and symbols. billion-of the mass of the planet. But now The scientific basis of this new under- even geologists, who study the least change- standing was prepared almost a century able face of the planet, are seeing connec- ago by a Harvard biological chemist named tions. The theory of plate tectonics shows Lawrence Henderson in The Fitness of the that the gradual shifting of plates has re- Environment (1913). Henderson was struck distributed life around the globe, and that by the unique set of circumstances that some forms of life have evolved to capture made life on Earth possible. The planet is the benefits of geologic change. The Earth's endowed with water, for example, which major iron ore deposits are, in turn, the re- "possesses certain nearly unique qualifica- sult of global environmental changes tions which are largely responsible for caused by bacteria on the early Earth. Like- making the earth habitable." Its high spe- wise, atmospheric scientists have found cific heat means that oceans, lakes, and that the evolution of plant life has greatly streams tend to maintain a constant tem- influenced the composition of the atmo- perature; such bodies of water also moder- sphere. ate summer and winter temperatures on land. rom these and other findings a new During the last two decades, scientists view of nature is gradually emerg- such as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis Fing. No longer is it possible to see have begun to appreciate that the environ- nature as a stately clock-like mechanism, ment is "fit" for life in part because life has slow, deliberate, static. Nature as we are evolved to take advantage of the environ- coming to know it is a patchwork of com- ment and has also altered the environment. plex systems with many things happening Lovelock and Margulis have taken this in- at once and with each system undergoing sight to an extreme, reviving organic think- changes at many scales of time and space. ing about nature. Lovelock argues in Gaia: Human beings, far from being alien inter- A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) that lopers who disturb the timeless rhythms of "the biosphere is a self-regulating entity nature, are intrinsic elements of the natural with the capacity to keep our planet healthy order. Chance events seem to play an im- by controlling the chemical and physical portant role. environment." The Gaia hypothesis- This is a very different nature from the named after the Greek goddess of the simple, one-thing-at-a-time, nothing-left-to- Earth-suggests that nature is akin to a sen- chance, everything-calculable-exactly na- tient being. One problem with this view- ture of the machine age. Complexity, as with the mechanistic view of old-is that chance, simultaneity of events, history, and nature never achieves the self-regulating change are the qualities of nature. "steady state" of perfection that Gaia's ad- Perhaps the hardest of these ideas for us vocates imagine. to accept is that of natural change. Do we But the notion that life and environ- open a Pandora's Box by admitting some ment interact is important. The traditional kinds of change? How do we manage some- view in science is that the Earth changes thing that is always changing? If we con- slowly and evenly, and is very little affected cede that some kinds of change are good,

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how can we decide which kinds are not? cherished beliefs about the pristine balance We are learning, however, that we have of nature. Learning to manage the environ- no choice but to accept change and to dis- ment is in many cases like learning the les- tinguish the good from the bad. Nature it- son Alice did in trying to reach a looking- self must be our guide. Changes that we im- glass house in the Lewis Carroll classic: pose on the landscape that are natural in Sometimes the only way to reach a thing is quality and speed are likely to be benign. to walk away from it. Rapid changes, or those that are novel in Conservationists in Michigan learned the history of biological evolution-such as that lesson. Today, the warbler survives in a the introduction of many new chemicals preserve of 38,000 acres where since 1976 into the environment-are likely to cause it has been government policy to set con- problems. Global warming, for example, trolled fires periodically. This small episode poses a challenge to us not so much be- may mark a turning point in the modem cause of the size of the change that is in the understanding and management of nature. offing but because of the unprecedented The warbler population is not managed to speed with which it may occur. obtain some magical number-a carrying On a practical level, this new view of capacity or maximum sustainable yield- nature leads to several possibilities for the but merely to be sizeable enough to mini- management of natural resources. Con- mize the chance of extinction. The idea is sider the Kirtland's warbler, a small song- to move beyond constancy and static stabil- bird that nests only in young jack pine ity-to manage for the recurrence of desir- woodlands in the coarse, sandy soils of Central Michigan. A friendly, pretty animal once proposed as the state bird, the warbler was the first songbird subject, in 195 1, to a com- plete census. By the early 1960s, the population had fallen by half, leaving only about 200 males. Conservation- ists and scientists realized that the warbler was in trouble because its habitat, the jack pine forest, was dis- appearing. The reason, ironically, was that well-intentioned authorities were suppressing forest fires in Cen- tral Michigan. But jack pines require such blazes to reproduce; their cones release seeds only after they have been heated by fires, and the seeds germinate only in the sunny clearings created by fires. It was not easy for scientists to persuade government conservation The shape of things to come? The tracks of subatomic authorities that they would have to particles, as revealed here by false-color bubble chamber start controlled forest fires to save photography, suggest the randomness and irregularity the warbler. That flatly contradicted that scientists are now discovering in nature.

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able conditions. tion, and where we will come out cannot Another goal can be the persistence easily be foreseen. The science of ecology over time within some desirable range. We lacks the equivalent of a Newtonian phys- could manage elephants at Tsavo so that ics-a coherent set of laws that explain the they are reasonably visible to tourists yet dynamics of nature rather than its struc- allow their number to vary with changes in ture. It awaits a genius on the order of climate and other conditions. Gone are the Newton or Einstein to create a new "math- stringent goals of a single carrying capacity, ematics of complex systems" that renders a perfectly constant climax ecosystem, a nature in all of its complexity, capturing the maximum sustainable production. play of chance, randomness, and variability. This emerging perspective can be ap- And ecologists are hardly alone in appreci- plied to a variety of environmental prob- ating the need to come to terms with such lems. For example, it suggests that on the factors. Some physicists, astronomers, nation's farms, integrated pest manage- paleobiologists, climatologists, and others ment, with its mix of biological controls recognize that the natural processes they and some benign artificial chemicals, study are not simple, regular, or certain, should be preferred over intense use of that what some now call "chaos" is ever chemical pesticides. Flood control projects present. should no longer include the straight-line As we search for new ways to under- canals of machine-age surveying; designers stand nature, we need not throw out the should try to maintain the mixture of habi- machine and organic metaphors com- tats that a natural flood plain has (as Fred- pletely. From the machine metaphor we erick Law Olmstead did a century ago in need the notion that systems can be ana- Back Bay Boston). Commercial foresters lyzed, cause and effect understood, and re- should adapt to local conditions, clear- pairs made. From the organic metaphor we cutting on a limited scale in regions (such need the idea of history, and of a beginning as New England) where disturbances are and end, of individuality. Computers sug- normal, the soil is fertile, and forests grow gest one avenue toward a new understand- back relatively quickly, but selectively log- ing. Computer games children play make ging other areas. And all logging should be familiar complexity, surprises, randomness, avoided in certain tropical forests and other and the simultaneity of events in a rapidly areas that have been untouched and where, changing situation. Our children will have because of poor soil, the prospects for an easier time conceiving of the nature we regeneration are bad. know from scientific observations than those of us who grew up building erector- ome of these ideas are familiar; what set towers and cranes driven by electric they still lack is a truly unifying vision motors-simple machines with a single and rationale. At the level of ideas equilibrium. Perhaps one of these children and metaphors, our culture is in a transi- will become the Einstein of ecology.

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MUDDLINGTHROUGH by Stephen Klaidman

wo weeks into the Middle It is hardly surprising, therefore, that East War a distraught At- puzzled Americans have a hard time sorting lanta Constitution editorial out serious environmental threats from writer declared on a televi- trivial ones. As EPA surveys regularly dem- sion news broadcast that onstrate, Americans misjudge these risks. the Iraqi oil spill in the Per- "The remaining and emerging environ- sian Gulf had thrown her into "despair." mental risks considered most serious by The same day, the New York Times and the the general public today," an EPA panel re- Washington Post published equivocal news ported last year, "are different from those stories about a U.S. Environmental Protec- considered most serious by the technical tion Agency (EPA) decision to require an professionals charged with reducing envi- Arizona utility company to spend $2.3 bil- ronmental risk." The regulators and scien- lion at one power plant to try to eradicate a tists stress global warming and the deple- seasonal blue haze that sometimes ob- tion of the ozone layer, the public worries scures views of the Grand Canyon. A week about hazardous waste dumps and ground- earlier the Times and the Post carried water pollution. And in general it is the lengthy reports under sharply conflicting public's concerns that shape policy. headlines on the cancer risk posed by There is, of course, a vague awareness dioxin. "High Dioxin Levels Linked to Can- among the public that environmental cer" said the Times; "Extensive Study Finds choices mean trade-offs: A better view of Reduced Dioxin Danger" said the Post. the Grand Canyon, for example, will mean These are the actions of an environmen- bigger utility bills for citizens of Arizona. tally conscious but confused nation. Envi- But neither public opinion nor public pol- ronmentalists are responsible for most of icy is guided by a comprehensive vision the consciousness and much of the confu- that is consistent with the broader eco- sion (although there is plenty of blame to nomic and social goals of American society. pass around). Because it takes a real cancer In a survey conducted by the New York scare to make Americans buy less-than-per- Times in 1989, an astonishing 80 percent of feet-looking apples, and because it will take those polled agreed with the proposition an imminent threat of floods and parched that "Protecting the environment is so im- earth to make them take the greenhouse portant that requirements and standards effect seriously (not to mention the fact that cannot be too high, and continuing envi- taking such challenges seriously means ronmental improvements must be made re- spending a lot of money), environmental- gardless of cost." All environmental stand- ists have always felt forced to manufacture ards? Regardless of cost? Such sentiments,

crises and exaggerate risks to provoke PO-0 in a nation that already spends $90 billion litical action. The news media leap on the annually on pollution control, cannot be story in its most dramatic form, rarely clari- the product of a rational approach to envi- fymg the issues. And so a crisis is born. ronmental problems.

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Science cannot be relied upon to extri- aware without developing a true environ- cate us from our dilemma over what to do mental ethic. about environmental challenges. Advances in ecology, toxicology, and other fields have odern environmentalism was contributed to our relatively new-found born a mere three decades ago solicitude toward the Earth. But despite the when Rachel Carson published increasing sophistication of the environ- Silent Spring (1962), an eloquent warning mental sciences-including the perfection about the destruction wrought by synthetic of highly precise measurement technol- chemicals such as DDT, Aldrin, Chlordane, ogies such as gas chromatography-there and Heptachlor. Carson took aim not only is much that we do not know. Scientists of- at industry, but at much of the existing con- ten alert us to potential risks long before servation movement in America, founded they can quantify and assess them. Uncer- more than a century earlier by the lawyer- tainty plagues researchers over a whole legislator-diplomat George Perkins Marsh. range of phenomena: low-level radiation; Marsh lamented man's destruction of the oil and chemical spills; air pollution (in- environment, but he was equally clear door and outdoor); and water pollution about humanity's right to use the Earth for (groundwater and drinking water). How its own purposes. Man, he reminded his does one assess the risks posed by doses of readers, is "a power of a higher order than carcinogens measured in parts per billion, any of the other forms of animated life, or of natural toxins and man-made toxins which, like him, are nourished at the table measured in parts per trillion? of bounteous nature." Officials who favor doing nothing more Carson attacked this notion head on. than additional research usually have two "The 'control of nature,'" she declared, "is imposing allies: inertia and powerful eco- a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of nomic interest groups. Environmentalists, the Neanderthal Age of biology and philos- on the other hand, must create a sense of ophy, when it was supposed that nature ex- urgency to motivate the public and put ists for the convenience of man. The con- pressure on policymakers. To do this they cepts and practices of applied entomology create crises, not out of whole cloth, but for the most part date from that Stone Age often based on evidence that is meager, at of science. It is our alarming misfortune least by the standards of science. This pro- that so primitive a science has armed itself cess does not necessarily lead to bad policy. with the most modem and terrible weap- Indeed, in some cases-global warming ons, and that in turning them against the comes to mind-it may be the only way to insects it has also turned them against the get action in time to make a difference. But earth." this haphazard lurching from crisis to crisis Carson's outrage was deeply felt, but frequently leads to costly errors, and always Marsh, too, was motivated by a concern for leaves us woefully ill-informed about the the environment. The question of whether ecological and health issues that confront humankind should assume stewardship of us. We have become environmentally nature, managing it prudently for human

Stephen Klaidman, a fanner Wilson Center Guest Scholar, is a Fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He has worked as a12 editor and reporter at the New York Times and Washington Post and as chief editorial writer of the International Herald Tribune. His new book, Health in the Headlines: The Stories Behind the Stories, will be published in June by Oxford Univer- sity Press.

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benefit, as implied by Marsh, or accommodate itself to the Earth's natural order, as Carson believes, is not laid to rest by invective. Marsh's perspective sees humans as paramount and is strongly grounded in scientific evi- dence and argument. It en- courages reasoned debate on the most compelling of all grounds: human self-in- terest. Carson's argument is nature-centered and polariz- ing. Even James E. Love- lock, the British scientist Earth Day 1970: Media event? who speaks of nature in near-mystical terms in Gaia: A New Look at cies that reflect it. Instead, we lurch from Life on Earth (1979), notes, "When Rachel crisis to crisis. Carson made us aware of the dangers aris- How this happens, and what it costs us, ing from the mass application of toxic can be appreciated by reviewing three re- chemicals, she presented her arguments in cent "crises": one exaggerated, one virtu- the manner of an advocate rather than that ally an illusion, and one likely all too real. of a scientist. In other words, she selected the evidence to prove her case." Lovelock notes that the chemical indus- try responded to Carson in kind, a re- sponse, he wrote, that may have set the pat- n 1953, when the Hooker Chemical tern of self-serving environmental Company turned over its Love Canal argument. Industry generally has been re- property to the Niagara Falls, N.Y., fractory, for the unsurprising reason that Board of Education for $1, the canal (by environmental protection cuts profit mar- then covered over) held roughly 2 1,000 gins: Despite the public's professed con- tons of chemical wastes, ranging from ben- cern for the environment (see box, p. 80), zene to trichlorethylene.* The deep, clay- catalytic converters don't sell cars. lined waste dump was considered adequate Undoubtedly, good things came out of by the standards of the day, but because the Silent Spring. It awakened the environmen- board insisted upon building a school on tal consciousness of the nation and led to the site, the deed specified that the board controls on DDT and other pesticides and would accept all risk and liability. In 1957, herbicides (some of which, however, despite warnings by Hooker officials, the turned out to be excessive). But the echoes board also traded land with developers, of Carson's clarion call over these past who built houses in the area. three decades have drowned out cooldis- Over the years, a few people near the cussion and helped prevent us, ironically, from arriving at a meaningful environmen- 'Much of what follows is drawn from Martin Linsky's excel- lent account in How the Press Affects Federal Policymaking tal ethic and sensible environmental poli- (1986), of which he was co-editor.

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AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS REPORT, 1970-91

Since 1970, the United States has spent some $700 billion on the war against pollution and billions more in related fields, such as conservation. The results so far are mixed. AIR Since the 1970 Clean Air Act, emis- Wild and Scenic Rivers System's "pro- sions of many pollutants have dropped: lead tected" list, a twelvefold increase. "Non- by 96 percent, sulfur dioxide by 28 percent, point" pollution (runoff from streets and particulates by 61 percent. But increasing farms) and groundwater contamination are use of automobiles (there was one car for a big concern; one study found 46 pesticides every 2.5 Americans in 1970; one for every in the groundwater of 38 states, tainting the 1.7 in 1990) has pushed up emissions of drinking water of half the populace. ozone, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen ox- ides. Some 150 million Americans breathe TOXICS Cleanup work has begun on air considered unhealthy by the EPA, cost- only 261 of the approximately 31,000 haz- ing an estimated $40 billion annually in ardous waste sites discovered by the EPA as health-care outlays and lost productivity. part of the $8.5 billion Superfund program. New on the EPA's most wanted list: "green- house" gas carbon dioxide, emissions of PESTICIDES More worrisome to the which have grown by 1.4 percent annually EPA than hazardous waste dumps or air pol- since 1970, and airborne toxic chemicals. lution, pesticide residues on food have come to public attention, ironically, as a result of WATER One of the rallying points for the false alarm over Alar. Another concern: Earth Day 1970, then-dirty and dying Lake Ninety percent of pesticides end up as runoff Erie has made a rally of its own. As a result in waterways. Over four billion pounds of of the 1972 Clean Water Act, 400,000 lake pesticides are sold worldwide each year. acres and 47,000 miles of rivers and streams are cleaner today. Some 8,400 miles of wa- SOLID WASTE Between 1970 and terways have been added to the National 1988, annual U.S. output of solid waste (i.e.

canal suffered bums, itchy skin, and blis- area, state Commissioner of Health Robert ters, and a number of trees mysteriously Whalen was announcing a "great and im- shrivelled up and died, but little was made minent peril" to Love Canal residents and of these incidents. Then, in 1976, the Niag- recommending the evacuation of pregnant ara Gazette reported that the New York women and very young children from one State Department of Environmental Con- part of the Love Canal site; President servation was investigating the canal as a Jimmy Carter designated it an emergency source of a flame retardant called Mirex, area and Governor Hugh L. Carey an- which had been found in Lake Ontario fish. nounced that the state would buy the From that point, the crisis built rapidly. The houses of 236 Love Canal families. There Gazette jumped on the story (and reporter still were no studies demonstrating any Michael Brown later helped make it na- threats to health. tional news with articles in the Atlantic and By December 1979, the federal govern- the New York Times Magazine in 1979); ment had filed a $124.5 million lawsuit Representative John LaFalce, the district's against Hooker and local authorities. Ac- congressman, also took up the cause. Both cording to Jeffrey Miller, who headed an looked for links between Hooker, a suitable EPA hazardous waste task force, the agency corporate villain, and the health complaints launched the suit with two main goals in of the Love Canal residents. By August mind: to get Congress to pass hazardous 1978, based on tests that revealed the pres- waste legislation and to get the press off its ence of several chemicals in the Love Canal back for inept handling of hazardous waste

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Fighting Pollution garbage) rose by nearly 25 percent, to 160 million tons, or 1,455 pounds per person. plus solid waste disposal) Castoff plastics, up by 14 percent annually since 1960, now account for 20 percent of 2 U.S. waste by volume. Nearly 75 percent of 65 American garbage still ends up in landfills, with half the remainder incinerated and half 60 recycled. Ten U.S. states have mandatory re- cycling laws; more than 1,000 communities 8 55 have started curbside pickup programs. c &? 50 is LAND CONSERVATION Since 1970, U.S. national parks have expanded by 50 million acres (up by 167 percent), national wildlife refuges by 60 million acres (up species have become extinct in this period, threefold), the national wilderness preserva- among them Sampson's pearly mussel. Five tion system by 81 million acres (up nine- species have recovered and been removed fold), and national forests by 4 million acres from the list since 1985, most recently the (up 2.2 percent). But most growth occurred purple-spined hedgehog cactus. during the 1970s and early '80s. Meanwhile, some 300-400,000 acres of wetlands, irre- OZONE DEPLETION In the 1987 placeable habitats for many fish, birds, and Montreal Protocol, the major industrial na- plants, are lost annually to development. tions agreed to a 50 percent cut in produc- tion of the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that ENDANGERED SPECIES During the erode the Earth's protective ozone layer. In 1980s, 28 American animal species were put 1989, the U.S. and other countries vowed to on the threatened list, 32 on the endangered halt all production by the year 2000. Yet list. The number of plant species on the lists CFCs already in the atmosphere will con- jumped from 58 in 1980 to 205 in 1989. Six tinue to do harm.

problems. The EPA still had no scientific ev- Ultimately, Love Canal cost the taxpay- idence to establish Hooker's liability, so it ers some $50 million, not to mention un- commissioned a pilot study to look for told anguish. And all, apparently, for chromosomal damage. The results seemed naught. Indeed, within a year the New York to show some deviations, but the study Times ruefully concluded that "it may well lacked a control population and was not turn out that the public suffered less from conclusive. Nevertheless, the results wound the chemicals there than from the hysteria up, through a leak, on page one of the New generated by flimsy research irresponsibly York Times. handled." Later studies by the Centers for The alarming story unleashed a media Disease Control (1983) and in the Journal blitz-and a quite understandable panic of the American Medical Association (1984) among local residents. At one point, an an- have shown no elevated levels of chromo- gry crowd held two EPA officials hostage, somal damage among Love Canal residents demanding action from Washington. On compared with other people in the Niagara May 21, 1980, the EPA ordered the emer- Falls area. Since cancer has long latency gency evacuation of 2,500 Love Canal resi- periods, these results are not conclusive ei- dents from their homes, and the Carter ad- ther. But to date, little or no scientific evi- ministration later announced that the state dence has been produced to justify the and federal governments would foot the Love Canal panic. Indeed, several hundred bill for the permanent relocation of more people have moved back to the area, since than 400 Love Canal families. renamed Black Creek Village.

WQ SPRING 1991 77 ENVIRONMENT

muffin mixes and Pillsbury cake mixes be- ing removed from supermarket shelves. efore Christmas 1983, American There was no mistaking the message: This farmers used about 20 million stuff is really bad for you. pounds of a chemical known as Ruckelshaus spent most of the winter EDB annually to fumigate grain milling ma- dealing with the snowballing panic over chinery and citrus and other crops. There EDB, and finally ordered a ban on its use. was evidence that EDB was a potent carcin- The ban hamstrung U.S. grain sales to the ogen in laboratory animals, but none that it Soviet Union, which had agreed to buy 7.1 caused cancer in humans. Moreover, it was million tons of U.S. wheat and corn in fiscal not believed to leave significant residues in year 1984; it also hurt several Caribbean na- fields and orchards that might leach into tions whose sales of tropical fruits to the groundwater. When William Ruckelshaus United States were compromised. The ban took over as administrator of the EPA for even wreaked havoc on the personal lives the second time in 1983 (he had served as of a handful of EPA employees, one of its first administrator in 1970-73), however, whom suffered a nervous breakdown as a traces of EDB had been found in ground- result of the pressure he was under during water in Georgia and California. This dis- the storm over EDB. Yet the ban was un- covery was noted in the appropriate offices necessary and Ruckelshaus, as he later said at EPA, but did not rise to Ruckelshaus's in an interview, knew it. There was little or attention; not, that is, until he went to Flor- no evidence that it was harmful to humans ida to spend Christmas with his mother. in the amounts at which they were being The discovery of EDB in Florida exposed to it. Indeed, the most likely re- groundwater, which Ruckelshaus learned placement for EDB, methyl bromide, was about from local television and newspaper possibly more dangerous than EDB. Why coverage, gave the story a whole new twist. did Ruckelshaus do it? Never mind that no Doyle Conner, the state commissioner of one had proved that trace amounts of EDB agriculture, was being accused by the Or- in food could cause cancer in humans; no lando Sentinel, the St. Petersburg Times, one could prove that they didn't. News me- and other Florida newspapers of permitting dia misrepresentation of this uncertainty the pesticide to be injected into the soil in made enough people deeply fearful that po- amounts greater than federal standards al- litical prudence left the EPA administrator lowed, raising the specter of groundwater no real choice. contamination. A diversionary action was needed to get the heat off. So Conner had a few popular supermarket items tested for EDB residues, and lo and behold, they were found. Overnight, EDB was national news. his nation, along with the rest of the Between December 21 and December world, is deeply engaged in what 23, 1983, all three television networks car- could turn out to be the most im- ried stories about EDB in food on their portant environmental debate in history. nightly newscasts. On the 2 lst, NBC anchor And then again, maybe it won't. The debate Tom Brokaw posed the portentous ques- is over global warming and what, if any- tion: "How dangerous is it?" No one knew, thing, to do about it. It is not over the but all three broadcasts showed packages greenhouse effect, which is real: Green- of well-known foods such as Duncan Hines house gases such as carbon dioxide, meth-

WQ SPRING 199 1 78 ENVIRONMENT

ane, and chlorofluorocarbons do trap heat has arrived. Never mind that none of his in Earth's atmosphere and do increase the colleagues agreed. planet's air temperatures. There is also little Hansen's judgment carried more weight doubt among qualified scientists that there because he was cloaked in the garb of the will be some global warming eventually, scientist and was speaking as an impartial probably in the next five to 10 years. But no government expert. According to Richard one is sure how much temperatures will Ken-, a reporter at Science magazine with a rise and what effect the increases will have. Ph.D. in chemical oceanography, "had it Predictions range from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees not been for Hansen and his fame, few in Centigrade. At the low end, effects would public office, and certainly not the public be minimal, but the high end leads to some itself, would have paid much attention to a frightening scenarios-flooding of coastal problem that everyone. . . agrees threatens lands, crop-destroying droughts, and mas- social and economic disruption around the sive deforestation. With so much uncer- globe." In this case a scientist with an envi- tainty about what might happen, and at ronmentalist bent, James Hansen, was the least an equal amount of uncertainty about crisis-maker. Time may prove that he was how much it will cost to contain the warrn- right. The public often responds radically to ing, what is a poor policymaker to do? environmental threats that seem to pose a On June 23, 1988, a bright and socially direct and dramatic threat to individuals- conscious climatologist named James Han- toxic waste dumps in the backyard, Alar on sen decided to lend a hand. Hansen, the apples, and EDB on oranges-but it sleeps director of the National Aeronautics and through warnings about threats that seem Space Administration's Goddard Institute diffuse and indirect, even if they are ulti- for Space Studies, told a U.S. Senate com- mately much more serious. Hansen woke mittee chaired by Albert Gore (D.-Tenn.) us up, and if the greenhouse effect assumes that the mean global temperature had risen the dimensions many scientists believe it by one degree Fahrenheit during the previous century. Moreover, Hansen said that he could say with "a high degree of confidence" that there was "a cause and ef- fect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming." This circumspect-sounding bit of jargon meant there was now something dra- matic for the media to talk about (during what hap- pened to be a particularly tropical summer). Global warming, Hansen had an- nounced to the world, is Some climatologists warned during the 1970s of an impending here, right now. It is not new Ice Age, which has not helped win great public credibility for coming in five or 10 years. It their more recent predictions of global warming.

WQ SPRING 1991 79 ENVIRONMENT

THEORY VERSUS PRACTICE

In opinion surveys, most Americans talk a good pro-environment game. Watch what they do, not what they say, caution editor Joe Schwartz and Thomas Miller, a vice president of the Roper Organization, in American Demographics (Feb. 1991).

Saving the environment is a high priority for down significantly when you look at con- most American citizens. But as consumers, sumer behavior. Perhaps bad-mouthing most of us are not willing to act on our be- businesses is easier than making important liefs. Over three-quarters (78 percent) of lifestyle changes and accepting some of the adults say that our nation must "make a ma- blame. jor effort to improve the quality of our envi- Consumer behavior usually affects the ronment," according to a recent study com- environment at two points. First, consumers missioned by S. C. Johnson and Son and can either buy or reject environmentally un- conducted by the Roper Organization. But sound products. After the purchase, they af- at the same time, most say that individuals fect he environment by either recycling can do little, if anything, to help improve the products or sending them to the dump. environment. At the moment, recycling appears to be Public concern about the environment is the most rapidly growing pro-environmental growing faster than concerns about any behavior. Between March 1989 and Febru- other issue monitored by Roper-at least ary 1990, the share of Americans who say before the Persian Gulf crisis and the soften- they regularly recycle bottles and cans rose ing of the economy. Businesses are tuning from 41 percent to 46 percent, and the share into this trend by producing "green" prod- who regularly recycle newspapers rose from ucts, services, and advertising campaigns. 20 percent to 26 percent. Those who sort But banking on environmental awareness their trash on a regular basis rose from 14 can backfire, because the majority of Ameri- percent to 24 percent of all adults. cans are already convinced that businesses Altruism isn't the only force behind the are not environmentally responsible. . . . recycling boom. Many states and municipal- ities have passed "bottle bills" and other mandatory recycling laws. People may be Americans tend to blame businesses for complying with the new rules and may even the environmental problems they see at be doing more than is required. But in many global, national, and local levels. More than cases, legislation stimulated their behavioral eight in 10 Americans say that industrial pol- changes. lution is the main reason for our environ- More than half of all adults (52 percent) mental problems, and nearly three-quarters never recycle newspapers. Only 16 percent of the public say that the products busi- say they avoid products that come from nesses use in manufacturing also harm the environmentally irresponsible companies, environment. Six in 10 Americans blame and just seven percent regularly avoid res- businesses for not developing environmen- taurants that use foam containers. Only tally sound consumer products, and an eight percent of Americans say they regu- equal share believes that some technological larly cut down on their driving to protect the advancements made by businesses eventu- environment. More than three-quarters (76 ally produce unanticipated environmental percent) say they just motor on as usual, problems. even though most acknowledge that emis- Americans blame themselves, too. Sev- sions from private automobiles are a leading enty percent say that consumers are more cause of air pollution. interested in convenience than they are in Vast majorities of Americans are worried environmentally sound products, and 53 about our environmental future. So far, only percent admit that consumers are not will- a minority have adopted more environmen- ing to pay more for safer products. tally responsible lifestyles. But attitudinal In theory, almost every American is pro- changes generally precede behavioral ones. environment. But the ardent environmental The stage, it seems, is finally set for the attitudes that come out in opinion polls cool "greening of America."

WQ SPRING 1991 80 ENVIRONMENT

may, we will thank him for it. But time may may have been disturbed, but the salmon also make Mr. Hansen a villain. catch this year set a record. Environmental advocacy, which is hat makes these three cases typi- meant to serve the public interest, has got- cal is that scientists, politicians, ten out of hand. It is arguable, indeed prob- and journalists used inconclu- ably correct, that 20 years ago hyperbole sive scientific data to advance their own was the only way to make industry and gov- agendas. Our adversarial, interest-group- ernment begin protecting the nation's dominated politics lends itself to this kind health and environmental patrimony. In of manipulation, as does our commercial many cases, however, the science has news media, whose only consistent bias is caught up with these exaggerations, result- for a dramatic, conflict-filled story. (It is this ing in a loss of credibility for environmen- story bias, not any ideological bias, that talists. Moreover, public interest in the envi- drives the news media.) ronment today is high. In the 1990s, a more The real failure of the environmental straightforward approach might yield bet- movement has been the extent to which it ter results. Environmentalists should learn has contributed-along with industry, Con- the lessons of Alar and dioxin. They should gress, and the news media-to national stick to the facts. They should seek to edu- contusion and misunderstanding about the cate rather than merely alarm the public. comparative risks posed by different haz- Uncertainty remains the most difficult ards. Environmentalists would have us be- obstacle to public understanding. For ex- lieve that many deaths and much illness ample, a recent study by the Congressional can be attributed to the nuclear accidents Office of Technology Assessment found that at Three Mile Island, Davis-Besse, and it is possible to reduce carbon dioxide Brown's Ferry, to Love Canal and Times emissions by 35 percent over the next 25 Beach, to living near high-tension power years. Would that slow the onset of global lines, to agricultural chemicals such as warming? Perhaps. The study also says that DDT, EDB, and Alar. But there is virtually the economic effect of this reduction might no reliable evidence to support these be anything from a net annual gain of $20 charges. Environmentalists, along with billion to a net annual expenditure of $150 journalists, portrayed the Exxon Valdez oil billion. How can one respond to expert dis- spill in Prince William Sound as a calamity agreement of this magnitude? on the order of a small war. Environmental- But where science fails to provide an- ists know that there is nothing like 30 sec- swers-and it often does-a prudent, com- onds of television network news footage of mon-sense calculation of the public interest dying, oil-soaked sea gulls and seals to stir can lead to a conclusion. It would pay, for the nation's environmental conscience: It example, to reduce carbon dioxide emis- was just such disturbing images of an oil sions produced by the burning of fossil fu- spill in Santa Barbara, California in 1969 els even if the global warming payoff is that helped create the momentum behind minimal because there are sufficient collat- the first Earth Day. But apart from the sad eral benefits-such as reducing depen- drama surrounding creatures in the area at dence on imported oil. On the other hand, the time, how much long-term damage to research shows that dioxin, only recently ecological systems is done by oil spills? Rel- billed as one of the great killers of the 20th atively little. In Prince William Sound, for century, poses no significant threat at the example, spawning of some fish species trace levels of exposure that exist outside

WQ SPRING 1991 8 1 ENVIRONMENT

the workplace. falls under the unexciting but essential cat- Scientific uncertainty by itself need not egory, "rational ordering of risks." paralyze policy. But we are still struggling to develop a real environmental ethic that here is good reason to doubt, how- allows us to confront those very serious ever, whether we are yet capable of problems that don't make good headlines T such changes. Consider the Navajo and to confront others before they do be- Generating Station again. Environmental- come headlines. Certain basic questions ists hailed the EPA decision; business de- must be faced. How much do we care cried it. The news media presented the about the environment? Who should pay claims and counter-claims of the utility, the the costs of addressing our concerns? How government, and the environmentalists, much? Take the blue haze over the Grand but usually without adequate background Canyon. It's not clear how much of it is to allow intelligent public participation. caused by emissions from the Navajo Gen- Traditionally, reporters and editors have erating Station. But even if most of it is, is maintained that they are not qualified to re- the removal of the haze worth the price? solve scientific controversies; the most they Should the operators of the plant bear the say they can do is to give a balanced full $2.3 billion cost? Should a decision of presentation of what the parties are saying. this kind be made by administrative fiat? What is required, however, is not resolution Should the utility be allowed to pass on to but enough investigation to separate facts its customers any or all of the cost? Should and reasonable beliefs from half-truths and the general public share the cost? misleading constructions, and enough in- The fact that 80 percent of those an- formation for a reader or viewer to make swering the New York Times poll of 1989 an informed judgment. said that no price is too great to pay in the Biology, epidemiology, ecology, cli- name of environmental quality shows that matoloay, and other sciences will continue we have yet to confront such questions. to offer mostly inconclusive answers to Our approach now recalls an old slogan questions about environmental risks. And with many painful associations: We are say- despite years of experience, dozens of mis- ing that we are willing to pay any price and takes, and a high level of concern, the pub- to bear any burden for the environment. lic remains woefully ignorant about the That is not a serious position at a time environment. For better or worse, neither when, for example, $70 billion will be can one expect much change in politics as needed over the next 30 years simply to re- practiced in the United States. A politics pair leaking underground storage tanks na- based on compromises hammered out tionwide. Increasingly, we will need to put through a televised clash of interests does aside our anxieties over such high-profile not encourage environmental statesman- but relatively trivial risks as Alar and EDB ship. For these reasons, despite whatever and begin to take cognizance of such sub- good intentions we might have, America is merged-not only literally but figura- likely for the foreseeable future to continue tively-threats as the storage tanks. This lurching from crisis to crisis.

WQ SPRING 1991 82 BACKGROUND BOOKS

RETHINKING THE ENVIRONMENT

wo years ago the New Yorker's Bill sort of genteel authoritarianism. McKibben published a well-publicized But there are also serious works in deep book whose title offered a blunt warning: The ecology. One of the best is Roderick Frazier End of Nature (Random, 1989). It was, more Nash's The Rights of Nature: A History of precisely, the idea of nature as wild and un- Environmental Ethics (Univ. of Wisc., 1989). touched that McKibben saw vanishing. "The The historian from the University of California, idea of nature will not survive the new global Santa Barbara, believes that history can be seen pollution-the carbon dioxide and the [chloro- as the gradual widening of the scope of rights fluorocarbons] and the like . . . . We have from the time of Magna Carta, which applied changed the atmosphere, and thus we are only to English noblemen, to the American changing the weather. By changing the Declaration of Independence, to the U.S. Civil weather, we make every spot on earth man- Rights Act of 1957 to, most recently, the Endan- made and artificial. We have deprived nature of gered Species Act of 1973. What he calls "envi- its independence, and that is fatal to its mean- ronmental ethics" are in his view only a logical, ing. Nature's independence is its meaning; though admittedly radical, next step in the without it there is nothing but us.'' development of liberal thought. Wolves and The End of Nature caused quite a stir; some maple trees do not petition for rights, he ac- suggested that it would have the same galvanic knowledges, so "Human beings are the moral impact on public opinion that Rachel Carson's agents who have the responsibility to articulate Silent Spring (also first published in the New and defend the rights of the other occupants of Yorker) had had 27 years before. But while the planet. Such a conception of rights means many were titillated by McKibben's violent that humans have duties or obligations toward obituary for nature, few seemed to pay much nature." Nash likens today's "biocentrists" to attention to his rescue plan. Man, he suggested, the crusading anti-slavery abolitionists of the should submit to nature and do what is best for early 19th century. "the planet." He proposed an "atopia" where As Nash shows, deep ecology is a product of "our desires are not the engine." Human happi- a partly submerged, second strand of American ness, he said, "would be of secondary impor- environmental thought. That strand had its ori- tance. Perhaps it would be best for the planet if gins in John Muir, the founder (in 1892) of the we all lived not in kibbutzes or on Jeffersonian Sierra Club, who broke with Theodore Roose- farms, but crammed into a few huge cities like velt and other late 19th-century conservation- so many ants." ists by emphasizing the need for preservation of The End of Nature is but one example of a untouched wilderness. Stephen Fox's John strand of environmental thinking called "deep Muir and His Legacy: The American Con- ecology." When scholars look back at deep servation Movement (Little Brown, 1981) is ecology years hence, they will doubtless make one of several recent studies. But the biocen- much of what is probably its only "atopian" trists look to another man, University of Wis- novel, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (Bantam, consin forestry professor Aldo Leopold, as the 1977). Originally self-published by Callenbach intellectual father of their movement. In A in Berkeley in 1975, Ecotopia went on to be- Sand County Almanac (1949), Leopold first come a cult classic. It tells of a visitor's adven- proposed a "land ethic" that explicitly sug- tures in 1999 in the new nation of Ecotopia- gested that humans were just one of many spe- carved out of Northern California, Washington, cies with rights on Earth, that other species and Oregon-an ecologically correct land of have something like a right to life, "as a matter hanging plants and natural fibers from which of biotic right, regardless of the presence or ab- plastic and all other symbols of the modern sence of economic advantage to us." At first ig- consumer society have been banished. Confor- nored, A Sand County Almanac enjoyed a ma- mity to the new Green ethos is enforced by a jor vogue beginning in the 1960s.

WQ SPRING 1991 83 ENVIRONMENT

Leopold, like Muir, was a dissenter from the ronmental policy. mainstream conservation movement. As Uni- Journalist William Tucker offers a far less versity of Pittsburgh historian Samuel P. Hays sympathetic version of the change in Progress writes in Conservation and the Gospel of Ef- and Privilege: America in the Age of Envi- ficiency (1959), the conservationists may have ronmentalism (Anchor/Doubleday, 1982). To- revered nature but they were not about to en- day's environmentalists, he argues, are a "nou- dow it with rights. In keeping with the Progres- veau aristocracy" who are "far more sive faith in professional management, Theo- concerned with preventing others from climb- dore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and other ing the ladder behind them, than in making it founding conservationists advocated wise up a few more rungs themselves." Tucker con- "stewardship" of natural resources for the ben- tends that a disproportionate share of the costs efit of mankind. They were optimists about the of this aristocracy's pet "environmental ameni- environment and "emphasized expansion, not ties," from suburban zoning regulations to air retrenchment; possibilities not gloom." pollution controls on factories, are borne by Perhaps because the conservationist ethic the lower middle class. so naturally became America's ethic, it was not Another interesting explanation of the greatly elaborated after this early period. That movement is offered by Mary Douglas and began to change with the work of bacteriologist Aaron Wildavsky in Risk and Culture (Univ. of Ren6 Dubos, who, in A God Within (Irvington, Calif., 1982). They argue that there are three 1972) and other books, developed the notion of strands of American political culture (the hi- "enlightened anthropocentrism." Dubos ac- erarchical, the individualistic, and the sectarian complished a hybridization of the two major or egalitarian) and that the rise of environmen- strands of environmental thought, arguing in talism reflects the recent strength of sectarian- effect that a holistic attitude toward nature is in ism. Because sectarianism regards all people as man's own best interest. equally valuable and of infinite worth, there is no limit to the price that it demands that soci- ven as Dubos wrote, old-fashioned ety pay for protection from carcinogens and E conservationism was in fact being trans- other environmental risks. The result: environ- formed into contemporary environmentalism. mentalism run amuck. In Beauty, Health, and Permanence (Cam- Neither environmentalists nor polluters get bridge Univ., 1987), Samuel P. Hays attributes much sympathy from biologist Garrett Hardin the change to a general shift in values growing in his latest book, Filters Against Folly (Viking, out of the nation's unprecedented mass afflu- 1985). A self-described "ecoconservative," Har- ence after World War 11. As Americans satisfied din is best known for his "tragedy of the com- their craving for homes, cars, washing ma- mons" thesis. He believes that environmental chines, and other material goods, their atten- harm most often results when the principles of tion turned to "environmental amenities." In private property are compromised. People who the age of Pinchot and Roosevelt, these had own the resources they use are good stewards; been available only to the wealthy few who those who shift the costs of their private inter- were able to travel to national parks and pri- ests to the public-be they polluters who foul vate retreats. But now, since the private market the air, nomadic herdsmen who graze common could not satisfy the broader public's desire for lands, or even, in a sense, environmentalists clean air and water, "there was increasing de- themselves-have no incentive to be moderate. mand that public and private nonprofit institu- "The greed of some enterprisers in seeking tions do so." Hays makes a similar argument in profits through pollution," Hardin suggests, "is Government and Environmental Politics matched by a different sort of greed of some (Wilson Center, 1989), edited by Michael J. environmentalists in demanding absolute pu- Lacey, a thorough history of many areas of envi- rity regardless of cost."

WQ SPRING 1991 84 The Albert Einstein Memorial National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.

Subscribe now to the nation's only journal to focus on important policy topics in science, at the special Introductory Price of technology, and health. Expert authors bring $24-a savings of $12 off the regular rate of you keen insights and informed opinion on $36. (The institutional rate is $65; the foreign global warming, AIDS research, space rate is $75.) policy, industrial competitiveness science education, and much, Name much more. ISSUES is published State ZIP quarterly by the Na- OUR GUARANTEE: Your money back tional Academy of if you are not completely satisfied with ISSUES. Mail to: ISSUES, National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Avenue, N. W., Washington, D.C. 20418. CURRENT BOOKS

SCHOLARS' CHOICE

The South African Conundrum

THE MIRROR AT MIDNIGHT: A South Afri- in front of me last year. One sentence, I can Journey. By Adam Hochschild. Viking. 309 remember, went, "Even at the end of our pp. $19.95 third day in Durban, Betty and I were still struggling to come to terms with the com- A DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA? Constitu- plexities of the place." Give it time, boy, I tional Engineering in a Divided Society. By Da- thought. What would Americans think of vid L. Horowilz. Univ. of Calif. 293 pp. $20 such instant authorities about, say, Mex- ico? They'd laugh, surely. So what's differ- raveling around South Africa (as I do ent about South Africa? The answer has to T most years), one gets used to meeting be that for most Americans South Africa is different waves of visiting Americans. They still like Mars: To have been there at all is come for many reasons. Ten and 15 years remarkable; to return with moral or politi- ago you met a lot of "Southeast Asia ex- cal insights, twice so. perts" who were anxiously retooling them- Adam Hochschild's The Mirror at Mid- selves and keen to move on to the latest night is more acute than many of these in- crisis zone. For the most part, this lot stant concoctions. The editor of Mother exited fairly rapidly once it became clear Jones, Hochschild has visited South Africa that South Africa weighed a great deal less several times and read more than just the in the global balance than cruise missiles, newspapers. A reader looking for an intro- the Japanese challenge in laptop comput- duction to contemporary personalities and ers, or whatever came after that. Mingling events in South Africa could do worse than with them were many who saw in South read this book. But such books date Africa a sort of action replay of the Ameri- quickly-and already Hochschild seems can civil-rights struggle of the 1960s. Such too romantically committed to "the strug- characters were there because they gle" to be a reliable guide to South Africa wanted to re-live the dramas of their in 199 1. That ubiquitous catch-phrase, youth, dramas in which most of the whites "the struggle," was born when Nelson were villains-Orval Faubuses, Lester Mandela was serving a life prison sentence Maddoxes and Bull Connors-and the and almost every opposition group was blacks came out of To Kill a Mockingbird. banned. But a new era of reasonableness Others came simply as political tourists, began on February 2, 1990, when Presi- confidently handing out prescriptions to dent de Klerk announced, among other re- the world's most complex and divided forms, the pardoning of Mandela after 27 country. There have also been, let it be years and the lifting of the ban on pro- said, good and serious scholars such as scribed groups. At the opening of Parlia- Gwendolen Carter and Stanley Greenberg, ment this year, de Klerk announced the re- whose work has made a genuine contribu- peal of the Group Areas Act, which had tion to thinking about the South African made residential integration punishable by conundrum. law. Such developments have rendered One phenomenon I have grown par- semi-obsolete many old assumptions ticularly wary of is the instant American about "the struggle." book about South Africa. The author of This "new South Africa" has created a one such book proudly pushed his product psychological problem for those within the

WQ SPRING 1991 CURRENT BOOKS

liberation movement who have, over de- cades, fallen in love with their own DOS- ture of romantic militancy againstLthe forces of darkness. This subculture was self-consciouslv that of the victim. It iden- tified with, and thus represented, "the op- pressed." Since the oppressed were just that, they enjoyed the moral high ground-indeed, could do no wrong- while their opponents were simply "the oppressor," for whom no fate was bad enough. Hochschild is a little too much of a pushover for this point of view, a little too unaware that this self-romanticization of Historicallv.a, white racists used divi- the oppressed actually serves a variety of sions and antagonisms among black tribal personal and political ends. He manages groups to serve their own ends. "Black to mention some of the appalling crimes tribalism" became the excuse for creating with which Winnie Mandela is associated, "bantustans" or ethnic homelands-that but then rushes to somehow blame the is, for setting aside sparse patches of lands government even for them. Similarly, he that tribal groups were told to regard as mentions the subject of the South African their homes. Tribal divisions also fur- Communist Party (SACP) only in order to nished the rationale for closed ethnic em- mock the government for its wild McCar- ployment, whereby companies, if they thvism. Yet the fact is that the SACP is wished, could employ members from only probably the third most Stalinist party in one ethnic group. the world, after its Chinese and Cuban In response to this use of tribal antago- counterparts. It controls a majority on the nisms. liberals and radicals from the 1950s national executive of the African National onward asserted that divisions between, Congress (ANC), and it dominated the first say, Zulus and Xhosas, were either un- negotiations between the ANC and the important or merely the product of white "government. Like it or not. the SACP is not maniuulation. The ANC has declared war just a figment of the government's over- on all modes of acting or thinking on eth- heated imagination. Hochschild tries hard nic or racial grounds and said it will use to play down the party's power not be- "liberatory intolerance" (which ranges cause he is a communist sympathizer but from legal suits to public humiliations) to precisely because he is a liberal and wants end it. As Horowitz points out, such tactics awkward matters like the SACP not to im- have often been seen before in Africa: In pair his romantic sympathy with "the op- the 1960s, Ugandan President Milton pressed." The oppressed, let it be said, are Obote, for example, under the pretext of in general keenly aware of the openings ending ethnic conflicts, attacked the Bu- this sort of determined gullibilitv affords ganda people and then set up a one-party them, and they take full advantage of it. police state. Nowhere have such tactics re- duced ethnic conflict, but in every case fter Hochschild's book, it is a treat to they were successful in stifling democracy. A turn to Donald Horowitz's eagerly The fact is that only a minority of South awaited A Democratic South Africa? Horo- Africans identify themselves as South Afri- witz, a professor of law and political sci- cans. As Horowitz's survey data show, the ence at Duke, points out a crucial fact: identities that matter are overwhelmingly Intelligent analysis of South Africa has ethnic or racial. Moreover, when the vari- been bedeviled by a virtual conspiracy of ous groups are asked to specify which silence over the significance of ethnicity. other groups they feel close to, a very defi-

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nite pecking-order emerges. Zulus, Tswan- there is such ready recourse to violence as, and Sotho in the north, for example, within many black communities that it is feel much closer to one another than any not clear that elections of anv kind are "20- of them do to Xhosas in the south. And ing to be at all easy to conduct. despite all the fashionable black rejection Yet despite such difficulties Horowitz is of white (English-speaking) liberals, all still right, even right about federalism, black groups feel far closer to English- whatever the resistance to it within the speaking whites than to Afrikaners. Strik- ANC. South Africa is probably the most ingly, Jews were the group disliked second fiercely divided society on earth. Its racial most, ahead even of Indians-this despite cleavages are infamous, but it is also the fact that Jews have played so promi- deeplydivided along ethnic, linguistic, re- nent a part in anti-apartheid politics. gional, class, and religious lines. Every- Horowitz feels, surely rightly, that a thine" we have learned from the exoerience peaceful and democratic future for South of other nations suggests how easy it is for Africa depends on the recognition not only such societies to collapse into civil war, of the reality of these ethnic groups but of and South Africa could, all too easily, pro- the inevitability of stress and rivalry vide the world with the spectacle of a giant among them. Fights between the ANC and Lebanon. Such mosaic societies can be the Zulu-based Inkatha have made head- ruled for a time by authoritarian elites- lines around the world and led to more Afrikaner or African-but violence will than 5,000 deaths, but the ANC has also break through in the end. The only hope clashed with every other black liberation for long-term peace (and the economic group. To accommodate such rivalries, growth which is probably indispensable to Horowitz argues, Pretoria must adopt a it) lies in a truly open-minded search for federal structure of government. supple, enabling democratic institutions. There are many obstacles in the way of The danger is that some will feel that the such a rational political course. As Horo- arrival in power of African nationalists will witz admits, he found that ANC activists be the happy democratic ending South Af- have for so long repeated their mantra rica needs. The point of Horowitz's work is about a unitary state-just as they have in- that that ending has to be merely a part of sisted upon inheriting the same state appa- a new democratic beginning. ratus their oppressors used-that even those who concede the value of federalism -R. W.Johnson is a fellow in politics at have not thought it worth the immense ef- Magdalen College, Oxford University, fort that would be required to change the and the author of How Long Will movement's mind about it. And indeed, South Africa Survive? (1977).

The Writer Without Certainties

PRECISION AND SOUL: Essays and Ad- as the philosopher Wittgenstein's, and his dresses. By Robert Musil. Ed. and trans. by Bur- fiction shrewder than Mann's or Proust's ton Pike and David S. Luft. Univ. of Chicago. in its analysis of a world without certain- 301 pp. $29.95 ties. Yet one obstacle stands in the way of Musil's reputation. His most celebrated mong the great modernist writers work, The Man without Qualities (1930- A only Robert Musil's name has failed to 43), is one of the longest novels ever writ- become a household word in the English- ten, and, despite its wit and brilliance, no speaking world. His mind was as original one ever quite seems to finish it. Indeed,

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Musil never finished it himself. The novel, ing into being and that no ideology had with all its exploration of tenuousness, begun to describe. doubt, and moral formlessness, was not so much unfinished as unfinishable. (A new he title of this collection comes from translation, to be published by Knopf early T The Man without Qualities and points next year, may finally bring the novel to one of Musil's constant preoccupations: wider recognition in America.) "We do not have too much intellect and Robert Musil was born in Austria in too little soul, but too little precision in 1880, and thus he belongs to that excep- matters of the soul." These essays treat tional generation of German-speaking nov- such subjects as Austria and Germany, the elists-Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Hermann nature of a nation as distinct from a state Broch, and Alfred Doblin-who came of or a civilization, the sociology of film, the creative age in the decade before World question of ideas and ideologies, the status War I. Son of a professor of mechanical of women, and the hope for a new world engineering, he was educated, mostly in after the Great War. All are connected by Berlin, on the assumption that science Musil's attempt-after the crisis of Euro- provided the most reliable access to reality pean culture that had led to the catastro- and that the best hope of philosophy lay in phe of World War I-to develop new ways positivism. When Musil moved toward psy- of thinking to enhance an individual's flex- chology, literature, and forms of philoso- ibility in responding to an uncertain civi- phy other than positivism, he found him- lization. self unable to make up his mind about The editors of this volume claim that anything. Musil's intellectual uncertainty Musil was a great essayist, and so he was if became the creative provocation of The the essay as a genre is best found among Man without Qualities. His fictions hover fragmentary perceptions, spurts of enthu- above certain feelings-doubt, misgiving, siasm, broken flights. Musil wrote most of equivocation-without settling upon any his essays upon invitation, and when he of them as the basis of life. Of course most saw them in print he thought them merely people, even writers, do not consciously occasional pieces. He felt about his writ- establish a "basis of life" but simply accept ings what his character Ulrich in The Man or fight the facts of their life as they occur. without Qualities feels about his own life: But Musil proposes an intriguing question: What would one's life be like if one at- For a long time there had been a faint air tached no particular privilege or meaning of aversion hovering over everything that to the fact that something exists? Some- he did and experienced, a shadow of helplessness and isolation, a universal thing else might have existed instead of it. disinclination to which he could not find Then what? the complementary inclination. At times Musil had the genius to see that this he felt as though he had been born with a predicament was not his alone. Like many gift for which at present there was no of his generation, Musil found the social function. world encumbered by "outworn ideologies such as Christianity, monar- Musil's great theme was indetermi- chism, Liberalism, and Social Democ- nacy: His characters are invariably found racy." These ideas were no longer actually among choices they are unwilling to put into practice, Musil said, yet people make, rival vocations between which they acted as though they still believed in them, scrupulously dither. The Confusions of thus lending those ideologies "the illusion Young Torless (1906), Musil's first novel, is of meaning and sacredness, which in addi- appropriately a story of adolescent waver- tion to everything else is also a sin against ing. In later stories-in Unions (19 1 l), the spirit." In his essays, collected in Preci- Three Women (1924), and the endlessly sion and Soul, Musil was trying to under- postponed Man without Qualities-even stand a civilization that was just then com- when adolescence is left behind, the wa-

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vering continues. In that last book Clarisse Musil's answer was partly Nietzschean: says: "A Man without Qualities does not Perhaps we can overcome the facticity "by say No to life, he says Not Yet, saving him- becoming a spiritually stronger type of hu- self up." No wonder Musil often felt dis- man being." But he couldn't bring himself gusted with storytelling, an art that can't to accept the other part of Nietzsche's an- avoid making the local commitment of swer: Lighten the burden by consulting saying that something happened and then only those facts that bear upon our future. something else happened. If you believe Nietzsche had urged his readers to seek "a that these happenings are arbitrary, you past from which we may spring, rather are bound to think their recital a specious than that past from which we seem to have affair. In any case, Musil discovered his ge- derived." Musil felt a scruple, and yet an- nius behind the appearances he could other misgiving, about this stratagem. "It hardly bring himself to narrate. His char- makes no sense," he writes, "to try to re- acters stare at events without really partici- move from the facts, through a false skepti- pating in them, and the interest of the cism, the weight of their facticity." events lodges itself in the stare more than In 1938, after the Anschluss of Nazi in the actions. In The Man without Quali- Germany and Austria, Musil left Vienna ties we read of Claudine: and settled in Switzerland. He died in Ge- neva on April 15, 1942. There is a certain What attracted her in the unintelligible propriety in his having removed himself to passage of events was all there was in it neutral Switzerland. The essays in Preci- that did not pertain to herself, to the sion and Soul show that virtually every so- spirit: What she loved was the helpless- cial or political position he adopted was ness and shame and anguish of her spirit-it was like striking something overwhelmed in the event. He derived dire weaker than oneself, a child, a woman, satisfaction from the notion that events are and then wanting to be the garment arbitrary and therefore interchangeable. wrapped about its pain, in the darkness Hitler acted upon a different notion. alone. Musil's Switzerland was fiction, not fact: There, if nowhere else, he could ordain Mostly, the unintelligible passage of things differently, dissolving the sinister events took the form-or the formless- forms of reality and projecting a "second ness-of the crowd, the masses. In 1912 state of being" from his choice feelings Musil wrote that "the fundamental cul- and desires. Not that he was content with tural difference between this and anv fictions of utopia. He continued to believe, other age" was one's experience of dissolv- or rather to hope against hope, that genius ing in the crowd; he speaks of "the loneli- could somehow float free of every limiting ness and anonvmitv of the individual in an condition. Rainer Maria Rilke was his ex- d d ever-increasing mass." The same motif re- ample-a poet released from the ordinari- curs in the essay on Spengler's Decline of ness of ordinary thinking. the West (19 18-22), where the individual The emergence of a Rilke could not in- mind is seen bewildered bv the multivlic- deed be explained, but Musil derived from ity and chaos of the images-the facticity, the naturalist Baron Alexander von Hum- as Musil calls it-it has to confront: boldt the idea that "significant individual- ity" is "a power of the spirit that springs up What characterizes and defines our intel- without reference to the course of events lectual situation is precisely the wealth of and begins a new series." Humboldt saw contents that can no longer be mastered, "nodal points and points of origin in cre- the swollen facticity of knowledge (in- ative people who absorb past things and cluding moral facts), the spilling out of experience over the surfaces of nature, release them in a new form that can no the impossibility of achieving an over- longer be traced back past their point of view, the chaos of things that cannot be origin." Unfortunately, a theory of free- denied. floating genius is just as applicable to Hit-

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ler as to Rilke. Musil hoped that such ge- was never content. As in the novels, so in nius would commit itself "to purely the essays, he thought he could make a intellectual endeavors," but he lived long new world by talking it into existence; enough to see that it did not. coaxing, cajoling, threatening, summon- The essays in Precision and Soul are ing. And then he broke off, his novel in- mostly a record of bewilderment, includ- complete, knowing that the magic would ing self-bewilderment. Some of them-the not work. Not yet, anyway. critique of Spengler, the obituary on Rilke-have the desolate and desolating -Denis Donoghue, a Wilson Center beauty of a noble mind at the end of its Fellow, holds the Henry James Chair tether. Musil's mind was always there. He of Letters at New York University.

King Oil

THE PRIZE: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, even in his wildest reverie Yergin could and Power. By Daniel Yergin. Simon & not have dreamed that publication of his Schuster. 877 pp. $24.95 oil saga would coincide with the greatest American military expedition since the very author dreams about good tim- Vietnam War. E ing, some stroke of luck that will dis- But coincide it did. Five days after tance his book from the pack of 50,000 ti- Yergin delivered his epilogue to Simon & tles published annually in the United Schuster, Saddam Hussein's troops in- States. During the seven years he worked vaded Kuwait. The publisher immediately on The Prize, Daniel Yergin may have embarked on a crash publishing schedule. imagined some sort of crisis in the oil-rich In four months, or one-third the time it Middle East that would make his book a normally takes to publish a book, The Prize hot property when it was published. But was in bookstores. Critics of the war have pointed to a base motive be- hind American policy ever since George Bush uttered the words, "This will not stand." If Kuwait exported, say, artichokes instead of oil, the United States would have cared considerably less about the fate of the emirate. But readers of The Prize will recognize an en- during principle at stake. In our century, oil begets na- tional wealth, which begets state Dower. Americans dif- feredover whether the re- sort to force was premature Two oilmen: Iraq's Saddam Hussein; George Bush (with George, or wise. But unless one had Jr.) in 1956, when he was president of Zapata Off-Shore Company. been a pacifist or consid-

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ered Saddam Hussein a benign force, the tions. Seven of today's top 20 Fortune 500 case for doing nothing would have been companies are oil conglomerates. hard to make. American inaction would World War I, with its new petroleum- have been as grievous a miscalculation as powered fleets and tanks, transformed oil was its involvement in Vietnam. A nation's from merely a commodity that generated foreign policy is, after all, a matter of mak- immense wealth into an essential resource ing distinctions. for nation-states. A young Winston Chur- But no one should conclude that chill was among the first to realize that Yergin's book lets the United States off the strategic mastery itself was the prize con- hook. Manv of the loudest advocates of ferred by control over oil. Churchill's in- force had earlier dismissed the criticism, sight sounds the second theme of The popular in the mid-1970s, that indiscrimi- Prize, in which Yergin correlates national nate arms sales to the Persian Gulf would power with control of oil resources. Oil- eventually come to haunt America. Yergin rich Iraq seems to prove this proposition: also reminds us that, even as U.S. forces With a population of only 17 million, Iraq battled in the Middle East, Americans was able to support the fourth largest mili- were consuming far more gasoline per tary force in the world. Yergin also re- capita, and paying far less for the privilege minds the reader how much American of doing so, than anyone else in the world. power is oil power. After World War 11, in Yergin, the author of Shattered Peace crises extending from the Korean War to (1977) and Energy Future (1982), here sets the Six Day War in 1967, America's capac- himself his most ambitious task to date: ity to maintain its oil supply through inter- nothing less than a history of petroleum, nal production and its ability to guarantee and all that oil has achieved and despoiled the international transport of oil to its al- since its modern discovery in the Pennsyl- lies played a major role in cementing the vania hills. The word modern is significant Western alliance under U.S. leadership. because black ooze seeping up through the Yergin makes this argument correlat- ground has been used since at least 3000 ing oil and power persuasive, perhaps too B.c., mostly as a medical nostrum. But the persuasive, because he fails to treat what Industrial Revolution found new and ever seem significant exceptions. His thesis more uses for petroleum-beginning with does not explain, for example, why the So- artificial lighting-until oil has become viet Union, the world's largest oil-produc- the key ingredient that makes modern so- ing country, has failed economically or ciety work. why Germany and Japan were able to be- come great powers without oil resources. t the outset, Yergin announces the (It can be argued of Japan and Germany, A three themes that he will explore in however, that their defeat in World War I1 The Prize. These are the ways petroleum was in no small part due to oil shortages.) has been perceived in this century: first as The struggle for control of oil has cre- a business, then as a strategic resource, ated, paradoxically, an environment out of and finally as a factor affecting the envi- control: The follies and shortsightedness of ronment. Hydrocarbon Man is Yergin's final theme. Oil became a big business and fortunes From global warming to the pollution and were made almost from the day that first congestion in cities from Mexico City to Pennsylvania well hit pay dirt in 1859. Eastern Europe, oil has contributed to Speculators in one early well earned conditions of life that threaten human $15,000 in profit for every dollar they in- health, endanger other species, and possi- vested. By the 20th century oil had be- bly imperil the planet. Yergin's look at the come the world's biggest business, virtu- high-energy way of life is, in many re- ally inextricable from modern capitalism, spects, the most sobering aspect of the en- multinational enterprise, the international tire book. What emerges, after putting economy, and business-government rela- aside all the struggles for individual, cor-

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porate, or national wealth and power, is an 1953 that overthrew him and placed the unflattering picture of human incapacity Shah in power. The previous year, when to manage a nonrenewable resource with Truman had sent Averell Harriman to ne- even a modicum of enlightenment. gotiate with Mossadegh, the prime minis- With such themes, and a cast of charac- ter had claimed he could not compromise ters ranging from John D. Rockefeller to because of the power of Ayatollah Seyed the Shah of Iran, Yergin could hardly have Kashani. Harriman had then sought out produced a dry, lifeless book. Yet for all its Kashani, only to be told-in words that detail, The Prize leaves several important anticipate a later ayatollah-that all for- threads dangling, never fully exploring eigners were evil and foreigners interested what the oil saga tells us about business- in oil were candidates for butchering. state relationships or the mix of oil money Yergin fails to do justice to the lawyer and with politics. It is only after 100 pages of democrat Mossadegh, who quite legiti- discussion that the reader is informed, al- mately wanted Iran to have control of its most incidentally, that John D. Rockefel- own resources. Mossadegh is portrayed ler's great success as an oilman depended here as something of an unreliable clown, in no small part on Standard Oil's ability to irrational in his obstinacy. pass and block legislation. The ramifications of Mossadegh's de- Yergin's narrative becomes more po- feat still resound today. The coup, its sup- litically oriented when it comes to the De- porters say, bought 25 years of stability in pression. He shows why the Roosevelt ad- Iran and provided America a key ally in ministration agreed to ration production the Cold War. But others note the irony and keep oil prices at or above $1 per bar- with which this episode has come full cir- rel during the 1930s. Grateful oilmen re- cle: American opposition to Mossadegh sponded by becoming the only major in- ushered in the regime of the Shah; internal dustrialists to back the Democrats. Even if, Iranian opposition to the Shah eventually eventually, more dollars from oil flowed to brought about the theocracy of the the Republican Party, the Democrats con- Ayatollah Khomeini. The United States, to tinued to receive competitive contribu- oppose Khomeini's Iran, supported and tions. (Certainly virtually no other industry built up Saddam Hussein during the was as generous to the Democratic Party 1980s-and the rest is history. Ironies and in the period from the 1930s to the '60s.) tragic elements abound in the all-too-hu- Oklahoma and Texas campaign contribu- man struggle over petroleum and all it tions were a financial pillar of the New confers, but too often they are missing Deal coalition. They made the infamous from Yergin's account. oil-depletion allowance politically invinci- Some early readers criticized The Prize, ble. Yet even here Yergin expends more feeling that Yergin had ascribed too much words on petroleum's contribution to the significance to oil, inflating its importance rise of the motel than in explaining this in events big and small. In fact, his opus stunning tax break. omits too much of the real history. One is Even when Yergin seems ready to get left with the sense that, while The Prize down to business, he often drops the ball. sketches the outlines of the complex tale, He devotes deserved space to one of the neither Yergin nor anyone else has com- most revealing episodes in the entire post- pletely mastered this epic drama. war era: that struggle which began in 195 1 when Iran's new prime minister, Moham- -Max Holland, a Wilson Center Fellow, med Mossadegh, nationalized British oil is writing a biography of John Mc- holdings. After a British-imposed embargo Cloy. He is the author of When the failed to deter Mossadegh, the U.S. Central Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale Intelligence Agency sponsored a coup in from Industrial America (1989).

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History proach was its assumption that ghettos could be converted into middle-class neighborhoods. THE PROMISED LAND: The Great Black In fact, most residents left the ghetto as soon as Migration and How It Changed America. By they were economically able. The inner-city Nicholas Leinann. Knopf. 320 pp. $24.95 blacks who staffed the various Office of Eco- nomic Opportunity or Housing and Urban After World War 11, more than five million Development programs used their paychecks southern blacks, mostly farmers, moved to to move up and out. northern cities. Suddenly race relations ceased But "the idea that the government can't ac- to be a "regional matter" and started affecting complish anything [in ghettos]," Lemann says, everything from joblessness in big cities to the is "a smokescreen" obscuring the very real ad- successes of the New Right in politics. vances that were made by Head Start and other Lemann, a contributing editor of the Atlantic, programs. Additional government programs- has a novelist's gift for folding this epic history education, birth control, job training-could into the stories of a few black families. During change the worst aspects of ghetto culture, but the 1940s, these families moved to Chicago they would be expensive: anywhere from $10 to from the small Mississippi Delta community of $25 billion a year. Lemann points out that these Clarksdale (birthplace of the late bluesman figures are still less than one-thirtieth of the fed- Muddy Waters). Displaced by mechanical cot- eral budget and far less than the cost of the ton pickers, they streamed north in search of a savings and loan bailout. Furthermore, such better way of life. Yet big-city ghetto society re- programs would ultimately save money cur- produced the social ills of sharecropper soci- rently spent on welfare and incarceration. ety-widespread illiteracy, terrible schools, Lacking now, he argues, is "a strong sense of large numbers of unwed mothers and broken national community," "a capability for national homes-and stirred in some new ones as well, action," aimed at healing the problem of the notably high crime rates. Lemann shows how ghetto. "panic peddlers" and machine politicians fos- Lemann, however, is not fatalistic. Race rela- tered residential segregation and overcrowding tions in America are the history of things once in order to stabilize their ethnically balkanized thought impossible-from emancipation to the city. Like other northern cities, Chicago built ending of legal segregation. Even the story told mammoth housing projects to deal with the in- in Promised Land would have once been un- flux. Lemann calls Chicago's Robert Taylor thinkable: "That black America could become Homes "among the worst places to live in the predominately middle class, non-Southern, and world," and living in such places "a fate that no nonagrarian would have seemed inconceivable American should have to suffer." until a bare two generations ago.'' Miraculously, many black migrants and their children did manage-in project vernacular- to "clear," that is, to climb out of the ghetto MAKING SEX: Body and Gender from the and into the middle class. Greeks to Freud. By Thomas Laqueur. Harvard. How African-Americans divided into two 313 pp. $27.95 economic strata is one of the ironies of the civil-rights movement. The War on Poverty The announcement that there happen to be two emerged from the embittered rivalry between sexes is hardly going to astound anyone. Yet, Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. John- according to Laqueur, an historian at Berkeley, son's overreaching ambition was to do some- until the 18th century, science postulated that thing on a grand scale. So he bypassed job pro- there was in effect only one biological sex. grams for community action and community Laqueur's contention-and that of a new development. Lemann argues that this was a school of historians who are bringing "sex" blunder because "it presumed a link between into history-is that our notion of what male political empowerment and individual eco- and female are is culturally imposed. nomic advancement that doesn't exist." The fa- Sociobiologists, who assume that physiology is tal flaw in the community-development ap- constant, evidently have had it wrong-and

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easy. But if "anatonly" sages in Aristotle suggest this. What Laqueur varies from culture to fails to acknowledge is how differences be- culture and period to tween the sexes were formerly expressed in period, then the study metaphysical and even cosmological terms, of sex-adding history which were as persuasive then as biological to sociology and biol- and scientific facts are now. The real nature of ogy-becomes so com- the revolution in the 18th-century thinking was plicated that even a that biology and medicine began supplying evi- scholar like Laqueur dence for what had been previously understood has trouble sorting out on a spiritual level. all the strands. Through most of Western history, La- THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE queur believes, anato- BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. By David mists were either establishing or responding to Cannadine. Yale. 832 pp. $35 a philosophical debate over man's dominant position in society. The one-sex model, first Last Christmas, British newspapers were run- popularized by the Greek anatomist Galen and ning an acid little story about Mrs. Thatcher's later refined by Aristotle, posited that the fe- final "honors list." Mrs. Thatcher wanted to use male sexual organ was merely an interior ver- aristocratic honor to reward new-made wealth sion of the male's. "The one-sex model," and loyal party service. So she proposed to Laqueur argues, "displayed what was already make the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch a massively evident in culture more generally: knight and pot-boiling novelist Jeffrey Archer a man is the measure of all things." lord. But she had to withdraw their names after Until the Renaissance, anatomists followed the committee that scrutinizes the lists on be- the lead of their classical forebears in interpret- half of the Queen objected. This minor fracas ing genital structures. Then, in 1559, matters nicely illustrates the fact that aristocratic title became problematic when Renaldus Columbus still maintains a complex symbolic presence- "discovered" the clitoris. The significance of a spectral afterlife of prestige without power- this discovery, Laqueur says, was that "the rela- in British political life. Behind such contradic- tionship between men and women was not in- tions lies the century-long social transforma- herently one of equality or inequality but rather tion that British historian David Cannadine of difference that required interpretation." traces in this exhaustively researched book. For the next three centuries, a great contro- One hundred years ago, the landowning versy -about conception, orgasm, and passion classes were Olympians: stupendously wealthy, was waged in order to preserve the one-sex immensely privileged, the arbiters of taste and model. Anatomists resorted to dubbing the cli- politics alike. Their decline began in a distant toris a "female penis." Even after scientists and unlikely place, the American Midwest. gave in to the two-sex model, there was little There, farming began to be practiced on such a doubt about which sex was "first." In 1865, for large scale that the English landlords could not example, the urologist William Acton won- compete. In England agricultural prices fell, as dered whether "the majority of women are not did the landlords' rents from property. In the much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind." century from 1880 to 1980, they were gradually Sigmund Freud transferred the female orgasm forced to sell off much of their landholdings. from the clitoris to the vagina, and, not surpris- Today there are still around 2,000 landed es- ingly, was left with the question, "What does tates, but a century ago they covered half the woman want?" land in Britain and now they cover only a quar- Laqueur's history of sexuality seems slightly ter. The reduction of the great aristocrats' es- too uniform to be entirely convincing. There is tates-such as the Duke of Devonshire's from evidence that people long before the 18th cen- 133,000 acres to 40,000 acres-is of less signifi- tury were aware-how could they not be?-of cance, though, than the disappearance of al- men and women as separate beings; even pas- most the entire class of lesser landlords. Of the

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the squirearchy of 1880-those gentlemen who in North America died. owned from 1,000 to 10,000 acres and who For nearly 60 years, in 23 books and 850 arti- propped up the whole system-only 16 percent cles, Northrop Frye had consistently argued have descendants who possess land today. that reading was not merely an intellectual ac- The aristocrats' social decline paralleled tivity but also an act of moral self-definition. their slide from economic affluence. Tocque- This is hardly a popular attitude in the current ville had predicted that democracy would un- academic establishment, where "decon- dermine aristocracy everywhere, and in Eng- struction" and the "new historicism" foster a land electoral reform loosened the great criticism in love with its own theoretical intri- landlords' hold on national power. Today, a few cacies. While Frye is aware of the post- hereditary nobles are still immensely wealthy; modernist style wars-a quarter of the essays in the Duke of Westminster's worth is estimated at Myth and Metaphor allude to deconstructionist anywhere from 400 million to one billion kingpin Jacques Derrida-he calmly insists on pounds. Most aristocrats, however, long ago what we can learn from the basic, enduring found themselves unable to keep up their great myths. houses, let alone imitate the influence of their "Myth" is the term that has been most closely ancestors. associated with Frye ever since his revolution- Along this melancholy trail, Cannadine ary overview of literary theory, Anatomy of Crit- dwells on the multifarious individuals' reac- icism (1957). To Frye, any work of literature is tions to their decline. On one side are rene- a variation or incarnation of mythic thinking. gades such as Jessica Mitford and Wilfrid By "myth," Frye does not mean mere fantasy or Scawen Blunt, who renounced the values of even folktales-and certainly not the overvalu- their class for various socialistic creeds, al- ation of the primitive associated with Joseph though often with aristocratic disdain for the Campbell. He means mythos, a story or narra- plutocrats who were emerging as the new tive which relates basic human needs to things power brokers. On the other side is an amazing their hearers need to know about their religion panorama of diehards and doomed grandees, or their society. The primary question about a patricians who fought a long and hopeless bat- myth, Frye writes, "is not Is it true?. . . . The tle against the 20th century. In between are all primary question is something more like Do we the diplomats and lord-lieutenants, governors need to know this?" of colonies, chancellors of universities, mayors In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature and local worthies who, with all the dignity (1982), Frye-above all else, a teacher (at the they could muster, settled into the positions of University of Toronto) and an ordained ornamental figureheads. Today some of them preacher-admitted that this was the book he claim the role of custodians of the national her- had been trying to write all along: a discourse itage and open their houses to the paying pub- on the Book of Books as a lesson in reading lic. Reduced, in effect, to living as tenants in mythic narratives. Now, in Words With Power, their own ancestral properties, "the lions of the sequel to The Great Code, Frye concludes yesteryear" (in Cannadine's words) "have be- his argument about how the Bible can teach us come the unicorns of today." how to read all books. "The organizing struc- ture of the Bible and the corresponding struc- tures of 'secular' literature," he says, "reflect Arts & Letters each other." The Bible contains a finite num- ber of myths (creation, fall, exodus, destruc- MYTH AND METAPHOR: Selected Essays, tion, and redemption) and also a limited num- 1974-1988. By Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert ber of metaphors (e.g., garden, mountain, cave, D. Denham. Univ. of Va. 386 pp. $35 and furnace), and these are the principal myths WORDS WITH POWER: Being a Second and metaphors of secular literature, too. The Study of the Bible and Literature. By Northrop myths deal primarily with events in time, the Frye. Harcourt, Brace. 342 pp. $24.95 metaphors arrange them in space-which is why learning to decode both is so valuable a On January 24, the most famous literary critic skill. "I come up against the fact that our ordi-

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nary experience rests on unreal and fuzzy ex- brooding melancholic; after Italy, as a learned, periences of time and space," Frye writes, "and cosmopolitan gentleman in elegant attire; and that myth and metaphor are among other in his famous self-portrait of 1500, as Christ things techniques of mediation, designed to fo- himself, thus uniting his religious and artistic cus our minds on a more real view of both." longings. Durer's most important contribution to the history of art is, arguably, not his paintings but ALBRECHT D~ER:A Biography. By Jane his prints and woodcuts. Masterful at religious Campbell Hutchinson. Princeton. 247 pp. propaganda, Durer understood perfectly how $25 to exploit the newly invented printing press to reach a broad audience on the eve of the Ref- Early in the 16th century, the Holy Roman Em- ormation. He ardently supported Martin Lu- peror Maximilian paid a visit to Albrecht Durer. ther, whose portrait he desired to engrave "for Durer was straining to draw on a high wall, so a lasting remembrance of this Christian man the Emperor ordered a courtier to let the who has helped me out of great distress." painter stand on his Durer presents a complex, contradictory fig- back. When the noble- ure, pointing at once forward and backward: man protested, Maxi- Rationalistic and religious, he believed in both milian snorted that he Renaissance humanism and old superstitions. could easily turn any These contradictions underscored the argu- I ,-,-- peasant into a noble- ment of Erwin Panofsky's The Life and Art of [ \ -%g man, but no nobleman Albrecht Diirer (1943). Panofsky showed a mel- could be remade into a Durer. This legend ancholic Durer suffering from an "interior ten- (possibly apocryphal) suggests how Durer sion" that could not reconcile the medieval raised painting in Germany from a manual, of- (Gothic Germany, his religious mysticism, his ten anonymous craft into an intellectual and essential naturalism) and the Renaissance (the noble pursuit. rationalism and classicism he found in Italy). Hutchinson, an art historian at the University Panofsky's commanding study has long dis- of Wisconsin, narrates Dtirer's progress from a couraged other scholars from approaching Du- goldsmith's son to an artist whose international rer, and it must be admitted that Panofsky's Du- renown was equaled only by that of Raphael, rer remains a more convincing figure than the Michelangelo, and Titian. In 1494, at age 23, good-natured, gregarious painter whom Hutch- Durer set off for Italy, becoming the first north- inson limns. Hutchinson, however, has erner to make the trip that would soon become documented Durer's life more folly than ever an indispensable part of an artistic education. before, and her biography provides the mate- Durer was determined, he said, "to learn the rial for the first reevaluation of Durer in almost secrets of the [Italian] art of perspective." In half a century. Italy he also observed the respect that was ac- corded to artists there: ere I am a gentle- man," he wrote, "at home only a parasite." Contemporary Affairs When he returned to Nuremberg a year later, Durer integrated the modem Renaissance tech- THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF CHILDREN. By nique-the rationalization of space through Robert Coles. Houghton Mifflin. 358 pp. $22.95 mathematical perspective-into the descriptive naturalism of his northern heritage. Immedi- The nature of children's "spirituality" is fre- ately he was in great demand for his psycholog- quently speculated upon but rarely investi- ically penetrating portraits. But the portraits gated. Do their ideas about God and religion that interested him most were those of himself. reflect a genuine impulse, or are children In an age of heightened individuality, he forged merely parroting their parents? his artistic identity by painting and drawing Coles, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, ex- more self-portraits than anyone before Rem- plores these and other matters in this culmina- brandt. As a young man, he drew himself as a tion of 30 years of writing about children. Prac-

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ETHNIC IDENTITY: The Transformation of White America. By Richard D. Alba. Yale. 374 pp. $35 ETHNIC OPTIONS: Choosing Identities in America. By Mary C. Waters. Univ. of Calif. 197 pp. $32.50

What does it mean, in 1991, to say you are Irish-American, Italian-American, or Jewish- tically inventing the discipline of children's American? Two sociologists, Richard Alba and oral history, Coles set a standard in his Children Mary Waters, use different methods to reach of Crisis series that psychologists, sociologists, the same conclusion: In most matters today,<. and historians have all attempted to equal. ethnicity counts for very little. The hundreds of children from age eight to Alba at the State University of New York and 13 whom Coles interviews here allow for some Waters at Harvard are the latest to loin in a interesting, if tentative generalizations. The debate that has continued since the turn of the Muslim children tend to accept Allah and their century. Mass immigrations created fears that religion without question. Jewish children are the new immigrants from Eastern and South- taught to question, but mainly as a learning de- ern Europe would overwhelm "true" American vice within the context of their religious stud- culture. Reassurance came from the new "sci- ies. Christian children, struggling with the ence" of sociology, notably from Robert Park strange paradox of an omnipotent God some- and Ernest Burgess of the "Chicago School," how connected to the child Jesus, freely ask the who argued that residence here would eventu- most questions of all. ally lead to complete assimilation. Coles's respect for the children's beliefs This "melting pot" theory has been chal- shows how far he has travelled since he was a lenged often over the years, never more power- young psychiatrist and accepted the dictates of fully than in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick his profession's god, Sigmund Freud. Freud put Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). religion on a par with "childhood neurosis," Glazer and Moynihan contended that complete but Coles refuses to reduce his young subjects' assimilation had not and would not take place spiritual concerns to neuroses or complexes. because each group establishes a new ethnic Children, he says, ask the same "questions our identity within America: Italian-American cul- philosophers and theologians and novelists ture, for example, is not Italian culture in have asked over the centuries and ordinary hu- America but a new creation that has become man beings have posed to themselves." part of a pluralist American society. Some critics have objected that Coles has fo- For two decades, this "pluralist" interpreta- cused almost exclusively on the brighter, more tion dominated sociological thinking. But dur- elevated aspects of religion, and that he ignores ing the 1980s, Herbert J. Gans revived the old those religious feelings of guilt and inadequacy assimilationist theory, arguing that Glazer and that, for example, torment Stephen Dedalus in Moynihan were discussing "symbolic ethnic- A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Coles, ity," an "ethnicity of last resort" in which indi- however, believes it a mistake to emphasize de- viduals identified with superficial practices that meaning, helpless, or passive images of the per- could be retained or dropped at their pleasure. son, which is what he feels psychiatry and the Alba and Waters test this argument with so- "healing professions" do. In recent years, his phisticated fieldwork and quantitative analysis. interest has turned to literature, and, in The ~lbainterviewed hundreds of people of Euro- Call of Stories (1989), he suggests that stories of pean descent living around Albany; Waters active, struggling human beings have a power studied 60 people from the suburbs of San Jose to heal. What Coles has elicited in Spiritual Life and Philadelphia. Only two percent of the peo- are really stories by and about children-sto- ple Alba interviewed had received help in busi- ries that are often as affecting as any in reli- ness from their "ethnic network"; only four gious literature. percent had suffered discrimination because of

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ethnicity; only one percent ate ethnic food on a course, be conceded to the law of meter." daily basis. Young Catholics more often than Gratzer, a cell biologist at King's College, not marry Protestants, and almost one out of London, has gathered 216 pieces, ranging from three Jews marries a non-Jew. For most whites, fiction to biography to journalism, to show moreover, the old urban "ethnic neighbor- what happens when the two cultures do meet. hoods" no longer exist. Ethnicity, Alba con- At certain moments, as when Primo Levi is cludes, represents only "a small portion of the writing, they appear to be kin: Both science identity 'masks' individuals present to others." and literature, Levi argues, rely upon observa- But both sociologists find that there is a tion to construct hypothetical models of behav- Brand-X or generic European-American iden- ior; both set problems and solve them. tity emerging in America. This vague new Yet most contributors to this anthology lack "white ethnicity" began as a reaction to the Levi's intimate knowledge of science. The pic- civil-rights movement and has increased as the ture that they collectively paint of scientists at new waves of immigration come to America work is a stereotype-actually two stereotypes. from Third World countries. (Paradoxically, at The more familiar one portrays the scientist as the very moment that white European "eth- a pure, disinterested observer who collects nics" are sloughing off their historical ances- facts and formulates theories to fit them: a sci- tries, African-Americans and Hispanic-Ameri- entist who is free, Gratzer says, "from the crises cans-who, judging by length of time spent of purpose and identity that have afflicted West- here, should be the most assimilated of all-are em music, literature, architecture, and paint- loudly recalling their racial roots.) ing." The classical scholar Maurice Bowra In this latest round of the old debate, Waters evokes this image when he says that scientists and Alba offer no new model of assimilation. make dangerous allies on university commit- The melting pot is out; adaptation (to a largely tees because "they are apt to change their Anglo-American prototype) is out. These two minds in response to arguments." studies show that new immigrants are greeted But contemporary scientists have another more tolerantly now than were those of the late reputation, this one more blemished. Gratzer 19th century. Yet this tolerance may have been admits that "emulation and jealousy among sci- purchased at the price of national self-defini- entists have become sanctified as the motives tion. New immigrants often seem somewhat that drive scientists forward." Gary Taubes, the puzzled-as Waters and Alba are-about what author of Nobel Dreams, shows the Harvard it now means to become an American. physicist Carlo Rubbia politicking unabashedly for the Nobel prize and skewing the work of a large team of researchers to further his own Science & Technology effort. And when politics gets coupled to sci- ence-as happened, to take an extreme exam- A LITERARY COMPANION TO SCIENCE, ple, under Stalin's regime in Russia-the Ed. by Walter Gratzer. Norton. 517 pp. $24.95 manipulative scientist becomes the stereotype, and results get further skewed. Thirty years ago C. P. Snow launched a public Gratzer's anthology succeeds in making sci- debate by claiming that science and the hu- entists and their work interesting to the lay- manities are two cultures, separate and ir- man, yet it oddly perpetuates the very cultural reconcilable. An entertaining example of the division it would close. Gratzer includes no sci- two mind-sets appears in this anthology: When entific papers, which, at their best, can con- the mathematician Charles Babbage read Ten- dense years of work into a few pages of unri- nyson's famous line, "Every minute dies a valed utilitarian lucidity. And as for literature, man,/Every minute one is bom," and noted Gratzer makes no distinction between first-rate that it failed to account for increasing popula- writing and third-rate science fiction. In his tion, he wrote Tennyson, suggesting an im- principle of selection, Gratzer seems to suggest provement: "'Every moment dies a man,/And that science is science and literature is litera- one and a sixteenth is born.' I may add that the ture, with a simple boundary running between exact figures are 1.167 but something must, of them. C. P. Snow would have agreed.

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ORIGINS: The Lives and Worlds of Modem Brawer write, "convinced many scientists for Cosmologists. By Alan Lightman the first time that cosmology had some contact and Roberta Brawer. Harvard. 563 pp. with reality, that cosmology was a legitimate $29.95 science." It is hard for a mere mortal to hear about the "Search for the origins of the universe and con- big bang theory without immediately wonder- template its demise." That would make a droll ing: Yes, but what was going on in the second job description, but it is exactly what cosmolo- right before the big bang? The cosmologists gists do. Their field is the Big Picture: Cosmolo- whom Lightman and Brawer interviewed ex- gists work in time frames of billions of years, in press more technical reservations. Alan Guth of distances measured in light years, and in media MIT discusses the "horizon problem." Accord- that consist of subatomic particles and micro- ing to the big bang theory, the universe should waves from outer space. They get into heated be more random than it is: Recent discoveries debates over what happened in the universe reveal all galaxies to be neatly organized in pat- during its first second, which they even terns that resemble bubbles. Then there is the have a name for-the Planck Era. Another age "flatness problemv-the universe's mass seems might have called their work an act of faith: to be just the amount needed to balance it be- Cosmologists elaborate theories based on parti- tween endless collapse and endless expan- cles whose existence has yet to be proved. sion-a freaky coincidence for which big bang "Cosmology is about as different as it can be theory offers no explanation. from our laboratory sciences," writes cosmolo- Given such quandaries, Lightman and gist Margaret Geller. "You have to have a sense Brawer attempt to find where inspiration and of humor about it because the likelihood of personal preference influence theories that are ever being right is so low." as yet unprovable. (One interesting speculation In Origins, physicists Lightman and Brawer is how the two posters of Marilyn Monroe on interview prominent cosmologists about their Stephen Hawking's wall have shaped his work.) sense of humor as well as their professional Dicke, for example, whose discovery seemed to accomplishments and their theories. Their goal substantiate big bang theory, actually prefers a is to understand a profession that obtained its competing theory-that of an "oscillating uni- scientific legitimacy scarcely a generation ago. verse" without beginning-and his reasons In 1965 Robert Dicke predicted the existence seem quite personal: "I wasn't impressed with of, and then found, background radiation com- the thought that you could suddenly make all ing from every direction in space. The big bang that matter that we see around us in sec- theory-which holds that the universe was onds. . . . A universe that is suddenly switched born around 10 billion years ago, when all mat- on I find highly disagreeable." Or as Guth says, ter was compressed to "If you can't explain extreme density and ex- the beginning [of the treme temperature, universe], it's not nice then exploded, ex- to have a beginning." panded, and cooled- Lightman and Braw- offered an explanation er have provided us for this radiation. This, with an intellectual along with the fact that portrait of 27 nice hu- the big bang theory ac- man beings, explaining counted for the known a science and indeed a hydrogen/helium com- universe no human be- position of the uni- ing will ever see, hear, verse, Lightman and or touch.

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Islands in the Street Gangs and American Urban Society MARTINSANCHEZ JANKOWSKI "Vivid, lively and yet theoretically informed, a triumph ofpatient and sustained field work. . . . Sanchez Jankowski presents the gang and its members not as pathological departures from social norms, but as shrewd and resourceful operators who strive to take advantage of the limited opportunities they encounter." -Michael Lipsky, M.I.T. In this daring examination of urban gangs, Sanchez Jankowski provides a new understanding of these underworlds of violence, defiance, and criminal activities. $24.95 cloth, 336 pages Cocaine Politics Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America PETER DALE SCOTT and JONATHAN MARSHALL "Reveals the contradictions between Washington's attempt at fighting both the drug war and die contra war in Central America." -Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia "An intricate, compelling, and often shocking tale of narcoterroris~nand corrup- tion, and the. leading role of die U.S. government in fostering die drug trade in die course of its terrorist operations in Central America."-Noam Chomsky, M.I.T. $24.95 cloth, 260 pages Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation ALAN WOLFE "One ofthe most iniportant books in years, disturbing in the best sense ofthe word and fascinating even when I disagreed with it." -Michael Harrington,-. author of The Other America "A new understanding of die fundamental predicaments of modernity." -Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits ofthe Heart "Spares neither right-wing champions of 'economic freedom' norleft-liberal advocates of an expanded welfare state. . . . Presents a compelling argument with passion and clarity."-The Washington Post Winner of the 1990 C. Wright Mills Award New in paper-$12.95, 388 pages

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BERKELEY LOSANGELES MEWYORK OXFORD REFLECTIONS

Mr. Kundera, The European

The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed a fitting title for a novel by Milan Kundera. In Kundera's fiction, experience is elusive, never quite what it seems: The grim political realities turn out to be laughable and the jokes to have terrible consequences. Although readers automatically identify Kundera with Eastern Europe, in his new novel, Immortality, not even the characters come from there. Ivan Sanders uncovers what is unchanging in Kundera: his exploration of what it means to be a writer today-especially a European writer.

by Ivan Sanders

astern Europeans have so of- feel vindicated by even a single Eastern ten bemoaned the lack of rec- European literary breakthrough may look ognition of their cultures that askance at the celebrity scoring the suc- when one of their artists does cesses. Writers from small countries who achieve world standing, they make a name for themselves abroad are are quick to proclaim him a frequently accused by their countrymen of genius who speaks for the entire region. A "internationalizing" their art, of blurring Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugregik, re- their deepest, most authentic creative im- cently recalled attending a lecture in Bel- pulses. And it is hard to say whether the grade by a "world-famous" American au- hostility stems from national insecurities, thor who, when asked if he had ever heard genuine concern, or plain envy. of Ivo Andrik, Miroslav Krleza, or Danilo For years Czechs have had an uncom- KiE (all three of them widely translated, fortably ambivalent relationship with Mi- and Andrik is a Nobel laureate), replied lan Kundera. What they seem to resent is with a calm "No." And how about the not the fact that he left his native land Czech Milan Kundera? his hosts inquired. some 16 years ago and chose France as his The much-admired visitor smiled confi- new home. Nor are they primarily both- dently: "Why yes, of course." "The audi- ered by the anticommunism of a writer ence breathed a sigh of relief," reports who was himself a vocal party member in UgreEik. "As a matter of fact, they would the late 1940s. After all, a number of noted have agreed right then and there to change Czech emigres have a similar history. It is the name of their country to Yugoslovakia, his unprecedented success in the West that just so they could continue to claim they have a hard time coming to terms Kundera as their own." with. A Czech journalist, in a New Yorker Paradoxically, the same people who report last year on the Prague scene,

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lashed out at Kundera in a by now familiar zart to Kafka. Prague has long been a Eu- manner: "His books are famous. Every- ropean cultural capital, and its residents body reads them and thinks they are true." believe there is a unique "spirit of Yet he "writes completely outside of real- Prague," which Kundera characterized ity here.. . . Actually, Kundera is not a thus: "An extraordinary sense of the real. Czech author anymore. He's become The common man's point of view. History something like a French wit. He should seen from below. A provocative simplicity. write about France rather than about A genius for the absurd. Humor with infi- Czechoslovakia." (Interestingly enough, as nite pessimism." we shall see, Kundera does just that in his When Kundera arrived in Prague in latest novel, Immortality.) 1948, however, its spirit was under siege Clearly, though, not everyone in by the new Stalinist regime. He took the Czechoslovakia is hostile to Kundera's art. surprising step of enrolling in the Prague Another urban intellectual in the same National Film School. Music and poetry Prague report defends Kundera by quoting were too close to his heart, he later said; Oscar Wilde: he studied script writing and film directing precisely because they didn't exert such an 'The only thing that cannot be forgiven is attraction for him-because cinema was talent.. . .' They also cannot forgive him an "art which serves the people." Kundera for having had a life for 16 years. They had joined the Czech Communist Party at profess to prefer the novels of [Josefl the age of 18 in 1947. Although he contin- Skvorecky, who hasn't a tenth of ued writing poetry, the three volumes he Kundera's talent but has devoted his life in exile to the cause of dissident Czech published in the 1950s adhered, more or writing. . . . This is admirable, of course, less, to the Marxist tenets in literature: The and Skvorecky is a splendid fellow, of Last May (1955), for example, celebrated a course, but it doesn't make him a great Czech communist hero who had opposed writer; it doesn't even make him a 'truer' the Nazis. Yet Kundera had already begun writer than Kundera. his quarrel with socialist realism in art, and even these early volumes, which were Actually, Milan Kundera is an atypical deemed cynical, barely escaped the cen- Czech novelist, and he would have re- sor's disapproval. mained atypical even if he had never left In the early 1960s Kundera returned to his native country or his native city of the film academy as a professor of litera- Brno (Bri.inn). There he was born in 1929 ture; among his students were budding on April first-a rather suitable birthday filmmakers such as Milo: Forman (direc- for a writer whose first novel is The Joke tor of Amadeus and One Flew Over the and who has two other books with the Cuckoo's Nest) who would bring about the word "laugh" in the title. The influences that helped shape his writing career were, from the start, un- usual. His early interests were not literary but musi- cal. His father was a pianist and a well-known musicol- ogist, the foremost expert on Czech composer Leo: JanEek. Janhcek and other musical influences like jazz would shape Kundera's conception of the novel. After his schooling in Brno. Kundera went to study in Prague, the city of A candidate for Immortality? This photo of Kundera, taken by his writers and artists from Mo- wife, shows the author in a bearably light mood.

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extraordinary resurgence of Czech cin- man," "a magnificent novelist," a "com- ema. Prague in the late 1960s was begin- plex, cerebral artist," but then added with ning to feel the liberalizing effect of Al- coy modesty: "I live in another world. . . ." exander DubEek's attempt to establish Although Kundera feels a definite kinship "socialism with a human face." By 1968 with the great Central European modern- the Czechs were behaving independently ists-Kafka, Robert Musil, Jaroslav HGek, enough to cause the worried Russians to Hermann Broch-his true literary fore- send tanks into Czechoslovakia. "Prague bears are more removed, both in space Spring" was a seminal event in Kundera's and time. life as it was in the life of his country. For Kundera has often said that the reason his participation in the events leading up he feels so much at home in France is that to it-most notably, for his speech to a he is enamored of French culture-but writers' congress in which he lamented not its contemporary culture so much as the fate of Czech culture under Stalin- older French literature. His real inspira- ism-Kundera was stripped of his position tions are the prose writers of the Renais- at the film institute. A year later he lost the sance and the Enlightenment-Rabelais, right to publish in his own country. All of Diderot, as well as England's Laurence his previous works were removed from Sterne. What Kundera admires in them is bookshops and library shelves. the relish with which they experimented For the next seven years Kundera was, with the malleable building blocks of a by his own description, "a corpse, some- still-new literary form. The novel to these one who no longer existed." Earnings left writers was a free-for-all, a "wonderful over from his enormously successful The game with invented characters." As its for- Joke (1967) helped him scrape by. His wife mal components solidified and the genre Vera gave English lessons, and Kundera itself became more respectable, it lost this wrote a play and radio scripts using other zaniness. Realism, to Kundera, is simplis- authors' names. Meanwhile, he finished tic; romanticism, the source of all kitsch. two novels in Czech (Life Is Elsewhere and Still, unlike many literary critics, he does The Farewell Party), convinced no Czech not for a moment believe that the novel would ever possibly read them. "But I was has exhausted its possibilities. Indeed, happy," Kundera later said and explained Kundera has helped revitalize fiction by why: Czechoslovakia was like a village, and being true to the brazenly inventive spirit he no longer needed to worry what the vil- of its 17th- and 18th-century innovators. lagers would think. Yet even as Kundera disappeared from the Czech literary world, undera's innovation is already evident he became more and more known in the in his first novel, The Joke, where he West, where The Joke in translation had al- uses a familiar narrative device with a new ready established his reputation. In 1973 twist. The central occurrence of the novel Life Is Elsewhere won France's Prix Medi- is the sending of a jocular-though in its cis for the best foreign novel of the year. In consequences disastrous-political mes- 1975 he was allowed to accept a guest lec- sage on a postcard: "Optimism is the tureship at a French university. He did not opium of the people.. . . Long live Trot- return to Prague. "My stay in France is fi- sky!" This event is recounted by the nov- nal," Kundera has said, "and therefore I el's various characters, and as each indi- am not an 6migr6." vidual narrative completes and contradicts Certainly Kundera is a more "interna- the other, it becomes clear that Kundera's tional" writer than, say, Bohumil Hrabal, ultimate aim is not to piece together parts the man considered to be the greatest liv- of a puzzle (as it is when most writers uti- ing Czech storyteller and a far more down- lize multiple narrators). Rather than arrive to-earth literary figure. Hrabal has praised at an objective "reality," he offers different Kundera extravagantly as a "great gentle- tantalizingly plausible interpretations of it.

Ivan Sanders holds the Soros Lectureship in Hungarian Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous essays on Eastern European literature, translator of novels by George Konrhd and Milan Fiist, and co-editor of Essays on World War I: A Case Study of Trianon (1982).

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This subjective understanding of experi- tion hits him. The truest reason he has to ence is a far cry from official Marxist destroy all evidence of his affair with this dogma, in which history has one meaning ugly, rigid woman is that he had in fact and one meaning only. been in love with her. Each possible moti- Already in The Joke, and even more in vation is highly believable and also highly Kundera's later fiction, the influence of suspect. As in The Joke, the meaning no cinema and music is on display. He bor- longer adheres to the event itself but in- rows the quick cuts and montage of film stead resides in the individual who must editing, and he relies on the musical de- interpret it fittingly. vices such as theme and seven-part inven- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is tions to break up the narrative of conven- also Kundera's most political novel. In it tional fiction. Too many novels, Kundera he illustrates the effects of totalitarian rule, has complained, are "encumbered by in particular the brainwashing, the 'technique,' by rules that do the author's "lobotomizing" of an entire nation. He work for him: present a character, de- quotes a famous Czech historian: "The first scribe a milieu, bring the action into its step in liquidating a people. . . is to erase historical setting, fill up the lifetime of the its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, characters with useless episodes." its history. Then have somebody write new Kundera has adapted a style based on books, manufacture a new culture, invent modern musical composers such as Jan&- a new history. Before long the nation will Zek, who created "brutal juxtaposition, in- begin to forget what it is and what it was." stead of transitions; repetition instead of In public statements, too, Kundera has variation-and always [went] straight to been quite specific about the evils of state- the heart of things: Only the note with inspired mind control, of "organized for- something essential to say is entitled to ex- getting." Since the post-1968 crackdown, ist." "My purpose," Kundera said, "is like he reminded Philip Roth back in 1980, JanGek's: to rid the novel of the automa- "Two hundred Czech writers have been tism of novelistic technique, of novelistic proscribed. One hundred and forty-five word-spinning." Czech historians have been dismissed Kundera has perfected the novel of from their posts. History has been rewrit- broken narratives, discontinuities, and ten, monuments demolished." contradictory exposition. In The Book of And yet Kundera cannot resist taking a Laughter and Forgetting (1978), Mirek is a skeptical attitude toward political pieties character who lives in a world governed or challenging firmly held views. In an epi- by none of the old novelistic certainties. In sode in The Book of Laughter and Forget- 197 1, in a halfhearted attempt to avoid offi- ting, a woman in her seventies experiences cial harassment, Mirek tries to retrieve a disturbing memory lapses and begins to bundle of love letters written to a one-time shift her order of priorities in odd ways. girlfriend, Zdena, whom he had known When Russian tanks occupy Czechoslo- when they were both young and ardent vakia in 1968, all she can think about is the communists. He believes the real reason pear tree in her garden, which because of he wants these letters back, in addition to all the commotion remains unpicked. Her avoiding possible arrest, is that he is angry son Karel and her daughter-in-law are in- at Zdena for remaining an orthodox com- furiated. "Everybody's thinking about munist, while he gave up his illusions tanks, and all you can think about is pears, about the system long ago. But after seeing they yelled. . . . But are tanks really more her again in Prague he realizes he wants to important than pears?" the narrator erase all traces of their relationship be- muses. "As time passed Karel realized that cause Zdena is-and always was-an in- the answer was not so obvious as he had credibly ugly woman. As the story pro- once thought, and he began sympathizing gresses, though, Mirek discovers that his secretly with Mother's perspective-a big affair of old was motivated by mere self- pear in the foreground and somewhere off interest: At the time he was a young man in the distance a tank, tiny as a lady bug, on the make and she was useful to him. ready at any moment to take wing and dis- But then an even more devastating realiza- appear from sight. So Mother was right af-

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IMAGOLOGY From Immortality: ger than reality, which anyway has long ceased to be what it was for my grand- Imagology! Who first thought up this re- mother, who lived in a Moravian village and markable neologism?. . . . It doesn't matter, still knew everything through her own ex- after all. What matters is that this word fi- perience: how bread is baked, how a house nally lets us put under one roof something is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the that goes by so many different names: ad- meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what vertising agencies; campaign managers of the priest and the schoolteacher think about politicians; designers who devise the shape the world; she met the whole village every of everything from cars to gym equipment; day and knew how many murders were fashion stylists; barbers; show-business stars committed in the county over the last 10 dictating the norms of physical beauty that years; she had, so to say, personal control all branches of imagology obey.. . . over reality so that nobody could fool her by All ideologies have been defeated: In the maintaining that Moravian agriculture was end their dogmas were unmasked as illu- thriving when people at home had nothing sions and people stopped taking them seri- to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time in ously. For example, communists used to be- an office, then he sits in his car and drives lieve that in the course of capitalist home, turns on the TV and when the an- development the proletariat would gradu- nouncer informs him that in the latest pub- ally grow poorer and poorer, but when it fi- lic opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen nally became clear that all over Europe voted their country the safest in Europe (I workers were driving to work in their own recently read such a report), he is overjoyed cars, they felt like shouting that reality was and opens a bottle of champagne without deceiving them. Reality proved stronger ever learning that three thefts and two mur- than ideology. And it is in this sense that ders were committed on his street that very imagology surpassed it: Imagology is stron- day.

ter all: Tanks are mortal, pears eternal." ist poet before the communist takeover, It is precisely such provocative per- and afterward he turned out volumes of spectives that have moved Kundera's crit- (almost) correct Marxist-Leninist verse. ics to label him brilliant but frivolous. His Kundera would soon do a volte-face, op- Czech detractors are especially disturbed pose communist rule, and eventually be by his unrelenting irony, his deracink rel- forced into exile. Yet-unlike less sophisti- ativism and cynicism. To them Kundera is cated writers-he never repudiated that just too clever, too cool a writer, too youthful version of himself. Instead he at- caught up in his cerebral games. tempted to understand the initial appeal of We ought to find Jaromil, the artist- communism in Czechoslovakia. The liter- hero of Life Is Elsewhere (1973), for exam- ary critic Jan Kott has said that commu- ple, downright despicable. He is an oppor- nism "was that most diabolical of tempta- tunist, a hack, who after the communist tions-to participate in history, a history takeover in Prague turns from flaming for which both stones and people are only avant-garde poet to Stalinist versifier with- the material used to build the 'brave new out missing a beat. Yet Kundera has his world.'" But Kundera recalls, besides anti-hero express some rather profound such temptations, the idealism. The com- ideas on revolution. He even suggests that munists took over in Czechoslovakia, he propaganda literature can be deeply felt reminds us in The Book of Laughter and and that the Stalinist period in Czechoslo- Forgetting, "not in bloodshed and violence, vakia "was not only a terrible epoch but a but to the cheers of about half the popula- lyrical one as well: It was ruled by the tion. And please note: The half that hangman, but by the poet too." cheered was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half. Yes, say what f course, Jaromil is a fictional charac- you will, the communists were more intel- 0ter and Life Is Elsewhere a novel. But, ligent. They had a grandiose program, a like Jaromil, Kundera was a young surreal- plan for a brand-new world in which ev-

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eryone would find his place. The commu- agonizing "lightness of being." One would nists* opponents had no great dream; all have thought that Kundera, the puckish they had was a few moral principles, stale ironist, would have a deeper affinity for and lifeless, to patch up the tattered trou- unfettered, free-floating existence. But sers of the established order. So of course Kundera, after all, comes from Czech- the grandiose enthusiasts won out over the oslovakia where-as in Poland and Hun- cautious compromisers." gary-culture is not free-floating but is Other commentators have pointed to rooted in quite specific local and national some such combination of idealism and conditions. The Unbearable Lightness of opportunism to explain the initial appeal Being anticipates, in a sense, the events in of communism in Eastern Europe. But Eastern Europe not of 1989 but of 1990, Kundera has gone further and discovered when freedom could not in itself provide something not only about himself but the answers. about the 20th-century European intellec- In his new novel, Immortality, tual. Recalling a debate in his Brno gymna- Kundera, while playful as ever, is bent on sium, Kundera remembered arguing that advocating the chastening proposition that he would support socialism even if the freedom is no guarantee against spiritual consequence was a transitional period of impoverishment. Human values can cultural darkness. Coming from a politi- shrivel in a democracy, too: They can be cian, such a remark would sound like utter trivialized by a different kind of crassness cynicism; coming from a student totally and coarseness, like the popular media. devoted to culture, as Kundera was, the His emancipated, urbane characters can words suggested something else. They sig- experience the same sense of abandon- nified mistrust of oneself, and intellectu- ment, the same Angst, as can the harried als, Kundera said, are very good at doubt- subjects of political dictatorships. (In the ing and rejecting themselves. But, in this past, Kundera has been taken to task by case, the intellectual was soon to find him- American neoconservatives for not mak- self rejected not only by himself but by the ing the proper distinction between the op- new communist regime; "rejected theoret- pressed life in Eastern Europe and the free ically, practically, even economically." And life in Western Europe.) so this particular Eastern European writer The plot line of Immortality involves a finally had "no alternative but to begin to curious game of musical chairs played understand his own importance, his own with incestuous infatuation. A graceful and lot, to start defending his own liberty." enigmatic Parisian woman named Agnes In The Unbearable Lightness of Being discovers that the important man in her (1984), Kundera describes an Eastern Eu- life has been her taciturn father and not ropean world where the possibilities for her gregarious lawyer husband. The hus- human action have become flat and lim- band in turn is erotically attracted to ited, yet Kundera, through his style, slyly Agnes's sister, the high-strung Laura, adds to that flat world nuance and multi- whom he winds up marrying after his dimensionality and irony. The novel is the wife's death. What could have been, in story of Tomas, a modern-day Don Juan other words, a conventional French com- whose hedonism is tempered, made more edy of manners is made into something somber, by the realization that constancy else by the interruptions of an intrusive and commitment can be as irresistible as and unabashedly manipulative narrator. the pull of total freedom. Of his two loves, He tells stories and anecdotes and injects Sabina is associated with lightness, uncon- bon mots of his own, which supply varia- ventionality, playfulness, but also lack of tions on such themes as the impoverish- commitment, rootlessness, and sterility; ment of contemporary culture, the pre- the earthbound Tereza connotes inertia, eminence of "imagologues" (i.e. image- rootedness, and provincialism. Tomas ulti- makers and propagandists), and above all, mately chooses not the self-sufficient immortality. Kundera uses "immortality" Sabina, a kindred spirit, but the hopelessly not in any religious sense but to refer to faithful Tereza. For all his worldliness, fame, the afterlife of the famous and not- Tomas, unlike Sabina, cannot endure the so-famous in posterity's memory. He even

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ers who swerve their vehi- cles to avoid hitting her. Today, there is a feeling abroad that after the revolu- tionary changes in Eastern Europe the works of hith- erto dissident writers have lost their urgency, their lus- ter, indeed their very reason for being. In Kundera's novels (at least until Immor- tality)-the argument goes-so much creative en- ergy is spent on the absurd contortions of the oppres- sors and the sly evasions of the oppressed that one can't help wondering if all of that is not passe. For many read- Art imitates terrible reality. The film The Unbearable Lightness of ers, the once breathtaking Being portrays the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague-an impor- pronouncements of Eastern tant event in the novel and the crucial event in Kundera's life. European. - intellectual heavyweights such as invents a meeting between Goethe and Na- Bronislaw Geremek, George Konrhd, and poleon and, in a sheer flight of fancy, a dia- Jhnos Kis are now mainly of historical in- logue on immortality between Goethe and terest. Communism may in retrospect turn Ernest Hemingway. out to have been (in the words of Polish In Immortality, even more than in his critic Jaroslaw Anders) "little more than other recent works, Kundera the intellec- another cruel, but also vulgar and stupid, tual, the man of culture, often obscures political system-no longer a subject, that the novelist. One need not be a devotee of is, for great moral drama." old-fashioned realism to be bothered by Certainly if Kundera's novels are the thinness of novelistic textures. When read-as many of his new readers in his plot and character are pretexts, a means to homeland now read them-less as fiction an end, as they are in Immortality, reading than as political exposes, they are, or soon becomes an abstract pleasure, and we find will be, passe. Yet as the precarious new ourselves longing for the denser air of be- democracies of Eastern Europe reveal a guiling fiction. worrisome degree of inward-turning and And for all its playfulness, the new xenophobia, Kundera may prove pertinent novel seems grimmer than Kundera's for a different reason. other fictions. The central character, Ag- Kundera has always viewed his writ- nes, gradually discovers that for her the ings as contributions not just to Eastern world is an alien place: She feels her soli- (or Central) European life but to the cul- tude when confronted by the ugliness and ture of Europe generally. The great mod- unlivability of 20th-century urban life. ern age in Europe which began with Des- Whereas the heroine of The Book of cartes and Cervantes-when cultural Laughter and Forgetting suffered from that values filled the place left vacant by reli- awful lightness of being, Agnes realizes gion-is now, Kundera argues, in danger that "what is unbearable in life is not being of coming to an end. He indicates what but being one's self." Agnes is driven to shall replace it in Immortality: the tissue- suicide when she becomes convinced that thin world of "imagology," a pseudo-real- her life has reached a dead end. She sits ity created by media executives, political down on a busy highway and stays there campaign managers, and ad agencies. until killed by a speeding car, though not This "bowing out of culture" is why before she causes the death of several driv- Kundera thinks that the fate of Prague

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Spring in 1968 was, ultimately, a tragedy over the Russian writer Dostoevsky. To be less of Russian oppression than of Euro- a European writer, Kundera argued, pean indifference. Because Europe no means holding a playful balance between longer valued its own culture, it could feeling and rationality; it demands enough blithely concede the loss of a key element skeptical detachment so that emotion in it, its eastern realm-the one-time doesn't supplant rational thought. "What home of Kakfa, Rilke, Husserl, and Bar- irritated me about Dostoevsky," he said, t6k-as though it had never mattered. "By "was the climate of his novels: a universe virtue of its cultural history," Kundera where everything turns into feelings; in wrote in The New York Review of Books in other words, where feelings are promoted 1984, Central Europe "is the West. But to the rank of value and of truth." Brodsky since Europe itself is in the process of los- mistrusted any definition of culture that ing its own cultural identity, it perceives in would exclude Dostoevsky. But he had no Central Europe nothing but a political re- doubt that "Mr. Kundera is a Continental, gime." Kundera, the novelist-historian of a European man," in fact trying "to be the Russian tragedy in Czechoslovakia, is a more European than the Europeans": dated writer; Kundera, the cultural com- "These people are seldom capable of see- mentator, who discounted the old political ing themselves from the outside," Brodsky chasm between Eastern and Western Eu- said. "If they do, it's invariably within the rope, and who now dismisses Dostoevsky context of Europe, for Europe offers them as a non-European mystifier, remains as a scale against which their importance is controversial acritic ai he ever was. detectable." In Immortality Kundera again returns In any case, one thing is certain: to the notion of "Europe," by focusing on Kundera-the writer from whom many the grand figure of Goethe, who was al- Western readers took their sense of ways better appreciated in Central Europe Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe under than, say, in the Mediterranean or the An- communism-is obviously no longer in- glo-Saxon world. Kundera is not the least terested in speaking for his "region." He bit interested in offering an idealized por- demands to be judged as a European trait of the German ooet.A, but he is cer- writer. The old objection that he has inter- tainly wistful about Goethe as a nationalized his art he would hardly con- quintessentially European phenomenon. sider a criticism at all. Several years ago he "Goethe," he writes, "is a figure placed even had his novels removed from Pen- precisely in the center of European his- guin Books' prestigious "Writers from the tory.. . . Not the center in the sense of a Other Europe" series. When Kundera emi- timid point that carefully avoids extremes, grated to France, he was 46-an age, he no, a firm center that holds both extremes said, when one's time and energy are lim- in a remarkable balance which Europe ited, and he had to choose: Either he could would never know again. . . . Goethe was live looking over his shoulder, to where he the greatest German of all, and at the same was not, in his former country with his for- time an antinationalist and a European." mer friends, or he could make the effort to profit from the catastrophe, starting over s there an implied comparison in Im- at zero, beginning a new life right where mortality? Not that Kundera would he was. "Without hesitation," Kundera claim to be a contemporary Goethe, but said, "I chose the second solution." rather that he too would write from the What Milan Kundera wished for has, same central point in European culture. with Immortality, come to pass. In France, What Kundera means by Europe-and and now in the United States, he is no writing from the central point of it-he longer seen as an author in exile, an East- made clear in his stormy debate in 1985 ern European emigre, but as a writer who with Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Brodsky is at home in Europe and in the world.

WQ SPRING 1991 109 REFLECTIONS

The Decay of Idleness

"Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler," Samuel Johnson observed two centuries ago. Alas, laments George Watson, few modern men (and now, women) would admit to such a languid ambition. Hereon, his complaint against the Achievement Society.

by George Watson

hy is nobody idle any man history. In former civilized ages there more? has always been at least an Idle Rich class, I mean openly, to- based on inherited wealth or riches newly tally, cheerfully idle, made, and it included idle women and idle and by choice. The in- youth. In the last century, for example, and dustrial world is no early in this, ladies did not work at all, as a doubt full of people who could work defining characteristic of their class. They harder, and know it, full of procrastinators had never worked and were never ex- and easy riders. But no one seems content pected to work, from birth to death, and to achieve nothing any more, whether at their lofty status was guaranteed by that school and college, or in industry or the simple fact. Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, professions. When I first taught at a uni- daughter of Prime Minister Herbert As- versity-in the Midwest during the quith (1908-16), used to tell how as a little 1950s-a good fifth of the students, it was girl at the turn of the century she asked widely accepted, did no work, or next to her nanny what her life would be. "Until none, and were content to drop out, fail, you are 18 you will do lessons," came the or pass at the bottom of the scale. That ex- reply, "and after 18 you will do nothing." perience was duplicated a year or two Such a life was then entirely normal for later when I began to teach at British uni- one of her class and sex. It would be hard versities. The student militancy of the to convey to the modern mind, and espe- 1960s, which thought itself the beginning cially to the modern woman, the sheer of something, now looks in retrospect like prestige in that age of Doing Nothing. its end, the last gasp of a fun-loving mood Needless to say, Doing Nothing could in- of endless leisure, since it was accompa- clude a lot of frantic activity. "How can nied by a marked disinclination to read you say such a thing?" a young lady ex- books or write papers, at least in any sys- claims in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband tematic way. But since the collapse of the (1899), when the young man of her choice New Left in the early 1970s no one seems is denounced by his father as idle. "Why, to want to be totally idle. For better or he rides in the Row at 10 o'clock in the worse, work is definitely in. morning, goes to the Opera three times a This is a mood hard to parallel in hu- week, changes his clothes at least five

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times a day, and dines out every night of 1950s, early in her reign, Queen Elizabeth the season. You don't call that leading an I1 abolished the ritual of presentation at idle life, do you?" court, for example, which once marked Most people would. Americans have no the "coming out" of a young lady of good great tradition of elegant indolence, but family and her readiness to attend balls they know about it from plays such as and entertain offers of marriage: after Wilde's, novels such as those in John Gals- which, it was understood, in a domestic worthy's Forsyte Saga (1906-29), and sto- world based on servants, she would do ries such as P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves se- nothing. As mothers noted with despair at ries, where Bertie Wooster is the immortal the time, the young simply ceased to be hish-class drone. One wav to describe the interested in the traditional prospect of change that has recently occurred, then, genteel and unending leisure. Nowadays would be to say that Europe has now work has an indispensable prestige, at joined the American condition of esteem- least if it is non-manual and part of a pro- ing work and nothing but work and of fessional hierarchy such as finance, higher knowing about elegant indolence only education, medicine, or law. We live in from literature. what the Germans call an Achievement So- Perhaps there is now a case for arguing ciety, and to be idle is to be uninteresting the charms of idleness, not to mention its and to have failed. uses. It can be elesant. which is a virtue in Whv is this? Since it is the first such itself. It can be notably charitable, on a societyin the history of civilization, it pre- personal or on an international scale. It sumably derives from a moral assumption can be a civilized influence providing a that is itself new. The assumption cannot sympathetic market of readers and collec- be Judeo-Christian, since that tradition, as tors for literature and the other arts. And it Scripture tells, allowed full credit to Mary can be amusing, and can sustain a valued over Martha, to the values of pure contem- tradition of conversational wit. The lazy, plation and to Solomon's lilies of the field one often notices, talk well. that neither toil nor spin. It is equally un- But for whatever reason, that world of likely to be socialist, whether Marxist or total idleness, along with the values that some other variety, since socialism is yes- once informed it, is dead. During the terday's work ethic and one that inspires

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only a small and dwindling band of the tion and get-rich-quick thinking in the land never-say-die. It is not, so far as I know, the that invented first Marxism and then Na- creation of any single sage, though it zism. But they only smile if you ask them smacks of a certain sort of guru-guide that how it happened. Since there is no other used to figure in American bestseller lists, view, they imply, the reigning view hardly with titles like How to Succeed in Busi- calls for any explanation, interpretation, or ness-books which nobody nowadays defense. That notable incuriosity about the wishes to be found reading. But then why age now extends all the way from Califor- should they? The mood of work is so omni- nia to the newly liberated lands of Eastern present that there is no need, by now, to Europe, and nobody is suggesting to Presi- read about it. One hears no other view but dent Gorbachev that he should try to re- to get on. Private schools ceased to train vive the Russian tradition of the hermit- gentlemen a generation and more ago, mystic or the religious contemplative. It and on both sides of the Atlantic they have pervades education, too. Students who become places where parents send chil- lack advice about how to get good grades dren as a preparative for worldly success. or find good posts can turn anxious, im- The modern women's movement, unlike portunate, or bitter; and very few young previous brands of feminism-the pre- women are heard to say they would be 1914 suffragettes in Britain, for example- content to marry and raise children. To be knows no other assumption. Germaine outside this competitive game, apparently, Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), for ex- is to be outside life itself. When I recently ample, simply took hierarchical success announced my retirement from an aca- for granted as the only goal of the new demic post, friends and colleagues woman, enthusing over the heroines of the stopped me in the street and asked with a new cause-"the first woman judge," "her sense of concern what I was going to do, own brokerage firmw-lamenting over as if the enjoyment of leisure was a pos- earlier generations of women who had sibility that had not entered into their missed their professional chances. Neo- minds. Even the British roval familv Marxism, too, which despised the worship works, and works hard, and is Photo- of the golden calf, has gone down utterly graphed by the press doing so, as an exam- before the mood, and the remnants of the ple to others. "I like to be busy," a retired New Left have mostly yielded to the new colleague remarked to me the other day, ethos and taken fat jobs in business and and I did not dare ask him why, in that the media, hoping to make them fatter case, he had retired. still. When Donald Trump remarked that, The causes of the decay of idleness as as he saw the immediate future, money is an ideal may be several, and it might be king, he may have fancied he was sum- helpful to list them. ming up a personal philosophy. In fact he 1. Inflation. Hippies flourished, for a brief was speaking for an age. age, on cheap food and cheap rents, much as the religious hermit once depended on f the new mood is without a prophet, it alms. They largely vanished in the 1970s I is also without analysts. The Germans, with hyperinflation, and failed to return in for example, live in the most successful the 1980s, with inflation in the Western in- Achievement Society in Europe-indeed, dustrial world still registering an uncom- they invented the term Lei.~t~ttzgsgesell- fortable 5-10 percent. A year off may be a schaft to describe it-yet theirs is a nation youthful aspiration for some, a time to cul- once notorious for its credulity of abstrac- tivate friendships and see the world. But tions, mysticisms, and extreme dogmas in no college-leaver doubts that he is going to religion and politics. The Germans note need to lock himself quickly into a pattern the contemporary monopoly of modera- of rising income and eventual pension

George Watson is a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge Univer.sity. He is general editor of the fow-volume New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1972-76) and author of Writing a Thesis (1976), The Idea of Liberalism (1985), and most recently British Literature Since 1945, just published by St. Martin's Press.

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rights if he is to live a life of stable relation- of time," Napoleon is reported to have said ships away from the cardboard jungles of on his way to St. Helena, wondering if he the city streets. might not while away the tedium of exile If inflation is the main determinant by writing his memoirs. Memoir-writing, here, then private enterprise may be said especially by retired statesmen, is well to have secreted within itself an ingenious known to be highly characteristic of the self-adjusting mechanism not yet fully age, and behind it, and much other work, noted by political philosophers. It runs, in lies a terror of vacancy and the dread of a outline, like this: Anti-commercial dissent wasteland with nothing to do. Television, a breeds militancy, militancy breeds indus- cynic has remarked, is driving people back trial unrest, unrest breeds high prices, and to life; modern household equipment high prices make for a return to office and makes housekeeping, at least for the better factory. It is observable that the contradic- off, almost childishly easy; and children tions of capitalism are seldom spoken of who abandon the habit of obedience as today, even by Marxists. The system is to early as the age of 12 have made the role of that extent self-adjusting, more or less, and parental responsibility look trivial, unre- seen to be so, at least on a long view. It is warding, and short. Meanwhile the ad- the contradictions of socialism, which de- vance of longevity stretches the gap be- pended in its day on exhortation and ter- tween the end of parental responsibility ror to achieve better services and higher and death. Of course women want to productivity, that will be the theme of his- work. in such a world: It would be surnris- torical analysis by ing if they did not. philosophers with a Their real compul- taste for fallacies. sion is not oppres- 2. Achievement. It is sion, as feminist pro- not enough to live: paganda sometimes one must live for suggests, but the sim- something. "No pi- ple fact that by his- lot," as Montaigne torical standards the remarks in one of his life of a housewife is Essais ("Against Idle- boringly easy. The ness"), "can perform male, in any case, his dutv on drv has no interest (to land." work is more speak generally) in than a chance to do your thing: It is a way keeping women out of the professions. of showing you have a thing to do. "I do Since about half the workers of the West- not love a man who is zealous for nothing" ern world are now female, the wealth of was a sentence which, to Samuel John- that world depends solidly on women go- son's regret, Oliver Goldsmith deleted ing out to work; if they did not go, men as from The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and well as women would be dramatically im- the sentiment has since become universal. poverished. I do not imply that feminism The Achievement Society cannot love a was a male trick to get women into the man or woman who is without zeal. The factory or office. Men are nothing like quest for achievement is as much a hunger clever enough to have thought of that. But for admiration as for wealth, and a com- now that it has happened, the situation has petitive age knows nothing of what Words- some evident advantages to the male, and worth once called "a wise passiveness." It boredom may have been a prime impulse esteems creative activity above all, some- behind it. thing to point to, to echo, and to touch. 4. Leisure. The wealth and variety of lei- The late British architect Basil Spence was sure activities in the present age-televi- once asked what the chief motive of his life sion as well as cinema, videos as well as had been, and he replied: "I should like to TV programs-should have made leisure have designed a building so good that I more attractive. No one, I believe, pre- would want to pat it." dicted that it would make work more at- 3. The fear of boredom. "Work is the scythe tractive. But then the media are lavishly

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leads inevitably to a sense of personal guilt. In unre- formed Europe, he wrote in Democracy in America (1835-40), he saw happy faces about him, whereas Americans had "a cloud ha- bitually upon their brow" and took their pleasures sadly, "forever brooding over advantages they do not possess." Such is the bur- den of liberty, which East- ern Europe is about to dis- cover for itself. To be free to choose is to be free to get it wrong; and to get it wrong can mean- -. a life of self-re-. . proach. The principal task involved in culture propaganda-Kenneth of the modern mind, in that event, is self- Clark's famous TV series Civilization was a forgiveness, and it is an undertaking highly classic instance-and watching movies characteristic of the age we are in. Other that extol achievement in the sciences, art, ages have asked God, or other people, to and exploration can make people want to forgive them: Nowadays we ask it of our- achieve something too, or at least make selves. them want to take a course to learn more The second demand is that work about the achievements of others. Even should be interesting. This is a recent the performances of pop stars such as Ma- development in human history, and work- donna, lacking as they may be in musical ers in field or factory over the centuries virtues, can be seen as an incentive to ac- would have been greatly puzzled by it. tion. They extol success. The Achievement Work used to be something you did be- Society can be faintly perverse in its judg- cause you had to do it. Now it is supposed ments, and what it esteems above all else to be interesting. That lies at the heart of is fame. I once stumbled over this truth in the vogue for higher education, which can- a manner little short of farcical by attend- not chiefly reflect a longing for riches, ing a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in since plumbers and mechanics can easily London which happened to be televised, be paid more than college graduates, not Sitting by chance behind the piano soloist, to mention their professors. Education is a I was caught by the cameras and found demand to be interested. All that reverses myself congratulated for weeks afterwards a traditional assumvtion of mankind. bv as never before. Even being famous for which leisure was supposed to be interest- nothing is apparently a great achievement. ing and work, almost by its nature, dull. Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters he decay of idleness, genteel or other- (1866), for example, tells of a governess wise, has led to certain strains in the who marries a prosperous widower whom new morality that has engendered it. she likes well enough, her principal mo- The first is a fear of failure. Never, tive, however, being her own comfort and surely, can the unemployed and the security-"she was tired of the struggle of unpromoted have felt so humiliated, in a earning her own livelihood." She gladly social sense, as they do in the Achievement gives up teaching to live a life of leisured Society of recent years. Alexis de Tocque- ease, serving tea to her fnends in a house- ville perceived that unhappy effect of lib- hold with servants. Her modern equivalent erty when he visited the United States in would be more likely to insist on keeping 1831-32. To make individuals freely re- her job as a stepping-stone to a better one. sponsible for their own lives, he observed, The industrial revolution, once blamed for

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creating the drudgery of the factory bench, worked, and Trollope jokingly observed in is now more sensibly seen as the instru- a letter of May 1871 that he regretted the ment by which mankind released itself Old Testament should have called labor from mechanical operations. Compared "the evil consequence of the Fall of Man," with work, leisure can be a bore. since it was self-evidently its greatest bless- The demand that work should be inter- ing. On the other hand, though he rose esting is very unevenly spread through the early to write fiction before spending all Western industrial world, with the Ger- day at the office, he often hunted in the mans and the Dutch minding commend- afternoon and enjoyed dinner parties in ably little about boredom, the French and the evening, and his last illness was caused the British minding a good deal more. by laughing too heartily over a new novel. America, in my experience, comes out That sounds like a balanced diet of living. well out in this comparison-on the as- 'My only doubt as to finding a heaven for sumption that a high boredom threshold is myself at last," he wrote in the same letter, a merit and an advantage, both morally "arises from the fear that the disembodied and materially. I am impressed, when I and beatified spirits will not want novels." teach in the United States, by the readiness That cheerful view of work is nothing like of students and colleagues to perform bor- the black pit of compulsive labor into ing tasks like reading ill-written but essen- which Scott Fitzgerald's hero falls. Worka- tial texts and spending long hours in highly holic is a 20th-century word, one suspects, undiverting classes and committees, and I because it is a 20th-century type. hope I have not exploited that virtue too relentlessly. British academic life, by con- he decay of idleness is not a disaster, trast, is markedly less tolerant of tedium; and the Achievement Society, by and French too. A low threshold of boredom is large, is no bad place to be. Its puritanical a considerable disadvantage in modern contempt for drones and parasites may life, and one wonders what the ultimate look faintly grim, at times, or absurdly cost will be. monomaniacal, but it is still a more ratio- A third strain is the phenomenon of the nal view than the respect for the unpro- workaholic. The word, invented in the ductive and the useless that reigned in United States as recently as 1968, may be many an ancien regime or the worlds of less than a quarter of a century old, but the P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and Eve- type itself cannot be much older, and it lyn Waugh's Brideshead. It is not, how- would be difficult to think of instances in ever, a tolerant world, and not everyone European or American fiction or life be- has noticed that the Permissive Age, which fore the present century. F. Scott Fitzger- once seemed here to stay, has vanished al- aid's The Last Tycoon (1941) shows such a most without a trace. The new age is natu- character, for whom failure is disgraceful, rally censorious. The parent obsessively work interesting, and the work-habit a worrying about the education of offspring, drug that drives out all other thoughts. the careerist agonizing over a lack of pro- Fitzgerald's hero is a Hollywood producer motion, the professional who finds it hard called Monro Stahr, and he is a type new, I or impossible to stop-these are all its suspect, to civilized mankind. In earlier children, and one can only wish them the ages people overworked, to be sure, but gift of whimsy and a good night's rest. commonly because they were forced by Odd that a century that began in full poverty or impelled by a sense of duty. confidence that Victorian values were Now work can be a neurotic addiction. dead and buried should have ended by The temptation lies in the fact that, all too resuscitating them so willingly and so ar- often, there is nothing more interesting to dently, and at something more than full do. Work, as Noel Coward said, is much strength. The Victorians, after all, never more fun than fun. suggested that work was the only life there The danger now is ultimately to sanity is. Capitalism, in the event, did not die: It itself. The great Victorians, like Dickens was reformed and reinforced, and it is and Trollope, disqualified themselves as spreading across the globe. The welfare workaholics by playing as hard as they state did not kill entrepreneurial skills, as

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many predicted: It turned welfare, by who know how to be richly, deeply, and cheapening it, into a dirty word, and made totally idle, who have never done a day's worldly success look all the more presti- work or thought to do so. Such beings, by gious and imperative. The sexual revolu- the 1990s, are rarer than rubies, even tion did not lead to license, for long: It among English ladies or Balkan counts, made millions more than ever conscious and by now one can only plunder litera- of the hazards, physical and emotional, ture and memory for hints of the lost se- that lie outside monogamy. A wheel has cret of their idleness. In a radio reminis- come full circle, and moved perhaps a lit- cence Sir John Gielgud has told how, as a tie further on. young actor-director between the wars, he Such is the world we are in. As Tocque- once visited a society hostess in London ville rightly foresaw, the Achievement So- and watched in wonderment as she enter- ciety has brought wealth but not joy. He tained her guests in an elegant sitting- remarked in the 1830s that the English room, mixing their teas, directing her ser- have the enviable faculty of looking down- vants, and maintaining a dazzling flow of ward with complacency, whereas the conversation as she did so; and he re- French look upward with envy. (Hence the turned to the theater, where he was re- French propensity, he argued, to violent hearsing a period comedy, determined to revolution.) The Achievement Society persuade a young actress in his charge to characteristically does both. Its players adopt those manners and that style. He look both upward and downward, ap- urged in vain: Such behavior, even in the plauding and reproaching themselves 1930s, was already part of a way of life daily and hourly for their success in having whose secret had been lost. climbed so far, their failure in having Such elegant and animated indolence climbed no farther. is not the note of the age, and it lies out- But then it is a world they have chosen, side its competence and even its ambition. after all; and often, in lands We are content to live where the achievement ,. ,. .- without style and to ad- ethos reigns supreme, . .' mire it, if at all, across such as Germany or footlights. A British ac- southern California, ademic visitor to the one feels this is the United States, puz- first race of mankind zled by the frequency

to live as it wishes to <: of campus revivals live, the first genera- of Wilde's Impor- tion unencumbered tance of Being Ear- by tradition and free nest, was told: "I to prosper by choice. . ::. guess it has every- Their very discontents thing we don't are something they have." If that means have chosen; they se- style, then it is al- lect and cherish their ost the only thing we anxieties with the do not have. The gap discrimination of a : is to be felt. The connoisseur. They . Achievement Society would be far sadder if has already done they had everything much, and in the fu- they wanted, and they ture may be expected know it. to do far more. But a What they have stylish indolence, one lost, in all this, is a suspects, is one thing it sense of style that natu- will not achieve. It will --. .,.. : rally belongs to those be too busy.

WQ SPRING 1991 REFLECTIONS

Death Sentences

Erudite, witty, and prolific, Anthony Burgess is known to American readers as the author of A Clockwork Orange (1963), Earthly Powers (1980)) and several dozen other works. But his long career as a profes- sional writer had a beginning which, even by the dire standards of the literary world, must be considered inauspicious. He was 42, with a few novels and a desultory career as a college lecturer in Malaya and Bor- neo behind him, when doctors told him he had only a year to live: brain tumor. In this essay he renders with characteristic humor what might be called a portrait of the artist as a condemned man.

by Anthony Burgess

sighed and put paper into the type- knew where I was. I was summoned to the writer. "I'd better start," I said. And local National Insurance office and asked I did. Meaning that, unemployable what I proposed doing about sticking since I had less than a year to live, I weekly stamps on a card. I replied that it had to turn myself into a profes- hardly seemed worthwhile to enter the sional writer. state scheme, and that the cost of my fu- It was January of 1960 and, according neral would far exceed any contributions I to the prognosis, I had a winter and a could make to it. What was I living on? I spring and a summer to live through and was dying on cached Malayan dollars in- would die with the fall of the leaf. I felt too vested in British stock. I was writing vigor- well. After the long enervation of the trop- ously to earn royalties for my prospective ics, my wife Lynne and I were being stimu- widow. When the Inland Revenue got onto lated by the winter gales of the Channel. me they found nothing, as yet, to tax. My Chill Hove sharpened the appetite, and we coming death provoked no official sympa- no longer had to feed ourselves on Singa- thy. It was a statistical item yet to be real- pore Cold Storage carrion and the surreal- ized. The coldness of the British was some- istic tubers of the Brunei market. The stay- thing that Lynne and I had become used to at-home British did not realize how lucky seeing as a property of colonial officials. they were. We ate stews of fresh beef, We had forgotten that it was here at home roasts of duck and chicken, sprouts and as well. cauliflowers and Jersey potatoes. There Also mannerlessness. I worked out a were also daffodils from the Scilly Isles in little speech that I proposed delivering to the flower shops. England was really a the chinny woman who ran the news- demi-paradise. But the serpent of the Brit- agent-tobacconist's shop round the comer. ish state had to flicker its forked tongue. "Madam, I have been coming here every The departments of the British state morning for the last three (or six or nine)

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months in order to buy the Times for my- professional is not meant to imply a high self, the Daily Mirror for my wife, and 80 standard of commitment and attainment: Player's cigarettes for us both. I have It meant then, as it still does, the pursuit of meticulously said good morning on ap- a trade or calling to the end of paying the proaching your counter and on leaving it. rent and buying liquor. I leave the myth of I have also said 'please' and 'thank you' inspiration and agonized creative inaction and made amiable comments on the to the amateurs. The practice of a profes- weather. But not once has there been a sion entails discipline, which for me reasonable phatic response from your meant the production of 2,000 words of unesteemed chinniness. It is as though fair copy every day, weekends included. I bloody Trappists ran the shop." This was discovered that, if I started early enough, I an intended valediction on leaving Hove, could complete the day's stint before the but it was never made. At the greengro- pubs opened. Or, if I could not, there was cer's shop my good morning was met only an elated period of the night after closing by a head-jerk of inquiry as to what I time, with neighbors banging on the walls wanted. Perhaps the unwillingness to say to protest at the industrious clacking. Two good morning had something apotropaic thousand words a day meant a yearly total about it: Say the morning is good and it of 730,000. Step up the rate and, without will turn out not to be. This must be true undue effort, you can reach a million. This of American airline ticket agents, who are ought to mean 10 novels of 100,000 words otherwise friendly enough. each. This quantitative approach to writing "Good morning." is not, naturally, to be approved. And be- "Hi." cause of hangovers, marital quarrels, cre- "Good morning." ative deadness induced by the weather, "It sure is." shopping trips, summonses to meet state "Good morning." officials, and sheer torpid gloom, I was not "You'd better believe it." able to achieve more than five and a half We had been living in a region where novels of moderate size in that pseudo-ter- the uneducated natives had been profuse minal year. Still, it was very nearly E. M. with tabek, tuatz and seluinat pagi, mem Forster's whole long life's output. and athletic with bows and hands on hearts. It was unnerving to be settling ime also had to be expended on find- down in double cold, also to be sur- T ing a house to live or die in. I did not rounded by so much pinko-grey skin, as E. propose meeting my maker in furnished M. Forster called it. It was like being in a rooms. And so, as spring approached, windy ward of the leprous. Like so many Lynne and I searched for a cottage in East repatriates from the East, we found that or West Sussex. We also prepared to fur- the tropical past was becoming the only nish it, wherever it was. This meant buying reality. We were in danger of turning into and storing Jacobean and deutero-caro- ex-colonial bores and eccentrics. In the line commodes and dressers at very rea- winter cold I sometimes put on my suit sonable prices. These, to me, were pledges over my pajamas: Lynne usually chose of continued life. They were also the solid- these occasions to drag me to a reach-me- ities of widowhood. When I died (but the down tailor's. We also drank as though we when was being slowly modified to if), were still sweltering under a ceiling fan. Lynne would be able to offer gin or white For me, if I was really dying, it did not wine to possible suitors in a polished much matter. For Lynne, ingesting two lonely home of her own. She was only in bottles of white wine and a ~intof "sin her late thirties and the beauty eroded by daily, it would matter a great deal. the tropics was returning. Meanwhile, in I got on with the task of turning myself one of our two rented rooms, I worked at into a brief professional writer. The term a novel called The Doctor is Sick.

Anthony Burgess is the author of more than 50 works of fiction and izoi7ficfion. This essay is ex- cerpted from his forthcoming You've Had Your Time. Reprinted with pen~i.s.sion from Grove Weidenfeld, a division of Grove, Inc. Copyriglit @ 1991 by Anthony Burgess.

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I clattered carefully at the dining table. couple living in vigorous sin: They slept To my right, dingy lace curtains occluded heavily and let the bath overflow through the view of an overgrown garden under a our bedroom ceiling. They could not be murky marine sky. To my left was a shabby awakened. sofa on which, before the shilling-in-the- slot gasfire, Lynne lay reading the Daily apologize for the irrelevance of that Mirror or a trashy novel. She had lost what- I naknik. I am evoking a time when I was ever literary taste she had ever had, except composing a novel about a man drunk on that she still adored Jane Austen, and one words, any words, and shoving him against of my duties was to fetch her fictional gar- his will into a world of things. Elias Canetti bage from the public library. If I brought has a novel, Auto da F2, in which an aging Henry James or Anthony Trollope, the philologist, expert in Chinese, is thrust book would be viciously hurled at my among criminals. The Doctor is Sick, more head. It was her fault that I could not take Britishly and perhaps less ponderously, ex- Jane Austen seriously; it was a matter of ploited the same situation. The hero is Ed- association. If she could read trash and win Spindrift, a Ph.D. whose speciality is a Jane Austen indifferently, Jane Austen had philology which, in the 1960s, was already to be close to trash. But she used my igno- out of date. and he is sent home from a rance of that scribbling spinster to trounce college inBurma where he has been my own literary pretensions. In our cups I teaching phonetics. He has, as I myself was catechized: had, a suspected tumor on the brain. He "How many daughters have Mr. and also has a dark-haired unfaithful wife Mrs. Bennet?" named Sheila. In the same neurological "Four, or is it five?" clinic as the one where I had been probed, "Who does Emma marry?" his tests prove positive and an operation is "A man of decent education, appear- proposed. But he escapes from the hospi- ance and income. I've forgotten his tal and goes looking for his wife, who he name." suspects is fornicating vigorously all over "What is the play that is put on in London. He has had his head shaven in Mansfield Park?" preparation for the scalpel; he wears a "Something by Kotzebue, I think." woolly cap. He has no money. He gets Lynne would never read any of my own mixed up with the same lowlife characters books, but she would ask for selected pas- I had encountered in a Bloomsbury un- sages from my first, Time for a Tiger, to be known to Virginia Woolf-the big man read to her when she was ill. She was not who worked in Covent Garden (mornings concerned with savoring literary quality; in the market, evenings sceneshifting in she merely wanted evocation of her own the Opera House) and kept a Tangerine Malayan past. mistress, the vendors of stolen watches I thought at first that her debased taste known as the Kettle Mob (among them a was a gesture of conformity to our landla- masochist who paid to be flagellated), the dy's furnishings. On the walls were pic- Jewish twins who ran an illegal drinking tures of monks fishing and then feasting club. on fish. All the friars had the same face, as These Jewish twins, Ralph and Leo, if they really were brothers, which meant paid a surprise visit to Hove just as I was that artistic poverty was matched by real ready to transfer them to fiction. They penury: The painter could afford only one wanted to start a small clothing enterprise model. There were odd knickknacks and needed 200 pounds to hire sewing ma- (strange that the Hebrew naknik should chines and pay first week's wages to a mean sausage)-ceramic buttonboxes, young seamstress who was also, they shell ashtrays from Brighton, all my step- frankly admitted, a shared doxy. We paid mother's paraphernalia. The carpets, blan- the money, though we foreknew the busi- kets, and sheets had holes in them. The ra- ness would fail. All their businesses had dio with the sunburst fascia, relic of the failed. Their only stock in trade was their 1930s, worked sporadically. Winds blew identical twinhood, useful in alibis. As for under the doors. Above us dwelt a young libeling them in a novel, they, or one of

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them, said: "You can't say nuffink worse of of lavabouts and failed artists onlv too us van we done already." We took them to ready to give it. He offers words instead of a pub which a handlebar-moustached ex- love. Even the small criminals he is squadron leader entered with great laugh- thrown among are vigorously transacting ter. "Musta sold two cars today," Ralph or in a world of realities. The whisky sold in Leo said. When the superior barmaid the illegal drinking club may be watered, served our gin, Leo or Ralph said: "Chip a and the kettles sold on building sites by the couple of cubes off yer aris, iceberg." Aris mobsters may cease to tick after a day or was short for Aristotle, itself rhyming slang so, but they are more substantial than for bottle, meaning bottle and glass, mean- words. Spindrift is only spoondrift, a ing arse. They went back to London with a feeder of philological pobs, and he de- check for 200 nicker, having ensured that serves to die. He has a neural disease, but there were at least five Hove pubs we this is only a confirmation of a psychical could no longer visit. But they were a disease-the morbidity of a useless pledge that life was going on somewhere, specialization. Giving a pair of improvi- if not in Hove. I went back to the novel dent Jewish twins a check for 200 nicker with appetite. was a recognition, on Spindrift's creator's Spindrift is forced (by the twins) to en- part, that life was more than words, that ter a competition for handsome bald Spindrift could not have been fabricated heads. He wins first prize but disapproves except by somebody dangerously like him. of the vulgarity of the contest. He shouts a To fail at treadling cloth was better than filthy monosyllable on television and, succeeding with words. anticipating Kenneth Tynan, makes his- tory. In 1960 it was not possible to spell n the other hand, a work of fiction is a the word out on the page. I had to describe 0 solidity that can be handled, weighed, it as an unvoiced ladiodental followed by sold, and its task is to present or distort the an unrounded back vowel in the region of real world through words. Words are real Cardinal Number 7, followed by an un- things, but only if they evoke real things. voiced velar plosive. Finally Dr. Spindrift But things become real only when they are meets an old Greek acquaintance, a ven- named. And we can only know reality dor of wine named Mr. Thanatos. Thanatos through our minds, which function means death, but we are not sure whether through structural oppositions, typically Spindrift dies or recovers from his opera- realized in phonemes and morphemes. tion. Nor are we sure whether his pica- But there is only one knowable mind, and resque adventures are dreams or reality. that is mine or yours. The solipsism sug- He has lived in a world of words but has gested in The Doctor is Sick-the external ignored their referents. The referents get world can be confirmed only by one per- up to bite him, perhaps kill him. Or con- ceiving mind, even if it is deranged, but ceivably they only pretend to. what do we mean by derangement?-is a Spindrift is a very improbable name. I tenable metaphysical position, but I was, do not think it is to be found in any tele- am, trying to be a kind of comic novelist phone directory. Spin is a distortion of playing with a few ideas. Perhaps it was spoon, and spoondrift is seaspray. It is inevitable that the Germans should make meant to connote the frivolous insubstan- more of this particular novel than the Brit- tial thrown off by the reality of life's heavy ish. There havebeen two translations- water. Dr. Spindrift gained his doctorate by Der Doktor ist Uebergeschnappt and Der writing a thesis on the Yiddish prefix shm, Doctor ist Defekt-and a number of schol- as used derisively in New York Jewish arly dissertations from the universities of English or Yidglish. I doubt if such a thesis the free Republik. The British have taken it would be possible. I doubt if Spindrift ever as mere, rather demented and certainly went, as he alleges, to Pasadena to take his tasteless, entertainment. doctoral degree. He is insubstantial to his Dr. Spindrift is not altogether myself, creator. He is useless to his wife, as his li- but some of his experiences are based on bido has failed him, and it is in order for my own, not least the failure of the libido. her to seek sexual sustenance in a London A Pakistani doctor at the Hospital for

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Tropical Diseases had lilted the term with they love amorous variety. The dissatisfac- relish and regret when questioning me tion of wives unable to find it has become, about my sexual life. Whether it was part since Flaubert, one of the stock themes of of a neuropathological syndrome was fiction. The flesh of my wife was never made clear. The fact was that sexual honeycolored and sumptuous, but I could relations between my wife and myself had not be attracted. She told me how often it practically ceased in 1959, and I did not had been handled by others, and how well need a clinical report to tell me why. If, at some of them had handled it. I was per- night, I was too drunk to perform the act haps better than A and B but not so good and, in the morning, too crapulous, it was as X or Y. I could not subdue my pride, probable that I soaked myself in gin in or- which was a grievous fault, and I preferred der to evade it. I wanted to evade it be- to put myself out of the running. This was cause of my wife's vaunted infidelity, inter- marital cruelty, though not according to mitted in valetudinarian Hove but, I the Catholic church, which blessed chaste suspected, ready to erupt again when, if, unions. I was always ready to call on my we settled in a abandoned faith randier ambience. I when I lacked the was prepared to ac- 1 courage to make my cept the discipline of own moral decisions. love but not the There was never abandon of sex-nei- any argument about ther in marriage nor, the deeper value of for the moment, else- our marriage, which where. Sex, but not could be viewed as a too much of it, could miniature civilization be reserved to my or micropolis. Or, novels. put it another way, it No husband can was complex semiot- ob'ect to his wife's ics. There was a fund in A delities if she does of common memo- not blab too much ries to draw on, a se- about them. But to ries of codes, a po- hear about the prow- tent shorthand. It ess of a Punjabi on was the ultimate inti- Bukit Chandan or a macy, except that it Eurasian on Batu was no longer physi- Road is the best of cal. I had reacted to detumescents. Mari- infidelity b v tal sex develops a condoning it; if, as routine, but the routines of a stranger are a there was, there was to be more of it, that novelty. Infidelities are a search for nov- would not affect the intimacy. But the re- elty, and dongiovannismo is more properly sentment would be all on her side, and it a woman's disease than a man's. Don would take forms unrelated to sex. One Juan's tragedy is that he finds all women form would be unwillingness to read my the same in the dark and that they, finding work and to take malicious pleasure in novelty in his routine, are innocent bad reviews of it. Another, not really enough to believe that the physical revela- anomalous, would be to spread the rumor tion is love. His tragic flaw is to choose the that she herself had produced it, myself innocent, who pursue him to death. not being quite clever enough. "Anthony Women thrive on novelty and are easy Burgess" was, after all, a pseudonym, and meat for the commerce of fashion. Men it need not be mine. George Eliot and the prefer old pipes and torn jackets. Women Bell brothers were women. If she fought love gifts (finding novel presents for Lynne for the work, which she did, if insulting on her birthday and at Christmas was agents, publishers, and reviewers could be strenuous work), and, given the chance, termed fighting, she would be fighting for

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herself. She cried out for notice while do- Ellmann's life of Joyce, just published, and ing nothing to earn it. What she had get on with the next. achieved, which she seemed to me to over- It had been suggested to me by James value, all lay in the past-head girl of her Michie of Heinemann that I take a literary school, hockey and tennis player for her agent. He recommended one, Peter Jan- county, swimmer for the principality, pet son-Smith, and I took the train to Charing of Professor Namier, minor star of the Cross to see him, the typescript of the new Board of Trade and the Ministry of War novel under my arm. I would prove small Transport. She identified with her father, beer to Janson-Smith, who was to handle successful headmaster of a minor Welsh the work of Ian Fleming, Professor C. grammar school, the more so as she could Northcote Parkinson, and Gavin Maxwell, not quell guilt over the death of her but of his goodness he took me on. He be- mother. Our marriage was bristling with gan by selling The Doctor is Sick to tensions, but it was still a marriage. It was Heinemann, which had already contracted sustained by love, which I do not have to for it, but with a slightly enhanced advance define. that covered the agent's commission. Jan- son-Smith was, I suppose, a good agent, wrote The Doctor is Sick in six weeks. As but I am not sure what a good agent is. I Lynne never read it, it was otiose to The best agent, it seemed to me at the wonder whether she would have seen any- time, was the one who would try to place a thing of herself in the character of Sheila first novel, but I do not think there were Spindrift, erring wife. Sheila was dark, many such agents around. When I had anyway, and Lynne was blonde, and, to a published Time for a Tiger in the 1950s, woman, the dichotomy is temperamental. received many encouraging reviews, and All women, with the exception of Ann seen the work go into a second impres- Gregory, might accept that blondness is a sion, I began to receive letters from reality that cosmetics cannot efface. Lynne agents: I had cranked up the car in freez- saw herself in the heroine of my Malayan ing weather, and now they would drive books, what she knew of them, and ac- from the back seat. What I wanted from cepted the blonde, chaste, patrician lady as my agent was publishers' commissions, an adequate portrait. The patrician aspect foreign sales, film options. They were slow was important in itself, besides relating to come. I was, it must be remembered, her to a writer more important than I. A trying to make a living from literature. family tree, engrossed by her primary- I was to do better when I ceased to schoolteacher sister, was imported, and have an agent. I now gravely doubt the the name of Lady Charlotte Isherwood of value of a literary middleman. The pub- Marple Hall was writ large in gold. The lisher himself, when you come to think of aristocratic heresy is convenient to those it, is not much more than that. In the 18th too lazy to develop talent or bitterly aware century Mr. Dilly, a bookseller, could com- that they have none. Blue blood is a fine mission a dictionary from Samuel Johnson substitute for genius: To Evelyn Waugh his and not have to be persuaded to display own genius was little more than a calling the book in his window. The essential trin- card for the houses of the great. Class is ity is the author, the printer-binder, and the the great British reality, and the more vendor with a cash register. In the United books I wrote the more Lynne termed me States this trinity has become a unity. A an unregenerable guttersnipe. Many crit- young writer, despairing of a publisher's ics agreed with her. As for all my fictional acceptance of his work, will type and copy women after Fenella Crabbe, these were to his book and then sell it on the street. Lynne mere interchangeable mannequins There was, I remember, a young Califor- for whom she kindly devised wardrobes. nian who wrote an interesting but, in pub- But she was not interested in how these lisher's terms, uncommercial trilogy in women, dressed by her, looked, nor in which the characters of the Popeye car- what they did. I had, with The Doctor is toons became figures in a theological alle- Sick, completed a book that she hoped gory. He printed his work on an IBM ma- was saleable. Now stop reading Richard chine and hawked his copies. He sold only

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about 400 of each volume but registered seem closer to the publisher than to him- an 80 percent profit. He managed to live. self. They will quarrel with an author and Later he took drugs and died, but this does even reject him as a nuisance, but they not invalidate his practice. With both dare not make an enemy of a publisher. agents and publishers hungry for They will push saleability more than liter- bestsellers, literature will have to end up ary merit, which can sometimes creep into as a cottage industry. a publisher's list because of a package deal: I will let you have this undoubted hen bestsellers are boosted, the bestseller if you will accept this unprofit- w number of languages into which able pastiche of Henry James. Done. they are translated is proclaimed with Agents dare not be overconcerned with lit- nride. But multinle translation is no index erary merit, as opposed to adequate liter- of anything. It is the agent's task to find acy, when they have many typescripts to foreign publishers but not to choose the sell. They usually disclaim the higher criti- translator, and many translations are very cal competence. Janson-Smith cautiously bad. They cannot be all that bad with what made a literary judgment of The Doctor is I have termed Class 1 novelists-those in Sick and suggested a change. I snarled, whom language is a discardable quality- and he withdrew. He knew he was exceed- but with Class 2 writers, those who are ing his brief. given to poetic effects, wordplay, and lin- The trip to London to meet Janson- guistic ambiguity, the translator himself Smith, in an office of which I can remem- must be a committed writer. I have ber only a large can of lighter fuel, should achieved a reading knowledge of a fair also have been crowned by a visit to the number of the 1ndo-~uro~eanlanguages, Neurological Institute for a spinal tap. I and I insist on seeing translations before did not go. I feared that there would be they are published. This is the kind of time- such an increase in the protein volume of consuming work which few agents would the cerebrospinal fluid that the year to live be willing or qualified to take on, but it is might be curtailed and discourage a new essential if howlers or total misrepresenta- novel. My failure to turn up seems to have tions are to be avoided. A lot of transla- been translated into a negative report from tions have to be rejected as inept. In a the laboratory, for I received a letter from novel of mine, Earthly Powers, the injunc- Sir Alexander Abercrombie informing me tion "Go to Malaya and write about plant- that the protein content of my spinal li- ers going down with DT's" was rendered quor had gone down dramatically and I into Italian to the effect of writing about was now kindly allowed to live. This did planters committing fellatio with doctors not provoke elation but rather new cau- of theology. A self-respecting author will tion: I had to be more careful when cross- never boast about the number of foreign ing the street. If, as I wished, I were to countries that know his work: He will con- start a very long novel about a minor poet sult accuracy and elegance of translation living in a lavatory, the gods might con- and pride himself, often in old age, on hav- trive pernicious anemia or galloping con- ing assembled a limited but reliable stable. sumption to thwart me. Now that death Agents will sell to anyone, if the money from a cerebral tumor was crossed off the seems right. They are quantitative people. list, there was still a limitless list of ail- They are buffers between authors and ments to draw on, all lethal. Life itself is publishers, but, to the author, they often lethal but, we hope, not yet.

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Continued from page 21

titularly those associated with colleges Broadcasters, "one of the most powerful and universities, began to organize in op- lobbies in Washington." FDR had more position. Educational broadcasters formed important battles to fight, and on June 18, the National Committee on Education by 1934, he signed into law the Communica- Radio (NCER) with the aim of getting Con- tions Act of 1934 which created the Fed- gress to reserve 15 percent of the broad- eral Communications Commission and cast channels for educational use. marked the effective end of the war over But the opposition movement faced in the airwaves. The commercial networks NBC, CBS, and the National Association of had won.

Elite NO More "Reporters who Cover Congresswby Stephen Hess, in Society (Jan.-Feb. 1991), Rutgers-The State University, New Bruns- wick, N.J. 08903. Washington reporters not so long ago bore beyond the Beltway. In 1978,62 percent of little demographic resemblance to journal- all Washington reporters had majored as ists elsewhere in the country. The scribes undergraduates in the liberal arts. Among and newscasters in the nation's capital ap- journalists elsewhere in the land, the pre- peared to constitute (for better or worse) ferred major was less intellectual-jour- something of an elite. Overwhelmingly nalism. Now, that is true among many of male, overwhelmingly white, dispropor- the Washington types, too, especially the tionately from the Northeast, they boasted TV ones. In part, Hess says, this may re- more formal education than other journal- flect "the recent drive of women and mi- ists. Most held undergraduate degrees in norities to get into journalism" through the liberal arts rather than journalism. and the proven track of professional education. one in three had gone on to earn an ad- Women especially have increased their vanced degree. In recent years, however, presence in Washington journalism. according to Hess, a Senior Fellow at the Whereas one-fourth of the reporters ac- Brookings Institution, the Washington credited to the congressional press galler- press corps has lost much of its elite cast, ies in 1979 were female, one-third were a especially with the influx of TV reporters decade later. "It can now be assumed that from stations in the hinterlands. Washington has caught up with the rest of For one thing, Washington reporters' the news industry, which [still] lags behind Northeastern "slant" has disappeared. In the rest of the nation's professional popu- 1978. more than one-third of them came lation by about 10 percent," Hess writes. from'the Northeast, although only a fourth Among Washington's regional reporters of the U.S. population lived in that part of who worked for radio or TV in 1988, the country. A decade later, however, ac- nearly 40 percent were women. cording to a survey of 190 reporters who The influx of TV reporters from local cover Congress for state, local, or regional stations has opened a new breach within audiences, the proportion of Northeastern- the Washington press corps. Unlike the ers in the press corps almost matched network reporters of old, today's TV re- their proportion in the population. porters tend to be younger than the print The difference in formal education has ones, are less likely to have graduate de- diminished, too, as more reporters outside grees, and are more likely to have majored Washington have come to possess sheep- in journalism. Unlike such giants of televi- skins. In 197 1, only 63 percent of daily sion journalism as Eric Sevareid and David newspaper reporters nationwide were col- Brinkley, few of the new TV reporters ever lege graduates; in 1988, 85 percent were. worked for newspapers or the wire ser- Washington reporters also have vices. The absence of such rigorous report- changed, with their educational back- ing experience clearly is no bar to mem- ground becoming more like that of those bership in today's Washington press corps.

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RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

Marketing God "Pedlar in Divinity': George Whitefield and the Great Awaken- ing, 1737-1745" by Frank Lambert, in The Journal ofAmerican ~Ltory(Dec. 1996, 1125 Atwater, Indiana Univ., ~liomin~ton, Ind. 47401. "Great and visible effects followed his ads for his collections of sermons and jour- preaching. There was never such a general nals. Publishers such as Ben Franklin awakening, and concern for the things of found that Whitefield's tracts were hot God known in America before." So wrote commodities. In certain cities, such as Anglican evangelist George Whitefield in Charleston, S.C., and Newport, R.I., White- 1740 in a third-person account of his own field's works generated more revenue for revivalist activities, cleverly advertising Franklin than even his own Poor Richard's them by means of an "objective" newspa- Almanack did. per article. But his puffery actually was not Whitefield-despite his belief in the Cal- far from the truth. The Great Awakening vinist doctrine of election-deliberately that began in 1739 and lasted through the aimed his writing at a mass audience. He ensuing decade was America's first mass viewed the reader as a consumer. "I wrote movement, and Whitefield (1714-70), a short," he said about one of his pamphlets, proto-Billy Graham, was its catalyst. "because I know long compositions gener- His message was of the need for a spiri- ally weary the reader." Cheap serial publi- tual "new birth," an emotional experience cation of his sermons and journals also of conversion and salvation, and he helped him get a large readership-and preached it in the open air to large, enthu- gave people, Lambert says, "a heightened siastic crowds in Philadelphia in 1739 and sense of anticipation as [they] followed the in New England the following year. The evangelist's progress toward their own message itself was not new-Jonathan Ed- communities." wards, Yale graduate and Congregational- ist minister of Northampton, Mass., had powerfully delivered a similar one in an earlier, regional "awakening." What was new, according to Lambert, a Northwest- ern University historian, was Whitefield's aggressive use of advertising and other marketing techniques to promote the mes- sage of revivalism. Drawing upon 18th-century merchants' experience in selling their wares at great distances, Whitefield used advance public- ity, especially newspaper advertising, to prepare the way for his revivalist visits. Be- fore his New England tour in 1740, for in- stance, newspaper readers in Boston were treated to glowing accounts of the evange- list's successes in the Middle and Southern counties, accounts that had been written by Whitefield himself or by his traveling companion. Besides reports of his successes and itin- eraries, colonial newspapers also provided reprints of Whitefield's publications and Whitefield inspired the Great Awakening.

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Not everyone approved of Whitefield's correspondent suggested in the Boston aggressive promotional efforts, however. Weekly News-Letter in 1742 that just as Methodists John and Charles Wesley, for there already was "a very wholesome law instance, deemed advertising religion a in the province to discourage Pedlars in tasteless "sounding [of] a trumpet." Bos- Trade," there ought to be a law "for the ton minister Charles Chauncy objected to discouragement of Pedlars in Divinity Whitefield's giving "Public Notice" of his also." Needless to say, that was one law preaching activities. And an anonymous that was never enacted.

Learning from Saints "The Lives of the Saints and the Pursuit of Virtue" by Robert L. Wilken, in First Things (Dec. 1990), Inst. on Religion and Public Life, 156 Fifth Ave., ~te.400, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Virtuous deeds "implant in those who pire, the use of written narratives of noble search them out a zeal and yearning that lives to teach virtue was well-established, leads to imitation," declared Plutarch (A.D. notes Wilken, a University of Virginia his- 46-120), whose Parallel Lives of noble torian. "Yet Christian hagiography. . . does Greeks and Romans offered just such not emerge until the end of the third cen- moral instruction. By the time Christianity tury and does not burst into luxurious made its appearance in the Roman Em- bloom until the fifth." The early Christians,

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it seems, preferred precepts to examples. swer was that Jesus as the Son of God was "You know what precepts we gave you "begotten not created, one in being with through the Lord Jesus," says Paul in I the Father." By making Jesus seem less Thessalonians. "For this is the will of God, "human," Wilken says, this created "a your sanctification: that you abstain from vacuum. . . that could be filled with other unchastity; that each one of you know how human faces." to take a wife for himself. . . that no man The publication of The Life of Antony, a transgress and wrong his brother in this biography of the founder of Egyptian matter." Other lists of precepts can be Christian monasticism written by Athana- found throughout the New Testament. Of- sius (A.D.293-373), bishop of Alexandria, ten the precepts stand alone, but some- marked the beginning of a new era. A mul- times they are supported by illustrations, titude of lives of saints appeared during the as when James cites Job for his patience. next three centuries. "The hagiographers, But such examples hardly constituted for the first time in Christian history, turn comprehensive biographies. to living persons, or those who have re- "Why, then, no lives?" asks Wilken. cently died, as models of the virtuous life," "The most obvious reason was that the writes Wilken. "By displaying men and gospels stood in the way. The supreme women from their own time, and often model for Christian life was Jesus.. . . At from their own communities. these lives this early stage of Christian history, it proclaim that holiness is possible, virtue is would have been presumptuous to bring attainable, perfection is within your grasp. other persons into competition with the They teach, in [Henri] Bergson's phrase, a primal model." That changed, however, morality of aspiration, not of obligation." with the Council of Nicaea, called in A.D. They also, in their diversity, implicitly sug- 325 to settle the question of whether Christ gest "that there is no single standard, no was different in substance from God. The one catalogue of virtues, no one way to council's (and Christian orthodoxy's) an- serve God."

"Tocqueville on Religious Truth & Political Necessity" by Cyn- Tocqueville's Faith thia J. Hinckley, in Polity (Fall 1990), Northeastern Political Sci- ence Assoc., ~hom~sonHall, Amherst, Mass. 01003.

In his classic Democracy in America racy. "[Ilf it does not impart a taste for (1835-40), Alexis de Tocqueville con- freedom, it facilitates the use of it," he tended that the influence of religion was wrote. Religion imposes "a salutary re- very important to society, but whether it straint" on the human intellect, which was a true faith was not. "Society has no makes men less likely to submit, in fear, to future life to hope for or to fear; and pro- servitude. It also checks certain "very dan- vided the citizens profess a religion, the pe- gerous propensitiesw-toward self-absorp- culiar tenets of that religion are of little tion and "an inordinate love of material importance to its interests," he wrote. gratificationm-fostered by "equality of Many scholars have concluded that conditions." Tocqueville favored convenient myth But, Hinckley observes, it was Christian- rather than genuine religion. But ity as practiced in America that provided Hinckley, a political scientist at California "the type of moral climate that Tocque- State University, San Bernardino, dis- ville found so favorable to liberty," and he agrees. "Tocqueville never thought that "gives every indication [of thinking] that belief in the social utility of religion could truth and utility converge in Christianity." substitute for faith," she says. In his view, she says, society, particularly The French visitor was struck by the American society, had no need to deter- usefulness of religion to American democ- mine which of the many religious sects

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possessed the truth, because they all were men-persons of rare intellect such as within what he called "the great unity of Blaise PascalÑ1'ar capable of genuine be- Christendom, and Christian morality is ev- lief," Hinckley writes. "The rest of human- ervwhere the same." ity has no choice but to accept religious ~ -J Tocqueville may or may not have been a dogma on faith, summoning as much be- believing Roman Catholic, Hinckley says, lief as one can for that which one can but "he unequivocally accepted as true the never know." Most people thus turn to or- essential Christian teachings, such as the ganized religion, which renders "eternal existence of a God, the immortality of the truths. . . intelligible to the crowd." Al- soul, the sacredness of the Gospels, and though it "may not be the highest form of the rightness" of Christian ethics." Tocaue- religion," organized religion, "unlike gen- ville, however, was plagued by religious uine religion,. . . links the many to the di- doubt, and some scholars have concluded vine." Tocqueville's distinction between he was a religious skeptic. But Hinckley genuine religion and its lower reflection says his correspondence makes clear that has been misconstrued by scholars as "a his anguish was not that of "a skeptic try- distinction between organized religion and ing to believe in God, but [that] of a be- civil (mythical) religion," Hinckley con- liever deorived bv his Creator of the unwa- tends. Tocqueville's real message, she says, vering certitude that characterizes faith of "is that liberal democracy needs religion, the highest order." that is, citizens who believe to the extent Tocqueville thought that only a very few they are capable of belief."

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Collision Course "Accidents of Birth" by Willy Benz, in The Sciences (Nov.-Dec. 1990), 2 E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021. Scientists hoped that the 1969-72 Apollo however. If the moon was a wanderer, for moon missions would yield piles of new example, how was it forced to settle into information about the solar system. And orbit? Now, a surprising new consensus is they have. We now know that the moon is forming about the origins of the moon. It some 4.4 billion years old (about the same grows out of a new theory of planetary for- age as Earth) and that it once had a mag- mation called "catastrophism." netic field. But the 700 pounds of rocks Aided by computer models developed that astronauts scooped off the moon's sur- by George W. Wetherill of the Carnegie In- face have provided no answer to a funda- stitution and others, scientists came to re- mental puzzle, writes Benz, a Harvard alize during the 1980s that the creation of astronomer: How was the moon formed? the solar system was much more violent The relatively small moons orbiting and chaotic than anybody had previously most other planets in the solar system imagined. Some 4.6 billion years ago, probably are debris left over from the Benz writes, a vast cloud of gas and dust planets' formation, Benz says. But the rotating around the galaxy became unsta- Earth's moon is too large to be a "left- bleÑdlperhap jostled by the shock wave over." Scientists have speculated that it is, of a nearby supernova"-collapsed under variously, a piece of the Earth's mantle its own weight, and burst out again, form- that was flung into orbit long ago; a "com- ing the sun. The remaining dust and gas panion planet" formed alongside the circled the young star, much like the rings Earth; or an interplanetary wanderer cap- that now girdle Saturn. The tiny particles tured by the Earth. stuck together, eventually forming trillions Each of these theories has major flaws, of "rocky conglomerates," many of them

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as much as a kilometer around. Over the the intense heat of collision. And it pro- next 250 million years, Benz writes, these vides an explanation of the moon's origins objects, known as "planetesimals," col- that does not require a series of events lided and combined, forming the nine unique to the moon. planets of the solar system. Until recently, Benz notes, scientists Benz's own computer model suggests were reluctant to accept any theories that that the moon is the wreckage resulting invoke catastrophes. Gradualism was the from a collision between the Earth and a watchword in all fields. But astronomers Mars-sized planet. He argues that his colli- are now joining biologists and geologists sion hypothesis accounts for several mys- in creating a new understanding of the im- teries about the moon: Its rocks were left portance of accidents and catastrophes in without volatile materials, for example, by the universe.

Mystery Drug "in"by Gerald Weissmann, in Scientific American (Jan. , 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. There is a bark of an English tree, which I French and English had an edge over the have found by experience to be a powerful Germans in natural chemistry, by the mid- astringent, and very efficacious in curing 19th century Germany led the world in anguish and intermitting disorders," wrote synthetic chemistry. In 1874, Friedrich the Reverend Edmund Stone to the presi- von Heyden established the first factory dent of the British Royal Society in 1763. devoted to the production of synthetic Although he did not know it, Stone had salicylates. In 1898, another German discovered salicylic acid-better known chemist, Felix Hofmann, discovered a today as aspirin. much less acidic derivative of the sub- Weissmann, a professor of medicine at stance, creating aspirin as we know it. New York University, reports that "Ameri- But it was not until the 1970s that scien- cans consume 16,000 tons of aspirin tab- tists began to understand how aspirin lets a year-80 million pills-and spend works. In 197 1, British scientist John R. about $2 billion a year for nonprescription Vane argued that aspirin inhibits the painkillers, many of which contain aspi- body's production of prostaglandins, hor- rin." We all know that aspirin reduces mones that induce pain and swelling headaches, soothes sore muscles, brings around damaged tissue. Although Vane's down fevers, and can even help prevent "prostaglandin hypothesis" became widely heart attacks. Less well-known, however, accepted, it has deficiencies. For example, are some of its other uses. acetaminophen, the most widely used aspi- Weissmann notes that aspirin and other rin substitute, works without suppressing salicylates-found in such plants as willow prostaglandins at all. And prostaglandins trees, meadowsweet, and wintergreen- also have important anti-inflammatory ef- can be used to dissolve corns and provoke fects. The hypothesis is dealt a final blow, uric acid loss from the kidneys. They also Weissmann says, by studies of species of inhibit the clotting of blood and induce ancient marine sponges, which react to as- peptic ulcers. "Cell biologists use aspirin pirin much as humans do, even though and salicylates to inhibit ion transport they do not produce prostaglandins. across cell membranes, to interfere with Weissmann says that Vane's hypothesis the activation of white blood cells," he explains some of aspirin's mysteries, and continues, and botanists even use it to in- he has his own idea: Aspirin works partly duce plants to flower. by interfering with "neutrophils," cells A half century after Stone tasted the bit- that cause damage when triggered by in- ter willow bark, French and German phar- flammatory agents. But "much remains to macologists began competing to unlock be learned" about this seemingly simple salicylate's secret. Although at the time the drug, Weissmann concludes. At least it is

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nice to know, he says, that research into its the sponges, "creatures from which mysteries has alerted us to the existence of humans have been separated by a billion biochemical pathways that we share with years of evolution."

"A Chip YOU Can Talk TO" by Rachel Nowak, in Johns Hopkins The Human Machine Magazine (Dec. 1990), 212 Whitehead Hall, Johns Hopkins Univ., 34th and Charles Streets, Baltimore, Md. 21218. If scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied change sounds into language a computer Physics Laboratory have their way, it won't can understand. be long before telephones dial numbers on There are many obstacles, Nowak spoken request, tape recorders transcribe writes. While humans are able to seoarate conversations directly onto paper, and meaningful sounds from noise (ahum- cars drive themselves. Nowak, a writer for ming refrigerator, for example, or droning Bio World, reports that researchers at the traffic), computers can't. But researcher lab are making their first breakthroughs Marc Cohen has developed a prototype of on computer chips that will enable ma- a microchip that may be the first step to- chines to hear and see. ward a solution. The chip separates Today's digital and serial computers are blended signals by detecting distinctive ill-equipped to understand language or in- frequency patterns and separating them. terpret light signals, Nowak explains. Sig- Work on chips that "see" is slower go- nals entering a microphone, for example, ing. So far the team has fabricated a three- are "analog." That is, they are recorded in layer "silicon retina," which, while not as fluctuating voltage levels. But computers complex as the human eye, can "detect can't read analog signals. They must first edges, as well as automatically adjust. . . to be converted into a "digital" string of ones different light intensities." One such chip, and zeros-a clumsy, time-consuming which is one centimeter square, will soon process. replace a refrigerator-sized computer in a To get around this problem, the team solar observatory in Sacramento. has developed a "basilar membrane" com- Eventually, the goal is to link the "see- puter chip, which interprets analog signals ing" and "hearing" chips through an "as- directly by imitating the human ear and sociative memory" chip, Nowak notes, so brain. Each of the chip's 30 microscopic that "the sight of an object, say a cup sit- filters responds to a particular frequency ting on a table, triggers the name of the range and then works with the others to object." interpret the signals. The researchers hope How long" will it be before we can ex- that all 30 filters soon will be contained on pect a "perceptive computer, obedient to an even smaller chip requiring only a mi- our slightest utterance?" At least 10 years, nuscule battery. It will process sound in- the researchers predict. The deepest mys- stantly, in "real time." conceivably, the teries confronting them do not involve fab- chip could be connected to the auditory ricating new microchips but understand- nerve in a deaf person's ear. The ultimate ing the human organ the chips are goal, however, is to create a chip that can supposed to mimic-the brain.

in "slave-making Ants" by Howard ~opoff,in American Scientist Ants Bondage (Nov.-Dec. 1990), P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, N.C. 27709. For centuries scientists have been fasci- tailed studies of ant societies and noted nated by the complex social structure of their remarkably efficient division of labor. ant colonies. Charles Darwin made de- In recent years, writes Topoff, a psycholo-

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Polyergus ants, led by the scouts who discovered the site, invade a nest of Formica ants to capture and carry off hundreds of pupae. Some of them are eaten; the rest are enslaved. gist at Hunter College, entomologists have the young Formica ants "identify the smell discovered more than 200 species of ants of the parasitic Polyergus ants as their own; that do no work at all-they have slaves to moreover, the Formica slaves do not rec- do it for them. ognize brood of their own species and will As an example he points to the ants of often destroy them." A Polyergus queen the Polyergus genus, which regularly raid ant sometimes will take over an entire For- nearby nests of Formica ants, secreting a mica nest, covering herself for several toxic acid that scares off the adults and minutes with the dead Formica queen and then carrying the Formica pupae back to fooling the workers. In as little as 15 min- their own nest. A typical raid yields 600 utes, Topoff says, the newly installed pupae. "Although a portion of the raided Polyergus queen is already being groomed brood is eaten," Topoff writes, "some of by Formica workers. the Formica pupae are reared to adult- Charles Darwin believed that slave-mak- hood. The Formica workers then assume ing species of ants evolved from predatory all responsibility for maintaining the per- ancestors, Topoff writes. "Because the pu- manent, mixed-species nest: foraging for pae could not always be entirely con- food, feeding the colony members, remov- sumed, however, some individuals of the ing wastes, and excavating new chambers abducted species would emerge to adult- as the population increases." When the hood." But Topoff contends that this the- colony becomes too large for the nest, the ory fails to explain how the queen became Formica slaves scout out a new nest and dependent on slaves. He favors another "carry all the Polyergus eggs. . . as well as theory, the "brood-transfer hypothesis." In every adult and even the Polyergus queen, simple terms, this hypothesis suggests that to the new nest." Polyergus ants have be- slave-making evolved out of much more come so dependent on their slaves that common territorial contests between ant they have lost the ability to care for them- species. Polyergus queens at some point in- selves. vaded Formica nests, took over, and both Why don't the slave ants revolt or wan- experienced "olfactory imprinting." The der back to their colony? Topoff says that result: the two genera have difficulty

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distinguishing each other. Today's ries, Topoff concedes that there is still Polyergus raiders believe they are kidnap- much to be learned. And considering that ping Poiyergus eggs. there are hundreds of species of slave- Although a relatively new entomological making ants, he concludes, "it is conceiv- subdiscipline devoted specifically to slave- able that no one theory will be universally making ants has produced many new theo- satisfactory."

The Perils Of Pesticides "Cancer Prevention Strategies Greatly Exaggerate Risks" and "Natural Plant Pesticides Pose Greater Risks Than Synthetic Ones" by Bruce N. Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold, and "Expo- sure to Certain Pesticides May Pose Real Carcinogenic Risk" and "Arguments That Discredit Animal Studies Lack Scientific Support" by James E. Huff and Joseph K. Haseman, in Chemi- cal & Engineering News (Jan. 7, 1991), American Chemical So- ciety, 1155 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. In her influential 1962 book Silent Spring, cule quantities of synthetic pesticides that naturalist Rachel Carson warned of the Americans take in with their food are dangers to the environment, and ulti- vastly outweighed by the "natural pesti- mately to human beings, from the wide- cides" they consume every day. These are spread and indiscriminate use of DDT and the toxins plants produce to protect them- other chemical pesticides. Nearly three de- selves against fungi, insects, and animal cades later, the debate about the hazards predators. Cabbage, for example, contains pesticides present still goes on. 49 natural pesticides. While relatively few Chemical pesticides are employed ex- such natural chemicals have been tested tensively in American agriculture. In 1988, on rats and mice, about half of those that more than one billion pounds of pesticides have been have caused cancer. Ames and and related chemicals were used-more Gold calculate that Americans eat about than four pounds for every American. But 1.5 grams of natural pesticides per person Ames and Gold, of the National Institute of per day-about 10,000 times more than Environmental Health Sciences Center at the amount of synthetic pesticide residues the University of California, Berkeley, con- they ingest. tend that the risks to consumers of devel- But such comparisons, because they oping cancer from pesticide residues on don't take into account the pesticides' their food have been greatly exaggerated. carcinogenic potencies, have little scien- Indeed, they say, by lowering the cost of tific value, argue Huff and Haseman, of the fruit and vegetables and so increasing their National Institute of Environmental consumption, the use of synthetic pesti- Health Sciences. And the rodent studies of cides may even indirectly reduce the dan- synthetic pesticides, they say, do have sig- ger of cancer. After all, eating more fruits nificant value in the eyes of most scien- and vegetables and less fat may be the best tists. Such studies indicate "that exposure way of lowering the risk of cancer, next to to certain pesticides may present real giving up smoking. carcinogenic hazards to humans." Pesticides that cause cancer in labora- One point on which both sides seem to tory rats or mice when administered in ex- agree is that there is reason to be con- tremely large doses don't necessarily do cerned when people are exposed to large the same in humans when taken in much, amounts of certain pesticides. Haseman much smaller amounts, Ames and Gold and Huff say that the potential risks to food point out. Moreover, they say, the minus- consumers shouldn't be minimized, but

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"we are more concerned about the farm- others who may be repeatedly exposed to ers, occupationally exposed workers, pesti- much higher levels of pesticides and there- cide applicators, weekend gardeners, and fore are at greater risk."

"Sense and Nonsense on the Environment" by Warren T. False Fixes Brookes, in The Quill (Jan.-Feb. 1991), Society of Professional Journalists, P.O. Box 77, Greencastle, Ind. 46135-0077. When McDonald's Corp. agreed last fall to Prince William Sound. abort its program to recycle the polysty- "Contrary to the hysteria generated by rene cartons it uses for its hamburgers, the news media and environmentalists," and to go back instead to using coated pa- Brookes writes, a report published last perboard, some environmentalists and year by James Mielke of the Congressional journalists hailed the decision as "good Research Service found that the ecological news for the planet." In reality, says effects of such spills are relatively modest Brookes, a Washington-based editorial and short-lived. The chemicals in petro- writer for the Detroit News, the hamburger leum, Mielke noted, "have long been part chain's decision was "on balance, bad of the marine environment and physical news, because it will at least double the impacts are likely to be temporary in the net adverse impact on the nation's envi- dynamic natural flux of the coastal envi- ronment." ronment." As an example of how little last- That's because coated paperboard, un- ing ecological damage was done in Alaska, like polystyrene, is not recyclable, and be- Mielke said that 40 million pink salmon- cause producing it takes 40-50 percent an all-time record number-were caught more energy and results in two to three in Prince William Sound last year, and times the air pollution and at least 70 per- most of the fingerlings had been released cent more waterborne wastes. into Sound hatcheries after the Exxon Why, then, did McDonald's decide to Valdez spill. In Mielke's view, the $2 bil- switch? Brookes suspects that the firm was lion spent on the cleanup there was concerned less about the environment "money that could have been better than about its corporate image. McDon- spent." ald's was under pressure from the Envi- Who's responsible for all the exagger- ronmental Defense Fund. and the foam ated environmental fears? Brookes savs packaging had simply become "a public that the news media deserve much of the relations liability." blame. Journalists are properly skeptical But the "Big Mac" threat is hardly the of environmental claims made by industry, only environmental peril that's been he says, but they also need to be skeptical greatly exaggerated in recent years, of claims made by the Environmental Pro- Brookes maintains. For example, he points tection Agency and by "self-styled public- to the "ecological disaster" of the March interest groups, many of which misuse or 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's abuse scientific data to arouse fear."

ARTS & LETTERS

Flag Revolution "Waving the Red Flag and Reconstituting Old Glory" by Albert Boime, in Smitksonian Studies in American Art (Spring 1990), Oxford Univ. Press, 2001 Evans Rd., Cary, N.C. 27513. When young radicals burned the U.S. flag Thomas (1884-1968) was appalled. He during the antiwar protests of the 1960s, thought the protesters "should be washing the venerable Socialist leader Norman the flag, not burning it." Little more than

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two decades later, however, a conservative decorum is normally played out," it be- U.S. Supreme Court took a more permis- came possible to see the flag "as a deper- sive view. In a 5-4 decision, the Court held sonalized, flat image," like the Campbell's that burning the flag was an allowable soup cans that Pop Art later immortalized. form of free speech. "We do not conse- Soon Claes Oldenburg and other Pop crate the flag by punishing its desecration, artists were using the flag as an element in for in doing so we dilute the freedom that their collages, montages, monoprints, and this cherished emblem represents," said other creations, and thus inadvertently then-Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. contributing to the "desacralization" of That 1989 decision (reaffirmed last year the flag as the era of Vietnam protest drew when the court struck down a new federal near. Celebrity protester Abbie Hoffman, law making it a crime to bum or deface perhaps inspired by the work of the Pop the American flag) was "the end result of a Art masters, made a shirt out of the flag in cultural revolution" that began in the mid- 1968. Many, less "hip" people, however, 1950s, according to Boime, an art histo- continued to regard the flag as sacred. rian at the University of California at Los Hoffman was arrested in Washington, Angeles. Jasper Johns fired the revolu- D.C., for wearing his flag shirt. tion's first shot, with Flag (1954) and other It was significant, Boime contends, that images of the Stars and Stripes. "Some- Johns, Oldenburg, and other artists whose times painted monochromatic gray or flag images contributed to the cultural white or painted on bright backgrounds, revolution filed a fnend-of-the-court brief Johns's flags served to neutralize the grand against flag-desecration laws in the 1989 metaphor of Old Glory by holding it up to Supreme Court case. "Once the flag could close scrutiny in the secularized space of be viewed as just another object in the vi- [an] art gallery," Boime says. With the sual field," he says, "it could no longer be flag's image "completely divorced from seen as either a record of conquest or a those sites in which the ritual of respect or universally accepted patriotic symbol."

Looking Backward "Tomorrow Never Knows" by Gail Collins, in The Nation (Jan. 21, 1991), 72 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 1001 1.

In 1935, historian Charles Beard, philoso- [Bellamy's] picture of society in the year pher John Dewey, and editor Edward 2000-from the day-to-day practicalities Weeks were asked to name the 25 most ('Our washing is all done at public laun- influential books published in the preced- dries at excessively cheap rates, and our ing 50 years. Karl Marx's Das Kapifal cooking at public kitchens') to his grand topped each man's list, but right behind it, vision of an economy in which all business in all three cases, was a utopian novel- has been swallowed up into one Great Looking Backward (1888). Trust run by the state and the work force Written by Edward Bellamy (1850- transformed into an eager industrial army 1898), a minister's son from Chicopee of patriotic citizens." Falls, Mass., Looking Backward told the The novel appeared at a time when mid- story of Julian West, a wealthy Bostonian dle-class Americans were alarmed by labor who went to sleep in 1887 and awoke 113 strife and violence, and by the flood of new years later to discover that the world had immigrants into the country. They also been greatly changed, and entirely for the were resentful of the Gilded Age rich, who better. The novel was all but devoid of ac- flaunted their wealth with gaudy displays tion, but late-19th-century readers didn't of conspicuous consumption. Bellamy and mind, notes Collins, co-author of The Mil- his "Nationalist" vision of social organiza- lennium Book. They "were fascinated with tion seemed to offer a solution. Sixty thou-

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- - -- sand copies of Looking Backward were ward "a horrible cockney dreamH-and sold in the first year, more than 100,000 then proceeded to set down, in News From the next. "Bellamy Clubs" began to spring Nowhere (1890), his own vision of the fu- up all over the country, their members in- ture. an arcadian communitv of artisans tent upon turning Bellamy's vision into a and 'craftsmen. reality. Bellamy's age, Collins writes, "was the Looking Backward also inspired dozens last in which futuristic novels would take of other utopian novels. Fictional heroes such an optimistic bent." Although the in increasing numbers began falling asleep 20th century brought far more technologi- and waking up, to their wonderment, a cal progress than Bellamy and his contem- century later. The hero of Paul DeVinne's poraries anticipated, it also brought world Day of Prosperity, found himself in New wars and other previously unimagined York City in the year 2000 and saw around horrors that have soured most futuristic him "only these 10-story palaces, varied in novelists on the future. "Looking back- decoration, surrounded by fruit trees, ward now from Bellamy's future," Collins flower beds, vases, statues, and marble says, "the saddest thing is not that we have seats." Some utopian authors were pro- failed to create the utopia he imagined but voked by Bellamy's work. British Marxist that we have stopped dreaming up utopias William Morris pronounced Looking Back- of our own."

"Literature and Politics in Latin America" by Mark Falcoff, in Latin Heroes The New Criterion (Dec. 1990), 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.

The Latin American writer is often thought brary. When individual writers were perse- to cut a heroic figure. As an independent cuted or driven into exile, Falcoff says, it critic of a corrupt society, he stands up in was usually "due to their affiliation with defense of humane and liberal values the party out of power, not to the allegedly against an established order of greed and subversive content of their work." violence. But that familiar image is much Devotion to democratic principle has exaggerated, says Falcoff, a resident not been characteristic of Latin American scholar at the American Enterprise Insti- writers, on the whole. Many older writers tute. Most writers in Latin America, he were attracted to Marxism at one time, says, "have been unusually drawn to and few allowed any disillusionment with power, for reasons both of economic ne- it to lead them to embrace liberal democ- cessity and cultural predisposition," and in racy. Since the late 1960s, younger New this century, they've been especially drawn Left writers, such as Chile's Ariel Dorfman to non-liberal or anti-liberal ideologies. and Uruguay's Eduardo Galeano, have Popular indifference has been a more taken as their themes protest, revolution, powerful enemy of literature than has cen- repression, solidarity, and North American sorship, and Latin American writers have consumerism's threat to the "authenticity" often relied upon the state for economic of native cultures. sustenance. Many governments, Left and The literary establishments in Western Right, have kept writers on the public pay- Europe and the United States, Falcoff says, roll. Successive Chilean governments, for have encouraged the writers' "anti-liberal example, rewarded poet Pablo Neruda bias." Not all of Latin America's writers with minor diplomatic posts in Spain and have responded with political themes, but elsewhere. Short-story writer Jorge Luis "the more ambitious (or unscrupulous) Borges was appointed director of Argenti- among them could not help noting that na's National Library after having worked revolutionary posturing was the most ex- for years at the Buenos Aires Public Li- peditious route to success in the North At-

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lantic publishing and literary worlds." and democratic commitment, explicitly The most important development in denouncing totalitarian regimes and uto- Latin American letters in recent years, pian ideologies." The most prominent ex- Falcoff says, has been the emergence of amples are Mexican poet and diplomat writers who have made "a decisive liberal Octavio Paz and Peruvian novelist (and

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1990 presidential candidate) Mario Vargas tro, has since concluded that sacrificing Llosa. Paz says that socialism in underde- freedom is not the way to overcome injus- veloped countries swiftly turns into des- tice. Perhaps there may be something to potic "state capitalism." Vargas Llosa, the heroic image of the Latin American once an enthusiastic backer of Fidel Cas- writer after all.

OTHER NATIONS

"The Vietnam Communist Party Strives to Remain the 'Only Going Halfway Force'" by Charles A. Joiner, in Asian Survey (Nov. 1990), Univ. of Calif., Room 408, 6701 San Pablo Ave., Oakland, Calif. 94720. Communist leaders in the Soviet Union Union and the nations of the former Soviet and Eastern Europe have taken two big bloc. Declines in the loans and trade are steps toward revitalizing their moribund sure to worsen Vietnam's problems. economies. One is to move toward free Overcoming them requires political, as markets, the other is to surrender the com- well as economic, reform, one member of munist monopoly of political power. Many the party's Politburo dared to suggest last analysts believe that both steps are essen- year. Tran Xuan Bach, who was a leader in tial for the nations' economic health. But party ideological affairs, warned that "You not everyone has agreed. Kim I1 Sung in can't walk with one long leg and one short North Korea and Fidel Castro in Cuba leg and you can't walk with only one leg." have refused to take either step. Others His "erroneous views" were not well re- have not been quite so steadfast in their ceived by his colleagues. He was expelled Marxist-Leninist faith. In Vietnam, Nguyen from the Politburo and the party's Central Van Linh and his colleagues, like their Committee. Linh, the party's general sec- counterparts in China, have decided to go retary, said in a major address in 1990 that halfway-they're taking the economic the Vietnam Communist Party must re- step, but not the political one. main the "only force" because "ours is a Since the Sixth Party Congress in De- party of the people, by the people, relying cember 1986, says Joiner, a Temple Uni- on the people and for the people." versity political scientist, Vietnam has Vietnam's "ubiquitous security system" tried to free up the command economy. is, of course, "a major deterrent to most "The 'new way of thinking' (doi moi), 'ren- forms of dissenting behavior" by the 67 ovation' (canh tan), and 'openness' (cong million Vietnamese, Joiner notes. Perhaps khai) have become the entrenched party it and "renovation" will be enough to en- line," he says. Despite some limited gains, able the party to maintain its monopoly of however, the country's enormous eco- political power. Still, he says, "whether it nomic difficulties remain. Among them: is possible to walk with one long leg and low productivity, inadequate public ser- one short one throughout much of the vices, and continued dependence on subsi- 1990s is far from being definitively re- dized loans and trade with the Soviet solved."

A Swedish Dilemma "Sweden: Social Democrats in Trouble" by Stefan Svallfors, in Dissent (Winter 1991), 521 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. During the early 1930s, when the United sives looked to Sweden's social democracy States and Europe were trying to cope as a successful "middle way" between dog- with the Great Depression, many progres- matic free enterprise and doctrinaire so-

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cialism. Now, with the collapse of commu- lieved that a fundamental principle was nism in the Soviet Union and Eastern discarded." But backsliding on income re- Europe, and the new enthusiasm even distribution isn't the only grievance. The there for free markets, some SAP leadership, to bolster a wage-and- progressives once agai price freeze, last spring proposed suspend- have turned their ing the right to strike. Although the pro- eyes toward the posal was eventually withdrawn, many "Swedish model." workers thought it showed that the SAP What they are finding, no longer acted in their interests. however, is a model in Beneath the various surface discon- danger of cracking up. tents with SAP policies, Svallfors Three years ago, the po- says, lies the fact that the class com- litical grip of Sweden's So- promise that is the foundation of cia1 Democratic Labor the "Swedish model" has begun to Party (SAP), which has come apart. Workers agreed to ruled for all but six years wage restraint in the early since 1932, appeared secure. 1980s, only to see their in- While the party slipped a little comes (in constant kro- at the ballot box in 1988, so nor) stagnate or decline; did the centrist and conserva- now, in the face of high infla- tive parties; only the envi- tion (10.9 percent in 1990), ronmentalist Greens many workers reject any gained. Now, however, appeals for wage restraint. opinion surveys indicate Meanwhile, the Swedish the SAP'S support has Employers' Confederation fallen sharply, down to is insisting on negotiating, just 35 percent. "The future o th its usual partner, the Trade SAP is more uncertain today Confederation, but rather

to a breakdown in labor's tradi- sity of Umea in Sweden. tional policy of "equal pay for Many workers are unhappy with equal work nationwide," which the party's economic policies. The SAP Svallfors notes was "a cornerstone minority government's recent reform of the Swedish model." of the tax system, for instance, ended up Perhaps even more significant for destroying much of its progressive char- the future of that model is that many acter. "Because the tax rate for high-in- leading Swedish companies now have come earners was lowered," Svallfors much of their workforce, as well as says, "many Social Democrats be- their market, abroad. Volvo, for in-

Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and his Social Democratic Labor party favor jamlik (equality), but their economic policies of late have made many workers unhappy.

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stance, recently announced that it was go- SAP'S domestic policies but rather "the ing to cut back production in its Swedish character of Western Europe's integrated facility because its factory in Ghent, Bel- market and the future direction of Eastern gium is more profitable. In the end, Europe [that] will largely determine the Svallfors concludes, it will be not the fate of the Swedish model."

Czars "Czars and Commiczars" by Robert C. Tucker, in The New Re- Bolshevik public (Jan. 21, 1991), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.

Most Western sovietologists have long re- chev, according to Soviet historian Vladen garded the October Revolution of 1917, in Sirotkin, is not unlike what happened un- which Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks der Alexander I1 in the 1860s and 1870s. seized power, as marking a decisive break "It was then," writes Tucker, "that a with the Russian past. But many Soviet schism opened up within the czarist no- intellectuals, free now in the glasnost era menklatura [ruling elite] between reform- to speak their minds, have been taking a ers who supported Alexander 11's pere- very different view, Princeton political sci- stroika and conservatives who opposed it." entist Tucker reports. As they see it, he That czar's rule ended in 188 1 when he fell says, czarist absolutism and historic Rus- victim to a revolutionary extremist's sian statism simply returned in a new bomb, and under his successor, Alexander guise during the Soviet period. 111, reaction set in. This was true from the regime's very As the Soviet era appears now to be outset, Soviet thinkers such as historian A. coming to an end, Soviet intellectuals are Mertsalov and Literatumaya Gazeta editor divided as to what "time" in Russian his- Fyodor Burlatsky contend. The retention tory it is. Some think that the country is of the minority-inhabited territories on the entering a period like the one that afflicted periphery meant the Russian empire re- Muscovy in the early 17th century, when mained intact in all but name. And, also the death of Czar Boris Godunov brought under a different name, a new line of de on disorder, civil war, and intervention by facto czars emerged, starting with Lenin. Poles and other foreigners. That smuta, or The dark, final years of Stalin after Time of Troubles, ended only with the World War 11, Tucker observes, were strik- crowning of Mikhail Romanov in 16 13 and ingly similar in many ways to the repres- the establishment of a new dynasty that sive 1830s and '40s under Czar Nicholas I. was to last for three centuries. But other When the Marquis de Custine visited Rus- Soviet intellectuals contend that Russia is sia in 1839, Tucker writes, he found "not in a revolutionary period like that of the the civilized monarchy he had imagined, early 20th century, with the country in cri- but a true tyranny, a serf state with a czar- sis and the question being whether a new cult upheld by officialdom." The form of October 19 17 can be avoided. government, as Custine wrote in his book Tucker suggests that the alternative Russia in 1839, was "absolute monarchy "times" are really, in essence, the same. moderated by murder." The revolutionary period was actually a The Soviet Nicholaian period, Tucker new Time of Troubles, and from it, too, a says, extended through the reign of Leonid new dynasty emerged. So the crucial ques- Brezhnev and the early 1980s. And then, tion now is: Can Russia finally escape from just as the "czar-liberator" Alexander I1 the cycles of its own history? If the answer (who abolished serfdom) succeeded the ty- is to be yes, Tucker says, "much time and rant Nicholas I, so a new "czar-liberator," much effort, no little good fortune, and Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in maybe substantial assistance from the 1985. What has happened under Gorba- United States" will be required.

WQ SPRING 1991 RESEARCH REPORTS

Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

"Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy." Harvard Univ. Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138. 251 pp. $29.95. Authors: Catherine E. Snow, Wendy S. Barnes, Jean Chandler, et al. In 1982, Snow, a professor at level of education, and her study's first year, nearly three- the Harvard Graduate School educational expectations for fourths of the children got A's of Education, and her col- the child. (The father's back- and B's in reading, even leagues, ended an 18-month ground mattered much less.) though about half were read- study of how children from The quality of schools also ing below grade level. But low-income families learn to made a difference, but a con- when parents did contact read and write on an optimis- siderably smaller one. teachers, children did better. tic note. "Only a few of them A third facet, reading com- As the years went by, how- were in serious academic trou- prehension, is more compli- ever, that happened less and ble then," the researchers re- cated. But schools and families less. Parental involvement de- call, "and even those scoring seemed to be able to compen- clined as the children ad- the lowest on our tests showed sate for each other's failings. In vanced into adolescence. Many the capacity to make great the 1980-82 study, all chil- parents, because of their own gains under the influence of dren-including those from academic shortcomings, did excellent teachers." the worst homes-who had ex- not feel competent to help But when the researchers cellent teaching for two years their children. Schools simply did a follow-up study four made the expected gains in could not compensate for pa- years later, their hopes were reading comprehension. rental withdrawal. dashed. "Few of the stu- The schools provided very Parents who continued to try dents. . . had continued to little instruction in how to to help and support their chil- make gains in literacy conso- write. And parents did have a dren, though, apparently made nant with their abilities. Only a big impact there, the research- a difference. Asked to write es- small minority were taking ers found. The "good writers" says about a person they ad- courses that would qualify tended to live in more orga- mired, adolescents who were them for. . . college. Several nized households, and to have doing well in school tended to were high school dropouts." more positive relationships write about parents (or others) During 1980-82, Snow and with their parents. who gave them academic or her colleagues went into the Parental involvement in the psychological support. Youths homes and classrooms of 32 schools bolstered student liter- who were not doing well typi- grade school children of aver- acy, the researchers found, but cally admired those who pro- age ability and various back- was often stymied by miscom- vided for their basic physical grounds. munication. The parents ex- needs. One ninth grader wrote: Two facets of literacy-word pected to be notified by the "I admire my mother and fa- recognition skills and vocabu- teachers when academic prob- ther because they feed me and lary-were strongly influenced lems arose. But report cards give me a roof over my head." by the "literacy environment" often painted a rosy-and in- That, sadly, is not enough to of the home, the mother's own accurate-picture. During the nurture a literate citizen.

"Peace Corps' Challenges in the 1990s." Editorial Research Reports, Congressional Quarterly, 1414 22nd St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037. 15 pp. $7. Author: Richard L. Worsnop The Peace Corps, born 30 But today's Peace Corps fields Editorial Research Reports. years ago March 1 during the less than half as many volun- Some other changes may be presidency of John F. Ken- teers (6,100) as the Corps of for the better. During the nedy, still projects an image of 1966. Its budget ($186 million) 1960s, up to 85 percent of the youthful "vigah" and ideal- is also down, in constant dol- volunteers were under age 26; ism-and that image still bears lars, by more than half, says today, only about half are. In some resemblance to reality. Worsnop, associate editor of the early years, nearly 60 per-

WQ SPRING 1991 RESEARCH REPORTS

cent of volunteers were young After the 1989 revolution in new public attention, but it generalists possessing only Eastern Europe, the Peace also aroused concern among bachelor's degrees in the lib- Corps sent 84 volunteers to Po- those committed to the agen- eral arts; today, generalists ac- land, 53 to Hungary, and 22 to cy's traditional mission of help- count for only about 30 per- Czechoslovakia. Many more ing poor people in poor coun- cent of volunteers, with most were due to go to the region tries. Thanks to a $17.4 million of the others being specialists this year. Poland is scheduled budget increase for 199 1, how- in business, engineering, eventually to have 213 volun- ever, the agency's expansion is health, or social work. Al- teers, one of the largest Peace not now being made at the ex- though the Peace Corps today Corps contingents in the pense of its programs in the has many fewer volunteers world. Honduras, with 339 vol- Third World. than it did in its '60s heyday, unteers as of January, has the Over the decades, one Peace they are spread more widely: largest number, followed by Corps veteran observed, the Volunteers are in 73 countries, Botswana (306), Guatemala Corps has shown it "can adapt more than ever before. And (244), Thailand (219), and itself to different countries and more countries are seeking Zaire (2 10). different situations," which volunteers now than did in re- The move into Eastern Eu- helps to explain why it has sur- cent decades. rope brought the Peace Corps vived adversity at home.

'Energy in Developing Countries" Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402-9325. 148 pp. $7. Developing countries have nearly 10 percent of world use. mental resources," OTA says. been fast increasing their con- Africa's 50 countries, by con- But if enough energy does not sumption of oil and other com- trast, use less than 3 percent. materialize, economic and so- mercial sources of energy- Most people in the develop- cial development could be from 17 percent of total global ing world-in particular, the thwarted. OTA looks to techno- consumption in 1973 to 23 2.5 billion living in rural vil- logical improvements to help percent in 1985. By 2020, their lages-use noncommercial en- to resolve the dilemma. demand for commercial en- ergy: firewood, charcoal, crop For example, switching from ergy could triple, increasing wastes, or animal dung. Devel- wood stoves to more efficient their share to 40 percent. oping countries account for 85 kerosene or liquefied petro- But many of these countries percent of the world's biomass leum gas ones could cut en- are already deeply in debt and fuel consumption, and use is ergy use (and pollution) signifi- are going to be very hard- growing; it generates air pollu- cantly, since cooking is the pressed to pay for this in- tion, as well as carbon dioxide largest single use of energy in crease. The Congressional Of- and other "greenhouse gases." many countries. Another po- fice of Technology Assessment As developing countries be- tential place to save energy, (OTA) thinks it has a way to come more industrialized and OTA says, is in steel produc- help: make technological im- urbanized, they shift toward us- tion. Plants in India and China provements to boost efficiency. ing oil and other types of com- use twice as much energy as That would not only reduce mercial energy-and their en- those in the United States and the need for energy, it would ergy needs grow. Three-fourths Japan. Some developing coun- cut pollution, too. of developing countries rely on tries have already cut energy Five developing countries- energy imports; many are al- use in steel production. South China, India, Mexico, Brazil, most completely dependent on Korea's steel industry is the and South Africa-are now oil imports. world's most efficient. Other among the world's largest con- To increase the energy sup- promising technologies for im- sumers of commercial energy ply on the scale required proving energy efficiency are (oil, gas, coal, and electricity). "would severely strain finan- to be explored in a later OTA China alone accounts for cial, manpower, and environ- report.

WQ SPRING 1991 141 COMMENTARY

We welcome timely letters from readers, especially those who wish to amplify or correct information published in the Quarterly and/or react to the views expressed in our essays. The writer's telephone number and address should be included. For reasons of space, letters are usually edited for publication. Some letters are received in response to the editors' requests for comment.

African Realities To Blame," WQ, Winter '911 to the multiform his- torical inquiry concerning Lyndon Johnson's ca- Kwame Anthony Appiah's article ["Altered States," reer and what we can learn through that subject WQ, Winter '911 develops in a readable way the about the United States since the 1930s. I hope reasons that one's hopes for the reconstitution of Dallek discovers what the rest of us miss and African polities lie in a vibrant civil society. We are teaches what the rest of us fail to understand. confronted in the 1990s with both African and East- Dallek firmly establishes his moral superiority ern European societies trying to deconstruct over Robert Caro and me by stating that we, Caro bloated, bureaucratic, kleptocratic, centralized and I, "have merely vilified Johnson. I put aside states to free up the energies and initiatives of civil that accusation until some other time. Here, it is society. In much of Eastern Europe civil society more apposite to point out that in the course of has to be reconstituted as well, but in many associ- Dallek's reflections, although they occupy only ations, marketing societies and educational institu- seven pages of the Wilson Quarterly, Dallek himself tions survive to reclaim their autonomy from mal- vilifies Johnson, as any Johnson loyalist will al- functioning military and authoritarian regimes. ready have observed. Dallek tells us here once Two points jump out of Dr. Appiah's articles. The again about Johnson's "reputation as a political op- first, historical. While the British practice of "indi- erator who lied to the public throughout his ca- rect rule" was a disaster for centralized national- reer," his "own corrupt campaign practices," and ism and the transfer of power, it may in retrospect his "few qualms about misleading the Congress be closer to the multistranded fabric of African pol- and the public" as he waged war in the Dominican ities than we thought in the 1960s. The second, pro- Republic and Vietnam. spective. What seems to be required in the arduous I believe it is correct to say that the beneficial task of African nation-creation is a new kind of con- effects of Johnson's Great Society programs have stitutional convention. The key parties at interest- been dismissed, distorted, ignored, and denied by such as ethnic groups, churches, trading associa- journalists and policy analysts, many of whom have tions, universities, labor unions, fanners' groups, been running with the pack during the Reagan- urban political parties-have to come together to Bush period and that Johnson must be credited determine for themselves what are the reciprocally with his real contributions to social policy in the necessary characteristics of the state they want. A United States. However. this statement. this ori- larger state cannot survive if its citizens always entation, will come as no surprise to anyone who think of themselves, and therefore shape their civic has been paying attention to the relevant studies of and kin obligations principally as Ashanti or Yor- Great Society programs by scholars who are true to uba or Luo. The African state has to be rebuilt from the data. Elsewhere I have expressed my opinion the bottom up by its own people who can articulate that Johnson was the greatest civil rights president the realities of common interest. Much the same is since Lincoln, and I am glad to see that, judging true of Yugoslavia-or, it appears, of the badly fray- from his sketch, Dallek is thinking along compat- ing bonds of the Soviet Union. That there are peo- ible lines. ple as perceptive and articulate as Dr. Appiah pro- I was hoping we might derive from Dallek's vides ground for a modest hope that this large and presentation of his views some solid indication of critical task can be pushed forward in Ghana and his own fresh perspective on our subject. But no: other parts of Africa. reasonably enough, we will have to wait for those Prosser Gifford books. I wish him the best of luck. However, the Director of Scholarly Programs next time he condemns those others of us who The Library of Congress have been occupied with this subject for indulging "our sense of moral superiority," his point will be more logically made if he can keep his own weak- Lessons Learned ness for that indulgence under better control. Ronnie Dugger I welcome Robert Dallek ["The President We Love Wellfleet, Mass.

WQ SPRING 1991 142 COMMENTARY

Polling History phy of Lyndon Johnson, perhaps LBJ will finally win some measure of public redemption. But don't In his perceptive essay on Lyndon Johnson, Robert count on it. Dallek emphasizes the very low standing of LBJ in Robert Divine the eyes of the general public. Dallek cites a 1988 University of Texas-Austin Harris poll in which people ranked Johnson near the bottom of all recent American presidents, be- hind even Richard Nixon. He goes on to argue that Songs of Praise historians, by their neglect of Johnson, have al- lowed journalists like Ronnie Dugger and Robert I was introduced to the Wilson Ouarterlv several Caro to send "his already tarnished reputation into years ago by a friend. Since then I have learned to a free fall.'' appreciate it more with each issue. I just finished What Dallek fails to note is the mounting evi- the summer issue today. I had the impression of dence that historians and political scientists hold a having listened to a masterful symphony. There's much higher opinion of Lyndon Johnson than do always so much in the WQ! So, thank you all for a the American people. Three polls of scholars taken very cogent, reliable, readable journal. in the early 1980s ranked him among the top dozen Dean Holt American presidents. In David L. Porter's survey of Columbia, Maryland 41 American historians in 1981, LBJ finished an impressive llth, among the "near great," while Steve Neal's poll of 49 historians and political sci- Protest entists who had written extensively on the presi- dency listed Johnson in the 12th position, just I wish to record my grave concern regarding the ahead of Kennedy and far ahead of Nixon, who quality of the Wilson Quarterly review of recent ar- ranked next to last. The most extensive poll of his- ticles on Cuba [Autumn '90, pp. 134-1351. The re- torians, conducted by Robert K. Murray and Tim viewer grossly misrepresented my article in the H. Blessing in 1982, placed Johnson loth, just be- Summer issue of Foreign Policy. Among the most hind John Adams among the "above average" pres- serious errors were: the statement that my article idents. "sees only strength" in the Cuban government's The explanation for this startling gap between position; the claim that I forecast "reductions in the way scholars and the general public view Lyn- Soviet aid are unlikely"; and the suggestion that I don Johnson lies in the very nature of presidential believe "the fall of Ortega and Noriega strength- popularity. Leaders such as Harry S. Truman and ened Castro." Either the reviewer did not read my John E Kennedy invariably do well in broad public article carefully, or he/she intentionally misrepre- opinion polls because people tend to admire them sented my position. as human beings. There was nothing likable about In my article I state that "Cuba's economy is ail- Lyndon Johnson. Yet historians who have in the ing and will suffer still more as a consequence of past probed beyond personal characteristics for stagnating or declining aid from the USSR." I also more tangible evidence of presidential leadership state that "immediate collapse" of the Cuban sys- have discovered many of the positive traits that tem is not likely, a statement vindicated by the con- Dallek finds praiseworthy. tinuation of the regime many months after my arti- It is fashionable to write about the "tragedy" of cle appeared, but that the "longer term outlook Lyndon Johnson-his rapid fall from grace be- remains less certain." I then list a range of possible tween 1964 and 1968, his doomed effort to try for scenarios, one of which is "either violent or peace- both guns and butter, even his apparent awareness ful overthrow" of the government. as early as 1965 that Vietnam would become his I never mention the fall of Ortega and contrary downfall. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all for to suggesting that Noriega's removal strengthened Johnson was the fact that he followed the charis- Castro, I state that the change of government in matic Jack Kennedy. No matter what he did, LBJ Panama "may soon shut down" Cuba's embargo- could never duplicate JFKs hold on the public circumventing operations there. imagination. As a loyal successor, he pursued Ken- Gillian Gunn nedy's policies to their logical conclusion. Yet LBJ Senior Associate never received the adulation that would have been Carnegie Endowment for International Peace heaped on Kennedy for the Great Society; instead he became the scapegoat for the failure of Viet- Editor's note: We believe our summary was fair, but nam. Historians know better and with the publica- it should have said that Gillian Gunn sees "mainly" tion of books such as Dallek's forthcoming biogra- strength in Cuba.

WQ SPRING 1991 143 CLASSIF ED ADV N

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