- , ,. THE WI LSON QUARTERLY

THOMAS JEFFERSON AVIATION READING - ~INAMERICA The New Cold War? Legislative Leviathan Religious Nationalism Confronts the Party Government in the House Secular State GARY W. COX MARK JUERGENSMEYER and MATHEW D. McCUBBINS "This is an indispensible book in helping us This book provides an incisive new look at understand the new world disorder that the inner workings of the House of Represen- seems to be overtaking us. . . . major tatives in the post-World War I1 era. De- achievement." -Robert Bellah, bunking prevailing arguments about the co-author of Habits of the Heart weakening of congressional parties, Cox and "A sensitive survey McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways of religious nation- in which parties exercise considerable alism around the discretion in organizing the House to carry world, with some out its work. gentle advice for California Series on Social Choice and Americans bewil- Political Economy, 23 dered by all the $45.00 cloth, $1 4.00 paper uproar. . . . Valu- able for its global perspective and its Robert Maynard ability to see things from the viewpoint Hutchins of the religious A Memoir

-~nationalists ~--- - them- MILTON MAYER selves; as such, must reading for the Clinton Edited by John H. Hicks Administration."-Kirkus Reviews With a Foreword by Studs Terkel Comparative Studies in Religion and Society, 5 'Mayer's memoir is by far the most exciting $25.00 cloth Hutchins book ever. His style, wit, and passion-and his insight-put it into a class by itself." -Studs Terkel Testing Testing $35.00 cloth, illustrated Social Consequences of the Examined Life Almost Chosen People F. ALLAN HANSON Oblique Biographies in "Surprisingly vivacious writing, given the sub- the American Grain ject. . . . The author brings to his often impas- sioned discussion of testing a fine humanism MICHAEL ZUCKERMAN that accepts the need of society's institutions to In his effort to remake the meaning of the know something about people but that de- American tradition, Zuckerman takes the en- plores the warping of the tools of assessment tire sweep of American history for his into prying, fearsome, demeaning instruments." province. The essays in this collection, -New York Times Book Review including two never before published and a $28.00 cloth new auto-biographical introduction, range from early New England settlements to the hallowed corridors of modern Washington. A Centennial Book Prescription- for Profit How Doctors Defraud Medicaid $30.00 cloth PAUL JESILOW, HENRY N. PONTELL, * and GILBERT GEIS At bookstores or order toll-free 1 8 9 3 @1 9 9 3 "A sound, well written, and highly interesting 1-800-822-6657. examination of how Medicaid. . . has given far too many physicians an opportunity to 'mop up' fraudulently, for their own financial gain, some of the $61 billion annual cost of the program." -Marshall B. Clinard, University of Wisconsin $25.00 cloth SPRING 1993 THE WILSON QUARTERLY

- Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

10 THE DRAGON STIRS by Anne Thurston Since the turmoil of Tiananmen, Deng Xiaoping has given eco- nomic reform, and China's communist dynasty, a second life. But what will come after the death of the paramount leader? 52 THERISE OF THE KNOWLEDGESOCIETY by Peter E Drucker In the new global economy, knowledge counts for more than capital or labor. Peter Drucker explains why.

38. Jefferson in His Time by Gordon Wood 99. A Reading Lesson by Robertson Davies 106. Republic of the Air by Robert Wohl 118. Why Freud Hated America by Howard L. Kaye

DEPARTMENTS 4. Editor's Comment 126. Periodicals 6. At Issue 150. Research Reports 74. Current Books 152. Commentary 92. Poetry 160. From the Center

Cover: Detail from Rise with Force and Spirit by James Bama. Copyright @ 1989 by the Greenwich Workshop, Inc. For information on obtaining limited edition fine art prints call 1-800-243-4244. Printed in the U.S.A.

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The Wilson Quarterly (ISSN-0363-32761 is published in fanuan/ Winter), April (Sprinfl, filly (Summer), and October (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704, Washington, D.C. 20024. Indexed biennially. Subscriptions: one year, $24; hro years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one year, $39; two years, $73. Single copies mailed upon request: $7; outside US. and possessions, $8; selected back issues: $7, including postage and handling; outside U.S., $8. ~ecoiid-classpostage paid at Wasiiiii~ton,D.C., and additional mailing offices. All unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped e~iuelope. The views e.rpressed herein are not necessarily those of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Members: Send changes of address and all subscription correspondence with Wilson Quarterly mailing label to Subscriber Service, The Wilson Quarterly, PO. Box 420406, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0406. (Subscriber hot line: 1-800-829-5108.)Postinaster: Send all address changes to The Wilson Quarterly, PO. Box 420406, Pnlni Coast, FL 32142-0406. Microfilm copies are available from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. U.S.A. newsstand distribution by Eastern News Distributors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Sandusky, Ohio 44870 (for iiifoniiatio~i,call 1-800-221-3148). FASCINATING LIVES, MAJOR AUTHORS

INFLUENTIAL- IDEAS PANDAEMONIUM LIVING WITHIN LIMITS Ethnicity in International Politics Ecology, Economics, and Population DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN Taboos "Throughout this century, a few inspired writers GARRETT HARDIN have been pointing out the persistence of nation- 'Garrett Hardin has done it again! Fuzzy think- alist and ethnic feelings, not the least of them ers will hate this book. Numerate people may not Moynihan .... He has defined the problem with agree with all that is in it, but they will love great wit and insight in this splendid little book" Hardin's keen analyses and crisp exposition"- -Thomas Gagen, The Boston Globe. "This is Paul R. Ehrlich. "Wonderfully rich in original assuredly a book no other living person could ideas and insights... acompelling examination of have written .... A brilliant work of utmost im- the central question facing our civilization at the portance"-Milton M. Gordon. "As always, the close of the millennium. Hardin is unfailingly Senator's prose is marvelously well turned, and serious and his analysis is penetrating. But as he is pungent with the is unable to write a dull sentence, he also offers memories of long-ago a rare intellectual feast that challenges, charms, controversies to which and engages the reader in every page. A book he was once aparty"- that will be widely read and is bound to be The New Yorker. The enduringly influentialu-Paul Demeny, nation's best thinker Editor, Population and Development Review. among politicians $25.00, 352 pp. since Lincolnm-U.S. News & WorldReport. $19.95, 221 pp. THE OXFORD COMPANION TO POLITICS OF THE WORLD Editor-in-Chief: JOEL KRIEGER "A unique volume that offers the widest range WAS HUCK BLACK? of perspectives and hence constitutes the most Mark Twain and African American Voices perfect resource for even the experienced deci- SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN sion makers. I recommend it to everyone inter- 'Here is that rarity in criticism, a monograph ested or involved in the events of our day"- almost sure to be definitive .... Twain's genius Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. "A with vernacular has always been acknowledged, remarkably timely and comprehensive resource but Fishkin shows, with formidable scholarship, for making sense of contemporary affairs from how black speech (and life) influenced white a genuinely international perspective. The culture and how, in American literature, the reader-whether scholar, diplomat, or curious Twain do indeed meet. Recommended for in- citizen-will not only learn to be more realistic formed readers and scholarsw-Library Journal. about the difficulties that the world faces, but "A dazzling and highly convincing bit of detec- will also learn new ways by which together tive work"-Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "An exhaus- we can surmount them" -Javier Perez de tive and provocative work, already creating a Cukllar, former Secretary-General of the UN. stir"-Kirkus Reviews. $23.00, 288 pp. $49.95, 1,088 pp. CHAPTERS INTO VERSE CULTURE OF Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible COMPLAINT Volume 1: Genesis to Malachi The Fraying of Volume 2: Gospels to Revelation America Edited by ROBERT ATWAN and ROBERT HUGHES LAURENCE WIEDER "Time's longtime art "Astonishing that no one has come up with this critic and an award- idea before! Editors Atwan and Wieder have winning historian of his compiled an anthology of poems from all eras, native Australia (The 1 '7 '',I2 styles, and degrees of reverence, which take as Fatal Shore), Hughes brings to the currently their major inspiration lines, verses, or chapters white-hot topic of U.S. cultural values an from the Bible .... To read these Scripture pas- outsider's apprehension of what is distinctly sages and the poems that follow them is to take American .... Never deserted by his rapier wit, an unusual, reflective journey through the Bible Hughes delivers the most enjoyable, most sen- and through the history of English poetrym- sible contribution to date to the American Library Journal. cultural debatem-Booklist. "It's hard not to be Volume 1: $25.00, 446 pp. stirred up and entertained by the three jer- Volume 2: $25.00, 354 pp. The set: $50.00 emiad-essays Hughes offers here" -Kirkus Reviews. Here is an extraordinary cri de coeur, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self. It is a PEE WEE RUSSELL book everyone interested in American culture The Life of a Jazzman will want to read. $19.95, 210 pp. ROBERT HILBERT 'Tremendously entertaining .... a life of great jazz clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, who cut the figure THE CREATION OF of a legendary drinker and inspired player but FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS who during his life was at once reviled for incom- From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy petence and respected for genius. The recorded GERDA LERNER works say geniusm-Kirkus Reviews. "Recom- "Wise, wonderful .... Everyone who thinks about mended not only because it fills a gapthis is the women's thinking should read this book"-Nell first booklength study of the musician-but be- Irvin Painter. "A pioneering study of the utmost cause it's well researched and well writtenm- importance which allows us to experience Library Journal. $25.00, 300 pp. the tragedy and the triumph of women who at- tempted over the centuries to understand their situation and their history. This work is bound to have enduring influence ... may well be Gerda NICHOLAS I1 Lemer's most significant contribution yetn- The Last of the Tsars Lawrence W. Levine. "Lemer doesn't simply MARC FERRO lament the silence endured by women ...but gives One of the world's preeminent historians of the these nearly forgotten Russian Revolution, Marc Ferro now turns his souls a voicem-Kirkus considerable talents to the biography of one of the Reviews. "This sharp, pivotal figures of the period, Nicholas 11. Graced incisive bookconcludes by many contemporary photographs, this volume the work Lemer so well offers a perceptive portrait of Nicholas based on began in The Creation both published and unpublished documents. of Patriarchy. Together "Upon a well-conceived framework Ferro hangs they make up avital con- telling and even colorful detail, resulting in a tribution to women's sound biography of wide appealm-Booklist. studiesw-Booklist. A History Book Club selection. $25.00, 305 pp. $27.50, 395 pp.

At better bookstores. To charge, 1-800-451-7556 (M-F, 9-5 EST) Editor: Jay Tolson Deputy Editor: Steven Lagerfeld Managing Editor: James H. Carrnan Literary Editor: Jeffery Paine EDITOR'S COMMENT Associate Editor: Robert K. Landers Poetry Editor: Joseph Brodsky cholars come in many guises, some in the gowns of aca- Copy Editor: Vincent Ercolano deme and some in the workaday worsted of the professional Design Consultant: Tawney Harding and business worlds. We are fortunate to have in this issue Contributing Editors: Max Holland, ones of the more interesting thinkers from the world of "affairs," Walter Reich, Charles Townshend, Peter Drucker. Of course, some might object that Drucker is just as Bertram Wyatt-Brown; Researchers: much a cap-and-gown sort as any tenured classicist. After all, he Travis M. Johnson, Yeatts M. Jones, has roosted in academe for more than 50 years, currently at the Paul W. MacKinnon; Librarian: Claremont Graduate School. While the objection has some merit, it ZdenZk V. David; Editorial Advisers: misses the larger point. Dr. Drucker came from the world of busi- Mary B. Bullock, Robert Darnton, ness and management, and he is still an important contributor to it. Francis M. Deng, Denis Donoghue, Born in Vienna, he received a doctorate in law and worked as a Nathan Glazer, Harry Harding, Eliz- bank economist, journalist, and business consultant for more than abeth Johns, Michael Lacey, John a decade before landing his first academic post. Since his first book, R. Lampe, Jackson Lears, Robert The End of Economic Man (1939), Drucker has continued his practi- Litwak, Frank McConnell, James M. cal involvement in managerial matters, bringing his experience to Morris, Mancur Olson, Richard bear in 27 books on the workings of the corporation, the economy, Rorty, Blair Ruble, Ann Sheffield, S. and the larger society. He has been, among other things, one of the Frederick Starr, Joseph Tulchin; more forceful advocates of the privatization of certain government Founding Editor: Peter Braestrup. functions. In this issue, Drucker turns his attention to a global Publishing Director: Warren B. Syer change in the making-the rise of the knowledge society. Publisher: Kathy Read Discerning readers will notice a more minor change afoot, this Business Manager: Suzanne Napper one in the design of the WQ. Our consultant, Tawney Harding, has Circulation Director: Rosalie Bruno given us an overdue face-lift. Her aim is not to overwhelm the Advertising Director: Sara Lawrence written word but to set it more cleanly and elegantly in a new type 901 D Street S.W., Suite 704 and against a more pleasing background. We like what she's done Washington, D.C. 20024 so far. We hope you do, too. (202) 287-3000

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The Wilson Center has published the Quarterly since 1976. It also publishes Wison 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 strengthening 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 Smithso- nian "castle" on the Mall. Financing comes from both private sources and an annual congressional appropriation.

4 WQ SPRING 1993 Sneak Spanish A like a diplomat !'

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And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coining"

round the world, rough beasts are with it the end of the modem state. If anything is busily slouching. They are the nations in the ascendant, Lukacs argues in The End of the recently emerged from decades of com- Twentieth Century and the End of the Modem Age, it munist misrule, or those on the verge is nationalism-a primitive creature that antedates of similar emergence, while some additional few the state that it is now outliving. The brave new are escapees from other forms of authoritarian gov- world to come may be ugly, but just as Lukacs ernance, both of the right and left persuasions. anticipates no Hegelian liberal apotheosis, so he What all have in common, from Russia and Poland expects no inevitable apocalypse. to Zambia and Nicaragua, is their embryonic politi- Lukacs is not alone in championing modest cal form. What shapes they may eventually as- expectations. Historian Martin Malia, writing in the sume remains the =eat- mystery, , of New Republic, argues that thecurrent our time. crisis in the former Soviet Union is the Not surprisingly, these various na- very "stuff that exits from commu- tivities-in-the-making have occa- nism are made of." Because exits from sioned a wide range of scholarly prog- communism are still something quite nosis. From one comer, what might be WQ new under the sun, Malia's confi- caricatured as the Francis ~ukuiama"end-of-his- dence may be premature, but at least he asks the tory" comer, come hosannahs about the vindica- right question: Why should anybody in the West tion and triumph of the liberal ideal. To these opti- have expected the formerly communist nations to mists, it is only a matter of time-and not much have an easy time crawling out from under the time, at that-before the rest of the world jumps rubble of a failed social and political experiment? on the free-market-and-democracy bandwagon. Certainly, the ruling nomenklatura of the former So- From the opposite comer weigh in the doom- viet Union, roughly five percent of the empire's sayers. How, they ask, can countries with no tradi- population, had every reason to make such an exit tion of rights or democracy turn into Swedens or as difficult as possible. And many of them are do- Britains overnight, or next week, or even within ing just that. the next 100 years? They point to the absence of It is easy to understand the behavior of the old legal and constitutional traditions, civil society, and nomenklatura in Russia or Poland or Romania, or other elements of a democratic infrastructure. that of the communist elites who are still holding Given such realities, they conclude, no one should on in China, Cuba, and North Korea. Self-interest be surprised that democracy in Nicaragua and Bra- is no mystery. Less easy to comprehend has been zil appears to be unraveling; that the forces of reac- the gloomy chorus of Western scholars who see tion are gaining ground in Russia; that ethnic nothing but failure and ineptitude in the earliest resentments, pent up for more than 45 years in efforts to bring about political and economic re- such countries as Yugoslavia, Romania, and Ger- form. many, are once again breaking out all over. Malia cites three such scholars in his field- Poised somewhere between the two parties, Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, and Peter though tending more toward the latter, is historian Reddaway-though, in fairness, he could have John Lukacs, a scholar of rare, if often cranky, inde- cited many others, and others far more pessimistic. pendence. He insists that we are seeing not the end Cohen is a vociferous opponent of economic shock of history but the end of the 20th century-a cen- therapy, calling it an inappropriate American im- tury that began in 1914 and ended in 1989-and port that has undercut the achievements of Soviet

6 WQ SPRING 1993 industrialization and the Soviet welfare system. tially unamenable to scientific analysis. Hough would like to see Yeltsin replaced by so- Is it merely humanistic arrogance to level such called centrist Arkadi Volski, a leader of the Civic a charge against the social sciences? Not at all, for Union, the club of choice among old-style indus- the humanities themselves are equally implicated, trial managers. Reddaway points to errors on having adopted many of the same scientific preten- Yeltsin's part, fraudulent economic strategies, and sions that hobble the various soaal sciences. His- beneath it all a fatally autocratic political culture torians, or at least many of them, are as likely as from which Russia will never escape. political scientists or sociologists to resort to behav- It would be easy to describe such criticism as ioral or structural models as well as to their own giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is not. Nor encrusted theories of national character. And they is it a case of ideological knee-jerkery. The three do so, it seems, without having profited from mis- commentators occupy quite distinct positions on takes they made during the Cold War. the political spectrum, from Cohen on the left to Classicist W. R. Connor, in a trenchant essay Reddaway in the center to Hough somewhere off published two years ago in the American Scholar, on his own. All three are serious, intelligent, well- asked his fellow scholars, "Why Were We Wrong?" meaning scholars, widely respected within their Why, that is, had Western observers of the Soviet field. The problem, however, may be precisely the Union and Eastern Europe been so surprised by field within which they are so widely respected, what happened in 1989? The answer, according to not just the field of Russian studies but the social Connor, was that scholars had fallen into the-habit sciences generally. of studying their subject through the keyhole of soaal science, focusing on a limited range of factors hat is it about the social sciences that such as military force, agricultural productivity, and makes them so inadequate to this "in- the behavior of party and state elites. Ignored, wteresting" time? German political scien- Connor said, were "the passions-the appeal of tist Hei~chVogel, in a talk delivered at the Wood- ethnic loyalty and nationalism, the demands for row Wilson Center last fall, decried what he calls freedom of religious practice and cultural expres- "mantras in Western transformation rhetoric," the sion, and the feeling that the regime had simply Procrustean application of such concepts as lost its moral legitimacy. These considerations were "chaos," "stability," "democracy," and "the West- 'soft' or 'unscientific,' and those who emphasized em market economy" to situations where they fit them could be scorned." uncomfortably at best. "Post-Soviet societies," Connor offered more than a postmortem over Vogel remarked, "are so far away from internal the body of failed scholarship. Looking to the fu- balance, in such disarray that outside calls for 'sta- ture, he argued that what was needed for the edu- bility' are tantamount to the support of forces who cation of leaders and citizens was not "more elabo- may be dreaming of a new equilibrium in repres- rate calculations, more sophisticated modeling, or sion.'' greater expenditures on the familiar forms of 's&z~~- At the same time, Vogel cautioned, efforts by rity studies,'" but instead a "greater attunement to legions of Western consultants to promote Western emotional and moral factors, to the persistent models of law, economy, and administration as claims of primary attachments, and of religious, though they belonged "to one denomination" ethnic, aid national identities." True security rather than representing "different variants of the would be found not in the misguided scientific Western world have only added to the confusion quest for systems of predictability but, Connor con- and raised expectations. Vogel sensibly appealed eluded, in "an awareness of complexity, a respect for a new and more nuanced language, one which for limits, and what the Greeks would call 'practi- he quite reasonably believes "can make a differ- cal intelligence.' '' ence in the political reality." But the problem may run deeper still, to the f Connor's advice is today being largely ig- very character of those categories for whose ren- nored within the academy, should those who ovation Vogel calls. For even in Vogel's measured live and toil beyond the cloistered halls be con- approach, we may detect the curse of saentism: a cerned? After all, what is the danger of intellectual blind faith in the methods and aims of science, irrelevance? Unfortunately, it may be considerable. particularly as applied to subjects that are essen- In precarious times, ideas are decisive, as are val-

WQ SPRING 1993 7 ues and individuals. Yet most social scientific theo- He knew, in a way that we can only hope our ries-whether structural, behavioral, or evolution- current leader knows, that to say decisively one ary-tend to scant all three. thing is good and another evil is the real founda- It would be particularly tragic if the citizens and tion of a vision. To act on anything less, however leaders of the democratic world forgot how impor- enlightened one's motives, is to give room to the tant ideas and ideals were in bringing about a fa- worst opportunists. vorable end to the Cold War. The testimony of There is no question that democratic nations Vhdav Have1 and other witnesses to the impor- will have to provide material aid to the newly lib- tance of standing firmly by principles should have erated nations of the world, but realistically there made this dear. Nevertheless, the voices of relativ- are limits to how much can-and even should-be ism are once again making themselves heard, and given. When it comes to the struggle of ideas, how- are doing so in the most influential places. The day ever, democracies can provide almost limitless sup- after Russia's reform-minded acting prime minister port. Whether or not they possess the will and en- Yegor Gaidar was forced to resign, the New York ergy to do so is uncertain. Also uncertain is how Times ran an op-ed piece by an American econo- helpful that support will be. The performance of mist saying that a partial return to the centralized Western intellectuals during the Cold War gives industrial-planning system of the former Soviet one little cause for hope, but some notable excep- Union might not be so bad. After all, the economist tions fend off despair, among them theologian and suggested, such a centralized system would not be author Reinhold Niebuhr. so different from the industrial policies being pro- Writing at the end of World War 11, Niebuhr posed by some of America's Democratic leader- described the struggle between good and evil in ship. This was not merely a case of bad timing on this world as a struggle between the "children of the part of the New York Times; it signaled a return light" and the "children of darkness." He believed to the same kind of fuzzy relativism that marked that the former, though full of the best intentions, much Western analysis during the Cold War, a rel- were dangerously prey to notions of innate good- ativism that blurs the all-important distinctions be- ness and human perfectibility. Such credulity made tween democratic and nondemocratic institutions them vulnerable to the wiles of the children of and practices. darkness, who play only according to the rules of self-interest. Niebuhr called on the children of light hose on whom we count most to make to arm themselves "with the wisdom of the chil- such distinctions are, of course, our heads of dren of darkness but remain free from their mal- T state. Yet in addition to forgetting the im- ice" so that they might "beguile, deflect, harness, portance of moral distinctions, we also seem to be and restrain self-interest, individuality, and collec- forgetting the importance of leaders. Whether it tivity for the sake of community.'' was Lech Walesa opening the way to democracy in Whether he single-handedly accomplished Poland or Deng Xiaoping controlling change to what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described as a "revo- preserve the communist regime in China, recent lution in American liberal thought," Niebuhr made history should have taught us that individuals mat- a difference in the course of world events. Without ter tremendously, for better and for worse. Al- denying ambiguities, he knew where it was impor- though much has been said against Ronald Reagan tant to take a stand, and his message was heard by .by his critics, it is hard to find fault with the former those who went on to wage and win the Cold War. president on one crucial point: He realized that This time of rough beasts calls for thinkers who are principles firmly stood by can change the world. just as principled, just as wise, and just as strong.

8 WQ SPRING 1993 The Albert Einstein Memorial National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. ISSUES EN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY a YES. Please enter my one-year subscription Subscribe now to the nation's only journal to ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECH- to focus on important policy topics in science, NOLOGY 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 I I much more. 1 Address ! ISSUES is published City State ____ ZIP OUR GUARANTEE: Your money back if you are not completely satisfied with Sciences, ati ion- /& ISSUES. Mail to: ISSUES, National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Avenue, N. W., Washington, D.C. 20418. tute of IVQ Medicine. BY ANNE THURSTON

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China's moribund communist dynasty has been at least par- tially revived. But as Deng Xiaoping, architect of the restor- ation, approaches his 89th year, China finds itself on the brink of a most uncertain future. Anne Thurston, a veteran China-watcher recently returned from the People's Republic, looks at the puzzles and contradictions of the present for clues to where Asia's greatest dragon may head.

ommunism has collapsed in Eastern stands in wait for the next outburst of nation- Europe and the Soviet Union, to- alist and ethnic hostilities. Of the six remain- gether with stability, and the pros- ing states that claim to be communist, two- pectsc for anarchy and economic ruin now North Korea and Cuba-totter on the edge of seem as likely as democracy and capitalist economic collapse. North Korea with appar- prosperity. With Yugoslavia plunged into the ent stoicism. Cuba with rumblings of discon- abyss of "ethnic cleansing," the language of tent. An impoverished Vietnam courts foreign the Holocaust is being revived, and the world investment, Cambodia is apparently ungov-

10 WQ SPRING 1993 Year of the Dragon, by Qin Dahu emable, and Laos has almost disappeared percent a year, and in 1992 the increase was from memory. an astounding 12 percent. A recent survey by Alone among communist states, past or the Economist argues that China has "brought present, China is thriving, so vibrant with about the biggest improvements in human economic energy that analysts are speaking of welfare anywhere at any time." The most re- an "economic miracle." For more than a dec- lentlessly optimistic observers believe that in ade, the country's gross national product more than a decade of economic reform, (GNP) has grown at an average rate of nine China has accidentally stumbled upon the se-

CHINA 11 cret of how to proceed, with minimal disrup- "Gang of Four," which included his wife, tion and social unrest, from a centrally Jiang Qing, was arrested, and the stage was planned socialist economy to a free-market set for the gradual ascent to power of Deng (but not entirely privatized) system. The Econ- Xiaoping, the man many believed to be the omist speculates about the global impact of a most astute and capable survivor of the Long modem, industrialized, export-oriented, 21st- March generation. When Deng assumed century China. The secret, according to the power two years later, he set out to imple- Chinese leadership, is "socialism with Chi- ment an old-fashioned, dynastic-style restora- nese characteristics." tion. Today, still paramount leader despite his Certain other "Chinese characteristics," semi-retirement, he is universally credited these of a more purely political nature, may with his country's economic ascent. not augur so well for that same leadership. Determined to transform China into a Despite the ideological novelty of commu- modem, industrialized nation-state, Deng nism, the history of the People's Republic ap- made it his goal to quadruple the 1978 GNP pears to be following a very traditional Chi- and assure the vast majority of his comrade nese pattern. For thousands of years, the citizens a comfortable standard of living by imperial dynasties of the Middle Kingdom the year 2000. The first step in his ambitious have risen and fallen in a cyclical pattern, plan was the decollectivization of agriculture. with an initial period of vigorand energy fol- Over a period of several years, the gigantic lowed by the onset of corruption, then de- communes were gradually broken up, and dine, and finally internal rebellion and a chal- the land was distributed to peasant families. lenge to dynastic rule. Some dynasties in Actual ownership of land remained with the decline were able to meet the challenge by collective, and peasant farmers contractually subduing the forces of opposition, rebuilding agreed to sell a fixed amount of their harvest the economy, cleaning up corruption, and re- to the collective each season. In a matter of viving the moral codes upon which the dy- years, however, the peasants' leases had been nasty had been founded. The question today extended so far into the future that they were is whether-or at least how long-the com- able to act as if the land they farmed were munist dynasty will be able to withstand the theirs. Land could not be sold, but rights to challenges to its authority. the land were marketable. Freed from the At the time of Mao Zedong's death in straitjacket of bureaucratic control, agricultural September 1976, the People's Republic of production rose, increasing at the rate of three China stood precariously at the brink-the percent a year. populace demoralized by decades of class struggle and political persecutions, the econ- t the same time, restrictions on other omy crippled by socialist constraints, the forms of rural enterprise were ended, more competent of the Communist Party's and light industry began to boom. leaders either purged or dead, the govern- When Deng came to power such industry ac- ment intimidated into inaction by its aging counted for no more than 20 percent of rural dictator-emperor and the radical clique that output; today it accounts for some 45 percent. surrounded him. The communist regime, it (Forty percent of the country's industrial la- appeared, was losing all legitimacy-or what borers live and work in rural areas.) Owned was once called the Mandate of Heaven. by local governments at the county, township, But within weeks of Mao's death, the or village level, "township and village enter-

Anne Thurston, a former Wilson Center Fellow, writes about modem China. She is the author of Enemies of the People (1987) and A Chinese Odyssey (1992) and is currently collaborating on a book with Mao Zedong's personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui. Copyright @ 1993 by Anne Thurston.

12 WQ SPRING 1993 Deng Xiaoping, second from left, and a daughter, Deng Nan, on. their famous trip to southern China in January 1992-a trip that signaled the return to the pre- Tiananmen spirit of reform. In ad- dition to the Special Economic Zones shown on the map, a num- ber of other cities and regions have been granted special eco- nomic privileges and dispensations.

prises" (TVEs) constitute a uniquely Chinese creasingly important source of foreign form of ownership and control. According to investment, followed by Japanese, American, Donald Anderson, the president of the U.S.- Canadian, European, and Australian compa- China Business Council, TWs grew last year nies. Joint ventures, too, have grown and by 29 percent. China's great economic expan- prospered and are the second driving force sion owes a great deal to the growth of its behind China's current economic boom, their rural industry. output growing last year at the galloping rate Deng also opened China to outside invest- of 49 percent. ment, permitting the establishment of compa- nies that are jointly owned and managed. eng's policy of economic liberaliza- Hong Kong investors have led the way and tion has been coupled with tight po- are, according to economist Jan Prybla, re- D litical control. While opening the sponsible for two-thirds of all current invest- door to foreign investment, technology, and ment in China. Taiwan is a second and in- management skills, he has tried to keep it

CHINA 13 dosed to such "bourgeois liberal" ideas - - de- Tiananmen Square, residents poured into the mocracy, freedom, and human rights. A cen- streets to prevent its advance, pelting the sol- trist, Deng has been forced to fight continual diers with chunks of sidewalk cement and rear-guard battles within his own party in or- whatever else they could find. In some spots, der to bring about economic reforms. The the army opened fire. Hundreds of Beijing cit- more conservative hardline faction, led by the izens were killed. With martial law now in aged and ostensibly retired Chen Yun and force in the capital (it had been formally de- publicly represented by Premier Li Peng, sub- dared on May 20), recriminations against the scribes to the "birdcage" theory of economic "counterrevolutionaries" began. Zhao Ziyang management-limited market freedom was purged, together with liberal reformers at within the parameters of a central state plan. all levels of the party and government hierar- The hardliners know the impossibility of chy, and several of his dosest supporters were opening the door economically while keeping jailed while others fled abroad. it dosed politically, and they are well aware Many Chinese believe that Deng Xiaoping that Western political values pose a direct knew immediately that military intervention challenge to their authority. had been a mistake. The international outcry, the sudden pall that descended over Beijing, he liberals, by contrast, advocate both the archaic Stalinist rhetoric of the hardline the continued expansion of China's conservatives that came to dominate the T market economy and gradual political press-all brought the momentum of reform reform-increased power for the National to a halt. The hardliners gained the upper People's Congress, the country's nominal leg- hand. Vindicated, it seemed, was their charge islature, and consultation with the so-called that foreign investment was part of a larger democratic parties within the Chinese Peo- Western conspiracy of "peaceful evolution," ple's Political Consultative Conference. and that the marketplace had been used to While the hardliners' position has gener- introduce the ideas of democracy and free- ally dominated, the birdcage began to break dom to China. Deng's views went into tem- even before the spring of 1989. But when porary eclipse. They did not regain ascen- hundreds of thousands of demonstrators dance until the spring of 1992. gathered that spring in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, framing their demands in the rhetoric he comeback actually began in January of democracy and freedom, the hardliners' 1992, when Deng visited the special worst fears seemed to come true. After weeks T economic zone (SEZ) of Shenzhen in of indecision and inaction, the party conserva- Guangdong province, just north of thriving tives finally prevailed over such liberal re- and capitalist Hong Kong. A boom town that formers as party chief Zhao Ziyang, who rec- 15 years ago had a population of 70,000 and ognized the legitimacy of some of the was little more than a transit point on the protesters' demands and was willing to grant Hong Kong-Guangzhou railroad, Shenzhen is concessions to them. Deng sided with the one of four SEZs that were established in conservatives and ordered the military into 1980 to attract foreign investment, technol- Beijing. The demonstrations that had brought ogy, and managerial skills and to foster the millions of people peacefully to Tiananmen growth of an export economy. By confining Square were denounced as "turmoil," the the flirtation with capitalism to discrete geo- work of a small band of counterrevolutionar- graphical areas, the reasoning went, "spiritual ies preaching bourgeois liberalization and pollution" from the West could be contained calling for the overthrow of the Communist while the experiment was conducted. Party and its government. As the army sur- Shenzhen today flashes with high-rise of- rounded the city and began moving toward fice buildings and glitzy hotels. It has a popu-

14 WQ SPRING 1993 lation of two million legal residents and prob- ably another half million illegal "floaters." The monthly wage of the average unskilled worker in Shenzhen is between 500 and 700 yuan (roughly 5.7 of which equal one U.S. dollar) compared to 150 to 200 yuan in other parts of Guangdong. The aty boasts numer- ous new and aspiring millionaires and owes its prosperity to investment that flows in from the British crown colony, to minimal interfer- ence by the party bureaucracy, and to its de- termined emulation of the capitalist metropo- he city of Xiamen, like Shenzhen, is a lis just across its border. Because Shenzhen flourishing SEZ. Located in Fujian possesses the closest thing China has to a T province on the South China coast di- genuine market economy, it is anathema to rectly opposite the Guornindang-controlled the party hardliners. island "province" of Taiwan, Fujian has his- Accompanied on his January trip by his torically been one of China's most outward- daughter, Deng Nan, and by China's presi- looking regions and is the ancestral home of dent, Yang Shangkun (the mastermind of the many of the people who fled to Taiwan after military crackdown in Beijing), Deng praised the revolution. Today the area is rife with Shenzhen's economic success and predicted Deng-wrought contradictions. The enduring if that southern China would soon become quiescent civil war between the mainland and Asia's "fifth dragon." Traveling from Shen- the island province makes it necessary for le- zhen to Zhuhai, another thriving special eco- gal visitors from Taiwan to enter by way of nomic zone in Guangdong province, Deng Hong Kong, even as a lively trade in the visited joint-venture factories and high-tech smuggling of goods and people is plied by enterprises. He lauded the economic miracle boats on the Taiwan straits. The 75-minute and criticized leftist hardliners who opposed flight from Hong Kong to Xiamen is filled reform, calling on the rest of the country to with Taiwan businesspeople-not the supra- emulate the south. national class of sleek, impeccably tailored, That Deng's remarks were first published business-school graduates who have been only in Hong Kong and Guangdong is testi- key actors in the development of Hong Kong mony to the hardliners' control of the Chinese but weathered, chain-smoking men in rum- media. When the People's Daily, the nation- pled, ill-fitting suits and their loudly-attired ally circulated newspaper of the Chinese female counterparts. Communist Party, finally published the story I took this much-traveled route to the Peo- of Deng's visit on April 28, 1992, the dam ple's Republic last December. The man sitting suddenly burst. The pall that had hung over next to me looked much like the other Taiwan much of the country since the Beijing massa- businessmen on board. Before the plane took ere began to lift. The mood in China changed. off, he located the air-sickness bag and used it Since then, the race to get rich has been on. In frequently as a makeshift spittoon. The two a country where the calculation of time has Taiwan women on the flight had the same long been tied to key events-before or after weathered look as the men, though they at- the "liberation" of 1949 that brought the tempted to cover the ravages of the sun with Communist Party to power, before or after heavy applications of eyebrow pencil, white the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966- powder, bright red lipstick, and rouge. Their everything now is dated from the time "Deng clothes were garish, their costume jewelry Xiaoping went south." jangled ostentatiously, and when they

CHINA 15 Pilar Bonet

Pilar Bonet, Moscow correspondent for El Pais, offers a series of compelling portraits of ordinary-and extra- FLOWERS ordinary-Soviet citizens at a time of dramatic change. Capturing hopes and fears inspired by the historic events of The Culture of 1990 and 1991, they are memorable accounts of people directly involved in Flowers a variety of incidents and issues-from Jack Goody the ecological catastrophe of the Aral The Culture of Flowers spans a variety of Sea to the fate of oil workers in Siberia, disciplines and four millennia of human from the seeds of anti-communism to civilization to look at the symbolic and the rise of Boris Yeltsin, from the transactional uses of flowers in secular life problems of a market economy to the new challenges of "risk" and and religious ritual. Looking at the history "individuality." of aesthetic horticulture, Jack Goody links the use of flowers to the rise of advanced "An extraordinary book that gives the systems of agriculture, the growth of social reader a unique insight into the social, stratification and the spread of luxury political, and above all human change goods. The impressive information assem- in the [former] Soviet Union that one bled by Professor Goody is enhanced by does not find in other works."-Juan T. first-hand knowledge gathered from travels Linz, Sterling Professor of Political and throughout much of the world, including Social Sciences, Yale University France, India, China, Japan and California. Woodrow Wilson Center Press 14 color plates164 halftones13 tables I 0-521-41441-5 Hardcover $54.95 $18.95 hardcover 0-521-42484-4 Paper $18.95

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If you act now, we'll send you -- FREE -- a beautiful HAMMOND PASSPORT TRAVELMATE and World Atlas. An indispensable item for all those travelling abroad, this handy travelmate features 64 pages of full-color maps plus 64 pages of valuable travel information, all in a convenient 3 1/2" x 5 1/2" package. walked, they wobbled uncertainly on their forts to ensure that a bill of rights would re- high-heeled shoes. main in force after the 1997 takeover. Beijing My fellow travelers were Taiwan's nou- wonders why the British rulers have waited veaux riches, successful farmers turned entre- so long to introduce democracy and argues preneurs, the very people whom some main- that airport construction will both deplete the landers charge are more interested in making Hong Kong coffers and saddle the communist a fast yuan in Fujian than in contributing to government with unwanted expenses. Beijing the long-term development of the province. also asserts that after 1997 it will honor no Official encouragement to foreign investors contracts to which it has not been a party. stipulates a three-year exemption from taxes, Hong Kong investors are jumpy. and in response many Taiwan entrepreneurs The South China Morning Post shows little have engaged in a sort of guerrilla investment sympathy for the party bosses in Beijing. One strategy-starting businesses that will reap story reports on a New York meeting of Hu- profits within three years, then dismantling man Rights in China, held only two days be- them and moving on to new endeavors. fore. Another discusses the continuing fallout over the return to China of the young hough some mainlanders resent them, Tiananrnen activist, Shen Tong. In the spring the Taiwan businesspeople are also the of 1989, while a student at Peking Univer- T envy of their Fujian compatriots. Tai- sity,* Shen had participated in efforts to nego- wan's own economic miracle is one that the tiate initiation of a "dialogue" between stu- people of Xiamen wish they could reproduce. dent protesters and the party leadership. One "The wrong side won," say many Xiamenites of the first of the young dissidents to reach of the civil war that ended with the establish- the United States legally following the massa- ment of the People's Republic of China on cre of June 4, Shen had returned to China in October 1,1949. The expression of such senti- the summer of 1992 accompanied by televi- ments would have earned mainlanders a sion crews, surreptitiously photographing lengthy stint in labor reform only a few short prisons and meeting with numerous dissi- years ago. Today, even the dress of their Tai- dents in scattered parts of the country. Shen wan compatriots is studiously copied, a Chi- had been incarcerated in Beijing on Septem- nese version of dress-for-success. ber 1, only hours before he was scheduled to While the plane sat on the Hong Kong hold a press conference to announce the tarmac, the stewardesses distributed newspa- opening of a Beijing branch of his Boston- pers-Chinese-language Hong Kong dailies based Fund for Democracy in China. Al- to the businesspeople, the South China Morn- though he was released eight weeks later, on ing Post to the three English speakers on October 24, and was returned to the United board. The separation of Princess Diana and States, reports continued to circulate that Prince Charles was the lead that morning, fol- many of the dissidents he had met in China lowed by a report on continuing Communist were being detained, brought in for interroga- Party invective against the newly appointed tion, or otherwise harassed by China's public- Hong Kong governor, Christopher Patten. security apparatus. The South China Morning With the British crown colony scheduled to be Post reported the detention of two more such handed back to the mainland government in activists. 1997, Patten had surprised everyone and out- As the plane began its descent into Xia- raged the mainland by insisting on construc- men, the stewardesses returned to collect the tion of a $22-bion airport. He had also ruf- newspapers while a matter-of-fact voice an- fled feathers by pushing for an expansion of nounced over the intercom that the People's democratically elected representation on the 'Convention provides for the old-style transliteration of Beijmg, colony's Legislative Council and making ef- Peking, in the exclusive case of the university's name.

18 WQ SPRING 1993 Republic of China prohibited passengers from Clinton. carrying Hong Kong newspapers onto its soil. Xiao Chen said that he was unaware of Deng Xiaoping's political quarantine was still the recent elections in the United States and securely in place. that he had never heard of Bill Clinton. The On the ground, during the long drive to "news" he watched on Chinese television my hotel, a newly built Holiday Inn, I struck consisted of movies, soap operas, and Hong up a conversation with the driver, a man in Kong's pop culture. He was not interested in his middle thirties who introduced himself as politics, he explained, not in Chinese politics Xiao Chen, or "Little" Chen. A talkative taxi and not in American politics. He did not be- driver, as most travelers know, is often the lieve in Deng Xiaoping and the Communist quickest and most reliable guide to the local Party, and he did not believe in democracy, mood, and Xiao Chen was as talkative as the either. Even in democracies, he said, politics is ride was long. The roads that day were nothing but struggle. Politics is like watching dogged with trucks, and the congestion was a play. It had nothing to do with him. He had made worse by road repairs and construction. never heard of Shen Tong and cared nothing Pollution-control devices are apparently un- for human rights. known in China, and the air was hazy with "What are you interested in?" I asked. fumes. New buildings were going up every- "Making money," Xiao Chen replied, re- where, and many were cheerily bright, a wel- peating a familiar rhyme, "Wo buyao quan, wo come departure from the gray-brown con- jiushi yao qian"-"I don't want power, I just crete-slab structures that seem to be the want money." architectural wave of the future in other parts Xiao Chen saw himself as an independent of China. Finding myself amid all these syrn- entrepreneur, one of a growing number of bols of China's modernization-traffic jams, brash young risk-takers who are giving up the pollution, and construction-I started with "iron rice bowl" of jobs in state enterprises to the obvious, and safest, topic, the city's thriv- strike out on their own. The Polish-built taxi ing economy. was his, bought six months earlier with the pooled savings of his family and friends. He iao Chen, a product of five years of was working 14, 15, 16 hours a day, seven primary-school education, voiced cau- days a week, earning five or six times what x tious optimism about Xiamen's eco- his friends in state-owned factories made. nomic future. A new mayor had just assumed But his situation was precarious. He felt office, and he was younger, more dynamic, insecure. He still owed money, and his cur- and more open to the West than his predeces- rent income depended on the continued pres- sor. A new industrial town was under con- ence of foreigners-businesspeople from Tai- struction on the outskirts of the old, Xiao wan and Hong Kong especially. Several years Chen told me, financed largely by invest- ago he had tried to go it alone, opening a ments from Taiwan. He pointed out the new small restaurant not far from a foreign hotel. housing that was going up all over the city. Business had thrived until June 1989. When I told Xiao Chen that his government had the army moved into Beijing, the foreigners not allowed me to bring in a newspaper from went home, and his business collapsed, leav- Hong Kong and wondered how he got his ing him with a lingering antipathy toward the news. The television and radio have plenty of student demonstrators and unsympathetic to news, he assured me, and there were many the democratic ideals they had espoused. As programs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the an independent entrepreneur, he was without United States. an official work unit and thus ineligible for I asked how he had followed the recent public health insurance. His wife had just U.S. elections and what he thought of Bill given birth prematurely, and the baby was

CHINA 19 still in an incubator. The medical costs totaled looks very much like the early stages of cap- thousands of yuan. He was not entitled to italism, and capitalism in its early stages is state-owned housing, either. Still living with neither pretty nor benign. (Might it not have his parents, he and his wife wanted to buy been Marx's biggest mistake, after all, to have their own apartment-another impossibly taken the early stages of capitalism as the har- large outlay of cash. They would be responsi- binger of the last?) Not only are "the rich get- ble for the costs of their child's education, too. ting rich and the poor getting poorer," as so Crime, increasing at an alarming rate, was many Chinese observe, but many who have another source of insecurity, and taxi drivers, yet to be touched by the new prosperity be- Xiao Chen told me, were particularly vulner- lieve that those with the greatest wealth are able. Several had been robbed in recent those who deserve it least. To many Chinese, months, and two had been killed. A few had not surprisingly, the growing economic dis- lost their cars to thieves. The thick wire-mesh parities seem patently unfair. And yet despite screen separating the driver's seat from the its ugliness and unfairness, this scramble for passengers' was testimony to Xiao Chen's private wealth is probably China's greatest caution. He also went to monthly meetings hope for the future. sponsored by the local public-security bureau, At the top of China's new economic lad- and for further protection he had begun to der stands a select and carefully defined invoke the gods. A bright red Buddhist good- group consisting of sons (and a few daugh- luck symbol dangled from his rear-view mir- ters) of men who, on the eve of the Cultural ror, exactly where many of his colleagues, in Revolution in 1966, ranked at the level of similar attempts at propitiation, had hung minister or above-not more than about likenesses of Mao. As we sat in the morning 3,000 people in all. Known in popular par- traffic jam, I noted that the charms dangling lance as the faizidang-the princes' party- from the rear-view mirrors of other city vehi- members of this new economic elite are often cles were running about three to one in favor thousands of times richer than the average of Mao. Chinese, who still has an average income of only $350 a year. When Deng's reforms be- gan, the "princes" were offered pride of place not only in the government and the military but in the huge trading companies that sprang up when the door was opened to trade and foreign investment. The salaries of these aris- tocrats are modest, but their perquisites are lavish-imported luxury cars, special housing and stores, the best in free medical care, for- eign credit cards, frequent travel abroad. Many of the faizidang are millionaires many times over. The stock market is one source of their hina's putative economic miracle wealth. When China's first stock market looks different on the ground from opened in Shenzhen in 1990, the princes what appears in all the statistical pro- were encouraged to invest on the inside files.c Not everyone is convinced that China's track-as a way both of demonstrating their current economic situation ought to be de- faith in China's reformist future and of prov- scribed as a miracle, least of all its alleged ing that this otherwise most capitalist of insti- beneficiaries, the Chinese people themselves. tutions was really just "socialism with Chi- Deng Xiaoping's "socialist market economy" nese characteristics." The son of one-time

20 WQ SPRING 1993 foreign minister Chen Yi is said to have re- the reform-minded party chief who was soon cently told an audience of Chinese students in to be purged. the United States that the first 10,000-yuan "We can stop the protests immediately by investment he made several years ago is now killing just two people," Deng says to Zhao. worth 800 times that, about one-and-a-half- "Which two?" Zhao asks. million dollars. "Your son and mine," replies Deng. The second source of wealth is described Among the big-character protest posters by a variety of euphemisms-"tea money," that filled the outdoor bulletin boards of every "welfare money," "errand money." A chari- university campus in Beijing was one that table translation of tea money is commission; compared the jobs of the sons and daughters the more accurate is bribe. The right to do of China's high-ranking officials with those of business with China's economic elite is tied to ranking officials in the democratic world. the payment of tea money, the amount of Ronald Reagan's son, one poster noted, was which naturally varies according to the deal. unemployed. Payment may be in cash or kind. A By all accounts, the wealth of the taizidang Mercedes-Benz and $100,000, the latter de- has only grown since the Tiananrnen protests posited in a Hong Kong bank, is not an un- of nearly four years ago, and with it the cyni- usual payment for connections made or cism and mistrust of the country's citizenry. agreements reached in a major contractual What is different since Deng Xiaoping went deal. The more profitable contracts are those south, some argue, is that now everyone has for military equipment, and the richest of the the opportunity to be corrupt. To get rich is taizidang are said to be in the military. He indeed glorious. Pengfei, the son of the late marshal He Long and now a military leader himself, is reputed overnment officials at all levels of the to be the richest of them all. Some Chinese hierarchy-central, provincial, and companies are said to maintain full-time staffs G local-form the next, and much to manage the transfer of tea money from larger, corps of beneficiaries of the Deng re- Hong Kong banks to private accounts in Swit- forms. Years of bureaucratic experience have zerland, and recent newspaper reports allege left these hard-working and enterprising offi- that millions of dollars in hard currency are cials with the powerful guanxi wang-web of being invested not in China, where the devel- connections-necessary to succeed in China. opment of infrastructure such as energy and The means they use to expand their liveli- transportation is most desperately needed, but hoods do not differ greatly from those of the in profit-making ventures abroad, from Hong taizidang. Rumor has it, for instance, that the Kong to Bangkok and from Los Angeles and vice mayor of Shenzhen has made a billion Florida to Peru. yuan on the stock market in the city he helps administer. The part-socialist, part-capitalist uring the political demonstrations in nature of the Chinese economy, and the con- the spring of 1989, protests against sequent disparity between artificially low the nepotism of China's highest- state-set prices and the higher prices of the ranking officials served as a rallying cry unit- market, provide another boost to these bu- ing all sectors of Chinese society-students reaucrats' income. Government officials with and intellectuals, workers and entrepreneurs. access to goods at low state prices can enrich Few ever accused leading officials themselves themselves greatly through free-market sales. of being personally corrupt. The problem was Rake-offs of government funds and the impo- that they allowed their children to be. One of sition of an increasing variety of local taxes the jokes that circulated in Tiananmen Square provide another means of enrichment, as do had Deng Xiaoping talking with Zhao Ziyang, gifts from constituents.

CHINA 21 In the rush to get rich, the power of Chi- nese officialdom-to grant or withhold all manner of licenses and permits, to tax, to ar- range-is great, and gifts are a means to smooth.the way. Chinese New Year is a par- ticularly propitious time to ensure future favor with officialdom, and recent stories in the Chinese press report that lines to the doors of officials often extend for blocks. Some receiv- ing lines are said to move so quickly that the supplicants have time only to deposit their gifts and name cards and quickly shake hands before being pushed unceremoniously out the back door. Well-watered bureaucrats are said to have liquor supplies that would extend well into the 21st century, if enjoyed at the rate of a bottle a week.

rivate entrepreneurs form the third cadre of China's nouveaux riches. The P more visible and apparently more nu- merous of the new entrepreneurs are the brash cigarette-smoking, cellular-phone-tot- ing young men who can be seen in every ho- tel lobby and coffee shop of China's bigger

Above: The new entrepre- neur of South China

Left: Party cadres in front of a portrait of Lenin

22 WQ SPRING 1993 Below: Factoru workers on break

Above: A glamorous woman of Shanghai

Right: A peasant woman of Guangxi Province

CHINA 23 cities. In a country where for 30 years any dents-daring, young, rejected by the state- tendencies toward capitalist activity were are joining the ranks of the entrepreneurs. punishable by imprisonment, labor reform, Some have been spectacularly successful, internal exile, or even death, and where the making tens of thousands of yuan in a single state-enterprise system cultivated a mind- fantastic deal. numbing passivity, only the young, daring, For some, land speculation has been the and marginal (or, like the taizidang and the route to instant wealth. In keeping with con- officials, the very well-connected and safe) are tinued lip service to socialism, land is still likely to jump at early opportunities to break owned by the state-the "whole people" in out of the mold. the communist lexicon. But the rights to use The vast majority of China's urban popu- that land can be sold. With foreign firms lation continues to be employed by the state building new factories and the growing need within the work-unit (danwef) system. More for private housing by foreign expatriates and than a place of work, the danwei is also a wel- returned overseas Chinese, the demand for fare organization. Employment, until recently, such rights is rising in tandem with the price. has been for life, and monthly salaries are The story of the young Beijing hopeful who small but certain-so certain that motivation left his 200-yuan-a-month job, borrowed is minimal, the eight-hour workday a joke, 20,000 yuan from a bank, and headed south and featherbedding endemic. .The work unit to make his fortune is typical. The young provides housing at pennies a day, and medi- speculator located a spot of land in the Xia- cal care is free. The price of such security is men suburbs, persuaded the township offi- submission. The leader of the unit has a ty- cials to sell him rights for 20,000 yuan, then rant's hold over his subordinates-from found a Hong Kong developer willing to buy granting permission to marry to irnplement- the rights for 200,000 yuan, leaving the ing the policy of one child per family, from young speculator with 180,000 yuan in profit. conducting classes in political study to grant- In three short months he made what would ing permission to travel or study abroad. The have taken 75 years to earn in his job at a leader's power to give and withhold creates a state-run enterprise. psychology of dependence that makes break- For some, the stock market brings similar ing away too painful to contemplate. Few rewards. Every young Chinese has a friend or work-unit drones are willing to give up guar- a classmate who borrowed money, went anteed lifetime employment, housing, and south, and made a killing on the Shenzhen medical care for the uncertainties and risks of stock market-500,000 yuan in a matter of the entrepreneur. months, the equivalent of several lifetimes of Given the pervasiveness of the work unit, earnings from a state job. it is hardly surprising that the first true free- lance entrepreneurs have been the young, the tories of such successes were no doubt disaffected, the criminal, or the daring. These a contributing cause of the Shenzhen are people whose background or legal status riot in the summer of 1992. When make them ill-suited or ineligible for jobs applications forms required for the purchase of with the state. They are the daredevils of Chi- stocks ran out, anxious buyers accused local nese society, for whom anything goes and of- officials of having hoarded the forms for ten does. Several years ago, a disproportion- themselves. The tens of thousands of people ate number of vendors in Beijing's "Okay who had lined up outside more than 300 Alley," the bustling open-air clothing market Shenzhen banks and brokerage houses just southeast of the Ritan Park diplomatic turned nasty and rampaged through the area, were ex-convicts fresh out of jail. More streets chanting "down with corruption," at- recently, many newly released political dissi- tacking plainclothes police, overturning vehi-

24 WQ SPRING 1993 cles, and setting at least one van on fire. The from the perspective of the Chinese every- police responded with tear gas and small- man. For all the glitter and new-found arms fire. The number of arrests and injuries wealth, China remains a poor and backward resulting from the riot has never been offi- country. The educational level of its people is cially reported. low, the opportunities are few, and those that The Chinese stock market is a gamble exist are inequitably distributed, either within rather than an investment, a lottery rather locales or across them. The phenomenon of than a calculated risk. Purchasers have no southern China is spreading north, and now control over which stock they will buy; in- Shanghai's Pudong district is slated for major stead, they compete for the chance to pur- economic development. The drive for pros- chase whatever they are offered. Nor is there perity is also spreading inland, where the ma- information about the financial standing and jority of the Chinese people, some 600 million operations of the companies whose stocks are of the 1.1-billion total, now live. Stymied by put on sale. In Hangzhou, the magnificent inefficient state-owned enterprises, conserva- lakeside city in wealthy Zhejiang province in tive officials, and a lack of economic expertise, southeastern China, stock-market results are China's heartland will have difficulty catching electronically posted in several storefront up with the economic boom. As the Washing- shops. The shops have the atmosphere of the ton Post recently reported, the annual income New York Off-Track Betting offices, with of peasants in Guangdong province in 1985 small crowds of otherwise unoccupied men was 25 percent higher than that of their in- loitering for hours in the hope that their vigi- land neighbors in Hunan. By 1990, the lance will help them win. Guangdong peasants were earning twice as Scams abound. The favorite in Xiamen, much as those in Hunan. played in hotel coffee shops, is the cellular- But what is most distressing about China's phone version of the chain letter that prom- new drive to get rich is the absence of what ises participants geometric returns on their Tocqueville and others would call a civil soci- money. Calling by cellular phone, the orga- ety. The quest for prosperity is proceeding nizer locates, say, 10 people willing to "in- with only minimal laws and no agreed-upon vest" 1,000 yuan with the promise that in a moral framework, without freedom of the month they will receive double their money. press or the right to free association, without With that money in hand, the organizer con- the moderating force of religion, without even tinues the game, gathering maybe 1,000 yuan basic agreement on the new rules of the from 30 people and making the same promise game, without any sense of working together to them. After skimming off some for himself, toward a common goal. The atmosphere is he fulfills his promise to the original 10, who reminiscent instead of the many political cam- are therefore eager to reinvest their funds. paigns that have upset China's equilibrium The game continues until it breaks down, and for more than four decades-campaigns in the organizer either flees with the money, which the entire population was mobilized to goes underground, or is tracked and set upon rid the nation of landlords or rightists or spar- by angry losers. Police patrols in Xiamen have rows, campaigns to build backyard steel fur- recently been beefed up-not to stop the naces or to study Lei Feng, or to buy "patri- scam itself but to prevent the outbursts of vio- otic" cabbage or destroy the "four olds." lence when the game finally collapses. Chinese will tell you that the game is being played with such fanaticism not because peo- ven though it may be ultimately bene- ple are confident about the future but because ficial, there is something deeply trou- they are so uncertain about it. Many are con- E bling about the fervor with which vinced, as Mao used to say, that "the Russia money is now being pursued, particularly of today is the China of tomorrow." Another

CHINA 25 popular saying, "Ye chang meng duo" ("The coastal Shandong province, officials rescued night is long and dreams are many"), suggests more than 1,000 women and children who that the situation is temporary and that it is had been sold into bondage, breaking up 54 therefore best to seize opportunity while you human-trafficking rings in the process. can. "It's a doomsday mentality," says Zhang The black market thrives with apparent Xiaogang, formerly an editor at one of China's impunity. Small family-owned businesses major newspapers and now a student of po- change money as a service on the side, and litical science living in the United States. the gang-run operations solicit openly on the streets. In southern China, almost any tender veryone knows that nothing is fair, that is accepted as payment-the Chinese things are bad and getting worse. renminbi (currency), the certificates that serve E Many are determined to live and love as the official exchange for foreign currency, their final days with gay abandon. Some men Hong Kong or American dollars, and the Jap- take second and third wives, building sepa- anese yen. Prices are listed in renminbi and rate new homes to house each new spouse- recalculated at the black-market rate accord- a modem adaptation of the traditional custom ing to the currency used. of the wealthy gentry. One young entrepre- While China is still safer than the streets neur, a married man who runs a thriving of New York, crime is rising at an alarming computer company, bragged to me about rate. Major criminal cases have increased ten- spending two or three nights each week in fold during the last decade. Theft is the most the beds of other women. He does so, he said, obvious crime. Americans visiting China in not only with his wife's knowledge but also the 1970s reported that empty ballpoint pens with her blessings. Women, when their hus- and discarded pantyhose left in hotel waste- bands can afford it, are retreating to the baskets were returned to them days later in home, there to serve as the traditional house- another town in a calculated demonstration of wife, mother, and servant. Prostitution, which national honesty. Today, while hotel theft is for decades the communist government hardly endemic, travelers bearing laptop com- boasted had been eliminated altogether, is puters are wary of leaving their equipment visibly on the rise. Businessmen from Taiwan unguarded, and foreign residents who travel and Japan are the more obvious customers, by public bus and train have been victimized and some of the sex tours that men from both by bag-slashing robbers. Long-distance travel countries used to take to now AIDS-plagued by public bus or train is much less safe than in Bangkok have changed their destination to the past, and Chinese report instances of the southern coast of China, an ironic com- whole villages organizing to stop and plunder mentary on party propaganda about "spiritual freight trains moving through their territory- pollution" from the West. In the Holiday Inn a 1990s version of America's Wild West. Mar- Xiamen, an American scholar was recently lowe Hood reports a dramatic increase in un- approached by a prostitute charging $100 derground "black-society" gangs-traditional U.S. a night. With foreigners willing to spend criminal brotherhoods-that range from such money and the value of a university de- small bands of highway robbers to intema- gree in decline, some of the prostitutes are tional heroin syndicates, from mob-run ciga- said to be college students. Traffic in women rette stands on urban street comers to nation- is on the rise, with village men buying brides wide publishing networks operating outside and sometimes kidnapping them. Marlowe the state-run monopoly, from local sects Hood, a journalist with years of experience in rooted in superstition to secret societies with China, writes that the kidnapping and sale of hundreds of members. Traditionally, such people is a 100-million-yuan-a-year business. black-society gangs have grown in numbers In 1991, in a single medium-sized city in and eventually in political importance in

26 WQ SPRING 1993 times of dynastic decline. In a nation without peasants into huge communes and to put rnil- a true civil society, they are the logical re- lions to work at backyard steel furnaces pro- sponse to the decline of central political au- ducing useless globs of metal. Mao promised thority. that this effort would enable China's indus- trial production to catch up with and overtake Great Britain's in a mere 15 years. The result- ing famine was the largest man-made disaster in history. Responsibility rested dearly with Mao and with a Communist Party that never opposed him. Yet neither the party chairman nor the party itself was ever held fully ac- countable.

nstead, in 1966, Mao Zedong launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I turning against the very officials, indud- ing Deng Xiaoping, who had directed the re- hina is in a state of moral disarray. treat from the Great Leap Forward and put Old values have crumbled, and new the country back on its economic feet. Almost ones have not yet been found. But the the entire corps of the country's intellectuals, problemc is even more acute than the "nor- the best and the brightest of China, were la- mal" identity crisis that every nation faces in beled "enemies of the people." Middle-school the passage from traditionalism to modernity and university students around the country or from one political and economic system to were mobilized, first to attack their teachers another. Traditional Confucian culture has and professors and then to struggle against been eroding for more than a century, begin- anyone suspected of having a "bourgeois" or ning with China's defeat in the Opium War "reactionary" past. As the movement un- with Great Britain in 1842 and followed by folded, thousands, tens of thousands, and fi- the assault from the country's intellectuals de- nally millions of people were drawn in. China manding democracy and science during the destroyed itself from within. Student turned May Fourth Movement of 1919. The problem against teacher, child against parent, colleague has been aggravated by the moral debilitation against colleague, friend against friend, wife and the chronic uncertainty engendered by against husband. Hundreds of thousands the Communist Party's politics of hate, more died, more were sent to prison and labor re- than 40 years of political agitation against one form camps, and when the prisons and camps "enemy" after another. Millions of landlords were filled, millions were shipped to "May perished during the land-reform campaign of Seventh Cadre Schools" in remote areas of the early 1950s, a period many Chinese still the countryside. Eighteen million "educated describe as the "golden years" of communist youth of middle-school age were separated rule. Half a million intellectuals were declared from their families and sent to the countryside rightists in 1957 and sent to prison, labor re- to "learn from the poor and lower middle form, or exile. Many did not return for more peasants." The fabric of Chinese society was than 20 years. In 1959, '60, and '61, some- rent, and the doth has yet to be repaired. where between 30 and 40 million people Government intransigence in the face of pop- above and beyond the normal natural mortal- ular protests during the spring of 1989, and ity rate died as a result of Mao Zedong's uto- the use of guns against a citizenry that most pian and egregiously ill-conceived Great Leap Chinese perceived to be holding the moral Forward, a campaign to gather the nation's upper hand, have inflicted new wounds that

CHINA 27 have not yet begun to heal. turning, at least not until the current govern- In 1981-82, while living in China, I con- ment was overthrown and some sort of dem- ducted lengthy interviews with several dozen ocratic rule established. Her remaining son people who were victims of Mao's Cultural was a student in the United States, working in Revolution. Living in China again after the exile to bring democracy to China. Beijing massacre of 1989, I began to contact Something dearly had changed as a result those victims anew. The book I had written of the bloodshed on the streets of Beijing. about their experiences, Enemies of the People Some elemental bond of loyalty had snapped. (1987), concluded with a description of the Devotion to country and loyalty to govern- remarkable patriotism that had survived de- ment were no longer synonymous. It was spite the immense suffering the party had in- possible to love China and oppose Comrnu- flicted on the Chinese people and despite the nist Party rule. lingering wounds and moral debilitation re- "You should be studying the children of sulting from decades of political persecution. the victims of the Cultural Revolution," sev- Even the victims still loved their country and eral of my Chinese friends in Beijing urged wanted to work for its good. I wanted to un- when they learned I was trying to find the derstand how the Beijing massacre had af- people I had written about earlier. My Beijing fected their love. friends were children of victims themselves, and they talked about the psychological dev- he first person I looked for was a astation that resulted from growing up during woman I had called Liang Aihua. Li- the turbulent '60s, witnessing their parents T ang Aihua was an American-educated under attack, their mothers forced to de- Ph.D., a returned overseas Chinese, and the nounce their fathers, fathers and mothers in most extreme example of blind devotion to "cowpens" or jail, their families separated and country I have ever encountered. Heiress to a dispatched to different comers of the country. family fortune she could have collected had They talked about what it was like as children she remained abroad, Liang Aihua had re- to be forced to live without their parents, turned to China in 1964 with her husband without adult supervision, forming children's and two sons to work for the development of gangs for protection and plunder. We talked her country. When the political persecutions about a recent sociological study that had began, her family was immediately set upon asked respondents in several countries to list by young "revolutionaries," and she lost both the 10 people whom they most admired. Peo- her husband and a son to the violence of the ple from other countries almost invariably Cultural Revolution. But when the movement listed their father among the top 10. People finally came to a halt and she was offered the from China did not. "During the Cultural opportunity to leave, she chose to stay. She Revolution, we saw our fathers either per- stayed because she felt she still had contribu- securing others or being persecuted them- tions to make to her country. She stayed be- selves. In both cases they were cowards," one cause, she said, "I am Chinese." friend said. 'When persecuted, they did not Liang Aihua was not in Beijing when I fight back." looked for her there in the summer of 1989. "We do not know how to love," said an- She seemed to have disappeared. Months other. "We never had normal families or saw later, on a brief visit to Hong Kong, I ran into love between our parents." She was in the one of her nieces, the one, in fact, who had process of a divorce, and the divorce rate helped with the initial introduction. Liang among her friends was high. The Confucian Aihua, she told me, was in Hong Kong. I met system puts familial loyalty at the root of hu- with her there. She had left China after the man relationships, and Chinese abroad have Beijing massacre and had no intention of re- thrived on such Confucian ties, with the fam-

28 WQ SPRING 1993 ily business and mom-and-pop shops serving tained during the Cultural Revolution. His as the path to economic success. Mao and his mother died a couple of years later of can- zealots did their best to destroy this funda- cer-a disease that the Chinese view as mental loyalty on the mainland, but not even symptomatic of social malaise. Song Wuhao the politics of class struggle, pitting family is in the United States now. Only his brother member against family member, completely remains behind, getting richer by the day and succeeded. Faced with political adversity, falling in love with every attractive woman many families pulled together for protection who comes along. He lives for wealth and against the hostile state. But many were left in pleasure alone. tatters. It is the Cultural Revolution generation and the children of the revolution's victims n 1989, I found few children of the vic- who are often in the vanguard of the current tims I had interviewed seven years earlier. drive to strike it rich. The taizidang, after all, is I They had fled to the United States, Can- composed of the sons and daughters of the ada, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, or Ja- top-ranking leaders whom Mao turned pan. The young manager of the Beijing com- against and purged. Deng Xiaoping's own puter company who spent several nights a son, Deng Pufang, is among them, the former week in the beds of other women was one of head of the multifaceted and consummately the few. I had known his family well. He was successful Kanghua Corporation. Deng the brother of Song Wuhao, whose story I Pufang uses a wheelchair because he is para- had told in Enemies of the People. Song lyzed from the waist down. When his father Wuhao had been a middle-school student was purged in 1967, Deng Pufang also came when the Cultural Revolution began, and his under attack. He was pushed or fell from an American-educated father, an engineer, had upper floor of a building on the campus at come under severe attack. One afternoon in Peking University, where he was a student of the fall of 1968, father and son had been astrophysics. In 1986, facing popular charges taken by young revolutionary rebels to a huge of corruption, Deng Pufang resigned his "struggle session" and put on the stage to- directorship of the Kanghua Corporation. To- gether. They beat his father with belts. Then day he stays behind the scenes, his steward- they beat Song Wuhao. They told him that ship informal, devoting his efforts to pro- they would stop beating him only if he would grams in support of people with disabilities. beat his own father. Both father and son had Chen Yi, one of the 10 marshals of the told me the story separately, and both had Chinese Revolution and a former foreign been in tears. Song Wuhao had begged, minister of the People's Republic, was at- pleaded, cried. He had fallen on his knees in tacked in 1967 and died in 1972. A colorful anger and cried out for mercy. But his per- and outspoken man, he had opposed Mao's secutors refused to relent and continued beat- choice of Lin Biao as second in command. ing Song Wuhao until he beat his father. (Lin Biao had proclaimed Mao the equal of When the beating was over, father and son Marx and declared that a single word from were separated, not to meet again for 11 the Great Helmsman was worth 10,000 from years. "From that time on," Song Wuhao anyone else.) Chen Yi was rehabilitated only said, "I doubted history, I doubted society. I in death, after Lin Biao had turned against began to recognize that there were evil people Mao, plotted a coup d'etat against him, and governing our country, evil people oppressing died in an airplane crash while fleeing to the the Chinese people I loved." Song Wuhao's Soviet Union. Today, his son, Chen Xiaolu, an ideals were shattered. active champion of liberal reform, is a million- Song Wuhao's father died several years aire. The children of Liu Shaoqi-who was ago, largely as a result of the injuries sus- Mao's designated successor until he was

CHINA 29 purged during the Cultural Revolution, bru- dren become abusers. Mao Zedong set out to tally attacked, and left to die of illness and create a new socialist man by preaching a neglect in 1969-are also doing well. politics of class struggle and hate. He left Chinese such as my dissident friend, Ni China a morally wounded society. Yuxian, who spent two years on death row Everyone in China, including the highest for putting up a big-character poster calling leaders, recognizes that the country is suffer- on his fellow citizens to awake and rise up ing from a profound moral crisis. During the (and who is the protagonist in both Liu period of martial law that followed the mili- Binyan's "A Second Kind of Loyalty" and my tary crackdown against the Tiananmen dem- own A Chinese Odyssey) see the taizidang's onstrations in June 1989, Deng Xiaoping at- search for prosperity as their way of saying tributed the student demonstrations to, "never again." Astonished during the Cul- among other things, a failure of "ideological" tural Revolution that their status could so education. He ordered a revival of political- quickly and resoundingly fall and that the study meetings, with lessons in the "four car- power of their fathers could so decisively end, dinal principlesu-the socialist road, the dic- they vowed upon Deng Xiaoping's return to tatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of protect themselves forever. Power is always the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism precarious. Money is more certain, Swiss and Mao Zedong Thought-and calls to emu- bank accounts are even more so, and invest- late the long-deceased model party soldier, ments abroad are considered an excellent Lei Feng. The campaign fell flat. The diver- means to increase one's wealth. gence between the Communist Party's ideals The brash young men who take up so and the modus vivendi of its ranking mem- much public space pursuing their scams and bers and their families is too obvious and too imitating the Taiwanese are also children of great. "It's bad people ordering us good peo- victims. Now in their late twenties and thir- ple to do good things," a Beijing friend ob- ties, they were born into the Cultural Revolu- served during the course of the campaign. tion or grew up during it, witnesses to its bru- tality. Their disdain for the weak and their hinese have begun searching on their determination to live without regard for rules own for an alternative system of val- are a natural outgrowth of the period in ues, for new ways to give meaning which they grew up. andc order to life apart from the false and hyp- ocritical morality thrust on them by the state. This spontaneous search for an alternative system of values is perhaps the best hope the country now has for the development of inde- pendent associations that may lay the groundwork for a genuine civil society. But even the quest for alternatives has a way of being subverted by the combined force of Communist Party interference and the present crisis of values. Confucianism is being revived and Confu- cian temples are being rebuilt, but the greatest reason for the revival is the perception that he Book of Job notwithstanding, bru- the success of Asia's "four little dragonsf'- tality and suffering are rarely enno- Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singa- T bling. Hatred usually begets hatred; pore-rests upon the Confucian ethic. If Con- brutality, the desire for revenge. Abused chil- fuaanism can be reintroduced, the reasoning

30 WQ SPRING 1993 As the thoughts of Chairman Mao cease to hold ethical force for most Chinese, main/ citizens of the People's Republic are beginning to explore other value systems, including that of the sage Confucius. goes, China itself, the greatest dragon of them observer of a Chinese Christian service would all, might finally awake. Confucianism was doubt the devotion of many in the congrega- always the ethic of the state, and therefore it tion, and some of the bravest dissenters should come as no surprise that the state even against the Chinese state are Christian clergy- now is intent upon directing the revival. The men who insist on the integrity of their faith. bureaucracy squabbles about who should ad- But even the turn toward Christianity has a minister the temples-the office of religion, strongly utilitarian cast. When the Comrnu- the cultural bureau, or the local bureau of nist Party sent a team to investigate the mil- tourism. The argument is as practical as it is lions of new Christians who had joined substantive. Overseas Chinese from the four churches in rural Henan in the heartland of little dragons are major contributors to the central China, they discovered that many temples, and everyone wants a share of the converts were drawn by the preachers' em- pious offerings. phasis on the correlation between riches and Buddhism is also finding new and return- religious belief-as demonstrated by the great ing adherents, particularly in southern China, wealth of the Christian countries of the West. where the religion has traditionally been Christmas was quite fashionable in China last strong. Buddhist temples, refurbished and year; families lined up to have their photo- renovated, now dot the countryside of Fujian graphs taken next to the Santa Claus in front and Guangdong. Many of the worshipers of Beijing's Friendship Hotel. The state keeps pray for prosperity and a son. a close watch over Christianity, too, and only Christianity, too, is attracting converts. so-called "patriotic churches" are permitted. Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are For Catholics, this has meant severing con- being rebuilt everywhere in China, and many nections with the Vatican. The underground of them are filled to overflowing. No Western church is growing, and many of China's pris-

CHINA 31 oners of conscience continue to be priests according to Marlowe Hood, fled to Sichuan who have refused to renounce the pope. to lead the Way of Basic Unity, presiding as a Perhaps the only spiritual alternative "dirt emperor" over his mountain stronghold without obvious instrumental value-and and carrying out vendettas against Commu- with a minimum of state control-is that of nist Party officials. Taoist retreat, withdrawal into passivity until Secret societies of the type that tradition- the situation changes and moral behavior is ally have sprung up in times of dynastic de- possible again. Many Chinese who have fled cline are also growing. Because the societies to the United States regard their action as the are secret and headquartered in China's rural only moral choice. While many also go to heartland, away from Westerners and foreign America in search of fortune, believing the influence, their activities are difficult to ob- streets are lined with gold (the Chinese name serve, much less to analyze. Marlowe Hood for San Francisco is still "old gold mountain"), has come closer than any other journalist to others believe that in the United States it is at explaining their workings. Quoting from a least possible to lead a moral life. Chinese Ministry of Public Security report, he notes "a continuous increase in cases of reac- n order both to pursue an alternative set tionary sect and secret society activity of values and to escape the tentacles of throughout the country." Long dormant secret I the state, many Chinese .are finding it societies, such as the Way of Basic Unity, the necessary to go underground. Tocqueville ob- Way of Original Harmony, and the Big Knife served that in America there are factions but Society, are springing back to life. As Hood no conspirators, because in countries where observes, "When centrifugal forces periodi- associations are free, secret societies are un- cally tug at the fabric of Chinese society, these known. By contrast, in China, where all asso- secret associations act as magnets, attracting ciations are either forbidden or controlled by adherents with a million promises of a just the state, association must take place in secret. and moral order, on the one hand, and eco- Much as the West might hope that the Chi- nomic opportunity, on the other." The secret nese underground is dominated by members society is rural China's answer to the absence of the democratic movement from the spring of a civil society, and it is as hostile to Western of 1989, the truth is probably otherwise. Na- influence as it is to Communist Party rule. tivist practices are blossoming in the heart- land of China. The village god has returned to rural areas, and so has the local shaman. Qigong, which roughly translates as "vital life force ability" and is a modem adaptation of traditional breathing and exercise tech- niques that promise both healing and long life, has been the rage throughout China for several years. "More people know the names of the qigong masters than that of [the dissi- dent astrophysicist] Fang Lizhi," one young journalist pointed out to me during a recent visit to Beijing. Pursued as a cure for cancer, a surefire way to lose weight, a cathartic re- s China awaits the death of Deng lease, and a means to promote longevity, Xiaoping, who will turn 89 in Au- qigong is also linked to the secret-society phe- A gust, and as the turmoil in the former nomenon. Zhang Hongbao, a qigong master Soviet Union and Eastern Europe continues, who once mesmerized crowds in Beijing, has, those who specialize in trying to understand

32 WQ SPRING 1993 China are called upon to predict the future. The best possible outcome, according to Prophecy is difficult in the most stable of dr- this scenario, involves the great white horse cumstances, more so in times of great instabil- of democracy galloping in to save the day ity. Theories, nonetheless, abound. once the pain of continued chaos becomes The more optimistic ones suggest that dear. In the midst of chaos, new leadership from the current discord will emerge the mak- will appear, the democrats in exile will return, ings of a demoaatic polity and a civil society. parliamentary government will be estab- The growing market economy will produce a lished, and elections will be held. demand for law, and the need for economic More conservative predictions focus on information will result in demands for free- the impending deaths of China's octogenarian dom of the press. The search for new values Long March generation. If Deng Xiaoping is and the propensity to form associations in the first to go, hardliners such as the pursuit of those ends, even when those asso- "birdcage" proponent Chen Yun and the ciations are secret societies, will promote the equally conservative Bo Yibo will gain the up- development of a civil society. When the Long per hand, and the process of economic reform March generation of Communist Party lead- will slow. Possibilities for political liberaliza- ers departs the scene, the new, younger, more tion will diminish. Further reforms will await liberal reformers will step forward to lead the the deaths of the conservatives, and the politi- country on the road to democracy. Like the cal struggle will be protracted. lotus blossom that emerges from muddy wa-' If, on the other hand, such conservative ters pure and dean, China will also emerge elders as Chen Yun or Bo Yibo are the first to from its present mess. depart the world, the position of the reform- At the other extreme, the most pessimistic ers will solidify, and Deng's policy of eco- forecast paints China descending further into nomic reform will continue. With the econ- chaos. According to this reading of the tea omy on a solid footing, a few measures could leaves, the central leadership after the death be introduced to appease the more democrati- of Deng will be so weak and divided, the cally inclined. Laws might be instituted to power struggle so protracted, that no authori- govern economic relationships. The several tative leader will emerge. At the bottom of "demoaatic parties" could be consulted on society, the strains from the growing inequal- policy issues of major importance. The Na- ities and the gap between rich and poor, cou- tional People's Congress, the country's nomi- pled with mass cynicism over the play being nal legislature, could be given a more public staged in Beijing, will result in the withdrawal and influential role. Press restrictions might of even the tenuous support for the central be loosened. The result: political stability. government that remains. With "the moun- Under such a "neoauthoritarian" system, tains high and the emperor far away," as the democracy could become a long-term goal. adage goes, the nativist revival will prosper, Because China's economy is still backward, together with crime and the expansion of the educational level of its people low, and black-society gangs. Strongman leaders might the population so huge, and because the emerge in particular locales-cities, provinces, country lacks a democratic political culture or or whole regions-but their activities will be even the rudiments of a civil society, the intro- directed downward, to the territory under duction of democracy any time soon is simply their control, and outward, to foreign invest- not feasible. In preparation for the later intro- ment and trade, not upward toward the cen- duction of democracy, a benignly authoritar- ter. Violence, sporadic and unpredictable, will ian tutelary government could rule, respon- spread. The thriving south may break away sive to the people but not directly accountable from Beijing, entering into formal alliance to them, with the more insistently democratic with Hong Kong and even Taiwan. elements of society, intellectuals in particular,

CHINA 33 given greater freedom and leadership roles. ruption, the gangs and the scams, the anger With the possible exception of the dra- and hatred and moral debilitation, the return matic appearance of the great white horse of to nativism and the quest for new values- democracy, all the scenarios are plausible and plague China, too. Nowhere in the present or none is entirely exclusive of any other, the former communist world has an easy solution differences often being a matter of short-term to the problem of governance been found. versus long-term solutions. Several facts, My experience in China has taught me to however, do seem certain: err on the side of pessimism. My formative First, the political situation in China is intellectual experience was as a student of the inherently unstable. The gross and growing Cultural Revolution, and the deepest convic- inequities, the corruption and the scams, are tion that such research instilled was a belief in breeding grounds of discontent. the fragility of civilized behavior, a humbling a Second, good does not easily or often recognition, described so well by Aldous arise from bad. The search for alternative val- Huxley, of how easily human beings, seem- ues will continue. ingly no better or worse than you or me, suc- Third, the Communist Party has legiti- cumb to barbarous behavior. I see no set of macy in China only as an interregnum, until a institutions, no new system of values, no new and more viable system of government leader with moral authority, to prevent Chi- can be found. Deng Xiaoping has been re- na's descent into violence should the perrnis- markably successful in instituting a restora- sive set of circumstances arise. tion, but the fundamental fact of all restora- tions is that they merely shore up declining or years, every time I have gone to dynasties without ever fully restoring them to China, I have carried with me a single political grace. A dynasty in restoration is a F sheet of paper upon which is written a dynasty facing its demise. prophecy from another revolution that began What happens in the former Soviet Union in failure. It appears on the final page of Dick- and Eastern Europe matters greatly to China, ens' A Tale of Two Cities, when the narrator and astute observers see the current degen- imagines the last thoughts of Sydney Carton eration of Russia and the newly independent as he prepares to meet the guillotine. republics not as a failure of reform but as the "I see a beautiful city and a brilliant peo- cumulative effects of decades of communist ple rising from this abyss, and, in their strug- rule playing themselves out in tragic fashion. gles to be truly free, in their triumphs and The Chinese say, "Not to reform is to wait for defeats, through long years to come, I see the death, but to carry out reform is to look for evil of this time and of the previous time of death." which this is the natural birth, gradually mak- Death will come in any case. It must, if ing expiation for itself and wearing out." In anything healthy is to be born. China may be China, as in the former Soviet Union and exceptional, but it is not the exception. Many Eastern Europe, the process of expiation and of the same problems sweeping the formerly atonement has only just begun. We must pre- communist states-the profits being reaped pare for that process to be protracted, and by party officialdom, the venality and the cor- painful for us all.

34 WQ SPRING 1993 CHINA AT DYNASTY'S END

BACKGROUND BOOKS

he field of contemporary China studies China's long history. The same can be said for has never been short on punditry, but Jonathan Spence's Chinese Roundabout: Es- T recent years have witnessed an out- says in History and Culture (W. W. Norton, pouring of essays and books on the current 1992), a collection of the Yale historian's ob- Chinese condition. The Beijing massacre of servations on several centuries of interaction 1989 alone produced over 30 books on the 50 between East and West in China. "Westem- days that shook the world. Most of the grow- ers," Spence writes, "have been unclear about ing Tiananmen bookshelf consists either of China since they first began to live there in descriptive accounts by foreign eyewitnesses any numbers and write about the country at or of emotional autobiographies by Chinese length. The history of our confusion goes dissidents now exiled abroad. The best analy- back more than 400 years." sis of the origins and events of 1989 is proba- bly Tony Saich's edited The Chinese Peo- nother valuable account placing Chi- ple's Movement: Perspectives on Spring na's current dilemmas in historical 1989 (M. E. Sharpe, 1990). A context is W. J. F. Jenner's The Tyr- Many recent books on China are more army of History: The Roots of China's Cri- scholarly in nature, and a fair number of these sis (Penguin, 1992). Focusing on the use and are products of a decade of research on the misuse of historiography in China, Jenner mainland. New data always recasts conven- comes to a discouraging conclusion: The tional wisdom, and the flood of new materials weight of China's authoritarian past is too emanating from the People's Republic in re- heavy a burden for the contemporary society cent years has done much to refine and revise to escape. our knowledge of the Mao years. This is most Brantly Womack's (ed.) Contemporary clearly evident in Volumes 14 and 15 of The Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective Cambridge History of China, edited by Har- (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991) places Deng's vard's Roderick MacFarquhar and the late reforms in historical perspective' showing John King Fairbank. In more than 1,800 how fundamental Deng's departures have pages, covering the period 1949-1982, one been in relation to China's century-long quest learns of repeated shifts in government policy, for modernity. Individual chapters examine the untold human suffering wrought by uto- the erosion of public authority and the pian ideologists (not the least of whom was growth of a nascent civil society; new chan- the Great Helmsman himself) and vindictive nels of political participation at the rice-roots; citizens, the schemings of Machiavellian problems associated with the dismantling of elites, a society struggling for dignity and the Stalinist industrial structure; the rise of meaningful life amid repression, and the pres- technocratic elites; and the evolving renegoti- sures of national security. ation of the social contract between a post- Fairbank, the doyen of American Sinol- totalitarian state and society. ogy, also left a lasting intellectual testament in Anyone wishing to refresh his memory China: A New History (Harvard Univ. Press, about the atrocities and machinations of the 1992). While not principally concerned with Maoist period can consult three recent sagas. contemporary China, his effortless travels Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters through millennia of imperial Chinese history of China (HarperColLins, 1992) may well be challenge orthodox historiography on several the most important autobiography to issue fronts and remind one of enduring themes in from the pen of a Chinese since the country

CHINA 35 opened up 20 years ago. Jung Chang's is an In recent years, scholars have paid consid- elegantly written and passionately described erable attention to the redefinition of state- account of three generations of women in society relations in the People's Republic. A modem China. Here, for example, she recalls collection of essays by leading American thoughts she had as a young instructor of China scholars in Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum's English at Sichuan University shortly before edited State and Society in China: The Con- going to England on a scholarship: "The Silk sequences of Reform (Westview, 1992) ex- River meandered past the campus, and I often amines the nexus in varying social sectors. wandered along its banks on my last eve- The withdrawal of the state and increased so- nings. Its surface glimmered in the moonlight cial autonomy has been argued by many, but and the hazy mist of the summer night. I con- this view is provocatively countered by Cor- templated my 26 years. I had experienced nell University political scientist Vivienne privilege as well as denunciation, courage as Shue. Her brief but important book, The well as fear, seen kindness and loyalty as well Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese as the depths of human ugliness. Amid suf- Body Politic (Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), ar- fering, ruin, and death, I had above all known gues that during the Maoist era the state's love and the indestructible human capacity to power was never as pervasive in rural areas survive and pursue happiness." as many had assumed. At the same time, she In its own way, John Byron and Robert finds, post-Mao reforms strengthened certain Pack's The Claws of the Dragon (Simon & aspects of state power, particularly in areas Schuster, 1992) also exposes the world of Chi- such as grain procurement, while weakening nese power and privilege under communism. the state's hand in such matters as birth con- Theirs is the account of the evil Kang Sheng, trol and tax collection. China's Beria, Kang Sheng was for many years Mao's henchman and was the father of imilar complexities are explored in two communist China's security services. Rich in superb accounts of rural life and politics detail, Byron (a pseudonym) and Peck expose under the reforms: Jean C. Oi's State the shady underworld of the communist elite ands Peasant in Contemporary China (Univ. and their intramural persecutions. of Calif. Press, 1989), and Daniel Kelliher's If the picture is not made adequately dear Peasant Power in China: The Era of Rural in Claws of the Dragon, it certainly is in Harri- Reform, 1979-89 (Yale Univ. Press, 1992). Oi son Salisbury's The New Emperors: China studies the division of the harvest and em- in the Era of Mao and Deng (Litfle, Brown, ploys a patron-client model to explain the 1992). For years China-watchers have sought relationships of authority in the Chinese to understand the inner workings of and the countryside. Kelliher's contribution reveals relationships among the Chinese Communist the degree to which peasants set the state's Party (CCP) elite. In one volume veteran for- agenda, rather than vice versa. Both of these eign correspondent Salisbury has provided studies should be required reading for people more juicy tidbits about this subject than any trying to understand the changes that have other book that has emerged during 70 years affected 800 million Chinese peasants. of CCP machinations (including the Red These volumes on rural life and politics Guard materials of the 1960s). Salisbury's generally paint a picture of stubborn localism, highly readable account is derived from ex- where the Leninist party-state barely exists. tensive interviews with high-ranking col- One gets a different picture from Kevin O'Bri- leagues of Mao and Deng, but readers should en's Reform Without Liberalization (Cam- be wary of Salisbury's data, much of which is bridge Univ. Press, 1990) and Barrett L. Mc- presented without adequate verification or Cormick's Political Reform in Post-Mao footnoting. China (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1990). Both

36 WQ SPRING 1993 books portray a political system in which Le- increasingly market-driven society. ninist norms and institutions remain primary, What will post-Deng China look like? despite their eroding efficacy under Deng's re- What variables will shape the passage to the forms. O'Brien finds that, while enlivened, post-Deng era? While it is impossible to an- China's parliament remains coopted by the swer the former question, three recent studies CCP, while McCormick argues that patronage shed considerable light on the latter: the Asia and corruption (both of which have risen Society's annual China Briefing, 1992, edited markedly under the reform program) are inte- by William A. Joseph (Westview, 1993); Ste- gral aspects of Leninist rulership. Leninist par- ven M. Goldstein's China at the Crossroads: ties typically penetrate their societies and set Reform after Tiananmen (Foreign Policy up webs of organizational dependency. Assoc. Headline Series, 1992); and China in the Nineties: Crisis Management and Be- wo other recent books on Chinese yond, edited by David S. G. Goodman and politics offer a more variegated picture Gerald Segal (Oxford Univ. Press, 1991). All T of political change in China. In From three focus on the present and sketch the lim- Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats its of change and principal trends in China in Socialist China (Univ. of Calif. Press, today. "After Deng's death . . . ," writes 1991), Berkeley political scientist Hong Yung Goldstein, "the new leadership will undoubt- Lee portrays a new bureaucratic elite increas- edly come under increased political pressure ingly technocratic and competent. The con- from both conservatives who would like to tributors to Kenneth G. Lieberthal's and Da- restrict ties with the outside world as well as vid M. Lampton's edited volume regional forces seeking broadened ties. Al- Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making though the initial instincts of Deng's succes- in Post-Mao China (Univ. of Calif. Press, sors are likely to be inclined toward a con- 1992) develop the thesis of "fragmented tinuation of Deng's economic policies and authoritarianism" to describe a bureaucratic thus a more accommodating posture toward system characterized by bargaining, compe- the United States as major economic support tition, and compartmentalism. The bargaining of China's reform effort, there are numerous perspective is useful, and the authors' empha- factors that might move policy in a much dif- sis on bureaucracy is a good reminder of the ferent direction." enduring importance of state institutions in an -David Shambaugh

David Shuinbaugh, formerly director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, teaches Chinese politics at the University of London and is the editor of the China Quarterly. His most recent book is Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 1972-1 990 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991).

CHINA 37 "If America is wrong, Jefferson is wrong," an early biographer wrote. "If America is right, Jefferson is right." This year, on his 250th birthday, it would appear that Jefferson was wrong. Many historians of late have found the third U.S. president guilty of racism and other sins that besmirch the national character. Gordon Wood, by contrast, argues that Jefferson has never been an apt mirror of America. He was a representative figure of his day whose words haunt us because, unlike him, they transcend his own time.

BY GORDON WOOD

mericans seem to have forgotten American Mind (1960), Merrill Peterson nothing about Thomas Jefferson, showed that American culture has always except that he was once a living, used Jefferson as "a sensitive reflector. . . of breathing human being. Through- America's troubled search for the image of it- outA our history, Jefferson has served as a sym- self." The symbolizing, the image-mongering, bol of what we as a people are, someone in- and the identifying of Jefferson with America vented, manipulated, turned into something has not changed a bit since Peterson's book we like or dislike within ourselves-whether was published, even though the level of pro- it is populism or elitism, agrarianism or rac- fessional historical scholarship has never been ism, atheism or liberalism. We continually ask higher. If anything the association of Jefferson ourselves whether Jefferson still survives, or with America has become more complete. what still lives in his thought, and we quote During the past three turbulent decades many him on nearly every side of every major ques- people, including some historians, have con- tion in our history. No figure in our past has cluded that something is seriously wrong embodied so much of our heritage and so with America and, therefore, that something many of our hopes. has to be wrong with Jefferson. In his superb The Jefferson Image in the The opening blast in this criticism of Jef-

38 WQ SPRING 1993 ferson was probably Leonard Levy's Jefferson enlightened part of Europe have given us the and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (1963). No greatest credit for inventing this instrument of subtle satire, no gentle mocking of the ironies security for the rights of the people, and have of Jefferson's inconsistencies and hypocrisies, been not a little surprised to see us so soon Levy's book was a prosecutor's indict- give it up." One almost has the feeling ment. ~evyripped off Jefferson's that Jefferson advocated a bill of mantle of libertarianism to ex- rights in 1787-88 out of con- pose his "darker side": his cern for what his liberal

think. One sometimes concern for basic civil has the same feeling liberties, and a self- about his antislav- ery statements, out-and-out ruth- seem to have lessness. Far from intellectual, al- It is in fact his views on black Americans

have made Jeffer- as something of an son most vulner- ideologue, eager to able to modem cen- fill the young with his sure. If America has political orthodoxy turned out to be wrong while censoring all those in its race relations, then books he did not like. Jefferson had to be wrong too. Samuel Johnson with his could in fact be downright doctrinaire, loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers an early version of a "knee-jerk liberal." In of Negroes?" had nothing on modem critics. this respect he was very different from his Who could not find the contrast between Jef- more skeptical and inquisitive friend James ferson's great declarations of liberty and Madison. Jefferson, for example, could under- equality and his life-long ownership of slaves stand the opening struggles of the French glaringly inconsistent? Jefferson undoubtedly Revolution only in terms of a traditional lib- hated slavery and believed that the self-evi- eral antagonism to an arrogant and over- dent truths that he had set forth in 1776 grown monarchy. He supported the addition ought eventually to doom the institution in of a bill of rights to the federal Constitution the United States. Early in his career he tried not because he had thought through the issue unsuccessfully to facilitate the manumission the way Madison had but largely because he of slaves in Virginia, and in the 1780s he believed that a bill of rights was what good worked hard to have slavery abolished in the governments were supposed to have. All of new western territories. But unlike George his liberal aristocratic French friends said so; Washington, he was never able to free all of indeed, as he told his fellow Americans, "the his slaves. More than that, as recent historians

JEFFERSON 39 have emphasized, he bought, bred, and both body and mind. flogged his slaves, and he hunted down fugi- It has even been suggested that Jefferson's tives in much the same way his fellow Vir- obsession (shared by so many other Ameri- ginia planters did-all the while declaring cans) with black sensuality was largely a pro- that American slavery was not as bad as that jection of his own repressed-and, perhaps in of the ancient Romans. the case of his attractive mulatto slave Sally Hemings, not-so-repressed-libidinal desires. ome recent historians even claim that The charge that Jefferson maintained Hem- Jefferson's attitudes and actions toward ings as his mistress for decades and fathered blacks were so repugnant that identify- several children by her was first made by an ings the Sage of Monticello with antislavery unscrupulous newspaperman, James discredits the reform movement. Jefferson Callender, in 1802. Since then, historians and could never truly imagine freed blacks living others have periodically resurrected the ac- in a white man's America, and throughout his cusation. In fact, in the most recent study of life he insisted that the emancipation of the Jefferson's political thought, political scientist slaves be accompanied by their expulsion Garrett Ward Sheldon treats Jefferson's "keep- from the country. He wanted all blacks sent to ing of a black mistress" as an established fact, the West Indies, or Africa, or anywhere out of a "common transgression of his class." the United States. In the end, it has been said, In her 1974 psychobiography of Jefferson Jefferson loaded such conditions on the aboli- the late Fawn Brodie made the most inge- tion of slavery that the antislavery movement nious and notorious use of Callender's ac- could scarcely get off the ground. In response cusation, building up her case for the passion- to the pleas of younger men that he speak out ate liaison between Jefferson and his mullato against slavery, he offered only excuses for slave largely through contrived readings of delay. evidence and even the absence of evidence. His remedy of expulsion was based on ra- In accord with our modem soap-opera sensi- cial fear and antipathy. While he had no bilities, Brodie naturally turned the relation- apprehensions about mingling white blood ship into a secret love affair. Brodie's sugges- with that of the Indian, he never ceased ex- tion of a love match aroused a great deal of pressing his "great aversion" to miscegena- controversy, perhaps because so many people tion between blacks and whites. When the believed it or at least were titillated by it. A Roman slave was freed, Jefferson wrote, he novel based on Brodie's concoctions was writ- "might mix with, without staining the blood ten, and there was even talk of a TV movie. of his master." When the black slave was These may seem like small and silly mat- freed, however, he had "to be removed be- ters, but they are not-not where Jefferson is yond the reach of mixture." Although Jeffer- involved-for the nature of American society son believed that the Indians were unavi- itself is at stake. The relationship with Sally lized, he always admired them and made all Hemings may be implausible to those who sorts of environmental explanations for their know Jefferson's character intimately. He was, differences from whites. Yet he was never after all, a man who never indulged his able to do the same for the African American. passions but always suppressed them. But Instead, he lastingly dung to the view that whether he had a relationship with Hernings, blacks were inherently inferior to whites in there is no denying that Jefferson presided

Gordon Wood, professor of history at Brown University, will be a Wilson Center Guest Scholar during 1993- 1994. He is the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1788 (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). A longer version of this essay will appear in Jefferson Legacies, edited by Peter Onuf (Univ. of Va. Press, 1993).

40 WQ SPRING 1993 The Embargo Act (1807) severely damaged President Jefferson's popularity. A contemporary cartoon depicted him as at once an impractical dreamer and a would-be monarch. over a household in which miscegenation has become the problem. The Jefferson that took place, a miscegenation that he believed emerges out of much recent scholarship was morally repugnant. Thus any attempt to therefore resembles the America that many make Jefferson's Monticello a model patriar- critics have visualized in the past three de- chal plantation is compromised at the outset. cades-self-righteous, guilt-ridden, racist, Everyone, it seems, sees America in Jeffer- doctrinaire, and filled with liberal pieties that son. When Carry Wills in his Inventing Amer- under stress are easily sacrificed. ica (1978) argued that Jefferson's Declaration Quite dearly, no historical figure can bear of Independence owed less to the individual- this kind of symbolic burden and still remain ism of John Weand more to the comrnu- a real person. Beneath all the images, beneath nitarian sentiments of the Scottish moralist all the allegorical Jeffersons, there once was a Francis Hutcheson, one critic accused Wills of human being with very human frailties and aiming "to supply the history of the Republic foibles. Certainly Jefferson's words and ideas with as pink a dawn as possible." So too the transcended his time, but he himself did not. shame and guilt that Jefferson must have suf- fered from his involvement in slavery and ra- he human Jefferson was essentially a cial mixing best represents the shame and man of the 18th century, a very intelli- guilt that white Americans feel in their tor- T gent and bookish slaveholding south- tured relations with blacks. Where Jefferson em planter, enlightened and progressive no for Vemon Louis Parrington and his genera- doubt, but like all human beings possessing tion of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s had been the as many weaknesses as strengths, inclined as solution, Jefferson for this present generation much to folly as to wisdom. Like most people

JEFFERSON 41 caught up in fast-moving events and compli- standing of nature. Some saw it occurring cated changing circumstances, the human Jef- mostly in religion, with the tempering of en- ferson was as much a victim as he was a pro- thusiasm and the elimination of superstition. tagonist of those events and circumstances. Others saw it happening mainly in politics- Despite all his achievements in the Revolu- in driving back the forces of tyranny and in tion and in the subsequent decades, he was the creating of new free governments. Still never in control of the popular forces he os- others saw it in the spread of civility and re- tensibly led; indeed, he never even fully com- finement and in the increase in the small, prehended these forces. It is the ultimate seemingly insignificant ways that life was be- irony of Jefferson's life, in a life filled with ing made easier, politer, more comfortable, ironies, that he should not have understood more enjoyable for more and more people. In the democratic revolution that he himself su- one way or another, the Enlightenment activi- premely spoke for. ties involved the imposition of order and rea- It is true that much of Jefferson's thinking son on the world. To contemplate aestheti- was conventional, although, as historian Wil- cally an ordered universe and to know the liam Freehling points out, he did have "an best that was thought and said in the world- extraordinary aft of lending grace to conven- that was enlightenment. tionalities." He had to be conventional or he Jefferson participated fully in all aspects of could never have had the impact he had on the 18th-century Enlightenment. He was his contemporaries. His writing of the Dec- probably the American Revolutionary leader laration of Independence, he later correctly re- most taken with the age's liberal prescriptions called, was "not to find out new principles, or for enlightenment, gentility, and refinement. new arguments, never before thought of. . . ; He was born in 1743 the son of a wealthy but but to place before mankind the common uneducated and ungenteel planter from west- sense of the subject, in terms so plain and em Virginia. He attended the College of Wil- firm as to command their assent, and to jus- liam and Mary, the first of his father's family tify ourselves in the independent stand we are to attend college. Like many of the Revolu- compelled to take." tionary leaders who were also the first of their family to acquire a liberal arts education in efferson's extraordinary impressionability, college, he wanted a society led by an aristoc- learning, and virtuosity were the source of racy of talent and taste. For too long men had his conventionality. He was very well- been judged by who their fathers were or Jread and extremely sensitive to the avant- whom they had married. In a new enlight- garde intellectual currents of his day. And he ened republican society they would be judged was eager to discover just what was the best, by merit and virtue and taste alone. most politically correct, and most enlightened Jefferson was not one to let his feelings in the world of the 18th century. It was his show, but even today we can sense beneath insatiable hunger for knowledge and his re- the placid surface of his autobiography, writ- markable receptivity to all that was new and ten in 1821 at the age of 77, some of his anger progressive that put him at the head of the at all those Virginians who prided themselves American Enlightenment. on their genealogy and judged men by their The 18th-century Enlightenment repre- family background. sented the pushing back of the boundaries of In its opening pages Jefferson tells us that darkness and what was called Gothic barba- the lineage of his Welsh father was lost in ob- rism and the spreading of light and knowl- scurity: He was able to find in Wales only two edge. This struggle occurred on many fronts. references to his father's family. His mother, Some saw the central battle taking place in on the other hand, was a Randolph, one of natural science and in the increasing under- the distinguished families of Virginia. The

42 WQ SPRING 1993 Randolphs, he said with about as much deri- art, he knew from reading and conversation sion as he ever allowed himself, "trace their what was considered good; and in 1771 he pedigree far back in England & Scotland, to wrote a list, ranging from the Apollo Belve- which let everyone ascribe the faith & merit dere to a Raphael cartoon, of those celebrated he chooses." He went on to describe his ef- paintings, drawings, and sculptures that he forts in 1776 in Virginia to bring down that hoped to acquire in copies. By 1782, "without "distinct set of families" who had used sev- having left his own country," this earnest eral legal devices to confine the inheritance of autodidact with a voracious appetite for leam- property both to the eldest son (primogeni- ing had become, as the French visitor Cheva- ture) and to special lines of heirs (entail) so as lier de Chastellux noted, "an American to form themselves "into a Patrician order, who. . . is at once a musician, a draftsman, an distinguished by the splendor and luxury of astronomer, a geometer, a physicist, a jurist their establishments." Historians have often and a statesman." thought Jefferson exaggerated the power of primogeniture and entail and this "Patrician n time Jefferson became quite proud of order." Not only was the setting aside of en- his gentility, his taste, and his liberal tails very common in Virginia; the "Patrician I brand of manners. In fact, he came to see order" seemed not all that different from its himself as a kind of impresario for America, challengers. But Jefferson dearly saw a differ- rescuing his countrymen from their "deplor- ence, and it rankled him. The privileges of able barbarism" by introducing them to the this "aristocracy of wealth," he wrote, needed finest and most enlightened aspects of Euro- to be destroyed "to make an opening for the pean culture. When Americans in the 1780s aristocracy of virtue and talentu-of which he realized that a statue of Washington was considered himself a prime example. needed, "there could be no question raised," he wrote from Paris, "as to the Sculptor who o become a natural aristocrat, one had should be employed, the reputation of Monsr. to acquire the attributes of a natural Houdon of this city being unrivalled in Eu- T aristocrat-enlightenment, gentility, rope." No American could stand up to his and taste. We will never understand the knowledge. When Washington timidly ex- young Jefferson until we appreciate the inten- pressed misgivings about Houdon's doing the sity and earnestness of his desire to become statue in Roman style, he quickly backed the most cosmopolitan, the most liberal, the down in the face of Jefferson's frown, unwill- most genteel, and the most enlightened gen- ing, as he said, "to oppose my judgment to tleman in all of America. From the outset he the taste of Connoisseurs." was the sensitive provincial quick to condemn Jefferson's excitement over the 16th-cen- the backwardness of his fellow colonials. At tury Italian, Andrea Palladio, whose Four college and later in studying law at Williams- Books of Architecture was virtually unknown burg he played the violin, learned French, in America, was the excitement of the provin- and acquired the tastes and refinements of the aal discovering the cosmopolitan taste of the larger world. At frequent dinners with Gover- larger world. He became ashamed of the nor Francis Fauquier and his teachers, William "gothic" Georgian architecture of his native Small and George Wythe, Jefferson said he Virginia, and he sought in Monticello to build "heard more good sense, more rational and a house that would do justice to those models philosophical conversations than in all my life that harked back to Roman antiquity. In the besides." Looking back, he called Williams- 1780s he badgered his Virginia colleagues burg "the finest school of manners and mor- into erecting as the new state capitol in Rich- als that ever existed in America." Although as mond a magnificent copy of the Maison a young man he had seen very few works of Carrke, a Roman temple from the first century

JEFFERSON 43 A.D. at Niines, because he wanted an Ameri- other Revolutionary leaders, but he was by no can public building that would be a model for means unique in his concern for refining his the people's "study and imitation" and "an own sensibilities as well as those of other object and proof of national good taste." Al- American citizens. This was a moral and po- most singlehandedly he became responsible litical imperative of all of the Founding Fa- for making America's public buildings resem- thers. To refine popular taste was in fact a ble Roman temples. moral and political imperative of all the en- No American knew more about wine than lightened of the 18th century. Jefferson. During his trips around Europe in The fine arts, good taste, and even good 1787-88he spent a great deal of time investi- manners had political implications. As the gating French, Italian, and German English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury had vineyards and wineries and preached, morality and good taste were allied:

making arrangements for %*t@l? "The science of virtuosi and that of the delivery of wine to the 4+s-a United States. Everyone in America acknowl-

Jefferson invented numerous practical devices, among them this contrivance for copying letters. edged his expertise in wine, and three presi- dents sought his advice about what wine to ship, politeness, and genteel refinement were serve at presidential dinners. In everythmg- connected with public morality and political from gardening and food to music, painting, leadership. Those who had good taste were and poetry-Jefferson wanted the latest and enlightened, and those who were enlightened most enlightened in European fashion. were virtuous. It is easy to make fun of Jefferson and his But note: virtuous in a modem, not an an- parvenu behavior. But it would be a mistake cient, manner. Politeness and refinement to dismiss Jefferson's obsession with art and tamed and domesticated the severe classical good taste merely as a trivial affectation, or as conception of virtue. Promoting social affec- the simple posturing and putting on of airs of tion was in fact the object of the civilizing pro- an American provincial who would be the cess. This new social virtue was less Spartan perfect gentlemen. Jefferson might have been and more Addisonian, less the harsh self-sac- more enthusiastic about such matters than the rifice of antiquity and more the willingness to

44 WQ SPRING 1993 get along with others for the sake of peace uted to benevolence and fellow-feeling. and prosperity. Virtue in the modem manner Jefferson could not have agreed more with became identified with politeness, good taste, this celebration of society over government. and one's instinctive sense of morality. As the Indeed, Paine's conventional liberal division 18th-century Scottish philosopher Lord between society and government was the Kames said, "a taste in the fine arts goes hand premise of Jefferson's political thinking-his in hand with the moral sense, to which in- faith in the natural ordering of society, his be- deed it is nearly allied." lief in the common moral sense of ordinary people, his idea of minimal government. ndeed, there was hardly an educated per- "Man," said Jefferson, "was destined for soci- son in all of 18th-century America who ety. His morality, therefore, was to be formed I did not at one time or another try to de- to this object. He was endowed with a sense scribe people's moral sense and the natural of right and wrong, merely relative to this . . . . forces of love and benevolence holding soci- The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a ety together. Jefferson's emphasis on the part of a man as his leg or arm. . . ." All hu- moral sense was scarcely peculiar to him. man beings had "implanted in our breasts" This modem virtue that Jefferson and oth- this "love of others," this "moral instinct"; ers extolled was very different from that of these "social dispositions" were what made the ancient republican tradition. Classical vir- democracy possible. tue had flowed from the citizen's participation The importance of this domesticated mod- in politics; government had been the source em virtue to the thinking of Jefferson and of of his civic consciousness and public spirited- other Americans can scarcely be exaggerated. ness. But modem virtue flowed from the citi- It laid the basis for all reform movements of zens participation in society, not in govem- the 19th century and for all subsequent liberal ment, which the liberal-minded increasingly thinking. We still yeam for a world in which saw as the source of the evils of the world. everyone will love one another. "Society," said Thomas Paine in a brilliant summary of this common enlightened separa- robably no American leader took this tion, "is produced by our wants and govem- belief in the natural sociability of peo- ment by our wickedness; the former promotes P ple more seriously than Jefferson. His our happiness positively by uniting our affec- scissors-and-paste redoing of the New Testa- tions, the latter negatively by restraining our ment in the early years of the 19th century vices. The one encourages intercourse, the stemmed from his desire to reconcile Chris- other creates distinctions." It was society-the tianity with the Enlightenment and at the affairs of private social life-that bred sympa- same time to answer all of those critics who thy and the new domesticated virtue. Min- said that he was an enemy of all religion. Jef- ghng in drawing rooms, dubs, and coffee- ferson discovered that Jesus, with his pre- houses-partaking of the innumerable scription for each of us to love our neighbors interchanges of the daily comings and goings as ourselves, actually spoke directly to the of modem life-created affection and fellow- modem enlightened age. Jefferson's version feeling, which were all the adhesives really of the New Testament offered a much-needed necessary to hold an enlightened people to- morality of social harmony for a new republi- gether. Some of Jefferson's contemporaries can society. even argued that commerce, that traditional Jefferson's faith in the natural sociability of enemy of classical virtue, was in fact a source people also lay behind his belief in minimal of modem virtue. Because it encouraged inter- government. In fact, Jefferson would have course and confidence among people and na- fully understood the Western world's present tions, commerce, it was said, actually contrib- interest in devolution and localist democracy.

JEFFERSON 45 He believed in nationhood but not the mod- scendants as those of the eastern.'' em idea of the state. He hated all bureaucracy It was Jefferson's extraordinary faith in the and all the coercive instruments of govem- natural sociability of people as a substitute for ment, and he sometimes gave the impression the traditional force of government that made that government was only a device by which the Federalists and especially Alexander the few attempted to rob, cheat, and oppress Hamilton dismiss him as a hopeless pie-in- the many. He certainly never accepted the the-sky dreamer. The idea that, "as human modem idea of the state as an entity possess- nature shall refine and ameliorate by the op- ing a life of its own, distinct from both rulers eration of a more enlightened plan," govem- and ruled. For Jefferson there could be no ment eventually "will become useless, and power independent of the people, in whom Society will subsist and flourish free from its he had an absolute faith. shackles" was, said Hamilton in 1794, a "wild Although he was not a modem democrat, and fatal. . . scheme," even if its "votaries" assuming as he did that a natural aristocracy like Jefferson did not always push such a would lead the country, he had a confidence scheme to the fullest. in the capacity and the virtue of the people to elect that aristocracy that was unmatched by efferson and other Revolutionary leaders any other of the Founding Fathers. Jefferson believed that commerce among nations in like the other Founding Fathers had doubts international affairs was the equivalent to about all officials in government, even the Jaffection among people in domestic affairs. popularly elected representatives in the lower Both were natural expressions of relationships houses of the legislatures ("173 despots that needed to be freed of monarchical ob- would surely be as oppressive as one"); but structions and interventions. Hence in 1776 he always thought that the people, if undis- and in the years following, Jefferson and turbed by demagogues or Federalist monar- other Revolutionary idealists hoped to do for chists, would eventually set matters right. It the world what they were doing for the soa- was never the people but only their elected ety of the United States-change the way agents that were at fault. people related to one another. They looked Not only did Jefferson refuse to recognize forward to a rational world in which corrupt the structure and institutions of a modem monarchical diplomacy and secret alliances, state; he scarcely accepted the basic premise balances of power, and dynastic rivalries of a state, namely, its presumed monopoly of would be replaced by the natural ties of com- legitimate control over a prescribed territory. merce. If the people of the various nations For him during his first presidential adminis- were left alone to exchange goods freely tration (1801-1804) the United States was among themselves, then international politics really just a loosely bound confederation, not would become republicanized and pacified, all that different from the government of the and war itself would be eliminated. Jefferson's former Articles of Confederation. Hence his and the Republican party's "candid and lib- vision of an expanding empire of liberty over eral" experiments in "peaceable coercion"- a huge continent posed no problems for his the various efforts of the United States to use relaxed idea of a state. As long as Americans nonimportation and ultimately Jefferson's di- continued to believe certain things, they re- sastrous Embargo of 1807-09 to change inter- mained Americans. Jefferson could be re- national behavior-were the inevitable con- markably indifferent to the possibility that a sequences of this sort of idealistic republican western confederacy might break away from confidence in the power of commerce. the eastern United States. What did it matter? Conventional as Jefferson's thinking he asked in 1804. "Those of the western con- might often have been, it was usually an en- federacy will be as much our children & de- lightened conventional radicalism that he es-

46 WQ SPRING 1993 poused. So eager was he to possess the latest rapid growth of democracy and evangelical and most liberal of 18th-century ideas that he religion, and the Missouri crisis over the could easily get carried away. He, like "others spread of slavery. It was also not a happy time of great genius," had "a habit," as Madison for Jefferson. To be sure, there was the Sage of gently put it in 1823, "of expressing in strong Monticello relaxing among his family and and round terms impressions of the mo- friends and holding court on top of his moun- ment." So he alone of the Founding Fathers tain for scores of visiting admirers. There was was unperturbed by Shays's rebellion in his reconciliation with John Adams and the 1786-1787. "I like a little rebellion now and wonderful correspondence between the two then," he said. "It is like a storm in the Atmo- old revolutionaries that followed. And there sphere." It was too bad that some people was his hard-fought establishment of the Uni- were killed, but "the tree of liberty must be versify of Virginia. But there was not much refreshed from time to time with the blood of else to comfort him. patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." The world around him, the world he Similar rhetorical exaggeration accompanied helped to create, was rapidly changing, and his response to the bloody excesses of the changing in ways that Jefferson found be- French Revolution. Because "the liberty of the wildering and sometimes even terrifying. The whole earth" depended on the success of the American Revolution was unfolding with rad- French Revolution, he wrote in 1793, lives ical and unexpected developments. American would have to be lost. "Rather than it should society was becoming more democratic and have failed, I would have seen half the earth more capitalistic, and Jefferson was not pre- desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve pared for either development. By the end of left in every country, & left free, it would be his life Jefferson had moments of apprehen- better than as it now is." Unlike Coleridge sion that the American Revolution, to which and Wordsworth and other disillusioned Eu- he had devoted his life, was actually in dan- ropean liberals, Jefferson remained a cham- ger of failing. In response his speech and ac- pion of the French Revolution to the end. tion often did not accord with what we now He saw it, after all, as a movement on be- like to think of as Jeffersonian principles. He half of the rights of man that had originated turned inward and began spouting dogmas in in the American Revolution. And to the a manner that many subsequent historians American Revolution and the rights of man and biographers have found embarrassing he remained dedicated until his death. In the and puzzling. last letter he wrote he described the American After Jefferson retired from public life in Revolution as "the signal of arousing men to 1809, he became more narrow-minded and burst the chains under which monkish igno- localist than he had ever been in his life. He rance and superstition had persuaded them to had always prided himself on his cosmopol- bind themselves, and to assume the blessings itanism, yet upon his retirement from the and security of self-government." presidency he returned to Virginia and never left it. In fact, he virtually never again lost et during Jefferson's final years in re- sight of his beloved Blue Ridge. He cut him- tirement these expressions of confi- self off from many of the current sources of dence in the future progress of the knowledge of the outside world, and became, Enlightenment came fewer and farther be- as one of his visitors George Ticknor noted, tween. The period between Jefferson's retire- "singularly ignorant & insensible on the sub- ment from the presidency in 1809 and his jects of passing politics." He took only one death in 1826 was a tumultuous one in Amer- newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer, and ican history-marked by war with the British seemed to have no strong interest in receiving and Indians, a severe commercial panic, the his mail. In all this he differed remarkably

JEFFERSON 47 from his friend and neighbor James Madison. banks and thought that the paper money is- Madison, said Ticknor, "receives multitudes sued by banks was designed "to enrich swin- of newspapers, keeps a servant always in dlers at the expense of the honest and indus- waiting for the arrival of the Post-and takes trious part of the nation." He could not anxious note of all passing events." understand how "legerdemain tricks upon Jefferson's turn inward was matched by a paper can produce as solid wealth or hard la- relative decline in the place of Virginia in the bor in the earth." As far as he was concerned, union. Decay was everywhere in early 19th- the buying and selling of stocks and the rais- century Virginia, and Jefferson felt it at Monti- ing of capital were simply licentious specula- cello. Despite his life-long aversion to public tion and wild gambling-all symptoms of debts, his private debts kept mounting, and "commercial avarice and corruption." he kept borrowing, taking out new loans to The ultimate culprit in the degeneration of meet old ones. He tried to sell his land, and America, he thought, was the corrupt and ty- when he could not he sold slaves instead. He rannical course of the national government. feared that he might lose Monticello and The Missouri Crisis of 1819-1820, provoked complained constantly of his debts, but he re- by northern efforts to limit the spread of slav- fused to cut back on his lavish hospitality and ery in the West, was to Jefferson "a fire bell in expensive wine purchases. the night," a threat to the union and to the Unable to comprehend .the economic Revolutionary experiment in republicanism. forces that were transforming the country and He believed that the federal government's destroying the upper South, Jefferson blamed proposed restriction on the right of the people the banks and the speculative spirit of the day of Missouri to own slaves violated the Con- for both his and Virginia's miseries. It is true stitution and threatened self-government. that he accepted the existence of commerce Only each state, he said, had the "exclusive and, after the War of 1812, even some limited right" to regulate slavery. If the federal gov- manufacturing for the United States. But the ernment arrogated to itself that right, then it commerce he accepted was tame and tradi- would next declare all slaves in the country tional stuff compared to the aggressive com- free, "in which case all the whites within the merce that was taking over northern America United States south of the Potomac and Ohio in the early 19th century. Jefferson's idea of must evacuate their States, and most fortu- commerce involved little more than the sale nate those who can do it first." abroad of agricultural staples-wheat, to- Jefferson became a bitter critic of the usur- bacco, and cotton. His commerce was not the pations of the Supreme Court and a more stri- incessant trucking and trading, the endless dent defender of states' rights than he had buying and selling with each other, that was been even in 1798 when he penned the Ken- coming to characterize the emerging northern tucky Resolution justifying the right of a state Yankee world. That kind of dynamic domestic to nullify federal laws. While his friend Madi- commerce and all the capitalistic accouter- son remained a nationalist and upheld the ments that went with it-banks, stock mar- right of the Supreme Court to interpret the kets, liquid capital, paper money-Jefferson Constitution, Jefferson lent his support to the feared and despised. most dogmatic, impassioned, and sectional- minded elements in Virginia, including the e did indeed want comforts and arch statesf-rightistsSpencer Roane and John prosperity for his American farmers, Randolph. He became parochial and alarmist, but like some modem liberals he and his zeal for states' rights, as even his sym- had little or no appreciation of the economic pathetic biographer Dumas Malone admits, forces that made such prosperity and com- "bordered on fanaticism." forts possible. He had no comprehension of For someone as optimistic and sanguine in

48 WQ SPRING 1993 Two months before Jefferson died, admirers held a lottery to help him pay his debts. temperament as Jefferson usually was, he had he himself had inspired. In the end Jefferson many gloomy and terrifying moments in was victimized by his overweening confi- these years between 1809 and 1826. What dence in the people and by his naive hopeful- happened? What accounts for these moments ness in the future. The Enlightenment and the of gloom and these expressions of fanaticism? democratic revolution he had contributed so How can we explain Jefferson's uncharacteris- much to bring about and his own liberal and tic but increasingly frequent doubts about the rosy temperament finally did him in. future? Jefferson's sublime faith in the people and Certainly his personal troubles, his rising the future is the source of that symbolic debts, the threat of bankruptcy, the fear of los- power he has had for succeeding generations ing Monticello, were part of it, but they are of Americans. He was never more American not the whole explanation. Something more than when he told John Adarns in 1816 that is involved in accounting for the awkward- he liked "the dreams of the future better than ness of his years of retirement than these out- the history of the past." He was always op- side forces, and that something seems to lie timistic; indeed, he was a virtual Pollyanna within Jefferson himself-in his principles about everything. His expectations always and outlook, in his deep and long-held faith outran reality, whether they concerned French in popular democracy and the future. aristocrats who turned out to be less liberal No one of the Revolutionary leaders be- than his friend Lafayette, or garden vegeta- lieved more strongly in progress and in the bles that never came up, or misbehaving stu- capacity of the American people for self-gov- dents at the University of Virginia who vio- eminent than did Jefferson. And no one was lated their honor code, or an American more convinced that the Enlightenment was Revolution that actually allowed people to on the march against the forces of medieval pursue their pecuniary happiness. He was the barbarism and darkness, of religious supersti- pure American innocent. He had little under- tion and enthusiasm. So sure was he of the standing of man's capacity for evil and had no future progress of American society that he tragic sense whatsoever. was intellectually and emotionally unpre- Through his long public career, while oth- pared for what happened in the years follow- ers were wringing their hands, Jefferson re- ing his retirement from public office. He was mained calm and hopeful. He knew slavery unprepared for the democratic revolution that was a great evil, but he believed his genera-

JEFFERSON 49 der the ship. Somehow or other these things find their way out as they come in, and so I suppose they will now." Was not progress on the march, and were not science and enlightenment every- where pushing back the forces of ignorance, supersti- tion, and darkness? The fu- ture, he felt, was on his side and on the side of the people. A liberal democratic society would be capable of solving every problem, if not in his lifetime, then surely in the coming years. But Jefferson lived too long, and the future and the coming generation were not what he had expected. Al- though he continued in his public letters, especially to foreigners, to affirm that progress and civilization were still on the march, in private he became more and more apprehensive of the future. He sensed that American so- Jefferson modestly requested that his epitaph record only that he was the ciety, including Virginia, "Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia." might not be getting better af- ter all, but actually going tion could do little about it. Instead he coun- backward. The American people were not be- seled patience and a reliance on the young coming more refined, more polite, and more who would follow. When one of those youn- sociable; if anything, he believed, they were ger men, Edward Coles, actually called on Jef- more barbaric and factional. Jefferson was ferson in 1814 to lend his voice in the struggle frightened by the divisions in the country and against slavery, he could only offer his confi- by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, whom dence in the future. "The hour of emanapa- he regarded as a man of violent passions and tion is advancing, in the march of time. It will unfit for the presidency. He felt overwhelmed come. . . ." by the new paper-money business culture It was the same with every difficulty. In that was sweeping through the country and one way or other he expected things to work never appreciated how much his democratic out. In 1814 he saw his financial troubles and egalitarian principles had contributed to coming at him and his household like "an its rise. approaching wave in a storm; still I think we Ordinary people, in whom he placed so shall live as long, eat as much, and drink as much confidence, more certainly than his much, as if the wave had already ghded un- friend Madison had, were not becoming more

50 WQ SPRING 1993 enlightened. In fact, superstition and bigotry, and less rational than they had been at the which Jefferson identified with organized reli- time of the Revolution. They did not seem to gion, were actually reviving, released by the know who he was, what he had done. Was democratic revolution he had led. He was this the new generation on which he rested temperamentally incapable of understanding all his hopes? During the last year of his life, the deep popular strength of the evangelical at a moment, says his biographer Malone, of forces that were seizing control of American "uneasiness that he had never known be- culture in these early decades of the 19th cen- fore," Jefferson was pathetically reduced to tury. He became what we might call a con- listing his contributions during 61 years of fused secular humanist in the midst of real public service in order to justify a legislative moral majorities. While Jefferson in 1822 was favor. No wonder he sometimes felt cast off. still predicting that there was not a young "All, all dead!" he wrote to an old friend in man now alive who would not die a Unitar- 1825, "and ourselves left alone midst a new ian, Methodists and Baptists and other evan- generation whom we know not, and who gelicals were gaining adherents by the tens of know not us." thousands in the Second Great Awakening. In These were only small cracks in his opti- response all Jefferson could do was blame the mism, only tinges of doubt in his democratic defunct New England Federalists and an faith, but for an innocent like him these were equally bewildered New England clergy for enough. Jefferson went further in states'- spreading both capitalism arid evangelical rights principles and in his fears of federal Christianity throughout the country. consolidation than his friend Madison did be- cause he had such higher expectations of the efferson's solution to this perceived threat Revolution and the people. He had always from New England and its "pious young invested so much more of himself intellec- monks from Harvard and Yale" was to tually and emotionally in the future and in Jhunker down in Virginia and build a uni- popular democracy than Madison had. Jeffer- versity that would perpetuate true republican son was inspired by a vision of how things principles. "It is in our seminary," he told could and should be. Madison tended to ac- Madison, "that that vestal flame is to be kept cept things as they were. Madison never lost alive." Yet even building the university his dark foreboding about the America yet to brought sorrow and shock. The Virginia legis- come, and he never shed his skepticism about lature was not as eager to spend money for the people and popular majorities. But Jeffer- higher education as he had expected. His sup- son had nothing but the people and the fu- port of the university became more of a politi- ture to fall back on; they were really all he cal liability in the legislature than an asset. ever believed in. That is why we remember The people in fact seemed more sectarian Jefferson, and not Madison.

JEFFERSON 51 OF THE

BY PETE-R F. DRUCKER

Since ancient times, new knowledge and new inventions have periodically remade human societies. Today, however, knowledge is assuming greater importance than ever before. Now more essential to the wealth of nations than either capital or labor, Peter Drucker argues here, it has already created a "postcapitalist" society and promises further transformations on a global scale.

n only 150 years, between about 1750 and capitalism into Capitalism. Instead of be- and 1900, capitalism and technology ing one element in society, as all earlier ex- conquered the globe and created a pressions of capitalism had been, Capital- world civilization. Neither capitalism ism-with a capital C-became society. nor technical innovations were new; Instead of being confined, as always before, to both had been common, recurrent a narrow locality, Capitalism prevailed phenomena throughout the ages in both the throughout all of Western and Northern Eu- West and the East. What was new was the rope by 1850. Within another 50 years it speed of their diffusion and their global reach spread throughout the entire inhabited world. across cultures, classes, and geography. And it This transformation was driven by a radi- was this speed and scope that converted tech- cal change in the meaning of knowledge. In nical advances into the Industrial Revolution both the West and Asia knowledge had al-

52 WQ SPRING 1993 George Segal's Machine of the Year (1983)

ways been seen as applying to being. Almost around World War 11, knowledge in its new overnight, it came to be applied to doing. It meaning came to be applied to work. This became a resource and a utility. Knowledge ushered in the Productivity Revolution, which had always been a private good. Almost over- in 75 years converted the proletariat into a night it became a public good. middle-class bourgeoisie with near-upper- For 100 years-in the first phase-knowl- class income. The Productivity Revolution edge was applied to tools, processes, and prod- thus defeated class war and communism. The ucts. This created the Industrial Revolution. last phase began after World War EL Knowl- But it also created what Marx called "alien- edge is being applied to knowledge itself. This ation" and new classes and class war, and is the Management Revolution. Knowledge is with them communism. In its second phase, now fast becoming the one factor of produc- beginning around 1880 and culminating tion, sidelining both capital and labor. It may

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 53 be premature (and certainly would be pre- ductive life focused on only one use of his sumptuous) to call ours a "knowledge sod- engine: to pump water out of mines-the use ety." So far we have only a knowledge econ- for which the steam engine had first been de- omy. But our society today is surely signed by Thomas Newcomen in the early "postcapitalist." years of the 18th century. But one of En- gland's leading iron masters immediately saw rom earliest times, new tools, new pro- that the redesigned steam engine could also cesses, new materials, new crops, new be used to blow air into a blast furnace, and F techniques-what we now call "tech- so he put in a bid for the second engine Watt nology1'Ñdiffuse swiftly throughout the Old built. Furthermore, Watt's partner, Matthew World. Few modem inventions, for instance, Boulton, promptly promoted the steam en- spread as rapidly as a 13th-century one: eye- gine as a provider of power for all kinds of glasses. Derived around 1270 from the optical industrial processes, especially, of course, for experiments of an English Franciscan friar, what was then the largest of all manufactur- Roger Bacon, reading glasses for the elderly ing industries, textiles. Thirty-five years later, were in use at the papal court at Avignon by an American, Robert Fulton, floated the first 1290, at the sultan's court in Cairo by 1300, steamboat on New York's Hudson River. and at the court of the Mongol emperor of Twenty years later the steam engine was put China no later than 1310. Only the sewing on wheels and the locomotive was born. And machine and the telephone, fastest-spreading by 1840-at the latest by 1850-the steam of all 19th-century inventions, moved as engine had transformed every single manu- quickly. facturing process, from glassmaking to print- But earlier technological change almost ing. It had transformed long-distance trans- without exception remained confined to one portation on land and sea, and it was craft or one application. It took another 200 beginning to transform fanning. By then, too, years, until the early 16th century, before Ba- it had penetrated almost the entire world- con's invention acquired a second application: with Tibet, Nepal, and the interior of tropical to correct nearsightedness. Similarly, the rede- Africa the only exceptions. sign of the windmill around A.D. 800, which converted it from the toy it had been in antiq- s in the 19th century, most people to- uity into a true machine, was not applied to day still believe that the Industrial ships for more than 300 years. Ships were still A Revolution was the first time a oared; if wind was used at all to propel them change in the "mode of production" (to use it was as an auxiliary and only if the breeze Karl Marx's term) changed sodal structure blew in the right direction. and created new classes, the capitalist and the The inventions of the Industrial Revolu- proletarian. It was not. Between A.D. 700 and tion, however, were immediately applied 1100 two new classes emerged in Europe as a across the board, and across all conceivable result of technological change: the feudal ar- crafts and industries. They were immediately istocracy and urban craftsmen. The knight seen as technology. James Watt's redesign of was created by the invention of the stirrup, an the steam engine between 1765 and 1776 innovation coming out of Central Asia around made it into a cost-effective provider of the year A.D. 700; the craftsman by the rede- power. Watt himself throughout his own pro- sign of water wheel and windmill into true

Peter F. Drucker is Clarke Professor of Social Science &Â Management at the Claremont Graduate School. He is the author of 27 books and a consultant on management to businesses and nonprofit organizations. This essay is adapted from the book Post-Capitalist Society by Peter E Drucker, published this month by HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 0 1993 by Peter E Drucker Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

54 WQ SPRING 1993 The age of the feudal knight, an invincible fighter supported on horseback by stirrups, was already succumbing to technological and social change at the time of this 13th-century French painting. machines that, for the first time, used inani- The craftsmen of antiquity had been mate forces rather than muscle as motive slaves. The craftsmen of the first "machine power. age," the craftsmen of Europe's Middle Ages, The stirrup made it possible to fight on became the urban ruling class, the "burghers" horseback. Without it a rider wielding a lance, who aeated Europe's unique city, and both sword, or heavy bow would have been the Gothic period and the Renaissance. thrown off his horse by the force described in Newton's Third Law: "To every action there he technical innovations-stirrup, wa- is always opposed an equal reaction." For ter wheel, and windmill-traveled several hundred years the knight was an in- T throughout the entire Old World, and vinable fighting machine. But this machine fast. But the social transformations involved had to be supported by a "military-agricul- in this earlier industrial revolution remained turd complexu-something quite new in his- largely contained within Europe. Only in Ja- tory. Germans until this century called it a pan around A.D. 1100 did there arise proud rittergut, a knight's estate endowed with legal and independent craftsmen who enjoyed status and with economic and political privi- high esteem and, until 1600, considerable leges, and populated by at least 50 peasant power. But while the Japanese adopted the families to produce the food needed to sup- stirrup for riding, they continued to fight on port the fighting machine: the knight, his foot. The rulers in rural Japan were the com- squire, his three horses, and his 12 to 15 manders of foot soldiers-the daimyo. They grooms. The stirrup, in other words, aeated levied taxes on the peasantry but possessed feudalism. no feudal estates. In China, in India, and in

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 55 the world of Islam, the new technologies had prime mover, required such enormous capital no social impact whatever. Craftsmen in investment that craftsmen could no longer fi- China remained serfs without social status. nance their "means of production" and thus The military did not become landowners but had to cede control to the capitalist. There is remained, as in Europe's antiquity, profes- one critical element, however, without which sional mercenaries. Even in Europe, the social capitalism and technical advance could not changes generated by this early industrial possibly have turned into a worldwide social revolution took almost 400 years to take full pandemic. It is the radical change in the effect. meaning of knowledge that occurred in Eu- By contrast, the social transformation of rope around the year 1700. society brought about by Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution took fewer than 100 here are as many theories about what years in Western Europe. In 1750 capitalists we can know and how we know it as and proletarians were still marginal groups. In T there have been metaphysicians, from fact, proletarians in the 19th-century meaning Plato in antiquity to Ludwig Wittgenstein and of the term-that is, factory workers-hardly Karl Popper in our own century. But since existed at all. By 1850 capitalists and proletar- Plato's time there have been only two theo- ians were the dynamic classes of Western Eu- ries in the West-and since roughly the same rope. They rapidly became the dominant time, two theories in Asia-regarding the classes wherever capitalism and modem tech- meaning and function of knowledge. Accord- nology penetrated. In Japan the transforma- ing to Plato, Socrates held that the only func- tion took fewer than 30 years, from the Meiji tion of knowledge is self-knowledge, that is Restoration in 1867 to the war with China in the intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth of 1894. It took not much longer in Shanghai the person. Socrates' ablest opponent, the and Hong Kong, Calcutta and Bombay, or in brilliant and learned Protagoras, held, how- the tsar's Russia. Capitalism and the Indus- ever, that the purpose of knowledge is to trial Revolution-because of their speed and make the holder effective by enabling him to their scope-created a world civilization. know what to say and how to say it. For Protagoras knowledge meant logic, grammar, nlike those "terrible simplifiers," He- and rhetoric-later to become the trivium, the gel, Marx, and other 19th-century core of learning in the Middle Ages and still ideologues, we know that major his- very much what we mean by a "liberal edu- toricalu events rarely have just one cause and cation" or what the Germans mean by just one explanation. They typically result allgemeine Bildung (general education). In Asia from the convergence of a good many sepa- there were essentially the same two theories rate and independent developments. Many of knowledge. Knowledge for the Confucian disparate trends-most of them probably was knowing what to say and how to say it, quite unconnected with one another-went the way to advancement and earthly success. into making capitalism into Capitalism and Knowledge for the Taoist and the Zen monk technical advance into the Industrial Revolu- was self-knowledge, and it was the road to tion. The best-known theory-that Capital- enlightenment and wisdom. But while the ism was the child of the "Protestant EthicJ'- two sides thus sharply disagreed about what expounded in the opening years of this cen- knowledge means, they were in total agree- tury by the German sociologist Max Weber, ment about what it did not mean. It did not has been largely discredited. There is simply mean ability to do. It did not mean utility. Util- not enough evidence for it. There is only a ity was not knowledge; it was skill-the little more evidence to support Karl Marx's Greek word for which is techn?. earlier thesis that the steam engine, the new Unlike their Eastern contemporaries, the

56 WQ SPRING 1993 Chinese Confucians, with their infinite con- The great document of this dramatic shift tempt for anything but book learning, both from skill to technology-one of the more im- Socrates and Protagoras respected techne. But portant books of all time-was the even to Socrates and Protagoras, techne, how- Encyclopedic (175 1-72), edited by Denis Dide- ever commendable, was not knowledge. It rot and Jean d'Alembert. This monumental was confined to one specific application and work attempted to bring together in orga- involved no general principles. What the nized and systematic form the knowledge of shipmaster knew about navigating from all crafts, and in such a way that the non- Greece to Sicily could not be applied to any- apprentice could learn to be a "technologist." thing else. Furthermore, the only way to learn It was by no means accidental that articles in a techne was through apprenticeship and ex- the Encyclopedic that describe individual crafts perience. A techne could not be explained in such as spinning or weaving were not written words, whether spoken or written. It could by craftsmen. They were written by "informa- only be demonstrated by one who had mas- tion specialists": people trained as analysts, as tered it. As late as 1700 or even later, the Eng- mathematicians, as logicians. Both Voltaire lish did not speak of "crafts." They spoke of and Rousseau were contributors. The under- 'mysteriesu-not only because the possessor lying thesis of the Encyclopedic was that effec- of a craft skill was sworn to secrecy but also tive results in the material universe-in tools, because a craft by definition was inaccessible processes, and products-are produced by to anyone who had not been apprenticed to a systematic analysis, and by systemat&, pur- master and taught by example. poseful application of knowledge. But the Then, beginning after 1700-and within Encyclopedic also preached that principles that the incredibly short span of 50 years-tech- produced results in one craft would produce nology was invented. The very word is a results in any other. That was anathema, manifesto in that it combines fechne, that is however, to both the traditional man of the mystery of a craft skill, with logy, orga- knowledge and the traditional craftsman. nized, systematic, purposeful knowledge. The first engineering school, the French ~coledes one of the technical schools of the Pontes et Chausskes, was founded in 1747, 18th century aimed at producing followed around 1770 in Germany by the first N new knowledge-nor did the school of agriculture, and in 1776 by the first Encyclopedic. None even talked of the applica- school of mining. In 1794 the first technical tion of science to tools, processes, and prod- university, France's ~colePolytechnique, was ucts, that is, to technology. This idea had to founded and with it was born the profession wait until around 1840, when Justus Liebig, a of engineering. Shortly thereafter, between German chemist, applied science to invent ar- 1820 and 1850, medical education and medi- tificial fertilizers and a way to preserve animal cal practice were reorganized as a systematic protein, in the form of meat extract. What the technology. early technical schools and the Encyclopedic As part of a parallel development in Brit- did, however, was perhaps more important. ain, the meaning of patents shifted between They brought together, codified, and pub- 1750 and 1800. Once monopolies to enrich lished the techne, the craft mystery, as it had royal favorites, patents now were granted to been developed over millennia. They con- encourage the application of knowledge to verted experience into knowledge, ap- tools, products, and processes, and to reward prenticeship into textbook, secrecy into meth- inventors, provided they published their in- odology, doing into applied knowledge. ventions. This not only triggered a century of These are the essentials of what we have feverish mechanical invention in Britain; it come to call the Industrial Revolution, in finished craft mystery and secretiveness. other words, the transformation by technol-

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 57 ogy of society and civilization worldwide. Ricardo. Even more surprising, neither factory It is this change in the meaning of knowl- workers nor bankers can be found in the nov- edge that then made modem Capitalism inev- els of Jane Austen, England's most perceptive itable and dominant. Above all, the speed of social critic. Her society (as has often been technical change created a demand for capital said) is thoroughly bourgeois. But it is still to- far beyond anything the craftsman could pos- tally preindustrial, a society of squires and sibly supply. The new technology also re- tenants, parsons and naval officers, lawyers, quired the concentration of production: thus craftsmen, and shopkeepers. Only in far- the shift to the factory. Knowledge could not away America did Alexander Hamilton see be applied in thousands of small individual very early that machine-based manufacturing workshops and in the cottage industries of the was fast becoming the central economic activ- rural village. The new technology also re- ity. But few even among his followers paid quired large quantities of energy, whether wa- much attention to his 1791 Report on Manu- ter power or steam power, which also encour- factures until long after his death. aged concentration. Although they were important, these energy needs were secon- y the 1830s, however, Honor4 de Bal- dary. The central point was that production zac was turning out best-selling novel almost overnight moved from being craft- B after best-selling novel depicting a cap- based to being technology-based. As a result italist France whose society was dominated the capitalist moved into the center of econ- by bankers and the stock exchange. And 15 omy and society. years later, capitalism, the factory system, and As late as 1750, large-scale enterprise was the machine, were central in the mature governmental rather than private. The earliest works of Charles Dickens, as were the new and for many centuries the greatest of all classes, the capitalists and the proletarians. In manufacturing enterprises in the Old World Bleak House (1852), the new society and its was the famous arsenal owned and run by tensions form the subplot in the contrast be- the government of Venice. And the 18th-cen- tween two able brothers, both sons of the tury "manufactories" such as the porcelain squire's housekeeper. One becomes a great works of Meissen and Sevres were still gov- industrialist in the North who plans to get ernment-owned. But by 1830 large-scale pri- himself elected to Parliament to fight the vate capitalist enterprise dominated in the landowners and break their power. The other West. By the time Karl Marx died in 1883, chooses to remain a loyal retainer of the bro- private capitalist enterprise had penetrated ken, defeated, ineffectual, precapitalist "gen- everywhere except to such remote comers of tleman." And Dickens's Hard Times (1854) is the world as Tibet and the Empty Quarter of the first and by far the most powerful indus- Arabia. trial novel, the story of a bitter strike in a cot- ton null and of class war at its starkest. dam Smith's Wealth of Nations ap- The social tensions and conflicts of the peared in the same year-1776-in new order were created by the unheard-of which James Watt patented the per- speed with which society was transformed. fected steam engine. Yet the Wealth of Nations We now know that there is no truth in the pays practically no attention to machines or nearly universal belief that factory workers in factories or industrial production. The produc- the early 19th century were worse off and tion it describes is still craft-based. Even 40 treated more harshly then they had been as years later, after the Napoleonic Wars, fac- landless laborers in the preindustrial country- tories and machines were not yet seen as cen- side. They were badly off, no doubt, and tral even by acute social observers. They play harshly treated. But they flocked to the fac- practically no role in the economics of David tory precisely because they were still better off

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 59 there than they were at the bottom of a static, 19th century shared with Marx the conviction tyrannical, and starving rural society. The new that capitalist society was a society of inev- factory workers experienced a much better itable class conflict-and in fact by 1910 most "quality of life." In the factory town infant "thinking people," at least in Europe (but also mortality immediately went down and life ex- in Japan), were inclining toward socialism. pectancy rose, thus triggering the enormous The greatest of 19th-century conservatives, population growth of industrializing Europe. Benjamin Disraeli, saw capitalist society very Today-in fact, since World War 11-we have much as Marx did. So did his conservative the example of the Third World countries. counterpart on the Continent, Otto von Bis- Brazilians and Peruvians stream into the marck, and it motivated him, after 1880, to favelas and barrios of Rio de Janeiro and Lima. enact the social legislation that ultimately pro- However hard, life there is better than in the duced the 20th-century welfare state. impoverished Noreste of Brazil or on Peru's By 1950 a good many observers already altiplano. As an Indian saying goes, "The knew that Marxism had failed both morally poorest beggar in Bombay still eats better and economically. (I had said so already in than the farm hand in the village." 1939, in my book, The End of Economic Man.) But Marxism was still the one coherent ideol- hile industrialization from the be- ogy for most of the world. And for most of ginning meant material irnprove- the world it looked invincible. What finally wment rather than Marx's famous overcame the "inevitable contradictions of "imrniseration," the pace of change was so capitalism," the "alienation" and "immisera- breathtaking as to be deeply traumatic. The tion" of the proletarians and with it the "pro- new class, the "proletarians," became "alien- letarian" condition altogether? The answer is ated," to use Marx's term. Their alienation, the Productivity Revolution. Marx predicted, would make inevitable their When knowledge changed its meaning exploitation. They were becoming totally de- 250 years ago, it began to be applied to tools, pendent for their livelihood on access to the processes, and products. This is still what "means of production," which were owned "technology" means to most people and what and controlled by the capitalist. This, Marx is being taught in engineering schools. But predicted, would increasingly concentrate two years before Marx's death the Productiv- ownership in fewer and bigger hands and in- ity Revolution began. In 1881, Frederick creasingly impoverish a powerless proletar- Winslow Taylor, then a foreman in a steel iat-until the day when the system would plant, first applied knowledge to the study of collapse of its own weight, with the few re- work, the analysis of work, and the engineer- maining capitalists being overthrown by pro- ing of work. letarians who "had nothing to lose but their In the West the dignity of work has re- chains." ceived lip service for a long time. The second Most of Marx's contemporaries shared his oldest Greek text, following the Homeric ep- view of capitalism even if they did not neces- ics by only 100 years or so, is a poem by sarily share his prediction of the outcome. Hesiod (eighth century B.c.), entitled Works Even anti-Marxists accepted Marx's analysis and Days, which sings of the work of the of the "inherent contradictions of capitalism." farmer. One of the finest Roman poems is Vir- Some, such as J. P. Morgan, the American gd's Georgics, a cycle of songs about the farm- banker, were confident that the military er's labor written in the first century B.C. Al- would keep the proletarian rabble in check. though there is no such concern with work in Liberals of all stripes believed that somehow Asia's literary traditions, the emperor of there could be reform and amelioration. But China once a year touched a plow to celebrate practically every thinking person of the late rice planting. But neither in the West nor in

60 WQ SPRING 1993 Asia did work receive more than token ges- Few thinkers in history have had greater tures. Neither Hesiod nor Virgil actually impact than Taylor. And few have been so looked at what a farmer does. Nor did any- willfully misunderstood and so assiduously body else throughout most of recorded his- misquoted. In part, Taylor has suffered be- tory. Work was beneath the attention of the cause history has proven him right and the educated, the well-to-do, and the powerful. intellectuals wrong. In part, Taylor is ignored Work was what slaves did. "Everybody because contempt for work still lingers, above knew" that the only way a worker could pro- all among the intellectuals. Surely shoveling duce more was by working longer hours or sand-the subject of Taylor's most famous by working harder. Marx too shared this be- analysis-is not something an "educated per- lief, as did every other 19th-century econo- son" would appreciate, let alone consider mist or engineer. important. In much larger part, how- It was by pure accident that r, Taylor's reputation has suf- Taylor, a well-to-do, educated fered precisely because he ap- man, became a worker. Poor plied knowledge to the study eyesight forced him to of work. This was anath- abandon plans to enter Harvard, where he had The steam engine's influence been accepted, and to was felt in many different take instead a job as an realms-including the popular apprentice machinist. Be- ing highly gifted, Taylor very soon rose to be one of , ema to the labor unions of the bosses. His metalwork- his day, and they mounted ing inventions made him a against Taylor one of the rich man very early. What got more vicious campaigns of Taylor started on the study of character assassination in work was his shock at the mu- - American history. Taylor's crime, tual and growing hatred between capital- in the eyes of the unions, was his assertion ists and workers, which had come to domi- that there is no "skilled work." In manual op- nate the late 19th century. Taylor, in other erations there is only "work." All work can be words, saw what Marx saw and what Disraeli analyzed the same way. Any worker who is and Bismarck saw. But he also recognized willing to do the work the way analysis something else: The conflict was unnecessary. shows it should be done, is a "first-class He set out to make workers productive so that man," deserving a "first-class wageupthat is, they would earn decent money. as much as, or more than, the skilled worker Taylor's goal was not to improve effi- got with his long years of apprenticeship. dency. It was not to create profits for the own- The unions that were most respected and ers. To his death he maintained that the major powerful in Taylor's America were the unions beneficiary of rising productivity had to be the in the government-owned arsenals and ship- worker, not the owner. His main concern was yards in which, prior to World War I, virtually the creation of a society in which owners and all peacetime U.S. defense production oc- workers, capitalists and proletarians, had a curred. These unions were craft monopolies, common interest in productivity and could and membership in them was largely re- build a relationship of harmony based on the stricted to sons or relatives of members. They application of knowledge to work. His lesson required an apprenticeship of five to seven has been best understood by Japan's post- years but had no systematic training or work World War I1 employers and unions. study. The unions allowed nothing to be writ-

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 61 ten down. There were not even blueprints or war with the United States. For the United any other drawings of the work to be done. States to field an effective force in Europe Union members were sworn to secrecy and would require a large fleet to transport troops, forbidden to discuss their work with non- and America at that time had almost no mer- members. Taylor's assertion that work could chant marine or destroyers to protect it. Mod- be studied, analyzed, and divided into a series em war, Hitler further argued, required preci- of simple repetitive motions, each of which sion optics in large quantities for bombsights had to be done in its one right way, in its own and other devices, and there were no skilled best time, and with its own right tools, was optical workers in America. indeed a frontal attack on such encrusted Hitler was absolutely right. The United guild practices. And so the unions vilified States did not have much of a merchant ma- him. They even succeeded in persuading rine, and its destroyers were few and ludi- Congress to ban Taylor's "task study" method crously obsolete. It also had almost no optical in government arsenals and shipyards, a ban industry. But by applying Taylor's "task that remained in force until after World War 11. study," American industry, which played a far more important role in war production than aylor's dealings with owners were as the old government arsenals, learned how to bad as those with unions, a fact that train totally unskilled workers, many of them T further hurt his cause. While he had former sharecroppers raised in a preindustrial little use for unions, he was contemptuous of environment, and convert them in 60 or 90 owners. His favorite epithet for them was days into first-rate welders and shipbuilders. 'hogs." And then there was his insistence The United States trained within a few that the workers rather than the owners months the same kind of people to turn out should get the lion's share of the increased precision optics superior in quality to what revenue that the application of his theory of the Germans produced, and did this, further- "Scientific Management" would produce. more, on an assembly line. Adding insult to injury, his "Fourth Principle" demanded that work study be done in con- aylor's greatest impact was in showing sultation, if not in partnership, with the the importance of training. Only a cen- worker. Finally, Taylor held that authority in T tury before Taylor, Adam Smith had the plant should be based not on ownership taken for granted that it took at least 50 years but solely on superior knowledge. He de- of experience (and more likely a full century) manded, in other words, what we now call for a country or a region to acquire the neces- "professional managementu-and that was sary skills to turn out high-quality products. anathema to 19th-century capitalists. They His examples were the production of musical bitterly attacked him as a troublemaker and a instruments in Bohemia and Saxony and of socialist. (Some of his closet disciples and as- silk fabrics in Scotland. Seventy years later, sociates, especially Carl Earth, his right-hand around 1840, August Borsig-one of the first man, were indeed avowed leftists and people outside England to build a steam loco- strongly anticapitalist.) motive-invented what is still the German Taylor's axiom that all manual work, system of apprenticeship, combining practical skilled or unskilled, could be analyzed and plant experience under a master with theoreti- organized by the application of knowledge cal grounding in school. This system remains seemed preposterous to his contemporaries. the foundation of Germany's industrial pro- The ancient belief that there was a mystique ductivity. But even Borsig's apprenticeship to craft skill continued to be accepted for took three to five years. Then, first during many years after Taylor made his case. This World War I, but especially during World War belief encouraged Hitler in 1941 to welcome 11, the United States systematically applied

62 WQ SPRING 1993 Taylot's "optimum shovel load" was a significant dis- covery at a time when workers still moved mountains of coal, coke, and other materials by hand.

ter 1880 explosively increased productivity.* For hundreds of years there had been no in- crease in the ability of workers to turn out goods or to move goods. Machines created greater capacity. But workers themselves were no more productive than they had been in the workshops of ancient Greece, in building the roads of imperial Rome, or in producing the highly prized woolen cloth that gave Renais- Taylor's approach, training "first-class men" sance Florence its wealth. But within a few (and women) to perform simplified tasks in a years after Taylor began to apply knowledge few months' time. This, more than any other to work, productivity began to rise at a rate of factor, explains why the United States was 3.5 to four percent annually, which meant able to defeat Japan and Germany. that productivity doubled every 18 years or All earlier economic powers in modem so. Ever since Taylor's principles took hold at history-England, the United States, Ger- the turn of the century, productivity has in- many-emerged through leadership in new creased some 50-fold in all advanced coun- technology. The new post-World War 11 eco- ties. On this unprecedented expansion rest nomic powers-first Japan, then South Korea, all the increases in both standard of living and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore-all owe quality of life in developed countries. their rise to an appreciation of Taylor's teach- Half of this additional productivity has ings about training. It enabled them to endow been used to increase purchasing power- a still largely preindustrial and therefore still creating a higher standard of living. But peo- low-wage work force with world-class pro- ple have used between one-third and one- ductivity in practically no time. In the post- half to increase their leisure time. As late as World War II decades Taylor-based training 'The term productivity was unknown in Taylor's time. In fact, it became the one truly effective engine of eco- was unknown until World War 11, when it first began to be used in the United States. As late as 1950 the most authoritative Eng- nomic development. lish dictionary, the Concise Oxford, still did not define the term as The application of knowledge to work af- it is used today.

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 63 1910, workers in developed countries still la- employment. It explains why the Great De- bored as long as they ever had before, that is, pression did not lead to a communist at least 3,000 hours per year. Today even the revolution, as Stalin and practically all Marx- Japanese work only 2,000 hours, Americans ists had confidently expected. By the 1930s, around 1,850, and Germans at most 1,600- Marx's proletarians had not yet become afflu- and all three nations produce 50 times as ent. But they had already become middle much per hour as they produced 80 years class. They had become productive. ago. Other substantial shares of the increased Darwin, Marx, and Freud make up the productivity have been taken in the form of trinity often cited as the "makers of the mod- health care, which has grown from a negligi- em world." Marx would be taken out and re- ble percentage of gross national product placed by Taylor if there were any justice. But (GNP) to between eight and 12 percent in de- that Taylor is not given his due is a minor veloped countries, and in the form of educa- matter. It is a serious matter, however, that too tion, which has grown from around two per- few people realize that it is the application of cent of GNP to 10 percent or more. knowledge to work that created developed Most of this increase-as Taylor pre- economies by setting off the productivity ex- dieted-has been taken by the workers, that plosion of the last hundred years. Technolo- is, by Marx's proletarians. Henry Ford gists give credit to machines, economists to brought out the first cheap automobile, the capital investment. But both elements were as Model T, in 1908. It was cheap, however, plentiful in the first hundred years of the cap- only by comparison with all other automo- italist age, that is before 1880, as they were biles on the market, which in terms of aver- afterward. But there was absolutely no in- age incomes cost as much as a two-engine crease in worker productivity during the first private plane costs today. At $825, the Model hundred years-and consequently also little T cost what an American industrial worker increase in workers' real incomes or any re- earned in three to four years-80 cents was duction in their working hours. What made then a good day's wage (and, of course, there the second hundred years so critically differ- were no benefits). Today, a unionized auto- ent can be explained only as the result of the mobile worker in the United States, Japan, or application of knowledge to work. Germany, working only 40 hours a week, The Productivity Revolution, however, earns $50,000 in wages and benefits- has come to an end. When Taylor started pro- $45,000 after taxes-which is roughly six pounding his principles, nine out of every 10 times what a cheap new car costs today. working people did manual work, making or moving things, whether in manufacturing, y 1930 Taylor's Scientific Manage- fanning, mining, or transportation. The pro- ment-despite resistance from unions ductivity of people engaged in making and and intellectuals-had swept the de- moving things is still going up at the historical veloped world. As a result Marx's proletarian rate of 3.5 to four percent annually-and in became a bourgeois. The blue-collar manufac- American and French agriculture, even faster. turing worker rather than the capitalist be- Forty years ago people who engaged in work came the true beneficiary of Capitalism and to make or to move things were still a major- the Industrial Revolution. This explains the ity in all developed countries. By 1990 this total failure of Marxism in the highly devel- group had shrunk to one-fifth of the work oped countries for which Marx had predicted force. By 2010 it will constitute no more than revolution by 1900. It explains why, after one-tenth. Increasing the productivity of man- 1918, there was no proletarian revolution, ual workers in manufacturing, in farming, in even in the defeated countries of Central Eu- mining, in transportation, can no longer cre- rope where there was misery, hunger, and un- ate wealth by itself. The Productivity Revolu-

64 WQ SPRING 1993 tion has become a victim of its own success. to Goettingen to study mathematics but From now on what matters is the productivity dropped out after one year. Few others even of nonmanual workers. And that requires ap- attended high school, let alone graduated plying knowledge to knowledge. from it. By my time, going to college was al- ready desirable. It gave social status. But it hen I decided in 1926 not to go to was by no means necessary, nor much of a college after finishing secondary help in one's life and career. When I made my wschool, my father was quite dis- first study of a major business corporation, tressed. Ours had long been a family of law- General Motors (published as Concept of the yers and doctors. Yet my father did not call Corporation in 1946), the GM public-relations me a dropout. He did not try to change my department tried very hard to conceal the fact mind. And he did not even predict that I that a good many of the company's top exec- would never amount to anything. utives had gone to college. The proper thing I was a responsible adult wanting to work then was to start as a machinist and work as an adult. (That I then also got a doctorate one's way up. As late as 1960, the quickest on the side had more to do with my trying to route to a middle-class income-in the annoy my father than with any belief on my United States, Great Britain, and Germany part that it would make any difference in my (though already no longer in Japan)-was to life and career.) Thirty years later, when my go to work at age 16 in one of the unionized son reached age 18,I practically forced him to mass-production industries. There one earned go to college. Like his father, he wanted to be a middle-class income after a few months- an adult among adults. Like his father, he felt the result of the productivity explosion. These that in 12 years of sitting in school he had opportunities are practically gone. Now there learned little, and that his chances of learning is virtually no access to a good income with- much by spending four more years in school out a formal degree attesting to the acquisition were not particularly great. And yet by 1958, of knowledge that can be obtained only sys- 31 years after I had moved from being a high- tematically and in a school. school graduate to being a trainee in an export firm, the college degree had become a neces- he change in the meaning of knowl- sity. It had become the passport to virtually all edge that began 250 years ago has careers. Not to go to college in 1958 was T transformed society and economy. For- "dropping out" for an American boy who had mal knowledge is seen as both the key per- grown up in a well-to-do family and who had sonal resource and the key economic re- done well in school. My father did not have source. Knowledge is the only meaningful the slightest difficulty finding a trainee job for resource today. The traditional "factors of pro- me in a reputable merchant house. Thirty duction''-land (i.e. natural resources), labor, years later such firms would not have ac- and capital-have not disappeared, but they cepted a high-school graduate as a trainee. All have become secondary. They can be ob- of them would have said, "Go to college for tained, and obtained easily, provided there is four years-and then you probably should go knowledge. And knowledge in this new on to graduate school." meaning is knowledge as a utility, knowledge In my father's generation-he was born in as the means to obtain social and economic 1876-going to college was either for the results. sons of the wealthy or for a very small num- These developments, whether desirable or ber of poor but exceptionally brilliant young- not, are responses to an irreversible change: sters (such as himself). Of all the American Knowledge is now being applied to knowledge. business successes of the 19th century, only This is the third and perhaps the ultimate step one went to college: J. I? Morgan, who went in the transformation of knowledge. Supply-

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 65 WQ: American schools now seem incapable of educat- Drucker: I have an old answer that I used to give ing students even in the traditional curriculum. How to students 50 years ago (and which Montaigne can they hope to prepare youngsters for the new era had, though he formulated it differently): Be a first- you describe? rate expert in one area and at least a journeyman in a second and totally unrelated one. This way you'll Drucker: It isn't true that American schools are in- understand. If you know only one area you can't capable of educating students. The parochial understand; and if you try to cover more than two schools, both Catholic and Protestant, do a reason- you'll be a dilettante. able job by being totally old-fashioned, that is, by This kind of exposure does not have to come in running the way they did during the 1950s. This is school. One of the more successful people I know exactly what the Japanese are doing, too. In fact, today, for instance, is a physician who at the same the various Christian schools, Catholic and Protes- time has learned enough to manage successfully a tant, are almost indistinguishable-except for the fair-size medical clinic. Another is the head of a cross on the wall and the absence of "examination medium-size company who came up through the hellf'-from Japanese schools. And a good many financial route but has learned enough biology to experimental schools, such as those in Harlem's work closely with his scientists. District Four in New York City, do a good job. Or look at what volunteers get when they join There is an old saying of mountaineers and groups at one of the pastoral churches. The groups hikers: If you have lost your way, don't try to be cut across all social layers and people work to- clever. Go back to where you last knew where you gether in, say, the church's drug-abuse program. were. I am an old "progressive educatoru-I taught While they are volunteers, they are not dilettantes. at two ultraprogressive colleges, Sarah Lawrence Counseling is professional work. The volunteers and Bennington, during the 1940s-but it's clear to gain respect for one another and also for a very me that we have lost our way since the 1950s. different kind of work. Other counties-Japan, Germany, France-stayed where they were, and their schools still work. We WQ: Although the Javanese colossus seems somewhat have to go back, I have become increasingly con- diminished today, Japan will remain one of America's vinced. That's why I believe that we have no major competitors in the future. What are the advan- choice but to go ahead with voucher plans that tages and disadvantages of the two countries in the allow parents to put their children in schools of new economy you describe? their choice. At least the kids will acquire core skills and-the most important things-standards and Drucker: Never underrate the Japanese. That said, self-confidence. they may be in for many years of transition. The Above all there are three things children need competitors to watch out for now may no longer to obtain very early: the ability to read, which is be primarily the Japanese but the Chinese and still the foundation skill; self-confidence, which other economic newcomers. means success in one area; and the ability to learn The Japanese advantage is clearly shrinking- in other areas. None of these do America's public the Japanese are wedded to a "bigger is better and schools pay much attention to today. the biggest is best" approach. Our main competi- tive advantage in the knowledge economy is that WQ: You emphasize the need to educate people the young people increasingly get training with the broadly in what you call the "knowlec'~es,"or various big companies but then quit-something you still technical disciplines. Which ones? cannot easily do in Japan-and go to work for me-

66 WQ SPRING 1993 dium-size or small businesses. As a result, these our society today. Now in the same family you businesses have the talent they need to succeed. might have a fellow who becomes a doctor while And it is becoming increasingly clear that the fu- his brother or sister works at check-out counter in ture no longer belongs to the giants. They are too a store, yet they remain a fafly. And that is why slow, too bureaucratic, and too focused on what the analogy with conflicts adclass war is proba- worked yesterday. bly the wrong analogy. But 'the division between Our competitive disadvantage is rooted in the knowledge workers and service workers is a source failure so far to work out the implications of the of tension. shift of corporate ownership from individuals to institutional investors and as a result the absence of WQ: How does your vision of the knowledge society any paradigm for corporate governance-some- differ from that of Daniel Bell, who argued in The thing which I have written about at considerable Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) that such a length in the past, most recently in my book Man- society, unable to provide a transcendent ethic for its aging for the Future (1992). This failure largely ex- people, was bound to experience a profound cultural plains the short-term preoccupations of America's crisis? large companies. Drucker: Daniel Bell and 1-1 in 1969, he four WQ: In Frederick W.Taylor's time the key conflict years later-started at very different points but was between "capital" and "labor." Is there a com- came out at pretty much the same place. Even ear- parable conflict today? lier, in my 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow, I tried to sketch out the kind of philosophy and ethic Drucker: The significant division in postcapitalist Bell was asking for. I called the chapter, overop- society is between knowledge workers and timistically, "The New Philosophy Comes to Life.'' nonknowledge, service workers, between, for in- It hasn't. And because I cannot answer the ques- stance, lawyers, advertising copywriters, and tion I am profoundly interested in the rapidly teachers, on the one hand, and salespeople, clerks, growing pastoral churches in this country, which and window washers, on the other. But it isn't a the new affluent two-earner families are corning to conflict, and I hope it never will become one. The in great numbers in a search for community, ethics, two kinds of workers are moving in different direc- and responsibility. tions. There will be tension between the two Altogether our society will have to be based on groups unless a way is found for the service work- individual responsibility. There are some move- ers to rapidly increase their productivity and their ments in that direction. We now expect the person income potential. to take responsibility for keeping himself or herself The situation today is very different from any healthy. We now expect-or are moving toward the world has seen before. The nature of social expecting-that parents take responsibility for the mobility has changed. The idea that there was no education of their children, which is what the upward mobility in earlier society is a kind of voucher movement is all about. We now increas- Marxist nonsense. In fact, mobility was probably ingly expect individuals-and especially people greater in 18th- and 19th-century Europe than it with a lot of schooling-to take responsibility for has ever been in this country. But if you moved out their careers, since obviously the corporate person- of your class, you moved out. You cut your bonds. nel department is unable and unwilling to do so That's what happens in the black community to- (despite all the talk about "organization develop- day. A colleague of mine, whose parents were ment" and "management development"). But sharecroppers and who is now a full professor and these are still only signs. a very distinguished one, has totally cut his bonds There is a great deal of talk today about "em- with his background. Totally. That was common in powermentf'-a term I have never used and never the past. The saying was that if a bright boy from a will. It does not do any good simply to take power blue-collar family got a scholarship, his father from the top and move it to the bottom. Power would say, "I've lost my son. I'm very proud of always corrupts unless it is first earned through him, but I've lost him." That's not true in most of responsibility.

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 67 ing knowledge to find out how existing organ of the knowledge soaety. knowledge can best be applied to produce re- Management has been around for a very suits is, in effect, what we mean by manage- long time. I am often asked whom I consider ment. But knowledge is now also being ap- the best or the greatest executive. My answer plied systematically and purposefully to is always "the man who conceived, designed, define what new knowledge is needed, and built the first Egyptian pyramid more whether it is feasible, and what has to be than 4,000 years ago-and it still stands." But done to make knowledge effective. It is being management as a specific kind of work was applied, in other words, to systematic innova- not seen until after World War I-and then by tion. a handful of people only. Management as a This third change in the dynamics of discipline emerged only after World War 11. As knowledge can be called the Management late as 1950, when the World Bank began to Revolution. Like its two predecessors- lend money for economic development, the knowledge applied to tools, processes, and word "management" was not even in its products, and knowledge applied to work- vocabulary. In fact, while management was the Management Revolution has swept the invented thousands of years ago, it was not earth. It took 100 years, from the middle of discovered until after World War 11. the 18th century to the middle of the 19th One reason for its discovery was the ex- century, for the Industrial Revolution to be- perience of World War I1 and especially the come dominant and worldwide. It took some performance of American industry. But per- 70 years, from 1880 to the end of World War haps equally important to the general accep- IJ, for the Productivity Revolution to do so. It tance of management has been the perfor- has taken fewer than 50 years-from 1945 to mance of Japan since 1950. Japan was not an 1990-for the Management Revolution to underdeveloped country immediately after prevail. World War 11, but its industry and economy were almost totally destroyed and it had prac- ' hen they hear the word "manage- tically no domestic technology. The nation's ment," most people still hear main resource was its willingness to adopt "business management." Manage- and to adapt the forms of management that ment did first emerge in its present form in the Americans had developed during World large-scale business organizations. When I War I1 (especially training). By the 1970s it first began to study management some 50 had become the world's second leading eco- years ago, I too concentrated on business nomic power and a technology leader. management. But we soon learned that man- When the Korean War ended in 1953 agement is needed in all modem organiza- South Korea was even more devastated than tions, whether they are businesses or not. In Japan had been eight years earlier. And it had fact, we soon learned that it is needed even never been anything but a backward country; more in organizations that are not businesses, indeed, the Japanese had systematically sup- whether not-for-profit (what I call "the Social pressed Korean enterprise and Korean higher Sector") or government agencies. They need education during their 35 years of occupation. management the most precisely because they But by using the colleges and universities of lack the discipline of the bottom line. That the United States to educate its able young management is not confined to business was people and by importing and applying man- recognized first in the United States. But it is agement, South Korea became a highly devel- now becoming accepted in all developed oped country within 25 years. countries. We now know that management is With this powerful expansion of manage- a generic function of all organizations, what- ment came a growing understanding of what ever their specific mission. It is the generic management really is. When I began to study

68 WQ SPRING 1993 management, during and immediately after knowledge as the essential resource. Land, la- World War 11, a manager was defined as bor, and capital are chiefly important as re- "someone who is responsible for the work of straints. Without them even knowledge can- subordinates." A manager in other words was not produce. Without them even a "boss," and management was rank and management cannot perform. Where there is power. This is probably still the defmition effective management, that is, application of many people have in mind when they speak knowledge to knowledge, we can always ob- of managers and management. But by the tain the other resources. The fact that knowl- early 1950s the definition had already edge has become the resource, rather than a changed to "a manager is responsible for the resource, is what makes our society performance of people." Now we know that "postcapitalist." It changes, and funda- this is also too narrow a definition. The right mentally, the structure of society. It creates definition is "a manager is responsible for the new social dynamics. It creates new economic application and performance of knowledge." Im- dynamics. It creates new politics. plicit in this definition is that we now see Underlying- - all three phases in the shift to knowledge-the Industrial evolution, the Productivity Revolution, the Management Revolution-is a profound change in the meaning of knowledge. We have moved from knowledge to knowledges. Traditionally, knowledge was general. What we now consider knowledge is of ne- cessity highly specialized. We never before spoke of a man or woman "of knowledge." We spoke of an "educated person." Educated persons were generalists. They knew enough to talk or write about a good many things, enough to understand a good many things. But they did not know enough to do any one thing. Knowledge today must prove itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is in- formation effective in action, information focused on re- suits. Results are outside the person, in society and the economy, or in the advance- ment of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything, this knowledge has to be highly specialized. This is the very

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 69 reason why the tradition-beginning with the tual, the specialist who focuses on words and ancients but still persisting in what we call ideas, and that of the manager, who focuses "liberal educationu-relegated it to the status on people and work. Intellectuals need their of techni or craft. It could neither be learned organization as a tool; it enables them to prac- nor taught. Nor did it imply any general prin- tice their techni, their specialized knowledge. ciple whatever. It was specific and specialized. Managers see knowledge as a means to the It was experience rather than learning, train- end of organizational performance. Both are ing rather than schooling. But today we do right. They are poles rather than contradic- not speak of these specialized knowledges as tions. Indeed, they need each other. The intel- "crafts." We speak of "disciplines." This is as lectual's world, unless counterbalanced by the great a change in intellectual history as any manager, becomes one in which everybody ever recorded. "does his own thing" but nobody does any- A discipline converts a craft into a meth- thing. The manager's world becomes bureau- odology-such as engineering, the scientific cratic and stultifying without the offsetting in- method, the quantitative method, or the phy- fluence of the intellectual. Many people in the sician's differential diagnosis. Each of these postcapitalist society will actually live and methodologies converts ad hoc experience work in these two cultures at the same time. into a system. Each converts anecdote into in- And many more could and should be ex- formation. Each converts skill into something posed to both by rotation early in their ca- that can be taught and learned. The shift from reer-by having the young computer techni- knowledge to knowledges has given knowl- cian, for example, serve as a project manager edge the power to create a new society. But and team leader. All educated persons in the this society has to be structured on the basis postcapitalist society will have to be prepared of knowledge being specialized and of to understand both cultures. "knowledge people" being specialists. This gives them their power. But it also raises basic or the educated person of the 19th cen- questions-of values, of vision, of beliefs, in tury techni were not knowledge. They other words, of all the things that hold society F were already taught in the university. together and give meaning to life. It also They had become "professional disciplines." raises a big-and new-question: What con- Their practitioners were "professionals" stitutes the educated person in the knowledge rather than "tradesmen" or "artisans." But society? they were not part of the liberal arts or of the allgemeine Bildung and thus not part of omorrow's educated person will have knowledge. Now that the techn6 have be- to be prepared to live in a global come knowledges, they have to be integrated T world. It will be a Westernized world. into knowledge. The classics, whatever that But educated people will also live in an in- term may mean, may still be the core of the creasingly tribalized world. They must be able educated person's knowledge. But the techni, to be citizens of the world-in their vision, too, have to be incorporated into the educated their horizons, their information-but they person's learning. That the liberal arts they will also have to draw nourishment from their enjoyed so much in their college years do not local roots and, in turn, enrich and nourish do that, cannot do that-in fact refuse even to their own local culture. try-is the reason why many young people Most, if not all, educated people will prac- repudiate them a few years out of college. tice their knowledge as members of an organ- They feel let down, indeed, betrayed. They ization. The educated person will therefore have good reason to feel that way. Liberal arts have to prepare to live and work simulta- and allgemeine Bildung that do not integrate neously in two cultures, that of the intellec- the knowledges into a "universe of knowl-

70 WQ SPRING 1993 edge" are neither liberal nor bildung (educa- and are willing to do the hard work this re- tion). They fall down on the first task: to cre- quires. ate mutual understanding-that "universe of Capitalism had been dominant for over a discoursef' without which there can be no century when Karl Marx in the first volume of civilization. Instead of uniting, such liberal Das Kapital (1867) identified it as a distinct arts fragment. social order. The term capitalism was not We neither need nor will get polymaths coined until 30 years later, well after Marx's who are at home in many knowledges. We death. It would therefore not only be pre- will probably become even more specialized. sumptuous in the extreme to attempt to write But what we do need-and what will define The Knowledge today; it would be ludicrously the educated person in the Knowledge Soci- premature. All that can be attempted is to de- ety-is the ability to understand the knowl- scribe society and polity as we begin the tran- edges, from law to computer science. What is sition from the Age of Capitalism (which, of each about? What is it trying to do? What are course, was also the Age of Socialism). But we its central concerns? What are its central theo- can hope that 100 years hence a book of this ries? What major insights has it produced? kind, if not a book entitled The Knowledge, can What are its important areas of ignorance, its and will be written. For that would mean that problems, its challenges? To make knowl- we have successfully weathered the transition edges into knowledge requires. that the hold- upon which we have embarked. It would be ers of the knowledges, the specialists, take as foolish today to predict the Knowledge So- responsibility for making both themselves ciety as it would have been to predict in and their knowledge area understood. The 1776-the year of the American Revolution, media, whether magazines, movies, or televi- of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and of sion, can help. But they cannot do the job. James Watt's steam engine-the society of Nor can any other kind of popularization. which Marx wrote 100 years later, and as it The knowledges must be understood as what was foolish of Marx to predict "with scientific they are: serious, rigorous, demanding. And infallibility" 20th-century society. such understanding can be acquired only if But one thing is predictable: The greatest the leaders in each of the knowledges-be- change will be in the form and content of ginning with the learned professors in their knowledge, in its meaning and its responsibil- tenured university chairs-take responsibility ity, and in what it means to be an educated for making their own knowledge understood person.

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 71 THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

BACKGROUND BOOKS uturology tends to make scholars queasy. destiny of mankind," Kotkin predicts. They generally prefer to leave the forecast- While Reich and Kotkin see the new world F ing trade to science-fiction scribblers, free- economy as an interconnected "global web," tradi- lance prognosticators, and other untenured sorts. tional "armed camp" metaphors persist in Lester Social scientists somberly agree that their work Thurow's Head to Head: The Coming Economic must have "predictive value," but actual predic- Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (Mor- tions, apart from economists' exercises in number row, 1992) and Paul Kennedy's Preparing For The crunching, are few. It is unique, then, to find some- Twenty-First Century (Random, 1993). To body from the scholarly world who not only has Thurow and Kennedy, knowledge, technology, and tried his hand at prediction but is in a position to skills are important but not decisive. Institutions, act: Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. beliefs, political policies-and national differ- The former Harvard professor cannot be ences-matter a great deal. Thurow, dean of MIT's faulted for pulling his punches. "We are living Sloan School of Management, argues that Ameri- through a transformation that will rearrange the cans and their companies must change their politics of the coming century," he begins The ways-concentrating on production instead of Work of Nations (Knopf, 1991). "There will be no consumption, for example, and maximizing market national products or technologies, no national cor- share rather than profits. Kennedy's book, which porations, no national industries." In Reich's new expands upon his much-discussed (if seldom read) world aborning, the wealth of nations depends The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), is a upon workers who develop the strategic problem- compendium of worldwide economic, demo- solving, problem-identifying, and brokering skills graphic, and technological trends, surprising in nei- driving today's high-value production. These ther its content nor the ambiguity of its predictions. "symbolic analysts," as Reich calls them, include The history of transformations on the scale of engineers and management consultants as well as today's suggests that such modesty may be wise. film editors and architects. How could those who lived through the subtle, The United States excels at producing symbolic centuries-long emergence of capitalism detailed in analysts, Reich says. What worries him is the fate Femand Braudel's three-volume Civilization and of the remaining four-fifths of the population- Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries (Harper, 1983- and the prospect that the symbolic analysts, find- 85) have realized what they were creating when ing more in common with their counterparts over- they expanded medieval fair markets or petitioned seas than with their fellow Americans, will quietly their sovereigns for charters to send out trading retreat to their own affluent exurban communities. ships? Like Braudel's medieval traders, we are con- The answer, Reich argues, is to equip more Ameri- fronted today by many small but significant cans to apply symbolic analysis, to prepare the gro- choices, most of them involving uses of the com- cery-store checkout clerk, for example, to help puter and other new information technologies. manage inventory. In Reich's view, that will require In The Age of the Smart Machine: The Fu- massive new spending on education, training, nu- tare of Work and Power (Basic, 1988), for exam- trition, and health care. ple, Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School Joel Kotkin's Tribes: How Race, Religion, and stresses that computerizing the workplace can lead Identity Determine Success in the New Global down two very different paths. Using the new Economy (Random, 1991) also depicts a world in technology only to automate existing jobs will fur- which nation-states hardly matter. Kotkin, a Senior ther depersonalize work. Going beyond automa- Fellow at the Center for the New West in Denver, tion to create what Zuboff calls "infonnating," argues that several quintessentially cosmopolitan, however, holds out the promise of empowering globally dispersed ethnic groups or "tribesn-the workers with knowledge of the production process Jews, Japanese, Indians, "Anglo-Americans," and and the ability to participate in its management. Chinese-are uniquely positioned to succeed in At several paper mills Zuboff studied, workers this new world. "It is likely such dispersed peo- not so long ago operated a single piece of equip- ples-and their worldwide business and cultural ment on a production line, dipping their hands into networks-will increasingly shape the economic the pulp to gauge its progress. Today, however,

72 WQ SPRING 1993 they do their jobs from computer control rooms. knowledge are to be put. "Self-directed computer Where the transition to "informating" is succeed- learning, for example, is offered as a wonderful hu- ing, these workers are no longer merely repeating manistic panacea, but it could spell the end of co- routine tasks; they are analyzing data, which en- operative group learning in the classroom. courages them "to notice, to think, to explore, to Postman, chairman of the department of com- experiment, to improve." munication arts at New York University, regards Likewise in the schools, writes Sherry Turkle, such naive computer worship as a symptom of an MIT sociologist, there are important choices to "Technopoly," a state of culture and of mind in be made. If computers are used only as tools to which "culture seeks its authorization in technol- implement conventional teaching methods, their ogy, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes potential will be squandered. But if students are its orders from technology." Technopoly "casts allowed to adapt computers to their own learning aside all traditional narratives and symbols that styles, the machines may become arenas for ex- suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, ploration and self-expression, more akin to musical of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ec- instruments than to hammers. "The question is not stasy of consumption." Signs of technology's do- what the computer will be like in the future," minion, Postman maintains, are everywhere- Turkle argues in The Second Self: Computers and from the doctor's office, where technology encour- the Human Spirit (Simon & Schuster, 1984), "but ages physicians to treat patients as inanimate ob- what will we be like?" jects, to the classroom, where children are classi- fied according to their scores on intelligence tests. ost speculation focuses more on technol- Postman's antidote is a new curriculum based ogy than on people. Stewart Brand looks on "the transcendent belief that humanity's destiny M at the future of "idiosyncratic systems" is the discovery of knowledgef'-through both the in The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT arts and the sciences, and not only for the sake of (Viking, 1987). These include electronic newspa- technological progress but to conquer "loneliness, pers that customize themselves to fit a reader's ignorance, and disorder." tastes, and educational software that molds itself to a child's learning style. Brand, the founder of The enjamin Barber, a Rutgers University politi- Whole Earth Catalog, sees in such technology the cal scientist, sees a Technopoly-like hope of "connecting, diversifying, [and] increasing B "McWorld tied together by technology, ecol- human complexity rather than reducing it." ogy, communications, and commerce" as one of A different kind of liberation is hoped for by two possible global futures. The other, even George Gilder, who sees a global network of inter- gloomier, is "Jihad," the "retribalization" of large active telecomputers linked by fiber optics as the portions of the post-Cold War world and an erup- key to a rebirth of American individualism. tion of the great sectarian plagues, war and civil 'Through this crystal web," he writes in Life After strife. In an article in the Atlantic (March 1992) Television (Norton, 1992), "we can reclaim our based on his forthcoming book, Barber suggests culture from the centralized influence of mass me- that neither of these forces-one that integrates dia. We can liberate our imaginations from pro- and homogenizes, another that divides and grams regulated by bureaucrats, chosen by a small tribalizes-needs or promotes democracy. The real elite of broadcasting professionals, and governed challenge of the 21st century, he insists, is political: by the need to target the lowest common denomi- to preserve democracy. nators of public interests." Perhaps this suggests why scholars shy away There are some, however, who see the altema- from prognostication. The future may bring the tives posed by the likes of Gilder, Turkle, and diminution of traditional politics, 2 la Reich, or its Zuboff as no alternatives at all. All of the violent reassertion, as in Barber's Jihad. One think- "choices," argues Neil Postman in Technopoly: er's dawning era of humanistic promise may look The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Knopf, to another like dread Technopoly. Imagining the 1992), are dictated by technology and deflect con- future, it seems, is less important than interrogating sideration of the uses to which technology and it in order to understand the present.

KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY 73 CURRENTBOOKS

After Chaos

ARTIFICIAL LIFE: The Quest for a New Cre- full of surprises, but instead of spiraling off ation. By Steven Levy. Pantheon. 390 pp. $25 into chaos they produce intricate patterns that COMPLEXITY: The Emerging Science at the seem to capture the essence of what we mean Edge of 'Order and Chaos. By M. Mitchell Waldrop. by complexity. In the jargon of this emerging Simon &Â Schuster. 380 pp. $23 field, complex adaptive systems-which COMPLEXITY: life at the Edge of Chaos. By might include cells, brains, organisms, ecosys- Roger Lewin. Macmillan. 208 pp. $22 tems, and maybe even corporations and econ- omies-exist on the "edge of chaos," in a re- e take our metaphors where we gime not so ordered as to be rigid and dull but can find them. With every scientific not so chaotic as to be meaningless. Like wa- wrevolution, failed or otherwise, ter turning from solid to liquid to vapor, the new metaphors and images wedge them- story goes, these systems go through "phase selves into the public mind. In the 19th cen- transitions" from order to chaos. And when tury, "entropy" and "the Second Law of Ther- they are poised on a cusp between these two modynamics" generated a perverse glee extremes, such "complex systems" gain the among those, including Protestant funda- ability to gather and process information, a mentalists, who were taken with the idea that flexibility that allows them to both alter and the universe is heading inevitably toward a adapt to their worlds. state of complete disorder, a scientific version Whether this is more than an arresting of the biblical fall. Earlier in this century, metaphor is still anybody's guess. In the "relativity" and "the Heisenberg Uncertainty meantime, science journalists, hoping to repli- Principle" (i.e. there is no such thing as an cate Gleick's success, have seized on complex- immaculate perception) provided English ma- ity as the hot new topic. For the last few years jors and seminarians with offbeat dissertation they have been descending on an interdisa- topics. Then came successive waves of journal plinary research center called the Santa Fe In- articles in the humanities whose keywords in- stitute, which functions as the focus of the cluded one of the four C's-cybernetics, catas- quest, to explain how complexity arises from trophe theory, chaos, and now, the newest of simplicity-networks of genes giving rise to them all, complexity. cells, networks of cells giving rise to organ- Several years ago, James Gleick's Chaos isms, networks of organisms giving rise to so- (1987) popularized the notion that there is a cieties, all because of their ability to process new science of chaos. Tiny differences in the information. The hope is that all of these numbers plugged into seemingly simple webs are strung together according to general equations, such as those used to model rules that have eluded mainstream science, weather or the turbulent flow of water, Gleick that there is a science of complexity. showed, can lead to wild swings in the out- put. The behavior of these so-called chaotic ith all the sudden attention, saen- nonlinear systems can be predicted only if we tists at the Santa Fe Institute must can be infinitely precise about the initial con- wfeel at times like the local Pueblo ditions; since that is impossible we are left Indian communities being scrutinized by an- with systems that, though completely deter- thropologists. While some retreat into their of- ministic, exhibit what to all appearances is fices for the more civilized company of com- random behavior. puter screens, others have come to enjoy the Not all nonlinear systems are so badly be- limelight, repackaging their lives with the haved, and that is where complexity comes kinds of anecdotes they have learned that in. Once again simple systems turn out to be journalists like to hear. The result has been a

74 WQ SPRING 1993 number of magazine articles and three recent ment of quixotic seekers on the fringe of com- books-Steven Levy's Artificial Life, M. puter science. One of the best chapters of Ar- Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity, and Roger tificial Life, called "Garage Band Science," Lewin's Complexity-in which we can read tells how, long before the Santa Fe Institute about the fomenters of this revolution. We began, several young veterans of the chaos hear, for example, three renditions of the life wars, inducting Doyne Farmer and Norman of Stuart Kauffman, a philosopher-turned- Packard, started a research lab in an old physician-turned-theoretical biologist, who is adobe tavern down the hill from nearby Los so sure that humanity must be more than a Alamos. Following their intuition that life is a random fluke that he is trying to recast Dar- process that can be skimmed from its car- winian evolution and uncover a grammar that boniferous substrate and programmed into a leads inexorably to increasingly complex crea- computer, the three scientists studied math- tures. We also get the thrice-told tale of Chris- ematical kaleidoscopes called cellular autom- topher Langton, a Vietnam-era conscientious ata. A cellular automaton consists of a grid of objector and blues guitarist who survived a cells that changes colors according to a few horrible hang-@ding accident and went on to simple rules. Displayed on a computer screen launch a new field called Artificial Life ("A- at lightning speed, cellular automata can gen- life," for short), which attempts to create self- erate astonishingly complex patterns, some reproducing computer programs so fluid and capable of navigating around their checker- complex that it might someday seem smug board universe and even cloning themselves. and anthropocentric not to grant that they too In explaining how this works, Levy gives a are alive. Hovering in the background of all nice historical sketch of John Horton Conway, three books is Murray Gell-Mann, who is who in the days before cheap, abundant com- more gun-shy of journalists. Gell-Mann, who puter power, invented one of the more well- earned his Nobel Prize for the ultimate sim- known cellular automata, The Game of Life, plification, showing how hundreds of sub- by manipulating tokens on a vast expanse of atomic particles can be reduced to a handful graph paper. of quarks, has come to Santa Fe to study the other side of the story: how nature goes from he next book on the shelves was the simple to the complex. Waldrop's Complexity, Though he fo- These and the other scientists featured in cuses more broadly on complex sys- these books are fascinating, brilliant people. tems-economies as well as organisms-and Still, no one but a reviewer, who gets the specifically on the Santa Fe Institute itself, we books for free, is likely to read all three. But learn a lot about A-life along the way. Readers deciding among them is not an easy task. of the journal Science know that Waldrop is First out of the chute was Levy, whose very good at translating the grayest abstrac- publisher ensured that his book came out in tions into pictures we can hold comfortably in time to benefit from the publicity surrounding our heads. His book includes the best descrip- the biennial Artificial Life conference, which tions I have read of what can be very difficult was held in Santa Fe last summer. Levy was work: Kauffrnan's attempts to tease out hid- there for a book-signing at a store just off the den orders that would show evolution to be Plaza, where the first customers got free t- less of a free-for-all than traditional Darwin- shirts with the legend "Get A-Life." Perhaps ists suppose, for example, or Langton's inven- because it was first, Artificial Life feels rushed tion of the so-called lambda parameter, which in places, but for the most part it is a solid may provide a rough measure of where a cel- piece of work. Levy showed in his first book, lular automaton lies on a continuum between Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution order and chaos. The other books say that (1985), how good he is at capturing the excite- there is something called the lambda param-

BOOKS 75 eter; Waldrop tells readers precisely what it is. iel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, two phi- But Waldrop's apparent efforts to emulate losophers who speculate on the most complex Tracy Kidder's book, Soul of a New Machine of complex systems, human consciousness, (1981), are less successful. In Kidder's book, and with those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who the drama comes from the reader's wonder- view the work at Santa Fe with a more jaun- ing whether the hero-engineers will succeed diced eye. Lewin's book is shaped not by the or fail in developing a new computer, and we happenstances of the Santa Fe Institute but by know we will find out before we turn the fi- the author's own curiosity. The scientific ex- nal page. We will not know for years whether planations are not as crisp or detailed as the Santa Fe Institute will come to be seen as Waldrop's; nor is the writing as well-honed. the catalyst of a new science or as a noble But science writing too often comes off like footnote to history. Consequently, it is hard to cheerleading, and Lewin makes up for some develop an interest in all the institutional mi- of the book's shortcomings with his more de- nutiae and blow-by-blow descriptions of po- tached, critical tone. litical battles that Waldrop presents. The peo- Yet I felt that even Lewin could have been ple-to-science ratio is much higher than in more skeptical. Like the other two authors, he Chaos. Gleick used the scientists as vehicles to treats the idea of a phase transition between explain some pretty abstract mathematics; one order and chaos as though it were done sci- learns very little about their personal lives and ence. One would not know from these books feels none the poorer for it. The scientists in that a backlash against the idea is already Complexity are spun into full-blown charac- developing. The term edge of chaos has be- ters. Much of this is very well done, but (as I come so nearly a cliche that whenever it is heard the wife of one of the saentist-charac- uttered at the Santa Fe Institute, one can ters say) by the time you have read the third count on hearing groans from the loyal oppo- or fourth life story of an unappreciated genius sition. In their recent work, even some of the who found a home at the intellectual mecca institute's more enthusiastic supporters raise in Santa Fe, it is an effort to keep from skim- serious questions about ideas that all three ming. books take as gospel. We will have to wait to see how all of this 0th Levy's and Waldrop's books set a comes out. Meanwhile, now that the journal- fast (sometimes frenetic) pace with the ists have had their say, it will soon be the volume of the prose set at full blast. In scientists' turn. Kauffman, Langton, and Gell- some ways, then, it is refreshing to find that Mann all have contracts to write books about the third complexity book, by Roger Lewin, is complexity. And they are aiming their words more low-key, focusing on relaxed encounters not at their students or colleagues but at the with remarkable people. I liked how Lewin, book-buying public. whose long career as a saence writer (he was also an editor at New Scientist and Science) -George Johnson is an editor for "The Week gives him perspective and authority, and he in Review" section of the New York ranges farther afield than Waldrop does. In Times. His most recent book is In the Pal- addition to the conversations in Santa Fe, we aces of Memory: How We Build the listen in on discussions with the likes of Dan- Worlds Inside Our Heads (1991).

76 WQ SPRING 1993 The Amoralist

KISSINGER: A Biography. By Walter Isaacson. Si- reached something of a high point in 1983 mon & Schuster. 893 pp. $30 with the publication of Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White xcept for John Kennedy, no recent pub- House. Graphic details about Kissinger's syco- lic figure in American life has been the phancy toward superiors and abuse of staff- E subject of more adulation and attack ers-as well as about illegal wiretaps to plug than Henry Kissinger. By 1974, five years af- press leaks-caused some Americans to have ter leaving his professorship at Harvard, Rich- second thoughts about Dr. Kissinger. When ard Nixon's national security adviser and sec- coupled with complaints that the Nixon-Kis- retary of state had ascended to the superstar singer policies unnecessarily extended the war status reserved for Hollywood actors and in Vietnam at a cost of more than 20,000 sports heroes. In an hour-long television doc- American lives, provoked the slaughter of umentary that year, ABC's Ted Koppel de- millions of Cambodians, and caused the top- scribed the country as "half-convinced that pling of a democratically elected regime in nothing was beyond the capacity of this re- Chile and the death of its president, Salvador markable man. Kissinger already threatens to Allende, Kissinger's reputation suffered a fur- become a legend, the most admired man in ther erosion. America, the magician, the miracle worker." Now comes a new, massively detailed bi- Kissinger consciously contributed to this ography by Time's assistant managing editor, larger-than-lifeportrait by encouraging a view of himself as America's first true practitioner of Realpolitik-a combination of MachiaveUi, Metternich, and Bismarck-who popularized the term geopolitics, offered brilliant mono- logues on world affairs in a German accent, and had the capacity to meet every conceiv- able challenge abroad. The Watergate crisis, which led to the first resignation of a presi- dent in U.S.history, added to Kissinger's hold on the public imagination. "As an individual I led a charmed life," Kissinger wrote in his memoirs. "I became the focal point of a de- gree of support unprecedented for a non- elected official. It was as if the Public and Congress felt the national peril instinctively and created a surrogate center around which the national purpose could rally.'' Yet Kissinger was never immune to criti- cism. Stories about his arrogance, affinity for intrigue, bureaucratic back-stabbing, ruthless treatment of subordinates, and willingness to lie to the public, press, and Congress to ad- vance himself and his policies coincided with his rise to prominence as a master of the dip- lomatic game. This assault on his reputation Walter Isaacson. The book provides a fresh sures propelled the book onto bestseller lists, look at Kissinger-an interpretation based on they may in the long run diminish it as a seri- extensive interviews with some 150 people, ous work of analysis about some of the more including Richard Nixon and Kissinger him- important foreign-policy decisions of the latter self, previously unavailable transcripts of con- 20th century. versations, and numerous documents from That is particularly unfortunate because the Nixon Presidential Papers Project in Al- Isaacson provides telling insights into and as- exandria, Virginia. Yet, despite Isaacson's im- tute assessments of Kissinger's diplomacy in pressive research, the great bulk of the docu- Vietnam, the opening to China, detente with mentary record on Kissinger's service as the Soviet Union, and the 1973 Yom Kippur national security adviser and secretary of state War. On balance, Isaacson sees Kissinger's di- was unavailable and will remain so until at plomacy as a success story. He writes: "The least five years after Kissinger's death. Kissin- structure of peace that Kissinger designed ger dismisses the need to open these materials places him with Henry Stirnson, George Mar- any time soon by cavalierly arguing that shall, and Dean Acheson atop the pantheon "what is written in diplomatic documents of modem American statesmen. In addition, never bears much relation to reality." He he was the foremost American negotiator of should understand, however, that it is in the this century and, along with George Kennan, national interest for Americans to have a re- the most influential foreign policy intellec- alistic understanding of their history. tual." All this was accomplished, Isaacson Isaacson's book is a significant advance to- points out, despite the fact that Kissinger ward that end, but historians will do well to lacked "an instinctive feel for American val- press the case for early disclosure of the entire ues and mores" and failed to satisfy American Kissinger record. cravings for a "moral" foreign policy based on democratic give-and-take. saacson's reconstruction of Kissinger's life However much Isaacson's book may add from those records at his disposal makes a to Kissinger's reputation for undemocratic and I powerful indictment of the man's charac- unprincipled actions, it will do little to under- ter and behavior. It is a portrait of a tempera- mine his continuing grip on the country's mental neurotic, an insecure but stunningly imagination. As the journalist George Black brilliant man whose paranoia, petty rages, wrote in September 1992, Kissinger's "public and deceitfulness in the service of his ambi- reputation has never stood higher. His advice tions make the reader cringe at the thought bends ears in the nation's top boardrooms, that such ugly characteristics could have been and the rest of us can rely on hearing those rewarded with such high station and so much familiar wet-gravel tones on TV whenever in- honor. Isaacson pulls no punches in describ- ternational events require expert commen- ing this side of Kissinger's nature. In fact, the tary." Henry Kissinger is, so to speak, our for- recounting of Kissinger's intrigues against and eign-policy safety net. Should some awful manipulation of university and government maelstrom erupt abroad, we can continue to colleagues, including President Nixon, Secre- look to Dr. Kissinger for life-saving advice. Es- tary of State William Rogers, and Secretaries pecially at a time when the country sees the of Defense Melvin Laird and James Schle- need for a domestically minded president, it singer, become at times a distraction from the reassures Americans to know that Kissinger larger public matters on which Kissinger's his- remains ready to provide needed expertise in torical reputation must ultimately rest. There foreign affairs. sometimes is a quality of journalistic sensa- But will we truly want it? Yes and no. Kis- tionalism to Isaacson's revelations about Kis- singer's record of foreign-policy leadership singer's personality. And while such disclo- was a mixture of big successes and big fail-

78 WQ SPRING 1993 ures. Perhaps the most striking feature of Kis- It deserves to be remembered as among the singer's public service was his eagerness to worst decisions made by American statesmen address large questions. Kissinger shared with in this century. And it was an extension of the men like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon deeper failing that will plague Kissingerls an affinity for the grandiose. Each of them reputation forever. His affinity for realism- was determined to leave a large mark on his readiness to sacrifice moral considerations American life. But large designs do not neces- for what he considered the national interest- sarily make for an unblemished record. should remind us that America's greatness as Kissinger, as Isaacson depicts him, was at a nation rests partly on our antagonism to the his best in dealing with the Middle East, more disastrous aspects of traditional interna- China, and the Soviet Union. The Nixon-Kis- tional power politics. singer actions here will be remembered as vi- In the final analysis Kissinger's record- tal achievements in the winning of the Cold and the heated response to it by the public War, comparable to the Truman Doctrine, the and the press-seem a microcosm of Ameri- Marshall Plan, John F. Kennedy's resolution ca's 20th-century struggle with itself over re- of the Cuban Missile Crisis, his Test Ban alism and idealism. His use of balance-of- Treaty, and Ronald Reagan's later embrace of power diplomacy to advance the national Gorbachev, perestroika, and glasnost. Like- interest takes its place in this country's cen- wise, Kissinger will win high marks for his tury-long transformation into an orthodox na- shuttle diplomacy during and after the Yom tion-state practicing power politics. By con- Kippur War. His efforts to strike a balance be- trast, complaints about Kissinger's unethical tween Israel and Egypt will be celebrated as or illegal foreign policy reflect America's on- ultimately leading to the Camp David Ac- going belief in, and hope for, a world gov- cords and greater stability in the Middle East. erned by right rather than might. Ultimately, Yet, as Isaacson shows, Kissinger also biographers and historians will debate and bears (along with Nixon) a heavy burden of study Kissinger for what he tells us not only guilt and shame for the massive loss of life about U.S. diplomacy but also about the na- and the substantial suffering inflicted on tional anguish over what makes sense in our Southeast Asia. The two men's conviction conduct of foreign affairs. that U.S. prestige required a slow, negotiated withdrawal from Vietnam-which in turn led -Robert Dallek is professor of history at to attacks upon Cambodia that brought inter- UCLA and the author of Lone Star Ris- nal instability and millions of deaths to that ing: Lyndon Johnson and his Times, benighted country-was a flawed judgment. 1908-1960 (1991).

Criticizing the Critics

A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM, 1750- image of human life, a fiction of possible 1950: Volume 8; French, Italian, and Spanish Criti- lives. There is no reason to believe that the cism, 1900-1950. By Ren.4 Wellek. Yale. 367 pp. lives that have been lived exhaust the pos- $42.50 sibilities of living. The future may contain lives you or I could not imagine. So we have history of literary criticism? Why literature-as we have painting, sculpture, would anyone want to read such a music, film, and dance-to sustain us in the A thing? One possible answer is that lit- conviction that life is, or may be, more vari- erary criticism is comment on literature as an ous than anyone has known it to be.

BOOKS 79 Literary critics are concerned with such particular movement of literary theory and possibilities, such fictions. They bring to their criticism which considered literature as an talk about poems, novels, and stories many aesthetic activity, one that entails a formally different interests. A work of literature may be distinctive use of language. The problem was read with many concerns in mind-religious, how to show those formal attributes in prac- social, political, historical, or aesthetic. You tice and to distinguish the literary or poetic might read Pride and Prejudice to understand use of language from other, more mundane what the lives of young, genteel, unaffluent employments of it. A difficult proceeding. Im- English women in the early years of the 19th pelled by his formalist conviction, Wellek pro- century were like, why the question of mar- posed to trace the history of literary criticism riage was so urgent, how it comes about that as it has been practiced during the past 200 one young woman differs so much from her years in many countries and many languages. sisters, her mother, and her father-or you The present volume concludes his long tra- might read it to see what the Enghsh novel in vail. For ease of reference and to note the the early 19th century was up to and good at. scale of his undertaking, I list the earlier vol- Then again you might read it to marvel at the umes: (1) The Later Eighteenth Century, (2) The inventive power of a writer named Jane Aus- Romantic Age, (3) The Age of Transition, (4) The ten, or, alternatively, to consider the creative Later Nineteenth Century, (5) English Criticism, capacity of the English language in particular 1900-1950, (6) American Criticism, 1900-1950, or of language in general. Or you might sim- and (7)German, Russian, and Eastern European ply read it for entertainment, diversion, to Criticism, 19004950. pass the time that would have passed anyway but not as pleasantly. Such is literary criticism. n 1982 Wellek, now professor emeritus of But why, having talked about literature, literature at Yale, published The Attack on would anyone want to talk about the criticism I Literature, and Other Essays. I shall refer to of it-or to write a history of that criticism? two of those essays, "Literature, Fiction, and Because literary criticism is part of the his- Literariness" and "Reflections on my History tory of ideas, of what the mind has made. You of Modern Criticism." In the first of these are interested in the ideas people have had Wellek defended his understanding of litera- and continue to have. Ideas, in this case, ture. While he conceded that any kind of about literature. Why not? Literary criticism is writing may be of interest to someone for at least as interesting as philosophy, if only some purpose, it is reasonable to claim for lit- because it deals with imagined lives in some erature a particular form of existence and a relation to chaos and order, to possibility and corresponding privilege. Literature exists and fate, to conditions and the ingenuity called may be recognized as "high imaginative fic- upon to overcome them. Literature is other tion''-fiction in the sense of a world con- lives, so far as they can be imagined and un- ceived rather than a world alluded to or anno- derstood. To write the history of literary criti- tated; imaginative, meaning that a writer, cism is to write the history of certain ideas composing a work of literature, exerts the dis- that have arisen from the experience not of tinctively human capacity to imagine what writing literature but of reading it. That is otherwise does not exist; high, presumably in where Ren6 Wellek comes in. He is interested the sense of spiritually and morally serious in the ideas critics have had who have read rather than trivial or sordid. Literature, Wellek many works of literature and tried to make declared, is an aesthetic experience that sense of their experience as readers. "yields a state of contemplation, of intransi- But Wellek, I am pleased to note, is not a tive attention that cannot be mistaken for detached observer. He has an axe to grind. As anything else." Wellek means that while one a young man in Prague, he took part in a reads the mind is content to pay full attention

80 WQ SPRING 1993 to the object, say a novel, and to postpone, for elusion, if not to an end, in 1950, just at the the time being, going forward to any other moment when criticism, in his view, started experience or interest. Wellek's precursors turning into something else. In 1953 Roland here are Kant and Schiller. The aesthetic ex- Barthes published Writing Degree Zero and an- perience is, as they have taught us to say, dis- nounced that "the whole of literature, from interested; it is pure; it is not possessive or Flaubert to the present, has become the predatory. problematics of language." This is another story, as Wellek says, and he evidently does ut Wellek hasn't gone much further not propose to tell it. He says nothing about than this to say what precisely the critical theory or practice in the past 30 years. B mind is doing while it pays the work of Nor does he use its strange words like art the tribute of intransitive attention. The indeterrninancy, differance, deconstruction, dearest account of this "act of the mind," so phallogocentric, and minority discourse. far as my reading goes, is in Susanne K. Lang- So the History is likely to be consulted er's Feeling and Form (1953), where works of rather than read; or, if read, construed as a art are deemed to be created "only for percep- monument to humane letters and scholarship, tion." Their elements, Langer maintains, have a concatenation of once-proud hopes. no other design upon us than to be perceived. Wellek's terms of reference are nearly gone. If I am listening well to a symphony, I am Take for instance his use of the word "aes- paying such complete attention to its internal thetic." In American colleges and universities relations, experiencing its forms with such it is becoming virtually impossible to gain a concentration of mind in their favor, that ev- hearing for "aesthetic function," much less for ery other interest I have in my life is sus- its dominance in a work of literature. Only a pended. few years ago, Wellek said that "we must con- Criticism comes into existence as debate cede the final inexplicability of a great work of about literature. Wellek wants to understand art, the exception of genius." It would be hard the history of criticism as one might hope to to write a less fashionable sentence. It is understand the history of any other ideas. widely deemed a scandal to talk of genius; Over the centuries, criticism has become an and a scandal just as grave to speak of "a apparently endless argument about a few great work of art" without indicting its author. concepts, notably concepts of language, style, Wordsworth, it is now common to claim, meaning, form, structure, and beauty. To un- should have written not about his feelings on derstand the debate, we should hold it within the occasion of visiting Tintern Abbey but brackets, to see criticism "as a relatively inde- about the "wretched of the earth" who shel- pendent activity," not for the purpose of tered behind its walls. And so on. The motto establishing "criticism for criticism's sake" but for this indictment comes from Walter Benja- to keep our minds concentrated on the main min: "There is no document of civilization issues. Wellek has been examining criticism, that is not at the same time a document of according to this understanding of it, for barbarism." So an interest in literature and many years and making his own sense of it in criticism, such as Wellek has been expressing these eight volumes. for many arduous years, is now commonly- His achievement is immense. Only a great not universally-regarded as sleeping with linguist and a tough-minded scholar could the enemy. have written this History. So much talk, so many distinctions, all those languages, those o matter. Wellek believes, I assume, contexts. I hope his work will continue to be that great literature will continue to appreciated. But I can't be sure that it will be. N attract the intransitive attention he Wellek brings the story of criticism to a con- describes, and that the history of criticism will

BOOKS 81 continue to interest a sufficient number of finds uncongenial or indeed silly-Jacques readers. But this final volume doesn't make a Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, strong case for criticism as a lively debate. for instance. He does his best to be equable, Perhaps Wellek got tired and couldn't face the but in the end confesses that "an outsider chore of dealing with the proliferation of criti- who is suspicious of vague and mystical con- cal theories as they have been made to serve cepts" cannot make much of Maritain. "It is a every conceivable ideological cause. Who pity," he wearily reports, "that such a book, could cope with this exorbitance? There is an- filled with fine reflections on poetry, on inspi- other problem. Wellek knows, or thinks he ration, and on different genres and figures in knows, what literature is, what the literary literary history, ends with a somewhat empty character of language is. I judge that he has gesture toward a religious metaphysics." It is lost patience with the error of other critics. He a more acute pity that Wellek has felt honor- can't be expected to dispute with adepts of ably obliged to read hundreds of such bab- deconstruction, feminism, postmodernism, bling books. queer theory, cultural studies, and a babel of In the end, the History of Criticism is most other rhetorics. Wellek confines his attention interesting, most touching, as Wellek's intel- to the standard sages. The big names in the lectual autobiography. The pressure of his life present volume are Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Va- in literature and criticism is felt in a word lery, Benedetto Croce, and Jose Ortega y Gas- here, a word there, an interpolated strange or set. But each of these is presented as a sloppy curious or odd when Wellek cannot bear to thinker, and the whole progress of modem leave the paraphrased sentences without criticism appears as a trek from one Cave of comment. His own life is in those adjectives, Error to the next. Even when he falls into en- for the most part ruefully enforced. thusiasm, Wellek recovers his severity almost at once. -Denis Donoghue, a Wilson Center Fellow, The labor of writing this History has evi- holds the Henry James Chair of Letters at dently been appalling, and it shows. Wellek New York University. His most recent often drives himself to paraphrase a book he book is The Pure Good of Theory (1992).

Contemporary Affairs moment. "Previous cyclical troughs for the U.S. middle class," he writes, were "mere hiccups in the BOILING POINT: Democrats, Republicans, and historical expansion that reached a late 20th-cen- the Decline of Middle-class Prosperity. By Kevin tury zenith at some point in the 1960s or 1970s Phillips. Random House. 307 pp. $23 when 50 to 55 percent of Americans belonged to an economic middle class without any foreign or The "American dream" has always been vague, historical equivalent." Other analysts tend to see but most people (especially outsiders) have as- the present economic slippage of the American sumed that it was fundamentally material rather middle class as merely another symptom of wors- than spiritual. Phillips's sprawling threnody to ening global economic conditions, but Phillips puts American exceptionalism makes the assumption the blame on specifically American circumstances, explicit. His argument is that the American "mid- on bad choices made by American business and dle-class squeeze" has reached a decisive historical political leaders.

82 WQ SPRING 1993 Phillips has some claim to the role of a political Phillips's assessment of the American dream in prophet. His Emerging Republican Majority (1967) strictly financial terms also makes it hard to assess predicted the conservative resurgence-and, as the his dark hints that bourgeois "boiling-points" have architect of Richard Nixon's 1968 "southern strat- alarming political consequences. Historically, pop- egy" he helped bring it about. Two decades later, ulist movements have involved marginal groups, in The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), he suggested but for the first time, he argues, it is the middle that middle-class woes might finally break the Re- class that is in revolt. What, exactly, are the temfy- publican monopoly on the White House. The rela- ing signs of this revolt? Phillips has little to display tively short time it took Phillips to go from a Re- other than George Bush's receipt of a smaller per- publican to a Democratic Jeremiah was the time it centage of the vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover took America, he believes, to undergo a secret got in '32 and, also, the twangy antiestablishment revolution. In the early 1950s, he points outs, gibes of a Texas billionaire. Knowing what has $600,000-a-year executives were taxed at around happened to the middle class elsewhere in the in- 75 percent of their income, while the median fam- dustrial world might allow readers to evaluate not ily "breadwinner" (in his quaint terminology) paid Phillips's statistics-which most economists ac- five percent. By the late 1980s "the effective com- cept-but his prognostications about what these biied rate of federal taxes on median or average statistics portend. Yet almost the only analogy families had climbed to the 25-28 percent range," Phillips offers is to the brede nziddenstand (broad while taxes on half-million dollar incomes had middle group) of the 17th-century Dutch Republic, with its comely houses along the Keizersgracht and Heerengracht. Readers skeptical of Phillips's barely veiled threat of a populist or fascist reaction to overtaxation may take comfort from the fact that the middle class of Amsterdam and Utrecht sur- vived the decline on which he morbidly focuses. There is life after exceptionalism.

NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS: The Tragic History of the Kurds. By John Bulloch and Harvey Morris. Oxford. 242 pp. $25 fallen to almost the same level. "There, in a sen- During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, responding to tence," he says, "was the fiscal revolution." President George Bush's call for the oppressed But what is the middle class, anyway, in a peoples of Iraq to rise up, Kurdish guerrillas seized "classless society" such as America? Even though control of much of northern Iraq. Once the UN Phillips is always ready to make assertions about truce was signed, Saddam Hussein sent his surviv- 'the middle-class psyche," his characterization is ing troops north, slaughtering the lightly armed purely financial: It is the mathematical middle-in- Kurds and driving millions more into exile. For the come group. He indignantly dismisses any altema- Kurds, the Allies' indifference to their fate was tive methods that might take behavior or attitudes business as usual. Constituting the world's largest into account. Such rigidity forces him to banish stateless nationality, the Kurds reside in countries from the middle class those most bourgeois of pro- where they have at times been denied the use of fessions, medicine and law, and to cast them as their language and even fatally poisoned by chemi- profiteering enemies of his median group. The ten- cal sprays-persecutions that are rarely reported in dency of young householders, unable to achieve the world press. Why this neglect? British journal- their parents' norm of "a suburban home with two ists Bdoch and Moms suggest that the major in- reasonably new cars in the garage," to substitute ternational powers share an "Arabocentric view" "stylish clothing and sophisticated wine and food of the Middle East. Those who consider the region he mocks as "simulating affluence." Such reason- essentially an Arab domain believe that the claims ing reduces his middle class to a tabular abstraction of the Palestinian Arabs demand attention and re- drained of social or cultural content. dress, while those of the Kurds, an ancient non-

BOOKS 83 Arabic people, seem less legitimate. It has hardly the loyal Erasmians of Berry's stripe. The Vatican helped that Kurdistan is partitioned among five would do well to listen now. countries (Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Armenia) and that Kurdish insurgents are too faction-ridden to form a single independence movement. In this A DAY IN THE NIGHT OF AMERICA. By first book-length history of the Kurds in English, Kevin Coyne. Random House. 316 pp. $22 Bulloch and Moms make clear that the Arab-Israeli THE TWENTY-FOUR HOUR SOCIETY: Un- conflict is neither the longest nor the bloodiest derstanding Human limits in a World That Never struggle in the Middle East. Stops. By Martin Moore-Ede. Addison-Wesley. 230 pp. $22.95

LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: Catholic America's "new frontier," declares journalist Kevin Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. By Jason Coyne, is the night. No nation in history (except, Berry. 407 pp. Doubleday. $22,50 possibly, contemporary Japan) has ever had so many people working through the night-7.3 mil- In the summer of 1983, in the heart of Louisiana's lion-as America does now. To map this world, Cajun country, a nightmare became real when two Coyne zigzagged nocturnally through 41 states, parishioners of St. John's Catholic church learned covering 18,000 miles and consuming, no doubt, that their trusted pastor, Father Gilbert Gauthe, about as many gallons of coffee. He accompanied had been sexually abusing their three sons, along oil workers on the Alaskan pipeline, Federal Ex- with dozens of other St. John's alter boys. Horrible press package handlers, and Las Vegas "working as the crime was, the response of the church hi- girls" on their nightly rounds. He soon came to erarchy to its disclosure was nearly as appalling. view day workers "the way the military often sees Gauthe, it turns out, had been removed from a civilians-pampered, undisciplined, ignorant of previous assignment for similar offenses. The vicar life's harsher truths." Most Americans who work at general of the diocese tried to downplay the more night do so not because they want to but because recent incidents, cautioning that too much talk the job requires it. And the monetary rewards for might hurt Gauthe's career. night labor are meager, at best. Still, Coyne con- While journalist Berry devotes considerable cludes his survey with an upbeat message: space to the Gauthe affair and other similar scan- Humans can adapt to almost any situation. dals, his book is far more than a mere expose. A Moore-Ede, a physiologist at the Harvard Medi- devout Catholic, Berry is concerned with funda- cal School, disagrees. Why, he asks, have most no- mental problems threatening the Catholic church, torious industrial accidents-Bhopal, Chernobyl, including the practice of celibacy and the evasive the Rhine chemical spill-occurred at night? Hu- political machinations of an out-of-touch church man sleep rhythms, millennia in the shaping, are hierarchy. Celibacy, Berry believes, and the allied ill-suited to a technological society that demands of opposition to women in clerical roles, are at least everyone, from hospital employees to Wall Street partially responsible for the declining number- currency traders, an elusive efficiency at 3 AM and quality-of those choosing a priestly vocation. Moore-Ede, however, is not a Luddite who would While there has been throughout history no lack of (so to speak) turn back the clock. He proposes al- sexually active priests, giving rise to one scandal or ternative night-work measures-ranging from arti- another, seldom have there been so many as to- ficial lighting that mimics the sun's rays to "poly- day. And according to several priests whom Berry phasic sleep" (strategic napping) to machines that quotes, there has never been so large a preponder- monitor alertness. Such precautions, he believes, ance of gay clerics-around 40 percent, by many can save lives and billions of dollars. The growing estimates. world of night work has, until now, caught plan- To be sure, very few homosexuals are pedo- ners unprepared. No one foresaw that differences philes, and heterosexuals can also be fixated upon between day and night would become blurred in children. The larger point of Berry's book is that an response to a global economy driven by telecom- unhealthy, unventilated atmosphere now prevails munications, computers, and faxes. "Societal revo- in the Catholic church-one that could bring on lutions," Moore-Ede comments, "have the habit of legions of angry Luthers, far less temperate than sneaking up on us."

84 WQ SPRING 1993 History presiding over hearth, home, and morals. Middle- and upper-class women, supplied not only with PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: moral authority but with leisure, expanded their The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United horizons through innumerable local church and States. By Theda Skocpol. Harvard. 714 pp. $34.95 civic clubs, which were then united through such organizations as the General Federation of Wom- For decades scholars have been trying to under- en's Clubs (GFWC). "All clubs," the GFWC stated, stand why the American welfare state was such a 'as bodies of trained housekeepers, should con- late bloomer and why, by European standards, its sider themselves guardians of the civic housekeep- growth remains stunted. Was the absence of a ing of their respective communities." They took up strong, European-style labor movement to blame? a host of causes, from temperance to juvenile de- Or were America's individualistic values? These linquency, and pressured many states into enacting and other theories are admirably surveyed (and, labor laws regulating the hours, wages, and safety with varying degrees of success, refuted) by conditions of female workers. In 1912, the federal Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, on her way to in- government created a Children's Bureau, which troducing yet another theory: The United States during the 1920s briefly offered prenatal and child- was no latecomer; indeed, it pioneered the welfare care education for mothers. state. By the mid-1920s, Skocpol notes, this wave of Her case rests on two early trial runs for a wel- reform had passed. Women cast their first votes in fare state in America. The first took form with the a national election in 1920, and feminists em- gradual expansion of Civil War pensions, which barked on a quest for equality, which could not be were inaugurated to aid disabled veterans and the squared with the notion of separate spheres. The dependents of men killed in the war. These pen- exalted moral status that had allowed women to sions, Skocpol writes, evolved into "an open- prevail was gone. Skocpol's study illustrates, albeit ended system of disability, old-age, and survivors' unintentionally, that in America receiving public benefits for any who could claim minimal service support posed questions that bore a higher moral time on the northern side of the Civil War." By charge than they did elsewhere. Only extraordi- 1910, more than one third of elderly northern men nary circumstances could overcome popular were receiving federal pensions averaging a rela- doubts about the welfare state. It took nothing less tively generous $172 annually. Skocpol concedes, than the Great Depression to bring about however, that the pension system was "not really a of the cornerstone Social Security Act of 1935. But 'welfare state."' It was more an elaborate patron- uniquely American doubts-as President Clinton's age scheme-the Republican Party's answer to the pledge to "abolish welfare as we know it" sug- turkeys handed out at Thanksgiving by Demo- gests-still linger. cratic ward heelers-and it helped to ensure the GOP's domination of national politics during the late 19th century. ANTISEMITISM: The Longest Hatred. By Robert The first modem welfare-state measures were S. Wistrich. Pantheon. 341 pp. $25 enacted in Germany during the 1880s and in Brit- ain during the early 1900s, but the United States Before the 1870s no one ever encountered an anti- emphatically declined to join in. An early 20th- Semite, at least by name. Only in that decade did a century attempt by reform groups such as the German journalist, Wihelm Man-, invent the term American Association for Labor Legislation to win anti-Semitism to advertise a new, improved way of pensions and other programs for the "army of la- hating Jews. Prejudice against Jews on religious bor" failed miserably. But even as these efforts fiz- grounds was then coming to seem backwards, zled, reform-minded women's groups were crusad- even medieval; Man- and others like him proposed ing for programs that could have become, in better grounds, reasons based on economics and Skocpol's view, the foundation of a "maternalist" race-a hatred of Jews that was, so they claimed, welfare state. By mutual agreement, the sexes in- modem and "scientific." To understand a prejudice habited "separate spheres" in late 19th- and early that has existed for millennia but whose shape and 20th-century America, with men immersed in the justification keep changing, Wistrich, a noted histo- world of work and partisan politics and women rian at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, has written

BOOKS 85 sizable remnant remains, and in the Middle East, where Islamic fundamentalists have imported an earlier Christian anti-Semitism to fortify their en- mity toward Israel. The particular logic in each case eventually comes to seem almost superfluous: @ ec mttwft,SnN< ec u(sS&$ofI

& tc,*?%bf<*:., *,2 *? x.\',>,Ef, Arts Letters >.:,::,+ $8,:: ,-*.<,: >22 <<" Je:ta&, >.8.>ea;e:,..,, ,<> .,:*7:-,,<*,g CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM. By Edward W. 3.:..~ .,, %A,z 8,,mk, , .B,?.,,., tG ,"c:.,::k, 2?'.>: 9%,",',. *~xs%z?E,: 380 $25 SieuiiQslattotiti~~~~ra~~i~~!1%ew wm~*tj,m IW~& W~$SS. Said. Knopf. pp.

Critics in the tradition of Matthew Arnold imagine culture to be above the selfish and sordid calcula- the first single-volume overview of Jew-hatred tions of politics, a disinterested realm of sweetness throughout history. and light. Where a social historian would record, "Although I loathe anti-Semitism," wrote Har- for example, that the Greeks practiced slavery, the old Nicholson satirically in 1945, "I do dislike Amoldian critic would note how in their culture Jews." Jews have proved, it seems, rather easy to and art the Greeks fashioned so noble an image of dislike. After the Diaspora, Jewish exiles-with the individual soul that, in the long run, it consti- their prohibitions against intermarriage, their di- tuted an argument against slavery. etary laws, and their doctrine of election-met Said, a professor of literature at Columbia, rejects with distrust wherever they ventured in the Medi- notions of "high culture and its essentially benign terranean world. But pagan "anti-Semitism" (to ap- effects. In his earlier and highly influential book ply the term generically) hardly differed from other Orientalism (1978), he argued that Western writers kinds of xenophobia common to the ancient world. had created a fictional Middle East, one that served Christianity, with its need to distinguish itself from to justify France's and England's imperialistic poli- its parent religion, came up with a novel accusa- cies in the region. In Culture and Imperialism the tion: The Jews had murdered God. This charge, suspect on trial is no longer simply the Orientalist elaborated with salacious and sensational details but modem Western literature itself. When literary and drummed into the European populace for cen- mandarins such as Arnold or T. S. Eliot specify the turies, gave anti-Semitism a radically different best that society has known and thought, they are character. It became theological, metaphysical; it no actually, in Said's view, ennobling certain "codes longer even required the presence of Jews. If, dur- of intellectual and moral behaviour" at the expense ing the 18th century, the Enlightenment and of other codes: theirs, in other words, at the ex- French Revolution finally ended legalized discrirni- pense of those of the oppressed and non-Western. nation and ghettoization, they paved the way for Eliot is thus an imperialist, a literary Cecil Rhodes. something worse. Once anti-Semitism was based More specifically, Said charges, it is no accident on pseudoscientific theories of racial pollution, that during the heyday of imperialism the novel Christians gave up their campaign to convert the "achieved eminence as the aesthetic form." The Jews. "The Nazis took over all the negative anti- sense of narrative that 19th-century fiction fostered Jewish stereotypes in Christianity," Wistrich writes, made the disjointed colonial conquests seem them- "but they removed the escape clause." selves part of an ongoing, necessary narrative, Fifty years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is while specific novels, from Dickens's Great Expec- again rearing its head, in Poland and Romania, tation to Kipling's Kim, defined "us" and "them" in where almost no Jews now live, in Russia, where a ways that created a rationale for the former gov-

86 WQ SPRING 1993 erning the latter. Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, CATULLUS. By Charles Martin. Yale. 197 pp. $30 and V. S. Naipaul might have exposed the evils of THE POEMS OF CATULLUS. Translated by colonialism, but Said finds these "reformers" little Charles Martin. Johns Hopkins. 181 pp. $35 better than the imperialists they criticized. Con- THE NORTON BOOK OF CLASSICAL LIT- rad's andGreene's fiction still presents a "Western ERATURE. Edited by Bernard Knox. Norton. 866 view of the non-Western world," Said writes, that pp. $29.95 "is so ingrained as to blind [them] to other histor- ies, other cultures, other aspirations." Who was the first Modernist poet? Ezra Pound? This kind of argument-which owes a debt to T. S. Eliot? Martin, a critic and translator, suggests Michel Foucault's linkages between power and an earlier candidate-Gaius Valerius Catullus, a knowledge-has become standard fare in the Roman of the first century B.C. Catullus is the only years since Orientalism was published. A reader surviving poet from a group known as "the mod- might want less to question it than to wonder why em ones" (the neoterics), a group of Roman bards a literary critic has so obviously checked literature who sought to throw off the prevailing Homeric at the door. Said discusses a novel no differently yoke and explore new metrical patterns and than he does a Verdi opera or a film such as Apoca- shorter lyric forms. Even Catullus's subjects-adul- lypse Now. Since only extractable messages interest tery, homosexuality, licentiousness-surprise read- him, novels could just as well all be op-ed pieces in ers today, who seldom expect such candor in an- the New York Times. Said also tends to focus not on dent verse. (In fact, as Martin observes, such racy the best but on the worst work of an author and, in topics were relatively familiar to literate Romans.) it, on some minor point. So in a chapter intrigu- Catullus, who was born in Verona but spent most ingly titled "Jane Austen and Empire," he deigns to of his brief life (84?-54 B.c.)in a Rome approaching analyze only Mansfield Park and, in that, only a the zenith of its powers and sophistication, has few passing references to Sir Thomas Bertram's long been regarded as a guilty pleasure among having been a planter in Antigua, without ever classicists. Repressed by Christian authorities, his considering the structure, language, characters, or work came close to disappearing altogether. After irony of the novel. Does a person come to resem- centuries in which he was only a name, a single ble, finally, that which he most violently opposes? manuscript of his surfaced in the 14th century in It would seem so. Having so long unmasked West- his native Verona, where it was recopied before em literature as propaganda, Said writes literary vanishing forever. criticism that is itself barely distinguishable from Beyond mere prurience, what is the secret of ideological polemics. Catullus's appeal for such 20th-century poets as Pound and Yeats? Catullus sought to explore the kind of truth that exists in everyday life, to release verse from the constraints of the epic. He created short, witty poems, sometimes on deliberately triv- ial subjects, teasing out his message through irony and innovative perspective. Consider this rninia- ture poem (one of the few possible to quote in its entirety in a stodgy periodical):

I hate & love. And if you should ask how I can do both, I couldn't say; but I feel it, and it shivers me.

Catullus reveals the same complicated emotions, expressed in conversational tone, whether embar- rassing a friend into returning a stolen napkin, at- tacking a bitter enemy with biting sarcasm, or wooing some object of his affections, notably the married female lover to whom he gave the name Lesbia. The very juxtaposition of Catullus's words and-in a larger sense-of the poems themselves

BOOKS 87 has a contemporary ring to modem readers. A shepherd boys discovered them in 1947, a seven- poem that extols the merits of marital fidelity will man scholarly team in East Jerusalem gained con- be followed by one discussing the potential bene- trol of the scrolls and severely limited access to fits of adultery; one that speaks of erotic obsession them. "The greatest manuscript find of modem will accompany a poem that treats the sanctity of times" (in archeologist W. E. Albright's words) has marriage. It is Catullus's ambivalence, his ability to thus had its meaning deciphered and publicized present contradictory views and to encompass the only piecemeal and slowly. Even the scrolls' long- full erotic spectrum, that led Yeats to invoke his awaited but unauthorized publication in 1991, name to mock the logical consistency of modem through a still-unnamed source, remains some- academics and thinkers: thing of a puzzle. Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review Lord, what would they say (BAR), here collects from his own publication the Did their Catullus walk that way? more important essays bearing upon the scrolls' meaning. The scrolls have provoked unending Martin's commentary is part of Yale University controversy by revealing that many practices once Press's new Hermes series, whose aim is to reintro- thought to be unique to the early Christian church duce the classics to a popular audience. Bernard were prefigured by the beliefs and rituals of a Jew- Knox, in his introduction to The Norton Book of ish Essene community near the Dead Sea. The lit- Classical Literature, reminds us that even fragments tle that was previously known about the Essenes of the works of poets such as Catullus "give us came from a few first-century A.D. writers-Jose- unforgettable glimpses into a brilliant archaic phus, Philo of Alexandria, and Pliny the Elder, the world." Those wanting a longer look might start latter of whom characterized the Essene sect as "re- with Knox's introduction to this comprehensive markable beyond all the other tribes in the world, volume. In 40 pages, Knox covers everything from the development of written language to the fall of Rome, tracing the course of classical literature from Homer to St. Augustine. "It would be a pity," Nietzsche wrote in the 19th century, "if the classics should speak to us less clearly because a million words stood in the way." The million words are, by now, probably a billion words, but Martin's study and translation of Catullus, the Herrnes se- ries, and Knox's work all skirt the industrial com- plex of technical scholarship to present ancient lit- erature afresh to the common reader.

UNDERSTANDING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS: A Reader from the Biblical Archeology Review. Ed. by Hershel Shanks. Random House. 336 pp. $23 JESUS AND THE RIDDLE OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS. By Barbara Thiering. HarperCollins. 451 pp. $24

The very name Dead Sea Scrolls has come to evoke, rather like "The Curse of the Mummy," im- ages of temple robbers and age-old intrigue. But if there is a mystery surrounding these documents- the only Hebrew manuscripts on either papyrus or leather to have survived from pre-Christian times-it is a modem one. Not long after Bedouin

88 WQ SPRING 1993 in that it has no women and has renounced all and irrational entertainment"; two centuries later, sexual desire, has no money, and has only palm the French composer Pierre Boulez proposed blow- trees for company." In the Dead Sea Scrolls, how- ing up the world's opera houses on the grounds ever, the Essenes come to life, although it is a life that they were devoted to an absurdly costly and that no one could have imagined for them. They indefensible art form. If opera is a bastard art-the staged sacred meals with eschatological signifi- "illegitimate" offspring of music, libretto, dance, cance, complete with the blessing of bread and historical costume, and theatrical production- wine, and they performed baptisms by immersion. then novelist-critic Littlejohn (like Edmund in King Moreover, both the early Christians and the Es- Lear) argues that bastard is best. For all its hybrid senes expected the Messiah to appear imminently. qualities, he insists, opera produces effects, such as One scroll, "The Messiah of Heaven and Earth," 'the human voice at its most powerful and expres- clearly alludes to the idea of bodily resurrection. sive," found nowhere else. Littlejohn pursues his So much from the scrolls seems dear, but a argument in essays ranging from "Why We Put Up number of questions they raise have no ready an- with Dumb Opera Plots" to the changing public swers: Was John the Baptist a member of the com- tastes of "The Janhcek Boom." Everywhere, munity that wrote the scrolls? Was Jesus, in fact, an Littlejohn opposes popular excesses, such as Peter Essene? Is the "Temple Scroll" the lost sixth book Sellars's stagings of Mozart, in which the "directo- of the Torah? Taken together, however, these es- rial conceit [is] alien to the score," as well as aca- says establish that early Christianity is grounded demic excesses, such as Comell University's "new more completely in Jewish thought than any au- opera studies," which treat librettos as autonomous thority before 1947 had proposed. works and subject them to advanced literary the- If the scholarly team controlling the scrolls was ory. Littlejohn may fail to convert the skeptic or to worried about their falling into the wrong hands, interest the academic specialist: Eschewing theory Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrates and what Shaw called the "Mesopotamian words" what happens when they do. There is no direct of technical musical analysis, he writes not to mention of Jesus in the scrolls, but such a small preach to the converts but to delight them. detail hardly deters Australian biblical scholar Bar- bara Thiering. She uses them to argue that Jesus was born to an unwed (hence, officially "virgin") Science & Technology woman, that he married twice and fathered three children, and that he did not die on the cross but THE CREATIVE MOMENT: How Science was drugged and later revived in a cave. What Made Itself Alien to Modem Culture. By Joseph Thiering has done, in fact, is substitute for the texts Schwartz. HarperCollins. 252 pp. $25 of the scrolls-which are fragmentary, sometimes contradictory, and in archaic script-the idea of a Joseph Schwartz has an unusual complaint: "Our subtext, a hidden code, which she then "decodes" poets do not tell of the intricacies of micromin- into a narrative that is fluent, coherent, and, of iature electronic circuitry." For that matter, he con- course, unverifiable. tinues, "the mere mention of relativity makes ev- There will likely be no such bold and final "solv- ery intellectual in Europe and the United States ing" of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But a wide range of start to stammer." To believe the former physics scholars, such as those represented in the BAR professor, little has changed during the 35 years reader, are now providing reliable information and since C. P. Snow identified the gulf between sci- possible interpretations of these manuscripts that, ences and the humanities as perhaps the problem as Shanks notes, "ignited the imagination of for modem society. nonscholar and scholar alike." Schwartz, moreover, maintains that this division is unnecessary, indeed little more than a historical accident. To locate the origins of the accident, he THE ULTIMATE ART: Essays Around and returns to Renaissance Italy, when Galileo's study About Opera. By David Littlejohn. Univ. of Calif. of the heavenly bodies landed him in trouble with 303 pp. $25 the pope. Galileo's solution was to convert his ar- guments into the rarefied language of mathemat- Samuel Johnson characterized opera as "an exotick ics, which mollified the church by being inaccessi-

BOOKS 89 ble to the laity. A trend, a long trend, began. it-including many eminent scientists. Cronin, an Schwartz's book is an examination of those scien- infectiously enthusiastic classical Darwinist at Ox- tific breakthroughs-from Sadi Camot's heat en- ford, begins her book with a handy if unsyrnpa- gine to the creation of nuclear physics and the "ge- thetic survey of rival views such as creationism, netic revolution"-that were couched in idealism, and Lamarckism, all of which she dis- unnecessarily complex terminologies baffling to misses as "follies" and "hopelessly off-target." the layperson. "The form in which understanding Cronin is not, however, attempting to argue the in physics [and other contemporary sciences] is ex- perfection of Darwin's original ideas. Rather she pressed," he writes, "has been mistaken for the confronts two crucial weaknesses that even many understanding itself." Schwartz himself wrote Ein- Darwinians have skimmed over. These problems stein for Beginners (1979) to demonstrate how tech- are "beauty" and "altruism." The peacock's beauti- nical scientific theories can be made comprehensi- ful tail, for example, requires enormous energy to ble to the general reader. grow, even while it hampers the bid's ability to Is there a solution to the "two-cultures" prob- fly-hardly a solid support for Darwin's theory lem? Is it even possible for science again to learn that only traits useful for survival survive. And the language of daily speech? Schwartz's proposals neuter ants, with what Cronin calls "saintly self- for achieving popular scientific literacy-support- abnegation," work dutifully for the community, ing a Green-movement awareness of the environ- seemingly in denial of natural selection's famous ment and adding a new undergraduate-level sci- self-interested, utilitarian imperative. Beauty and ence course on technology-seem feeble. What altruism were telling arguments against Darwin a Schwartz has to offer is less a than a dif- century ago and caused him immense difficulty. To ferent perspective. Science writers today tend to explain beauty, Darwin resorted to the argument of fall into two opposing camps: the supporters who sexual selection-that peahens, for example, pre- view science as the most legitimate method of ac- ferred mates with gaudier tails-an idea that other quiring knowledge and the detractors who take 19th-century male scientists mocked. They main- stock of ever more deadly engines and destructive tained that females could never choose anything technologies. To his credit, Schwartz avoids the consistently enough to have a lasting evolutionary stock jargon of either group. He wants to promote effect. To explain altruistic behavior, Darwin was science but at the same time to shame it into aban- driven even further afield: He posited a rudimen- doning its claim to an "occult" or privileged status. tary moral sense in animals. His outlook, at least, is refreshing. Cronin proves a stricter Darwinian than Darwin himself. The problem of altruism, she writes, "dis- solves, gratifyingly, before our eyes" when we take THE ANT AND THE PEACOCK: Altruism and a "gene-centered view" of evolution. Since the Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today. By Helena 1960s the idea of selfish genes has become increas- Cronin. Cambridge. 490 pp. $39.95 ingly accepted. According to this view, animals, once considered the basic evolutionary unit, are Despite its imposing simplicity and awesome nothing more than vehicles for the transmission of explanatory power, the theory of natural selection genes between generations. The problem of beauty has never achieved the status of a universally ac- is more intractable, and Cronin (and others) are cepted scientific law. As recent surveys reveal, an reviving Darwin's once-ridiculed idea of sexual se- astonishingly large proportion of people in the oth- lection. Sensible peahens could well prefer men- erwise rational West do not believe in evolution. folk with sexy tails, she argues, because such Belief, however, is not the only issue: The idea of plumage might indicate beneficial genetic charac- design-without-a-designerhas had to struggle for teristics. Darwinism is now in the midst of a re- survival against not only those who dislike its im- vival, and perhaps not since the master himself has plications but also those who just misunderstand it found a more eloquent exponent than Cronin.

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90 WQ SPRING 1993 A HISTORY OF MUSIC OF THE WESTERN WORLD

1100-1980 yr Contents This new program is for anyone who likes music 1. Medieval Music 1100-1480 and would like to know more about it. Hundreds of musical examples are combined with explanatory comments by 2. Music of the Renaissance 1480-1600 15 orominent musical authorities. The stimulating discussions 3. Baroque Period 1600-1750 covering the period 1100 to 1980 are richly illustrated with authentic musical examples performed by major international 4. Classical Period 1750-1830 orchestras and chamber groups. 5. Romantic Period 1830-1900 The program is on 12 full-length audio-cassettes. Featured 6. Modern Period 1900-1945 commentators include Dr. Christopher Page of Oxford Univer- sity, Anthony Rooley, founder of the Early Music Centre in 7. Contemporary Music 1945-Present London, Christopher Hogwood, director of the Handel and 8. Approaches to Popular Music Haydn Society, and many others. For the first time you can hear 9. History of Percussion Instruments insightful discussion of the roots of our rich musical heritage and then moments later hear the actual pieces being played. As 10. Story of Reggae and Calypso enthusiastic reviewer James K. Bowman, declared, "it's wonder- 11. Introduction to English Folk Music ful - no more flipping from book chapter to recod 3, band 5. It's all right here." 12. Instruments around the World Full information on lecturers. comoosers. and oerformine artists is included with each caisett;. ~his'attraitivel~pa&- aged program is only $89.50 postpaid and is available from Audio-Forum. To place your order call us toll-free at 1-800-243-1234,or Fax us at 203-453-9774, or write to: m@RoomK400,96 Broad St., Guilford, CT 06437 T61: (203) 453-9794

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THE UNIVERSITYOF UTAH PRESS zip 101 University Services Bldg. ll citY I Salt Lake City, UT 841 12 (800) 444-8638 ext. 6771 BOX15-830 HAMILTON ~allsVillage, CT 06031 POETRY WELDON KEES

Selected and Introduced by Joseph Brodsky

f Weldon Kees were alive today, he would be 79 years old; but the first thing that makes this unthinkable is his poems. Their vehement bleak- ness makes it all too plausible that on July 19, 1955, when a car regis- Itered in his name was found near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran- cisco, the 41-year-old Weldon Kees had committed suicide. No body was ever found. Now and then a rumor would have him alive and well under an assumed name, south of the border. However, during the last 35 years, nothing even remotely dose to his diction, either under his or an assumed name, has appeared in print. As far as this evidence goes, the poet is dead. Suicide, as the great Czech poet Vladimir Holan once said, is not an exit; it is the word "exit" painted on a wall. Suicide-or, for that matter, a disappear- ing act-is also bad PR, particularly when the general disposition of the public toward poetry is that of benign neglect (of such extraordinary propor- tions, it must be added, that one wonders what the word benign is doing here). Whatever happened to the body of Weldon Kees, the body of his work, given the size of this nation's potential readership, might just as well also rest at the bottom of the Pacific. The consolation, perhaps, is that it is not there alone. Scores and scores of outstanding American poets see their work consigned to the same fate by the existing system of book distribution in this country. "The American peopleu- in the memorable phrase of a former U.S. senatorÑd'hav the right to be wrong." This sounds truly democratic and in line with the Constitution, yet nature and Providence, or both, thrust poets into the nation's midst to make it more lucid. As things are, the American people's right to know their own poetry is denied to most of them. With that, democracy is denied its purpose, for democracy is not an end unto itself. The purpose of democracy is to become enlightened democracy. Democracy without enlightenment is but a well-policed jungle. What does this have to do with Weldon Kees? Not much, perhaps, except that his dark vision could spare many an individual the loneliness of his or her agony. It could because in Kees's poetry agony is raised to the level of art. And this is the level to which, to paraphrase Walter Pater, all human experience, be it negative or positive, aspires. This is what enlightenment is all about. It should not be mistaken for therapy, although it can perform that task also. At a certain point, men and women should grow up and recognize that they are the sum not only of their intentions and convictions but also of their deeds. In clarifying this point, the poems of Weldon Kees come in handy. He is a poet of remarkable totality of

92 WQ SPRING 1993 approach toward the world and his very self. Behind his irate dismissal of both, one discerns a fierce Calvinist spirit; one sees a man summoning his epoch and himself to his own last judgment and finding no argument in either's defense, and, naturally, no grace. He does this with relish and with savage irony. How is it, one may won- der, that a boy from Nebraska turned into this merciless, supreme agonist? Was there something in his background? Was it the Wall Street Crash, or the years of the Great Depression? Was it the war on the Continent, and perhaps the need to compensate for his guilt at not taking part in it? A failed marriage? Should we wax Freudian? We should not. Neither taken separately nor in their totality will these explanations account for this poet's diction. They will not because Kees was not alone on the scene, although there is no denying his cooperation in that diction's hardening. Its origins are not in his life but in his very art and in its terrifying ability to impose standards upon work and life alike. The measure of one's surrender to these standards is, frankly, the measure of one's talent, and Kees was a man of immense talent. Herein lies the explanation of his artistic success and his human tragedy.

o put it simply, by the time of Weldon Kees's arrival, the dominant note in poetry on both sides of the Atlantic was that of negation of the modem reality. The source of that note was, of course, European T Romanticism; its current mouthpiece, Modernism. To be sure, the reality by and large did not deserve any better. On the whole, art's treatment of contemporary reality is almost invariably punitive-so much so that art itself, especially the incurably semantic art of poetry, can be suspected of having a strong Calvinist streak. It does: because aesthetic authority cannot be delegated. However, unlike its practitioners, it is capable of an equivalent of grace. Be that as it may, Kees had no alternative but to pick up that note of negation and play it the best he could. He did, and he played it better than anyone around, to the bitter end. He was a genuine American soloist, with no mute and no support. He played better, to my mind, than Eliot and, on occasion, Auden, whose respective repertoires were wider to begin with. Be- cause they existed, Kees had to go further. He had to go further, I suspect, also because he was from Nebraska. Unlike his great and small contemporaries, he took negation and alienation literally. His poems display neither the incoherence of nostalgia for some mentally palatable past nor, however vaguely charted, the possibility of the future. All he had was the present, which was not to his Muse's liking, and eventually not to his own either. His poetry, in other words, is that of the here and now and of no escape, except for poetry itself. Yet for all he had to say about the present, his language is amazingly dear and direct, and the formal aspects of his verse are amazingly conservative. Evidently Kees did not feel the impera- tive of arrythrnia so palpable among his less memorable peers, not to mention successors. This makes his sanity less questionable than many a melodrama buff would have liked. As for his spiritualistic imagery, that, too, I believe, owes

POETRY 93 more to Max Ernst than to his own nightmares. The real nightmare for him was to do a mediocre job; his 1975 Collected Poems (edited by Donald Justice) shows him in absolute control of his subconsdous. Kees was a professional, not an amateur, and certainly not a sissy. Amateurs and sissies don't write poems as tough as the ones you find in this selection. Once or twice this toughness could be faked, but not for 12 years: the duration of Weldon Kees's career as a poet. Then, too, it's deliberate, which is to say genuine. And it makes one think that whatever happened on July 19,1955, was not a fluke. It was deliberate. On that day America lost a very tough poet. For him, it was presumably the end of his rope, but it should not be that way for us. He should be read, and here are a few of his poems. In them, you will hear that keen, implacable, truly American solo, which cannot be mistaken for anything else. This is our trumpet; this, if you will, is our early cool. It is calling to us from the depth of the 1950s, the Eisenhower years. It is very pure, very heart-rending. Its silver penetrates the darkness, and vice versa, almost in gratitude. It sounds sort of like a trumpet solo by Clifford Brown, who also died around the same time.

The Scene of the Crime

There should have been some witness there, accusing- Women with angry mouths and burning eyes To fill the house with unforgiving cries; But there was only silence for abuse.

There should have been exposure-more than curtains Drawn, the stairway coiling to the floor Where no one walked, the sheeted furniture, And one thin line of light beneath the door.

Walking the stairs to reach that room, a pool Of blood swam in his thought, a hideous guide That led him on and vanished in the hall. There should have been damnation. But, inside, Only an old man clawed the bed, and drooled, Whispering, "Murderer!" before he died.

94 WQ SPRING 1993 The Patient is Rallying

Difficult to recall an emotion that is dead, Particularly so among these unbelieved fanfares And admonitions from a camouflaged sky:

I should have remained burdened with destinations Perhaps, or stayed quite drunk, or obeyed The undertaker, who was fairly charming, after all.

Or was there a room like that one, worn With our whispers, and a great tree blossoming Outside blue windows, warm rain blowing in the night?

There seems to be some doubt. No doubt, however, Of the chilled and empty tissues of the mind -Cold, cold, a great gray winter entering- Like spines of air, frozen in an ice cube.

A Distance from the Sea

To Ernest Brace

"And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not."-Revelations, X, 4.

That raft we rigged up, under the water, Was just the item: when he walked, With his robes blowing, dark against the sky, It was as though the unsubstantial waves held up His slender and inviolate feet. The gulls flew over, Dropping, crying alone; thin ragged lengths of cloud Drifted in bars across the sun. There on the shore The crowd's response was instantaneous. He Handled it well, I thought-the gait, the tilt of the head, just right. Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves. And then we knew our work well worth the time: The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails, The tiresome rehearsals, considerations of execution. But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it, Lay your plans carefully and keep one jump Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle Is a pleasure unalloyed; but staging one requires Tact, imagination, a special knack for the job Not everyone possesses. A miracle, in fact, means work. -And now there are those who have come saying

POETRY 95 That miracles were not what we were after. But what else Is there? What other hope does life hold out But the miraculous, the skilled and patient Execution, the teamwork, all the pain and worry every miracle involves?

Visionaries tossing in their beds, haunted and racked By questions of Messiahship and eschatology, Are like the mist rising at nightfall, and come, Perhaps, to even less. Grave supernaturalists, devoted wor- shippers Experience the ecstasy (such as it is), but not Our ecstasy. It was our making. Yet sometimes When the torrent of that time Comes pouring back, I wonder at our courage And our enterprise. It was as though the world Had been one darkening, abandoned hall Where rows of unlit candles stood; and we Not out of love, so much, or hope, or even worship, but Out of the fear of death, came with our lights And watched the candles, one by one, take fire, flames Against the long night of our fear. We thought That we could never die. Now I am less convinced. -The traveller on the plain makes out the mountains At a distance; then he loses sight. His way Winds through the valleys; then, at a sudden turning of a path, The peaks stand nakedly before him: they are something else Than what he saw below. I think now of the raft (For me, somehow, the summit of the whole experience) And all the expectations of that day, but also of the cave We stocked with bread, the secret meetings In the hills, the fake assassins hired for the last pursuit, The careful staging of the cures, the bribed officials, The angels' garments, tailored faultlessly, The medicines administered behind the stone, That ultimate cloud, so perfect, and so opportune. Who managed all that blood I never knew.

The days get longer. It was a long time ago. And I have come to that point in the turning of the path Where peaks are infinite-horn-shaped and scaly, choked with thorns. But even here, I know our work was worth the cost. What we have brought to pass, no one can take away. Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance. Nothing will be the same as once it was, I tell myself.-It's dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting darker. It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy. Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down. And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.

% WQ SPRING 1993 Aspects of Robinson

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds. Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door. The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red. This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down. Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath, Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour. -Here's where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.

Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant. Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson Saying, "Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday At five? I'd love to. Pretty well. And you?' Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.

Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home; Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.

Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes, Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down, The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief- Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

Equinox

Under black lace the bald skull shines and nods, A melon seasoned in this winter sun, Bare, yellowed, finial Above the claw-and-ball-foot chair that mourns North toward the frozen window and the bay. The gulls Rise in a long line off the rocks, steer For the lighthouse, shadowing the boats That toss, abandoned, far beyond the point. Dead fish are heaped upon the coast for miles. Her life is sleep, and pain. With wakening To this sequestered and snow-haunted world, The black mantilla creaks with frost; red eyes Break through the rinds of flesh, blur

POETRY 97 Toward the dripping faucet and the last cans of Spaghetti and baked beans, corroding on the shelves.

A bubble, then a sound that borders on a word Breaks from her mouth. If she could think, Her eighty years would bend toward Spain Shadows of santos, crowds swarming in the heat, Plumes, awnings, shields, the sun six hours high

She believes this coast is in the South. A month ago, Smoke from the village chimneys died. No lights bum In windows of the cottages. Over the vacant docks The birds are featureless, but her sight fails Where these walls end. Exile without remembrance, Spawned in the heat to perish in this cold, Ravaged by paresis, and her sight at last A blackness in the blood, she moves her chair Inch by excruciating inch, her face Steered-raw, blank, aching-toward the beans: The last survivor of the race.

Late Evening Song

For a while Let it be enough: The responsive smile, Though effort goes into it.

Across the warm room Shared in candlelight, This look beyond shame, Possible now, at night,

Goes out to yours. Hidden by day And shaped by fires Grown dead, gone gray,

That burned in other rooms I knew Too long ago to mark, It forms again. I look at you Across those fires and the dark.

Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 0 1975 by the University of Nebraska Press.

98 WQ SPRING 1993 "Of making many books," warns Ecclesiastes, "there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Faced with the prospect of digesting centuries' worth of Great Books, the reader today may throw up his hands in despair. Canadian novelist Robertson Dames, himself a maker of many books, offers a remedy: Read selectively, listen to the inner music of a writer's words, and reread books that bring you pleasure.

BY ROBERTSON DAVIES

irst of all I think it is desirable to put "curl up with a book." I despised them. I aside some time for reading-per- have never curled. My physique is not formed haps an evening, or an hour, or half for it. It is a matter of legend that Abraham an hour, or even 15 minutes, but a Lincoln read lying on his stomach in front of time in which to read and do nothing else and the fire; you should try that in order to under- pay no attention to anything but the book. stand the extraordinary indifference to physi- We can read any way we please. When I cal comfort that Lincoln possessed. I have was a boy, and was known to be fond of read about children who "creep away into the reading, many patronizing adults assured me attic" to read, and Victorian children's stories that there was nothing I liked better than to are full of children who cannot read any-

READING 99 where except in a deeply embrasured win- very important. Incidentally your reading dow seat. You have to find your own best may bring you information, or enlightenment, place for reading, and for most of us in the but unless it brings pleasure first you should Western world it is sitting in a chair with a think carefully about why you are doing it. decent light-though for Lincolnians, of All readers used to verbalize as they read. course, firelight is the thing. I have forgotten Indeed, during the Middle Ages people read those people of whom it is said that they "al- aloud, and everybody knows the story about ways have their noses in a book." This makes the scholar who had to discontinue his stud- reading difficult, but as I have said, you must ies because he had a sore throat. Because they suit yourself. verbalized-I hate that word, but I can't find You then read your book, somewhat more another-they truly took in-drank in, one slowly than modem educationists recom- might almost say-what they read and it was mend. Remember, you are trying to find out impressed on their minds forever. what the book has to say. You are not strain- Verbalizing is also one of the best critical ing to reach the end, in order that you may procedures. If you meet with a passage in a read something else. If you don't like the book that seems to be in some way dubious book, you do not have to read it. Put it aside or false, try reading it aloud, and your doubts and read something you do like, because will be settled. The trick of argument or the there is no reason at all why you should read falsity of emphasis, will declare itself to your what bores you during your serious reading ear, when it seemed to be deceiving your eye. time. You have to read enough boring stuff in Lots of young people come to me to ask my the ordinary way of life, without extending advice about writing. I haven't much to give the borders of ennui. But if you do like the them, and if they think anyone but them- book, if it engages you seriously, do not rush selves can teach them to write, they are sadly at it. Read it at the pace at which you can mistaken. I am fond of a story about Beetho- pronounce and hear every word in your own ven, who was approached by a young man head. Read eloquently. who asked him how to become a composer. "I cannot tell you," said Beethoven, "I really know this is heresy. People who teach don't know." "But you have become a com- reading are dead against what they call poser yourself," protested the young man. I "verbalizing." If you verbalize, you lose "Yes, but I never had to ask," was the answer. time. What time are they talking about? Time I tell the young people who come to me to try is one of the great hobgoblins of our day. reading their work aloud, to see how it There is really no time except the single, fleet- sounds. "Oh, but I'm not writing for perfor- ing moment that slips by us like water, and to mance," they say. "Oh yes, you are," I reply, talk about losing time, or saving time, is often and often they are mystified. But in truth writ- a very dubious argument. When you are ing is for performance. The great works of reading you cannot save time, but you can imagination-the masterworks of poetry, diminish your pleasure by trying to do so. drama, and fiction-are simply indications for What are you going to do with this time performance that you hold in your hand, and when you have saved it? Have you anything like musical scores they call for skilled perfor- to do more important than reading? You are mance by you, the artist and the reader. Litera- reading for pleasure, you see, and pleasure is ture is an art, and reading is also an art, and

Robertson Davies has written more than 25 books, including The Personal Art: Reading to Good Purpose (1961), the Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, 1970-75), The Rebel Angels (1981), and What's Bred in the Bone (1985). This essay is drawn from Davies's Reading and Writing, copyright @ 1992 by the University of Utah Press. Reprinted with permission.

100 WQ SPRING 1993 unless you recognize and develop your quali- stories and their repeated refrains, when they ties as an interpretative artist you are not get- pass over the eye, leap into vivid life when ting the best from your reading. You do not they are heard, because they belong to a tra- play a Bach concerto for the solo cello on a dition of poetry that had not renounced the musical saw, and you should not read a play delights of rhyme, rhythm, and the quality of of Shakespeare in the voice of an auctioneer incantation that our distant forebears valued selling tobacco. in poetry. Poetry that has decided to do with- out music, to divorce itself from song, has his business of verbalizing, of reading thrown away much of its reason for being, so that you hear what is read with the and a recognition of the element of music in T inner ear, is an invaluable critical poetry narrows the gap between, for instance, method when you are reading poetry. Much Keats and Byron, which might appear to a of what passes as poetry is perishable stuff. reader who had never heard them to be al- Not long ago I was making a comparison be- most unbridgeable. Until quite recently there tween the Oxford Book of English Poetry as it was an academic fashion of looking down on appeared in 1900, edited by the late Sir Ar- Tennyson, who was said to be mellifluous but thur Quiller-Couch, and the latest edition, simple-minded. But listen to Tennyson, and edited by Dame Helen Gardner. It was an his music will tell you something that the astonishing revelation of change in taste-in closest sort of mute analysis cannot do, and the taste of scholars of great reputation who his stature as a poet is restored and perhaps as critics command respect. But I permitted increased thereby. myself-critical worm that I am in compari- son with these godlike figures-to wonder if have been talking about poetry, and I do Sir Arthur and Dame Helen had taken the urge you to renew your acquaintance trouble to read aloud all that they offered to I with it, if by chance you have not been the world, with justifiable confidence in their reading much poetry lately. Perhaps this is the authority, as a survey of the best verse of five point at which I should advise you, if you are centimes. Had Sir Arthur ever really tested reading for pleasure, to read several books at "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot," on once, and to keep on your table a ,book of his tongue? If he had done so, could he have poetry, as well as a novel, some essays, and missed that what he took for honey was sac- perhaps a play or two. The notion that you charine? Perhaps so; there are elements in lit- have to read solemnly through one book be- erary taste that seem not to be things of rea- fore you can allow yourself to take up another son but of something relating to time, which is simple Puritanism, probably left over from determines taste. When Dame Helen includes childhood. If you choose to be an epicurean reader, which is what I am recommending, Lay your sleeping head, my love there will be times when nothing but poetry Human on my faithless arm will satisfy your appetite, and you must have poetry readily at hand. Perhaps you like to most of her readers will applaud, but what keep up with what the young poets are do- will readers say in another 70 years? Modem ing, and that is admirable, but I urge you also disillusion is unlikely to last forever, and to read some poetry that has been tested by nothing rings so hollow as the angst of yester- time, and which does things that the modems year. do not seek to do, or perhaps-I say this al- Reading to hear, rather than merely to most apologetically-cannot do. One of the comprehend, explains much about the poetry things I miss in modem poetry is joy, exuber- of earlier days. Old ballads, which seem ance, sheer delight in life. That is a quality somewhat simple-minded, with their bleak that preserves a poet marvelously.

READING 101 Ty hye, ty hye! 0 sweet delight! Loathly Damsel of medieval legend, who was He tickles this age that can repellent at first encounter but who, when Call Tullia's ape a marmosite And Leda's goose a swan. embraced, changed into a girl of inexhaustible charm, wisdom, and beauty. Who writes charming invitations to pleasure in a kind of splendid giggling frolic spirit like hat I have just said about rereading that nowadays? Not the people who write is a point I should like to stress. lyrics-if they may so be called-for rock wThe great sin, as I have said, is to music; their joy seems to have its roots in dis- assume that something that has been read array of the mind. But the little squib that I once has been read forever. As a very simple have just quoted springs from joy that is unal- example I mention Thackeray's Vanity Fair. loyed, and it was written in a time when the People are expected to read it during their plague and war and the ill-will of nations was university years. But you are mistaken if you just as prevalent on the earth as it is today, think you read Thackeray's book then; you and the average expectation of life was about read a lesser book of your own. It should be 32 years. read again when you are 36, which is the age I myself have a taste for Browning. There of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be are times when nothing but Browning will do. read for a third time when you are 56, 66, 76, He is not particularly musical, and that is odd, in order to see how Thackeray's irony stands because he is one of the few poets who was a up to your own experience of life. Perhaps technically trained and skilled musician. His you will not read every page in these later language is knotty and there are times when years, but you really should take another look his reader feels like at a great book, in order to find out how great it is, or how great it has remained, to you. You The old man of Ashokan see, Thackeray was an artist, and artists de- Who loved to chew wood, mostly oaken; serve this kind of careful consideration. We Very often he'd quip With a smile on his lip, must not gobble their work, like chocolates, Ah sho' can gnash oak in Ashokan. or olives, or anchovies, and think we know it forever. Nobody ever reads the same book twice. Browning's tough colloquialism used to be Of course everybody knows that, but how held against him, and as an undergraduate I many people act upon it? One of the great encountered professors who would quote: achievements of literature in our century is Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu; in the Irks care the crop-full bird? edition I have it runs to 12 convenient vol- Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? umes. In my experience people tend to read it when young, and never to look at it again. -and then go off into paroxysms of dusty But it is not a young person's book. Of course academic mirth at what they thought was young people should read it, but they should Browning's willful clumsiness. But once you go on reading it or reading in it during the life have accustomed yourself to his voice, that follows. When I read it as a young man, Browning has golden things to say, and I have the homosexual exploits of the Baron de been a lifelong champion of The Ring and the Charlus seemed extraordinary dispatches Book, which is neglected by many readers be- from an unknown world; nowadays, when cause it is long and intimidating. But it is also one can meet a mini-Charlus every day of the a very great poem, and you do not have to week, the extraordinary quality has gone. But read it all at once. But to sense its worth you what has not gone-what is indeed freshly should read in it, and reread, at various times understood-is Proust's serious and com- in your life. Frequently it recalls to me the passionate treatment of this theme in a book

102 WQ SPRING 1993 of many themes. Charlus is one of those great new pleasures and new insights. It is also one characters whom we know better than we of the funniest books in our language. The know most of our contemporaries, and his fun lies not in obvious jokes; it is in the grain creator's attitude toward him and his tender- of the prose, and it rises from the extraordi- ness toward the Baron's dreadful disintegra- nary mind of the author. When we read, we tion enlarge our own sensibility and give us a must always be aware of the mind that lies different attitude toward excitable protests on behind the book. Not that we may be wholly behalf of "gays" in our very un-Proustian so- persuaded by it, or that we should have no ciety. The Baron would have shrunk from be- minds of our own, but that we may share it ing typified as "gay." and be shown new meanings by it. Also that So it is also with another towering cre- we should assess it. When I was a professor I ation of this century, James Joyce's Ulysses. seemed to meet a great many students who One cannot, of course, measure what Molly were wholly possessed and beglamoured by Bloom's magnificent soliloquy at the end of Oscar Wilde, and some of them were, for a that book has done to enlarge and reshape few weeks, mini-Wildes, dealing extensively our ideas about women, but one knows that in rhchauffe wit of the 1890s. Sometimes I its influence has been vast. When Sigmund suggested that they examine, not the reful- Freud asked his supposedly unanswerable gent surface, the shot-silk elegance of his question-"What do women really want?"- prose, but whatever they were able to discern he had not read what Molly wanted or he behind it of the mind that had created such would have phrased it differently. It is not beautiful things. It is a Faberg6 mind, and al- that she says what she wants, but she makes though we should not like to be without us feel what she wants, and it is something far Faberg6, we should not wish to make him our beyond the range of any sociological or psy- standard of artistic achievement. There are choanalytical answer. Molly wants to live on people who insist that Wilde ranks with Con- a mythological level, and that certainly does greve as a great writer of comedy. Consider not mean that she wants to posture as a god- both minds: Congreve was wise-worldly dess or indulge in any pseudoclassical antics; wise as well-in a degree that Wilde never it means that she wants a largeness of percep- achieved, kindly, good, generous, fatuous tion, a wider dimension of life, a psychologi- man that he was. cal freedom that the modem world does not give her. She wants a rich simplicity. And that oyce is an Irishman of a different stripe, is the whole thrust of the book. Unaware of and Wilde's admirers might describe him the fact, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as a duty-fmgemails writer. If Joyce's fm- are living out a great classical theme in their Jgemails are duty, it is because he has no dingy Dublin lives, and the greatness of what objection to grubbing in the dirt, if the dirt has they are doing eludes them. Eludes them not anything to tell him. And he has taught us because they are stupid-they are nothing of one of the lessons of our century, which is the sort-but because it is part of our fate that the dirt has very important things to tell never to see our destiny as a whole or discern us, because it is from the dirt that we all the archetypal forces that shape our lives. spring, and no disease is so fatal to an ade- Molly does not see these things either, but she quate understanding of life as over-refine- has an intuitive sense of them, and thus she is ment, which is inevitably false refinement. able to long for them when the men, corseted For refinement of feeling is surely a quality in reason and logic, cannot draw so near to we bring to everything we touch, and not this aspect of truth. something that cuts us off from a great part of Ulysses is a wonder, and we can recur to it human experience. Modem hygiene has ban- time and again with the certainty of finding ished much of the physical dirt of an earlier

READING 103 the novels I read by its add, seeking for gold, for gold plate, and for dis- sembling brass. The simplest function of the novel is the tale, but only someone who has never tried it thinks that the discovery and relation of a tale is simple work. The wish to be told a story never dies in the human heart, and great story- tellers enjoy a long life that more sub- tle writers sometimes envy. Consider the Sherlock Holmes stories. Unless you are beglamoured by them, they are queer reading. The mysteries that confront the great detective are tailor- made for his style of detection; they day, but the lessons that are hidden in the dirt are puzzles suited to a particular puzzle must not be forgotten. solver. Confront Holmes with a simple back- Of Joyce's other rema-rkable book, street murder or theft, and he would probably Finnegans Wake, I shall not speak, because I have to confess his inferiority to the Scotland have not yet come to any conclusions about Yard bunglers he despised. But the tale-telling it. I know few people who have read it, and is so skillful, the contrast between Holmes of those, I meet fewer still who appear to and Watson so brilliant, the upper-middle- have come anywhere near to understanding class level of crime, which is the kind that it. I grope in it, holding a candle that is plainly Holmes usually takes on (you observe that he marked "Manufactured by C. G. Jung and rarely has truck or trade with the likes of Jack Co., Zurich." It is not a candle that Joyce the Ripper), is all so deftly handled by Arthur would have approved-he hated Jung be- Conan Doyle that he has created a legend cause Jung told him something he didn't want that seems to be increasing 60 years after the to hear-but the Jungian candle is the only death of its creator. Will Virginia Woolf last so one I have. long? It seems to me that I see the mists clos- ing in as her novels give place to scandalous hope you do not think that I am being revelations about her life. trivial, or treating you with less than Then comes the parable. What is a para- I proper respect, because I am talking so ble? A moral tale, is it not? Such novels are much about novels. When I was an under- very popular because, whatever appears on graduate there were still academics who the surface, our time loves a display of moral- thought novel-reading an inferior sort of liter- ism; innumerable novels are rooted in the ary enjoyment. But a good novel has its roots words of Saint Paul: "Be not deceived; God is in life as surely as a good poem and usually not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, more truly than the work of most essayists. It that shall he also reap." That is the message was when I was young that I read the opinion of Tom Wolfe's best seller Bonfire of the Vani- of a critic-popular at that time and now al- ties. It seems to be couched in modem, rather most forgotten-John Middleton Murry, that grotty language: Keep your nose dean; don't "a truly great novel is a tale to the simple, a risk everything for the big bucks; never trust a parable to the wise, and a direct revelation of dame. But behind this street wisdom is the reality to a man who has made it part of his wisdom of Paul, served up with the pepper being." I have never forgotten that and test and tabasco that persuades so many innocent

104 WQ SPRING 1993 readers that they are getting something un- who was too cultured for his own good. He dreamed of in the past. seems never to have listened to the voices Now, what about the book that is a direct which must, surely, have spoken to him in revelation of reality? We all have our favorites, dreams or in moments when he was off his and they are the books that accord with the guard-voices that spoke of the human long- reality life has brought to us. We cannot hope ing for what is ordinary, what is cornmon- to grasp total, all-embracing reality. For many place, vulgar, possibly obscene or smutty. Our people these are the great blockbusters-nov- grandparents used to say that we must eat a els like War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, peck of dirt before we die, and they were The Magic Mountain, Middlemarch, Remem- right. And you must read a lot of rubbish be- brance of Things Past. I have known people fore you die as well, because an exclusive diet who found this sort of revelation in Don Qui- of masterpieces will give you spiritual dys- xote, which I can understand but not accept as pepsia. How can you know that a mountain my own; I have known others who found it peak is glorious if you have never scrambled in T'stram Shandy, which I confess puzzles through a dirty valley? How do you know me. One must find one's own great novels, that your gourmet meal is perfect in its kind if which seem to illuminate and explain por- you have never eaten a roadside hot dog? If tions of one's own experience, just as one you want to know what a masterpiece The must find the poetry that speaks most inti- Pilgrim's Progress is, read Bonfire of the Vani- mately to oneself. For one reader it is Shake- ties, and if you have any taste-which of speare's Sonnets, for another Wordsworth's course may not be the case-you will quickly Prelude, for another The Ring and the Book. find out. So I advise you, as well as reading And so it would be possible to go on elaborat- great books that I have been talking about, ing and extending lists, because the choice is read some current books and some periodi- great and individual preference the final fac- cals. They will help you to take the measure tor in making a choice. And in addition to of the age in which you live. these milestones on the most traveled roads, I hope you are not disappointed in the ad- the real enthusiast for reading will find by- vice I have been giving. Certainly I have not ways, like the works of Rabelais, or Button's flogged you on to feats of endurance and Anatomy of Melancholy, or the magpie accu- intellectual stress. Quite the contrary, I have mulations of John Aubrey. It is absurd to urged you to relax, to read more slowly, to speak of these books as byways, but I do so reread books that speak to you with special because I do not meet many people who read intimacy, to act out your fictions in your in them frequently, or indeed at all. minds, as if you were a great theatrical direc- tor with infinite choice in casting, in decor, in ow dull he is being, you may think, all the adjuncts that produce a convincing at- as I draw near to my conclusion. mosphere. H How like a professor. He is simply I have urged you to allow your poetry to parroting Matthew Arnold, with his tedious sing to you so that you may hear the authen- adjuration that "culture is the acquainting tic bardic voice wherever it is to be found. ourselves with the best that has been known This is reading for pleasure, not to become and said in the world, and thus with the his- immensely widely read, not to become an ex- tory of the human spirit." But I assure you pert on anything, but to have read deeply and that I mean no such thing, and I have always to have invited a few great masterpieces into had my reservations about Matthew Arnold, your life.

READING 105 'We [Futurists] believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and we say without smiling that wings sleep in the flesh of man." -F. T. Marinetti

106 WQ SPRING 1993 Republic of the Air

Not many years after the Wright Brothers took to the air in 1903, a vast popular culture of aviation took flight with them. Ranging from Mussolini to Russian Futurism to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Flying Down to Rio, historian Robert Wohl shows how aviation came to represent the hope of cultural and moral renewal-and how the cult was eventually brought down to earth.

BY ROBERT WOHL

concourses of today's airports on our way to catch a plane, how many of us pause to think that we are about to undertake an essentially aesthetic and moral experience? Yet only 60 years ago Western culture, high and low, celebrated aviation in just such terms. Hollywood's big studios glamourized the miracle of flight in a spate of star- studded films. Charles Lindbergh acquired the divine sobriquet "the new Christ." And the Modernist architect and aty planner Le Corbusier proclaimed the airplane the foremost symbol of the 20th century and the "vanguard of the conquering armies of the New Age." For Le Corbusier, aviation was not only a technology that held out the promise of moving people and goods more rapidly from one place to another; it was also, and more importantly, a source of aesthetic energy and faith capable of inspiring new forms

AVIATION 107 of cultural creation. Le Corbusier insisted that of seeing an airplane disappear alone into the flying machine and the new perspective it oblivion over a boundless sea. Generations of offered on the world, if interpreted correctly, aviators would follow Blhriot's example in could provide invaluable lessons for architects search of fame and fortune. and urban planners. Indeed, in his un- Journalists and intellectuals lost no time bounded enthusiasm for the new technology, explaining the meaning of the new technol- Le Corbusier went so far as to claim that the ogy to their readers. What is striking is how airplane embodied the same spirit of imagina- quick they were to interpret the new inven- tion and "cold reason" that produced the Par- tion in cultural and political terms. As the Ital- thenon. The implication was that the West ian man of letters Gabriele D'Annunzio con- was on the verge of entering a new classical fided to a French interviewer in 1910 soon era of rationalism in which machine-inspired after taking his first flight, aviation carried functionalism would dictate design. within itself "the promise of a profound meta- But the Age of Aviation, while it left a last- morphosis of civic life" that would have far- ing imprint on the way we live our lives, reaching consequences for aesthetics as well failed to realize the cultural hopes that Le as for war and peace. New idols would ap- Corbusier and others had placed in it. Born pear; new laws would have to be written; re- during the century's first decade, aviation cd- lations among nations would be transformed. ture reached its apogee during the 1930s and High in the sky, above the clouds, customs lost much of its vigor and self-confidence dur- barriers, property rights, and frontiers lost ing the years that followed the Second World their meaning. Aviation would create a new War. To review its history today is to be re- civilization, a new way of life, and a new elite. minded that our century has been a voracious The "Republic of the Air" would exile the consumer of ideals and a relentless shatterer wicked and the parasites and would open it- of dreams. self to "men of good will." The "elect" would abandon the "chrysalis of weight" and would opular enthusiasm for aviation was take flight. slow to develop. Though the Wright D'Annunzio's novel Perhaps Yes, Perhaps P brothers achieved their first powered No, published the same year, provided a por- flight in December 1903, it was not until they trait of the new elite. Its protagonist Paolo demonstrated their flying machine under con- Tarsis, like Blkriot "a builder of wings" and a trolled conditions at Fort Myer, Virginia, and record-setting competitor in air meets, escapes Le Mans, France, in the fall of 1908 that skep- from a destructive love affair and a psycho- tical observers began to concede that human logically twisted mistress by flying 135 nauti- beings were now capable of navigating the cal miles from the west coast of Italy to the air. Public enthusiasm for the new invention island of Sardinia, where he is spiritually re- took a quantum leap the following summer born. D'Annunzio intuited what would be- when Louis Bliriot crossed the English Chan- come the recurring refrain of aviation litera- nel in a daring flight of 36% minutes. This ture. For him, aviation was not a sport, still aerial beau geste set off massive demonstra- less a new mode of transportation; it was a tions in France and England. To capture the means of moral and spiritual transcendence public's imagination, Bliriot explained, it was that elevated man above his fate, and this jus- necessary to risk everything by flying over tified the sacrifice of lives that conquering the water. Nothing could duplicate the sensation air would inevitably entail. By accepting the

Robert Wohl, a fanner Wilson Center Fellow, is professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of The Generation of 1914 (1979) and the forthcoming A Passion for Wings, volume one of a trilogy about aviation and the Western imagination. Copyright @ 1993 by Robert Wohl.

108 WQ SPRING 1993 terrible risks of flight and challenging death, Thereafter he wisely limited his aeronautical he believed, the new elect of pilots could cre- activities to the realm of the imagination and ate a religion of speed and escape from the produced an impressive body of avant-garde limitations of everyday life. The aviator, in poetry, in which he evoked the coming age of short, was "the messenger of a vaster life," a flight. In his airminded vision, boys and girls technological superman whose mission was climbed rainbows instead of trees; "clean" to triumph over space and time. The earth- and "sublime" technological achievement bound would have to settle for the vicarious had rendered the wisdom of the ancients ob- identification they could feel with these "ce- solete; electric lights shone brighter than the lestial helmsmen" who looked down on those sun or moon; and aviators, with their record- below with a scornful smile. breaking flights, had taken possession of the D'Annunzio's countryman, the founder of earth. Capable of flying anywhere in the Futurism, F. T. Marinetti, took D'Annunzio's world, his pilots spit contemptuously on the message one step further. In his view, technol- subhumans who remained attached to the ogy did not merely offer a topic for literature; ground. it had replaced literature and rendered the ro- mantic and sentimental sensibility of the 19th o be sure, not all Western poets and century obsolete. Men would merge with mo- intellectuals greeted the coming of the tors. Their will would become like steel. Their T flying machine with the unqualified vital organs would become as interchangeable enthusiasm of D'Annunzio, Marinetti, and as a flying machine's spare parts. The motor Kamensky. Some, like the Viennese journalist was man's "perfected brother" because it was and critic Karl Kraus, feared that their contem- capable of eternal youth. "We [Futurists] be- poraries were becoming the prisoners of their lieve in the possibility of an incalculable num- own inventions. They had been clever ber of human transformations, and we say enough to create sophisticated machines, but without smiling that wings sleep in the flesh they lacked the intelligence to use them prop- of man." erly. Because the air had been conquered, the earth was now condemned to be bombarded. f wings slept in the flesh of man, why go Instead of raising humanity toward the stars, on producing literature? Why not fly? then, aviation had only extended man's mis- I One Russian Futurist writer came to just ery to the skies, "as if it did not have ample this conclusion. In 1910, soon after publishing room down below." his first novel, Vasily Kamensky abandoned The British novelist John Galsworthy also literature in order to devote himself to avia- deplored what he called "the prostitution of tion. He later wrote: "I wanted to participate the conquest of the air to the ends of war- in the great discovery not merely with words, fare." "If ever men presented a spectacle of but with deeds. What are poems and novels? sheer inanity it is now," he wrote in 1911, The airplane-that is the truest achievement "when, having at long last triumphed in their of our time. . . . If we are people of the motor- struggle to subordinate to their welfare the ized present, poets of universal dynamism, unconquered element, they have straight- newcomers and messengers of the future, away commenced to defile that element, so masters of action and activity, enthusiastic heroically mastered, by filling it with engines builders of new forms of life-then we must of destruction. If ever the gods were justified be, we have no choice but to be, flyers." of their ironic smile-by the gods, it is now!" Kamensky went on to become a profes- But Kraus and Galsworthy were excep- sional pilot and flew exhibitions until he was tions. Even writers who deplored the building nearly killed in 1912, when he lost control of up of nationalist tensions and the cult of vio- his Blhriot XI and crashed into a Polish bog. lence in pre-1914 Europe could not suppress

AVIATION 109 their enthusiasm for aviation. The passion for flying machine was interpreted as a confirrna- flight and the willingness of young aviators to tion that the Western peoples had subjugated risk their lives, they felt, was a sign of vitality Nature to their will and intelligence, and and a demonstration that, contrary to what hence as a promise, even a guarantee, of many claimed, the Western peoples were not greater victories to come. To a civilization that in decline. Ancient virtues that many feared had recently extended its dominion through- had been eroded by urban civilization had re- out the world by means of imperialist expan- appeared. Heroism had been reborn. The sion and annexation, it seemed natural to turn "huddled masses" had been forced to raise its energies and its attention to the mastery of their faces away from the dirty city pave- the sky. Now that Western man had success- ments toward the purity of the sky. Or as Ed- fully escaped from the earth and invaded the mond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, heavens-a realm formerly preserved for put it in a long poem, "Hymn of the Wings," birds, angels, and God-who could say with which he devoted to the new technology and any certitude where his limitations lay? Time, its apprentices: space, even death might be overcome. Aviation, then, was the realization of the Higher! ever higher, pilot! and glory to men Promethean dream that had tormented the Of great will! Glory to those stealers of the flame that we are! peoples of the West throughout their history. Glory to Humanity! Through the miracle of flight, myth had been transformed into technological reality. Hence- Looking at pre-1918 Western culture, one forth technology would take the place of cannot help be struck by the variety of con- myth. The sky was no longer a limit, but a texts in which aviation metaphors appeared. frontier to be explored and mastered. Flight could signify the act of imagination and artistic creation, escape from the constraints of he external sign of the flying machine's a dreary bourgeois world, triumph over the deepest meaning was the rapidity with limitations placed on human beings by na- T which it moved through the air. Born ture, ascension toward a new system of per- of the "Spirit of Speed," as one pre-1914 poet ception, or sometimes union with the angels put it, the airplane was "the youngest child of and God. The aviator, in the hands of a motion1'-the younger brother and successor painter like the Russian Kazimir Malevich, be- to the locomotive, the bicycle, and the auto- came a symbol for the man of the future who mobile. Its exploits thrilled the audiences who would liberate himself from the limitations of flocked to air meets and, as a metaphor for gravity and earthly space. The connection be- modernity, it promised to shrink the world, tween avant-garde art and aviation was so collapsing days of travel into hours and by natural and so accepted that when the young doing so enriching and extending life. photographer Jacques Lartigue attended the Yet paradoxically, because of the aircraft's Rite of Spring in June 1913, what he liked fragile construction and the perils of the ever- about Stravinsky's music was that its throb- changing weather, the airplane put the men bing rhythms-vroum, vroum, vroum-re- and women who dared to fly in intimate and minded him of the roar of airplane engines dangerous contact with the elements, thus taking off at the airfield he frequented outside bringing to an end the alienation from nature Paris, Issy-les-Moulineaux. that many had come to associate with moder- For most people, of course, the matter was nity and industrialism. How exhilarating to simpler, though the feelings aroused by the feel the lash of the wind on one's face and to flying machine were no less intense. Coming feel at one with the world as one flew above as it did on the heels of an apparently never- it! Could there be an experience more intense ending series of technological innovations, the than pitting one's flying skills against the

110 WQ SPRING 1993 Ill NOILVIAV

'uopaaq %s am noA 01 suado pue pun08 aq$ a$OJM ,,'uopaaq,, :uopaaJJ 30 pad aip u0.q noA saipqap $pip deal sg,, '8161 ~1 -so~da^ in0 ppq aue1dJre aip 'p aAoqv XIO-DB-J Xaueq pmouiam pue ~owpeipuaq ^.ire PN~~M,,aip JO spoou appy this road without limit that can cross all roads this image of the aviator became embedded in at any altitude and in any direction. Freedom, the popular culture of the Western countries. this infinite conquest of trees, of towns, of Scores of books and films were devoted to plains, and mountains." The freedom to come this theme. Among other things, they testify and go as you pleased and to leave behind to the longing for a different type of war from the mundane cares of a corrupt world. the one most combatants knew during the years between 1914 and 1918. mall wonder, then, that the apostles of Charles Lindbergh was only one of thou- the new religion predicted that aviation sands of young boys who decided to become would bring about a moral and physi- an aviator after reading an account of the ad- cals regeneration of the Western peoples and a ventures of a World War I ace. After a brief profound renewal of culture. "The music of apprenticeship as a barnstormer, wing-walker, new times stood above us in the heavens," an army air force cadet, and airmail pilot, he air-minded German novelist wrote in 1914; went on to become the most famous airman "the song of the future roared confidently; a in history. Even today, it is difficult to explain new world had been born of a different kind his extraordinary and persisting celebrity. and a different form." Those who truly be- Contrary to what many people believe, he lieved in aviation knew that life would never was not the first person to fly the Atlantic. A be the same again. long train of aviators before him (beginning One might guess that the trauma of the with the American pilot A. C. Read and his First World War would have had the effect of crew in 1919) had made spectacular overseas inspiring second thoughts about the conquest flights that had captured the imagination of of the air. This turned out not to be the case. the public and the headlines of newspapers True, the inhabitants of Paris and London got throughout the world. But no one before a preview of aircraft, as H. G. Wells had de- Lindbergh had made the flight alone, and no scribed them in his 1908 novel War in the Air, one before had ever so charismatically incar- "dripping death" from the sky. Watching a nated the promise of the airplane to change zeppelin raid over London, D. H. Lawrence the world, a mission he invoked when he en- had visions of apocalypse and the birth of a titled his 1927 autobiography We, suggesting new cosmos symbolized by the German air- the fusion that Marinetti had earlier predicted ship "calm and drifting in a glow of light, like between human beings and their machines. a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes To be sure, when Lindbergh made his on the ground." "So it is the end," he wrote prize-winning flight from New York to Paris in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell. "Our in May 1927, the groundwork had already world is gone, and we are like dust in the air.'' been laid for the explosion of aviation culture But the dominant image of the aviator that that would occur over the next decade. In It- emerged from the war was not that of the aly, for example, Mussolini understood that merciless bombardier who threatened an end aviation could be used for ideological pur- to civilization but rather that of the flying ace, poses to identify the new fascist movement a knight of the air who jousted with blazing he had founded with speed, audacity, and machine guns in chivalrous combat above the domination of the air. Aviators figured promi- stalemated and entrenched armies of the nently in Mussolini's entourage when he ground. Heroes larger than life were driven to came to power in October 1922 and one of seek combat in the clouds-in W. B. Yeats's his first actions as premier was to create a stirring phrase-not by law or duty nor by Ministry of Aviation, whose portfolio he per- cheering crowds but by "a lonely impulse of sonally assumed. His goal was not just to de- delight." velop a powerful air force-indispensable to In retrospect, it is astonishing how deeply Italy's imperial expansion-but to cultivate an

112 WQ SPRING 1993 aviation consaousness among the Italian peo- aviators with poets and airplanes with objets ple. As he explained to a gathering of aviators d'art. Marcel Proust found the metaphor of in 1923, not everyone could learn to fly. Hy- flight so compelling that he used it in his ing would remain the privilege of an aristoc- novel In Search of Lost Time to express his as- racy. But everyone must long to fly and regard cension toward "the silent heights of mem- aviators with envy. "All devoted citizens must ory." Jean Cocteau wrote elegant verses cele; follow with profound feeling the develop- brating the exploits of his friend, the famous ment of Italian wings." aviator Rolland Garros, and identifying him- To implement this program, Mussolini self as an "aviator of ink." Several best-selling sponsored highly publicized record-breaking books dealt with the adventures of French flights by Italian aviators and built a monu- aviators during the Great War, the most influ- mental Air Ministry in the center of Rome ential being Henry Bordeaux's biography of whose lavish murals suggested the omnipres- the ace Georges Guynemer. In 1924 Louise ence of Italian air power. His minister of avia- Faure-Favier, author of the first novel devoted tion, Italo Balbo, led flotillas of Italian sea- to commercial aviation pilots, called upon

Mussolini endowed his fascist movement with the glamorous aura of airpower. Art from an Italian government calendar of 1941 depicts I1 Duce at the controls of an airplane.

planes across the South and North Atlantic, French writers to "go up in planes." reaching in 1933 as far as Chicago, whose aty But it was not until the publication in 1931 council erected a monument to Balbo along of Night Flight by Antoine Saint-Exupery that Lake Michigan and named one of the city's the aviation novel was sanctioned by the streets after him. Italian artists were encour- French literary establishment. Drawing on his aged to paint on aviation topics, postage friends' and his own experiences as airmail stamps were issued to commemorate Italian pilots for the line that came to be known as aerial triumphs, and Mussolini, who had him- Aeropostale, Saint-Exupery created a portrait self learned how to fly, was often photo- of a group of men whose dedication to their graphed at the controls of Italian military air- craft as aviators was such that it bore no rela- planes. tionship to the cargo that they carried. Hying, In France aviation had also become a ma- for them, was a means of spiritual transcen- jor cultural theme. Ever since Wilbur Wright dence that raised them above themselves and had first flown near Le Mans in August 1908, allowed them to achieve nobility, even if do- French writers had been inclined to identify ing so required their death. Their monk-like

AVIATION 113 Flight-Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)-gave the impression that the aviator represented a new breed of man, a creature both freer and nobler than the ordinary run of human being. And this was precisely the way the book was interpreted by its more authoritative crit- ics, and one of the reasons for its great popular success. One of the features of avi- ation culture from the begin- ning was the ease with which themes and images traversed the intellectual distance sepa- rating Modernist and avant- garde- culture from mass cul- The dancers in Flying Down to-Rio 0933) perform their routine high ture. HollYwood discovered above the Brazilian city. Aviation movies were ideal fare for American aviation in the 1920s and audiences intent upon soaring above the hard realities of the Depression. quickly learned how to adapt the airplane aesthetic to its leader, Riviere, lived by a code so austere that own commercial ends. The translation of the he never considered putting the safety of the culture of flight to film was all the smoother individual above the common mission: The because many of the directors, actors, and mail must go through, no matter what the writers who participated in the making of human cost. In a preface to the novel, Andre Hollywood aviation films were themselves pi- Gide, the reigning pope of the French literary lots, some of whom had flown in Europe dur- establishment, expressed his gratitude to ing World War I. Saint-Exuphry for having elucidated a para- In view of this and the flourishing cult of doxical truth that the French badly needed to aces in popular magazines and books, it is not understand: namely "that man's happiness is surprising that the aviation topic for which not to be found in liberty, but in the accep- Hollywood showed the most enthusiasm dur- tance of a duty.'' ing the late 1920s and 1930s was combat in the skies of France in 1917-18. William aint-Exupery liked to compare the craft Wellman's Wings-winner of the first Acad- of the aviator to that of the carpenter or emy Award in 1928 and dedicated to Charles simple tiller of the soil. The pilot, he Lmdbergh, whose flight preceded by only a said,s was an artisan who lived in dose com- few months the release of the film-por- munion and harmony with nature. "The ma- trayed in unforgettable images the mechanical chine, which at first seemed to isolate man ballet of scout planes making deadly passes in from the great problems of nature, actually the air. Wings managed to give the impression submits him to them with greater force. that the actors had fused with their machines, Alone, amidst the great tribunal that a stormy an uncanny realization of Marinetti's prewar sky creates for him, the pilot defends his mail Futurist fantasies, but one which, unlike his, against three elementary divinities, the moun- reached an audience of millions. Determined tains, the sea, and the tempest." But the book to go Wings one better, the millionaire aviator with which Saint-Exupery followed Night Howard Hughes invested $4 million of his

114 WQ SPRING 1993 own money-a fortune in those days-to hind the controls of a plane, its (mostly male) produce an even more elaborate reconstruc- writers either identified the female flyer with tion of the aerial war. As late as 1938, in the adultery and sent her crashing to her death, aftermath of the Munich agreements, Holly- as in the 1933 Christopher Strong, or they sug- wood was busy remaking Dawn Patrol, a bit- gested that their protagonist had taken up fly- ter yet exhilarating look back at the life (and ing in order to impress or to get closer to the death) of British fighter pilots during the last man she loved, as in the 1938 Tail Spin. In phase of World War I. Hollywood's vision of the world, women avi- A second theme of aviation culture that ators invariably ended badly. Hollywood adopted with alacrity was misogynism, which had already played a ollywood was much more comfort- leading role in D'Annunzio and Marinetti's able when celebrating the marriage prewar writings. Right in their novels and po- H of macho men and cutting-edge ems had been a means of escaping from the technology. This was nowhere more evident sordid and demeaning world of women. Hol- than in the 1933 musical Flying Down to Rio, lywood screenwriters could not allow them- in many ways Hollywood's most astonishing selves the luxury of such unwholesome liter- and exuberant display of aviation madness. ary conceits, but they often presented the Rising above an inconsequential plot based female lead as a greater threat to the aviator on a triangle between a sultry Brazilian and his companions than wind, fog, sleet, or beauty played by Dolores del Rio, her rich snow. In Wings the perfect friendship of Brazilian fiance, and an American aviator- Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen is destroyed band leader, the film throbs with Latin and Arlen dies because of a quarrel caused by rhythms, the roar of aircraft engines, and the their rivalry for Clara Bow's affections; in excitement of exotic settings. The genius of Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the appear- this vibrantly air-minded movie lies in the re- ance of Jean Arthur at a tropical hotel-air- alization by its makers that flight had become drome results in the fatal crash of Noah Berry, a form of spectacle. Deprived of the use of the Jr., the wounding of the Riviere-like head of nightclub in which they had been appearing, the airmail service, Cary Grant, and the death the dancers take to the sky and, strapped to of his best friend, Thomas Mitchell-all be- the wings of airplanes, perform their act cause a woman is incapable of understanding above the city. Afterwards, in a surprising the virile feelings and higher ethic that drive twist, Del Rio's fiance arranges for her to be aviators to fly and risk their lives. married to the American aviator by the cap- Watching these films, one would never tain of the airplane, then parachutes out over guess that the 1930s was the great age of the the city, leaving the couple to fly away toward aviatrix. Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham in eternal happiness. The entire film is full of England, Helene Boucher and Maryse Basti6 aviation motifs, designed by Carroll Clark and in France, Thea Rasche and Hanna Reitsch in Van Nest Polglass, and leaves an impression Germany, Elinor Smith and Amelia Earhart in of irrepressible aeronautical enthusiasm and the United States all showed by their record- the limitless possibilities of love and intema- breaking flights that women were as good, if tional communication opened up by the new not better, at handling airplanes than men. technology. Flying, said Rasche, was "more thrilling than From such romantic heights the cult of love for a man and far less dangerous." It was aviation was soon to fall. When Flying Down also a means by which women could explore to Rio was released, Adolf Hitler had been in and expand the boundaries of newly acquired power for 11 months. With every year there- freedoms. But on the few occasions during after, the prospect of war seemed more threat- this decade when Hollywood put women be- ening, and many believed that if war came, it

AVIATION 115 would be decided in the air. The bombing of happening to the United States? "Our atomic the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 during bombs return from Japan to haunt us, and in the Spanish Civil War provided a brutal ex- our science we foresee our doom." ample of what lay in store for civilian popula- By 1948, when he committed these tions. But flying lost none of its glamour, par- thoughts to paper in a little book entitled Of ticularly among the young men who were Flight and Life, Lindbergh's memory of his going to fight the coming war. As the future "mail plane boring northward over moonlit RAF pilot Richard Hillary explained to a paci- clouds" during the idyllic 1920s had become fist friend at Oxford: "In a fighter plane. . . we mingled in his mind with the images of trac- have found a way to return to war as it ought ers from his fighter, "flaming comets of war- to be, war which is individual combat be- planes, and bombs falling irretrievably tween two people, in which one either kills or through the air." Why, he asked, should he is killed. It's exciting, it's individual, and it's devote his life to developing aviation, "if air- disinterested." The ace myth was dearly still craft are to ruin the nations which produce alive and well in 1939. them? Why work for the idol of science when Hillary and his fellow RAF pilots saved it demands the sacrifice of cities full of chil- Britain from defeat and probable invasion in dren; when it makes robots out of men and 1940, prompting Churchill's eulogy "Never in blinds their eyes to God?" the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." But for millions indbergh acknowledged that Western of people in Europe and Asia the droning man could not live without science and sound of aircraft engines, and the sight of air- L technology. And indeed the great ex- plane wings, became identified during the pansion and democratization of commercial years between 1939 and 1945 with death- aviation began precisely at the time that Lind- dealing explosives raining from the sky, gut- bergh wrote Of Flight and Life. More and ted buildings, shrieking children, and more people began to travel by air; airports crowded air-raid shelters in which families were expanded into self-contained cities; and huddled together as the ground above them airline pilots began to acquire the reputation shook. The incineration of entire cities, such for unflappable regularity and safety that they as Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, possess today, high-tech bus drivers distin- was a cruel reminder that, far from bringing guished by the fact that their highways are an end to war as many had claimed or hoped thousands of feet above the ground and their it would before 1914, the airplane had instead salaries correspondingly lofty. As airspace is made it impossible to maintain a distinction more and more controlled, as airports become between combatants and civilians. After Hiro- increasingly congested, as liability problems shima and Nagasaki, the world would live drive more and more aircraft manufacturers to with the knowledge that the age of aviation abandon the building of light aircraft, the idea might culminate in the end of civilized life in of flight as liberation has inevitably lost much entire sections of the planet. of its former meaning. And so too has the Driving through the ruins of Munich in belief that aviation was a source of cultural May 1945, Lindbergh, the leading apostle of inspiration, "the vanguard of the conquering aeronautical faith in the 1930s, felt a sense of armies of the New Age." rising apprehension for the future. "A forma- Not that aviation is incapable of arousing tion of aircraft passes high overhead; a button popular enthusiasm. Enter any museum of air is pressed; black dots tumble through the air; and space, and you will find milling a pinpoint on earth erupts, and civilization is crowds-consisting of people of every age- rubble, smoke, and flame." What was to pre- admiring the flying machines and aeronauti- vent what had happened to Germany from cal icons of the past. Flick on your television

116 WQ SPRING 1993 set, and you will have trouble avoiding The today's jumbo jets have scarcely any sensa- Spirit of St. Louis, Twelve O'clock High, or Top tion of having left the ground. They have lost Gun. Glance at the collection of glossy paper- almost completely that intimate contact with backs in your supermarket, and you will see the elements that was such an important part that the aviation novel continues to sell. of the early charm of flying. For much of their Browse through a computer software store, flight, they are unable to see the ground. and you will notice that flight simulators are They know that at 33,000 feet they are safer in ample supply. Visit an air show, and you than they will be when driving home from will be astonished to discover how many peo- the airport in their car. ple still thrill to the sight of airplanes booming No danger, no mystique. Then, too, the through the sky. The opening weeks of the democratization of air travel has deprived the Persian Gulf War, the most extensive and con- airplane of much of the sacred aura of elitism centrated air operation in history and the first from which it derived so much of its glamour one to be watched as it happened by a mass during the first 30 years of its existence. Fa- public, kept Americans glued to'their televi- miliarity has bred indifference, if not con- sion sets and convinced many that their tax tempt. Who now can appreciate the sense of dollars had been wisely spent. risk, adventure, and singularity with which Yet among these devotees of aviation, the first air travelers committed their lives to who believes that the airplane has the power the hazards of the sky? to renew culture, abolish war, create a new type of civilization, cultivate deeper human r does the explanation go even relationships, or produce a race of supermen? deeper? Could it be that we have lost Would it occur to anyone to think that the 0 some of our enthusiasm for the con- members of the Navy's Tailhook Association quest of nature? Perhaps the sense of pride at represent a higher form of morality that having dominated the air no longer thrills us brings them-and with them, us-closer to in the way it did our predecessors? If so, the mythical heroes of old? Charles Lindbergh will once again turn out to Is this because the place of aviation was be a pioneer. As a young man, Lindbergh be- taken by space exploration? I think not. lieved that the development of commercial Though most of us are fascinated by space aviation was a means of increasing human technology, we do not see it as a source of freedom and bringing the peoples of the new values and meanings. No astronaut has world together in understanding and peace. ever inspired the popular enthusiasm or cult During the last decades of his life, he came to that Undbergh and other famous aviators and the conclusion that rapid communication aviatrixes of the pre-World War Il period did. brought in its wake "deadly standardization" Instead of being seen as heroes, the astro- and the destruction of the environment. The nauts are perceived as highly trained techni- secret of cultural renewal and survival for the cians, which in fact is what they are. human race lay, he now thought, not in the On reflection, it is dear that the waning of lessons of machines but in the "wisdom of aviation culture was implicit in the logic of the wildness." Having longed to flee the limi- aeronautical progress. Once flying was no tations and constraints of the ground as a longer dangerous and the skies had become young man, Lindbergh spent his last years friendly, aviation's role as a means of tran- getting to know the earth. For him, as for us, scendence was doomed to disappear. The aviation no longer held the answers to the hundreds of passengers who are herded into questions that really mattered.

AVIATION 117 Sigmund Freud came to the United States in 1909 an eager admirer of this nation and left after a brief visit one of its more vehement critics. Baffled scholars have gone so far as to wonder if it was the American taste for barbecue that alienated the father of psychoanalysis. Here Howard Kaye argues that Freud was appalled by what American reality revealed about his own theories.

BY HOWARD L. KAYE

igmund Freud was well-established dence that his reputation was at last begin- but far from famous when he re- ning to grow and that psychoanalysis was ceived a letter in December 1908 achieving respectability. Slowly, he was from G. Stanley Hall, a noted Ameri- putting behind him the long years of what he cans psychologist and the president of Clark called his "splendid isolation." In 1908, more University, inviting him to give a series of in- than 20 years after he had begun the long troductory lectures on psychoanalysis. The journey from neurology to psychoanalysis, he 52-year-old physician would be one of sev- reconstituted and formalized as the Vienna eral distinguished speakers at a ceremony Psycho-Analytic Society, the Wednesday- marking the 20th anniversary of the Worces- night group of obscure, Jewish, and all-too- ter, Massachusetts, institution. It was an excit- bohemian physicians who met at his Vienna ing opportunity for Freud, but he had rnisgiv- flat to smoke and discuss his ideas. He had ings. Like most cultured Europeans of his day, also attracted new disciples, including several he viewed the United States with casual con- promising foreigners who lent his movement tempt, considering it a land of vulgarity and more respectability. As well as Karl Abraham prudishness. More to the point, he thought it in Berlin and Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest, unlikely that his sexual theories would be there were the essential non-Jews, Ernest well-received by a nation of uncultured Jones in London and Jung in Zurich. prudes. Despite such misgivings, Freud's am- bitions for psychoanalysis and vanity pre- lthough Freud had written several vailed. After further correspondence with books, including The Interpretation Hall, he accepted the invitation. To Carl Jung, of Dreams (1899), they had found then his closest disciple, Freud confessed, only a small and specialized audi- "This has thrilled me more than anything else ence. The lectures at Clark, which Hall had '. that has happened in the last few already made an important American center 'years . . . and I have been thinking of nothing in the fledgling field of psychology, would else." mark Freud's first public presentations on To Freud the invitation was tangible evi- psychoanalysis. In attendance would be intel-

118 WQ SPRING 1993 Signzund Freud sitting with host G. Stanley Hall (cen- ter) and Carl lung (at right) at Clark University. lectual eminences such as philosopher Wi- thralled that he memorized Lincoln's speech liam James, anthropologist Franz Boas, and and recited it to his sisters. neurologist James J. Putnam (later the first president of the American Psychoanalytic o the young Jew coming of age dur- Association). Freud's ideas might finally gain ing a brief interlude of liberalization a sympathetic hearing within established, al- in the Austro-Hungarian Empire beit American, intellectual circles. and dreaming of a political career, There was, however, another reason for Lincoln's eloquent evocations of the ideals of Freud's excitement. As he explained to Jung, liberty and equality were deeply stirring. Hall's invitation had reawakened his "youth- When Austrian anti-Semitism began to in- ful enthusiasm" for the United States. Accord- crease after the depression of 1873, Freud ing to his sister Anna, that enthusiasm was even considered emigration. In 1882, he kindled when the 17-year-old Freud encoun- wrote to Martha Bemays, to whom he had tered the Gettysburg Address and some of recently become engaged, "I am aching for Abraham Lincoln's letters at the International independence, so as to follow my own Exhibition of 1873, held in Vienna. She later wishes" and said he would likely leave for recalled that the young Freud was so en- England, the United States, or even Australia.

FREUD 119 It was not only opportunity that beckoned. Freud disciple and future biographer who at- Freud was attracted to the English-speaking tended the Clark lectures, reports that a world because of "its sober industriousness, woman in the audience begged him to ask its generous devotion to the public weal, the Freud to say more on sexual matters-a re- stubbornness and sensitive feeling for justice quest that Freud declined. of its inhabitants." In contrast to Vienna, ruled After the lectures, the visitors took brief by an aristocracy and rife with religious preju- trips to Niagara Falls and to Putnam's rustic dice, the English-speaking world offered "a Adirondack retreat near Lake Placid before re- home where human worth is more re- turning to New York City and sailing for spected." During his internship at the General home. AH told, Freud's visit lasted only three Hospital of Vienna he hung a copy of the weeks. But its effects proved enduring. It pro- Declaration of Independence over his bed. foundly altered not only his view of the coun- Even after he married (in 1886) and estab- try he had admired as a young man but, far lished his private psychiatric practice, Freud more important, the course of his social the- still expected to emigrate to the United States. ory and cultural criticism. As a two-month trial period in Vienna stretched into years, however, his sister-in- o all outward appearances, the trip law Minna began to joke that "he should stay was a professional success and a in Austria until his fame reached America, personal triumph, but inwardly when so many American patients would flock T Freud was deeply disillusioned. His to him that he would be saved the trouble of thoroughly conventional European snobbery emigrating." toward the New World soon gave way to a pervasive and deeply irrational hatred that o when Freud, along with Jung and grew with the passing years. In the United Ferenczi, arrived in New York City at States his ideas quickly won professional and the end of August 1909, the occasion popular acclaim-they were the stuff of arti- was fraught with professional and cles in women's magazines by 1915-yet personal meanings. The visit was to be both a Freud never returned to the scene of his tri- triumph for the psychoanalytic movement umph. In fact, he became distraught even and the fulfillment of Freud's youthful dream when any of his followers crossed the Atlan- of seeing the New World. He and his entou- tic, as Jung did only a year later, fearing that rage spent a week seeing the sights of New they would be tantalized by the country's York, tromping to Chinatown and Coney Is- overwhelming materialism and the tempta- land as well as the Metropolitan Museum of tions of popular acclaim. He came to see the Art, before they traveled on to Worcester. United States as "a gigantic mistake," a "mis- There, much to Freud's surprise, his sexual carriage," a "bad experiment conducted by theories met with little resistance. To the con- Providence." Americans were neurotic and trary, his five talks were well-received and so- hypocritical. Their manners were lax, their berly reported by the Worcester newspapers learning superficial, their speech garbled. For- and the Boston Evening Transcript. "In prudish tunately, the country was destined for extinc- America," he later noted, "it was possible, in tion and, as Freud once told Marie Bonaparte, academic circles at least, to discuss freely and a Freud acolyte and distant relative of Em- scientifically everything that in ordinary life is peror Napoleon I, "it serves her right. A coun- regarded as objectionable." Ernest Jones, a try without even wild strawberries!"

Howard L. Kaye, a professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College, is the author of The Social Meaning of Modem Biology, from Social Darwinism to sociobiology (1986). He is working on a book about Freud and social theory. Copyright 0 1993 by Howard L. Kaye.

120 WQ SPRING 1993 Freud's views on the United States be- mix of materialistic egalitarianism and sexual came so unremittingly harsh, so prejudiced, prudery. In his recent book, Freud, Jung and that even he recognized the need for some Hall the Kingmaker (1992), Saul Rosenzweig explanation. In his mind, as he wrote on vari- of Washington University suggests that ous occasions over the years, it all went back Freud's animosity was the product of a "dis- to the various physical ailments he had suf- placed sibling rivalry" with his brother-in-law fered during his visit: a mild case of appendi- Eli Bernays, who had emigrated with his fam- citis; an inflamed prostate (which made him ily to New York 17 years earlier. The two men experience the scarcity, inaccessibility, and were doubly related: Each had married the grandeur of American bathrooms with par- other's sister. But Freud had come to dislike ticular resentment); and, above all, an attack Bernays intensely in Vienna, and he was fur- of colitis, which he blamed on American ther angered when his brother-in-law made it cooking. (The offending meal was apparently difficult for him to visit his sister Anna in a steak prepared, as if by "savages," over an New York. open fire at Putnam's Adirondack retreat.) While no doubt containing elements of Freud even held America responsible for the truth, such explanations are inadequate to ac- deterioration of his handwriting. count for so passionate a hatred. How, for ex- His psychoanalytic disciples, while struck ample, could an affront to European refme- by his irrational hatred, offered no less super- ment in matters of learning and decorum lead ficial explanations. Jones believed that Freud's to the kind of brutal attack that Freud and the hostile reaction was in part that of "a good American diplomat William Bullitt launched European with a sense of dignity and respect in their biographical study of Woodrow Wil- for learning which at that time was less prom- son, America's exemplary progressive? Writ- inent in America." But on "a more funda- ten during the 1930s but published only in mental personal" level, Jones suggested, 1967, in deference to the second Mrs. Wilson, Freud's animosity "had nothing to do with Thomas Woodrow Wilson:A Psychological Study America itself" but stemmed from his difficul- has been an embarrassment to Freudians. It is ties with American Enghsh, which may have hard to justify its mean-spirited portrayal of revived painful memories of his awkward ex- "little Tommy Wilson," the weak and neurotic periences with French while conducting re- "mama's boy" and father-worshiper who search in Paris during 1885 and '86. Equally identified with Christ yet ultimately lacked unpersuasive is Sandor Ferenczi's suggestion the moral strength either to live up to his ego that Freud's anti-American animus was a de- ideal or to rebel in a "masculine" way against fensive reaction against his "American van- its impossible demands. Freud's defenders ity," inspired by the honors he received dur- may be right in blaming Bullitt for much of ing his visit. the book's crudity, but its scorn and contempt Freud's most recent biographer, Yale histo- for Wilson were also genuinely Freud's. rian Peter Gay, points to the master's quite understandable exasperation with the con- ow then to explain Freud's loath- stant bickering within the American psycho- ing for America? His own writ- analytic community but suggests that the ulti- ings and remarks following his mate source of his anti-Americanism was a visit offer a clue, for a new theme volatile mismatch of cultural characteristics. began to emerge in both his practical and the- Freud combined a stiff European sense of oretical works: the problem of authority. bourgeois propriety with distinctly anti-bour- Freud saw in America something that he had geois attitudes toward sexual liberalization. not anticipated, a disturbing disregard for sci- The Americans he met during his travels, on entific, political, and familial authority that he, the other hand, exhibited an equally unusual like Tocqueville, attributed to American egali-

FREUD 121 tarianism. "The Americans," he later com- Toward this end Freud had suggested to plained, "transfer the democratic principle Jung two months earlier that psychoanalysis from politics into science. Everybody must be- ally itself with the International Fraternity for come president once, no one must remain Ethics and Culture, a secular movement for president; none may excel before the others, the promotion of public morality. The sugges- and thus all of them neither learn nor achieve tion set off an emotional explosion in Jung, anything." Freud acknowledged in his History bringing to the surface the strong religious, of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914) that "racial" (Jewish versus Aryan), and theoretical "the absence of any deep-rooted scientific tra- disagreements growing between the two dition in America and the much less stringent men. Jung bristled at Freud's tepid vision of rule of official authority" had made it possible the public role of psychoanalysis. The idea of for psychoanalysis to gain more rapid accep- scientific moralizing appalled him. Jung tance there than in Europe, but he was dis- longed for an antinomian rebellion led by mayed to discover that this absence of tradi- psychoanalysis, a "drunken feast of joy" in tion and authority also contributed to which "ecstatic instinctual forces" would be superficial understanding, inconstancy of alle- reawakened and a new myth, or a new reli- giance, and incessant bickering among his gion, would be born. "Must we not love evil," American followers. Rejecting the American he asked Freud, "if we are to break away principles of equality and competition, which from the obsession with virtue that makes us now seemed to Freud to stifle the indepen- sick and forbids us the joys of life?" Deeply dence of thought he had hoped to find, Freud disturbed, Freud urged the younger man to wrote to Ferenczi after their trip to say he sublimate his unmet religious needs into more agreed with Ferenczi's assertion that "the psy- practical, and safer, pursuits. Privately, how- choanalytic outlook does not lead to demo- ever, Freud turned his attention to unmasking cratic equalizing: There should be an elite psychoanalytically such religious cravings- rather on the lines of Plato's rule of philoso- both the craving for an authority to submit to phers." and the craving for ecstatic release from its demands-in order to defuse their destructive hat Freud was not simply referring potential. During the next two years, the split to the need for acknowledged au- between the two widened, culminating in thority-his own-within the psy- their break in 1914. T choanalytic movement is made clear In October 1910, Freud took up the prob- by his remarks to the Second Psycho-Analyti- lem of authority once again, this time in the cal Congress in March 1910. There, as in his realm of the family. Freud the therapist might famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, which he have sought to weaken his neurotic patients' began writing within weeks of his return from irrational ties to parental authority, but Freud the United States, Freud emphasized "the in- the social theorist came to fear challenges to tensity of people's inner lack of resolution and authority. America represented a realization of craving for authority." As evidence of this vi- these fears. Against the suggestions of his Vi- tal human need for guidance and support, ennese disciples, who believed, not without Freud pointed to the "extraordinary increase reason, that they were following their mas- in neuroses [and "the impoverishment of the ter's lead in arguing that intense parent-child ego"] since the power of religion has waned." bonds were pathogenic and needed to be di- Only through a transference of "social author- minished through a variety of means-a cool- ity" from religion to science in general, and to ing of the family's emotional climate, a trans- psychoanalysis in particular, could "the most ference of "the essential part of child- radical prophylaxis against neurotic disor- raising. . . to a place away from home," and ders" be achieved. an emphasis on coeducation-Freud pointed

122 WQ SPRING 1993 to the disastrous example of America. The which all of Western civilization was headed. American educational system, he argued, cit- He believed that this condition-which he ing Hall as his authority, was based on came to call "the psychological poverty of "downgrading the influence of the family" on groupsu-with its threat to individual health, the character and values of children as much social order, and cultural achievement, devel- as possible. In addition, Freud said, the Arner- oped in societies such as America where "in- ican experiment with coeducation had proved dividuals of the leader type do not acquire the harmful: "The girls develop more rapidly importance that should fall to them in the for- than the boys, feel superior to them in every- mation of a group." This posed an obvious thing and lose their respect for the male sex. question, which Freud did not address: Was To this must be added the fact that in the not such a society made more likely by his United States, the father-ideal appears to be own teachings, which unmasked the father of downgraded, so that the American girl cannot childhood behind the leader of men, thereby muster the illusion that is necessary for mar- breaking the spell of authority? riage." A weakening of parental, and particu- larly paternal, authority might have reduced fter 1910, the origin of this "soaal the incidence of neurosis due to sexual repres- feeling" and the causes of its de- sion, Freud suggested, but the cultural costs dine became the central question were great. They could be seen in the Ameri- A in Freud's writings on social the- cans' slavishness to public opinion, their em- ory. Freud identified a number of sources of brace of mediocrity, and their antipathy to ex- social cohesion apart from fear and neces- cellence. sity-love (both homosexual and heterosex- ual), identification, narcissism, guilt, cultural he shift in Freud's critique of Amer- ideals, envy, coercion, and even reason. But ica after his visit was paralleled by a he focused most of his attention on the indi- significant change in his diagnosis of vidual's ambivalent bond to the leader, a contemporary Western civilization. bond wrought out of a complex amalgam of He began to move away from his old empha- love, hostility, and guilt which he first ex- sis on the pathogenic effects of failed sexual plored in Group Psychology and Analysis of the repression, a theme he continued to articulate Ego (1921). as late as 1908 in his essay, "'Civilized' Sexual Freud recognized, of course, that solidarity Morality and Modem Nervous Illness." In- with others could be based on the recognition stead he became more and more concerned of any common quality or situation-such as with the impoverishment of the individual race, class, creed, or nationality-but he be- psyche as a result of its detachment from lieved that the strength of such bonds paled strong ego and cultural ideals and from the before those formed on the basis of a shared soaal institutions (such as churches) that sup- and intense emotional bond to a powerful port them. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he be- leader like Moses or Napoleon. Even after he gan to argue that neurotics were not just the is long dead, Freud argued, such a leader is victims of excessive sexual frustration but of able to weld individuals into a group and failed social institutions and an erosion of "so- even reorder their personalities, partly cial feeling" that compelled the hapless indi- through the force of his ideas but especially vidual to "endeavor to achieve by private through the power of his personality. The means what is effected in society by collective leader serves as a kind of "substitute father," effort," namely, "the problems of compensat- not for the actual father of childhood but for ing for unsatisfied wishes." the "paramount and dangerous personality" America, in short, came to represent for of childhood fantasy, "to whom one's will Freud a dangerous cultural condition toward [and conscience] has to be surrendered." En-

FREUD 123 thralled by such a figure or ideal, individuals dividuals inoculated against communal en- recognize their commonality in their shared thusiasms and capable at last of indepen- love for and bondage to it, and are motivated dence. In a study of Freud's thought, Philip to master their mutual envy and hostility Rieff put the matter succinctly: "A follower through the countervailing forces of "commu- can never be as ardent after he recognizes his nal or group feeling." Most remarkably of all, leader as a father-image." in their love of the leader they may intemal- In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), ize his ideals and demands, making them Freud elaborated his ideal of human indepen- their own, thereby achieving greater unity dence, citing as an example the "cautious within their psyches and with one another. business-man'' of pleasure carefully utilizing a In Group Psychology, written shortly after variety of "techniques of livingw-such as World War I, it is dear that what Freud feared love, work, fantasy, and sublimation-rather most was the destructive power of this "crav- than foolishly seeking happiness "from a sin- ing for authority." When satisfied, it threat- gle aspiration," and particularly from the ened to produce both psychological and social mass delusions of communal life. But once regression-a loss of intellectual rigor and in- again America loomed in Freud's mind as a dividuality; a "predominance of the life of warning of the opposite danger, a danger to phantasy" over reality (amply demonstrated which his own theory might contribute. In a in a Wble world's belief in the "fantastic society of individuals freed from the submis- promises" of President Woodrow Wilson's sion to any authority, each pursuing his or her Fourteen Points); and a release of hostility, own pleasure and security, each "has no hesi- even brutality, toward those outside the tation" in using, "injuring," "insulting," and group. When this craving is frustrated, or "slandering" others. Thus, "Civilization has when the spell of authority is broken by the to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits death of the leader or disenchantment with to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the him, intolerance and cruelty toward outsiders manifestation of them in check by psychical may subside, but the cost is psychic and social reaction-formations . . . identifications and dissolution. The disastrous war just com- aim-inhibited relationships of love." In other pleted offered many cases of both neurosis in words, there was a need for authority in all individual soldiers and mass panic on the bat- walks of life. Envy must be transformed into tlefield caused by the loss of a commander. group feeling, aggression toward others into With the "undeniable weakening of religious guilt for such temptations, and erotic love into feelings" in his age, both possibilities, melan- generalized affection. The coercive power of cholia and mania, seemed to Freud to lie be- the state and "the interest of work in com- fore humanity as it struggled to throw off old mon" were not enough, in Freud's view, to ideals and objects while desperately grasping bind a society (and individual souls) together, at new ones, among them socialism and na- particularly as societies become increasingly tionalism. large and heterogeneous. Small ethnic com- munities and cultural groups enjoyed the ad- reud's preferred means of breaking vantage of the "narcissism of minor differ- this destructive cycle of enchantment ences," creating cohesion within the group by and disenchantment was to unmask expressing hostility toward neighboring peo- what he believed was the "infantile" ples. But what could weld together psycho- nature of the craving that drove it: the child's logically a soaety as diverse as America? love, dependence, and guilt transferred to It is the weakness of such psychologically others. By revealing this transference and us- binding forces that Freud referred to when he ing it, Freud hoped that psychoanalysis warned of "the psychological poverty of would dissolve it, thereby producing true in- groups." American individualism, egalitarian-

124 WQ SPRING 1993 ism, and hostility to personal and communal said. "To understand all is not to forgive all." authority undercut the formation of fellow He boasted of his own high ideals even in the feeling, the mastery of envy and aggression, absence of religious faith. He clung, in other and even independence of thought itself. But words, to the positivist belief that the ethical its greatest danger for Freud was that it failed demands of civilization could indeed be to inspire and to reconcile such impoverished placed on a rational, scientific basis, at least individuals to the demands and ideals of civi- for the cultural elite. Among these few, civility lized life and to the sufferings and sacrifices and the rule of reason had become virtually that such a life entails, leaving them exposed innate through long practice. What of the to neurosis, discontent, and, as in the case of masses, in whom "no love for instinctual Jung, a potentially explosive "hostility to civi- renunciation" had yet been cultivated? Only lization'' itself in the name of some chimerical through their recognition of authority and redemption. "The present cultural state of their emulation of their leaders could they be America," Freud warned in Civilization and its raised and "induced to perform the work and Discontents, amply demonstrated "the dam- undergo the renunciations on which the exis- age to civilization which is thus to be feared." tence of civilization depends."

s a theorist, Freud sought to un- I he spectacle of an American elite, mask the fantasies and illusions personified by Woodrow Wilson, behind both our lowest desires crippled by neurosis and moral and our highest aspirations. Evil is weakness and thus incapable of but a return of the infantile; the sense of jus- leading-and of a people hostile to all author- tice is but a "reaction-formation" against ity-must have seemed to Freud to make a envy; ideals are only idealizations; the attach- mockery of this final hope. Indeed, the dis- ment to authority is nothing but the guilty semination of Freud's own psychoanalytic child's longing for protection. Yet Freud, fully theory made both moral leadership and moral aware of the requirements of civilized life, re- elevation increasingly suspect. No wonder mained personally committed to what he at- Freud hated America. It was a symbol of his tacked theoretically in the name of individual worst fears and a challenge to his fondest freedom and social order. Whenever it was hopes. But above all, it was a portent of pre- brought home to him, Freud attempted to rec- cisely the kind of world that his own theoreti- oncile this fundamental tension with brave cal and therapeutic efforts might bring into words. "What is moral is self-evident," he being.

FREUD 125 THE PERIODICAL OBSERVER Reviews of articles from periodicals and specialized journals here and abroad

The New Face of Mexico A Survey of Recent Articles

ust over a decade ago, Mexico suddenly con- writes in Current Histoy (Feb. 1993). fronted economic ruin. A decline in world oil Economic reform-launched during the 1980s prices left it in default on its huge (nearly $100- by Salinas's predecessor, President Miguel de la Jbillion) foreign debt, and it found itself unable to Madrid Hurtado-led to the closer relationship take out new loans. It became the first developing with the United States. Mexico's economy did not nation in the 1980s to require major debt-re- grow at all between 1982 and 1988. Turning that scheduling. Today, however, after seven years of around required getting away from the strong anti- dramatic and successful reforms, Mexico is a American nationalism that, before de la Madrid changed nation. Its economy is no longer govern- and Salinas, had been all but obligatory for Mexi- ment-dominated; the telephone company, the can governments. The "Colossus to the North" is banks, and agriculture have been privatized. The Mexico's main commercial partner (buying 60-70 door has been opened to foreign competition. percent of its exports) and main source of capital, Since joining the General Agreement on Tariffs notes Jorge Chabat, a professor at the Universidad and Trade (GATT) in 1987, Mexico has slashed the Iberoamericana in Mexico City, in Current History. average tariff on imports from 45 percent to 9 per- That does not mean that antigringoism is dead cent. Inflation has dropped dramatically-from a in this country of 85 million people. But politicians peak of 159 percent in 1987 to 12 percent last from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party year-as has the government deficit. Real wages, (PRI) "no longer run on the rhetoric of gringo which fell by as much as 50 percent between 1983 bashing," Sidney Weintraub, of the University of and '88, are on the rebound. The economy has Texas's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Af- begun to grow again. fairs, and M. Delal Baer, of the Center for Strategic So successful have the reforms been that the and International Studies' Mexico Project, observe Economist (Feb. 13, 1993) declares that President in the Washington Quarterly (Spring 1992). Inci- Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who took office in 1988, dents that once would have set Mexico aflame "has a claim to be hailed as one of the great men of with nationalistic fervor-such as the U.S. kidnap- the 20th century." It is a tribute to how far Salinas ping in 1990 of a Mexican doctor implicated in the has taken Mexico that the 24-member Organiza- murder of a U.S. official-"are now dealt with tion for Economic Cooperation and Development calmly as aberrations amenable to correction in an (OECD) is taking seriously the application from his otherwise friendly relationship."

Third World nation (with a gross domestic product "Mexico is ceasing to be 'Mexico,' " Mark Falcoff, per person of only $3,400 in 1991) for membership a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Insti- in that exclusive "rich countries' club." tute, writes in the American Enterprise (Jan.-Feb. Perhaps Salinas's greatest achievement, in the 1993). "That is, Mexico has begun to discard an eyes of the Economist and other observers, has entire set of civic values and practices that for more been overcoming Mexico's traditional fear of than 70 years defined its national identity and gringo domination. The North American Free made it one of the ideological lodestars of Latin Trade Agreement (NAFTA), initialed by trade ne- America." One-party rule and economic national- gotiators from Mexico, the United States, and Can- ism, once seen as obvious responses to the Yankee ada last October and now awaiting ratification, was threat, now seem antiquated to many Mexicans. his idea. Under Salinas's leadership, Mexico seems So far, however, all the change has meant only to have shed much of the debilitating ideological modest reform of Mexico's political institutions. Sa- baggage of the past. "After decades of ambivalence has, as one pundit put it, has pursued "perestroika toward the United States, Mexico is opening its without glasnost." And so Mexico remains, in Peru- economy and society to American business culture vian novelist Mario Vargas Uosa's phrase, a "per- and values," economist Peter Morici, director of the fect dictatorship," having all the characteristics of a University of Maine's Canadian-American Center, dictatorship except the appearance of one. Its sys-

126 WQ SPRING 1993 tern of presidential absolutism (presidencialismo) is him to rule so effectively." The result has been hidden behind a veil of constitutional democracy. some real political change. Before 1988, it would The PRI, which has ruled Mexico since 1929, has have been unthinkable for any state governments never officially lost a presidential election. "[Sali- to be in the hands of the opposition to the PRI. But nas's] reforms may be widely lauded," notes the the conservative Party of National Action (PAN) Economist, "but they have still been imposed from now governs the border states of Baja California above." and Chihuahua, and also holds the interim gover- Jorge G. Castafieda, a professor of international norship of Guanajuato in central Mexico. affairs at the National Autonomous University of "By mid-1991," writes Emory University politi- Mexico, argues in Current History that Salinas was cal scientist Robert A. Pastor in the Brookings Re- forced to undertake his bold program of economic view (Winter 1993), "Salinas and the PRI had re- reforms for political reasons. "The leitmotif of the gained substantial popular support because of the Salinas term has been to win in office the elections economic recovery and because of a program he stole at the polls, at least in the eyes of a major- aimed at helping poor communities. The PRI won ity of the Mexican people. In a sense, Carlos Sali- an overwhelming victory in the August midterm nas has never stopped campaigning." elections, leaving the opposition demoralized. His near-defeat in 1988, Susan Kaufman Purcell, Again, there were charges of fraud-exaggerated, vice president for Latin American affairs at the but not without foundation. By permitting exit Americas Society, writes in Current History (Feb. polls and replacing three PRI governors who were 1992), was due to the unpopularity of the austerity accused of election irregularities, Salinas sent a sig- measures undertaken by de la Madrid at the outset . nal to the PRI cadre that such 'alchemy' was no of the debt crisis. Many former PRI supporters, in- longer acceptable. But he also let them know that cluding government bureaucrats and members of the 'system' was still being managed." PRI-afffliated labor unions, defected from de la NAFTA-if ratified by the United States, where Madrid's hand-picked successor, Saliias, to vote it has run into opposition from labor unions and for left-wing candidate Cuauht6moc Cardenas, environmentalists-may accelerate Mexico's who promised a return to the status quo ante. movement toward democracy. Hector Aguilar Camin, an editor who is close to Salinas, is quoted uch a return was not really possible. The by Pastor as noting that the "institutional logic" of protectionist development strategy that opening Mexico's economy and linking it with the Mexico had been following before de la Ma- United States is that ultimately it demands opening drids took office in 1982, which required ever-larger "the political marketplace," too. state subsidies to its industries, "was no longer via- What is happening in Mexico, say Sidney ble," Purcell notes. "Deprived of foreign lending the country had to find other ways to finance itself. The two obvious alternatives were increased ex- ports and foreign investment." But Mexico's pro- POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 128 tected industries could not hope to compete FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE 130 abroad. Its anti-Americanism, and the govem- ment's view that foreign investment was a form of ECONOMICS, LABOR & BUSINESS 134 imperialism, did not encourage foreign investors. SOCIETY 136 De la Madrid was forced to make a radical break with the past-and Salinas greatly accelerated the PRESS & MEDIA 137 process. By doing so, Salinas has won credibility, but in RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY 140 the absence of genuine democracy he still lacks SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY 141 legitimacy. His strategy, the Economist observes, "has been to open up the political process just & ENVIRONMENT enough to prevent the sort of violent protests that ARTS & LETTERS 144 would attract international attention and so put NAFTA at risk, while at the same time not diluting OTHER NATIONS 147 the powers of the presidency that have enabled

PERIODICALS 127 Weintraub and M. Delal Baer, is similar to what has sor. But today, Andrew Reding, a Senior Fellow at been happening in Taiwan and South Korea and to the World Policy Institute, writes in World Policy what happened in Chile under General Augusto Journal (Spring 1991), "the culture of Pinochet Ugarte. "Mexican presidents are not dic- presidencialismo appears more naked than at any tators in the same mold as Pinochet. But the pat- time since the ill-fated reign of Porfirio Diaz," the tern is a familiar one. Electoral democracy eventu- dictator overthrown in 1911. The PRI, says the ally came back to Chile, and it is making inroads in Economist, "cannot afford to maintain its reforming South Korea and Taiwan; and it is also coming, in ways without securing real legitimacy for its con- fits and starts, to Mexico." tinued rule. This means winning a presidential Salinas's six-year term expires in 1994. Under election which is seen to be fair." Many observers, the present system of the dedazo ("pointing of the both inside and outside Mexico, will be watching finger"), the incumbent will choose his PRI succes- next year to see if that happens.

The Politics abortion and other moral issues. Before liberals Of Privacy congratulate themselves too loudly, warns Wolfe, a dean at the New School for Social Research, they "Whose Body Politic?" b Alan Wolfe, in The American had better recognize that similar dilemmas con- Prospect (Winter 1993) p.6. Box 383080, Cambridge, front them. Should they, for example, stand by the Mass. 02138. principle of free speech or back various liberal groups' demands for university "speech codes," Without Ronald Reagan and the Cold War to unite antipornography laws, and sexual-harassment them, conservatives today are badly divided over regulations?

What is public, what is private? That sometimes perplexing question has long divided conservatives from liberals on such issues as sex education in the schools. More recently, it has divided conservatives from conservatives-and liberals from liberals.

128 WQ SPRING 1993 Traditionally, liberals have regarded economic affairs as a public domain open to government in- tervention, and religion and speech as the realm of sacrosanct private rights. But the rise of cultural and "life-style" issues in American politics since the 1960s has vastly complicated matters. "As a result, it is not at all clear where people who be- lieve in greater equality and social justice ought to stand," Wolfe writes. Liberals have tended toward a kind of cultural libertarianism based on a perpet- ual expansion of the right to privacy. But Wolfe believes that that route-followed by constitu- tional scholar Laurence Tribe, among others-is fraught with moral and political hazards. Conser- vatives stuck to an absolute defense of private eco- nomic rights for roughly the first 60 years of the 20th century and paid dearly for it. Their beliefs left them powerless to address some genuine pub- lic problems. Absolutism in the pursuit of privacy likewise threatens liberals, Wolfe warns. Defending abor- tion rights, "the Left sometimes imagines children as fully public the moment after delivery and fully private the moment before." But if pregnancy is purely private, can the state do nothing to protect the unborn child of a crack-using mother? During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, San Fran- cisco authorities bowed to gay activists' objections and delayed closing gay bathhouses. "It remains impossible to know," Wolfe remarks, "how many individuals are now dead because the right to pri- vacy was deemed more fundamental than the pro- tection of public health." Wolfe says that only a few kinds of private be- havior deserve automatic immunity from regula- tion-notably those occurring in the bedroom (but not the bathhouse). He offers no axioms for the rest. In fact, his point is that there ought to be no axioms, that "a politics of tolerance and accommo- dation" is the best way to deal with conflicts be- tween the private and the public. Liberals, he ar- gues, should try to secure their objectives through legislation rather than judicial fiat; they should speak of public responsibilities as well as private rights; and they should demand the tolerance of private behavior by gays and others but stop trying to "legislate positive attitudes" toward them through such measures as curriculum reform. "We remain best off not trying to separate the public and the private each on its own island but instead building a bridge between them." Conser- vatives, take note.

PERIODICALS 129 Toward a Prozac from a paralyzing depression," Gilbert writes. He Presidency? "withdrew almost completely from interaction with Congress and showed little interest even in "Travails of the Chief by Robert E. Gilbert, in The Sci- the departments of his own government. His ences (Jan.-Feb. 1993), New York Acad. of Sciences, workdays shrank, and his naps grew longer and Two E. 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021. more frequent." Coolidge was only 60 when he died of heart disease. Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) is remembered as an One way or another, it seems, the stress of life indifferent president who favored short workdays can take a heavy toll in the White House. Leaving and long naps. When he died, only four years after aside the four presidents who were assassinated leaving the White House, writer Dorothy Parker (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) and asked: "How can they tell?" But Northeastern Uni- the six who are still living, Gilbert points out that versity political scientist Gilbert says that Silent Cal 21 chief executives died before their time. Only 10 had not always been so given to lassitude. defied the actuaries. The longest-lived ones, ironi- Elected governor of Massachusetts in 1918, Coo- cally, were the first 10 (George Washington lidge proved a vigorous executive and won na- through John Tyler), who died at an average age of tional acclaim for breaking the Boston police strike 77.9 years-well beyond their life expectancy. of 1919. Elected to the vice presidency the next Stress makes depression and other psychological year, he became president in August 1923 when woes an occupational hazard of the presidency. Yet Warren Harding died of a stroke. "Coolidge moved there are no adequate safeguards to protect against swiftly and surefootedly to consolidate his hold on a recurrence of the Coolidge phenomenon. the reins of government," Gilbert writes. "He The 25th Amendment, enacted in 1967, puts the worked long hours and appeared to enjoy himself burden on the vice president and the Cabinet to act immensely. In his first message to Congress he set if the president becomes incapacitated. Deterrnin- forth in direct, unequivocal language his positions ing if a president is physically incapacitated can be on a wide range of issues. He spoke as a strong, difficult enough, Gilbert notes; challenging a presi- even activist chief executive-quite the antithesis dent's mental fitness is almost unimaginable. of his historical reputation." Suppose in the case of Coolidge, apparently suf- The turnabout in Coolidge's political ways, Gil- fering from a major depression, that Vice President bert says, came in the summer of 1924, when he Charles G. Dawes had declared the chief executive was on the verge of a landslide electoral triumph. 'psychologically impaired," and then set about re- His 16-year-old son, Calvin, Jr., died of blood poi- moving him from office. The public reaction can soning, which had developed from a blister. The only be imagined, Gilbert says, but it "seems un- tragedy shattered the president. "Unbeknownst to likely that even Silent Cal would have remained all but a few intimates, Coolidge began suffering mute in the face of such a challenge."

The New Jingoes now call for the United Nations to intervene in civil conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, "The New Interventionists" bv Stephen lohn and elsewhere. Stedman, a professor at the Johns Stedman, in Foreign Affairs (special &sue, 1992-93), Council on Foreign Relations, 58 East 68th St., New Hopkins School of Advanced International Stud- York, N.Y. 10021. ies, contends that many of these "new interven- tionists" are unrealistic. The intoxicating post-Cold War freedom from old To begin with, he notes, civil wars are no more constraints has spawned a new breed of American frequent now than they were before the Cold War interventionist. Invoking the moral obligations of ended. There are 18 civil wars raging today; in the international community, these "new interven- 1985 there were 19. Such conflicts have been tionists"-an odd coalition of Wilsonian intema- among the hardest to settle politically, and today's tionalists and former anticommunist crusaders- "should not be expected to be more amenable to

130 WQ SPRING 1993 negotiation" than yesterday's. While the super- from $750 million in 1991 to $2.9 billion in 1992, powers still had leverage, before the Cold War of which member nations have contributed only clearly ended, "to settle various disputes such as $2 billion. "The United Nations has somehow Angola and El Salvador," their influence over their taken on a mythic status as the cure for all ills," former allies is now much reduced. Stedman says, "yet it has not received the re- Armed intervention to enforce peace among sources necessary to carry out even the tasks it has warring parties, even if undertaken by the UN, is embarked on already." no more likely to succeed in the post-Cold War era Humanitarian concerns are not enough to justify than before, Stedman says. Some interventionists intervention, Stedrnan argues. If they were, he have called upon the UN to use military force to says, then, in terms of deaths and genocidal cam- compel Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to abide by the paigns, Bosnia would trail Sudan, Liberia, and East 1991 Paris Peace Accords. Why, he asks, "should Timor. "Serbian thugs are certainly rank amateurs the United Nations be expected to succeed where compared [with] Cambodia's Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese army, one of the world's most dis- Mozambique's RENAMO, both of whom have ciplined, could not?" been accorded international legitimacy in the The UN is already "overextended and under- search for peace." funded," Stedman points out. During the last three The end of the Cold War, Stedman insists, has years, it has been involved in 14 peace -missions- not altered the fundamental logic of intervention. It the same number as in all its preceding 43 years. is justified only when international security is The estimated cost of peacekeeping has grown clearly at stake, and some civil wars threaten it

PERIODICALS 131 more than others. "The war in the Balkans is a the military's role in combating drug-smuggling. greater danger to international security than civil "By 1991 the Department of Defense was spend- wars in Somalia, Liberia or Sudan because it may ing $1.2 billion on counter-narcotics crusades. Air overwhelm Europe's political stability and eco- Force surveillance aircraft were sent to track air- nomic productivity, prerequisites for Third World borne smugglers; Navy ships patrolled the Carib- development." bean looking for drug-laden vessels; and National Likewise, the goals of any intervention still must Guardsmen were searching for marijuana caches be clearly defined. "Only a combination of coher- near the borders." Proposals were made to have ent strategy, sufficient leverage, and a keen sense the military rebuild bridges and roads, rehabilitate of timing will allow a third party to bring peace. public housing, and even help out urban hospitals. Most civil wars become amenable to settlement U.S. troops were given humanitarian missions only after they have played themselves out with overseas, in such countries as Iraq, Bangladesh, the ferocity." A short-term emphasis on ceasefires, or Philippines, and Somalia. When several African the provision of humanitarian aid, may sometimes governments collapsed around the turn of the cen- only prolong the bloody conflict rather than end it. tury, according to Dunlap's imaginary account, Many civil wars, in Stedman's view, may just have U.S. troops were called upon to provide basic ser- to be allowed to run their tragic course. vices-and never left. At home, the armed forces had gotten involved in many vital areas of Ameri- can life, and 21st-century legislators called for even greater involvement. By taking on civilian tasks, Dunlap contends, the It Can't military is diverted from its main mission-waging Happen Here? war and preparing to wage war-and "the very ethos of military service" is eroded. Instead of con- 'The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" sidering themselves warriors, people in the military by Charles 1. Dunlap, Jr., in Parameters (Winter 1992- come to think of themselves as "policemen, relief 93), U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa. 17013-5050. workers, educators, builders, health care providers, politicians-everything but warfighters." "With so much responsibility for virtually every- The year is 2012 and the White House is abruptly thing government was expected to do," his imagi- taken over by General Thomas E. T. Brutus, heretofore nary prisoner recalls, "the military increasingly de- merely the uniformed chief of the unified armed forces. manded a larger role in policymaking." Well- Upon the president's death and the vice president's intentioned officers, accustomed to the military not entirely voluntary retirement, Brutus declares hierarchy of command, "became impatient with martial law, postpones elections, and names himself the delays and inefficiencies inherent in the demo- permanent Military Plenipotentiary. The coup is rati- cratic process," and increasingly sought to circum- fied in a national referendum. vent it. General Brutus's coup was nothing more This scenario may seem like a fanciful Holly- than the next logical step. wood film treatment, but Dunlap, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, is afraid that it is becoming all too possible. Casting his argument in the form of a letter from a senior officer imprisoned for resisting the imag- Rambo Retires ined coup of 2012, Dunlap notes that high public confidence in the military after the Persian Gulf 'War Without Killing" b Harvey M. Sapolsky and Sharon K. Weiner, in Breakthrou hs (Winter 1992-931, War and disillusionment with most other arms of Defense and Anns Control Studies Pro am MIT, 292 government made it tempting, with the Cold War Main St. (E38-603), Cambridge, Mass. 02139. over, to give the armed forces major responsibil- ities for dealing with crime, environmental haz- The American military has always gone to great ards, natural disasters, and other civilian problems. lengths to minimize deaths in wartime. Now, how- Other institutions did not seem to be up to the job. ever, it may be going too far. Even before then, in 1981, Congress had expanded It is one thing to keep U.S. soldiers and civilians,

132 WQ SPRING 1993 and even enemy civilians, from harm's way, note cluding the two atomic bombs) killed 600,000 Ger- Sapolsky and Weiner, a professor and graduate man and Japanese civilians. By contrast, when a student, respectively, in the department of political civilian bomb shelter in Baghdad was mistakenly science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- blown up during the Persian Gulf War, alarmed ogy. Today, though, Americans seem to have leaders in Washington halted the bombing of "&owing qualms. . . about killing enemy soldiers." Baghdad for several days and nearly called off the American culture has always bred an extraordi- air war. nary aversion to death-which is one reason why, Doubts about killing enemy soldiers began to the great consternation of President Bill Clinton, creeping in during the Vietnam War-when some Americans spend so much on health care. In the Americans saw the enemy as "peasant soldiers military, the unusually high value attached to life fighting for their freedom." By the Persian Gulf has long been reflected in a heavy reliance on fire- War, the U.S. military had wised up. Reporters power. "The one sure way to keep American casu- were kept far from the front lines and the public alties down in war," the authors note, "is to blast was shown high-tech missiles smashing cleanly away at the enemy"-in effect, as they put it, to into bunkers and tanks. No dead bodies. When substitute capital for labor. This the U.S. military some of the old-fashioned blood-and-guts stuff did has done with a vengeance. During World War 11, slip out-a film clip from an Apache helicopter it expended one ton of munitions (artillery, bombs, showing Iraqi soldiers being mowed down-the etc.) per "man-year of combat exposure"; in Korea, Pentagon quickly recalled the film. Still, "in large eight tons; in Vietnam, 26. part because of [the military's] reluctance to go on But targets have been chosen with increasing with the killing and a fear of the political reaction," selectivity. "Our one big experiment in killing civil- the authors say, President George Bush was forced ians," Sapolsky and Weiner say, came during to end the war before Iraq's Republican Guard World War 11, when allied strategic bombing (in- could be destroyed.

During Persian Gulf War, word spread quickly about the "Highway of Death," in Kuwait. Far from rejoicing at the death of their Iraqi foes, Americans recoiled.

PERIODICALS 133 America's future enemies will not all be as stu- ica's weapons, the authors warn "will do little to pid as Saddam Hussein, who foolishly suppressed dissuade an antagonist who knows that we like pictures of the "awful gore" inflicted by American neither to suffer nor inflict casualties, military or weapons until after the war. Shrewd adversaries civilian." At some point, they predict, the United will locate their military bases in civilian areas or States will be unable even to contemplate war, and near cultural and religious landmarks. All of Amer- "isolation will eventually be our answer."

The New Wisdom on Minimum-Wage Laws A Survey of Recent Articles

he minimum-wage law, that hardy peren- sleuths who believe they have succeeded in failing nial of American political argument, may to find any evidence that increases in minimum T soon have its last, best hearing on the politi- wages cause employment declines, and who, like cal stage. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wants to Sherlock Holmes, discern much significance in the increase the current federal minimum wage of dog that did not bark. The economists present their $4.25 an hour by 10 percent-and then index it, dissenting findings in Industrial and Labor Relations thus removing the issue from the political battle- Review (Oct. 1992)-only to have them immedi- field. ately subjected, in the same issue, to a large dose of Reich will have at his disposal some surprising cold water from some fellow economist-detectives. new research. After decades of debate, economists Harvard economist Lawrence F. Katz (now chief by the early 1980s seemed to be in agreement on economist at the Department of Labor) and Prince- the subject of minimum-wage laws. The consensus ton colleague Alan B. Krueger begin the challenge was that they are a decidedly mixed blessing (per- to the conventional wisdom. They surveyed fast- haps not unlike economists themselves). Studies food restaurants in Texas after the federal mini- indicated that, other things being equal, a 10-per- mum wage was hiked from $3.35 to $3.80 an hour cent increase in the minimum wage reduced teen- in April 1990 and after it was further increased the age employment by one to three percent. (Nearly following April to $4.25. They found that at firms half of all teenagers now hold jobs.) Agreement most likely to be affected by the change (i.e. those among economists being an unnatural state, it is firms employing relatively more low-wage work- remarkable how long the consensus held up. But ers), employment actually increased. But they take lately it has come under challenge from economist- a bit of the edge off this finding by noting that their surveys would have missed any restaurants forced to close by the higher minimum wage, as well as any slowdown it might have brought about in the An Eroding Minimum? rate at which new restaurants opened.

he next challenger to appear in Industrial and Labor Relations Review's pages is Prince- Average Hourly ton economist David Card, who flings two Earnings of separate stones at the conventional-wisdom Goli- U.S. Workers ath. The first takes advantage of the fact that some ($4.25) states raised their minimum wages above the fed- eral one. As a result, the April 1990 boost in the Federal federal minimum wage had no effect on teenagers Minimum Wage in California and several New England states. If $1 the federal law had any negative impact at all, it 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990

134 WQ SPRING 1993 would have showed up as a change in teenage The challengers, however, do not have the last employment rates in other states relative to the word on the subject. University of Pennsylvania rates in California and New England. But, accord- economist David Neumark and William Wascher ing to Card, Current Population Survey data show of the National Bureau of Economic Research step no indication of any such negative impact in those forward in Industrial and Labor Relations Review to states. present some new research of their own (and to Card hurls his second challenge to the conven- fault Card for flaws they see in his statistical ap- tional wisdom from California, which raised its proach). Analyzing state data for the years 1973- minimum wage to $4.25 an hour in July 1988, long 89, they conclude: A 10-percent increase in the before the federal minimum reached that level. He minimum wage cuts teenagers' employment by contrasts the changes in teenage employment there one to two percent. with changes in certain states that did not increase There is plenty to quibble with in all of these their minimum wages then. Once again, the dog studies. How well, for example, do they adjust for does not bark. "I find no empirical support for the other factors that affect teenage employment, such conventional prediction," Card declares. The mini- as the varying economic health of different states? mum-wage increase boosted the earnings of low- Questions like that suggest that the new debate on wage workers in the Golden State but "does not the effects of the minimum wage will not be much seem to have significantly reduced employment." more conclusive than earlier ones.

No More sources and markets spurred technological innova- Number Ones? tion. The other source of American technological dominance was new: massive postwar invest- 'The Rise and Fall of American Technological Lead- ments, both private and public, in research and ership: The Postwar Era in Historical Perspective" by development (R&D) and in scientific and technical Richard R. Nelson and Gavin Wright, in Journal of Eco- nomic Literature (Dec. 1992), American Economic Assoc., education. The number of U.S. scientists and engi- 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. neers in industrial research soared from fewer than 50,000 in 1946 to roughly 300,000 in 1962. Total For more than a decade, more and more voices U.S. expenditures on R&D more than doubled be- have been heard bemoaning the loss of U.S. lead- tween 1953 and 1960. Other nations lagged far be- ership in high technology and calling for a govern- hind. ment-led industrial policy to set things right. What But these advantages were bound to fade. Other such analysts fail to understand, contend econo- nations learned the importance of investing in edu- mists Nelson of Columbia and Wright of Stanford, cation, training, and R&D. Falling trade barriers is why the United States had its big technological created international markets in both raw materials edge in the first place-and why no nation will be and finished goods, erasing the advantages Amer- able to gain such an advantage again. ica enjoyed in a simpler time. The world's ad- After World War 11, U.S. firms did seem to own vanced economies have converged and, to an ex- the future. They dominated high-tech fields, par- tent, intertwined. There is no sense trying to put ticularly computers, transistors, and other semi- Humpty-Dumpty back together again, the authors conductors, and claimed a big share of world mar- believe. In this environment, a moment's techno- kets. At home, technology helped to make U.S. logical advantage is quickly lost, as other nations industry the most productive in the world. adopt the new technology. This technological lead had two sources, accord- Now, the authors speculate, national advantage ing to Nelson and Wright. The first was America's may be based on "social capabilities," which are long-standing dominance in mass-production in- the product of the subtle social and political pro- dustries, built on the twin pillars of vast natural cesses that shape savings, investment, and pro- resources-coal, iron ore, copper, petroleum, and ductivity. But in the new world economy, even others-and a vast domestic market. Ample re- these advantages are bound to be fleeting.

PERIODICALS 135 Why Black Students extra help to low achievers i.n poverty-ridden Are Making Progress schools. But worthwhile as these programs may be, Armor says, national studies have found that 'Why Is Black Educational Achievement Rising?" by their positive effects are modest or short-lived. "Al- David J. Armor, in The Public Interest (Summer 1992), though compensatory programs may explain some 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036. portion of black achievement gains, it is unlikely they account for most of the improvement." The bad news about the lives of many blacks living Most national studies of academic achievement in America's cities is all too familiar: drugs, crime, show that it is most strongly linked to such socio- joblessness, family breakdown, and, by many ac- economic factors as parental education, income, counts, failing public schools. Yet, in the face of and job status, Armor notes. NAEP data suggest these oft-reported woes, black students in America the same. In 1971, only 21 percent of black 13- over the course of the 1970s and '80s posted sub- year-olds had parents whose education extended stantial gains in math and reading achievement, past high school; by 1990, 49 percent did. By the according to the National Assessment of Educa- latter year the black parents had achieved near- tional Progress (NAEP). What explains this good parity with the white parents, 53 percent of whom news? Armor, a George Mason University sociolo- had gone beyond high school. "The increased edu- gist, contends that the most important factor was cation of black parents is not necessarily the direct neither school desegregation nor compensatory- cause of achievement gains" by their sons and education programs but rather the rising socioeco- daughters, Armor says. Rather, it indicates "a host nomic status of many black families. of specific family behaviors and attitudes-such as The students' accomplishment-as measured by motivation, educational aspirations, child-rearing NAEP tests, a series of "snapshots" based on sam- practices, help with homework-which [translate] ples of schools and students and done for the U.S. into actual academic improvement for their chil- Department of Education-is impressive, whatever dren." Encouraging such behavior and attitudes the reasons for it, especially when contrasted with within families, he suggests, might help American white achievement, which was largely stagnant children of all races and ethnic groups more than over the same period. In reading, for example, the all the much-touted schemes for school reform. scores of black 13-year-olds jumped from 222 (out of 500) in 1971 to 242 in 1990, cutting the black- white gap nearly in half-from 39 points to 20. In mathematics, the story was much the same, with the black-white gap for 13-year-olds dropping from 46 points to 27. My Brother's Educators and others, including the head of the Keeper research organization that administers the NAEP, have speculated that the black achievement gains "Selling Poor Steven" by Philip Bumham, in American may result in part from school desegregation. Ar- Heritage (Feb.-Mar. 1993), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. mor, however, says the trends do not match up. 10011. Most of the increase in school desegregation took place during 1968-72 and few comprehensive It was "a very Sad Day" for William Johnson of plans were implemented after 1980. The gains in Natchez, Mississippi. "Many tears were in my black achievement were as large after 1980 as they Eyes. . . ," he wrote in his diary on December 31, were during the '70s. Moreover, recently released 1843, "On acct. of my Selling poor Steven," a slave data from the NAEP itself show that while blacks whom he had bought in 1832 for $455 and just in majority-white schools generally scored higher sold for $600. Of all Johnson's slaves-he had 15 than blacks in predominantly minority schools, the helping him try to turn a profit on his farm when latter students registered equal or greater gains. he died in 1851-only one, aided by "a white Specialists trying to explain the striking progress scoundrel," ever escaped to freedom. Yet, as in the of black students also have looked to the growth of case of Steven, Johnson expressed considerable compensatory-education programs such as Head compassion for his human property in his diaries. Start for preschoolers and Chapter I, which gives As well he should have, for Johnson once had

136 WQ SPRING 1993 been a slave himself. ily disputes. After Dilsey Pope, a free woman of Black slave-owners do not fit easily into today's color in Columbus, Georgia, quarreled with her stereotypes of the slave master, notes Bumham, a husband, whom she owned, she sold him to a washington-based free-lance journalist. Yet black white slave-owner. Husband and wife eventually slave-owners were a reality in ante-bellum Amer- settled their differences, but the new owner refused ica, a1beit"a tiny minority within a minority." to sell him back to her.) Nearly one in eight blacks, or more than Not all black slave-owners, however, were moti- 300,000, according to the 1830 census, were so- vated by a desire to protect family members. A called free persons of color, having reached that "significant minority," Bumham observes, owned status by birthright, manumission, or the purchase slaves "for the same reasons that motivated white of their freedom. Of those, 3,775 blacks, living slave-owners: commercial profit and prestige." An- mostlv in the South, owned a total of 12,760 drew Dumford, a free man of color, bought slaves slaves. The vast majority of these masters had no at auction for use on his sugar plantation south of more than a few slaves, but some in Louisiana and New Orleans. He did not think manumission South Carolina owned as many as 70 or 80. would become widespread. "Self-interest is too In most cases, Bumham says, the motive for strongly rooted in the bosom of all that breathes ownership appears to have been benevolent. the American atmosphere," he once explained. At Mosby Shepherd, for instance, manumitted by the his death in 1859, he owned 77 human beings. ~irginialegislature for having provided infonna- As the Civil War approached, Bumham says, the tion about an insurrection in 1800, bought his own position of black slave-owners grew more uneasy. son with the intent of later freeing him. "Owning In 1860, several wrote to the New Orleans Daily blood relatives could be a convenient legal fiction Delta that "the free colored population (native) of to protect them from the hostility that free blacks Louisiana. . . own slaves, and they are dearly at- attracted," Bumham notes. "Often it was a way to tached to their native land. . . and they are ready to evade stringent laws requiring newly freed slaves shed their blood for her defence. They have no to leave the state within a certain period." (Some- sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, times, ownership added a new dimension to fam- but they have plenty for Louisiana."

The Cheerleaders on the Bus A Survey of Recent Articles

ever before had a presidential candidate which visual images-of Willie Horton, of George donned shades and played the saxo- Bush at a flag factory, of Michael Dukakis in a N phone on a late-night television talk tank-seemed to predominate. "This time, there show. And never before had a serious contender was a real determination to keep the candidates for the nation's highest office announced his candi- from controlling our agenda," Newsday campaign dacy on a television call-in show. No doubt about correspondent Susan Page comments in a survey it: The Making of the President 1992 was different. in The Finish Line: Covering the Campaign's Final But if TV chat shows assumed unprecedented po- Days (Jan. 1993), a special report from the Freedom litical importance last year, most Americans, ac- Forum Media Studies Center. "The best example," cording to the Times Mirror Center for the People she says, "may be the tough coverage.. . of televi- and the Press, still got their news about the presi- sion ads for distortion and lack of context." dential contest from the traditional sources: TV Yet if the press in 1992 succeeded in correcting news programs and daily newspapers. its worst failures of '88, and tried hard to give Many journalists thought the press had done thoughtful coverage to economic and other issues, badly in covering the 1988 presidential contest, in it still managed to stumble badly, in the view of

PERIODICALS 137 aren't covered, or [aren't] covered aggressively." A case in point, he says, was an allegation made by Gennifer Rowers, whose claim to have been Clinton's mistress made its controversial way early in the year from the disreputable supermarket tabloid Star to the reluctant New York Times. Charges of infidelity may be none of the public's business, but "Flowers's charge that Clinton put her on the state payroll, at least, bore looking into." The press, however, "didn't want to spoil Clinton's party." But, then, neither did Weisberg. He com- plains about the absence of "a good story on Clinton's contra- dictory positions on the Gulf some media veterans. "No one denies the press war," then adds: "Of course, I'm guilty too. I saved tilted toward Clinton during the campaign and was this point for November 4." hostile to Bush," the New Republic's (Nov. 30, Reporters have climbed on presidential band- 1992) Fred Barnes writes. (Robert and Linda wagons before. Hugh Sidey, Time's long-time Lichter's Media Monitor INov. 19921 lends some Washington observer, admits in Finish Line that as statistical support: TV news' negative evaluations a campaign correspondent in 1960, he promoted of Bush exceeded those of Bill Clinton by 23 per- Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy. That year, centage points.) "Egregious as that was," Barnes he says, "I was one of the sinners along with Ben continues, "there was something worse. The press Bradlee and all the others who defected to Ken- was unashamedly pro-Clinton. I think an impor- nedy. We were propagandists, and there wasn't tant line was crossed." While journalists in previ- any question about it. We tried to skewer [Republi- ous presidential campaigns at least kept up "the can candidate Richard] Nixon every time we could, pretense of fairness," Barnes says, that restraint and we raised Kennedy up. But we had editors was thrown off in 1992. back in the old home office who could offer a pretty good balance. So we got a pretty fair ac- lthough there was no "orchestrated, parti- counting." In 1992, however, the news media's san press assault" on Bush and the Repub- self-correcting mechanisms too often broke down, A licans, Christopher Hanson, Washington in Sidey's view. correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ob- Not so many years ago, editors had to guard serves in Columbia Journalism Review (Nov.-Dec. against bias of a different sort. During the 1930s, 1992), some of the coverage did indeed have a fan- '40s, and '50s, newspaper publishers, as two-time magazine quality to it. "There was, for instance, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson the breezy, 1,700-word, July 22 Washington Post once complained, were "automatically against piece about Bill Clinton and Al Gore's post-con- Democrats. . . as dogs are against cats." That trans- vention [Midwest] bus tour, whose headline, lated into a lot of editorial endorsements for Re- . . . NEW HEARTTHROBS OF THE HEART- publicans, and the publishers' conservative views LAND, drew understandable groans of disgust often affected news content, sometimes in heavy- from GOP operatives." handed ways. When reporters or others objected, it Still, readers were able to recognize "the gushing was usually in the name of objectivity and fairness. copy about Clinton" for what it was, New Republic Today, Richard Harwood, a former ombudsman (Nov. 23, 1992) Deputy Editor Jacob Weisberg as- at the Washington Post, observes in Nienzan Reports serts: "The real unfairness occurs in the stories that (Winter 1992), owners and publishers mostly keep

138 WQ SPRING 1993 hands off the news. But the old ideal of fairness intended to vote for Bush, and that most of the seems to have lost some of its force. When they White House press corps openly scorned the presi- have strongly held views about, for example, abor- dent. Henry, a Pulitzer Prize winner, expected his tion or environmentalism or (it seems) competing assertions to make waves-but they didn't. "Jour- residential contenders, some editors and reporters nalists didn't seem shocked by these facts," he do not hesitate to take sides. writes, "and the public didn't seem surprised." Yet the Clinton cheerleaders did not constitute a With the election over, Congressional Quarterly majority of the press, R. W. Apple Jr., a veteran reporter Jeffrey L. Katz notes in the Washington New York Times reporter, argues in Nieman Reports. Journalism Review (Jan.-Feb. 1993), journalists Clinton, after all, did take a fierce pounding from themselves "are now questioning whether Clinton the press during the primaries. More than once his got better coverage than he deserved." That may candidacy was left for dead. The general election presage some journalistic efforts at correction in the seemed a different story. William A. Henry 111, a next presidential election. Meanwhile it will be in- Time senior writer, writes in Media Studies Journal teresting to see whether the media's apparent af- (Fall 1992), that he observed in print during the fection for Clinton will survive its traditional skep- campaign's waning days that the press did have a ticism of sitting presidents, Democrats and liberal bias, that hardly any "big league" journalists Republicans alike.

PERIODICALS 139 Dewey and many people find fulfillment in other realms. Democracy Looking upon politics as "the locus of human connection" is dangerous, Galston warns, "for po- litical fraternity tends to be most completely real- "Salvation through Participation: John Dewey and the Religion of Democracy" by William A. Galston, in ized in the course of shared ventures that bring Raritai~(Winter 1993), Rutgers Univ., 31 Mine St., New groups together in opposition to others. Harmony Bmnswick, N.J. 08903. and conflict are twinned." The search for political fraternity, he says, can easily lead to "the suppres- John Dewey (1859-1952) is regarded by some ad- sion of difference and the romanticizing of vio- mirers as America's uncrowned philosopher-king, lence''-in short, to jeopardy for democratic insti- the man who defined and popularized a civic reli- tutions and liberties. The great philosopher of gion of democracy. In his long career, Dewey democracy failed to grasp that. struggled to liberate philosophy from metaphysics, became the fountainhead of progressive thinking about education, and emphasized what he called "the religious meaning of democracy." But, con- tends Galston, a research scholar at the University The Good News of Maryland's Institute for Philosophy and Public Of Secularism Policy before he joined the Clinton White House staff, Dewey's understanding of democracy was, to 'The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, put it politely, "surprisingly idiosyncratic." 1875-1925" by Richard Wi htrnan Fox, in The Journal o In Dewey's eyes, as he told a class in political Inteidiscipiinary History (dnter 1993), 325 Markle Hal[ ethics in 1898, the democratic ideal was embodied Lafayette College, Easton, Pa. 18042-1768. in the French Revolution's slogan, "Liberty, Equal- ity, Fraternity." This invocation was symptomatic, Historians usually cast the Progressive era as a Galston says, of the philosopher's lifelong failure time of growing secularization of American life. to take any sustained interest in American political America's Protestants, inspired by a belief in sden- institutions. In the 552 pages of Robert B. tific progress and other worldly ideals, began turn- Westbrook's recent biography, John Dewey and ing away from their churches during the last quar- American Democracy (1992), Galston points out, ter of the 19th century, in this view, even as their there is no sign that Dewey ever intellectually en- churches turned away from traditional religious gaged in a serious way the American founding, the faith and embraced the era's reform causes. Constitution, or American political history. For Fox, author of Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography Dewey, Galston says, politics meant "a moral ideal (1985), believes this portrait is a bit too neat. The at one extreme and positions on specific issues at division between religious and secular culture was the other." The middle ground of institutions and never so sharp in America, suggests the Boston strategies for implementing ideals was missing. University historian, and by the end of the 19th "Dewey was incapable of thinking politically," century the two cultures were thoroughly inter- Galston asserts, and his attempts to do so resulted twined. In fact, he writes, "religious institutions in "his characteristic combination of high-minded and authorities played an indispensable part in moralism and practical ineptitude." During the promoting the secular culture." As the decades 1930s, the philosopher aligned himself with foes of progressed, the faithful were increasingly likely to the New Deal such as Louisiana populist Huey be told by liberal ministers to leave Calvinist suspi- Long and activist Father Charles Coughlin, the "ra- don of the world behind, "that it was their religious dio priest," and became involved in "increasingly calling to immerse themselves in the world, to ex- marginal third-party ventures." perience its natural and human-made delights." The "central flaw" in Dewey's thought, Galston After the Civil War, Fox says, liberal Protestant argues, was his "uncritical embrace of the ideal of clergymen were instrumental in redefining the direct democracy." He saw political participation as ideals of character and personality to suit a mod- the route to self-realization and a way of achieving ernizing America. Character was the traditional fraternity, but his definition of self-realization was ideal. Its Calvinist emphasis on self-sacrifice and vague, Galston writes, and ignored the fact that self-control, and on individual subordination to a

140 WQ SPRING 1993 higher law, was well-suited to an industrializing 'producer" society. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the rise of a "con- sumer" society was accompanied by a new emphasis on personality. According to the new ideal, Fox writes, "adulthood was open- ended, always still to be grown into, and ever subject to renegotiation." According to Fox, it was not, as some historians have insisted, that personality displaced character, but that the two were merged. And the merger was carried out partly under the auspices of Protestant thinkers. Thus Henry Ward Beecher, the celebrated preacher from Brooklyn, N.Y., believed, in Fox's words, that amid the routiniza- tion of industrial America "character could be sustained. . . only by the cultiva- tion and spread of personality"-by which Beecher meant the ability of individuals to change, to adapt, and to assert t Leaders of the Social Gospel mov such as Washington Gladden, also spoke the new language of personality. But ladd den and For preacher Henry Ward Beecher, the ideal of person- others believed that individual- ality not only promoted individual vitality but permit- ism had gone too far, and their ted what he called "spiritual engineering." efforts to mold "personality" sometimes amounted to little more than old-fash- currents that it flirted with, incorporated, and bap- ioned character-building. Gladden, for example, tized," Fox says. It was repudiated by liberal "real- was an enthusiastic supporter of the People's Tab- ists" of the 1920s such as theologian Reinhold Nie- ernacle in Cleveland, where some 4,000 working buhr. Then it suffered "the much more significant folk were brought together for evenings of lectures, cross-denominational evangelicalism which over orchestral music, and other forms of genteel uplift. the last half of the 20th century has displaced lib- Liberal Protestantism paid dearly for failing to eral Protestantism from its position of cultural "distinguish itself forcefully from various secular dominance."

THE (BI0)DNERSITY DEBATE A Survey of Recent Articles

heobatrachus silus is what biologists call a the New York Times Magazine (Dec. 13, 1992) the species of frog found in an Australian rain remarkable way in which it reproduces: "The R forest. Other people might simply call the Rheobatrachus female swallows her fertilized eggs, animal amazing. Writer Emily Yoffe describes in which then gestate in her stomach and are regurgi-

PERIODICALS 141 tated as tiny froglets six weeks later." Scientists of 1.5 to 1.8 million recorded species, May says, hoped that since the frog somehow is able to turn the true number of insect species may be two to off its gastric activity, research might reveal secrets three million. that would help humans with stomach ailments. But in 1980, only six years after Rheobatrachus hat difference does a reduction in silus's extraordinary reproductive strategy was dis- biodiversity make? Wilson and Ehrlich covered by Michael J. Tyler, a zoologist at the Uni- wargue that biodiversity is essential to the versity of Adelaide in Australia, the gastric-brood- working of natural ecosystems, that it provides ing frogs disappeared for their normal winter precious sources of medicines, foods, and fuel, and hibernation-and have not been seen since. The that humans "have an absolute moral responsibil- species is presumed extinct. ity to protect what are our only known living com- It is far from the only one. "Just as the impor- panions in this universe." Indeed, Wilson is quoted tance of all life forms for human welfare becomes in U.S. News & World Report (Nov. 30, 1992) as most clear," biologists Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford warning: "If we let too many species go, we face and Edward 0. Wilson of Harvard write in Science an enormous psychological and spiritual loss." (Aug. 16,1991), "the extinction of wild species and The only way to save "our fellow living crea- ecosystems is . . . accelerating," largely as a result of tures and ourselves in the long run," Wilson and the destruction of rain forests and other natural Ehrlich claim, is "to reduce the scale of human ac- habitats. The two scientists are an odd couple. Ehr- tivities," ceasing all development of "relatively un- lich is the crusading prophet who warned in a fam- disturbed" land. "Every new shopping center built ous 1968 book that the "population bomb" was in the California chaparral, every hectare of tropi- about to explode, and Wilson is the father of cal forest cut and burned, every swamp converted sociobiology, a man whom liberals have anathe- into a rice paddy or shrimp farm means less matized. Joining forces, they calculate that tropical biodiversity." deforestation alone now causes the annual loss of Human beings are more than just "intruders, at least 0.2 percent of all the species of plants, ani- tramplers, and destroyers," asserts Thomas Palmer, mals, and microorganisms in the forests-a loss of author of Landscape with Reptile: Rattlesnakes in an 40,000 species per year, assuming there are 20 mil- Urban World (1992). And yet biodiversity is so nar- lion in the forests. Critics, however, point out that rowly construed, he complains in the Atlantic (Jan. there is virtually no empirical evidence to support 1992), that its defenders fail to recognize human such claims. contributions. "The possibility that [Bach] chorales and [three-masted] schooners might represent posi- obody really knows just how many spe- tive contributions to biotic richness-that they cies there are in the forests or elsewhere might, just as much as any rain-forest orchid, em- on the planet, Robert M. May of Oxford body the special genius of this planet-is never University notes in Scientific American (Oct. 1992). admitted." "Despite more than 250 years of systematic re- The controversy has very practical implications. search, estimates. . . vary widely, all the way from When the northern spotted owl was listed as an three million to 30 million or more." (Ehrlich and endangered species in 1990, the result was a series Wilson believe that there may be as many as 100 of court cases that halted logging in millions of million species.) Ever since the 18th-century Swed- acres of ancient forest in the Pacific Northwest, ish scientist Carolus Linnaeus recorded some 9,000 contributing to the loss of tens of thousands of species of plants and animals in his Systema Natu- jobs. Brian F. Mannix, an economic consultant who rue (1758), taxonomists have been adding to the did work on the issue for the timber industry, com- list. "By far the most attention has been lavished plains in the American Enterprise (Nov.-Dec. 1992) on animals endowed with the charm of feathers or that the federal Endangered Species Act has be- fur," May says. For birds (9,000 known species) come a sort of entitlement program. "It grants to and mammals (4,000), and for butterflies (17,500), the members of officially designated species an ar- which many naturalists treat as honorary birds, the ray of absolute and inalienable rights that would record is nearly complete. For many other crea- be the envy of advocates for the rights of the tures, it is not. Although the 900,000 known spe- homeless, the disabled, or any other group needing cies of insects make up most of the estimated total help that consists of mere humans."

142 WQ SPRING 1993 'It certainly makes no sense to save all species at sooner or later it will cease to function." any cost, any more than to attempt to save all hu- Yet change, dramatic change, is a constant in the man lives at any cost," assert University of Mary- story of life on this planet, observes Thomas land economist Julian L. Simon and Berkeley po- Palmer in the Atlantic, and the imminent end of litical scientist Aaron Wildavsky in Society (Nov.- the world has frequently been proclaimed in times Dec. 1992). They suggest looking backward. past. "To say that the changes [humans] have "What were the species extinguished when the set- brought, and will continue to bring, are somehow tlers cleared the [U.S.] Middle West? Are we the alien to the world, and are within a half inch of poorer now for their loss? Obviously, we cannot making its 'natural' continuance impossible, dis- know in any scientific way. But can we even imag- plays some contempt, I think, for the forces at ine that we would be enormously better off with work, along with a large dose of inverted the persistence of any hypothetical species?" pride. . . ." "Few would deny that the effort to preserve and aybe not. But defenders of biodiversity protect as many as possible of the millions of spe- see the future in dire terms. "We don't cies now existing represents a fresh and heartening M know how many species can be lost be- expansion of human ambitions," Palmer writes. fore the system ceases to function," biologist Rich- "But to suppose that earthly diversity is past its ard L. Wyman of the State University of New York prime, and that a strenuous program of self-efface- at Albany told the New York Times Magazine's ment is the best contribution our species has left to Emily Yoffe. "But eliminate enough species and offer, is neither good biology nor good history."

Fatal Glitches National Research Council. "Despite rigorous and systematic testing, most "TheRisks of Software" by Bev Littlewood and large programs contain some residual bugs when Lorenzo Strigini, in Scientific American (Nov. 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017-1111. delivered," they write. "The reason for this is the complexity of the source code." A computer pro- gram with only a few hundred lines of code may Occasional computer failure is a familiar fact of permit thousands of alternative "paths" of deci- modem life. The usual result is inconvenience, a sions-and programs written for critical applica- day's work lost or a rile destroyed. When comput- tions can have millions of lines of code. A "wrong" ers are used in critical applications, however, flaws decision can result from a particular "input" not in the software can spell disaster. During the Per- foreseen by the program's designer or not used sian Gulf War, for example, the Patriot missile sys- during testing of the program. There are many tem failed to track an Iraqi Scud missile that killed other routes to error. Specifications often change 28 U.S. soldiers. The apparent problem: The Pa- during a system's development, and the changes triot computer was kept on so long that minor in- can introduce bugs into previously designed parts. accuracies in its internal clock accumulated and Or the system may be used in unintended ways, as threw off its timing. in the Patriot missile case. Its designers expected As complex computer programs are used in that it would be turned off and restarted often more and more critical applications, from nuclear enough to prevent the accumulated error in time- reactors to antilock brakes in automobiles, the dan- keeping from ever becoming dangerous. ger of computer-generated catastrophe spreads. Digital systems intrinsically make creation of re- The solution might seem to be simply to search out liable software difficult, the authors say. Changing and eliminate all the "bugs" lurking in a computer only one "bit" from 0 to 1, for instance, may make program. In theory, that can be done, but in prac- a radical difference. A single incorrect character in tice, it is not always easy, warn Littlewood, a com- the control program for the Atlas rocket carrying puter scientist who directs the Center for Software the first U.S. interplanetary spacecraft, Mariner 1, in Reliability, in London, and Strigini, a researcher at 1962, caused it to veer off course soon after launch. the Institute for Information Processing of Italy's The craft had to be destroyed.

PERIODICALS 143 The lesson to be drawn from the imperfections nology or taking a different approach should be of computer software, Littlewood and Strigini con- used. An industrial plant whose operations are clude, is that, especially in situations where con- controlled primarily by computers, for example, cern for safety is paramount, software should not could be equipped "with safety systems that do not be given "too critical" a role. Either the assigned depend on any software or other complex design." role should be so modest that the reliability of the In short, despite the dazzling technical achieve- software can be demonstrated beforehand, or else ments of the past two decades, "being skeptical is independent backup systems using different tech- the safest course of action."

Barbershop Dustup the '30s, and had a spectacular national hit in 1943 with Paper Doll-had taught his boys harmony in "'Pla That Barber Sho Chord': A Case for the Afri- his barbershop in Piqua, Ohio. can-American Origin ofBarbersho Harmony" by Lynn Abbott, in American Music (Faf1992), Univ. of LU. "In the days when such a thing as a white bar- Press, 54 E. Gregory Dr., Champaign, 111. 61820. ber was unknown in the South," black lyricist James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1925, drawing on Mention barbershop quartet, and a Gay Nineties im- his memories of Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1880s, age of dapper white barbers and-their patrons har- "every barber shop had its quartet, and the men monizing together comes to mind. The impression spent their leisure time playing on the that barbershopping is a white tradition was fos- guitar. . . and 'harmonizing.'" Their style, Johnson tered for decades by the Society for the Preserva- added, "gave a tremendous vogue to male quartet tion and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet singing, first on the minstrel stage, then in vaude- Singing in America, founded in 1938 in Tulsa, ville; and soon white young men, where four or Oklahoma. Abbott, an independent scholar, strikes more gathered together, tried themselves at 'har-

a dissonant note. like jazz and rock music, he says, monizing.' " the "barbershop" style probably originated with African-Americans. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Pa blo Picasso, American black men frequently lifted their voices Classicist in harmonious song. In Kansas City during the late 1880s, recalled vaudevillian Billy McClain, "about "Picasso: In the Beaux Ouartiers" bv Michael C. Fitz- every four dark faces you met was a quartet." Dr. gerald, in Art in ~merica(~ec.1992),'575 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. Laddie Melton, who began harmonizing in schoolyard quartets in New Orleans around 1910, said that whenever "three or four Negroes [got] During the years after World War I, Pablo Picasso together," they'd say, "Let's crack up a chord! Let's (1881-1973) suddenly shed the image of bohe- hit a note!" mian Cubist and assumed the role of fashionable "The art of 'cracking up a chord,'" Abbott says, Classicist. He even did some paintings that very "was born in unabashed celebrations of the much resemble society portraits. At the center of 'weird,' organically blended harmonies that first this re-creation of himself, according to Fitzgerald, distinguished the group-singing traditions of plan- an art historian at Trinity College, Hartford, is Stud- tation slavery." Although heard in many places, ies (1920-22), a painting that looks like an intrigu- from lodge halls to barrooms, the unique sound ing puzzle picture and that until recently was little came to be especially associated with black barber- known. shops, which served as places for socializing and "At first glance," Fitzgerald notes, "one might for rehearsing and performing music, and so it dismiss Studies as merely a chance assemblage of came to be known as "barbershop harmony." The unrelated sketches." But the images have a distinct father of the famous Mills Brothers-who began order. "Highly finished miniature Cubist still lifes singing in the 1920s, made successful recordings in at the outer edges frame the canvas, while figures

144 WQ SPRING 1993 rendered in a sketchily classiciz- ing style nearly crisscross its cen- ter." The dancing couple in ev- eryday clothes, as Brigitte Leal, a curator at the Musee Picasso in Paris, has noted, is "straight from Pierre Auguste Renoir." The influence of Renoir (1841- 1919) provides the key to Studies, says Fitzgerald. The Cubists re- viled Impressionism, and Renoir himself was widely condemned by the early-20th-century avant- garde for having embraced aca- demicism. Picasso, however, took a different view of the older mas- ter. "Renoir's struggle during his last decades to bridge the gap be- tween his early work and the Western classical tradition with- out jettisoning his pioneering contributions to Impressionism," Fitzgerald writes, "provided a model for Picasso's own effort to broaden his art without turning his back on Cubism." The strange pattern of Picas- so's Studies is tied to Renoir's late style, Fitzgerald says. "During his years of searching for this new style, Renoir developed an un- usual practice of sketching on In Studies, "a summa of Picasso's esthetic position in the years after World canvas." As one critic explained War I," the artist applied both realism (to figure) and Cubism (to still life). in 1920, Renoir "multiplied his sketches, throwing numbers of them on a single canvas, here and there, heads of When Hollywood girls and children, flowers, fruit, fish, game-what- Wooed the Censors ever he had in reach at the moment." This let him evaluate not only different subjects side by side but "Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Tryin to also different styles. In Studies, Picasso adopted Re- Censor the Movies Before the Production Code" tY Francis G. Couvares, in American Quarter1 (Dec 1992), noir's strategy, Fitzgerald says, and created "a Johns Ho kins Univ Press, 2715 N. char!& ~t.,~aiti- painting whose coherence depends on his self-con- more, ~d.21218-4319. scious inquiry into the same problem that Renoir had addressed before him-the relationship be- Today's liberal-conservative clashes over the arts tween avant-garde and traditional styles." and public morality are hardly the first such con- By the mid-1920s, Picasso was ready to move on flicts in American history. The Roman Catholic to a new phase of his career. In search of "another Church's Legion of Decency in 1934 launched a path for reviving the avant-garde,'' Fitzgerald campaign of movie boycotts and edged the film notes, he began to address "the budding move- industry into self-censorship. The conflict, how- ment of Surrealism. Picasso turned from the sooth- ever, was not just a case of artistic freedom versus ing glamour of 'things' to consider instead their repressive moralism, contends Couvares, an Am- capacity to shock." herst College historian. The struggle between Hol-

PERIODICALS 145 lywood and the Church, he says, was, to a consid- In 1921, after several Hollywood sex scandals erable degree, "a mutual embrace." (including one in which comedian Fatty Arbuckle, Well before the 1930s, movie moguls, most of one of the top stars of the day, was accused of rape them Jewish, had struggled to mollify their critics, and murder), and just after New York became the most of them Protestant. But that proved difficult. sixth state to set up a board of movie censorship, When upper-middle-class Protestant New Yorkers the moviemakers formed a trade association to founded the National Board of Censorship in 1909, head off further legislated censorship. Will Hays, a movie producers and distributors expected that the Presbyterian elder and prominent Republican who board would readily arrive at acceptable standards. had run Warren Harding's successful presidential The industry was almost eager to comply. But the campaign in 1920, was named to head the new "censors" could not always agree among them- organization. selves. What was worse, they often found their Hays's message to critics, Couvares says, was standards bitterly attacked as far too liberal by simple: "Oppose legislated censorship and the many middle-American Protestants. movie industry will allow you. . . to collaborate ac-

146 WQ SPRING 1993 tively in the great work of improving the 'democ- movies they found offensive. Independent exhibi- racy of entertainment.'" That meant visits to Hol- tors, struggling with large, studio-owned theater lywood stars and studios, and subsidized speaking chains for survival, joined the reformers. tours to spread the gospel of "film betterment," i.e. At that critical moment, Couvares writes, "a to praise Hollywood's "good" movies rather than powerful ally appeared from the unlikeliest quar- condemn its "bad" ones. ter-the Catholic Church." While the Church hi- At first, many critics were co-opted. However, erarchy included some bitter critics of Hollywood Couvares writes, "frustration over the failure of fare, it also strongly opposed both legislated cen- Prohibition. . . and the emergence of a more vocal sorship and antitrust legislation. Hays turned to the fundamentalist dissent from the cosmopolitan att- hierarchy and leading Catholic laity for support. hides of the mainstream church leadership" paved He "allowed the Catholics to write the Production the way for new protests against Hollywood. The Code" in 1930, and then in 1934, after the Legion call for a federal censorship law grew louder. By of Decency pushed for mandatory enforcement, he 1927-when movie producers reluctantly ap- put a prominent Catholic layman in charge of ad- proved a Hays associate's list of "Eleven Don'ts ministering it. The Production Code ruled in Holly- and Twenty-Six Be Carefuls" for filmmakers-re- wood until the early 1950s, and Hays, now re- formers were also supporting legislation to ban membered chiefly as an enemy of free speech, "block booking" and thus let local exhibitors refuse helped avert a federal censorship law.

AFTER THE VELVET DIVORCE A Survey of Recent Articles

Aclav Havel, the dissident playwright who The return of freedom to a country that had be- helped bring about a "velvet" end in 1989 come "morally unhinged" under communism, to decades of communist rule, is now Viclav Havel observed last spring in the New York presidentv of the Czech Republic-but no longer of Review of Books (April 9, 1992), unexpectedly pro- Czechoslovakia itself, which has ceased to exist. duced "an enormous and blindingly visible explo- On the first day of this year, the Czechoslovak fed- sion of every imaginable human vice," including eration, which Havel had valiantly tried to hold 'hatred among nationalities." Looking ahead then together, split into its two constituent parts: the to the June 1992 elections for the Federal Assembly Czech Reuublic and Slovakia. and the two republics' National Councils, the The implications of this fission could prove to be Czech president, while trying to remain hopeful, profound. Czechoslovakia was "not just another saw demagogy "everywhere." little country in Eastern Europe," historian Theo- dore ~ra~ernotes in the ~ew~orkReview of Books rom the beginning, Czechoslovakia was a (Jan. 14 & 28, 1993). "It [was] the only country union of "two different national and cultural between Germany and the former Soviet Union entities with different political and historical that has had an authentic democratic past." For 20 experience," note Martin Butora, a former adviser years after its creation in 1918 from the wreckage to Havel and cofounder of Public Against Violence, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a thriving the leading movement of the democratic revolu- democracy. If Czechoslovakia could not survive the tion in Slovakia in 1989, and his wife, Zora transition from communism to multiethnic liberal Butorova, a sociologist with the Center for Social democracy, how much worse must be the pros- Analysis in Bratislava. Before 1918, the Czechs had pects that Romania, Bulgaria, and the other states lived under Austrian rule, the Slovaks under Hun- of Eastern Europe will do so. garian rule. "On one side," Butora and Butorova write in Freedom Review (Nov.- Dec. 1992), "was the economi- cally and educationally backward Slovakia, brainwashed by de- cades of Hungarization and made up mostly of farmers with deep [Catholic] religious convic- tions. On the other was the more developed Czech society." Yet "a marked amalgamation" of the two different societies was achieved during the democratic interlude of 1918-38. Under the Communists, the differences that persisted between Czechs and Slovaks were largely suppressed or ignored, and, in the excitement of the Velvet Revolution they were temporarily forgotten. Czechoslovak president Ha- vel-in theory a ceremonial pres- Vbclav Havel, the hero of the Velvet Revolution, was not able to prevent ident above politics-came out the Czechoslovak Federation from splitting into separate nations. boldly in 1991 for a common state and urged a nationwide referendum on the cratic Slovakia, which won 37 percent of the vote issue of separatism. For more than a year, he for the Slovak National Council. Klaus and Meciar, worked hard on constitutional changes to give the the new prime ministers of their respective repub- federal president of the proposed common state lics, were committed, albeit for different reasons, to more power, including the authority to call a ref- splitting up the Czechoslovak state-yet neither erendum. "He seems to have trusted that the poli- emphasized the fact during his political campaign. ticians would grasp the good sense in his ideas, Klaus, a zealous follower of the American econo- and accept them," writer and translator Paul Wil- mist Milton Friedman, was intent upon rapidly son notes in the New York Review of Books (Aug. 13, transforming the Czech economy along free-mar- 1992). But his proposals went down to defeat in ket lines-and he came to believe that cutting eco- the Federal Assembly. "The intellectual-tumed- nomically backward Slovakia loose would make politician is by nature self-critical, and thus unable that easier to accomplish. In Slovakia, meanwhile, to campaign in his own favor," Eda Kriseovh, Ha- Meciar campaigned for a mixed economy, a much vel's biographer and a former adviser, remarks in slower rate of privatization, and continued state Partisan Review (no. 4, 1992). Students and intel- subsidies to failing industries. He said little about lectuals had largely set off the Velvet Revolution. separatism. According to public opinion polls in But intellectuals, Kriseovi says, "shy away from mid-1992, no more than one in five Slovaks fa- the power of government. They have a perma- vored separatism. Economically, however, the Slo- nently critical attitude to power, a lack of confi- vaks were badly hurting. dence in it. For that reason they are not very suc- For 40 years, notes Paul Wilson, "the Commu- cessful at practical politics." nist regime had put large steel plants, arms fac- tories, and chemical works into Slovakia in an ef- o referendum on dividing Czechoslovakia fort to transform its largely rural economy. Thus was held. But the winners of the June while communism had meant a decline in the 1992 parliamentary elections were Vhclav standard of living for most Czechs, most Slovaks Klaus and his rightist Civic Democratic Party, had experienced steady improvement. Now their which won 30 percent of the vote for the Czech main market, the Soviet Union, had collapsed." National Council, and Vladirnir Meciar, a former Unemployment in Slovakia climbed to about 12 Communist, and his leftist Movement for a Demo- percent-three times what it was in the Czech Re-

148 WQ SPRING 1993 public. The economic disparity, as much as nation- Czechoslovaks to face about 10 million Hungar- alist sentiment, fueled Slovak resentment. ians; now, there are only five million Slovaks to "The original impetus for the split came from the face twice as many Hungarians. "The Slovaks may Slovaks . . . ," Draper observes, "yet they are un- find that it is not so comfortable to survive alone in doubtedly going to pay the highest price for it." In a hostile environment," notes Draper. years past, Slovakia got some $300 million in an- "[The] Czecho-Slovak train that was optimisti- nual subsidies from the federal government. But cally speeding forward has suddenly jumped the the split will cost more than money. Slovakia has a rails," lament Martin Butora and Zora Butorova. large Hungarian minority along its border with "Despite the peacefulness of recent developments, Hungary, which has been fixed at the middle of the Czechoslovakia is now viewed as a less secure area Danube River. A Hungarian hydroelectric project, for investment, as a hazardous place with an un- by diverting the Danube, has put the location of certain future." That is unfortunate in itself-and it the border in question. There were 15 million does not bode well for the rest of Eastern Europe.

India's Tilt reduction of U.S. forces in the Indian and Pacific Toward the West Oceans, the economic dominance of Japan, and China's tendency to flex its muscles." 'India Copes with the Kremlin's Fall" by 1. Mohan Prime Minister Rao, in office since June 1991, Malik, in Orbis (Winter 1993), Foreign Policy Research has acted boldly to deal with India's accumulated Inst., 3615 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa, 19104. economic woes. [Inflation has dropped to 7.1 per- cent, the lowest level in two years.] Despite the The demise of the Soviet Union, India's main ally pressure to curb spending, Rao's government re- in recent decades, has forced the Asian nation to mains committed to a strong military, not only to turn toward the West. Not only is Moscow's exten- keep a step ahead of Prime Minister Mian Nawaz sive military, economic, and diplomatic support a Sharifs Pakistan and to stay even with China, but thing of the past, but, with the Cold War over, so is also to hold Sikh, Kashrniri, and Assamese separat- New Delhi's ability to extract advantages for itself ist movements in check. During the 1980s, India, by playing the Soviets off against the West. Even with Soviet help, built up one of the largest mil- so, asserts Malik, a lecturer in defense studies at tary forces in the Third World. The Indian navy, Australia's Deakin University, Prime Minister P. V. which includes two aircraft carriers, now is able to Narasimha Rao's government now enjoys "un- show the flag from the Persian Gulf to the Straits precedented" strategic opportunities. of Malacca, and the nation's nuclear-weapons and "First and foremost," Malik says, "is the oppor- ballistic-missile programs are in an advanced stage tunity to wean the United States away from its of development. traditional ally, Pakistan, and thus effect a major Western fears about the rise of Islamic funda- strategic change in South Asia." The United States mentalism, Malik points out, give New Delhi the had "tilted" toward Pakistan during the Cold War. opportunity to attract military and economic aid for After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, what is, as one observer put it, "the region's last Washington channeled aid to the Afghan outpost of secular democracy." mujahedin resistance through Pakistan. In October But New Delhi and Washington "remain suspi- 1990, however, unable to certify, as required by cious of each other's long-term agenda and inten- law, that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weap- tions," Malik notes. Many Indian strategists and ons, the Bush administration suspended all U.S. academics worry that closer ties with the West may. economic and military aid ($587 million). Washing- mean having to accept the United States as unchal- ton, Malik says, has begun to view India, not as the lenged global policeman. Senior officials in Rao's Soviet ally of yesterday, but "as an independent government do not seem to share those fears, power in Asia and even as a source of stability Malik reports. In any case, given India's tense rela- there, especially in view of the withdrawal of U.S. tions with Pakistan and China and its need for aid, military bases from the Philippines, the planned New Delhi now appears to have very little choice.

PERIODICALS 149 -- - - RESEARCHREPORTS Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions

"Service Sector Productivity!' McKinsey and Co., 1101 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004. 138 pp. Privately circulated.

hat the United States has ployed person, France and Ger- growth in Japan and Germany not fallen behind the other many improve their relative has slowed to 4.6 and 1.1 per- T advanced nations in pro- standing. Even so, substantial dif- cent, respectively. ductivity should not be news. In ferences in productivity remain. In all the advanced economies, 1990, gross domestic product To get a better picture of what the service sector dwarfs manu- (GDP) per capita in the United is going on, the authors focus on facturing. Productivity in services States was $21,450-16 percent the market economy (leaving out is much harder to measure. The greater than in West Germany, 22 government, health, and educa- McKinsey analysts looked closely percent greater than in Japan, tion). This shows the United at five service industries (airlines, and 23 percent greater than in States still the leader in GDP per telecommunications, retail bank- France. Where the United States employed person, with Japan, ing, general merchandise retail- has been lagging, at least until surprisingly, pulling up the rear ing, and restaurants) and found lately, is in its rate of productivity (with productivity in 1989 only that, with only one exception growth. What is surprising, note 61 percent that of the United (restaurants), the United States the authors of this report from States). The explanation? While had higher productivity. Poor McKinsey and Co., an intema- Japanese manufacturing firms management and archaic prac- tional management consulting dominate certain world markets, tices accounted for some of the firm, is that nearly a half-century they account for only a fraction productivity deficit overseas. after the end of World War 11, a of Japan's economy; many other Banks in the United Kingdom greater convergence in GDP per Japanese firms are not very effi- "still encode checks in branches, capita has not occurred. Technol- dent or productive. while [U.S.] banks. . . have cen- ogy and capital now can move According to a 1992 study of tralized this function and gained freely among the advanced na- the world's Big Three manufac- productivity." U.S. service indus- tions, and workers are equally turing countries by two Dutch tries, the analysts believe, derive healthy and well-educated, yet economists, Japan's manufactur- much of their advantage from the national differences in productiv- ing productivity was 80 percent rigors of competition. Japanese ity persist. that of the United States, as was retailing and other service indus- Part of the reason is that in the Germany's. It appears that the tries are shielded behind protec- United States, the two-worker United States will retain a mod- tionist walls. The chief barrier family has become common, and est lead for some years to come. blocking convergence of the ad- so a larger proportion of the pop- U.S. manufacturing productivity vanced nations, they conclude, is ulace is employed. If productivity has been growing by 3.5 percent government policy and regula- is measured by GDP per em- annually in recent years but tion in Europe and Japan.

"Post-Communist Economic Revolutions: How Big a Bang?" Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ste. 400, 1800 K St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006. 106 pp. $9.95 Author: Anders &ind

s economic "shock therapy" plunged by more than 20 per- pean Economics, argues that a killing the patient in Eastern cent. Critics contend that the for- comparison of the economic fe- I Europe? Some official statis- mer communist nations should ver charts of the various tics paint a grim picture. Since only gradually move from a com- postcommunist nations indicates Poland lifted controls on prices in mand economy to a free-market just the opposite: A rapid transi- January 1990, for example, its one. ~slund,director of the tion works best. gross national product (GNP) has Stockholm Institute of East Euro- "The poorly elaborated, grad-

150 WQ SPRING 1993 ual reform programs pursued by gradualist Hungary, suffered eties, and they are prepared to Bulgaria, Romania, and the So- from high inflation, Aslund accept quite a bit of suffering to viet Union before fundamental notes, but after two years of radi- achieve it." change of the economic system cal change, unemployment in The slower the move toward began have proved extremely Poland, for example, did not rise democracy, Aslund says, the costly," hlund says. The drop in above "a West European level" more difficult the economic tran- GNP since 1990 in Romania has (11.4 percent). In Bohemia and sition has been. Hungary and been about 30 percent; in Bul- Moravia (now, the Czech Repub- Czechoslovakia had legitimate garia, 40 percent, and in most of lic), unemployment actually fell elections in March and June the former Soviet Union, proba- from six percent at the start of 1990, respectively. Poland, on the bly about 50 percent. Hungary, 1992 to three percent last sum- other hand, waited until late where the shift has been gradual mer. A gradual transition does 1990 and 1991, allowing foes of and relatively successful, "seems not ensure less joblessness. Hun- reform to exploit discontent. In an exception to the rule." There, gary, Aslund says, "seems to be Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, as in the former Czechoslovakia, heading for the highest unem- Aslund points out, former com- which moved relatively quickly ployment rate in Eastern Eu- munists won the first elections, toward a market economy, the rope." suggesting that only a slow dem- drop in GNP was only about 16- Given the extensive hardship ocratic awakening had taken 18 percent. But Hungary, which in these postcommunist nations, place. In Russia, too, democrati- had a large private sector to be- Aslund says, it is remarkable zation has been sluggish. gin with, is "a very special case," how little social unrest there has "If there is a gradual path [to Aslund says. been. "People clearly want a fun- capitalism]," ~slundsays, "it ap- All of the countries, including damental change of their soci- pears very difficult to find."

Who Lacks Health Insurance? (By Work Status of Family Head)

Some 36.3 million people-16.6 percent of Americans under the age of 65-went without health insurance, private or public, dur- ing 1991, according to the non- profit Employee Benefit Research IFuU Year, FuU Time Institute. Of these, more than 10.3 million 53.2% half-19.3 million-were in fam- ilies whose head worked full time for the entire year. Only 5.6 million people were in families 3 whose heads were out of the work force entirely. Of all the uninsured, 9.5 million 36.3 Million Uninsured under Age 65 were children. From "Sources of Health Insurance and Charac- teristics of the Uninsured: Analysis of the March 1992 Current Population Survey," Employee Ben- efit Research Institute, January 1993.

RESEARCH REPORTS 151 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.

In Defense of Marx The time has come to study Marx patiently and without reference to communist regimes. George Watson's article ["Millar or Marx?," WQ, Winter Yuri Boichuk '931 raised old controversies concerning the fundamental UN Secretariat ideas of communism. His main point is that Marx used a New York, N.Y very simple two-level social structure for his analysis and heavily borrowed from his predecessors. Praise for Poetry Marx's method, not the political implications and practical realization of his theory, is worth discussing. A few weeks ago I was going to drop you a note ap- Watson's use of "rank makes any meaningful theoretical plauding your inclusion of poetry in the WQ. Never got analysis of society virtually impossible. Marx proposed a around to it. But thanks-now maybe I can really under- highly schematic but useful division of society into two stand what is in the New Yorker. main classes according to their relation to the means of Wally Snow production. Cherry Hill, N.J. Marx, indeed, did not invent much. The hist volume of Das Kapital is full of extensive footnotes, which he The Western Military Tradition commented on and analyzed in his text. Marx, however, refined and corrected this extensive body of critical politi- The excellent essays by Paul Rahe, Charles Townshend, cal economy and produced the theory of surplus value. and Charles Moskos ["The Military and Society," WQ, This theory stated the impossibility of achieving stability Winter '931 make a valuable contribution to the general on any level of production, proclaiming the contradiction study of war and society. As they recognize, they cannot between capital and labor to be antagonistic. Strangely cover the whole field, and inevitably they focus on the enough, being an adept of Hegelian theory of dialectic Western tradition. Of increasing relevance to our times, contradictions, Marx did not see it in a more positive way, however, are the comparable traditions in the Muslim as a stimulus to increased productivity and, consequently, and Confucian societies-especially the former. Perhaps to increased wealth. one day you will consider publishing a group of articles Marx's approach transformed economic theory into dealing with the difference between major world cultures political theory of an extremist nature. That resulted in its in their consideration of military affairs. low practical value for economic analysis and policy. Sir Michael Howard Nevertheless, none of the economic theory was tested to Dept. of History the extent Marx's political theory was. According to Marx, Yale University practice is the only criterion of truth. History, however, played a cruel joke on him. When asked about the appro- Confronting Infrastructure priateness of his ideas for a Russian environment, Marx answered negatively. His theory was supposed to be im- The two articles dealing with infrastructure ["The Saga of plemented in Western Europe, most probably in Great American Infrastructure," WQ, Winter '931 provide useful Britain and Germany. insights into the issues involved in understanding the his- It is virtually impossible to criticize his economic the- tory of infrastructure and planning for its future. Each is ory. It is based on its own assumptions and deals with skeptical of the contributions of engineers to infrastruc- capital and labor relations in a highly theoretical manner. ture planning and of the value of efficiency and cost- At the same time the theory is very logical and appealing benefits methodologies, and each argues that much of the and has a strong personal touch, which resulted in con- public reaction against infrastructure construction can be siderable borrowing of its ideas by others. blamed on engineering arrogance, as reflected particu- As far as its implementation is concerned, it is hard to larly in highway building practices. For Gifford, the an- prove that the Russian catastrophe was its direct result. swer to our infrastructure problems is to rely more upon Lenin used everything, including Marx's theory, that market solutions, used in combination with new commu- somehow was in line with his own political goals and nications technologies in flexible approaches. Seely, how- added weight to his ideas. ever, like the good historian he is, notes that many of the Having read Marx extensively, I cannot but admire so-called reforms and new approaches advocated today his personality, the intensity of his thoughts, his ability to have been tried in the past. Although he believes that a persuade, and the feeling of something new, comparable "broader vision" is required for infrastructure, he cautions only with the experience of reading Renaissance writers. against a return to centralized planning and a reliance

152 WQ SPRING 1993 upon experts. Politics, he warns us, will always be Carrolton. The Saint Charles Avenue line initially used present in infrastructure development and to deny this is mule drawn rail cars, steam locomotives later replaced to court disaster. the mules and in 1893 the line became electric powered, Where, one might ask, does this leave us? I believe it still is today. In the 1880s, New Orleans had one of the that the Gifford and Seely articles plot out a viable course most extensive urban streetcar systems in the country. that places the design of an infrastructure system using The Saint Charles Avenue streetcar became the last re- flexible technologies within a modified market context. maining New Orleans streetcar line in 1964, and it is now An important role for government would be to correct the oldest continuously operating street railroad in the imbalances and to mitigate damages where hard choices world. have to be made. The public reacted against infrastruc- Louis l? Dewenter, JK ture decisions in the past because it had lost confidence New Orleans, La. that fairness was involved in decision-making, and this trust needs to be restored. One method may be to create Bruce Seely evokes an era of great infrastructure leader- mechanisms providing for more citizen input but another ship and growth, now sadly ended in his judgment. Not- may be to clarify the process at work. Infrastructure ded- ing that 19th-century urban infrastructure was largely sion-making essentially revolves around what I call the planned, financed, and built at the local level, often with five "R's." In confronting an infrastructure decision in- private investor funds, Seely stresses the emergent 20th- volving an existing technological structure one faces four century role of the federal government in highway con- options-to replace the existing infrastructure with a struction. Two questions arise. Why were 19th-century newer and more efficient technology, to remove it, to American cities more capable of financing daunting infra- repair it, or to retrofit it with new technology and so structure needs than are late 20th century cities? Is the enhance its operating capabilities. And, in order to under- "golden age" of infrastructure development really over? stand which choice is the most optimal'in the situation, a Jane Jacobs has argued that deliberately anti-urban fifth "R," research, is mandatory. Such research could in- federal finance has "robbed the cities of the surplus their volve not only technical questions but also the attitudes economic growth produces. Thus the difference between of the public about a facility. And, of course, it is only the 19th- and early-20th-century urban self-financing of in- fifth "R," research, that can supply answers to the ques- frastructure and post-World War I1 federal grants-in-aid tion as regards new infrastructure construction. In the financing may bespeak both cities' loss of the tax re- process of working through this model, it is important sources and the vassaliing of the urban monster. that concerns over "expertise" and centralized decision- The construction of Boston's third harbor; the new making don't produce excessive timidity on the part of transit systems in San Diego, Portland, Buffalo, Baltimore politicians. For, regardless of the projects of the future, and other cities, along with the complete reconstruction engineering expertise and will continue to be and extension of Boston's Green, Red, and Orange lines; required and new projects will always produce their Chicago's extension of rapid transit lines to 0'~areand share of losers as well as winners. Midway, along with "down-the-middle" use of express- Joel A. Tarr ways as transit rights-of-way; the Hartford, Connecticut Dept. of History rebuilding of the 1-84-1-91 interchange along with the Camegie MeffonUniversity reconstruction of 1-91 north to Massachusetts; Los Angeles's new transit system; Denver's new airport-all Bruce Seely states in his article that an alternative to the this and more suggest that it is much too early to bring horse-drawn coach was the horsecar which was "intro- down the curtain on the golden age. duced in New York City in 1832 but not elsewhere until To be sure, New York City for what appear to be much later." He then goes on to chronicle the spread of ideological reasons has rejected necessary transit, rail, this mode of transportation. Never once did he mention sewage, water supply, and highway improvements, let- New Orleans, the Queen City of the South, which was ting federal money go to Boston and elsewhere. But New the national leader in urban rail transportation. York is not the nation. In 1830, New Orleans opened the Pontchartrain Rail- Seely assigns the blame for the end of the golden age road, one of the nation's hturban horse-drawn rail car to politics, implying that the federal leadership role has system. It followed a 5.2-mile-long route from the French been stopped at the courthouse or city hall door. This, Quarter out along Elysian Fields Boulevard to Lake Pont- too, is hyperbole. chartrain. A steam locomotive, "Smokey Mary," later re- Charles 1. Stokes placed the horses. This route lasted continuously until Dept. of Economics 1932. In 1835, the New Orleans and Cai~oltonRailroad Andrews Universiiy was the second New Orleans urban streetcar route, which later became the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar The authors of "The Saga of American Infrastructure" line. It followed a 5.2-mile route from the French Quarter, overlooked some subtle points. One of particular signifi- upriver along Saint Charles Avenue, to the village of cance is that where businesses must seek projects that

COMMENTARY 153 entice customers to part with their money, governments the 17th-century mechanism of Descartes to be still mak- command the citizen to pay for any purpose that satisfies ing the rounds. If there is no way to prove animal con- a political need. Rarely is the underlying intent to pro- sciousness "scientifically," then much-vaunted human duce a better product or service; rather, it is to create jobs awareness and unprejudiced reasoning must be called or redistribute wealth, especially nowadays. Many forth and applied to our own abilities as well. projects add nothing to economic growth. Marquita Fam's Hilt True, water supplies, sewage systems, and, initially, Honolulu. Hawaii roads are necessary to the functioning of any municipal- ity. Eventually, however, the wealth returned on these Lapsus Lingua investments dwindles. In southern California, the expan- sion of water distribution and storage has become an end In "Yugoslavia, Mon Amour" [WQ, Winter '931, the Latin unto itself. Efforts should be directed toward new meth- sentence, "ex patris et filioque procedit" should read, "qui ods and innovation in obtaining water; but such activities ex patre filioque procedit." The suffix "que" is the equiva- are, first, beyond the grasp of the civil engineers and, lent of the conjunction "et." Therefore, using both would second, likely to topple existing bureaucratic empires. constitute a pleonasm. Also, "pater" should be in ablative Civil engineers are at the heart of many of our prob- ("patre") instead of genitive ("patris"), because the con- lems. They grasp for each clever idea used in science- junction "ex" requires from "pater" the same ablative that fiction movies while ignoring limitations and costs. For it does from "filius" ("filio"). For corroboration, ask any example, the type 170 traffic signal controller used in old Catholic fogy like me to sing the "Credo in unurn California is fully electronic and is programmed like a Deurn" of the Gregorian Mass as he remembers it from computer, but the traffic engineers here have trouble run- his youth and you will hear the correct text. The "et" in ning the system. An additional $6.5 million is budgeted the middle of the sentence would disrupt its cadence. in San Diego to connect signals to a new central com- Leopoldo Lapuerta, M.D. puter. Yet the existing computer serving the downtown San Antonio, Texas area does a very poor job of moving traffic; the civil engi- neers have never mastered its programming. Reforming American Education A true folly is the vice president's enthusiasm for in- stalling nationwide fiber-optic links. Yes, they have the Surprised, delighted, dismayed, and moved. Surprised necessary bandwidth for computer use. But this band- that my first copy of the WQ contains an article on educa- width is a purely local existing microwave links tion ("The Perpetual Reform of American Education," in can handle long-haul functions. And soon satellites will "The Periodical Observer," Winter '93); delighted that it be able to handle broad-band transmissions directly from should address the number one issue, reform; dismayed telephone-to-telephone, rendering a fiber-optic system that the materials reviewed all miss the central issue; and obsolete. The vice president's solution is simply another then moved to write this letter. political solution, poorly thought out, and guaranteeing It is astounding to read David F. Labaree's warning the squandering of large sums of money. that education should not be reduced to a "technical mat- Robert Hoffman ter that must be left in the hands of certified experts." I Sun Diego, Calif. wonder if Mr. Labaree would rather deal with doctors, engineers, and lawyers who are not certified experts. Thinking Animals? Which brings me to the main issue that the articles you reviewed managed to elide. I'll phrase it as a ques- Regarding your book review on animal consciousness tion: Why is little headway being made in student [WQ, Winter '93, p. 1111, it is sad to see scientists defend a achievement and graduation rates? point of view so at odds with observed phenomena. Here is why: We continue to rely on the manager/ We try to justify grossly inhumane exploitation of politician approach to educational reform as expressed in food and laboratory animals by claiming they lack con- school vouchers, school-based management, curriculum sciousness, and then select behaviors that support that redesign, and outcomes-based initiatives. These organiza- claim, especially when research funds can be garnered to tional/political approaches to educational reform are the help obfuscate the matter. equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If a cockatoo I have observed closely for over two We must employ educational solutions. We must change decades who can feint in her own invented game of hide- how teaching and learning actually take place in the and-seek-trying to convince her "victim" that she is af- classroom. ter him in one direction, then suddenly switching direc- If educators had set out to select the most bo~e, tions as soon as she has convinced him wrongly-is not intellectually bitter, least motivating way to teach and aware of what she is doing, then we humans must also learn, then we could hardly have done worse than to be unconscious and unaware when we pretend. choose the one-dimensional, sequentially oriented, rote- It is a little late in the day for thought reminiscent of inducing, skills-defeating approach to teaching and leam-

154 WQ SPRING 1993 ing we use today. We stifle and strangle the stuff of leam- Unlike J. P. Morgan, Mr. Milken was empowering ing: subject matter and its inherent excitement. entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized companies. We must stop training teachers in methods that in- Because of his efforts, he often ran afoul of the corporate duce rote learning. We must train all teachers at all levels monoliths. to be certified experts in delivering subject matter while Now that high-yield securities are being seen as solid simultaneously developing cognitive and communication revenue producers and as real sources of capital, Mr. skills in students. In a learner-centered, analytical class- Milken will be viewed in a different light. Serious econo- room students can leam how to engage the subject mat- mists are already revisiting the "Milken era." ter. The analytical framework leads naturally to the Lorraine Spurge development of analytical/critical thinking, communica- President &Â CEO tion, and problem-solving skills. Knowledge Exchange, Inc. Am I saying that simply employing this approach to Beverly Hills, Calif. the classroom will solve our education problems? Of course not. Teachers face many noninstryctional chal- Bradford DeLong and Roy Smith miss important points lenges and the inequalities produced by lack of school in their thoughtful essays on American finance. DeLong funds are plainly unacceptable. Let the managers and demonstrates the important role of active investors in politicians address these problems. The real challenge to comparing Morgan and Non-Morgan companies. The reform is not primarily financial, auricular, managerial, paucity of active owners, entrepreneurs, and manager- or political. owners before the restructuring wave of the 1980s clearly Victor P. Maiorana did limit productivity, returns, and employment asset The City University growth. But early 20th-century finance led to economic of New York concentration, while early 21st-century finance (heralded by the Milken era of the early 1980s) focuses on ex- Maybe Milken Was Right panded economic participation, innovation, and change. Smith's article breezily echoes every platitude the I have just read the two articles devoted to "American popular press proffered on Milken and high-yield inno- Finance" [WQ, Autumn '921. Both carried inaccurate and vations in finance. The lions' share of high-yield finance misleading statements about Michael Milken. Since I went to fund innovation and growth to new industries worked at Drexel Burnham Lambert for more than 20 and new owners, not RJR-~~~~acquisitions. The article years, directly with Mr. Milken for 12 years, I have de- fails to differentiate between the business combination tailed knowledge of the high-yield securities market and activity oriented towards conglomeration or familiarity with Mr. Milken's career as well as his "case." deconglomeration, between refinancing and growth fi- I was saddened that the WQ would choose to dispatch nance, between job and value creation and destruction. both high-yield bonds and Mr. Miken with such care- The extraordinary return of the high-yield market after lessness. The classification of high-yield bonds as "worth- the legislated market panic introduced by the S&L bailout less" and the appointment of Mr. Milken as a symbol of bill is nowhere mentioned by the author. "the sins of the 1980s" reflect the ignorance and tabloid Without a more developed analysis, we cannot un- tendencies of the authors. Indeed, their reliance on mate- derstand why we were unable to keep economic growth rial from Connie Bruck's The Predator's Ball reveals "re- alive by the end of the 1980s. Much of the concern ex- search" akin to using Kitty Kelly as a primary source for a pressed about excessive credit and capital excess is con- book on Nancy Reagan. nected to the political battle between those trying to pro- High-yield securities were supported by Mr. Milken tect old capital and those trying to build new capital in as a means to provide capital to small and medium-sized the 1980s. The wave of regulations, litigation, and pros- companies and to create jobs. They have been consis- ecution that blocked financial access and ownership tently effective in both areas. As for Mr. Milken, the ver- change was a case of the use of regulation to restrict eco- diet of history will surely be more tempered than the nomic competition and growth, not expand it. author's vilifications. Glenn Yago Since the market's downturn in 1990, returns of over Dept. of Economics 40 percent have been achieved by investors in "junk The City University bonds"-a return equivalent to approximately $100 bi- of New York lion. During the mid-1980s, Drexel Burnham was the un- derwriter on as many equity and equity-related deals as Building the Proper House they were on debt deals. However, Mr. Milken had noth- ing to do with merger and acquisition transactions or le- Three cheers for Witold Rybczynski's "The Art of Build- veraged buy-outs. Such activities were handled (as is the ing, or the Building of Art?" [WQ, Autumn '921. case in all investment banking firms) by the corporate Rybczynski says outright what is currently taboo in archi- finance and capital market departments of the firm. tectural criticism. That is, that the art of architecture is

COMMENTARY 155 unique to itself, and that the language of architecture dif- that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to fers fundamentally from that of other visual arts. make something useful." My own experience with students confirms Moshe Safdie, Architect Rybczynski's observation; they prefer to work on projects Moshe Safdie and that are programmatically uncharged. A house for Shake- Associates, Inc. speare's Prospero is preferable to a school; a monument Somerville, Mass. to a poet, preferable to a library. I was commiserating about this with the eminent Russian physicist Lev Okun, Bell Revisited who reported what he thought was a parallel develop- ment among students of physics. A popular endeavor I write to take issue with Richard Fox's comment [WQ, currently, he said, was the study of two-dimensional Winter '931 on Daniel Bell's "America's Cultural Wars" mathematics. Extremely elegant solutions can be devel- [WQ, Summer '921. But let me begin on a point of agree- oped to problems for physics and mathematics in this ment with Fox. I too was dissatisfied with the Bell article. way, and many students were drawn to this pursuit. Un- Richard John Neuhaus's 1992 book, America Against It- fortunately, Okun noted, the real world is three-dimen- self, did a vastly superior job of explaining why American sional. public discourse, especially as seen in our politics, has The parallel is obvious. The programmatically grown so poisonous. charged architectural problem allows no escape from I disagree with Fox's contention that "[tlhe basic rift in dealing with the more complex spatial, behavioral, and our culture is not between Left and Right," but rather technical aspects of a building-in short, its purpose and "between self and community." Bell does treat the self- the physical means of its fulfillment. In reading community rift, only he identifies it (correctly, I believe) Rybczynski's piece it occurred to me that the current as the fault line separating liberals and communitarians. "anything goes" attitude toward architecture-reflected If Bell and I are right that the reconciling of individual in Philip Johnson's proclamation, "There are no rights, no and community needs is really an argument in Left ver- wrongs in any of the arts and architecture today, only the sus Center politics, then Fox's taking of this as supreme world of wonderful freedomT'-is conditioned by two re- automatically excludes conservatives from any meaning- cent developments. ful role in public debate. The first is the embrace of architecture by the main- second, Fox confuses cause and effect in his descrip- stream of the commercial world. Developers, ranging tion of how we came to today's untenable pass. He traces from hard-nosed office builders to the imaginative Dis- the chain of causality thus: Community erodes. The sense ney Company, have discovered the potential of architec- of self disintegrates. Narcissism takes root. Derealiition ture as a marketing device. occurs. Fox has this precisely backward. We entered this The second development is a shift within architecture, vicious cycle when we lost a shared sense of reality. If we which once saw itself as a component of city building but possessed a shared sense of reality, we could regain our now devotes itself to producing the singular object sense of community. treated as a stage set. In the past, it was virtually impossi- The true great divide in our discourse is between ble to separate the philosophy and style of an individual "thinking" and "nonthinking" people. In borrowing his architect from his conception and vision of the city as a dichotomy from Barry Farber, I use these terms to refer whole. Even the towers of Mies van der Rohe and the only to differing fundamental assumptions and ways of prototypes of Le Corbusier could not be separated from experiencing the world, not to impugn "nonthinkers." the designers' proposals for new urban forms. One could Thinkers hold that truth exists and can be discovered. demonstrate how a certain building, introduced into an Those on the other side take subjectivity as their primary urban context, helped to make a whole greater than its way of experiencing reality. They deny that objectivity is parts. This is not the case today, when many eminent possible and speak of various truths. In some cases, they architects with strong personal and identifiable styles reject logic and language as instruments of oppression. generally have not extended their concepts to include the They stress assuring access to a diversity of viewpoints. broader urban consequences of their architecture. Yet as Bell writes: "One can apply a moral It is this question, the kind of urban form and urban judgment. . . only if we see that language decidedly re- life that we ultimately have in mind, that must dominate fers to reality, that meanings are not necessarily inde- our strategy in considering the merits of individual build- terminate, that the 'self does exist and can be used to ings in the future. Rybczynski, while emphasizing the elucidate an author's intention, and that the truth can be pursuit of a building's intrinsic purpose as the generator established . . . .And if one does deny that, then all moral of its aesthetics, never quite buys into the notion that "the discourse is meaningless." response to function shall yield beauty." Nevertheless, Fox concludes by calling for "intellectual openness" in Oscar Wilde's words seem to appropriately summarize service of "a democratic sensibility in which all voices his position: "I have found that all ugly things are made deserve to be heard." I wholeheartedly agree with that. by those who strive to make something beautiful, and But Fox is dead wrong in his conclusion: '"Cultural diver-

156 WQ SPRING 1993 sity' is the concrete path forward for those who venerate freedom." The doctrine of cultural diversity has operated Credits: Cover, Rise with Force and Spirit, James Bama, 0 The only to empower a few self-appointed representatives of Greenwich Workshop, Inc., 1989; pp. 10-11, The Year of the Dragon, Qin Da Hu, 0 The Greenwich Workshop, Inc., 1990. For infonna- various approved groups; no one else is permitted partici- tion on limited edition fine art prints call 1-800-243-4244; p. 13, pation in such debates. Photo by Xinhua, Gamma-Liaison;p. 13, Map reprinted with permis- If we are to cultivate true intellectual openness and a sion from Current History magazine, 0 1992; pp. 15, 20, 27, 30, 32, real democratic sensibility, in which all voices are heard, From Chinese Dragon Patterns, Wan Li Book Company Limited, Hong Kong; pp. 22, 23, From Towards a Truer Life: Photographs of China we must not set out with preconceived notions of who 1980-1990 by Reagan Louie, Aperture Foundation, Inc.; p. 31 (left), constitutes "all." If we are ever to recover a shared sense From Brushes with Power: Modem Politics and the Art of Chinese Callig- of community, we must adopt policies and practices that raphy by Richard Curt Kraus, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1991, Originally whosoever will, may come-and whosoever will, may from China Recoi~slrucls,February 1968; pp. 31 (right), 39,50, Repro- duced from the Collections of the Library of Congress; pp. 44, Photo speak. by Edward Owen; pp. 41, 49, Courtesy Monticello, 0 Thomas Jeffer- B. I. Coleman son Memorial Foundation, Inc.; pp. 52-53, 69, Machine of the Year San Diego, Calif. (1983) Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New York; p. 55, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. M.638, f.27~;p. 58, Photo from Diderot's Encyclopedia, Courtesy Gregg Publishing; p. 63, Courtesy of the Fred- erick W. Taylor Collection, Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point, Hoboken, NJ; p. 77, Paul Szep, The Boston Globe; p. 83, 0 1992 The Cincinnati Post, used with permission; p. 86 (top), Poster Collec- tion/Hoover Institution Archives; (bottom) item collection Negrophil- ia 3206, Cosmic Illusion Productions Foundation; p. 88, The Ben- mann Archive; p. 99, From the collection of Loren and Frances Roth- schild; p. 104 And6 Kertkz, Paris 1929, 0 1993, the Estate of Andre Kertkz; p. 106, from The Legend of the Skies by Pascal dry 0 Editions HMbeke, 1991; p. Ill, Bibliotheque Fomey, Paris, From The Legend of the Skies by Pascal Ory 6 Editions HMbeke, 1991; p. 113, Courtesy of the National Air & Space Museum; p. 114, Flyinx Douw to Rio, @ Corrections 1933 RKO Pictures, Inc., All Rights Reserved, Still Courtesy of the Turner Entertainment Co.; p. 119, Courtesy Clark University Ar- In the review of Breaking the Maya Code [WQ,Winter '931, chives; p. 128, 0 1985 The Charlotte Observer; p. 133, Photo by Peter Tumley, Black Star Agency; p. 138, 0 1992 The Times-Picayune Tri- Fray Diego de Landa was described as a Jesuit. In fact, he bune Media Services; p. 141, Cartoon from the New York Daily belonged to the Franciscan order. Graphic, November 23, 1874; p. 145, Studies, 1920-22, Picasso, Mu& On page 45, the caption incorrectly stated that "bullet Picasso, Paris, 6 R.M.N./Spadem; p. 148, Oliver Der Standard, Vi- trains" in Japan are magnetically suspended above their enna, Austria, Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate. tracks. Thev are not. Organize and Protect Your Copies of Wilson Quarterly

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FELLOWSHIPS IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 1993-94

Located on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the Center awards approximately- - 35 residential fellow- ships each year for advanced research in the humanities and social sciences. Men and women from any country and from a wide variety of backgrounds (including government, the corporate world, and the professions, as well as academe) may apply. Applicants must hold a doctorate or have equivalent professional accomplishments. Fellows are provided offices, access to the Library of Congress, computers or manuscript typing services, and research assistants. The Center publishes selected works written at the Center through the Woodrow Wilson Center Press. The Center also helps Fellows locate appropriate housing. Fellowships are normally for an academic year, although a few fellowships are available for shorter periods, with a minimum of four months. In determining stipends, the Center seeks to follow the principle of no gain/no loss in terms of a Fellow's previous year's salary. However, limited funds make it desirable for most applicants to seek supplementary sources of funding such as sabbatical support or grants from other sources: in no case can the Center's stipend exceed $56,000; the average yearly stipend is approximately $42,000. Travel expenses for Fellows, spouses, and dependent children are provided. The application deadline is October 1, 1993. For application materials write to: Fellowships Office, Woodrow Wilson Center, 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W., Washington, DC 20560 SI MRC 022. Tel: (202) 357-2841 FROM THE CENTER

ussia has never been a country for the 200,000 private and cooperative farms were busy weak of heart. Last month's bone-crush- producing much-needed food. ing collision between Russian Federation A great deal of change has been taking place President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian beyond the capital's Ring Road (Moscow's belt- CongressR of People's Deputies is but the latest in a way), and this transformation poses a terrible prob- long series of emotional roller-coaster rides for lem for many Western analysts and Russian intel- those who try to follow Russian events. lectuals who prefer never to set foot outside Story after story in the American press decries downtown Moscow. Regional leaders-even for- the slow and muddled pace of economic reform. mer communist bosses-are struggling with de- Read the pages of our premier newspapers or listen mocracy and the marketplace. Russia beyond Mos- to discussions on leading television shows, and cow exudes a primal energy that is both terrifying you will inevitably conclude that Russia is on the and inspiring. Provincial governments, for exam- edge of disaster. Talk to a Russian, and your worst ple, struggle heroically to maintain a social safety fears will be confirmed. The Russian penchant for net even as local entrepreneurs seize mineral and the dramatic gesture, the extravagant action, and oil rights, thereby realizing huge windfall profits. the morose explanation has always been strong. World-class museums teeter on the brink of closure And during the past few years, it has colored our even as gaggles of Mercedes-Benzes ghde by out- perception of what has been happening through- side. This massive transformation has been pre- out the country. As my closest Russian friend re- sided over by Boris Nikolaevich, as complicated a cently explained, "Sure, everything is looking up. political figure as one can find on the current world But this is Russia. It will never last." scene-but a figure who is nothing if not pro- There is much to be concerned about in Russia. foundly Russian. Nuclear waste threatens to pollute the entire Arctic Boris Grushin, a leading Russian public opinion Ocean. A vocal "Red-Brown" alliance specialist, recently told a Wilson Cen- of unreconstructed Stalinists and neo- ter audience that he can identify five fascistic nationalists hopes to overturn dusters of public opinion in his coun- democratic government. Hyperinfla- try ranging from the most retrograde tion has wiped out personal savings. form of national fascism to libertarian Collapsing industrial production democracy. Because these dusters of threatens to unleash millions of angry unemployed opinion are in pitched battle with one another, workers ready, if given the chance, to ravage the Russia's future remains very much in doubt. None property of their country's new middle class. of the five groupings can be readily identified with Apocalyptic visions are the stock-in-trade of any particular social faction, Grushin concluded, Russian writers, who for generations have pro- because each exists to a greater or lesser degree duced a national literature arguably as rich as any within EACH AND EVERY RUSSIAN, including on earth. Scornful of Western materialism, Rus- the president of the Russian Federation. sians have, to quote the author Tatyana Tolstaya, President Yeltsin's power and authority have "mocked the English with their machines, the Ger- rested on the impression that he, too, is engaged in mans with their order and precision, the French a fierce internal struggle over what kind of individ- with their logic, and finally the Americans with ual he will become.The battle over the Russian their love of money. As a result, in Russia we have future is the story of 150 million individual strug- neither machines, nor order, nor logic, nor money." gles to redefine identity at a time when all the old Just look at Boris Niolaevich Yeltsin the next time signposts have been smashed and most new ones his face flashes into your living room. Is this some- point in conflicting directions. What's happening one to whom you would want to entrust your chil- now is a story of epic proportions, but it doesn't dren's future? have a simple story line. We should all remember But there is much that is hopeful in Russia as this the next time someone tries to tell us how it well. During 1992, state authorities sold off 600 will all turn out. large and 40,000 small businesses-primarily to lo- cal investors. Twenty million families became land- -Blair Ruble, Director, owners-usually buying small plots for vegetable Kennan Institute for gardens or small homes. By the end of 1992, nearly Advanced Russian Studies

160 WQ SPRING 1993 The Gnat Is Older than Man Global Environment and Human Agenda Christopher D. Stone 'I.. . should be read by everyone concerned with the future of our planet." ÑJOh H. Chaffee, U.S. Senator (Rhode Island) "Christopher Stone is sensitive, rigorous, and visionary-all at once. This book is a remarkable achievement." -Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Former Prime Minister of New Zealand Cloth: $21.95 ISBN 0-691-03250-5

The Now in paperback "Underclass" Vladimir Debate Nabokov Views from History The Russian Years Edited by Michael B. Katz Brian Boyd a definitive life of Do ominous reports of an ". . . emerging "underclass" reveal an the man and a superbly unprecedented crisis in American documented chronicle of his society or are social commentators time."ÑSerge Davydov, The New York Times Book Review simply rediscovering the tragedy of Now in paper: $15.95 recurring urban poverty? Although ISBN 0-691-02470-7 social scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions about these questions, they have little Vladimir information about the crucial differences between past and Nabokov present. By providing a badly needed The American Years historical context, the contributors focus not on individual and family Brian Boyd behavior but on a complex set of "Nabokov has found at processes that have been at work last a biographer worthy of over a long period, degrading the him."-Walter Kendrick, The inner cities and the nation aia whole. New York Times Book Review Paper: $16.95 ISBN 0-691-00628-8 Now in paper: $16.95 Cloth: $59.50 ISBN 0-691-04810-X ISBN 0-691-02471-5 Princeton University Press

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